Nov 14
What's the Big Lesson This Week? Everything the Far Right Touches Dies
What MAGA's Downfall and Twitter's Botched Takeover Have in Common
Over the last week or so, we've had two vivid examples of a principle that everyone should be learning by now, if they haven't already: everything the far right touches dies.
"Did you see…this?!" It was my wife asking, incredulously. I frowned. And then I gawped. Maybe by now you know the story by now. A cheesy billionaire bought Twitter, proceeded to wreck any form of moderation, remove the guardrails, and started selling blue ticks. Soon enough, all the crazies were out in full force. Jesus got verified, and so did Satan. But the stuff really hit the fan when someone bought a blue tick, pretended to be one of the world's biggest Pharma companies, and announced that…insulin would be free. Cue panic.
Shares of Pharma companies slid by 5% or so. On the basis of a single tweet. But not just any old tweet: disinformation. Now, it was a prank, and it was a blackly funny one, because of course, in any sane world, insulin should be free. It costs pennies to make, after all. But the upshot of this surreal episode?
Nobody big, and I mean nobody big, is ever going to advertise on Twitter again. The CEOs of every blue chip company in the world right now are putting frantic calls into their ad agencies, and all those calls are saying the same thing. Yank those ads. Because if my stock slides on the basis of some dumb tweet, I'll be the one getting the axe, and hey, that bonus is going to buy my next yacht.
The Billionaire Who Bought Twitter appears to have no idea how media or advertising actually works. It's funny, it's surreal, and it's jaw-dropping, because of course, after all, it proves the point: he really did buy one of the world's great comms platforms…for political reasons. He is so far out of his depth that he's saying hi to goldfish.
How does advertising work? Well, the very first rule is that it's incredibly hard to create a thing like "value" from advertising — it takes years and decades to build the smallest shreds of "brand equity." But it can be wrecked almost overnight. One misstep can be fatal to a public reputation — especially that of a large company, which people aren't exactly huge fans of to begin with. But even "brands" that think they're "loved" by people only really have so much attachment — like, say, Kanye. It's incredibly hard to build a brand, especially a global one — but wrecking one? Any idiot can do it, and many have.
Hence, the very first thing every CMO in the world is doing right now — those worth their salt, anyways — is yanking ads from Twitter, because, well, do you really want to be associated with a platform that can destroy your reputation in seconds, and doesn't care? That enables it? Of course not, LOL. How hard is this to get? So why didn't the Cheesy Billionaire?
Because, like I said, the last couple of weeks are vivid evidence that he really did buy Twitter for political reasons. There were a couple of camps here: one said "The Billionaire is a Genius!! All Billionaires Are Geniuses!! Ayn Rand Said So!! I am John Galt!!!" and the other said, "This guy….runs a car company…and even that's facing serious and numerous charges of bad behavior…so…is this really going to work? Probably not." By now, we know which side was right. He has no idea what he's doing.
All there was here was a naked political impulse — a fanatical one. "Free speech!" But as everyone should know, you can hardly walk into, I don't know, your local cafe, bar, restaurant, or pottery studio, and start harassing people, intimidating them, threatening to r*pe and kill them. You can't walk into your local cafe or bar and say, "Hey, I'm from this company, and would you like to do business with me?" You'd get sued, pretty swiftly. Free speech isn't about people saying whatever they like anywhere. There is such a thing as private property, and if this fanatical notion of "free speech" extended there, well, then anyone could stand on your head on your sofa, and shout "MAGA!!" and you'd just have to groan and suffer in silence. Obviously, it doesn't work like that.
To have such an understanding of "freedom" tells us that a person is pretty dumb in the first place. I don't mean that as insult, I mean it as a fact. Freedom isn't my "right" to harass, intimidate, hector, abuse, silence you. It's not my "right" to…take yours away. It can't be, because if it is, then it has no purpose or meaning at all. Freedom of speech, in particular, can't be about fanatics silencing everyone else with rage and hate. Because of course that only leads to less freedom of every kind for everyone in the end. To think about things this way tells us that we are dealing with people who aren't thinking at all: ideologues.
So Twitter did exactly what I said it was going to do — what anyone said guessed: it's collapsing. Advertisers are fleeing in horror, because, well, imagine waking up tomorrow and you're the guy responsible for shaving 5% off your company's share price. Good luck, I hope you like never having a job in that field again. Meanwhile, the Billionaire Who's Out of His League is…flailing desperately…for some semblance of an idea.
There isn't going to be one. Why not? Everything the far right touches dies. Here we have a perfect example, and yet I haven't quite distilled it, so let me. Why did this happen? Well, for a very simple reason, which underlies all the above, really. The entire idea of far right thinking — if it can be called that — is just this: the strong survive and the weak perish. Hence, any form of rules or codes of conduct or limitations just get in the way.
The strong, in this way of thinking, are those who can impose the most "will to power" — that is, the most ruthless, the most brutal, the most violent, the most indifferent.
You can literally see this happening on Twitter. Now it's the loudest and angriest whose voices rise to the top. Doesn't matter if what they have to say is true. Doesn't matter if they encourage literal violence and hate — use of the N word has risen by 500 percent since the takeover. All the rules are gone, and you know that, but understand the reason for it: because in this ideology, rules just get in the way of the strong rising above the weak, and the entire point of existence, all of it, every social institution, every human interaction, is the strong subjugating the weak, who are liabilities and parasites and subhumans.
This is the vulgar moral thinking behind the fanatical policy.
Now. Why does that doom a system to collapse? Well, for a pretty simple reason. Anyone sane doesn't want to be part of it. Take blue chip companies and ad agencies. They're not exactly known for being stellar citizens or saints, but even they're repelled and fleeing this trainwreck. It's too much even for them. That's because without rules, well, anything goes. And then what do you have?
