The Age of Cowards and What Happens Next

into law, Elon Musk giving a double fascist salute. Donald Trump saluting and dancing with the village people, proud boys tramping through the streets of our nation's capital, reveling in their newfound impunity. The dark days have come again because they never really left. All the battles and street fighting and organizing from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty brought us four years of badly negotiated peace while the rot continued unabated rot. It's a term I see a lot these days.

A colleague and friend ed Zeitron refers to the hell our tech oligarchs continue to force upon us as the rot economy. Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament, use the term rage rot to refer to now President Trump's Christmas Day message suggesting Canada should become the fifty first state. Over the last year, I've seen a slew of articles bemoaning democratic decay, the rot plaguing democracy, and the deep rot at the heart of our political system.

One thing I have done over the last four years is learn how to efficiently process the carcasses of wild animals. So I hunter, raise, and slaughter, but many are roadkill, harvested from the side of the road. My family comes from rural Oklahoma, so perhaps there's some epigenetic hillbilly memory that makes this so satisfying to me. But it's also changed the way I understand the word rot. Rot starts

from the bone. If you look at the back leg of an animal that's been hit by a truck, you'll see it spreading a deep black bruise from the ball and sockage. Point out. If your goal is to preserve good meat, then the key is to remove those limbs from the body and then the meat from the bone sooner rather than later. When I think of rot and

how to arrest it, I think of dismemberment. This seems to be the one thing that almost every political person in the country agrees with the United States as it is, must be dismembered, disassembled, sliced from the rotten bone, and changed into something more palatable for whoever holds the knife. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party failed primarily because they refuse to start cutting. Their successors will not make the

same mistake on the opposing side of the isle. Today, I see a lot of angry people arguing about what the knife ought to be cutting, and how much better they'd use it if it passed into their hands. That doesn't help any of us Right now. Migrants are dying of thirst while vigilantes destroy water drops left by activists who themselves will likely be criminalized in the near future.

Homeless Americans trying not to freeze to death at knight may soon find themselves arrested, forced into camps where they'll be made to labor for pennies. Neo Nazi's cheer as the billionaire behind the throne makes fascist salutes from the White House with smirking impunity. The knife is so far away from our hands, I find myself distrusting anyone who wastes time bemoaning how it ought to be used. Where

does that leave us, though? Is there anything to do in this deep winter besides listen to the jackals howling outside our doors. I have an answer to this question. Yes, now is the time to try to test the boundaries of our collective cage. Now is the time to experiment. Since the time of the founding fathers, this country and its system have been referred to as the American Experiment. One could see the very terms narcissistic, yet another solipsistic

gasp of American exceptionalism. But I tend to think the appellation is one we've earned. This country is and always has been a test for new, often bad ideas about how a society ought to run. American civilization's only core value is throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. That also happens to be the only real way to

fight back against authoritarianism. There's a scientific paper I bring up often, the evolution of overconfidence, which set out to explain why people so often badly overestimate their own abilities. The authors pondered quote, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions. So it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Now.

The conclusion these researchers came to was that when significant resources are contested between two organisms, the organism most willing to try to take said resources, even if it is not the strongest, tends to succeed often enough to make over confidence evolutionarily beneficial. This is the most basic explanation for how fascist movements continue to arise and improbably take power. Put simply, they always go for it. January sixth provides

us with a fine example. It was a ludicrous, idiotic, reckless burst of stupidity, mocked for years by everyone except the perpetrators, who four years later find themselves with ultimate power.

They didn't win because they were the strongest. They won because they kept trying, and the people who should have stopped them feared bad press, the pushback of looking unfair, and so stood back while the fascists made smaller grabs, gobbling up bits of the media, local school boards, and narrative oxygen around issues like immigration and now, well, we're here and we'll continue to talk about here after these

ads we're back. The coming days will be ugly. Yet I feel it's my job to remind you that bad as this is, we are not vymar Germany, and this is not nineteen thirty three. Trump and his lieutenants aren't battle hardened trench fighters. They're elon musk and a coterie of half enthusiastic, half frightened billionaires who got rich gambling on apps to let you rate your classmates tits. They're foot soldiers, are used car salesmen from Encino, not freikorps.

