You Are Not Crazy

Two old men talk over coffee at McDonald’s about whether Maryland’s constitutional right to abortion means anything if the second Trump administration delivers a national abortion ban to the never-satisfied anti-abortion forces.

A young woman outside the grocery store only half jokingly tells her friend to be careful what she says around her phone because Trump’s FBI could be listening. 

Pre-teen boys nervously giggle about which of their classmates would be deported come January and come up with an unofficial list that tops a dozen names. 

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Everywhere I’ve gone since November 5 – and as a guy with what the right derisively calls an “email job,” I don’t go many places – I’ve seen and heard the uncertainty and anxiety of Americans after a candidate won the White House four years after trying – and barely failing – to overthrow the American government. 

There is a sense that things will change dramatically; it’s how they might change that people can’t quite identify. It’s something toxic wafting through the air, and even those of us who take the time to find the origin of the stench can’t quite identify it, or tell others what it might mean for them. The stench gets trapped in our nostrils and simply becomes part of being alive. Soon, maybe, we won’t remember life before the stench. Soon we may tell our friends and family that the stench has always been there, when we know, deep down in the part of us that is free from terror and anxiety and overwhelming manipulation, it has not. 

My hope for Bad Faith Times in the coming months and, hopefully, years, is to remind BFT subscribers and readers that this stench trapped in our nostrils has not, in fact, always been there. It was put there by the worst among us and with inhuman patience and great effort, it can be expelled. If you open yourself to our current moment, you can feel fascism meshing into popular culture in ways that it most certainly did not in 2017, when Donald Trump entered office after accidentally winning the presidency. There was widespread cultural rejection of fascism in that first go-around with Trump – corporations largely expressing feigned solidarity with culturally liberal consumers, mass protests, news outlets mostly refusing to mainstream the far-right views that Trump and his cronies sought to make mainstream. 

Today we see fascist thought drifting everywhere, infecting (almost) everyone, becoming normal for an entire generation of young people who have no memory of pre-fascist America. Today it is different. Billionaire owners of major media outlets are happily bending the knee to our new fascist leader. Formerly oppositional cable news hosts are begging to kiss the ring and gain access as Trump tries to remake the United States in his monstrous image. Pro athletes are dancing like the fascist leader in moments of on-field glory, and even bowing to him before rabid throngs as they celebrate their wins. The largest social media platform on earth – owned by the richest man on earth – is now wholly dedicated to promoting our fascist leader as the savior of the United States and will push his radical, anti-democracy agenda to millions of people who will ingest propaganda without ever once questioning it. I’m old enough to remember that this was not the case in 2016. 

Young men now see Trump as their last, best chance to undo the gains made by women that have threatened men’s place in the hierarchy of domination, to bring the promised violence and retribution of Gamergate to federal policymaking. That was not so eight years ago. When young men go fash, democracies have a problem that can’t be easily solved. 

You’re going to feel crazy through much of the next four years. You’re going to be told by strangers both in real life and online that you were always outside the mainstream, and that the mainstream has not actually changed, and that Trump and his followers represent normal people trying to live normal lives in this third decade of the 21st century. You will undoubtedly be told by people who you love and trust that you have always been the wrong one. They will point to the legions of Americans following our new fascist leader and ask you how so many people can be wrong. If that fails – if you reject that – they will point to God and ask how God can be wrong. God loves tax cuts and small government and hates pronouns, after all.

My goal with Bad Faith Times for the foreseeable future is to remind you that you are not, in fact, crazy, that things were not always like this, that your friends and family falling under the spell of the toxicity wafting everywhere all the time does not mean you must also let the stench become normal, unquestioned, reality itself. We are going to live through what so many in failed democracies have endured over the generations. The era of liberal democracy is over. Fascism, led by conquerors of democracy in Russia and Eastern Europe, is ascendant, primed to become the new norm in the United States. That doesn't mean we cannot or should not push back and refuse to let this stench settle in our nostrils. In fact, it’s incumbent on us to always be aware of that fucking rank smell if we are ever to live in a country where that smell is once again (rightly) identified as disgusting, unnatural, an assault on the senses. My hope with Bad Faith Times is to help create consciousness around the spread of this political toxin. 

I want to get through this with you. I’m not going to pretend writing about the rise of fascism in the United States since 2022 has not been cathartic for me. It very much has been a form of laborious therapy, being able to jot down the ways in which our political leaders and press have failed to identify and effectively fight the growing threat to our democratic republic. This failure stems from generations of a two party system in which members tacitly agreed to (mostly) play between the 20 yard lines. When one party broke that arrangement – which was always going to fail – and pushed the ball over the goal line before setting the entire field on fire, our politicians and media were not prepared. Major media outlets covered the fascist movement like they had covered every mainstream movement of the past half century. And now we must live with the consequences of the total and complete failure of the Fourth Estate. 

Analysis of the American right’s weaponization of bad faith will continue in Bad Faith Times because understanding how conservatives use political bad faith to fool the electorate and the media is critical in seeing political reality for what it is. My hope, as always, is for some of this analysis – along with other forms of scrutinizing the fascist agenda and the movement’s various strategies – to leak into more mainstream circles and help create a clear-eyed public as the enemy within takes power. 

