The Cruelling And Stupiding Of America
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
How bipartisan cruelty and stupidity came to dominate American politics
I don’t like torture porn horror movies for the same reason I don’t like American politics: both reward cruelty and stupidity on a bipartisan scale. The Hostel franchise presents privileged rich fucks who treat the plebs (that’s us, folks) like objects. Or, as in The Human Centipede, the cruelty is simply the point.
Torture porn sometimes wraps itself in flimsy righteousness, testing and ‘teaching’ morally questionable characters by antagonists who are themselves far more morally compromised. Saw pretends to teach the value of life by, what, permanently traumatizing people? The psychopathic ex-Nazi creates a human centipede the way a child pulls the legs off a spider.
Because he can. Because it’s cool. Because the power.
Knowing how popular these torture porn franchises are, I wonder why anyone with a soul would want to watch them. And that makes me want to go live in the woods with the animals.
So here we are. Trump/Harris America, with a blindingly sadistic and stupid President, only occasionally corralled by one party of obedience who’s afraid of him, and the party that drove voters to this hellish vision right into his arms.
Cinematic Nero’s circuses remind me too much of us. Mindless cruelty and moral decay are what customarily precedes the decline of the republic.
2024: A bipartisan comparison of cruelty and stupidity
The 2024 U.S. election was emblematic of what’s failing with America, and Americans. Our winner was he who embodied both elements in near-equivalent measure: One of the stupidest Presidents ever with an astonishing capacity for cruelty.
Trump’s opponent’s fatal flaws manifested differently, in a very smart and educated woman, but who catered to the stupidity of woke progressives because she thought they would lead her to victory. Kamala Harris also embraced its sister, not by being cruel herself but by catering to the most heartless voters of her base rather than failing to challenge them—the gleefully vicious anti-semites, the Goebbels-censors of social media and blogging, the pronoun police, the elite academic madrassas, the manipulative, rank misogynists and child groomer transactivists, the ‘acceptable’ racists struggling to preserve DEI.
Both candidates exemplified everything hideously wrong with America. The difference is that Harris didn’t embody cruelty and stupidity like Trump, but rather, refused to question progressive values which had long since crossed over into sadistic Dark Triadism, smiling like a Brat as she toted her putrescent backpack through the Democratic Thunderdome.
There’s a Trump knuckle-dragger somewhere on the left, with the same narcissistic cruelty and commitment to advancing the cruelling and stupiding of America, but I don’t know who that is. I have a few ideas, but it’s possible we’ve not yet heard of them. It may take years or decades for that far-left narcissistic psychopath to manifest, unless Americans decide they don’t want to become a failed state duking it out over scarce resources like Sudan.
Trump epitomizes the cardboard movie ‘serial killer’ we all fear, yet, on a deeper level, admire. Real ones sometimes get away with it forever; 150 years later, we still can’t be sure who Jack the Ripper was, or the Zodiac Killer. You can’t help but respect that cleverness on some level.
Sometimes, the bad guy wins. Trump appeals to the reptilian corner of the psyche because he’s meaner than anyone else. He’s not afraid to use force, violence, or even torture to accomplish his goals, and his followers revel in watching him eviscerate those they hate, driven further by algorithms.
Meanwhile, their brothers and sisters and ‘thems’ on the left have enjoyed torturing anyone who runs afoul of the house extremism, mostly by daring to express original, critical, questioning thoughts. They destroy, too.
Trump’s core supporters knew he was no Rhodes scholar; many voted for him because they hoped he’d punish those they’d come to define as Everything Wrong With America.
Payback’s gonna be a bitch, bitches. I don’t look forward to it.
Some voted for Trump out of desperation for something different, others because they were little different from him. Hillary Clinton was right about the basket for the almost inarguably worst candidate America had to offer. He didn’t muscle his way in like most wannabe dictators; he was chosen by the people, who knew of his criminal legacy, that he was a convicted felon, who tried to steal an election, that he was a compulsive liar, a serial cheater, a confessed sexual predator, who refused to stop an insurrection, and who associated with a notorious pedophile. I feel no pity for these voters who are now whining about an unstable economy and spiralling food and gas prices and wars they didn’t vote for.
Yes they fucking did. But I also have zero fucks to give for the deplorables on my own side.
Progressives, Epsteinmania, and what they ignored
Epsteinmania conveniently distracts stupid progressives from a presidential moral crime far more detrimental to the entire republic than Epstein’s rich-boy yen for very young women.
Progressives blew it—as they are wont to do—with the scandal they could have plausibly used to bring down Trump for good. It flew mostly under the radar, though, because there were no glamorous islands, wayward penises or teenage titties on display: The highly classified, stolen documents found in the potty at Mar-A-Lago.
Trump appointee Judge Aileen Cannon has ‘permanently blocked’ Jack Smith’s probe of the highly sensitive documents at Trump’s Florida home. This has, as usual, flown over stupid progressive heads, who have yet to figure out that they are not going to bring down Trump via his wayward toadstool.
There were no obsessive lamentations on social media about this.
