the Bradbury Effect edition

​Nine FACTS, One LIE
Issue # 29

1. Well, Zuckerbook says I posted this 13 years ago today. What's so striking is, despite my inherent personal skepticism, I remember in a very raw and sadly painful way the degree to which I was convinced that, for the first time in my life, America was moving in a positive direction.

2. Which is to say, toward reason and stability and ethics and intellect and cultural openness and, yes, Hope with a capital H. If you had told me then, as I held my 7 year old daughter in my lap, that in 2025 we would be living in a genuinely Fascist Autocracy, I would have told you that you were a lunatic.

3. If only because there was no chance that America could simply roll over like a dying bison, sigh with regret, and allow the flies to descend.

4. And yet, that is precisely what has happened. The Lord Of Flies, throughout my childhood an openly ridiculed buffoon who helmed one business disaster after another, named Donald J. Trump, is, as I type this and to my burning fissile amazement, still president every day I wake.
5. People are being dragged out of their beds and zip-tied. ICE is on course to soon be larger than the US Marines. Colleges, Museums, and National Parks have been forcibly edited to suit a particularly false narrative. Foreign policy is being deliberately altered to suit Russian expansionism and weaken democracy in Europe. Anti-science initiatives are pushed daily, with the zombie corpse of John F. Kennedy's nephew at the helm. Congress has been reduced to a collection of powerless lab monkeys and sycophants. Giddily racist, white nationalist, and xenophobic utterances are celebrated daily. The Supreme Court is merely an evangelist arm of the Heritage Foundation, the same people who wrote, denied, and then implemented Project 2025.

6. Perhaps most distressingly, 150 million Americans blithely support these events, mouthing banalities about freedoms and speech and patriotism and America As An Ideal, while they drool all over themselves attempting to find ways to justify the artifice.

7. America is no longer a place, it is a concept. And that concept is a dark, masturbatory fantasy.

8. Unreasoning anger is the lifeblood of the movement toward authoritarianism, and anger, in the end, is just fear in a leather jacket.

9. There was a time, back in the days of Freewheelin' Barry Obama, when people simply held differing political views and even dangerously strident positions, which had to be accommodated as part of the pact we've made with ourselves, as the world's best, if not only, truly functional Social Democracy, in which every citizen has a right to their opinion.

10. That time has passed. No one has the right to support Fascism, no matter what shade of lipstick it wears. Abundant irony, top-shelf coffee, and clever sentences are no longer enough of a response. Unfortunately, the only way to fight Fascism is by force, if not outright violence. Is there still time for judicial, legislative, and force of Popular Will to somehow eke out a victory from beneath the jackloafers of Stephen Miller and what's left of the manipulated brain of Donald J. Trump?

11. I guess we're going to find out.

12. If you, today, this morning, still support Donald J. Trump because you think it'll help your stock portfolio, or a Woke Mob will force you to stop saying "retard" in public, or you have yet to admit to yourself that your son actually looks pretty fantastic in a lilac dress, you are a flat TRAITOR to any ideal you claim to possess.

13. It's real close to Man The Barricades time. Can't believe I believe that either, or what form it would actually take, but it's also very likely that The Remaining Sane Citizens Of America should have been out in the streets six months ago, and refused to relent until the unforgivable knee-bending to the forces of fatuousness, cretinism, imbecility, greed, dissimulation, propaganda, prevarications, myths, figments, and terminological inexactitude were cleansed away with the powerful antiseptic that brought about The Age Of Reason.
​
14. Five-hundred years ago, true courage, fledgling science, unabashed secularism, and true enlightenment were afoot. We're doomed if we are unable to find that spirit again.