by Daniel Barge
Forget about Trump, a big noisy boomer who wrote checks with his mouth that his ass couldn't cash. He will soon be forgotten as a pathetic one-term president who failed to deliver on a single campaign promise to his base, but still found plenty of time and money to do favours for Israel. Next year will mark the end of Trump's time-wasting story line, as a figure of hope that turned to dust and ashes before our eyes. The reason he will go down in flames is because he pissed off the one group he couldn't afford to piss off—the Dissident Right.
Don't laugh. It's true. It was the Dissident Right—then incorrectly known as the Alt-Right—that got his sorry orange butt into the White House in 2016. Without the memes and incessant online activism of tens of thousands of what are now called "Veterans of the Great Meme War," Trump would have been toast for Jeb! to smear his rancid butter on, and Hillary Clinton's oval orifice would now be sitting in the Oval Office.
To be honest that result wouldn't have been much worse than what we got with Trump. In fact, in some ways it might have been better.
Since day one the Dissident Right has been Trump's only ace, his single metapolitical weapon to fight back against the establishment shitstorm. Academia hates him, the mass media hates him, Hollywood hates him, the Jewish institutions hate him, and the Deep State loathes him. But as long as he had the Dissident Right, he had the memes, and as long as he had the memes, he could still hang in there. But we didn't want him to just "hang in there"—we wanted death or victory. We wanted someone to put up a real fight, even if he went down in flames, because even that would have been a victory, and would have prepared the way for the collapse of the old system.
But, no, Trump didn't want to be a trier or a martyr. He wanted to be the get along guy, the big, popular glad-hander, and to be finally acknowledged as the one thing he never was—a much respected, fully-paid-up member of the establishment, instead of the occasional comic relief.
He believed that his ability to mobilise the anger, dreams, hopes, and frustrations of the common man—and then manage them—would give him the leverage he needed to be accepted by his fellow billionaires and globalists. But there was a contradiction here, intensified by the high price demanded by the establishment for its acceptance: for each tiny drop of that precious commodity Trump had to trade the interests of his base in tanker loads. In short, it was the worst deal in history, and one which his enemies in the establishment knew would bankrupt and discredit him with his base, while also demoralising those rebellious voters into accepting their subservience once more.
The Dissident Right has looked on at this slow motion car crash in growing horror and disbelief, endeavouring all the while to find crumbs of comfort or arcane explanations for what Trump was "really" up to—muh 4D chess. Some of them, let's be frank, had their own Trump Derangement Syndrome.
But, after watching Trump kowtow to Israel, U-turn on troop withdrawals, fail on the Wall while boasting of the highest ever "legal" immigration, the Dissident Right finally arrived at the complete realisation that it had been taken for a ride. The biggest ever trade and budget deficits in US history didn't help either. Trump's recent CPAC speech was the capping stone on that gruesome edifice.
But what really stung—and proved to be the sting of death to Trump—was his complete lack of action in defence of the freedom of speech and safety of his most dedicated supporters.
While people in MAGA caps were beaten to a pulp, what did Trump do?
He appointed more Neocons.
While Trump supporters were demonetised, deplatformed, or shadow-banned from social media for spurious reasons, what did he do?
He trusted Paul Ryan and waited for the Dems to take over the Congress.
His worst betrayal was not to the voters—although he betrayed them as well—but to his own foot soldiers, the tens of thousands of mainly anonymous men and women who memed, tweeted, shared, and argued for countless hours on the internet, breaking the wall of media control. Many of them literally lost friends, jobs, and even their health and well-being on account of Trump.
At the time of his 2016 campaign, Trump was seen by many as a Caesar-like figures—the "God Emperor Trump" as it was memed. But which Caesar would ever hold power by betraying his own legions? This is precisely the mistake Trump made. His legionnaires were not the men risking their lives in pointless wars and deployments in faraway places like Syria and Afghanistan. Sure, many of those guys often supported Trump as well, but those were not the "crack troops" with which he gained power completely against the odds.
While he maintained the flow of billions to the military industrial complex and kept the drones raining death, his real foot soldiers, the members of the Dissident Right, got less than nothing from him. Instead they effectively became scapegoats, personally punished in Trump's stead.
For too long the House of Trump has been hollowed out, its timbers rotting and creaking in the wind. The only reason it didn't collapse into a heap of matchwood was because there was no alternative; certainly nothing in the GOP, while the Democrats still seemed to be the party of Hillary.
The midterms changed all that, thrusting people like Tulsi Gabbard, Ilhan Omar, and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the limelight—politicians from the Left who addressed issues with a radical and often honest approach that reminded Trump supporters of what they once saw in Trump, even if the issues were different and the IQ levels all over the place.
But even this wasn't quite enough to start the implosion. We had to wait until the innovative campaign and edgy issues of Andrew Yang for the Dissident Right to find the energy to meme its way off the Trump plantation, but meme they did.
Trump forgot to build two walls, the one to stop illegal immigrants traipsing over the border, and the other, much more important one, to stop his former supporters defecting in mass to the first candidate who came along with something more intriguing and stimulating than Trump's broken promises, soiled covenant, and jaded slogans.
