American policy has evolved into spreading content and cultivating corona

When the Donald Trump administration issued orders to send… National Guard In Portland, Oregon, a person wearing a balloon frog suit appeared at the city’s ICE facility, where protesters had gathered. After Frog jumped into the air in front of a crowd of federal law enforcement — many dressed head to toe in camouflage with military helmets, gas masks and riot shields — the feds began to slowly back away. What else can they do? A soldier knows what to do when he encounters another soldier. But a frog humping the air?

As of writing, this video has over a million views on TikTok and has been reposted and repackaged on that and other platforms. The frog is ridiculous. The frog makes no sense. The frog is a viral symbol of resistance against the Trump regime, and the key to understanding what happened to rhetoric in Trump’s second presidency.

Trump’s first presidency involved Trump tweeting crazy things, and the White House’s desperate attempt to act normal in the aftermath. (Near the end, the White House stopped holding press conferences entirely.) But this second administration, and the new Republican Party, sided with Trump, resulting in chaotic, incoherent, and unnatural political discourse.

The Trump regime and its closest allies oscillate wildly between decision-making Alcatraz alligator memes And calling for violence against shadow forces Combating domestic terrorism. It’s not just Republicans doing this back and forth — California Governor and aspiring podcast host Gavin Newsom also alternates between admiration and excitement. Try Trump Post.

Even when individual speakers are not engaging in this startling and constant shift in tone, all of American speech is awash in a frenetic mixture of Churchillian tirades and deliberate banality.

By intentional foolishness, I don’t mean satire. Satire turns meaning on its head, even when it is absurd, it has a point of reference and a message. Pokemon Relay memes are not satire Pokemon Or immigration policy, and The Frog is not a satire of anything in particular. Frog is not like Saturday Night Live From 2017 to 2020. The frog makes no sense. If a frog appeared in a grocery store in another era, the reaction it would elicit would be puzzled looks and perhaps someone trying to escort it out of the produce section.

But the frog in its context is powerful.

“I care about what’s happening in my community and what the Trump administration is enabling ICE agents, DHS agents, and these federal agents to do to members of my community day in and day out,” Frog said in an interview on a local TV channel. “I don’t want to see anyone treated inhumanely.” They then called the Department of Homeland Security “immature” for ineffectively pepper-spraying their suit’s air vent.

Although the frog appears serious, the effect of this interview is ironic. A serious TV reporter holds up the microphone to a large, smiling cartoon balloon frog character with googly eyes. The effect is most noticeable when you hear the frog’s slightly squeaky sound. It is one of the most stunning responses to the Trump regime’s military repression, and should be understood as a representative pinnacle of how political discourse works in America today.

In short, politics boils down to three patterns. There are still people out there acting normal – or rather, trying to act normal as the world around them becomes increasingly strange. But most policies are now divided between two types of toxic online behavior: corona cultivation and trivial content posting.

Areola transplantation is a serious attempt to look great. Vice President J.D. Vance was cultivating corona when he announced he would take over Revenge By Charlie Kirk. Trump was planting the corona when Threatened with imprisonment Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. Pritzker was cultivating the aura when he responded with, “Come and get me.Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was planting the corona when she paraded on the roof of an ICE facility in Portland in a supposed challenge to the Antifa movement.

Unfortunately for Noem, she was standing still Man wearing a chicken suit. Dirty poster.

Spreading shit is incoherence in the form of humor, a kind of nihilism that refuses to deal with meaning, words, or reality. Spreading nonsense material is a mockery of seriousness, but because it is so incoherent, it has little or no effect on normal people who behave normally. Imagine if a guy in a chicken suit showed up to protest Chuck Schumer giving a speech about inflation. It simply won’t be the same.

But sloppy sawing will always beat corona cultivation. This is the result of the White House ASMR relay videos – They are dirty sites aimed at cultivating the aura of #resistance. They are senseless and have no inherent policy other than senseless cruelty. There is no call to action, no attempt to persuade, no message to be heard. It’s just a shit site.

The frog, as a person, may have a message to convey, but the frog’s costume has no meaning either. It’s the juxtaposition with the increasingly militarized ICE that makes its big eyes so powerful.

You might think of the dynamic here as something like rock-paper-scissors (or, if you’re an idiot, as… Triangle of sword, ax and spear Subordinate Fire emblem series).

Politics in the second Trump era can mostly be defined as people posting aggressively in public. The politics covered in the media are mostly corona farmers fighting other corona farmers – people pitted against each other in an accelerating arms race that inevitably justifies violence. Beating Nazis is cultivating the corona. Military marches are corona cultivation. Sending in the National Guard is the penultimate exercise in corona cultivation.

Corona cultivators have enormous influence over the population – that is, over ordinary people who behave normally. But they are by nature very vulnerable to frivolous labels. Meanwhile, content posting has little effectiveness when used against ordinary people behaving normally.

The normal versus normal competition is what politics used to be: persuasion, correspondence, negotiation, and compromise. Acting this way will lose to someone wearing body armor while calling you a member of the MS-13 domestic terrorist gang Antifa. And the guy in the body armor will always lose to the guy in the inflatable frog suit.

The Frog is the best thing to happen to American politics all year, but the fact that politics has turned into publishing is ultimately a bad thing. As you can see in the results grid, more often than not, people are simply posting to each other rather than dealing with reality or solving teamwork problems. The question of who wins and who loses in Triangle Posting Politics is separate from material circumstances, justice, or the common good.

As for any other increasingly authoritarian country, I suppose the politics of publishing would eventually collapse under the weight of all that militarization – you can’t keep publishing through them when there’s no internet and memes are illegal.

But this second Trump presidency is so intertwined and so dependent on it that it is impossible to predict what will happen next. All we know is that the Trump regime is unable to act normally. As long as they maintain corona cultivation,… com. shitposters He will win.