A dangerous, threatening climate favors the extremist. When order breaks down, chaos agents ostentatiously flout rules, laws and norms, the population is forced to take angry sides against each other, moderates are attacked and vilified, lawmakers, law enforcement, judges and witnesses are threatened, death threats and violence proliferate and the extremist cause flourishes. It isn’t surprising that MAGA world is gaga for anything that increases chaos, division, anger and hatred.

Coincidentally, and also because authoritarianism is narcissism on a mass scale, the deliberate chaos that Nazi types unleash increases their ability to spread their emotionally resonant message. Their righteous story, of course, is that everything is out of control, dangerous, humiliating, that evil is running wild, we’re all going to hell in yer proverbial handbasket because of godless traitors, and only their leader’s iron will can save the people who deserve saving.

How Putin is smirking over there, at the end of his 60 foot long dining table, at the adorable antics of the American Chaos Caucus, who supports ending military and humanitarian aid to the country that Putin invaded and has been committing war crimes in. Hamas created another wonderful worldwide wedge by slaughtering 1,400 in particularly brutal and sadistic ways and provoking the current war in Gaza. Now in the US, and worldwide, you have deep fractures in the party that opposes American Nazism, huge marches condemning the Israeli (far right extremist) government’s deadly, baby slaughtering reaction to the atrocity.

Now there are two sides, five sides to every story, and every story is also a lie, though the lies told by Christian Nationalists are not lies because they were imparted directly by God and Jesus. This truth is simple for the truly faithful to understand.

The timeline for this recent round of chaos is sobering. It has the stink of oligarch/authoritarian conspiracy all over it, though these fuckers never have to meet or coordinate, since their interests are so perfectly aligned that what benefits one benefits all. As Boof Kavanaugh’s mother told young Boofie, “look at who stands to gain by the story you’re being told and use your common sense in assessing it, son” The timeline of recent events is striking, conspiracy or no.

October 3, the spineless McCarthy was removed by Trump’s myrmidon Matt Gaetz, after McCarthy consented to being removed on the motion of a single MAGA rep. On October 7, while current Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson’s wife was down on her knees praying day after day for her husband to be Jesus’s choice for Speaker of the House, Hamas overran southern Israel and videoed themselves torturing, raping and murdering, ISIS-style. Then the massive Israeli response. By Halloween Christ had chosen MAGA Mike, as he himself declared on the floor of Congress (his wife exhausted by weeks of prayer), and his affable, nice guy mask was off. He would not send a bill to the Senate for military aid to Israel, Ukraine or humanitarian aid to Gaza , or Ukraine, or to fund patrols on the southern border, unless the IRS budget was scaled way back, by many billions.

Because, in this moment of international crisis, there is a great opportunity for the wealthiest and most corrupt Americans to make a little more money in the name of Jesus, Whiteness, anti-wokeness, Asleepness, American Credulity, American Exceptionalism, Defense of the Sacred Unborn, Debunking Alarmist Lies about the Climate, making the burning of faggots great again, and so on.

It strikes me how neatly all this ugliness, which benefits the cause of global authoritarianism, fits together when you think of a perfect, plausible phone call from Vladimir to his buddy the beleaguered Hitler-wannabe in Florida. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in four days, because of your big, stupid mouth, but make sure the House has no speaker ASAP. Decapitate Congress and you will be very happy, very soon. The degree of chaos and violent distraction, and the rage it will unleash on all sides, will delight even your insatiable lust for violent chaos, my useful idiot friend.”