Whatever objections might be raised, Yang is the man right now. Trump has lost his meme warriors who are now busy acclaiming a new Emperor.
Don't laugh. It's true. It was the Dissident Right—then incorrectly known as the Alt-Right—that got his sorry orange butt into the White House in 2016. Without the memes and incessant online activism of tens of thousands of what are now called "Veterans of the Great Meme War," Trump would have been toast for Jeb! to smear his rancid butter on, and Hillary Clinton's oval orifice would now be sitting in the Oval Office.
To be honest that result wouldn't have been much worse than what we got with Trump. In fact, in some ways it might have been better.
Since day one the Dissident Right has been Trump's only ace, his single metapolitical weapon to fight back against the establishment shitstorm. Academia hates him, the mass media hates him, Hollywood hates him, the Jewish institutions hate him, and the Deep State loathes him. But as long as he had the Dissident Right, he had the memes, and as long as he had the memes, he could still hang in there. But we didn't want him to just "hang in there"—we wanted death or victory. We wanted someone to put up a real fight, even if he went down in flames, because even that would have been a victory, and would have prepared the way for the collapse of the old system.
But, no, Trump didn't want to be a trier or a martyr. He wanted to be the get along guy, the big, popular glad-hander, and to be finally acknowledged as the one thing he never was—a much respected, fully-paid-up member of the establishment, instead of the occasional comic relief.
He believed that his ability to mobilise the anger, dreams, hopes, and frustrations of the common man—and then manage them—would give him the leverage he needed to be accepted by his fellow billionaires and globalists. But there was a contradiction here, intensified by the high price demanded by the establishment for its acceptance: for each tiny drop of that precious commodity Trump had to trade the interests of his base in tanker loads. In short, it was the worst deal in history, and one which his enemies in the establishment knew would bankrupt and discredit him with his base, while also demoralising those rebellious voters into accepting their subservience once more.
The Dissident Right has looked on at this slow motion car crash in growing horror and disbelief, endeavouring all the while to find crumbs of comfort or arcane explanations for what Trump was "really" up to—muh 4D chess. Some of them, let's be frank, had their own Trump Derangement Syndrome.
But, after watching Trump kowtow to Israel, U-turn on troop withdrawals, fail on the Wall while boasting of the highest ever "legal" immigration, the Dissident Right finally arrived at the complete realisation that it had been taken for a ride. The biggest ever trade and budget deficits in US history didn't help either. Trump's recent CPAC speech was the capping stone on that gruesome edifice.
But what really stung—and proved to be the sting of death to Trump—was his complete lack of action in defence of the freedom of speech and safety of his most dedicated supporters.
While people in MAGA caps were beaten to a pulp, what did Trump do?
He appointed more Neocons.
While Trump supporters were demonetised, deplatformed, or shadow-banned from social media for spurious reasons, what did he do?
He trusted Paul Ryan and waited for the Dems to take over the Congress.
His worst betrayal was not to the voters—although he betrayed them as well—but to his own foot soldiers, the tens of thousands of mainly anonymous men and women who memed, tweeted, shared, and argued for countless hours on the internet, breaking the wall of media control. Many of them literally lost friends, jobs, and even their health and well-being on account of Trump.
At the time of his 2016 campaign, Trump was seen by many as a Caesar-like figures—the "God Emperor Trump" as it was memed. But which Caesar would ever hold power by betraying his own legions? This is precisely the mistake Trump made. His legionnaires were not the men risking their lives in pointless wars and deployments in faraway places like Syria and Afghanistan. Sure, many of those guys often supported Trump as well, but those were not the "crack troops" with which he gained power completely against the odds.
While he maintained the flow of billions to the military industrial complex and kept the drones raining death, his real foot soldiers, the members of the Dissident Right, got less than nothing from him. Instead they effectively became scapegoats, personally punished in Trump's stead.
For too long the House of Trump has been hollowed out, its timbers rotting and creaking in the wind. The only reason it didn't collapse into a heap of matchwood was because there was no alternative; certainly nothing in the GOP, while the Democrats still seemed to be the party of Hillary.
The midterms changed all that, thrusting people like Tulsi Gabbard, Ilhan Omar, and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the limelight—politicians from the Left who addressed issues with a radical and often honest approach that reminded Trump supporters of what they once saw in Trump, even if the issues were different and the IQ levels all over the place.
But even this wasn't quite enough to start the implosion. We had to wait until the innovative campaign and edgy issues of Andrew Yang for the Dissident Right to find the energy to meme its way off the Trump plantation, but meme they did.
Trump forgot to build two walls, the one to stop illegal immigrants traipsing over the border, and the other, much more important one, to stop his former supporters defecting in mass to the first candidate who came along with something more intriguing and stimulating than Trump's broken promises, soiled covenant, and jaded slogans.
Whatever objections might be raised, Yang is the man right now. Trump has lost his meme warriors who are now busy acclaiming a new Emperor.
