The country is run by conservative content creators with low numbers and poor engagement.
Social media is an altar of power for the conservative torment nexus. They're one step away from *follow4follow* behavior.
The United States Of Snitches – defector.com/the-united-s…— Veronica Ripley đłď¸ââ§ď¸ (@nikatine.com) September 17, 2025 at 1:57 PM
National treasure Dave Roth, at Defector:
… There aren’t really central tenets to Trumpism, at least beyond the bigoted defaults of the stupid and spiteful stripe of the American Elite from which Trump himself emerged; that absence of ethos, at least beyond the belief that it is the absolute and natural right of that rancid elect to prey upon everyone and everything else, constructs a perverse permission structure of its own. Trump did not invent any of this so much as it invented him, and the fantasy of Trumpism, for those who have remade or simply discovered themselves in the service of it, is that Trump’s followers might through their service claim for themselves the same privileges that Trump himself has so delighted in abusing. This is not how it works for followers, though, or with Trump; those who live to serve him have always very clearly been destined to be buried alive with him. It is, in every degrading sense, a sort of American Dream.
… This combination of laziness and mercilessness perfectly suits a movement of dully depraved local gentry, but it is striking how much this relentless and scattershot pettiness has made its way upward. For all of Scheming Vizier and aspiring genocidaire Stephen Miller’s superheated rhetoric of total culture warâ”With god as my witness,” Miller said on Monday, “we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people”âthe instinct to snitch and bully and gloat has reliably won out even among actual elites. The Governor of Texas brags on social media about the explusion of an 18-year-old Texas Tech student who engaged in the wrong type of free speech in the designated campus Free Speech Area. Pam Bondi, Attorney General of the United States, goes on TV and reminds a rogue Office Depot employee that it is very much within her power to prosecute him. Trump himself, who gets testy when people talk about someone other than him for too long, has moved all the way on, and out inexorably toward the first tee.
The entire program is lavishly and howlingly fascist, of course, but it is also so preposterous and so small. All of this underwrought bombast and frantic bullying is doing real and unjust damage in actual people’s lives, but it is also slick with the sort of flopsweat that adheres to the phrase “like and subscribe.” In the absence of governance, or just in its place, the state has taken up a grim and shameful kind of content creation. The conservative elite, all purpose and prayerfulness in their powerful offices, now has to crash out about nonbinary baristas and kick around sophomores with septum piercings for clout, like common influencers.
Again, this all emanates from and returns to Trump himself, whose industry as a content creator is exceeded only by his blank and insatiable appetite for consuming it. There is a certain type of content that the big guy likes, which is mostly cops roughing up bad guys, but also rich people attending fancy parties and crowds rising for him in unanimous applause and footage of missiles blowing things up. The political culture now works mostly to create those images for him and explain why they are so popular and important. It shows them over and over again, and discusses them in tones of calculated aweâare they bigger, will there be more, how radical or reckless or bold are they, do you think, relative to the ones from yesterday, or last week?
These things are in fact not popular, and are increasingly unpopular; for the many people who cannot subsist on content and grievance alone, it has become very difficult to ignore the reality that everything else in American life is atrophying due to the attention and resources currently being redirected to manufacturing this content. No one and nothing else matters; Trump, in his bloated imperial phase, no longer even pretends that anyone or anything else ever could. This leaves the people who have given themselves over to this bleak fandom on their phones, mostly, but not entirely out of the game. Their job is to like and subscribe and amplify and support, and to await the call to hop into the crypt with their president and everything he has hoarded away for himself…
But for all of Miller’s furious Cobra Commander rhetoric, for all the metastatic gilding and trophy clutter in Trump’s Oval Office, for all the strident and signifying fascism down on the streets, the reality of all this is plain and shabby. It is not any kind of full-spectrum authoritarian command, or even the grubby paranoid snitchscape of oppressive surveillance states, but the more familiar sputtering busybody bullshit and hair-trigger offense of a deranged Homeowners Association. Not some grand tyranny directed from above, but a sweaty congeries of little tyrants patrolling the little fiefdoms they’ve arrogated for themselves, working less to knit their awful stupid grievances together than merely against their neighbors everywhere and anywhere possible. Vance, true to form, was just amplifying the one thing that Trumpism has ever offeredânot real opportunity or purpose, not inclusion or community, not even personal advancement, but merely the chance to hurt other people and get away with it.
