Words of Perfidy

My Pet Peeve About Fascism

“The capacity of human beings to believe the obviously not true is apparently almost unlimited. Politicians fall into trouble, not by overestimating it, but by underestimating it.”

-H.L. Mencken

The Trump/Musk administration’s rhetorical crimes seem like the least of their offenses, trivial compared to their dismantling of the institutions of democratic government, deliberate assault on human health and the planet, betrayal of our democratic allies and embrace of gangster autocracies—what looks like a concerted effort to irreparably wreck anything good or helpful or even halfway decent this country ever did. And yet I still want to yell, in naive, little-kid outrage, Hey that’s not right! whenever Trump or one of his underlings states the exact opposite of the truth, inverts reality to make themselves victims and their victims oppressors, or accuses their enemies of precisely their own crimes and motives.

At my age I should really be beyond this sort of ingenuous shock. I’ve read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda and even Adolf Hitler’s thoughts on the crude art of mass lying in Mein Kampf. Let’s call it a peeve—my pet peeve about fascism. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer that this administration’s injustices toward language offend me, just as their arrogant disregard for evidence and consensus must aggrieve scientists, or their fiscally imbecilic tariffs and trade wars must cause economists physical pain. Or maybe it’s just that crimes against fact are more finite, comprehensible, easier to feel than the larger ones, the way it’s easier to mourn a dead cat by the highway than the hundreds or thousands of species we drive to extinction every year.

Some of this is just the standard misdirection and lies political leaders have deployed for millennia, cloaking venal motives under virtuous excuses, as when they cite “cost cutting” or “efficiency” in their gutting of the government. They’ve even suckered some dimwit pundits into debating their means, as though “efficiency” were the real end. If the administration gave a shit about efficiency they’d start by cutting what’s far and away the largest and most stupendously wasteful expenditure in the budget, the military. DOGE’s only real agenda is to eviscerate the United States government, cripple its ability to function beyond repair—everything except the necessary apparatus of fascism, the military and surveillance.

The designated henchman for this task, Elon Musk, has a personal investment in this agenda: he’s a sadist who enjoys firing people the way normal people enjoy sex. He takes obvious pleasure in scaring, threatening and insulting the people under his power, depriving them of their livelihoods and trashing their life’s work, like a kid stomping his sister’s sand castle. He gleefully brandished the slasher-movie prop of a chainsaw, playing serial killer, while wrecking decades of dedicated work and accumulated expertise, destroying careers, and ruining lives. I have several friends who are federal employees: one, an engineer who enabled systems SpaceX depends on every launch, received Elon’s email urging him to get a “high-productivity private-sector job” instead of idling away his remaining years in a government sinecure; another, a physician who’s spent decades building the best team in his field in the world, has seen it abruptly defunded, its members dispersed. The rest of us can only watch as this grinning, dimwitted manchild pulls one feebly flailing leg after another off the body of the republic.

Some of Trump’s rhetoric is so patently nonsensical that it actively flaunts its indifference to conveying information, meaning, or any content at all. He’s blamed “DEI” for, among other things, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, his own attempted assassination, the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the Los Angeles wildfires, and various plane crashes. These statements are such utter non sequiturs that they tacitly announce their real purpose, which is simply to attack; they mean the same thing as calling someone bitch. As with his boast about murdering someone on 5th Avenue, Trump wants to demonstrate that his dumb cultists will believe, and cheer, anything he says or does at all.

It especially grates when fascists ape the rhetoric of the left, appropriating the language of pluralism and tolerance to their opposite end. They cite the “defense of women” as an excuse to bully trans people, as though they haven’t already deprived women of their most fundamental rights, and would gladly take their credit cards, bank accounts, and vote away as soon as it’s feasible; they express deep concern about “antisemitism” on campuses in their campaign to cripple academia, even as they’re literally sieg-heiling on TV, sending masked thugs to abduct people in unmarked vans, and insisting that their facilities for the indefinite detention of deportees are not to be called “camps.”

