Morning musing (extremely controversial, yes, but read the whole thing carefully):
I don’t follow the news cycle religiously or play the partisan political game/culture war currently strangling American political discourse. I mostly follow the news at a distance, do my research when necessary, and form an opinion from the highest vantage point I can reach.
That said, upon careful review, the inaugural speech he gave and the executive orders the POTUS signed upon entering the Oval Office seem much like everything else he does in the White House: an assortment of White Nationalist, Christian fundamentalist, and corrupt oligarchic moves, engineered by his neoreactionary funders and advisors to turn the USA into a white nationalist Christo-fascist colonizing megastate dominating the north western hemisphere and sharing multipolar geopolitical power with its Russian, Iranian, and Chinese frenemies – interwoven with many innocuous and cliched decisions and pronouncements that are, honestly, hard to object to in their banality, common sense obviousness, and/or practical irrelevance.
This is how fascist rhetoric works: It covers the true agenda, which is carried out in broad daylight, behind an obfuscating mask of patriotism, populism, and plausible deniability. Supporters are duped by the mask, but critics fatally stumble in ignoring the mask.
The popular Leftist reaction to the current POTUS – treating everything he says and does as an outrageous sin – is completely ineffective against the rise of racialized neo-fascism in America, as demonstrated by the failure to erode his populist base and prevent him from entering a second term. People are not convinced by hysterics and, with so much mud in the waters (amply supplied by the above mentioned frenemies and poured across the media networks owned by the administration and its cronies), can not differentiate between the real and the reactionary criticism.
That is a real problem that requires a complete shift in rhetorical approach, not more of the same triggered outrage. Critics, dissenters, and resisters of the current trend need to Level Up and make targeted, unassailable, and effective moves – not keep playing into the hands of bad actors who have steadily advanced their agenda while their opponents subject each other to endless purity tests.
I don’t know for sure what the next four years will bring. I could be wrong about everything I see and what I think it means for the USA and the world, and above all I believe that it is in the hands of the Heavens. But I do think that the choice is left to us – and we need to make effective, strategic choices, especially when the stakes are increasing.