We’re Going To Need More Earnestness
All this bad faith everywhere!
We can have cringey and sometimes overbearing and humorless earnestness, or we can have soul-killing nihilism. These are our choices in 2026 and beyond.
I wrote for Bad Faith Times this month about the coming resurgence of political and cultural earnestness, as seen in Minnesota’s anti-fascist mobilization during the Trump regime’s terror campaign, and at myriad No Kings protests over the past year (including another massive No Kings turnout this past weekend), because this is the future of American politics. Earnestness has largely animated opposition to the nakedly criminal and anti-constitutional regime, and will guide whatever comes after the regime’s fall.
Think of it as a return of sorts to Obama-era cringe: People — especially young folks — daring to say publicly and loudly that a better world is possible and that they will work toward the version of the world they want for themselves and their loved ones. No one is trying to be cool and detached. No one is deeming themselves Above It All, intellectually and otherwise. No one is saying they’re too savvy to fall for the lie that a better world is possible.
We’re seeing cringe everywhere during this second Trump term — a veritable ocean of cringe coming to wipe away the fascist nihilism that fuels this hideous regime — and that’s a good thing. We need more. We need the Cringe Machine to be cranked up to 11.
The Obama-era cringe has been replaced by a nihilism that pervades everything the Trump regime does, from intentionally starving human beings in developing countries, to forcing detained children to watch ICE goons eat a delicious dinner, to posting Nazi-adjacent memes on official government social media accounts. In place of a movement that dared to say a better world was possible, we now have a movement that knows a worse world is possible and sees it as its job to deliver that version of the world.
Like every fascist movement in history, the Trump regime longs for the void. Its leaders have no politics but those that advance us toward that void, where they will no longer feel the pain of being alive and miserable and hateful and loveless.
So we can have one or the other: Cringe or the void. It’s not a hard choice for me, and maybe it’s not a tough call for you either. Just remember that the next time you see someone in person or online being earnest as hell, so very vulnerable, and have the urge to detach, to be cool, to be above it all. Take in that cringe and be cringe yourself, because it’s cringe that will deliver a better world.
Disabused of the notion that we can’t or shouldn’t fight fire with fire, our earnestness can be weaponized against those who would tell us that nothing matters, that the void awaits.
Here are all the Bad Faith Times blogs from the past month if you’re into it. I always have stuff to analyze because the faith is bad and getting worse every day, unfortunately.
This Is Not What Winning Looks Like
The American fascist movement had no real, tangible goals beyond upsetting liberals online. That much has become miserably, terribly clear over this past year as groypers — a phrase I wish I did not know — have taken over the Trump regime’s communication apparatus, namely the government’s social media accounts.
I wrote about the explicitly fascist messaging found in many of the regime’s posts and memes, shit that can make you sound deranged if you were to explain it to a normie who doesn’t spend eight hours a day breaking their brains on social media.
But here’s the thing about all this lib triggering: It’s not in any way what winning looks like. These people are lazy and stupid and have no understanding of history beyond knowing that mom and dad said Hitler was bad so maybe Hitler was actually good. Their definition of winning — taunting their enemies on the internet with genocidal imagery — does not constitute winning, as American monarchist Curtis Yarvin knows well.
Some Incredibly Inconvenient Data For College Republicans
All those bad-faith complaints about college Republicans being harassed and treated as second-class citizens on campuses across the country turned out to be bullshit. Imagine that.
I looked into some recent polling data that (strongly) suggests college Republicans feel very much welcomed on campus, not tormented by left-wing professors and students determined to pump out a generation of communists or whatever. The recent data says liberal/left students are the ones who feel their views are being censored.
That checks out considering every major educational institution immediately bowed to the Trump regime, which now dictates, through the power of AI, what college students can and can’t learn, and what they can and cannot say.
Everybody Loves DEI Now
I recall a few polls in the early days of the second Trump regime that showed a disturbing if predictable decrease in public support for diversity efforts in the US. This, naturally, came on the heels of a presidential campaign in which white folks were told they are the victims of systemic discrimination because the government and universities and some businesses sometimes hire ladies and people of color.