You don't have business, for one thing, because, well, anyone can pretend to be you, or lie about anything, or cheat anyone, and so forth. You don't have freedom, really, either, as we've discussed, because without some form of rules preventing some fanatic from attacking us just for existing, everyone's less free.
Nothing works. When I say that, maybe it's a little hard to understand, so let me make it clearer. When there are no rules, and the maniacs and fanatics and morons are loosed to attack the rest of us — whether with disinformation, or Big Lies, or actual violence — what happens? Destruction happens. Destruction's all that can happen. It can be destruction of a brand, like in the Pharma example — or it can be the attempted destruction of a democracy, like on Jan 6th.
But you can't build anything this way. You can't create anything. Can't bring anything new into existence. Because of course that usually takes a) collaboration b) peace c) real freedom, at a bare minimum. But without some basic rules — you don't ever have those things. The most violent and brutal and selfish just end up in a magical contest to try and own you. Which is more or less what Twitter's devolved to at the moment. Without some basic form of rules, nothing can be created, and so only destruction is left.
This is the place that utopian libertarian fantasies fail. Always fail. When anything goes — everything implodes.
Let's come then to the second example, which is MAGA Trumpism. It just suffered a stunning setback in the midterms. It was a glorious moment for American democracy, which is a phrase I think I've never written before. And yet it's true — American democracy rose to the challenge, and rebuffed Trumpism, big-time. It's remarkable stuff to watch.
How is Trumpism reacting? Well, the thing to note about it is that it's a movement just like the Cheesy Billionaire's acquisition of Twitter. There are to be no rules, really, only the raw animating impulse of the strong rising above the weak. So if we put those subhumans in concentration camps, or if we "separate" kids from their families, and after that, if we come for gays, and then women, and then gay kids — well, if any of that's against the rules, just break them. Hey, want to shout death threats at some poor teacher? Want to call a kid a slur just because their sexuality or gender's different? Go right ahead!! This is how we Become Great Again!!
The problem with all this is something that Americans finally began to understand. They might not have even consciously gotten it, but they understood it deep in their guts. What does any of that solve? This is a country with real problems, serious ones. The economy's in poor shape, infrastructure barely works, there's almost no social contract to speak of, gun violence is omnipresent, and there are at this point five generations in downward mobility. How is just saying there are no rules and now we get to hate anyone we want as loudly as we can, and maybe even hurt them, going to solve anything?
Solving our problems, Americans began to understand, requires coming together and building. Creating. Everything from schools and hospitals and roads to social norms of decency to communities and bonds between those with pretty minor-league political differences. You can't do any of that if there are no rules, and anything goes, just so the maniacs can get in everyone else's way, because well, that's what some crackpot said "freedom" is. Those crackpots read too much Ayn Rand, and she read too much Nietzsche, and he ended up a bitter, lonely old man. Sound like where anyone else wants to end up? You can't create anything this way, and right about now, we need to get back to the hard work of building stuff again.
Not just manufacturing, but of course that. Yet deeper stuff, too. Democracy. Respect among equals. Cities and towns. Hope in our kids, not a weary sense of fatalism, iced over with cool fatalism. A future. We need to build all that stuff.
It can't be done by simply buying something that, no, wasn't perfect, like Twitter, but hey, at least it was trying — and then tearing it down to its bare bones, just so that maniacs could scream at the top of their lungs. You can't create anything like that. It can't be done the MAGA way — just by tearing up the rulebook so that the most ignorant and violent can hate someone new today, and try to take their rights away.
You get nowhere like this. This is the road to the abyss.
Americans got that, somewhere deep in their guts. They felt it in their bones, even if they could't quite articulate it. They understood that far right thinking leads nowhere, because in the end, it's a form of absolute nihilism, in which there is no moral purpose for anyone, anything, not you, not me, not human society, not existence — there's just eternal conflict, in which the strong rise above the weak, with violence and hate. It can't go anywhere, because it has nowhere to go. They might not be able to put that philosophically, but it doesn't matter — they felt it, knew it, saw it, and that's the crucial thing.
Most of us know something's badly wrong with what's happened to Twitter, and here, too the lesson is the same. Only it's a little better hidden, because of the surreal black humor of things like the insulin prank, or the sheer delicious scahdenfreude of watching the world's richest cheeseball reveal himself to be a clueless fumbling incompetent who really did just blow $44 billion dollars because he thought he was smarter than everyone else, only, LOL, well, just take a look at this mess, and then think to yourself: who's ever going to advertise here again?
But the principle is exactly the same as MAGA Trumpism: nihilism of this kind, where the only point of a thing is that the eternal conflict of the strong rising over the weak — it can't accomplish anything. Not even something as mundane as some company trying to sell you stuff, because of course, if the first goal is letting some crazy bastard who thinks he's Zarathustra shout hate and lies and god knows what else right into everyone's eardrum at a shattering volume, well, I guess we're going to have to take our business somewhere else. And if you can't get the humdrum stuff of business done, then forget something as complex as democracy.
We should all learn the principle. Everything the far right touches dies. Sadly, much of the world is going to have to learn this the hard way, from European nations foolish enough to embrace it all over again, to Russia, losing its bloody war, to Britain, where the government admits the NHS is collapsing…and then gins up a fake crisis about Albanians…oh no, the mafia's coming to get us…and Brits, breathtakingly, are foolish enough to be more worried about the latter than the former. We shouldn't be living in an age where perhaps the greatest mistake of modern history is being repeated over and over again, on such a surreal scale, but we are, so we'd better wise up and say it loud: everything the far right touches dies.
Umair
November 2022
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