The dream world of the Trumpist intellectual
By 
A friend suggested I watch a certain TikTok video to get a better understanding of the mental world inhabited by Trumpist intellectuals. I ended up creating a TikTok account in order to do this (not all heroes wear capes), so if by the end of the week I’m only watching videos of battleships that have become anime girls you’ll know who to blame. (There’s a whole subthread in this post about anime girls becoming battleships and the country of Belarus. Or possibly vice versa. I don’t really know what these words mean and I don’t think I want to know. Also there are too many states these days; please eliminate three).
Anyway, here’s the video:
It’s five and half minutes of a speech by Thomas Klingenstein, a very rich financier who has been chairman of the board of the Claremont Institute since 2010. Klingenstein is one of the right wing’s biggest financial backers, and obviously plays a key role at Claremont, which has become the most important think tank on the right during the Trump years.
Klingenstein’s spiel here can be reduced to the following propositions.
There’s traditional America and multicultural America.
Traditional America believes in:
Hard work
Individual rights
Color blindness
Patriotism
That America is good.
Donald Trump.
Multicultural American believes in:
Multiculturalism, aka political correctness, cultural Marxism, intersectionality, and wokeness.
Diversity
Socialism
Government tyranny to achieve the above.
That slavery is the central fact of American history.
That America is bad.
Multicultural America is a revolutionary movement, not metaphorically but literally. It aims to overthrow, permanently and definitively, traditional America, by using government power to redistribute wealth according to the multiculturalist creed, in which everyone is equal, also again literally. So basically Joe Biden is at the head of a crypto-Maoist campaign to reduce a once-great country to a kind of communist hellscape, enlivened by compulsory DEI struggle sessions and trans something something.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic I encourage you to watch the video above, and also Klingenstein’s related YouTube videos, because I’m not.
There’s something at the core of all this that could be called the Fascist Contradiction. The Fascist Contradiction is that the Nation is essentially great and pure and chosen for its world-historical destiny, but simultaneously decadent and depraved and almost past all saving, hence the need for its resurrection via the leadership of the Leader. This is amusingly (or maybe not) captured by Trump’s claims that America had ceased to be great by 2016, became great again for exactly four years, then ceased to be great on January 20th — or perhaps January 6th — 2021, but can become great again in a few months.
It should be unnecessary to point out that statements such as “America is good” or “America is bad” can only be taken seriously by people with an essentially child-like understanding of politics, history, culture, etc., but hey is that an Ariana Grande song on my Spotify?
Also too I should do a separate post on this, but speaking of extremely stupid things, the idea that hard work is a virtue is a bit of Calvinist nonsense that should be taken out and shot (metaphorically). Hard work is bad by definition, and should to the extent possible — which at this point is very considerable — be eliminated, not worshiped.
Of course the only people who say this are either very stupid or have never actually done any hard work, or often both, but it’s one of those reflexive shibboleths that should be stamped out by all right thinking multiculturalist haters of Jesus etc.