In 1949, George Orwell released a book called Nineteen Eighty-Four, sometimes published as 1984. It is widely regarded as the greatest dystopian novel ever written, and it’s so commonly read and known that people can just say ‘1984,’ and it’s understood that they’re talking about dystopia. “Orwellian” is also used to describe dystopian things in our world. Many of 1984’s concepts have made their way into our society’s lexicon such as “Big Brother,” “2 + 2 = 5,” “Doublethink,” and “Thoughtcrime,” among others.
While I do think Orwell gets overly romanticized as a prophet, I do see similarities between elements of his story and elements of our society. The Patriot Act echoes the surveillance of Big Brother. Israel joining the Board of Peace while committing genocide echoes the “War is Peace” contradiction. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth destroys truth itself. It chooses what is true and what isn’t. Donald Trump, who has done the most in the modern era to desecrate the concept of truth, owns his Truth Social platform.
There’s a lot of horrible shit out there, and we should raise awareness, and resist it, fight it, and so on. But what I’ve been thinking about recently is just how stupid so much of this is. That’s what I’d like to rant about.
Let’s take George W. Bush, for example. In October 2001, he signed into law the Patriot Act, which, as I said, committed the US to massive, massive surveillance. That’s a bit dystopian, and it seems to violate the 4th amendment to the constitution, but hey, I’m no constitutional expert. It was bad, but it was also stupid. First of all, we call it the “Patriot Act,” but really it’s the “USA Patriot Act,” but actually it’s the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. Now, if you follow those bold letters, you see that it spells out USA Patriot.
Seriously? Are we serious? Is this what happens? We turn this dystopian project into a cute little acronym? What a fucking joke. “Hey guys, I know we’re gonna spy on all of you, but look at this adorable little acrostic poem we wrote. Isn’t that sweet?” Fuck you. It’s really crazy to me how often this happens. In 2017, a bill was introduced called the Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement Act, which spells out COVFEFE. Covfefe was a typo from a Donald Trump tweet. A fucking typo. What a stupid world we live in. Some stupid ones from Democrats include the STABLE GENIUS Act and the ZOMBIE Act.
But that’s only part of the stupidity of the situation. This is a horrible act, yet it was ushered in by an absolute buffoon. It’s all about technology and surveillance and tapping and all that, yet it’s signed by a guy who says “Internets,” and “the Google.” Now, we all misspeak, we all have gaffes, but as far as Presidents go, there was no one more prolific than George W. Bush, at least at the time.
Bush’s Iraq War was built on lies. Several, several lies, including their desire to not have the “smoking gun come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” They all said this again and again. The nuclear threat was a key part of the rationale for this horrific war. Yet George Bush himself couldn’t even say the word “nuclear.” He doesn’t know how to say it. How stupid. It’s maddening to have someone capable of causing so much destruction at home and abroad, and yet have so much stupidity spewing from his mouth all the time. It seems like his “Bushisms” have whitewashed his regime. Another stupid thing from the Iraq War was that the US tried to convince other nations to join in our illegal invasion. They convinced their old ally, the UK to join, but their other old ally, France, said no. So in response, the US changed their congressional cafeteria menu from ‘French fries’ to ‘Freedom fries.’ That’ll show ‘em! How petty and stupid.
Let’s move on to Barack Obama. Obama didn’t have nearly as much personal stupidity as Bush. But he still deserves regular criticism for continuing the war on terror, his drone strike campaign, maintaining the torture program, bowing to Wall Street, and so on. Those all deserve condemnation. The stupidity came from what he was actually condemned for.
In the first year of his Presidency, he committed the unspeakable crime of ordering a burger with dijon mustard instead of good old-fashioned, true American yellow mustard. What a disgrace. Just imagine if he did that on a plant-based burger too. That would truly be a Leninist/Maoist gesture. A few years later, he did something so scandalous that it definitely needed to be talked about on Fox News. Barack Obama wore a tan suit during a press conference.
Republican representative Peter King literally went on national television and said, “There’s no way I think any of us can excuse what the President did yesterday.” INEXCUSABLE! That’s the kind of shit I’d say about Watergate, not a tan fucking suit. I mean, think about suits. There’s gray, black, blue. Tan is right up there. It’s not like he was out there in a purple suit and green vest like the fuckin joker.