So this is it: the old national crises of meaninglessness and arbitrary violence and anomie and elite impunity, reshaped by the soft hands of the elites who authored and command all those crises into an opportunity for regular Americans to meet the moment and fulfill their duty as citizens by trying to get the lib wife of the guy who manages the Buca Di Beppo near the mall into some kind of trouble. There is no actual purpose to it, no broader program in it, nothing but the belief that all these cruelties are allowed, now, and so might replace any other right and every other thing that had come before. “People say, ‘Oh, people have a right to say things,'” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said on Fox News. “Well, actually they don’t necessarily have a right to say things.”
The Senate’s resident libertarian was talking about the nasty stuff that people say to him online. His statement is ridiculous on its face, un-American not just in its defiance of the oldest national values but in its violation of the longstanding national bias against whiny little twerps, but it was also absolutely in earnest. These are clowns, factory seconds, prissy sadistic losers, and the clock is ticking. They know as much. They also really mean it.
bbleh
It is not any kind of full-spectrum authoritarian command, or even the grubby paranoid snitchscape of oppressive surveillance states, but the more familiar sputtering busybody bullshit and hair-trigger offense of a deranged Homeowners Association.
FTW.
Baud
@bbleh:
Agree. Best line.
Spanky
@bbleh:
Seems redundant, in my experience.
MattF
Exhibit A is our Secretary of War giving a pep talk to unwillingly assembled generals and admirals. I worried for a while that there was some unspoken ulterior machination going on hereâ but shouldnât have. Itâs just stupidity.
evodevo
@Spanky:Â â
Two thumbs up lol
schrodingers_cat
How white people perceive the latest iteration of Republican rule is different than how non-white people and other targeted minorities experience it
I can assure you that there is nothing remotely funny about it.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I read the OP to call them pathetic rather than funny. YMMV.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: OP? Opinion piece? They are pathetic and unfunny
Jimmy Kimmel gets so much coverage compared to the proposed end to all skilled legal immigration. Its disheartening. Not unexpected. Makes me question my life decisions.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Original post.
Agree. Pathetic and unfunny.
Marc
@schrodingers_cat: The funny part is that most white people still can’t (or don’t want to) see it.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: There are a lot of minority populations who use black humor to get through bad situations. It’s not because the situation is actually funny.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: I speak for myself. I find it unfunny and enraging.
Marc
@schrodingers_cat: Jimmy Kimmel gets so much coverage compared to the proposed end to all
skillednon-white legal immigration.Craigie
âDeranged Homeowners Association â is the perfect encapsulation of this current regime.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@schrodingers_cat: Agreed. This entire maladministration is malevolent horseshyte and needs to be purged with fire.
With that said, perhaps humor will get the message through to the YT voters who might be persuaded that Felonious Thunk should be repudiated at the ballot box.
schrodingers_cat
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): I hope so. Because they are going to be affected too. I found out recently that close to 50% of rural healthcare workers (physicians to nurses to pharmacists and so on) are foreign born and on some kind of visa.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Personal stories, especially involving famous people, will always get more media than issues, especially issues affecting marginalized groups.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Marc: This needs to be made much more of. Especially since so many healthcare pros are admitted to the US through H1B and other programs.
I for one don’t want a PCP who got their MD because the place was open thanks to better qualified applicants being denied entry.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@schrodingers_cat: Seems we had the same thought.
