250 Years of Fear and Loathing In America
A senile mob boss is running the country and destroying our sanity.
There is perhaps no better metaphor for the MAGA movement than the parasite that has found its way back into America this month after 60+ years of being eradicated—the New World Screwworm. Like many such crises since January 20, 2025, this resurgence is directly tied to a DOGE funding cut made by the Mad Edgelord, Elon Musk. The smooth-brained idiots at DOGE slashed the funding for the prevention programs that had kept this very nasty parasite out of America for six decades, quite possibly because the grant name had the word transgenic in it, and now, as is typical for most crises, it will cost more to fix the emergency than keeping the prevention measures in place would have been.
The graphic above explains the process of infection, but kind of undersells the horror of the cycle in its scientific language. The components that make this nasty larva so devastating is that it literally has sharp pincers that dig into the flesh. If you try to remove it, it will burrow further into the flesh to evade capture (hence the term “screwworm”). Imagine these horrid little things digging under your skin, laying eggs, eating away at you, and turning into flies that swarm around your wounds. While it mainly affects livestock, it can also infect humans and pets. That’s certainly bad enough, and with the overall levels of cattle herds in America at a 75-year-low, this holds potential for driving up beef prices to astronomical levels. As it is, beef prices have already been lousy enough that Texas barbeque joints, a staple of the state for decades, are closing left and right. That was before this flesh-eating monstrosity returned. God help us if it’s not contained.
I went out the night it was confirmed the screwworm was here and stocked up. Hamburgers, ground beef for various meals like pasta, brisket…I wanted options before the great Price Spike of 2026 launched, because you just know that containment is going to fail this time around. Have you heard Agriculture Barbie, excuse me, Brooke Rollins, talk about this? “We’re looking at using minidrones powered by AI to fly over herds and look for infections.” Artificial intelligence cannot make up for the lack of common sense that this Cabinet lacks.
The screwworm is the perfect metaphor for the MAGA mindset. Donald Trump and his cult burrowed into America’s flesh, slowly killing this nation from inside, eating away at our shared beliefs and principles while utterly shunning science and . Despite starting a massively inflationary and pointless war, despite trying to give himself a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off violent insurrectionists with, despite tariffs that are making everyone poorer, despite repeatedly falling asleep during staged Oval Office television events and in sycophantic Cabinet meetings, Trump manages to hold a baseline level of support around one-third of America. This is especially true within the Republican Party, where the bar of decent behavior cannot be located. Every time you think that bar has been set, along comes an event or person that should be unable to clear the bar, and yet, they do, because Republicans hold the levers of power in all three branches of the federal government and accept that the bar is in Hell.
East of El Paso, Texas, is a string of counties that were founded in the 1880s, named after Confederate leaders from the Civil War. Reeves County, for Colonel George Reeves; Jeff Davis County, for the former president of the Confederacy; and Culberson County, named for David Culberson, a Confederate soldier later elected to the U.S. House when Reconstruction ended. These counties are staunchly Republican, which tracks, because Republican Party members are increasingly part of the Confederacy redux. These three counties together don’t quite reach a total population of 20,000 people—the two most notable things about them is that Reeves County is home to the famed Old West town of Pecos (the phrase “West of the Pecos” derives from it) and Jeff Davis County is home to Mount Livermore and the McDonald Astronomical Observatory. They also serve as poster children for why the MAGA clowns that post maps showing “all that red!” are clowns—that spot is red, but there aren’t many voters in it.
In 2024, Donald Trump won these counties by a 60-40 split in the general election, which is on par for most deep red counties in America. His total number of votes in Culberson and Jeff Davis counties was merely in the hundreds, though, and his campaign made no mention of it as newsworthy because it was just par for the course. On May 26th, the Texas runoff primary between sitting senator John Cornyn, the Majority Whip, and sleazeball Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took place, and Cornyn got beat badly statewide by a 65-35% spread. Paxton, like many Republican primary challengers these days, took a stance that was fully aligned with President Trump as his campaign message. If Trump said it, Paxton would echo the same phrases, whether talking about Cornyn or Democratic nominee James Talarico. This tendency led to something very funny in the aftermath of the runoff, however. Paxton, eager to preen about how much he won by because his narcissism rivals the President’s for its inability to ignore insignificant events, sent out a press release that touted his victories in the above named counties as 15-20% higher than Donald Trump’s in 2024. On the surface, that would seem like quite an accomplishment.
Then you remember that the phrase “Everything’s bigger in Texas” also applies to the scale of the lies told by its public officials.
