The Criminal's response to an airline crash showed fascism's reliance on hoaxes and delusion

There's a few related points that need to be made about The Criminal's bizarre press conference in which he immediately tried to blame yesterday's midair collision between a commercial jet and military helicopter on "diversity." You don't have to listen to this bullshit, I'm just including it here for the record.

That was the tail end of a long string of The Criminal's usual free-association racism games. You don't need to watch the fuller version either: here's a rundown.

All right, here we go.

First, you need to remember one thing. You are not the one who is crazy here. Fascist movements are, by definition, egregiously stupid things specifically because they shun (often violently) expertise to instead embrace hoaxes and conspiracy theories. Fascist governments always sound like a confederacy of pudding-brained conspiracy freaks because that is what they are, but it is also an explicit movement tactic.

For supporters: A steady stream of hoaxes and conspiratorial rhetoric to keep the fascist base forever angry and paranoid. For opponents: A steady stream of those same delusional falsehoods, said with governmental authority and conviction, to drive all those outside the movement to a point where they give up on trying to determine the truth altogether, putting their heads down and ignoring "politics" while the fascist hoaxers run roughshod over everything they once thought to be true and moral.

They are declaring war on your sense of reason; what you yourself need to invest in is your own mental health. Don't tune out--but don't obsess, either. Separate out the things you can do something about from the things you can't.

Can give either this malevolent idiot or his far more malevolent, far more calculating aides a basic sense of human decency? No. No, you can't. So focus instead on what you can do, and don't let this seditious convicted felon shit-for-brains here wear you down with his dementia-laced frothing about everything else.

What you can do right now, more than anything else, is find opportunities in your life to question the Trump supporters around you about every new scandal and insult that arises. Is this what they voted for? What do they think of it? Why do they want to be associated with it?

Be a walking dictionary of all the most embarrassing things Trump has done, and ask them flat-out, but nicely, whether this is what they thought they were voting for and what they wanted to happen. A complete hiring shutdown that's screwing your entire community over? Blaming wildfires on women and air disasters on minorities? Ain't that a little to racist and weird even for you, Bob? And so on.

As for the specifics of Trump's lie: I'm not sure it's really his lie. And the reason I say that is because it was trotted out as the Republican-wide talking point with great speed this morning, even though it is obviously f--king delusional and embarrassingly stupid.

We're going to spend Hegseth's entire (probably brief) tenure as Defense Secretary wondering whether he's sober, during events like this, or whether he was pried out of his office mid-bender. The jury's still out on this performance.

If professional suck-up J.D. Vance and abusive white nationalist day-drinking Fox morning show host Pete Hegseth whining that we're "not getting the best people in government" makes you dizzy: Yeah. Yeah, fascism will do that. Trump's been combing the nation for the least qualified and most exploitable Aryan faces to stuff into his cabinet, and they're pretty sure they're more qualified than any expert, any American woman, any member of an American minority group, and each other.

But J.D. Couchlover and Secretary of Beer Pong Hegseth did not come up with "what if we blamed the crash on DEI" in a vacuum, and neither did Trump. It was clearly a Republican-crafted and widely disseminated talking point. And by "DEI," they mean "the entire civil rights movement."

To me, the broad dissemination of this talking point suggests that The Criminal is not actually the one pressing for it. It's his aides, almost all of whom have been plucked from fascist groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, or an array of even more blatant white supremacist dens. It was Trump's aides that likely came up with "let's blame DEI (civil rights)," and The Criminal is just parroting the line he was given like Vance, Hegseth, and the others. During The Criminal's press conference you could see him trying to backfill the assertion in his usual random word association style, none of it coherent. It doesn't sound like a deeply held belief, it sounds like grasping at straws.

It's also not The Criminal's well-documented style. During Trump's first administration, he would be far more likely to blame any random disaster on China, or terrorists, or immigrants—not an abstraction like "diversity." He is not someone who allows his racism to be that abstract.

Trump standing up and blaming "DEI (civil rights)," then, is something I'm going to personally put a pin in as more evidence that he's not actually in charge of much of what "his" White House is up to. He's focused on personal fixations like Greenland and tariffs, and is likely barely aware of his aides' moves to, say, shut down the majority of the government for funsies.

A figurehead fascist. One who will likely hold decreasing power in his own administration but will be propped up, Weekend at Bernie's style, for as long as his aides can possibly justify it and then a good while longer than that.

Goodie.

So you're not crazy, and The Fascists are still operating from a position of weakness, even if they do have every f--king House and Senate Republican in their camp due to the fanatical nature of the first and the abject cowardice of the second. But we really do have to bludgeon the so-called free press into being not so abjectly complicit in everything the most malevolent propagandists in America belch out.

When a powerful figure makes an outlandish claim that has no evidence behind it, that is called "lying." When a political figure or group has a longstanding pattern of making false claims to "frame" major events through their own lens, that is called "propaganda."

And that is an act of corruption, not of politics.

The political media is, because they are a power-humping group that imagines themselves to be in partnership with those they cover rather than their public watchdogs, of the firm and all-encompassing belief that the nation's "news" should consist of "whatever a powerful person says, regardless of whether it is true or false." Every other press sin comes from that one, and it's a dereliction of journalistic duty that fascism now uses as its primary weapon.

Any authoritarian talking point, no matter outrageous, will be repeated ad nauseam in every media outlet to catch wind of it. That is the corporate media's modern conception of what "news" is, primarily because it is the cheapest possible so-called journalism that can possibly be produced. It requires no fact checking, no context, and threatens no powerful figure.

What "news" actually came out of this pseudo-presidential presser? The big, huge news is that the sitting president immediately sought to blame a major disaster on the mere presence of non-white men somewhere in the chain of events, a claim that is both frothingly racist and obviously an attempt at disinformation. The "news" is that a sitting president lied about an air disaster so as to stir up hate.

That's a huge story, but most of the political pseudo-journalists covering the event couldn't see it for the trees. They reflexively "reported" that the ragingly dishonest convicted felon said a thing, then they and their editors worked out just how much they could dare point out the obvious untruth of it without unduly pissing off the fascist who said it.

Truly cowardly stuff. And that's been the whole story of post-coup-attempt America; a wide-ranging cowardice that has infected every institution, every corporation, and almost every last person of even middling national influence. They've all turned a blind eye to a fascist movement for the sake of protecting their own power and, perhaps, squeezing a few regulatory rollbacks or tax cuts out in exchange for their complicity.

Keep yourself sane, and know that The Criminal's house of cards could come crashing down at any moment. That's precisely why they're acting with such desperation: Russell Vought, Elon Musk, and all the others know that the things they're doing are so unpopular that the majority of America would reel in disgust if they knew the half of it. So they're ramming through everything they can, as fast as they can, before the Find Out stage of their experiment comes knocking on their doors.