Well! Here’s something so sad, I don’t have words for it.
It’s written by Laurie Penny, who is so smart, I would like her to have all the words. The piece describes Penny attending an off-site gathering during the RNC, overseen by a human-shaped ego named Milo. It is Milo’s business to pretend at being hateful, abusive, and amoral. One of Penny’s many sad, smart takeaways:
“I run into a British writer from the Spectator, who is as bewildered as I am by the way Americans take Milo and his ilk seriously, by their willingness to take pride in performative bigotry and call it strength. It works. It sells. It’s the unholy marriage of that soulless debate culture that works so well in Britain, transplanted to a nation with no social safety net and half a billion guns. It works, in part, because of the essentially cult-like nature of US culture and the structured ignorance that accompanies it. America is a nation eaten by its own myth. The entire idea of America is about believing impossible things. Nobody said those things had to be benign.”