When you feel helpless, are in need of the consoling connection to others that all living creatures require, a common response to this desperation is anger.  You derive energy and a feeling of righteousness from galvanizing your hurt into rage.  You can also turn anger on yourself, blaming yourself for feeling helpless, hopeless, weak, abandoned and so forth, but this self-directed rage inflicts even more damage than what has already been done to you.   Turning the anger outward requires only a good story, a good enough story (it can actually be a completely incoherent story), to let you know who is to blame for the pain you are in.   Once you can ascribe blame you’re on your way.

Today’s radical right wing has become expert in keeping the rage turned up all the time.   You feel fucked?   We’ll tell you why — it’s that senile puppet Joe Biden’s fucking fault, like it was Obama’s before him, and fucking Clinton’s before that.   The only time you were watched over tenderly in recent memory, these extremists preach, was under Donald Trump and Dick Cheney.   Radical antidemocratic oligarchs like Charles Koch have no hesitation to use any tactic that works to convince millions that large societal problems aren’t being solved, not because of the zero sum divisive political warfare he has been relentlessly waging for decades, and the lawmaking gridlock their obstructionist tactics have caused, no! — it’s the fault of the fucking communists who have taken over one of the major political parties in the country!   

I suspect that every person susceptible to this “argument” — that everything was, more or less, perfect until these “woke” libtard cucks took over the party of our enemies and are constantly acting like “snowflake” victims, cynically exploiting “identity politics,” to win rigged elections that always favor majoritarian tyranny — has personal reason to be angry.  Focusing the free floating personal anger and anxiety on enemies, who can be blamed, hated and, in a perfect world, publicly executed, is the genius of the radical right, has been all throughout history.  It exploits the feeling of justice we have every time we put a bully on his ass.

On a personal level we can often see the roots of rage quite clearly.   An abusive parent, insisting they never abused anyone.  A rape that nobody in the legal system, unfortunately, is going to be able to do anything about.  That one day hesitation to report the crime proved fatal to the legal case against the rapist fuck.   Indigestible things happen to us sometimes, and those things are food for anger, which, like water, can take on any shape, fit any container perfectly, and is always flowing.   The ratings king of rage, the guy with the puckered brow who just keeps asking innocently leading questions of his gigantic audience, Tucker Carlson, has only recently revealed the partial roots of his always boiling, though jovially presented, “just asking” anger.

For many years, Tucker Carlson was tight-lipped about the rupture [with his mother]. In a New Yorker profile in 2017, not long after his show debuted, he described his mother’s departure as a “totally bizarre situation — which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all.” But as controversy and criticism engulfed his show, Mr. Carlson began to describe his early life in darker tones, painting the California of his youth as a countercultural dystopia and his mother as abusive and erratic.

In 2019, speaking on a podcast with the right-leaning comedian Adam Carolla, Mr. Carlson said his mother had forced drugs on her children. “She was like, doing real drugs around us when we were little, and getting us to do it, and just like being a nut case,” Mr. Carlson said. By his account, his mother made clear to her two young sons that she had little affection for them. “When you realize your own mother doesn’t like you, when she says that, it’s like, oh gosh,” he told Mr. Carolla, adding that he “felt all kinds of rage about it.”

All kinds of rage, you know.  Many different forms of rage.  Rage rages, it’s all it can do.  It may rage quietly or loudly, but everything it does is in the service of keeping the righteous feeling of being totally fucking right pumping away.   And, as everybody knows, there are few feelings to equal the satisfaction of knowing that you are totally fucking right and justified, in anything you do to bring justice to the vicious fucks you blame for hurting you.