The Leopards Are Getting Fat
It's fun to pretend elected leaders in charge of a nation of 350 million people can handpick who suffers and who does not.
Fox News host and avid hair dye enthusiast Jesse Waters looked into the camera, and therefore into the eyes of the president of the United States, and told his audience – the president – that illegal and indiscriminate cuts to the federal government carried out by a foreign entity called DOGE had hurt the wrong person.
Waters’ buddy, who works for the Pentagon, was one of the thousands of probationary federal workers laid off for no particular reason by Elon Musk’s hackers determined to replace the American government with AI designed to carry out any and every fascist command.
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Waters delivered his plea for clemency in the closing moments of The Five, a show where one or two liberals – depending on the night – are paid to get their teeth kicked in by fascism fanboys and girls. This Pentagon employee, Waters told his audience (Trump), was not among those who deserved the pain Trump and Musk had promised on the campaign trail. This federal employee had been part of an “elite” military unit and killed “enemies” of the United States, Waters said. And most importantly, he was not a DEI hire.
Waters, like so many Americans in these first nightmarish weeks of the second Trump administration, was flummoxed. How could one of us be punished by the president we voted for specifically because he promised to use his power to deliver pain, and lots of it? Waters seemed to wonder aloud: How can the president not micro-target his vengeance?
Denny Carter
It’s a question on the lips of many who enthusiastically backed Trump last year as he promised to unravel the constitutional order and punish anyone who has ever opposed him in his decade-long attack on the United States. They say: I voted for you so you could terrorize immigrants and trans folks and destroy the lives of women and LGBTQ people and people of color who work for the U.S. government. I voted for you so you would bully major corporations into normalizing and accepting fascist politics and goals.
How, they ask, could you not be more careful in your assault on the civil service, higher education, and any other sector of society swept up in Musk’s coup? How did I get a taste of the pain?
Waters gave away the game in his live TV plea to the president. The Right People were not supposed to feel any pain.
A Two-Fold Fascist Promise
Ours is hardly the first era defined by a desire for suffering.
Not our suffering, of course. And not our family or friends’ suffering. The people who deserve to suffer, however, should suffer, and suffer a lot. It’s an idea that could only emerge in a society without any semblance of civic life or basic understanding of how successful societies operate: We will elect people who will watch out for Us materially, economically, militarily, and in all ways, while using their power to punish Them.
Who is Them? Well, it depends on the news cycle. It depends on the president's mood.
