We need to talk about Donald Trump, this bad-faith, haphazard coup, and how professional wrestling explains what's going on and why this grift could become incredibly dangerous.
1/
I wrote a thread the other day about how this coup is both legitimate and a total grift, but something people need to realize is that we're watching the rhetorical strategies of professional wrestling play out in politics and our country.
Here's an explanation.
2/
Professional wrestling is an industry of grift. It's about open and closed system of power and knowledge. It is divided between "smarts," people who understand the grift and "marks," people who are being manipulated.
Right now, this coup is about the same systems.
3/
While we're on here talking about Trump's media moves, his staff looking for other jobs, and Republicans admitting they know Biden won, Trump's supporters are awash in declarations of stolen elections, fundraising schemes.
It's smarts and marks.
4/
What Trump is doing right now is called "a work." A work means people are involved in a scam together and know they're playing roles. They even engage in feuds and grudges as a means of bilking people out of their money.
Real moments are "shoots."
We're in a work right now.
5/
Trump, Fox, the GOP, all of the grifters who feed off them with podcasts, YouTube shows, they're bilking people for money in this work.
But here's the thing. Works become shoots in a real hurry as the performers are consumed by their own performances.
6/
The marks Trump and the GOP are hitting are getting worked up, meaning they're more likely to shell out money or even become violent, like fans at a wrestling show lashing out at the bad guys.
But if the work grows and catches, sometimes it becomes real and dangerous.
7/
Performers "work themselves into a shoot," meaning they begin by playing roles and then it becomes real.
With Trump/GOP continuing to ratchet up the temperature, the marks get more dangerous and the performers themselves can start to believe their own lies.
8/
Trump is professional wrestling through and through. He's even in the WWE Hall of Fame. He's been around it his entire adult life. Trump starts off working people and then works himself into a shoot. It's his essential characteristic.
This coup is a con, but it becomes real.
9/
The problem is that these con-men can't stop. Once a work starts to draw heat and money, it has to continue to grow and grow and grow. Trump and the GOP will peddle this stolen election garbage for forever.
But people will believe them, and they may start believing it.
10/
Again. This coup is a total con. A way to raise money, push the GA special election, fluff cable news viewership, and to save face.
Trump knows it. The GOP knows it. Fox knows it. But the more they push it the more the lie becomes real.
11/
This coup is a total work to steal money from the marks while all of us smarts sit here and shake our heads.
But the performers are working themselves into a shoot. It doesn't mean it'll happen or that the coup will be successful, but it's becoming part of their reality.
12/
This is the essence of the Trump Era of Politics. It's a matter of open and closed systems of knowledge and power, the malleable nature of reality.
Professional wrestling pioneered this stuff and it's now playing out right in front of us and threatening our society.
13/
You can roll your eyes all you want, dismiss the danger of the moment, but Trump and the GOP are not going to relent, and with every moment the work becomes a shoot, meaning either the marks are going to get violent, the coup will gain steam, or possibly both.
14/14
For those interested, my book AMERICAN RULE is about how the mythology of America is a work that became a shoot and how it ensnared the country and the rest of the world in a completely fabricated reality from which we need to escape.
And again, the coup is both real and a grift. It’s both things, simultaneously. While we’re all caught up in dichotomies the grifters have moved on into more complicated nuances. That’s an essential truth of grifting. The grift has to evolve above developing understanding.
This is why Trump successfully took over the GOP. He took their grift, called it a grift, and said here’s the truth and surprise, it was another grift that encompassed the tired grift. Circles within circles within circles of other grifts.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
People are rightfully feeling a ton of anxiety about the election.
We must take these last few days to calm and fortify ourselves, recognize the control we have, replenish ourselves, and decide how we will continue the fight to make the world better.
This podcast tries to provide strategies to overcome election anxiety and ground ourselves in reality and focus on what we can do to combat authoritarianism beyond Tuesday.
We need to take this anxious energy and convert it into actionable things.
Combating authoritarianism is exhausting. It’s systematic, weaponized abuse designed to ground you down.
We have to find the moments of calm to replenish ourselves so we don’t burn out, so we don’t fall into despair the way authoritarians want us to.
One of the biggest issues of the 2024 Election is going largely unreported.
Elon Musk has used his wealth to buy the shambling, decaying corpse of Donald Trump and MAGA in order to seize control over the government without ever appearing on a ballot.
Everyone knows Trump is in decline, and Musk recognizes a prime opportunity to install a puppet who will rubber stamp his agenda while handing him unmatched and unaccountable control over the functions of government.
This is a major, major threat.
Trump as a spectacle soaks up so much attention, but the donors behind him and the oligarchical Musk are pulling the strings with only light scrutiny.
We are watching the co-opting of the presidency in real-time, and if it’s allowed to happen the consequences would be dire.
It’s time for people to understand that Republicans and MAGA aren’t actually interested in curbing immigration.
They want to profit off fearmongering tethered to white paranoia and create an environment of sheer terror in which immigrants are more easily exploited.
The billionaires puppeting the GOP rely on immigrant labor as a means of maximizing profit and circumventing regulation.
What they’re pursuing is a country where immigrants have a huge, brutal system over their heads to keep them from challenging anything.
As resources are more scarce and conditions worsen, the Right will absolutely brutalize immigrants. They have created a subsection of people who are vulnerable and exploitable and expendable.
That’s it. The whole ballgame. And the framing everyone accepts is disastrous.
The episode of The Midnight Kingdom is out and explores our present crisis, including the rise of authoritarianism, attacks on democracy by the wealth class, and what we must do to get out of this mess.
The five part series is now complete. Please share.
The series tracks modern history, explaining how the powerful have used racism, religious mythologies, and weaponized conspiracy theories to control us and expand their power.
It's a reconsideration of where we came from and where we are.
Episode 1 starts with the merging of Christianity with Roman power and dissects how religion was used to create "Western Civilization" and a feudal empire where control was almost total, which is where many Right Wing ideologues want to return to.
Last night JD Vance was allowed to lie and present himself and Trump as moderates.
It was repulsive and dangerous. Winning this election, and defeating MAGA as an authoritarian movement, means breaking this facade and communicating how extreme they are.
It is disgusting how Vance, who has hundreds of hours of available podcasts and videotaped interviews, wasn’t confronted by his antidemocratic, misogynistic, and wildly authoritarian and extreme positions.
Instead, he was allowed to say time and again that he and Walz agreed.
It’s bad enough that CBS dropped the ball in one of the most embarrassing debates we’ve seen in awhile, but Tim Walz had two jobs: communicate how dangerous MAGA is and provide an alternative.
He didn’t do that. And that should serve as a wake up call for the campaign.
There’s a real Roman-Empire-Telling-Britain-They’re-On-Their-Own vibe to everything right now.
Only it’s now this weird, hard for some people to explain caveat of capitalism having fully possessed the US and overtaken its process for the purposes of system operation that just makes everything worse and very difficult to grasp for people who haven’t been taught about it.
Watching what’s happening in Gaza and Lebanon with the backdrop of worsening climate change, infrastructure collapse, austerity, and intentional inequality, leaving people drowning and suffering and roads and bridges and dams collapse is just…awful.