To Be Insulted By These Fascists Is So Degrading

All we want is a little honesty from our fascist overlords. 

Sometimes we get that honesty in the form of lapel pins of Donald Trump’s jowly face in place of American lapel pins that used to be so important that presidential hopes would rise and fall with the size and placement of said pins. Sometimes we get that honesty in the hideous form of the regime’s comically evil deportation leader encouraging better business practices for the federal government’s human trafficking program. 

This honesty is never fun. It’ll never make you smile, and it certainly won’t make you feel better. But at least you know where they stand on things. At least you don’t have to pretend they care about shit they clearly do not. 

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It’s when these fascists are not honest with us – usually with the expert use of weaponized bad faith – that we feel insulted and degraded. When they feign interest in free and fair elections by passing a stunning piece of voter suppression legislation, it’s insulting. When they talk a big fucking game about cutting government costs and addressing the national debt by dispatching a gang of teenage hackers to stop congressionally appropriated money, it’s insulting. 

And when they do a clumsy international dump and pump – nothing more than a trick mastered by crypto bros – so their friends and financial backers can get a little richer, it’s insulting. 

We all know what happened this week with the financial markets. The president announced crushing tariffs on every country in the world except for the one he works for in a deliberate attempt to tank the markets. This, as you know by now, allowed those in the know – Trump’s vapid hangers on, his allies, his enablers – to buy low before the tariffs were strategically pulled back, sending stocks through the goddamn roof for one very green afternoon. Somewhere in the middle of all that scheming, the president posted a wink-wink social media message about buying now (before he killed most of the tariffs and caused a market feeding frenzy).

That we are supposed to pretend this was not an intentional if stupid and potentially disastrous plan to enrich himself and his friends is insulting. The fucking guy admitted to the whole thing on camera, surrounded by the ageless moneymen of American fascism, all wealthy in the most obscene ways possible. 

“To be insulted by these fascists is so degrading,” David Bowie griped on the opening and closing tracks of his 1980 album Scary Monsters And Super Creeps (a largely underrated Bowie album in the context of his glam rock stuff, which, for me, doesn’t measure up to Scary Monsters). 

With reformed politics following his cocaine-addled flirtations with fascist aesthetics and ideas in the mid-70s, Bowie in “It’s Not Game” sang about what it was like to observe the ascendance of fascism through the lens of a television viewer. Documentaries on refugees fleeing war-torn countries and meeting resistance in the west, “couples against the target,” watching the silhouettes and shadows cast by politicians so people could not properly understand the situation – Bowie offers a list of ways in which the current moment (the rise of right-wing parties in the US and the UK) was disorienting. The accelerating fragmentation of media and life itself over the next 45 years has given us a moment orders of magnitude more disorienting and impossible to understand. 

We find Bowie seeking some meaning in all this fascist chaos, in the societal fragmentation that had so complicated life. “So where’s the moral?” Bowie asks, “when fingers have their fingers broken. To be insulted by these fascists, it’s so degrading.”

To watch our monstrous president – the manifestation of ceaseless capitalist greed and online radicalization – toy with the international markets to deliver one big fucking payday to his funders is bad enough. To know that for now, under what is at best competitive authoritarianism, one man determines all policy in the United States is bad enough. For this man and his inner circle of American psychos trying to dismantle our country and sell it for parts to lie to us about it, to be dishonest about their aims, is doubly insulting. It’s the kind of insult that makes your blood pump harder and your thoughts turn darker. It’s the kind of insult that activates the part of your brain that you used to need to survive. 

While the president happily fucked with the markets, congressional Republicans advanced a bill that would eviscerate Medicaid to clear room for Elon Musk’s big fucking tax cut. They blithely took basic health care away from the neediest Americans and justified it as a way to get young men off the couch and into the workforce, as if Fortnite-addicted 20-somethings were the primary beneficiaries of Medicaid. Again: Insulting, and deeply so. 

Rather than getting trapped in our outrage and our indignation, let’s get mad. Let’s get fucking furious that these people would play around with our measly retirement accounts to make a few extra million on a Wednesday afternoon. Let’s get mad about telling poor folks they do not deserve access to life-saving health services because the fascist billionaire class needs a third major tax cut in this young century. 

Let’s not take this degradation lying down. Get mad and stay mad, and help others better understand the situation and get mad with you. Over the past 90 days you have been insulted and degraded in ways you did not think possible. They think you are stupid. They loathe you more than you can ever know. We are together in this degradation, and we can get out of it together. Be hopeful and stay mad. It’s all we have right now.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.