Ken Paxton won Culberson County 79-21%. Ken Paxton only received THIRTY VOTES. John Cornyn won EIGHT VOTES.1 Bragging that you won by twenty percent more than Donald Trump, when the total vote count was lower than the casualty count2 of the El Paso and Sutherland Springs mass shootings and equal to the casualty count of the Uvalde mass shooting is a special kind of pathetic. Bragging about minor accomplishments is very Trumpian, and another of the main Trumpian components of the party is its naked, open corruption—and again, Ken Paxton embodies it on a massive scale. He is one of those unique people that is cartoonishly evil and yet has managed to evade consequences his entire adult life. His own party impeached him in the Texas legislature, and he only escaped conviction because his wife was a senator and rallied them to his cause. A year later, she’d file for divorce because he began openly cheating on her, a very Trumplike display of ingratitude. His office has routinely taken cases away from local district attorneys, only to either lose them or plead them out—most notably so in child sexual abuse cases. It’s such a noticeable pattern that judges in these cases have openly called into question the plea bargains, and the Texas Tribune, in partnership with KUTX Public Radio, did a great job in breaking down these cases. Paxton has released hardcore sex abusers of children into the population either through deliberate choice or gross incompetence. I’m sure that would’ve made Jeffrey Epstein happy were that monster still around, and perhaps Donald Trump likes it very much as well, since there’s a better than zero chance that he raped underage girls based upon his history.
Let’s leave those Confederate counties we’ve been discussing, hop on Interstate 20 and drive through many of the deeply Republican counties of the state until we reach Fort Worth, the heart of Tarrant County, population approximately two million people. Tarrant County’s Republican Party is chaired by a fellow named Bo French, and after May 26th, he is the party’s nominee to sit on the Texas Railroad Commission. It doesn’t sound very important until you discover that the TRC regulates the oil and gas industry in Texas. Bo French doesn’t mean anything to you until you Google him and discover what an unrepentant racist shitheel he is. The oil and gas industry is remarkably integrated amongst the workforce in the field, and because of its risks it pays very well—and that’s why Bo French is running to regulate it. He represents the degenerate white nationalism of the Party of Trump, best buds with Temu Himmler, excuse me, White House Obergruppenführer Stephen Miller. French wants America to deport a third of the country’s population, 100 million people, so he can take away those well-paying oil jobs and give them to other white folks. Texas was part of Mexico for centuries until we seized it in a war, but sure, let’s kick out the real natives so the colonizers can have more to themselves.
It’s a childlike white supremacist view of how the world works, because the only way you remove 100 million people from a nation is by murdering all of them—and these people who tout their “Christianity” at every turn would commit a massacre that would exceed the deaths of God flooding the earth and destroying His creation. The vast majority of the country is repulsed by this behavior, but the Republican Party cheers it on, continues funding it, continues voting for the people Donald Trump points at and labels “one of us.” Lately, that includes Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia, who won the nomination to face Senator Jon Ossoff in November, and Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama, who won the primary for Tommy Tuberville’s Senate seat. Collins, on his best day, is a man who can only muster the intellectual wattage of a nightlight, but he hates anyone who isn’t the correct shade of cream coloring; meanwhile, Moore is a loudly self-proclaimed Christian who supported the Jan. 6th insurrection, refused to vote to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the Capitol Police who prevented greater violence during said insurrection, and ran away from his constituents last year during a town hall where they were angry about his screwing them over. Moore’s also got a perjury charge to his name, which he managed to beat, but clearly lying is perfectly acceptable to this charlatan. He’s also a crypto industry puppet, which makes him a perfect mark for Trump’s crypto scam (one of the many impeachable offenses the man has committed).
Can you conjure up a better distillation of the average MAGA congressman these days?
With less than a month to go before America’s 250th birthday, the gloomy outlook of 1976 seems almost quaint compared to now. There was stagflation and a massive Vietnam hangover, yet the country largely celebrated the bicentennial with a degree of joy. I recently visited the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, where a whole exhibit of bicentennial tchotchkes is on display, and they were rather dorky, but pure at the same time. Nothing I saw there looked like the sort of gung-ho, chest-puffing fake machismo merchandise being hawked online and in stores. There was definitely more of an innocence to it, an innocence so many of us desperately long for right now.
What I didn’t see at the Ford museum was photos of a grotesque “Claw” on the South Lawn of the White House, where motocross stunts and UFC fights took place on Sunday for the amusement of the would-be emperor Donald of Orangeface. What I didn’t see at the museum was video of some drunk bum named Josh Hokit, who showed up for the weigh-in at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday hammered, slurring, and vomiting on himself. Hokit then followed up this disgraceful appearance by grabbing the microphone held by Joe Rogan (who doesn’t know how to tie a tie or wear one at the proper length) and bellowing that “Michelle Obama is a man, am I right?” Rogan, whose use of HGH and other “enhancing” drugs makes him look like he ate his past self, smiled and laughed like it was funny to disgustingly insult the former First Lady, a woman of class that nobody in attendance could come close to achieving.
