This Is Not Fine

Twenty years ago, at the outset of over a decade’s service at the department recently re-branded from “Defense” to “War”, I swore an oath to the Constitution of a country that day-by-day I find increasingly difficult to recognize.

Take a beat to stew in the cognitive dissonance of a POTUS who just weeks ago was exhorting everyone to eschew political violence while asserting it a problem exclusively of the left and yet, just yesterday, responded to No Kings protests by sharing an AI slop video of himself, styled as a king, using military hardware to assault protestors who (I note with some irony) aren’t even depicted as engaging non-peacefully.

Only the trend toward this becoming the new normal softens the shock of its inanity and obscenity — consider the similar employment of AI slop in the recent crafting of a crude deep fake of Schumer and Jeffries at the onset of the present government shutdown.

As I moved on from this, my Facebook feed treated me to a taxpayer-funded puff piece for the Secretary Of War who has been aggressively politicizing and purging our military.

I must have stared agape at this so long that the algorithm flagged it as engagement which caused my feed to enqueue more state propaganda still, this time from a department whence Trump fired the chief statistician a few months ago as punishment for the regularly scheduled publication of standardized labor statistics. The protagonist of this item made plain the demographic profile required to avoid summary roll-up by ICE and denial of due process (“lucky” me).

This is not normal and it is definitely not okay — this is unhinged.

Even if you are wholly onboard with the present administration’s policy choices, you should not want a government that conducts itself thus, either in appearance or substance. Yes, the previous administration screwed up many things, immigration policy chief among them as they did their own ill-considered version of “Flood The Zone”, and we are all now reaping the whirlwind. Yet no rational actor should cheer an environment where the most perilously powerful organs of state — military, intelligence, and law enforcement — morph into capricious agents of fear and vengeance as the Commander In Chief makes his justice protocol clear.

For my friends, everything.

For my enemies, the law.

Within all of us exists some part that imagines that a charismatic strongman seemingly aligned to our short-term interests may be our strongman but in reality such a narcissistic sociopathic strongman only ever belongs to himself. With the rule of law gone, and citizens reduced to subjects, all members of the general public will find they share a certain equality in the eyes of an autocrat who seeks to replace a principled (if flawed) republic with naked kleptocracy while far too many of our elected officials bend the knee.