Fascism and Bad Faith

They Did It For The Content

The kidnapping of Venezuela's president was the Trump's regime's latest in content (and reality) creation

When you’re a poster, you’re either consuming content or creating content, or, I suppose, sleeping and eating when necessary.

Donald Trump is president because he is a natural-born poster. Pete Hegseth is a poster. So is Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi and Elon Musk and Gregory Bovino and every other ghoul calling the shots in the Trump regime’s trampling of the United States, which it hates very much. I know these regime figures are posters because I too am a poster and have been for many years. A poster knows a fellow poster when he sees one.

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And as a poster observing the actions of the first American administration run from top to bottom by online broken brains determined to flood the public and the media with tsunamis of dopamine, I think I know why the regime committed a variety of international crimes in kidnapping Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and his wife over the weekend.

They did it for the online engagement: For the excitement, for the videos of American aircraft bombing Caracas (and killing 80-some civilians) and the pictures of a blindfolded Maduro being frog-walked out of a government plane in New York and the president presiding over the capture from his make-believe bunker in Mar-a-lago, haggard and tieless and working hard for the average American Joe, who wanted nothing more than for the American government to abduct a head of state from a country he could not identify on a map. It’s why Hegseth and Miller and others in the Mar-a-lago bunker were closely monitoring the X platform during the illegal operation.

They are posters at heart, and they are addicted to the thrill of their content going viral. I say this as someone who understands the sensation. And this – yes, this – was little more than content creation dressed up as serious foreign policy. You can see these regime officials smiling as they scan Musk’s fascist propaganda platform that now dabbles in CSAM: They are happy. People are enjoying the content they’ve created.

I’ve posted more than 26,000 times on Bluesky, the only legitimate microblogging platform and the Official App of Sports, since joining in late 2022. Before Twitter mutated into the central communication and propaganda hub for the international fascist project, I posted 244,000 times over eleven years. I’ve posted to Threads, unfortunately, 1,900 times. I’ve posted on Facebook since the start of the second George W. Bush administration.

I am a born poster, as my Rotoworld colleague and friend Patrick Daugherty is fond of saying, for he too is a born poster. We have thoughts – a lot of thoughts, too many thoughts – that must be foisted upon the world. It’s why Father John Misty’s Ballad of the Dying Man engenders in me a sort of existential self reflection. (“Naturally the dying man wonders to himself: Has commentary been more lucid than anybody else?”). I don’t like it.

You’ll hear various justifications for the violation of Venezuela’s national sovereignty from various regime officials, shit that makes it sound like they had a plan all along and this insane action is part of a larger, thought-out agenda for new, aggressive domination of the Western hemisphere unchained from 20th century niceties about spreading democracy and freedom to every corner of the globe.

The wild-eyed and constantly-sniffing Marco Rubio will tell you this is just the start of a strategic toppling of every Latin American government that does not do business the way Americans want them to do business. Stephen Miller, meanwhile, will tell you this is part of the regime’s campaign to stop the flow of narcotics into the fatherland. Pete Hegseth, his hair ever greasier, will get on the TV and tell you things went boom boom, bang bang, and boom boom, bang bang is always good. God bless the unwoke troops.

Please don’t listen to any of this. There is no strategy, no plan for what comes next in Venezuela. The content has been created and distributed and people online and on cable TV did what they always do after American military action and marveled, mouth agape, tears in their eyes, at the sheer power of the United States war machine. The plan, in short, was to create content. Maybe a couple oil companies get sweetheart deals to plunder Venezuela after a regime-friendly puppet is installed as the country’s new leader. But that’s all incidental. The content was the point.

If you don’t believe me, listen to congressional Republicans babble incoherently on cable news about why they wholeheartedly support the regime’s illegal actions. Every Republican has a different reason because no real reason has been offered, only a menu of potential reasons that can and will be interpreted in good faith by an American political press that cannot process bad faith, or a major political party that by every metric is anti-democracy.

They Lack That Grindset

Trump and his lackeys are not even bothering to dress up the kidnapping of a regime opponent as a benevolent act to free the Venezuelan people from a leader who indeed did away with small-d democratic norms, arresting and persecuting any and all internal political rivals. At least the Bush administration had the decency to hatch a lengthy campaign to slowly and carefully manufacture consent among the American public and mainstream media outlets before its illegal war in Iraq.

