Shout It From the Rooftops!

 

 

Opinion by Mabel Doge Luhan for Mabel’s Table, Kandit News & Views

My, we are living in interesting times. It’s a historian’s playground.

Fat Hitler has been doing everything to emulate Fit Hitler — if only he could grow a mustache, or paint landscapes! Fat Hitler has, however, just like Fit Hitler, declared that our democracy is full of corruption, that our military must be purged, that communists have infiltrated our universities, and that we are under foreign invasion. That’s pretty much word-for-word what Syphillis Mustache said to justify his sweeping powers.

Just like Skinny Hitler, Cantaloupe Catastrophe claims he and his wife’s African boyfriend are the only people (term used loosely) who can save us. Oh, and that laws don’t matter, because feelings are more important. He’s even got the Nazi capitalization thing going!

Like every Nazi apparatchik, Elon Musket, with his weird little son at his side, has cooked up a bunch of lies about the faults of our democracy. Supposedly millions of people my age or even older are collecting social security! That is so obviously stupid and untrue that I only fault SSA for not combating the lie faster.

SSA has buildings full of people with PhDs in statistics, applied mathematics, data science, information science, and public management. You know, that “swamp.” And we are talking about real statisticians, not the “statisticians” who work at MVA.

Do you know what kind of advanced math is involved in detecting social security benefits fraud? Look it up sometime.

Do you really, seriously think that these people have never thought to check for unusually old people on the list of SSI recipients? (On the other hand, do you think Elon & Co even know what SSI is?)

How about checking out some of the actual professionals that used to run Social Security for the past almost-century?

https://www.wethebuilders.org/

But in came Elon, backed up by Incel Team Six, pulled up SQL, searched for people over 100 years old, and declared victory. And spread a bunch of lies about millions of 150-year-olds receiving benefits.

Every single word of that turned out to be untrue. Yes, there are dead 150-year-olds in the Social Security system, because everyone ever assigned an SSN is in the system. None of those 150-year-olds were receiving any benefits. (I AM ONLY A SPRIGHTLY 146.)

You might as well point out that there are 150-year-olds in some military personnel database. This kind of searching for “fraud” is what a 12-year-old would do. It’s an NMC class project. And yet these Nazi dipshits have crowned themselves the geniuses of government administration.

Elon & Co claimed to have saved $8 billion by cutting one contract of providing multi-language training to ICE (wow, how unnecessary!). That contract value was actually $8 million, not $8 billion. They’re only off by a factor of a thousand times! The Marianas Variety does it all the time!

And these supposed meritocrats, masters of competence, throw these obvious, huge lies or mistakes or both in our faces. And nobody among the MAGA cult mentions cutting them. They are allowed to fail, catastrophically, and somehow it doesn’t matter, when the entire movement is supposedly about merit and ability uber alles.

Here in the Marianas, there must be some vindication and schadenfreude of the same kind seen everywhere among the MAGA base: finally, all those college-educated high-earning bureaucrats are getting their due! Just like in Appalachia, the foremost critics of the tremendously skilled professionals we have in the civil service are folks whose biggest life achievement might be qualifying for SNAP when they’re secretly working for cash.

Indeed, bilking the government is the biggest life achievement of Trumpworld’s two biggest heroes: Elon Musk, who made his wealth on “woke” environmental subsidies, and Vladimir Putin, a former taxi driver who became the greatest thief in all recorded history by stealing an approximate 30% of the GDP of his entire country. No wonder Rafet was always in good graces with this bunch!

But it’s more than just about respecting the law for us here in the Marianas. More than any other place under the American flag, we depend on government payouts, and on a foreign labor force and tourism.

We’re already seeing the way Trumpism is about to destroy our way of life. Recent ICE raids at the major hotels have threatened to destroy our economy. Have you tried to get a taxi, a construction worker, a plumber, or a landscaper in Saipan recently? Nobody wants to leave their home. And no foreigners want to come vacation in America either.