Lou Dobbs, some right-wing commentator, went on TV and said it was “shocking.” I’m shocked that anyone fuckin talked about it. There’s serious shit going on, and we’re talking about a tan suit. Everyone on Fox bemoaned that it was “unpresidential,” they loved using that word. Now, I think Presidents, generally speaking, are rotten, but let’s just say there is some ideal concept known as being “presidential.” It involves being formal, smiling when appropriate, giving firm handshakes to other dignitaries, being diplomatic, accepting your own mistakes when you make them, having some sense of cordiality in disagreements and not resorting to personal attacks. Right? I mean, if a tan suit is so unpresidential, I’m sure Lou Dobbs really hated the next guy, the most unpresidential guy in our fuckin country. Right?
It was around this time, the mid-2010’s, that I became a young adult and started to take an interest in politics. I thought, “I’m an adult now. I’m gonna look seriously at this serious world. I’m going to read books about history and politics and I’ll follow the current events, and I’ll listen to perspectives and be serious about my thoughts.” So then I start following the news, starting with events covered by the mainstream media on YouTube, and what do I see in the comments? DemoCRAPS, DEMONcrats, Lyin’ Ted. CHEETO MAN. Drumpf. He’s a Cheeto man. He looks like a Cheeto, that snack food. Is it a chip? Anyway, it’s orange, like him. He’s orange.
I just couldn’t believe how stupid it all was. And I get there’s always gonna be some stupid, but the amount of people that just loved this kindergarten level shit was astounding. And it was not just the people. It was led by the fucking main candidate of the party! My first impression of politics was how serious and stupid it was at the same time.
This Tump-Biden-Trump era has felt like one long nightmare, and it has been. Trump was incredibly wild, and Biden was clueless. Trump reversed even the basic environmental protections he had. While doing that, he claimed that the noise from windmills causes cancer. He talked about airports during the Revolutionary War. He claimed magnets would be deactivated if you pour a cup of water on them. He says, “Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.” He claimed to decrease drug prices by 1000% or 600% which makes no sense. It goes on and on and on.
Trump is fulfilling some of Orwell’s “predictions” in the stupidest way possible. Orwell had the Ministry of Truth, and Trump has Truth Social, which he uses to post A.I.-generated video of him shitting on his own country from a jet. Very cool. Very sane. Orwell had the Ministry of Peace, which, of course, is all about war. Trump has the Board of Peace, yet he supports this genocide/eradication so his son-in-law can build luxury resorts or golf courses or whatever the fuck. You know, Hannah Arendt talked about the ‘banality of evil,’ which basically posits that the great evils of the holocaust were not committed by sadists or psychopaths or ‘monsters,’ but rather mundane people. I guess I’m saying that it doesn’t take any particular intelligence or sophistication to not only commit those evils, but to lead them. In fact, it’s common for those to be fucking stupid.
[I know a lot of that is from the second term, but whatever] And the Democrats thought, “All right, we gotta get rid of this guy, who’s our best bet? I know, how about a guy that can hardly speak? Because he has name recognition.” So we got stuck with this old man who hardly had any idea what was going on around him, it seemed. If anyone was as incoherent as he was doing any job whatsoever, you’d have to tell him he’s not up for it, and ask his family to consider putting him in a home. Yet there he was, the most powerful man on Earth. He always looked like he was trying so hard to form sentences. So, for me, it was less of him being stupid, just old, but our country being stupid for having him as President. Listening to him try to speak was painful and embarrassing.
Yet, all the while, rent goes up, wages don’t, mass shootings keep happening, medical debt increases, police keep brutalizing people, mass incarceration stays steady, the military budget balloons, foreign interventions keep happening, emissions skyrocket, etc. etc. etc. and so on. Lotta serious, horrible shit, yet so stupid at the same time.
It’s not just politicians, though. The ultra-wealthy are also fucking stupid. For years and years I’ve been told about how much of a genius Elon Musk is. While I never really cared or bought into it, I think his stupidity, at least the stupidity I’m talking about, escalated a lot in recent years.