The latest example of this tactic was when Richard Grenell, the Fox talking head Trump installed as president of the Kennedy Center, tsk-tsked over the mass booing of Vice President Vance at a performance there, lamenting that the audience was “mostly white and intolerant of diverse political views.” (Grenell has been described by more than one source as the single most dishonest person they’ve ever met in their entire careers in politics and media.) Coming from an apparatchik for an administration that’s made “DEI” the acceptable new euphemism for n_____r, had the “Black Lives Matter” street mural painted over, and overturned federal regulations banning segregated facilities in government contractors, this pious clucking about “diversity” cannot be anything other than a smug, chuckling fuck you.

(By contrast, evangelical Christians are refreshingly forthright in the unabashed hatefulness of their rhetoric, free of any pretext of decency. Lately they’ve been warning the faithful against the dangers of “the sin of empathy,” which The wily Devil uses to trick the righteous into caring for the poor and the brown, and complaining that the U.S. is a “gyneocracy,” governed by the softhearted feminine weakness of uncritical compassion, rather than being properly ruled by the manly Christian virtues of bigotry, cruelty, and greed. This in obeyance of the exhortation from the second book of Habakkuk to “close your hearts to pity.”¹)

It is a violation of the rules of combat—an “act of perfidy”—to deceptively wear the colors of your enemy. But of course fascists aren’t really pretending to be open or tolerant; they’re pretending to pretend, as an in-joke, a parody of the left’s earnest bleeding-heart values. Like free speech, elections, or the other institutions of democracy, tolerance is a tool that they’re happy to exploit to their own advantage, but which they’ll deny to their enemies and ban as soon as it’s no longer of use. This rhetoric isn’t a real attempt to claim the moral high ground, or provide acceptable cover for their agenda. Donald Trump’s crude brain probably can’t distinguish between truth and lies anymore than a shark’s can between fish and license plates; his propagandists and spokesmodels certainly don’t believe their own tweets and press releases; and, though some of their supporters are certainly dumb enough to believe whatever they’re told on Fox or facebook or youtube—especially if it feeds their self-pitying fantasy that straight Christian white men are the most persecuted minority in America—persuading their base isn’t the real intention, either. Their base doesn’t need “persuading”: naturally submissive like all fascists, and conditioned by childhood brainwashing at church, they’ll reliably root for their team and support their cult leader in defiance of all evidence or consequence, even after they’ve lost their own jobs or veteran’s benefits or legal status as citizens. For them, belief is a matter of tribal allegiance—what they call “faith”—rather than a considered evaluation based on empirical data.

People in the late 60s-early 70s probably couldn’t have imagined we’d ever look back with nostalgic fondness at what they called the “Credibility gap”—the dissonance between official rhetoric and the evident facts on the ground, e.g., LBJ and his generals insisting that “the light at the end of the tunnel” was visible in Vietnam even though people’s sons kept coming home in caskets, or Nixon assuring them that their President was “not a crook” before they heard him conniving to pay hush money to cover up a break-in. At the time it was seen as a failure of the democratic contract, a breakdown of trust between government and citizenry; in retrospect it looks more like a sign of health in the body politic that people were able to discern, and acknowledge, the contradiction between official bullshit and the evidence of their senses. Even though people disagreed bitterly over the issues, were willing to do battle in the streets over Civil rights or Vietnam, they at least agreed on the fundamental facts of those issues. There were three TV networks, which tended toward a general consensus about the nature of reality; NBC was not declaring victory in Vietnam after Tet, or calling the smoking gun tape a fake. (It’s hard to believe there was really a time when a newsman was called “the most trusted man in America”; now conservative dads buy humorous cartoon T-shirts about lynching journalists.) And back then not every dropout older brother, sour-smelling Ayn Rand fan, or creepy drug dealer with Nazi memorabilia had access to the tools of mass media to broadcast their theories and ideology.

Another crucial difference is that LBJ and Nixon were earnest in their deceits; they genuinely intended and hoped that their lies would be believed. Trump could give a shit. No: for fascists, to lie brazenly, to flatly contradict self-evident fact, to call black white and night day even as they’re blinding you, is just a flex, a display of power. Trump triumphantly heralded the fabulous new golden age of economic recovery he’d single-handedly inaugurated in all caps with multiple exclamation points on the same day the Dow Jones looked like the EKG of a terminal patient’s last seconds. Journalist Masha Gessen, a Russian emigré, calls this the “bully lie,” a way of “asserting power over reality itself.” It forces the listener to take sides, to choose either to accept and submit to the obviously untrue, or to contradict and resist it. (Cf. Orwell’s formulation about the basis of freedom being the ability to say that two plus two makes four.) Maybe rhetorical crimes aren’t so trivial; controlling perception is a way of controlling action. Coining an epithet—a signature talent of Trump’s—is step 1 in the process of dehumanizing someone, at the end of which sequence you get to kill them without having to feel bad.