Recent polling from The Economist and YouGov paints an entirely different picture a year after the regime used AI to resegregate American society. Americans, it turns out, are very much into the idea of diversity in hiring practices. Even non-MAGA Republicans — whatever that means — seem to believe diversity is a strength, according to the polling data. It appears people are repulsed by a federal government run by ferocious white supremacists.
No Gerrymander Can Save Republicans Now
The emergency pro-democracy coalition that formed in 2019 and 2020 in response to the president’s first attempt at ending representative government in the US appears to be reconstituting after it fell to fucking pieces in 2024.
In early March we saw that coalition — supercharged by a tyrant who hasn’t made shit any cheaper — show its strength in the Texas primaries. For the first time in a long time, more Democrats cast a ballot than Republicans in the Texas primary elections.
I wrote for BFT about how many of the Republican gerrymanders we’ve seen over the past year — including the Jim Crow-style Texas gerrymander — are based on the idea that the 2024 electorate is a permanent one. Republicans seem to believe that Latino men and zoomer bros and others who left the pro-democracy coalition in 2024 are permanently in the GOP camp for 2026 and 2028 and beyond. All available polling, of course, says this is dead wrong. Trump’s 2024 coalition, forged with the power of Elon Musk’s weaponized X algorithm, has already fallen apart.
The 2026 electoral maps conservatives have created were built on this faulty belief, which is why no gerrymander can save Republicans from what’s coming: The biggest electoral wipeout of our lifetimes.
Judge To RFK Jr: Vaccine Policy Has To Be Reality-Based
The Trump regime in March continued getting its teeth kicked in by federal judges who don’t abide by the American right’s unreality, as most clearly seen on Elon Musk’s social media website.
That’s a tough break for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our protein-packed HHS secretary, who had all his stupid anti-vaxx shit thrown out by a judge in Massachusetts a few weeks ago.
The judge pointed out to the anti-vaccine eugenicists making the country’s vaccine recommendations that the US government has traditionally been focused on vaccine policy that eradicates and reduces diseases, and uses “a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements” to develop said policies.
“Unfortunately,” US District Court Judge Brian Murphy said, “the government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”
It’s the latest sign that a viable legal system can sustain itself against an authoritarian onslaught — at least until these cases reach the red-pilled freaks on the Supreme Court.
From Edgy To Evil: The Contrarian’s Fate
Going into this piece, I was blissfully unaware of the professional contrarian take that Jeffrey Epstein did nothing wrong. I wish I had remained ignorant of this bad faith bomb. Maybe you do too. Sorry about that.
Anyway, Michael Tracey — the guy who insists nothing actually happened on January 6, 2021 — has turned his contrarianism up to levels never before seen in his defense of Epstein and those connected to the infamous sex trafficker. That’s the thing, Tracey says: There is no such thing as sex trafficking. It’s all a left-wing myth.
This, I think, is the natural and nightmarish endpoint for anyone committed to being a contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
Fascism Depends On The Presumption Of Good Faith
Media outlets largely treated the president’s mobilization of his paramilitary into US airports as a good-faith effort to solve a seemingly intractable funding stalemate made worse by Republican lawmakers who actively loathe the people they represent. It was the same story of the past decade, one that grants the presumption of good faith to a man who only operates in the worst faith.
Many mainstream outlets ran the president’s announcement of ICE coming to airports — a mob boss-style threat — through the sanewashing machine they keep by the office fax machine, and came up with headlines and stories about Trump “assisting” the poor airport staffers struggling mightily with TSA workers refusing to show up for work because the president’s party refuses to pay them.
It’s the sort of thing that drives you insane. Without the presumption of good faith, the American fascist movement would have precious little oxygen with which to work.
A Fuzzy Totalitarianism
Umberto Eco, an Italian philosopher and political commentator, tried to warn western nations in the mid-1990s of the power of fascism and the everlasting allure of returning to a glorious past that never existed.
After reading Eco’s essay “Ur-Fascism,” I had no choice but to analyze our current fascist moment through the lens of Eco’s description of “eternal fascism.” The man was right about everything.
The followers of a fascist movement “must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”
Ur-Fascism is an uncomfortable read, but one that’s worthwhile.
There is some importance with being earnest, I've heard.
Found on the Internet:
"The bigger question is why do people support candidates that constantly shit on them?"
Because "teams."