The United States is not starving to death crippled by war. It's irritated anxious because it's working people have been robbed blind by the same billionaires standing behind Trump. Now. The one thing we do have in common with Vimar is that our fascists now find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated to them, not out of enthusiastic consent, but exhaustion, cowardice, and above all, a feeling that it didn't really matter that last one, the feeling that nothing matters.

The system as fucked. There's no point in engaging or organizing. That is the most powerful weapon they have right now, because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them, from interrupting as they reach out. Yet again to take something you love or need. But there's a danger here too.

In moments of stress and anger, the desire to do something anything, can be intense, and when we're swept up in that mood, the natural tendency is defaulting to the things we know best, the things we've done before, the marches and chants and poster boards we've been walking and shouting and carrying all century long. Going back to those tactics without iteration or acknowledgment of their limitations and failures

is a road to more failure. I've been to a lot of protests, starting at Zukati Park in twenty eleven an ending last year in Chicago. At one of the most dispeariting moments of my life was listening to young anti genocide activists bow to shut down the dn C to quote make it great like sixty eight. This was

a reference to the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention. Mass protests were ignited there when the favorite anti war candidate, Eugene McCarthy was ratfucked by Democratic Party insiders in favor of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently with tear gas and truncheons. Protesters chanted, the whole world is watching, and it's been a chant ever since. The world may have been watching then, but the war went on.

Nixon won election, then re election, and then finally pulled US troops out of Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on Southeast Asia to have ended several Third Reichs. In twenty twenty four, a new batch of anti war protesters chanted, the whole world is watching, and I can say unequivocally it was not. The Only people watching were me, several other journalists, and of course some people on Twitter. The police, as they kettled Macedon arrested members of the crowd barely

seemed to care. The DNC didn't shut down. Kamala Harris was made the nominee. There wasn't even a real anti war candidate for party insiders to rat fuck in her favor. Garrison Davis, my colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards that the DNC had been somehow much more depressing than its Republican counterpart a month earlier. He was right on

the stage floor. All the Democrats had to present were aging celebrities and Bill goddamn Clinton drooling out the same platitudes that led us to the Trump era in the first place, and doing their best to ignore delegates who walked out and slept in front of the convention center to protest the genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, in the streets, a lot of very nice, earnest people alongside a handful of grifters did the only thing they could think of

doing after months of imbibing footage of war crimes. They walked around and shouted. The police, and the city largely let them because they knew none of it was going to change a goddamn thing. I'd felt tremendous optimism right after Joe Biden resigned, not because I loved Kamala, but because it was something shocking, an upset, an experiment, or

at least it seemed that way. At first, the DNC made it clear that Biden's advisors and consiglieries, the powers behind the throne, still ran the show and would not allow any real change. The rot had spread too far, spoiling the meat, spoiling everything. It was my accurate belief in twenty twenty that the Democratic Party, broken as it was, had the numbers and the organizational capacity to slow the

spread of fascism. For a short time. It was my inaccurate belief in twenty twenty four that this might still be the case. I had a hope because I'd lost any sense of actual productive optimism we lean on when we have no ideas to brace ourselves against hope, as George Miller reminded us, is a mistake. If you don't fix what's broken, you'll go crazy. And that's where we

are now going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent, regular people who fill the party, not the soulless shogoths of capital running things, are going crazy because we return to normal, decent politician to office. He kept the economy humming along, and everyone still hated him. Leftists are crazy for a different reason. In twenty twenty, this country saw the largest sustained uprising of its modern history, and nothing fundamentally changed

in its aftermath. The oligarchs who control social media set to tweaking, buying, or outright inverting their algorithms to ensure no similar movement whatever gain that kind of steam again. Their efforts have largely been successful, and yet many organizers, be they progressive, social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever, they're all still stuck in the same loops behind each march to nowhere,

and tired chant is an equally tired hope. The social democrats dream of a giant, continent sized Denmark with cyclists replacing Ford trucks, universal healthcare, good schools, and a bevy of other lovely things. Both political parties will fight tooth and nail to prevent. The communists dream of a new October revolution, but this one will work and not just create a new kind of dictatorship that ages and dies