The Bush people spent a lot of time and energy lying to us and saying in bad faith that they wanted to free the Iraqi people from the shackles of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, which the US liked very much until we didn’t. They spent a lot of political capital making us believe that if we did not launch a full ground invasion of Iraq, there would be another 9/11, maybe many 9/11s, maybe a new 9/11 every other Tuesday until further notice. When the American populace was sufficiently scared and dissent was sufficiently muzzled, the invasion began. A million Iraqis were killed – along with nearly 4,500 U.S. troops – and we felt a little better, a little safer. We watched it on TV between ad breaks to make sure things went as planned.

The posters who constitute the Trump camp lack the bad-faith grindset of the early-2000s Bush camp. The Trump people are, in the end, an extraordinarily lazy bunch with precious little intellectual curiosity, no sense of history, and an overwhelming desire to consume and create content above all else. They had neither the capacity or the know-how for a real content manufacturing campaign designed to frighten Americans into seeing Maduro as some kind of madman bent on the destruction of the United States, or a drug kingpin determined to kill their children with fentanyl. They didn’t even bother to bully members of Congress into blessing their half baked attack on Venezuela.

They just did the thing, sat back, and watched the videos and images do great numbers on the X platform. Look at those fucking retweets. Watch the likes pour in; feel them tickle your exhausted dopamine receptors. Goddamn, that feels good.

We are living in a simulacrum of a fully consolidated authoritarian regime, a social media replication of the 20th century tyrannical regimes conservatives have always admired. The Trump people know you and I are addicted to our phones, so they use Hollywood-style cameras and production techniques to portray themselves as an unstoppable force that will crush all enemies, unconstrained by pesky, soyboy constitutional norms. They started blowing up random boats of fishermen a few months back largely because it created wonderful content to spread online. When the regime received no pushback for these extrajudicial executions, they kept going, providing more and more snuff content to their admirers and worshippers: Loveless, depression-addled, basement-dwelling gooners who spend 12 hours a day asking Elon Musk’s Grok to create child pornography for their consumption.

As disturbing as it is for Stephen Miller's wife, the Musk-curious Katie Miller, to post a picture of a red, white, and blue Greenland in the aftermath of the Maduro kidnapping, I have trouble taking this seriously. I know a poster when I see one, and Katie Miller is a poster. She saw that image while scrolling X and it made her feel cool and edgy to repost it on her official X page. It felt good, it felt right. This is the guiding principle of the poster: To make the brain tell you that you are happy, at least for a moment. It is an exhausting existence.

The same people who wanted to create content of Maduro’s kidnapping have also created content of the president’s secret police kicking in the doors of their opponents, National Guard troops marching into opposition strongholds for entirely invented reasons, and immigrants dressed in chains shuffling their way to a plane that would take them to a faraway concentration camp. This sort of online content satiates the burning fascist need for the pain and torment of their enemies, both real and perceived. The fascist wants nothing more than the void, after all, and those who know and understand the fascist mind are all too happy to provide the content that points the way to that glorious void, the destruction of beauty and life, the end of all things. This is and always has been the endpoint of any fascist project. So it is today.

Almost none of it is real though. In a true authoritarian onslaught, National Guard troops would have stormed into Democrat-run cities and committed acts of unspeakable violence against anyone who dared to protest. They would have arrested and killed every opposition leader in those states and they would have done it quickly and without pretense. Their cameras would certainly not be on for any of this. Instead they carefully set up little movie sets of the National Guard marching into places conservatives have been trained to see as crime-infested no-go zones, and that content was splashed all over the fascist internet and watched by millions of people who experience life one scroll at a time.

In a true authoritarian onslaught, the regime's thugs would not have even entertained the idea of standing before a judge, explaining their attacks on immigrant communities and coming up with faulty legal justifications for their ethnic cleansing campaign. They would have simply arrested or killed the judge, as leading American monarchist and JD Vance adviser Curtis Yarvin has advocated, and carried on with their ethnic cleansing business.

Instead, Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino took glamour shots of himself dressed as an SS officer outside a Chicago courthouse. Because, you see, content is king. Content is the whole point. It always has been.

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