He’s the richest man in the world, and in some sense the richest man in the history of the world. With that comes so much power, so much ability to do things. What does he do? He buys Twitter because they banned his favorite satire page, the Babylon Bee. Whatever, that’s not that stupid. I don’t use Twitter, but Elon and his team made a bunch of changes really quickly, and it seemed like it kinda sucked. So then he put up this poll which said, “Should I step down as the head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.” And, of course, people voted “Yes,” and, of course, he didn’t abide by it.
This is just so stupid. The richest man on the planet, one of the most powerful men on Earth, and he’s acting like a fifth grader with a crush. Like he’s passing a note in class to a girl: “Do you like me? Yes or No.” What a joke. And then he did a Nazi salute and all the right-wingers had to pretend it wasn’t. And then he, the owner of the website, made antisemitic tweets, so then he bitched to Andrew Ross Sorkin that they’re [the advertisers] killing the company, not that his shitty behavior was making them not want to be associated with him. Whatever happened to personal fuckin responsibility, huh?
Then this supergenius, who’s just like Iron Man, by the way, tweets, on the platform that he owns, that Donald Trump is covering up the Epstein files because he’s implicated in them. Now I don’t necessarily have anything against that in particular, but after that, he decides, because he’s a genius boy, to go and have a nice formal dinner with the guy he just accused of covering up a sex trafficking operation. He said it was a lovely dinner.
This is what really got me thinking about the stupidity/evil situation: Jeffrey Epstein. He was one of the most horrific criminals in history, and many [not all] of his files have been released, with inappropriate non-redactions of victims and inappropriate redactions of potential collaborators. What’s the word for this? Uhm, stupid? Anyway, it gives us a slight glimpse into the shadowy, dark, evil world of the super elites. While many of us suspected this kind of thing, I guess I just expected a little more, I don’t know what the word is, sophistication?
I don’t know, maybe I’m just as stupid, but I assumed they’d have all these crazy alternative email accounts and dark web stuff and untraceable cell phones and sophisticated terminology. But when you look at it, it just looks like a bunch of dickheads sitting around, texting and emailing each other from their phones while committing the worst shit imaginable. It’s very fratboyish. That’s what this feels like. These are the fratboys of Earth. Really rich, love partying, have absolutely no empathy for anyone else, hate women [in this case women and girls] intensely, yet are attracted to them and want to control them. Only in this case it’s like ten million times worse. And I get that the evil acts committed and who committed them are the real story, and they’re worth continued examination, but it also is just the culmination of this growing feeling I’ve had that the world is just stupid.
The investigation has been stupid too. The files are real, no they’re not, they’re on my desk, never mind, it’s a complete Democrat hoax, actually it’s kinda real, but there’s phony stuff in there, if it’s about Trump it’s fake, but if it’s Clinton it’s real, but we won’t release them to protect victims, but then when we do release them, we’ll reveal additional victims who didn’t want to be identified.
Then they throw Pam Bondi out there to answer questions about her lackluster investigation. She’s the Attorney General, by the way, which means she’s the head of the Department of Justice. So they’re like “Hey Pam, what’s the deal? How’s the investigation? You gonna arrest anyone? You gonna unredact those certain parts?” And she starts talking about the fucking DOW Jones. The economy. The fucking stock market. Then she whines like a baby, like a five year-old, about why they didn’t ask Merrick Garland the same thing. Like, YOU are the Attorney General! You’re in charge of justice! You’re the Attorney General right now!
Just imagine Pam Bondi’s in history. Like, “Hey, Pontius Pilate, did you just wash your hands while that innocent man was killed?” And he’s like “What about the 50,000 denarii that Tiberius brought in? That’s the real story. And a lot of Roman Governors wash their hands too, why don’t you ask them?” Or, “Hey O.J. did you kill your wife?” “Why didn’t you ask Henry VIII the same question, I never heard you ask him, and he’s accused of killing multiple wives. I didn’t hear a single question from you back in 1542 about the same thing.”
So fucking stupid. If you’re in charge of justice, and there’s a giant sex trafficking investigation going on, the absolute bare fucking minimum you’d do is set up some communication with the survivors to try to get some amount of justice, but she can’t even doing that. What a fucking disgrace. What a stupid world.
Lefty Forrester 