Marc
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): Yes, although frankly, few noticed when this only impacted skilled immigrants from African and Caribbean countries. Now that’s being more broadly applied to those who, uh, may have thought they had a pass, it’s getting some attention.
Suzanne
So many of these people have never been told NO and it shows. The Party of Mediocre White Men.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Honor over principle.
zhena gogolia
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): Our entire medical team are immigrants. And we’re not that rural.
satby
I was coming over here to share David Rothkopf’s latest post to subscribers because it’s just so excellent:
Melancholy Jaques
@schrodingers_cat:
I have never found anything funny about that asshole, but then I didn’t find any humor in the Bush/Cheney Junta either.
Snarki, child of Loki
Is Trump getting paranoid about being replaced by Vance?
And seeking some pre-emptive vengence?
Why ELSE would he put big tariffs on “upholstered furniture” than to take direct aim at Vance???
schrodingers_cat
@satby: IDK who us is. Are immigrants included in the us? I am increasing feeling like a them.
schrodingers_cat
@Melancholy Jaques: In some ways we are here because the privileged wanted to be entertained and Biden was boring.
Suzanne
@Baud: It occurs to me just how staggeringly lazy these people are. They are emotionally lazy. They donât want to do the work of persistence or diligence in the face of doubt or uncertainty. They demand that we tell them how great they are. Fuck them, fuck that.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: Hang on to your citizenship papers. My BIL from China also got his post election.
My family has been here since mid 17th century but we can’t prove it. No records back then. So you and my BIL are more legal than we are. Most recent were Irish escaping the Famine and rich Canadian going to nursing school. Can’t prove that either.
I had a horrible racist grandmother in the DAR ( Daughters of the American Revolution) so maybe we can document descent from the slavers.
This would be obnoxiously entertaining if it were not so serious
ETA My husband’s people were coal miners in Pennsylvania a hundred years back. Citizens? Who knows?
Melancholy Jaques
@schrodingers_cat:
Not just the privileged. The normies want a TV show.
Librettist
sports.yahoo.com/nfl/breaking-news/article/former-bears-cb-charles-peanut-tillman-says-he-quit-fbi-d…
Nukular Biskits
Good evenin’, y’all!
That was a damned good read, AL, particularly this:
As Adam Serwer said in 2018, “the cruelty is the point.”
Nukular Biskits
@MattF:
Hanlon’s Razor is a great predictor of Trump Admin behavior.
Baud
@Librettist:
Awesome.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
This:
…explains Epstein, both his predilections/predations and the company he kept, better than any more erudite analysis ever could.
Baud
@Suzanne:
No lie told.
Librettist
@Librettist:
Roger that.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@satby: Forgive my saying so, but isn’t
… a textbook definition of fascism?
gene108
@schrodingers_cat:
Yeah, they want bar all immigration to the U.S. Targeting student visas, H1-Bs, and OPTs keep Asians out of the country.
There are a lot of white people who do not want foreigners here, especially in good high paying jobs.
Baud
@gene108:
They also don’t want American minorities or. If they’re male, women.
The circle never stops shrinking.
HinTN
@schrodingers_cat: Yep, that’s about the size of it. In glad Joe didn’t dance to their tune but damn…
trnc
Sorry, a bit late and off topic, but I nominate “Okay, well” as a rotating tag.
satby
@schrodingers_cat: of course “us” means “all of us who oppose the administration”.
satby
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): and your point? Did that detract in some way from what he wrote?
Honestly, we’ll parse ourselves to death while the opposition fills concentration camps.
Baud
Newsom is a snitch. He told on Stephen Miller.
Geminid
@Snarki, child of Loki: I don’t know about the tariffs, but I expect Trump has been paranoid about Vance ever since he picked him for VP. One if the many flaws Trump might see in our system is that he can’t fire Vance. He can fire eveyone else, but he can’t fire Vance.
