Techno fascism is fascism

Call it by its name

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy

Dipshits, dipshits, everywhere.

Before there was “Survivor” and “The Real House Wives,” before there were Paris and Nicole, “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” “The Osbournes,” and even the OJ and the Menendez brothers’ trials, there was “The Real World” on MTV.

Thirteen days after OJ Simpson’s white Bronco made its last run, season three of “The Real World” aired on June 30, 1994.

I was 23 years old.

For the record, Bill Belichick was 42 years old, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was 23.

Duffy, of course, was a “The Real World” cast member. I distinctly remember thinking at the time that, even though I was living in San Francisco, it was as unlikely that I would encounter a dipshit from the show meandering about the city as it was to encounter a white shark off Ocean Beach.

Yet, with this essay our paths have crossed 31 years later. Anything remains possible in America.

Honestly, when Sean Duffy was elected to Congress from Wisconsin I was happy because democracy means below average people deserve representation too. After all, what harm could any random vapid member of Congress actually do?

Sean Duffy always reminded me of the member of Congress who would have sat upright when Congressman Hank Johnson questioned a US Navy admiral about whether Guam could sink if America built a new base, and declared, “I was just thinking the same thing. Can we work together on that?”

At any rate, one thing I didn’t think about at age 23 was dating a 72-year-old woman.

It would have been odd, n’est-ce pas?

I wonder what we would have talked about.

I’ve tried to think about what I’d say to the coach if my 21-year-old daughter brought him home to meet Dad.

AP Photo/Brynn Anderson

Let’s just say there would be a fair amount of coverage speculating about where the coach was during the Super Bowl pregame.

I digress, but it needed to be said…

Larry, 80, looks happy with his new bride, aged 33.

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

If Trump wants Larry to be happy, and Larry wants his son to run Paramount because he needs a job, and all it takes for Trump to be happy is to make CBS News give him $25 million and say sorry for doing nothing, then why not?

Everyone is happy.

It’s just like when Magic Larry waved his wand over the University of Michigan.

One feature of our coming era is how similar American oligarchs will become to their Russian counterparts with all manner of secret second and third families. The American oligarch is to be firmly unshackled from any pretense of restraint. Those are earthly constraints and they are gods, and gods can sate themselves as they please beyond the view of so many plebes and serfs.

I digress too much.

Let’s get back to Sean Duffy, whose confirmation to become US Transportation Secretary marks the single greatest drop in IQ points between a serving secretary and their predecessor in American history.

It isn’t even close.

Let us consider this observation by the man who presides over a $117 billion Department of Transportation with responsibility for the safety of the almost nine million Americans who fly every year, that he shared with Sean Hannity. Hannity seems to fill a space for the young MAGA powerbrokers that Lord Mountbatten filled for a lonely Charles.

When you have these 22-year-old young people who are smart and can engage and give us good advice, we’ll move at the speed of business as opposed to the speed of bureaucracy and government.

What is he talking about?

The dismantling and rebuilding of America’s air traffic control system at the direction of the Magic Elon and ‘Big Balls,’ of course.

Duffy goes on:

Sean, I was talking to Elon. I said, ‘What can we do this in, Elon? Two and a half, three years, can we make this happen?’ And he was like, ‘No, no. Two and a half, three years. No. We could do this in one year’.”

Why not six months, or even three?

Have you ever even met ‘Big Balls?’

Now, in the old days, rebooting the entire American air traffic control system might involve planning, experts and wisdom, but that was before we had the only expert who mattered and the only one who knew anything, who is the same guy who knows everything, except one thing, which is what this is:

I think he knows what it means, which means I know he’s lying about not knowing, which means, well..

We know what it means.

The chaos around us is everywhere, and it is accruing to Donald Trump’s benefit.

It is a tragic paradox that the true threat to America is strengthened by the winds that precede catastrophe.

Instead of weakening the demagogue, danger and trouble give him more ammunition.

Fear is a contagion, and people will give up almost anything if they become fearful enough, including their freedom.

My fourteen-year-old mind appreciated “1984” by George Orwell.

I understood its meaning, and was absolutely certain that no such totalitarianism could ever exist in America.

It was, however, clear that it existed in other places like the Soviet Union, China, Iran, and all of Eastern Europe.

What bound those totalitarian societies were the way that they perceived truth, reality, or even clear language as a threat.

Doublespeak existed as a daily practice over much of the world where the state subjugated human beings. The truth was always strangled in dictatorships.

What became true was what the leader said was true.

There was no debate beyond that.

When the leader said there was a problem there was always a common strain in the pronouncement. The leader needed more power, and the enemy was always invisible.

The crisis was described as ever present, but never quite evident.

Among the greatest absurdities of the early 2000s was the insistence by Saddam Hussein’s spokesperson that there were no American tanks at the Baghdad airport when American tanks were there.

Sean Spicer one upped him in 2017 when on day one of the Trump administration he lied to the world in “Baghdad Bob” fashion, insisting A is bigger than B, when in fact B was much larger than A. There are many differences between Iraq and the United States.

Two of them are that Baghdad Bob doesn’t appear on any Iraqi newscasts as a commentator, and he never danced on national television in a neon yellow shirt.

There is an absurdism that is laughable between the antics of a Baghdad Bob or Sean Spicer, but there must also be a recognition between both of what is jointly chilling.

Absurd lies can quickly become deadly lies.

Those lies can become profoundly insidious when mandated by the state as dogma that impedes the freedom of speech, conscience and faith.

In “1984,” Orwell introduces the concept of ‘doublespeak:’

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.

Even to understand the word involved the use of doublethink.

Authoritarians hollow out the meaning of language and reduce words to pablum. Slogans replace thoughts, and conformity becomes enforced between the boundary lines of what can and cannot be said.

The right combination of words can eviscerate meaning from any sentence and reduce it to a stultifying and stupefying stew of nothingness.

The nothingness can be applied in many directions, including for the purposes of advancing indifference against evil in the name of a dogma or new ‘ism’ that always holds at its core that grievances are legitimate and payback earned.

This ideology has been called many things, but no matter where it manifests itself or whatever it calls itself, it is antithetical to the concept of Americanism, which deserves robust defense — and now more than ever.

The lies compound, and the audacity of the liars does too.

The journey from Sean Spicer to Karoline Leavitt is a story of a horrific descent and crash. It is the parable of the hapless frog boiling in the pot unaware that he had been cooked before succumbing.

Elon Musk is giving shape to the dimensions of what was coming, but is now arriving like a freight train with Chuck Schumer tied to the tracks.

This is techno fascism.

It is here, and it is evil.

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