Of course, ‘permanent’ is such an impermanent word in Washington. If American progressives and the rest of the world—all of whom have skin in this game if that information is weaponized against any of us, wielded or provided by someone who was no longer authorized to have it—for eyes who were NEVER authorized to see it—had spent as much time demanding the release of the Jack Smith probe as they have the Epstein Files, America might be a different country today.
Let’s remember, out of all the politicians from both parties caught with classified documents at home, all complied with requests to return them except Trump: He lied, of course, about having them, leading to a raid on the premises to retrieve them. Here’s what Harris herself demanded:
Oops, sorry, I guess she wasn’t paying attention, either.
Harris got all legalistic when she spoke of the classified documents case, framing it as evidence Trump believes he’s ‘above the ‘law’ and should be held to the same standards as everyone else. Duhhh. No moral outrage there. Just legalism, when she’s not talking about his titty-mongering friend.
Yeah, that was really going out on a limb, Kammy.
She focused on unemotional legal precedent yet again when Aileen Cannon dismissed the documents case last summer, ruling Jack Smith’s appointment as ‘unconstitutional’. Harris lamented, instead, the now-MIA guardrails.
No yelling on a podcast about how Trump could have shared his highly classified information with his boycrush Vladimir Putin or people who’d be happy to pass it on to Islamofascist terrorists. The files included nuclear secrets; we know there was correspondence between Trump and his other boyfriend Kim Jong-Un. We don’t know much else except that it was some of the most sensitive intelligence the United States possesses.
We truly have no fucking clue how much danger we might be in because we’re too obsessed with dick.
Joe Biden and Mike Pence were caught with top-secret documents as well, but both were considered less sensitive.
Troubling, still, especially since the former was going senile. I don’t suspect Biden or Pence of ever having actively colluded with our enemies against America, but the completely indefensible Trump kept those documents stacked in his bathroom, and lying about it makes me wonder whether we might have to start sticking kiddie porn in top secret documents to get progressives to pay attention when they disappear for awhile.
It’s no wonder Biden revoked Trump’s right to Presidential Daily Briefs, unprecedented by any previous President. He cited Trump’s erratic behavior and his connection to the January 6th proceedings. I don’t know whether Biden missed the Mar-A-Lago boat along with seemingly every other progressive in America, but I would have cited the FBI seizures first.
Harris, the Regressive Left, and the Party of Obedience
Harris embodies Stupidity more than Cruelty, but lacks not the latter. She’s no Trumpian villain, but instead represents the vacuous intentional stupidity and moral vacuum of what passes for ‘progressivism’. Leaning into ‘The Brat’ and surrounding herself with woke, mostly female cheerleaders, Kamala Harris was an appointed post turtle, and Democrats obediently bent the knee.
Harris’s obvious weakness was why so many of us didn’t vote for her. Wokeism is predicated entirely on victimhood identity and an eternal search for ‘disadvantage’ status. America’s greatest threats, before the election, were Putin and Xinpeng; there was no way this little girlie-girl who hid out during most of her vice-presidency at the White House was going to stand up to them.
Harris’s wokeness looked opportunistic and performative, and she stated her support for many deplorable ideas because the Mean Girls wouldn’t like her if she didn’t.
I chose Neither in the 2024 election to avoid voting for cruelty and stupidity. The Regressive Left is every bit as capable, handed enough power, of turning America into an authoritarian snakepit, which is why I approach the 2026 midterms apathetically.
Misogynists, fauxminists, racists, trans-nazis, antisemites, and the Islamofascist Regressive Left define the cruel and stupid that Harris embraced. Choose her for 2028, and I will vote Neither again. I want a better Democratic candidate than the last two. My standards are high.
A challenge for YOU
I’m fuzzier on what Democrats’ Amerithoritarian Hell would look like, but I know I would hate it as much as I already hate MAGAvision.
Having just read Tim Miller’s Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road To Hell, he emphasizes over and over how Republicans reacted to the first Trump term (the book came out before 2024) much the same way the rest of America did: With horror, shock and fear. They’ve been, however, much quieter about their unease. They mouth loyal pieties in public but behind the scenes they sound just like us: WTF? How could this have happened? How could Americans have been this stupid?
Stupid, indeed. And cruel. There’s been little soul-searching since then, Miller says. To which I would add: And that goes for the Democrats and their cruels and stupids, too.
We Normies have to speak out more. We have to be willing to shed our stupider, crueller brethren who shouldn’t be our friends if we can’t say Israel has the right to exist without risking social blackballing. Good-bye. Good riddance.
I challenge you all to pick a topic, issue, ideal, or value from your side of American politics that you disagree with—stupid or cruel, or both—and publicly refute it. Just one. It doesn’t have to be a big idea, just something that sends a message to your partisan friends—I don’t support this. I challenge it. I question. Maybe even, I’ve just asked the glaringly obvious question you won’t.
Go ahead. Choose one. Write it in the comments. Better yet, write a Substack about it! And then say it publicly in front of people you know will object.
I dare you. Don’t be a pussy like Lindsay Graham:
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