In The Absence Of Justice, We Have Dark Fantasies

We doom-scroll and we watch and read the news and we see morally vacuous people persecuting the politically marginalized and the weakest among us and we rage internally and sometimes externally and we wonder where justice has gone and whether it will ever return and who might bring it back (the answer, inconveniently, is you and me).

In the meantime, while we wait and commiserate and scroll and scroll and scroll and blog and reply and post and repost and read and listen and watch and bear witness to horrors both big and small, we fantasize. 

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We dream of what should happen to those doing the lawless persecuting, ripping families apart for no reason but to inflict pain on those they hate. We imagine dark fates for those snatching people off the streets and traumatizing children and closing hospitals and making healthcare harder to come by and bullying LGBTQ folks and talking openly about the intellectual inferiority of black and brown people, even pondering – again, in the open, for all to see – whether chattel slavery was a worthwhile system that should be resurrected from the deepest depths of hell. We dream of what we’d like to befall those who log on to various social media apps and post jokes about Trump’s concentration camps and pose with cutesy signs for those camps. Our thoughts get dark, and fast. 

We compartmentalize: The suffering goes here, the righteous anger goes there, and here’s a place for the shrill scream for justice that comes from somewhere primal. Now to do the dishes. Dinner needs to be ready in an hour. The trash needs to go to the curb.

The fantasies run wild. We have dark thoughts, the darkest thoughts, because we feel so utterly hopeless and helpless in this moment of pulsating nihilism and fascism and large-scale yearning for the void. We want the persecutors to suffer. We think of the ways and it brings us temporary relief, even pleasure. But when the darkness fades and the imaginings end, we’re back in a world with no justice. 

Our longing to make things right, to defend those who need defending, bought us a few minutes of dark relief, nothing more. You made your soul sick with a burning hatred of fascists and all you got was this lousy t-shirt. 

On and on, your soul gets sicker by degrees, by inches, until one day you’re watching unprecedented floodwaters wash away homes and summer camps and people in deep-red Texas and you either shrug with indifference or you cheer on death, you root for the Reaper. You do this because your desire for justice has morphed into something ugly, something sinister, something that looks an awful lot like the way your political enemies see the world. You stand up and clap for the flood waters that have taken 70 people so far and you say well, that’s what happens when you elect an authoritarian who promised to eviscerate the federal government, a tyrant who hired the world’s richest man – a fascist nerd with a trillion dollars – to overthrow the government and hack its various systems, eliminating critical, life-saving services all in the name of austerity. 

To Be Insulted By These Fascists Is So Degrading

It’s no game.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Sorry but that’s what you get, you might say. Except you’re not sorry. You’re gleeful, smitten. Finally, you think, your soul corroded to a degree you do not realize, a little justice around these parts. 

For better or worse – it’s the latter, most definitely the latter – I spend enough time online to know there are plenty of folks treating last week’s tragic and totally preventable Texas flood deaths as some kind of perverse deliverance of long-delayed justice for a state that hasn’t elected a statewide Democrat since the Black Hole Sun music video was traumatizing children across the country. Folks on Bluesky – people with unfailingly progressive politics who are repulsed by anything and everything MAGA – are in my replies and posting online about the flood victims in Texas deserving what they got after voting for Republican representatives and presidents for thirty straight years. 

These people say I just don’t understand. They’re calling me the Neville Chamberlain of Bluesky because I suggested liberals and leftists shouldn’t engage in the wanton bloodlust that has been a hallmark of far-right politics for generations. I suppose like Chamberlain, I am appeasing fascists when I say we should take no pleasure in death and misery of regular folks going about their everyday lives when floodwaters take them away because Musk’s DOGE menace gutted the services that would have coordinated warnings for those in the water’s path. 

We can imagine that everyone killed in this preventable tragedy forged by DOGE hackers was politically and culturally problematic. Pretend everyone swept away in the Texas flooding took great pleasure in seeing Latino folks harassed and brutalized by Trump’s secret police and whisked away to third-world prisons and I guess you can justify your glee and satiate your desperate need for justice. Create a scenario in which the flood took the lives of only vicious and unrepentant white supremacists and you might shrug and say ah well, nevertheless. 

That’s not the reality and you know it. There were kids killed in the Texas flooding, children who had never voted and maybe never thought of politics for one goddamn second of their short lives. Even if internet sleuths one day find online posts or pictures of these kids (or any other flooding victim) celebrating the nation’s dismantling at the hands of its first tyrant, they did not deserve to die. If you’ve talked yourself into this – that the price for bad politics is death – you have consciously or unconsciously accepted the political logic of the fascist and all his hatreds and grievances, festering and writhing like a mass of maggots in his soul. 

You’re tainted by the political disease that has spread like a killer virus over these past ten years. I am too. We all are. 

Like the fascist, someone who sees natural disasters in red states as comeuppance for undesirable voting patterns holds the false belief that suffering can be targeted, delivered only to those who deserve the pain. Just as the fascist believes the federal government under the tyrant’s control can ensure only those they hate are affected by destructive policies, those watching the flooding of Texas communities pretend it’s possible that only the deserving got what was coming to them. We all know that isn’t true. 

Fascism offers permission to be your worst self; it's the trick to Trump's success and his total domination of politics for the past ten years. You can hate, you can mock, you can deride and harass and bully, and it will all be excused – even encouraged and praised – under fascism. The appeal of this promise is strong because it's always easier to be your worst self than your best self. Fascism is a worm in your brain, squirming around, unlocking every last inhibition you've ever had. Maybe for you that means watching and reading about the Texas flooding with muted euphoria. The worm is squirming.

“You don’t have to be polite. You don’t have to be someone you’re not," as one young man said of Trump's appeal. "You don’t have to be restrained.”

Bad Faith Is Turning Us Into Monsters

We have no recourse against the power of a radicalized Supreme Court. So we’re left to dream dark dreams.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Justice is the first thing to go in a competitive authoritarian system, and ours is that, make no mistake about it. With enough political will and courage and yeah, sacrifice, justice will return in some form, but only if we want it. If we don’t believe that, we have nothing, no reason to go on, no reason to resist a movement that wants to end the republic and rebuild it in the image of their criminal, traitorous god. 

I know for certain that hatred and bloodlust are not the path to justice, but the path to nowhere, or even worse, a path to a future in which fascist logic is the only logic, where everyone has bought in because their souls are too polluted to see the truth: That hatred is easy, love is hard, and those are our only two options.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.