Anarcho-Trumpism: A Thesis
Hello! A fun coda to what’s probably my favorite essay in Neoreaction a Basilisk sits below. But first, I wanted to flag that the Patreon is currently $90 or so below the threshold where my Doctor Who reviews will be public. So as it stands, come Friday night/Saturday morning I’ll be posting a paywalled review over there. Whereas if twenty of you go decide to give me and Penn $5 a month and get access to all my ebooks, all our comics, and more essays like this one, which Patrons had back in February, I’ll be posting it here for everyone’s enjoyment.
And if you give $10 a month, not only will it only take ten of you, you’ll also get Penn’s weekly Morning Album Reviews column. See, I’m always up first, so every day as I head into the shower I put an album on for him to wake up to. And afterwards, he reviews them. Sometimes I fill in gaps in his knowledge of pop music and throw him venerable classics like The Wall, Maggot Brain, and A Love Supreme. Sometimes I set him up to offer linkable hot takes on The Tortured Poets Department, Cowboy Carter, or, for what’ll be his next installment, the astonishing seven albums of immediate interest to him that all dropped on 4/26. And sometimes I just throw him total weirdo stuff because the primary dynamic of our marriage is mischief—like The World of Harry Partch, The Scientist Rids the World of The Evil Curse of the Vampires, or the week I set out to convince him that Neil Young—an artist I’d basically never listened to—was actually his favorite.
Anyway. I really hope you’ll sign up, because I love being able to post Doctor Who reviews publicly and the discussions that follow in what remains one of the only good comment sections on the Internet. And either way, the Jodie Whittaker era of TARDIS Eruditorum returns July 1st with Spyfall. Or, y’know, with Village of the Angels in a couple weeks for Patrons.
And with that unseemly self-promotion over with, Anarcho-Trumpism: A Thesis.
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32.
Eight years into the throbbing agony of anticlimactic eschatology, it is perhaps time to reflect on what we’ve learned. First, let us consider QAnon, which I’ll use as a metonym for the larger phenomenon of conspiratorial fascism. Jeff Sharlet has observed that the actual discursive practice of QAnon is fundamentally gnostic in structure and approach—all hidden and implicit truths that must be individually discovered through the meditational contemplation of endless YouTube videos.
This is not surprising—what other form would the intellectual discourse of a nihilistic Ruined Modernism take? For that matter, what other form would an intellectual discourse based on wall to wall falsehoods take? For all the alarm and panic about pervasive misinformation, the fact, as hundreds of thousands of dead COVID truthers can’t actually attest, is that material reality eventually asserts itself. And so of course the intellectual discourse surrounding a mendaciously narcissistic avatar of the twentieth century’s death drive is fundamentally gnostic.…