My Atlanta friend is paranoid about Vance too.. He wonders if last year’s election was an effort by Musk, Thiel and others to make JD Vance the next president, and maybe sooner rather than later.
Baud
@satby:
Prison camps.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: Ha! Thank you, I needed that laugh.
zhena gogolia
@MagdaInBlack: He is funny.
MagdaInBlack
@Geminid: He wonders? I’m convinced of it.
Jay
@schrodingers_cat:
Some people are “media worthy”. Just their name in a headline, be it the WAPO, the FTFNYT, People Magazine or The National Enquirer, generate clicks and views, sell paper, get copied and reposted all over social media.
Some people issues and conditions only get covered by alt media and Independents.
It in various extremes have always been more or less the same since the start of Yellow “Journalism”.
And it is only going to get worse.
Long post,…………………………….
nitter.poast.org/P_Kallioniemi/status/1971279957415395384#m
frosty
@Spanky: We are moving to a new house with an HOA. First HOA I’ll ever have to deal with – you don’t find them in neighborhoods with 50 to 100-year old houses. I’m not looking forward to it.
My oldest friend dealt with it by becoming the organization’s president. Nice move.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@satby: Just saying there are more succinct ways of putting it. The longer version seems to pretend the shorter version is something different. Nothing about parsing ourselves to death, more about calling the thing what it is and not pretending that what we face today is the bargain-basement version – somehow less threatening, less virulent, than the original.
tobie
Dave Roth’s description of the attitude of small-town Americans strikes me as spot on. I live off a dirt road in a small town, and the angriest online Trumpers in the neighborhood have installed speed bumps and posted speed limit signs (5 mph / Children at play) that drive the rest of us crazy. I liked Tim Walz’s riff during the campaign: “Mind your own damn business.” That used to be a Republican credo but the pro-life movement destroyed it.
Baud
Gamer news via reddit
Matt McIrvin
@tobie: They had a concrete if stupid liberty argument during the COVID pandemic– “my freedom to not wear a mask or get vaccinated outweighs your right to stay uninfected in public”–until they started ripping the masks off of other people, screaming at them for masking and freaking out about them shedding imaginary vaccine proteins.
David Collier-Brown
@Baud:
That may explain why they’re trying to kill us with COVID and measles. To get the population of non-whites down.
sab
@frosty: I have been doing AUPs ( agreed upon procedures.) for HoAs for the last fifteen plus years. My favorite part is readinfg the minutes. WATB. Just horrible people. But needs to be done because sometimes those underpaid treasurers do steal.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: I have documentation to prove I was born in the US, but according to MAGA that’s not enough, you have to be able to prove your parents were not here illegally. Well, I might be able to prove that THEY were born in the US, but then I have to prove that THEIR parents were here legally.
Go back one more generation, to my great-grandparents, and you start encountering immigrants. Were they here legally? Well, probably, because it was before the 1920s and they weren’t Chinese. But can I prove that? I don’t think so.
iKropoclast
Not funny, perhaps, but endlessly embarrassing and subject to mockery.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
Less funny but spot on.
David Collier-Brown
@frosty:
If the realtor really want to get paid, he’ll take your HOA application with the “refused with prejudice” written across it and just drop it in the file.
sab
@Matt McIrvin: Hence my hope from my horrible grandmother’s DAR registration.
How phucked is that that belonging to a racist sisterhood makes your citizenship assured.
schrodingers_cat
@satby: Sometimes on BJ I totally feel like a “them”.
iKropoclast
@schrodingers_cat: Tell me whom to boycott over these new visa regulations and I got you.
The Kimmel situation had an obvious money hungry target involved to put pressure on. Where does the pressure go now?
MagdaInBlack
@tobie: Having grown up itty small town, and been the object of some of the busy body nature of it, I have always thought maga and their ilk behaved like…small town nosy folk
@Baud: Bitter laughter still counts, yes?
iKropoclast
@MagdaInBlack: Having grown up in blue suburbs, my impression of MAGA looks more like willfully obtuse high-income professionals.
sab
@sab: HOA Horrible people.
