Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season

Things seem to be falling apart at a very fast pace.

The big difference between Trump’s first term and what’s happening now is that he wasn’t ready, at all, the first time around. This resulted in somewhat competent people being in most of the most important administration positions, at least until the latter stages of the term.

This time, things are very different. The personnel in Trump’s second administration reflect perfectly this quote from Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Tommy Tuberville, though not yet in the administration itself, reflects the quality of the sort of people Arendt was talking about, and who now completely dominate the administration:

U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville on Monday claimed there are entire teams of transgender girls participating in women’s high school sports, but did not provide any evidence to back up his assertion.

The Alabama Republican made the claim while championing his bill to ban to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports under Title IX during an appearance on the “Megyn Kelly Show.”

“It is a very, very touchy subject. Do you know, Megyn, that there’s some high school teams in this country – in blue states – are totally biological boys? It is a disgrace, it is a disgrace what’s going on,” Alabama’s senior senator told the SiriusXM radio host.

This is some combination of crazy delusion and Goebbels-level lie: In a nation of 340 million people, it’s extremely difficult to find ANY trans girl athletes competing in high school athletics anywhere in the United States, as in literally any:

Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) . . . told Newsweek that Save Women’s Sports, an organization advocating for banning transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, identified only five transgender athletes competing on girls’ teams in school sports for grades K through 12.

A key element of fascism is that it requires and produces a complete collapse of anything resembling intellectual standards. Another quote from Arendt’s great work, which is now more relevant than when it was first published nearly 75 years ago:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.