inside the space of a single human lifetime. Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws and the logic and futility of the hopes of the two previous groups, but they are just as bereft of ideas for how to stop what's coming. Some tendencies dream of collapse, maybe even accelerationism, an end to industrial society, and then either living in the woods eating berries, or some kind of

solar punk day dream wildflowers spouting from rubble. I sympathize, but try offering eye their future to a single mom who can't afford her five year old's insulin and see

how excited she gets. On the other side of the anarchist coin, you've got the helpers, the people who cheerfully admit they don't know how to solve the big problem, but they do know how to provide free eye exams to homeless people once a month, or do water drops down at the border so migrants don't die of dehydration, or make it more expensive for the state to bulldoze

a forest and build a police training facility. If you are where we all are right now, bereft of ideas, staring down the barrel of a nightmare, those are good folks to know. Like everyone else, they're defaulting to what they've been doing, but at least what they've been doing helps people. The larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive, will be something new, something we haven't

tried yet. I feel very confident that they won't take the form of another march, or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the same kind of communist or anarchist or whatever. Sean Fayne, chief of the United Autoworkers Union, has called for a general strike in twenty twenty eight, and so far that is the only clear plan I have heard from anyone that feels like it has a ghost of a chance it is audacious, and I recommend reading what Sean's laid out about it. But half of why I

support the idea is because it's audacious. The religious right got to where they are right now in this country by being bold, as I laid out earlier. Fascists win because they try, and this is something we need to copy. Shit can be different, but not unless you're willing to try different shit. Many pundits and columnists were shocked and horrified by the mass of an instant support for Luigim

Mangioni when he assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare. Both the tutting gatekeepers of traditional media and the actually sweating oligarchs characterize this as evidence of bloodthirstiness. Some leftists did the same and interpreted support for Luigi as proof that the body politic did indeed have energy for an uprising. I saw something a bit different, more than the actual killing itself. I think people were excited to see someone

try something new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic. He carried it out in a novel way, and in doing so, he did more to punish one of the oligarchs bleeding us dry than the entire occupy movement. Novelty is the one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigi mangione together. The enthusiastic public response to both men's actions and the

simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves. In twenty twenty four, Trump still had enough novelty to convince people that he might upset the apple cart in a way that benefited them. He rode a global anti incumbent wave back to the White House. The consequence of this is that he and his are now on their way to becoming the new establishment. This is the downside of the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating

their coverage of Trump. If not embracing him outright, he is being normalized. His toadies, Musk Chief among them, are now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly. I suspect the same thing will be true of the copycats who follow in Luigi Maggioni's footsteps. Most of his plagiarists won't be good at what they do. At best, newly heightened security will see these people dropped before they

get to pull a trigger. At worst, innocent folks will be killed or maimed by bullets and bombs that fail to hit their intended targets, or do but with a lot of collateral damage. So I don't know what the next new thing to actually work will be. But between Trump and Luigi, there aren't many old norms left to shatter.

We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new things are about to be tried, and as awful and bloody as the fallout from some of them will be, we all have no choice but to strap in and roll some dice of our own is ugly, the future unwritten, but the only way we'll make it a better one is if we embrace boldness, creativity, and perhaps a little over confidence of our own. And this is not the end of the episode. We've got something else for you, folks,

But first, here's another ad break. Okay, everybody, we're back, And obviously what you just listened to is an essay I wrote about my thoughts and feelings today, the first day of the new Trump administration. I felt like that wasn't quite enough. And the first thing I actually came across this morning when I woke up, before I started subjecting myself to a barrage of Horrible News was a poem written by a friend of mine, Emily Gorchinsky. It's called the Time of Cowards, and I think it's a

very useful thing for you to hear right now. I think it's a good companion to what I wrote, So I'm going to let Emily take it away before I do that. If you want to read the poem and text form, or find her other work, you can go to Emily Gorchynsky g o r ce n ski dot com. That's Emily g O r c e n ski dot com. Here. It is the time of cowards.