Can’t take in your fifteen year old grandchild to get him in a better school district because he is a teen.
Can’t allow actual homeowners to swim in the pool because they use walkers or wheelchairs (they might poop in the pool.)
As I said, these are horrible people.
One year a treasurer was so extremely rude I told my partner I wouldn’t deal with him anymore. My immediate supervisor with a very calm temperment and a hide like a rhinoceros said the same.
Fortunately the guy died before the next year.
iKropoclast
@Baud: Calling them fascists is a call to violence, doncha know?
Meanwhile then calling us demons, socialist, communists, looters, rioters, and enablers of the invasion of the country…isn’t?
How about any acknowledgement of the fact Democrats follow up their criticisms of Republicans with admonitions to vote or protest and Republicans instead spin a narrative about the second amendment that suggests it is okay to meet what they perceive as injustice with violence?
MagdaInBlack
@iKropoclast: I do see the similarity. I now live in a blue suburb and work for some pretty fkn obtuse high income managerial class folks who supported trump. So there’s that too.
iKropoclast
@MagdaInBlack:Â When they talk about eliminating trans people that isn’t a threat…
They’re only getting rid of incompetent black women in the government, not all of them…
These fuckers can ignore the bleeding obvious every time as long as it benefits their 401K. Or they think it does.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@iKropoclast:
Which is ironic considering the Administration and a few others on the right have more or less shown they don’t think the left or others they don’t like should have the same 2A rights as they do and should be disarmed or treated with suspicion
This was posted by some city council twerp in Palm Beach, FL
Notice the symbol of a human figure throwing a swastika into a trashcan is labeled as “anti-white”
Jackie
@MagdaInBlack:
đśThe day my mama socked it to the Harper Valley PTA.đś
Such an honest song. True way before then; Still true today.
prostratedragon
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq):Â What about all the people who don’t understand that those mundane garbage attitudes are precisely the grist of fascism? It has to be broken down for them.
Mike in Pasadena
Most judges I appeared before would have reamed an attorney of Halligan’s incompetence. Most would have said, Case dismissed without prejudice. Try again, refile when you have it together, counsel.
iKropoclast
LMAO. Accidental truth right there. It wasn’t even just incidental. That was the whole label.
Jay
UncleEbeneezer
@bbleh: So is this one:
Jackie
BREAKING NEWS!
Will FFOTUS TACO – again?
iKropoclast
Any chance of a link?
UncleEbeneezer
@schrodingers_cat: Politics is just no fun unless we help put Dems in the biggest hole possible by attacking all of our best leaders.
Jay
@iKropoclast:
bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3lztxzvmkx224
iKropoclast
@Jay: Thank you. Luckily I enrolled in Bluesky a couple days ago. Only for the links.
WTFghost
Ah, hell. I’ve hit one of those life situations in which someone wants to lock me up, seeing as how, if I was given as much alc as I wanted, I’d suck back a half gallon a day. And i’d look back, possibly a bit bleary-ishly, and say “if’n you hurt as much as me, I’d be just as schnockered, four drinks behind you, and *you* would be the one I’m keeping alive, and all I’d be doing is asking if you’ll eat a bagged salad. Now, do you want to split a bag of effing salad, asshole?”
For the record: no, I’m not drinking as much as I wanted. The only time I would drink 1750 in a day, is, if I didn’t, I’d assume I’d eat a shotgun, instead.. Please, don’t intervene, unless you want me to step up behind you and go BOOM one day, just so you really comprehend the reality.
But, to be clear, no, that’s not how much I’m drinking – I just know it won’t numb the pain, enough, so, I stop before then. Still – it’s not some effin’ moral limit, you see? It’s just, practically, it’s a hella lot worse than 750 ever was. If you’re going to cry if I’m drinking a fifth, to stay alive to the sixth, then, let me find a place where you don’t go, to discuss my survival needs – with no offense intended to you.
