When Bad-Faith Unreality Crashes Into Reality

It's not funny-haha, but the kind of funny that elicits an internal scream.

One prominent feature of both Trump administration – but especially the second one, which operates within the parameters of competitive authoritarianism – is the right's bad-faith arguments and its vast unreality running headlong into what we might call actual reality, the one mostly ignored by Trump worshippers.

It's happened seemingly every day since the start of his second term, and it's taken on a level of contradiction we didn't experience the first time around because the right wing's unreality has hardened like connective tissue thanks to advances in the fascist takeover of social media. Probably the most prominent example of the American right's unreality slamming into reality is Trump's pledge to expose the Epstein Files, which for years has been viewed by his followers as a motherlode of confirmation bias.

Only elected Democrats and their funders were in those files, they knew. When Trump refused to make the Epstein material public and bury himself as a close confidant and perhaps business partner with America's most famous sex trafficker, the right's unreality had smashed into actual reality and Trump had a problem – one that won't go away ... for now.

Another glorious examples of the right's unreality running into reality: Right-wing shitheads running the agencies they accused of mass murder during the worst parts of the COVID pandemic. Their charge was that Anthony Fauci and other lifelong civil servants doing their best to manage a pandemic while Republican officials on every level of government intentionally undermined the government response had overseen the killing of thousands upon thousands of innocents. This was done primarily through the COVID vaccine, which Trump wanted credit for before realizing his hoards were against saving the lives of fellow Americans.

Well now these people are in charge of the nation's health agencies, including the FDA, where Commissioner Martin Makary is telling cable news anchors that he knows of people who were killed by the COVID vaccine. If that's true – if Makary really does have evidence that people succumbed to the jab – then one would think FDA policy would be shaped by this danger, that COVID vaccines would be banned or at least severely restricted since, according to Makary, they are killing people. Probably that should take priority. Big if true, things of that nature.

But no. The country's health apparatus has not banned the vaccine (for now). This must mean Makary is either lying or he continues to use anecdotal evidence – maybe passed from a friend of a friend – to push dangerous misinformation about COVID and ways to stop it from making you sick or killing you. Makary says the Trump regime is looking powerfully into "vaccine injury" since the jab (in the right-wing unreality) made hundreds of thousands of American sick during the darkest parts of the pandemic.

Remember in the first few weeks after the COVID vaccine had been released to the general public when you could open Twitter and see any number of videos showing people convulsing and screaming in agony after supposedly taking the jab? Remember how this video evidence of people having hours-long seizures was supposed to scare us into maybe not taking the vaccine? This was all part of the unreality creation that permeated the discourse and eventually made its way into the cultural and political mainstream. The folks who pushed those lies are now in charge of shit, but won't make the policy changes they wanted because none of that really happened. That means one of two things: Makary is allowing people to suffer life-changing "vaccine injuries" or dying via vaccine, or he never really meant what he said about the so-called dangers of the shot. There's no third option.

Makary and guys like him have used this line of argument around the vaccine for so long they cannot possibly abandon it now. He doesn't mean what he says when he goes on TV and claims he knows people who were killed by the evil COVID vaccine. But guys like Makary needed that to be true back then if they were to undermine the Biden administration's attempts to stabilize the country and possibly reap the benefits from that post-2020 stabilization. Makary's lies were nothing but a bad-faith tool back then. You know that today because he didn't enter his position kicking and screaming about stopping the distribution of the killer jab. His bad faith eventually ran into reality, as it always does when unreality residents wake up and find themselves in charge.

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