Also, it amuses fascists to flaunt their bigotry and cruelty dressed up in liberal drag. Barbarians regard the devices and conventions of civilization as hilariously faggy and contemptible; they value only money and force. So they like torturing our precious words and ideas in front of us because they think it’s funny that it hurts us, that we actually take this democracy shit seriously, like bullies playing a game of keep-away with something you love. The perverse, naked hypocrisy is part of the fun. And my innocent anger at their deliberate abuse of the truth is in itself the desired effect. Understanding this really ought to give me more equanimity than it does. As I said, it’s the least of their offenses—just adding insult to atrocity—yet I can’t help but let it get to me. It’s like watching the man who murdered your mother wear her face as a mask, and go Boo hoo hoo in a crooning falsetto.

From someplace or other—goodness only knows where—Donald Trump seems to have picked up a lot of Russian disinformation tactics. “Flooding the zone” with too much shocking/outrageous news to process is one; so is creating so many false narratives that people are too fatigued to bother figuring out, or care, what’s true anymore, like dumping a tubful of cheap plastic beads over a single gem. This smug presumption of superiority over old-fashioned fact is a symptom of authoritarianism; it’s also typical of reactionary administrations’ earliest days in power, when they’re still giddy with the testosterone of victory, flush with delusional, hubristic ambitions that haven’t yet been checked. During the first term of the George W. Bush administration, an unidentified official (almost certainly Karl Rove) coined the contemptuous phrase “reality-based community” to dismiss those of us who thought the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq would be disasters. In Trump’s first administration, one of his spokesmodels rebranded lies as “alternative facts,” announcing that they would now be manufacturing their own reality just for conservatives (not unlike “Conservapedia,” the alternative to wikipedia with customized “facts” about Vince Foster and Benghazi to coddle the delusions of conspiracists). But now, only a few months into their second administration, the slow erosive creep of hundreds of lawsuits and judicial orders is beginning to eat away at the Trump/Musk administration’s façade. Already we’re seeing divisions and infighting; soon enough will come the firings, defections, and tell-alls that’ll expose how halfassed, dysfunctional and dumb this administration always was.

Perhaps the only thing more fatal to such administrations than having their plans thwarted is getting to implement their plans unhindered. The Bush administration’s invasions were, per predictions, catastrophic fuckups that ground on for decades and killed at least half a million people to no discernible end whatsoever. Inasmuch as Donald Trump has any consistent agenda, it appears to be the systematic and irrevocable destruction of America’s economy, culture, scientific preeminence, and geopolitical standing. His tariffs casually tanked millions of people’s retirement savings, and may single-handedly precipitate a global recession. This fall, when the agricultural harvest is supposed to happen, all the people who actually do that harvesting will be gone, deported into what are definitely not camps. And when the next natural catastrophe occurs, or the next pandemic erupts, FEMA and the NIH will each have been reduced to a few dozen Trump flunkies.

Every toddler has an apple-of-knowledge moment when he learns the magical power of lying; most of them then, soon after, have a Cain-and-Abel moment when they learn its limitations, and its cost. Donald Trump has never yet had the latter; he thinks reality, like some bimbo he recruited from Fox to be his press secretary, will do whatever he tells it to. But Philip K. Dick defined reality as “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” (And in AA they have a darker epigram: “The truth will set you free, but not until it’s done with you.”) I’m confident that the truth will inevitably out, and reality ultimately triumph over Trumpism—ideally in court, or at the ballot box, but, if not, it’ll prevail in the arena of natural, pitiless consequence: in the guttering economy, in measles outbreaks, in ravaging fires and floods, the Dies Irae of cause and effect, scourging the innocent and guilty alike, sparing none of us.

1. Whoops, I actually got that citation wrong (sorry, it’s been a long time since I went to Sunday school)—that was actually Adolf Hitler in his address to the commanders of the Wehrmacht, August 22, 1936.