On Saturday, the chairman of the Republican Party in Michigan's Oakland County spent his afternoon directing his online followers' attention to local businesses that had not lowered their flags to half staff to honor the memory of the slain conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk. President Donald Trump had issued that order, "for all American flags," earlier in the day, in a post on the Playskool version of Twitter where he does such things. "Maintaining a flag is a responsibility that shouldn’t be taken lightly," the GOP chairman, Vance Patrick, wrote. "Post anyone who isn’t taking it seriously in this thread."
Patrick became the change he wanted to see by naming and shaming a garden center, tire store, and car wash; in his mentions are pictures, clearly taken through the windows of a car, of a McDonald's and an Aloft hotel in Park City, Utah, and of a second Michigan car wash, and of a Methodist church in Illinois. By Twitter's own accounting, just a few hundred people saw Patrick's posts, and only a few dozen saw the replies. That Patrick is, and pardon the political science jargon here, "just some squeaker" both is and isn't salient. Whether Patrick was able to make trouble for the offending garden center or tire store, whose phone numbers he provided with that goal in mind, the more meaningful part is that he understood it as his civic obligation to try. Or, maybe, he was just some squeaker scrabbling around for clout at the expense of a stranger. It is increasingly difficult to tell the difference.
There aren't really central tenets to Trumpism, at least beyond the bigoted defaults of the stupid and spiteful stripe of the American Elite from which Trump himself emerged; that absence of ethos, at least beyond the belief that it is the absolute and natural right of that rancid elect to prey upon everyone and everything else, constructs a perverse permission structure of its own. Trump did not invent any of this so much as it invented him, and the fantasy of Trumpism, for those who have remade or simply discovered themselves in the service of it, is that Trump's followers might through their service claim for themselves the same privileges that Trump himself has so delighted in abusing. This is not how it works for followers, though, or with Trump; those who live to serve him have always very clearly been destined to be buried alive with him. It is, in every degrading sense, a sort of American Dream.
It's that crabbed fantasy as much as any more specific vengeance that your Vance Patrick types are chasing as they mount their greasy platforms and call for the disciplining of irreverent undergrads and the firing of rude goth programmers. This combination of laziness and mercilessness perfectly suits a movement of dully depraved local gentry, but it is striking how much this relentless and scattershot pettiness has made its way upward. For all of Scheming Vizier and aspiring genocidaire Stephen Miller's superheated rhetoric of total culture war—"With god as my witness," Miller said on Monday, "we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people"—the instinct to snitch and bully and gloat has reliably won out even among actual elites. The Governor of Texas brags on social media about the explusion of an 18-year-old Texas Tech student who engaged in the wrong type of free speech in the designated campus Free Speech Area. Pam Bondi, Attorney General of the United States, goes on TV and reminds a rogue Office Depot employee that it is very much within her power to prosecute him. Trump himself, who gets testy when people talk about someone other than him for too long, has moved all the way on, and out inexorably toward the first tee.
The entire program is lavishly and howlingly fascist, of course, but it is also so preposterous and so small. All of this underwrought bombast and frantic bullying is doing real and unjust damage in actual people's lives, but it is also slick with the sort of flopsweat that adheres to the phrase "like and subscribe." In the absence of governance, or just in its place, the state has taken up a grim and shameful kind of content creation. The conservative elite, all purpose and prayerfulness in their powerful offices, now has to crash out about nonbinary baristas and kick around sophomores with septum piercings for clout, like common influencers.
Again, this all emanates from and returns to Trump himself, whose industry as a content creator is exceeded only by his blank and insatiable appetite for consuming it. There is a certain type of content that the big guy likes, which is mostly cops roughing up bad guys, but also rich people attending fancy parties and crowds rising for him in unanimous applause and footage of missiles blowing things up. The political culture now works mostly to create those images for him and explain why they are so popular and important. It shows them over and over again, and discusses them in tones of calculated awe—are they bigger, will there be more, how radical or reckless or bold are they, do you think, relative to the ones from yesterday, or last week?