How could this possibly not destroy our economy? And if these “illegals” all “go home” (actually, Saipan is their home, for the most part), what’s going to replace all the rent they paid and all the groceries they bought? Team “go home illegals!” certainly isn’t; their only economic activity is usually based only on government handouts.

Trumpworld has openly attempted to ally the United States with the world’s tinpot dictators, and throw away the alliances we’ve built over centuries. Even if we manage to get out of this mess — who will ever trust America again?

Tariffs were demonstrated to be a losing economic strategy almost two hundred years ago. They’re about as much discredited as anti-vax conspiracy theories, which were also popular back then. Isn’t it conservatives who love to say “facts don’t care about your feelings?” How’s about them facts then?

Inflation is up. Consumer confidence is down. Homebuilding starts are way down. Walmart just warned about lower revenues. Is this all Biden’s fault now? Even if it is all Biden’s fault (hint: it’s not), if Trump can’t fix it, then why did we elect him?

Real investment professionals — the research desks at the major Wall Street banks — have put out warnings about the damage MAGA will do to the American economy. These are real people managing billions of real dollars in investments, not CNMI style “investors” who are generally small-time Ponzi scammers. Do you not believe Wall Street? Do you still prefer to believe that Facebook graphic or X thread that tells you otherwise? Are you going to say that Wall Street is a bunch of communists?

Economies and investment portfolios can be fixed. Human spirits, less so. How are we ever going to make up for all the tears, all the missed opportunities, all the heartaches caused by MAGA’s wild run through the institutions of American greatness?

How are we going to heal the scars?

And when we look back on this time — how will we feel about ourselves?

When someone asks you about your life during the Trump times, what will you say? That you were cheerleading and posting “TDS!!!!” on Facebook as our country was torn to shreds? That you were cheerleading as our friends and neighbors were rounded up and sent to concentration camps? That you kept voting for those who celebrate Naziism?

Or will you do something? Will you be able to say that at least you did something?

If you work for government or a government contractor at any level, you have a ton of power in your hands. You can make things grind to a halt without giving anyone a reason to fire you.

See Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service. Russell Sage Foundation. Also see Bardach, E. (1977). The Implementation Game: What Happens After a Bill Becomes a Law. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

You can “work to order.” That means following the rules exactly. Too exactly. So exactly that nothing can happen, because you are not going to break any rule.

Are you active online? An opinion leader of any sort? Speak up. Don’t worry about the rabid hate. They can spew all they want. You will at least be airing the truth. And you may bring a few new people over to see the light.

Remember Troy Torso’s recent editorial about the MAGA cult? It lost Kandit some subscribers. But you know what else? It gained Kandit even more subscribers.

Go watch the movie No. (Larraín, Pablo, director. No. Participant Media, Fabula, and Funny Movie, 2012.) It’s about a thought influencer very hesitantly deciding to speak up.

One of the most controversial academic works of the past few decades is Dan Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. It asserts that most ordinary Germans just stood by, in full knowledge of what was going on, as Hitler implemented his most murderous policies.

Not because those everyday Germans consciously agreed with the Holocaust, but because they didn’t know how to disagree — and didn’t know that other people also disagreed. (See Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.)

If you’re just a random regular person with no special clout, you still count. Make sure your friends know that you disagree with what’s happening. You don’t have to argue with them. But don’t hide your disagreement. Because many people know they disagree, but what they don’t realize is how many others disagree.

That’s why dictators like Trump and Putin censor media. Even if everyone already knows how bad it is, what’s really dangerous is if everyone knows that everyone knows how bad it is. Which is also why dictators like Trump and Putin either ban or attempt to discredit opinion polling.

In the future — whether that’s a future where the Trump years are seen as the beginning of a new era, or one where they’re seen as a weird little blip on American progress — you’ll have a clean conscience. You’ll be able to say that you did something.

Because doing something is at least better than doing nothing. And a bunch of people doing something is the only way change has ever happened.

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Mabel Doge Luhan is a woman of loose morals. She resides in Kagman V, where she pursues her passions of crocheting, beatboxing, and falconry.