This is the dawn of masculine energy. Not the energy your father taught you about measuring twice and cutting once, but picking yourself up and how the sting of hydrogen peroxide means it's working. Or your grandfather who spent the days you spent smoking weed behind a seven eleven, serving on a torpedo boat, waiting for the sharks, who never failed to stop to lend a hand to those in need, or say grace before dinner, or to help you with your math homework, or teach you not to wear a

necktie at a lathe. This is the year of cutting once and never measuring, pencil in the blueprints with whatever comes out. It's faster that way. The season of hypocrites, and not of confidence, but confidence men, the masculine energy of the Khan, the scam, the bamboozle, the fraud, the pulling of the rug and the begging of the question.

Now is the killing hour. The clock hands float over, the blood in the streets, and the rage, and the rage, and the uncorked hatred overflows, the minutes of impotence, expanding overflowing, fizzling. Deception gives way to more deception. Not a single promise is kept. Rapaciousness and rape and abandonment and the cutting of corners and KPIs. A newborn died in a baby

box in Italy because the alarm sensor didn't work. It is an honorless time, a time of only one question, not how or may or can or if or whether, but when how soon? No legacy, no history, no reputation. Build the factories, then abandon them. The soil keeps the memory, and the burn scars and the floodwaters, and the clear windshields where the splatters of bugguts used to be, and the images in the twenty year old magazine still in the rack, and the guest bathrooms never used. That showed

how children used to go sledding. And maybe the house is too big. No one comes by. I shoveled the neighbor's walk in the snow and salted it so he didn't slip on the ice and could receive his mail. He's an old man, one of the few black men left living in this neighborhood that was theirs. Once he sent me a letter, it went all the way to Richmond to come to my dea. He's the last man

with dignity. In the letter, he told me he has a new toy, a laptop, which makes him happy because he is a big lover of history and he can go online and read about it and I weep for this last dignified man who proudly wears a cap honoring his service, because this is the era of synthesis and generation and revision and content content content, and inverifiability and manipulation. This is the pseudo scene. I bought a bottle of wine from a century's old vineyard, destroyed in a devastating flood,

an unsyllable bottle in the retail market, fundraiser souvenir. I kept it as a memento Mary of our changing world, a mud covered reminder of how we all must work, little by little to give the world forward. It broke when I tried to move it home on my seventy second flight of the year. It is the decade of hypocrisy. Even for those who can see hypocrisy. They may be a vice president. And with every title change, I move

farther from God, a God I never believed in. I was raised in New England towns named for biblical places by people who thought working the rocky soil brought them closer to God. The only holy men left are those in the fields Basra and Lebanon, and the Gilead and Hebron. The people who named those towns committed a genocide to name them, and four hundred years later in their namesakes the same. It is the epoch of cadaverin. It is the night of bonfires and Feuershpusche, the twilight of stories

that dared in poems and albums. And I tried to sell a book, and I learned that there's only interest in a book when you put yourself into it to be consumed. Words are calories, measured in the amount of heat they gave a flame. I walked over the Westminster Bridge one night with a journalist who told me that they can't publish two good stories at a time because if one goes viral, it punishes the other. The arcane

footfalls of the algorithm dance. It is the sunset of craft and skills handed down in heritage, waxing of a crass and pandering moon of pantomime, a frictionless night, a night where nothing dared, nothing gained, a night of shutters and locks. These are the dark ages, ages of embarrassing the future. There is a shame here that penance cannot satisfy. The sturdy empty shells, the blue hyperlinks to nowhere, and a generation lost must be lost because profit cannot be

taken from an idea. I think of the mimiograph machines stuck under the floorboards of the Solidara Nosche houses, and the punks and the whores who copied radical zines in the public library, xerox machines, and the Yugoslavian Galaxia, and the novels now considered some of the greatest of all time, once banned for obscenity. In Chochescu's house, the original TV remains. The revolutionaries didn't bother to steal it because there were

only thirty minutes of broadcast TV each day. In the crepuscular light, birds dare to sing, even though they know the cats hunt below. In Vilnius, there is a tile in a square. They say, if you make a win and spin around it three times, your wish will come true. At this tile a human chain formed and spanned three countries,

and they sang at Hadra Kim. On the right day, the morning light filters in over the lonesome island of Philflow and fills a hole drilled in the sandstone five thousand years ago, and has done so unfailingly over the millennia that have seen countless empires rise and fall, and the solstice of retribution will come again.