These things are in fact not popular, and are increasingly unpopular; for the many people who cannot subsist on content and grievance alone, it has become very difficult to ignore the reality that everything else in American life is atrophying due to the attention and resources currently being redirected to manufacturing this content. No one and nothing else matters; Trump, in his bloated imperial phase, no longer even pretends that anyone or anything else ever could. This leaves the people who have given themselves over to this bleak fandom on their phones, mostly, but not entirely out of the game. Their job is to like and subscribe and amplify and support, and to await the call to hop into the crypt with their president and everything he has hoarded away for himself.
But the work that Vance Patrick and many thousands of other Vance Patricks have done, while awaiting that call home, reflects how well they understand their role. By Monday, when JD Vance encouraged listeners of Kirk's podcast to "get involved, get involved" by finding people who had been inadequate in their reverence after Kirk's death and "[calling] them out, hell, call their employers," he was following, not leading. On social media, from accounts as obscure as Vance Patrick's and as powerful as Elon Musk's, and on a website that was first called "Expose Charlie's Murderers" and then the "Charlie Kirk Data Foundation," posts from people who worked in schools or hospitals or Apple Stores or the Washington Post or in the military were leveraged as part of what The Guardian described as a "mass 'doxing' effort to track down, intimidate, and harass people perceived not to have sufficiently mourned the killing of the rightwing activist." It is a crystalline expression of this political movement: cadres of desperately wack suck-ups, cynical and credulous in roughly equal measure, expressing their belief that the solution to every social and political problem is more assertive bossing, and volunteering to stay late to help.
Both Vance and Miller justified this clarion call to start snitching as part of their ordained work rolling up the vast left-wing network that they painted as being the driving force behind Kirk's death; within hours of Kirk's killing, Trump had done the same. That is a useful way for them to frame it, as it plays to the instincts and preferences of the addled TV news casualty they serve—more bad guys for the cops to go get on his behalf, more applause for the great work he has done Making Things Safe by having had them do it—but it is not a very convincing one. It doesn't have to be, of course, for those who are already convinced; they look out their car windows and see nothing but the enemy and a thousand brazen insults, a whole world to be brought to order, one call to the cops at a time.
But for all of Miller's furious Cobra Commander rhetoric, for all the metastatic gilding and trophy clutter in Trump's Oval Office, for all the strident and signifying fascism down on the streets, the reality of all this is plain and shabby. It is not any kind of full-spectrum authoritarian command, or even the grubby paranoid snitchscape of oppressive surveillance states, but the more familiar sputtering busybody bullshit and hair-trigger offense of a deranged Homeowners Association. Not some grand tyranny directed from above, but a sweaty congeries of little tyrants patrolling the little fiefdoms they've arrogated for themselves, working less to knit their awful stupid grievances together than merely against their neighbors everywhere and anywhere possible. Vance, true to form, was just amplifying the one thing that Trumpism has ever offered—not real opportunity or purpose, not inclusion or community, not even personal advancement, but merely the chance to hurt other people and get away with it.
So this is it: the old national crises of meaninglessness and arbitrary violence and anomie and elite impunity, reshaped by the soft hands of the elites who authored and command all those crises into an opportunity for regular Americans to meet the moment and fulfill their duty as citizens by trying to get the lib wife of the guy who manages the Buca Di Beppo near the mall into some kind of trouble. There is no actual purpose to it, no broader program in it, nothing but the belief that all these cruelties are allowed, now, and so might replace any other right and every other thing that had come before. "People say, 'Oh, people have a right to say things,'" Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said on Fox News. "Well, actually they don't necessarily have a right to say things."
The Senate's resident libertarian was talking about the nasty stuff that people say to him online. His statement is ridiculous on its face, un-American not just in its defiance of the oldest national values but in its violation of the longstanding national bias against whiny little twerps, but it was also absolutely in earnest. These are clowns, factory seconds, prissy sadistic losers, and the clock is ticking. They know as much. They also really mean it.