What I didn’t see was the Marines in full dress uniform providing an honor guard for this collection of derelicts, or $1000 gold “Trump coins” sold to attendees, or MURICA baseball hats, or any of the tasteless, tacky, and downright absurdities that were part of this supposed “event to celebrate America” that you had to pay $15.99/month to Paramount to even watch. The billionaires will share their ill-gotten gains with the President who enables it, but not with us regular folk. We are Peasants, and they are the Feudal Lords, and they are determined to show us our Rightful Place in their broligarchy.
Oh, speaking of broligarchs, our Secretary of WAR(!) Pete Hegseth went to D-Day memorial ceremonies and berated the Europeans for allowing “an immigrant invasion upon their shores” and not “defending Western values as we did in World War II,” demonstrating once again that he’s a drunken fratboy who clearly skipped history class—America and the UK were “Western nations” that were fighting Germany and Italy, also “Western nations,” but Pete was too wasted on Four Loko to show up to class at Princeton (another black mark on the Ivies) —and who has no sense of purpose other than bellowing empty threats and personally holding down Black and female military officers from promotion while he works to make the military a grotesque patriarchal Christian Crusader Force.
Somehow Fratboy Kegseth also managed to make the military incapable of carrying out victory against Iran,3 which is why last night, Donald of Orangeface sat at the Palace of Versailles and signed the worst surrender treaty since the ill-fated one Germany signed there in 1919. There is no doubt that Iran won, our nation’s stature was left doubly diminished by our war crimes and by the humiliation inflicted by a far lesser power, and that this treaty, like the one in 1919, will inevitably lead us to far greater bloodshed down the road. If there’s one thing you can count on from the average fascist, they are incapable of subtlety or executing plans efficiently. Most of the time, they’re just downright fucking stupid, and the cult of personality that permeates every fascist state ensures that all of the downstream chorus of sealions must twist themselves into knots while yelping that the glorious leader has won another smashing victory over his foes.
When I was growing up and learned about the bicentennial events in social studies, I dreamed of the day when the 250th anniversary of our founding came. The child version of me thought it’d be similar, lots of patriotism and fireworks and fun-themed events on television. I never imagined that the White House would resemble the alternate 1985 that Marty McFly found in Back to the Future II, where Biff Tannen turned the center of Hill Valley into Biff Tannen’s Pleasure Palace.
For a child of the Eighties, who grew up with the gauzy Reagan view of patriotism and the mythos of an America that anyone could succeed to the highest levels in, where our institutions were cherished and respected, where our politicians didn’t regularly utter profanity or speak like third-graders, this has been a shock. The scales long ago fell from my eyes regarding American conduct, but at year 240, with a Black president in the White House and equal rights for LGBTQ people, it seemed like we’d get to 250 in decent shape.
Instead, much as my Hunter S. Thompson-inspired headline implies, the nation is filled with fear and loathing. Fear at what a dementia-addled, pants-shitting narcissist of a president might do each day after he’s gone on a Diet-Coke-and-Adderall-fueled rampage on Truth Social, fear that the reincarnation of the Gestapo known as ICE might do, fear at a sudden collapse of the global economy, losing our jobs and homes and dignity, and loathing of what a disgrace America has become. Loathing of those who run it, loathing of the Epstein class of millionaires and billionaires who raped underage girls and got away with it, loathing of the inequality and suffering, and loathing of our fellow citizens who enabled this disaster because they were convinced that brown people and gender dysphoria were the real threats to our security.
America is about to turn 250, and the walls are cracking while the roof prepares to fall in. Maybe we deserve this for our arrogance, strutting across the globe and dictating to others what they should do. Maybe it’s our just desserts to be joining the United Kingdom, our “mother country,” in the fall of two former empires. I’d like to hope America can still be saved, but a large part of me questions whether anything is left worth saving. Oh well. Happy birthday, I guess.
Donald Trump got 451 votes in Culberson County and 699 in Jeff Davis County. Paxton received 189 in Jeff Davis County to go with his 30 from Culberson.
Casualties here, just as described by any police or military around the world, includes both dead and wounded victims.
Retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling wrote a perceptive piece for The Bulwark last week that I’d urge everyone to read in full, but which basically pointed out that the further that the military gets dragged into stupid stunts, bigotry, and political theatre, the less capable they are to defend the nation or fight its wars.