I want to be honest with you. That might seem like an empty pledge after I spent the entire summer and fall gassing up Bad Faith Times readers for a glorious election night in which we deliver a final body blow to the fascist menace. I was wrong – deeply wrong – in believing Americans understood the stakes of the 2024 election. While there’s reason to believe the fascist takeover of Twitter and a curdled information environment made it impossible for any Democrat to win the presidency in 2024, the country was clearly ready and willing to fuck around and find out – the finding out being less fun than the fucking around. I was either unable or unwilling to see this in the months before election day. For that I'm sorry.

I want BFT readers to know that I was in no way painting a rosy picture for attention or readership. I truly believed the Harris campaign, before it turned into a run-of-the-mill failed Democratic campaign, was primed to defeat fascism and hang on to democratic norms for at least another four years. I should have seen the Harris campaign's centering of Liz Cheney for what it was: A campaign trying not to lose. I refused to see this in the moment. That's on me.

Back in the early days of the first Trump administration, I did an ongoing bit on the site formerly known as Twitter in which I was a nihilist. The thing about bits is that they become reality if you're not careful. Pretending to be a nihilist – even making and selling nihilistic calendars – turned me into a nihilist. It was fun for a time. I made folks laugh with my nihilistic posts and videos and whatnot. Today I regret this phase deeply, more than you can know. I suppose I had to go through it if I was going to fully appreciate how destructive and unproductive nihilism can be. I guess I wouldn't have known just how bleak nihilism is if I hadn't messed around with it like those idiots mess around with that puzzle box in the Hellraiser movies.

Nihilism, as BFT readers know, is a key ingredient – maybe the key ingredient – for any successful fascist movement. I reject it and so should you. You are creating space for fascism to grow when you believe or say that nothing matters. Someone told me the other day that "Congress no longer exists." It's a strange statement, and one the Trump administration would like to be true. It's deeply nihilistic too.

Please remember these people want nothing more than your despair. They want you to believe they are inevitable, an unstoppable juggernaut with an overwhelming mandate that will roll over anything and everything that gets in its way. Do not concede in advance. Join me in rejecting nihilism, the ideology or your enemy.

It’s Not All Bad (Really)

It feels all bad, I know. A Republican governing trifecta taking power after two years of frothing right-wing lunatics cosplaying comic book supervillains with promises of death and destruction for anyone who dares oppose them. 

But I’ve looked into it and it’s not all bad, actually. In fact, some of it is good. 

• North Carolina voters again elected a Democratic governor – easily defeating “Martin Luther King on steroids” – and flipped both the lieutenant governor’s office and the state school superintendent’s job against an insurrectionist candidate. Democrats appear likely to hang on to a state supreme court seat that was all but lost on election night. North Carolina Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in the state house, meaning incoming Governor Josh Stein will have some ability to govern like a Democrat. That Kamala Harris didn’t come close to winning North Carolina prompts a series of difficult questions that I won’t get into right now. 
• Though Michigan Democrats lost their historic governing trifecta with a couple close races, liberals retained a dominant state supreme court majority – a crucial hold considering the court’s role in un-fucking Michigan’s wildly gerrymandered election maps. 
• Then there’s Alaska, where Democrats (very) unexpectedly flipped the state house while losing a close race for the state’s lone U.S. House of Representatives seat. 
• Pennsylvania Democrats, meanwhile, held on to a one-seat house majority while the rest of the state embraced far-right candidates up and down the ballot. This was thanks to The States Project, a vitally important organization that has helped to beat back the right-wing takeover of state legislatures that began in 2010. 
• Democrats, thanks again to The States Project, flipped ten seats in the Wisconsin Assembly and finally ended the Republican supermajority in the state senate. It was short of the 15 needed to secure a majority, but it puts Democrats in a good position to seize the majority in the 2026 elections and take power from the anti-democracy forces that have run Wisconsin for the past decade and a half. 

That Trump swept the swing states and made the electoral map redder than LSU head coach Brian Kelly’s face during the fourth quarter of an upset loss should not deter us in the years ahead. Around 200,000 voters over three critical swing states cost Harris the election, and Trump – after holding a shocking popular vote lead – will likely end up with the smallest popular vote margin of victory in history.

This means nothing of substance, of course. Winning the popular vote is the coldest comfort imaginable, the kind of cold that burns. It’s also a signal to those of us who are going to be made to feel crazy in 2025 and beyond that Americans did not give our new fascist leader a mandate to destroy everything we know and love. Some swing voters in the Midwest deciding to vote for the Leopard Party because they are somehow sure the leopards won’t eat their face should not in any way be interpreted as a final victory for the far right. They will say it was a resounding victory, and some on the left, defeated and demoralized, will repeat the claim. That does not make it true.

Try your best over these coming days and weeks not to feed your inner doomer with the latest in doomeristic news. If you have the overwhelming urge to do this – to become the doomer within – remember it’s exactly what the bad guys want you to do. You’re playing right into their sweaty little hands. 

And remember: You are not crazy. This shit stinks. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. 

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