What haunts me now, is not the pain that wants to suck back an enormous amount of liquor, to find some numbness. It’s having that pain, for so many, many, years, and realizing I can’t drink my pain away, no matter how close I come to death, and, I’m not close to death, but… damn it.
The most unfair thing in this world is a patient can never said “doctor, you made me want to die, right now.” They can only say “now, in the rational today, I can report, way back when, you made me want to die!” and doctor can say, with a pat on the head, “that was for your own good!”
I’m in the realm of pain that can’t be discussed, because “any ordinary person is in grave danger of death, now, that’s for you pussies, not those of us with 20, 30 years experience feeling like this, for us, it’s a really shitty 3-4 weeks, maybe 3-4 months, but, we’ll live. I mean, because if we say otherwise, you numnuts nazis would lock us the eff up wouldn’t you? But no, you’ve only killed the *teenaged* Ghost, who if I may mention, is named for an *afterlife* state!!
That’s kind of the point. I can’t die, right? Who-hooooo-oooo, I’m a ghost! But, no, I’m not in any danger. I’m just in a metric assload of pain
(“Hey, ‘Ghost, I thought you hated ‘boatload’.”
“Yeah, you tell me who needs *assload* of pain explained? Hmm?”)
and a bit worried, because I’m now surrounded by people who don’t have 55 years experience dealing with this crap.
Frontpagers, please feel free to pull this if you feel the need.
Gvg
@schrodingers_cat: humor has often been the best first weapon of subversion in a revolt against authoritarianism. It canât be the only one, and it doesnât suit all people or reach them, but donât disdain it because itâs on your side this time. It is not trivializing what is happening. People are having a conversation with each other and saying things silently with their laughter. Itâs kind of a straw poll, plus conversation starter with neighbors. The high ratings tell people that they arenât alone, other people were noticing too.
As for the lack of similar support against the Visa restrictions, well I am sure the employers are complaining, but not yet being listened to. There is no show people can watch and show support for, plus there really is a lot of anti immigrant feeling even among liberals. There has also been a lot of misinformation fed for a long time. Itâs going to take some time for people to find out how many of their assumptions were wrong. We democrats need to start using the word scapegoat a lot more IMO
Jay
@iKropoclast:
You don’t need a BlueSky account to read, link and repost most BlueSky accounts, only a few restrict other reposting their posts unless you are part of their “community”, you usually see it when a BlueSky poster reposts or comments on their post.
iKropoclast
Republicans’ immigration policies are the main thing they push that makes me want to light a fire*. Especially considering that this is easily their most extreme view that has significant purchase outside their party.
*My own person, I would never want to hurt anyone else
@Jay: Prior to creating account, I have never clicked on a Bluesky link without being presented with a sign in screen.
Either way, I’m on now.
Soprano2
@Jay: This isn’t anything we didn’t already know but it’s nice to have proof.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Maybe every one who wants to work for the government in what I call as leadership of one sort or another should have to spend time as an enlisted person in the US military. A 2 year minimum should do. Can’t get ranked high enough to be all that smug and will be treated in the finest way by people of higher rank who have nothing else to do but try to break you. It either opens your eyes and ears or awards you last place in life platitudes.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
I like your style!
Ruckus
@gene108:
@Baud:
They don’t want people that will work harder than they will.
They don’t want people that will learn more than they can.
They don’t want to be made to look the fools that they are.
They don’t want or to admit that they were born from immigrant parents or grandparents. Because most people born here have immigrant backgrounds in their family chain. I do, one at the grandparent level. Not real sure of the backgrounds of anyone before grandparents but just by knowing them and some of their history, I’d bet that my family tree of born in the US does not go back all that far. And many of us in this country have similar histories that don’t go back all that far.