This Is Not What Winning Looks Like
The Trump regime's online posting reveals the emptiness of its cause
Everyone in this third decade of the 21st century is 12 years old, as you may have heard, and everyone on the right has a radically childish interpretation of basic rights, how a society functions, and their place in that society.
This was never clearer than in the hours after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 as part of a plutocratic plot to dismantle pro-democracy media outlets in the US. Musk bought the platform under the bad faith guise of promoting free speech and ending the left-wing censorship campaign that exists at the sordid center of the right-wing imagination.
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The chuds on Twitter knew exactly what Musk really meant though. It's why, within a few minutes of the news that Musk had bought the nerve center of American politics, the chuds began testing whether the speech was indeed free with a new boss in charge.
Their test? Posting racist and homophobic slurs and seeing if their Twitter accounts would be suspended. That was their definition of winning, of beating the libs, of Total Victory: Freely posting vile insults based on a human being's immutable traits. That's all it was about. Because at heart they are all 12 years old and stupid as shit.
It's the loser's idea of victory, and you see it reflected in the way the Trump regime's official accounts post to the X platform, a place of unbridled racism and hatred and violence. The chinless, loveless 4chan boys who run these official regime accounts are posting overtly fascist memes both to promote the regime's half-assed measures to decimate the gains of the 20th century and to upset liberals who value fairness and equality and yes, democracy.
They do this – they post like this – because they think it's what winning looks like. In their blackened hearts, these guys truly believe triggering the libs online is what you do when you've achieved victory. There's nothing beyond that.
The U.S. Education Department, which recently had its re-segregation efforts slapped down by a federal judge, recently posted a shitty photo of an all-white classroom saying the Pledge of Allegiance. The image appears to be from before the landmark Brown v. Board Supreme Court ruling, a massive loss for the American right.
Nothing about this post is subtle. It turns the subtext of Make America Great Again into pure text. Whereas MAGA in its early days could get away with subtle nods to racism and xenophobia, a decade of fascist calcification in the hearts and minds of young men who hate themselves has created a political culture in which it is acceptable – even encouraged – to wish for the days before Black and brown people in the US had political rights.
Denny Carter
Regime officials and the pathetic little boys running their socials have shed the bad faith they used to use to talk about civil rights in the US. It's all explicit now, in your fucking face: We want a country in which only white people have basic rights. We want apartheid. Here's a meme if you don't understand. Choke on that, libs.
Posts like the one above are disgusting and infuriating. I get that. The temerity to post racist dreck on official government accounts makes my pores open. I feel the anger harden into hatred, and that hatred churns out the Dark Thoughts that do nothing to advance the great cause of anti-fascism. The Dark Thoughts do nothing to reject the doomerism the fascists want you to feel. Consider this lib triggered, I suppose.
Then I remember that the immature antagonizing that defines modern fascist movements is not winning. This is not just the opinion of an elder millennial lib either – far from it.
Curtis Yarvin, a leading American monarchist and close friend of JD Vance, warned against this very conception of fascist victory in the first year of this second Trump term. Absurdly fearing future Democratic Party concentration camps for his white children, Yarvin mocked key regime officials – folks like Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi – and their hangers-on for fooling themselves into believing they had won the Final Battle, that the 2024 election marked the end of history and the last raspy gasps of American democracy.
Yarvin (accurately) said the 21st century American fascist movement "cannot even imagine what winning looks like."
This is literal. You literally can’t picture it. You can picture winning on this, winning on that, winning on the other thing. But winning overall? You can’t picture it, because you can’t handle the truth. Try anyway—then put yourself in that headspace, and look back at the things the Trump administration is trying to do today. Unfortunately, I rather expect you’ll laugh."
Denny Carter
Yarvin and others who salivate at the prospect of the end of American self governance know what fascist victory looks like. When they see the blackpilled kids posting their cutsie little fashy memes to the federal government's social media accounts, they laugh because they know this is all the movement ever wanted: To trigger the libs.
If I can indulge your worst nightmares for a moment: An actual fascist victory would include the end of the United States judiciary and the abolition of Congress. It would include thousands and thousands of regime opponents being kidnapped and hauled to secret prisons. There would be dozens of high-profile assassinations opposition parties. All elections would be indefinitely suspended. There would be, in short, an armed destruction of every American institution, total chaos, complete obliteration.
This is what Yarvin wants, and it's what he won't get. He knows as much.
The reward for Stephen Miller and his ilk is also on earth. They look tough. They’re doing something. That they are not even doing 0.01% of what it would take to solve the problem—that, at much more risk to themselves, the most they could probably do is 0.05%—matters not. They can milk it as far as it goes. They, too, will sell books. I’m sure they understand this and are doing all they can! Yet this does not change the facts.
Only a born loser would see the above memes – and the other shit that makes you feel and sound crazy – as the spoils of the victor. They're having fun with their little posts and their childlike antagonizing of Americans who want what's best for their country. That's fine. I hope they have fun while they can. Maybe they even know that the emptiness of their cause has been made plain for all to see. And maybe they don't care.
Shitposting was all they ever wanted, just as fascists on Twitter only wanted to torment their perceived enemies with harsh words. I don't love saying this but Curtis Yarvin was right. Call it a lack of imagination, a shortage of ambition, a laziness that has always animated anti-democracy forces.
Trump officials have spent 14 months' worth of political capital to thrash around the internet making what they think of as Epic Content instead of doing what a real authoritarian movement would do: Anything and everything to consolidate power and prevent opposition forces from gaining a foothold. While these stone cold losers have been posting about a return to white patriarchal dominance, Woke 2.0 has percolated and some place called White Settlement, Texas has gone woke.
These people don't know what winning looks like. For that I'm grateful.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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