Welcome to the splintered multiverse. It’s a place where the scoreboard is a lie, the players are ghosts, and the spectators are so high on the dopamine of domestic spite that they haven’t noticed the 45,000 corpses piling up of innocent protesters in Iran.
If you’ve been following the headlines lately, you’re being fed a steady diet of geopolitical fan-fiction. We’re told Iran is winning. We’re told the Islamic Republic has achieved a strategic victory.
The reality? The Iranian regime is a decapitated husk.
Their new leader is either buried or disfigured, following the assassination of his father, the former leader. The navy is non-existent, and the missile and nuke programs are scrap metal. They have virtually no military left to speak of.
They are functionally a Ghost State, propped up by a well-funded, well-oiled propaganda machine that continues to churn out digital junk mail for audiences all too eager to hit subscribe.
The world hates US President Trump so much – and frankly, given his track record and how he acts, that’s not unjustified – that they want to see him lose so reflexively that it means Iran has to win. We’ve reached a point where the Anti-Trump crowd needs an Ayatollah-foil to win so badly they’re rooting for America to lose.
Take a look at the TACO Chicken paradox. The anti-Trump factions screamed the president was going to bring nuclear winter to Iran and that he was a warmonger who would set the Middle East ablaze. But now that he stopped short of committing war crimes through the destruction of civilian infrastructure? Those same people are calling him a chicken because he didn’t attack. Give me a break.
Trump has no benefit of the doubt left, and frankly, people have no fucks left to give. He’s squandered his institutional trust. But what’s frustrating is that even when other Western nations back up the facts of the slaughter in Iran, people refuse to believe it. When the messenger is poisoned, the machine breaks, and the truth dies.
We are currently witnessing the shameful spectacle of the West simping for a regime that slaughtered 45,000 of its own citizens in just a few weeks. This all started in January, when the regime slaughtered thousands for the crime of protesting. These aren’t the good guys. This is a regime with no LGBT rights, that exports terror, and whose literal slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, and Curse the Jews.”
Yet, the West is silent. Acknowledging the bodies would make it impossible to keep using Trump as a foil. It would force people to actually think about which side they are supporting – advertently or inadvertently.
This is the Administrative Siege on our collective sanity. We saw during COVID that we were unable to make a collective sacrifice for the health and wellbeing of our families and neighbors. Trust collapsed, institutions were blamed, people died.
When people are hurt and trust falters, society is harmed. It’s much like how people who voted for Trump said he was a grenade to throw into the machine to hurt others, or how at the Ambassador Bridge Blockade people who lost their jobs due to vaccine mandates told me they wanted to see others hurt like they were hurt. When things affect you personally you see things differently.
We’ve become so addicted to the dopamine hit of domestic infighting that we’ve surrendered not only our mutual collectivity, but also our collective good. We’re a husk of a community in need of connection, trading the societal gains from the post-war era for today’s social media clicks and instant dopamine gratification.
The greatest threat to the right now is our lack of cohesion. Our politics of reflexive hate is outweighing our need for the politics of the collective good. If we can’t collectively recognize that a regime that slaughters 45,000 people in a fortnight is the bad guy, we’re never going to be able to recognize the bad when it’s staring us in the face at home.
We’re acting small., we’re thinking small, and if we don’t snap out of this vibe-based vertigo, we won’t just be watching a ghost state collapse – we’ll be watching our own.
KVETCH WITH JON LIEDTKE can be heard on Spreaker, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, or other podcasting platforms.