One of the things we talk about in our new book, WTF America?!, is the importance of language. It is critically important that the words we use actually capture what we’re experiencing.
Let me give you an example. I don’t think calling what’s taking place in the Trump regime “corruption” does it justice.
Corruption, in my view, is a word that describes a sickness inside a broader body politic. In the past, I thought of corruption in the United States as a virus, an ailment within a generally healthy body.
You identify it, you target it, you purge it, and you hold people accountable, the same way you’d identify a cancer and go after it.
But what happens when the body politic itself becomes the corruption? Then just saying “corruption” doesn’t cut it.
Every day, a hundred stories come out about Trump corruption.
A Venezuelan billionaire’s family hires Alina Habba as general counsel in a deal reportedly worth more than $50 million, and weeks later Trump pardons him.
Kimberly Guilfoyle in Greece.
The Trump children cashing in on their different endeavors, from government contracts to a club called “Executive Branch” that charges $500,000 for a membership.
Trump’s stock trading.
Trump’s CFTC telling its own analysts to retract a referral about suspicious oil trades placed minutes before one of his posts.
Trump’s media company selling Wall Street firms faster access to his Truth Social posts.
I could go on. There are literally thousands of examples each month.
At some point it stops being an issue of mere corruption. The body politic has been overwhelmed. It’s no longer a healthy body searching for the illness. The illness has taken over the body, almost the way we’d think about a healthy body becoming zombified.
We are a zombified nation. We are beyond corruption. It is a destroyed nation. It is a shattered nation. It is an unserious nation. It is a dangerous nation run by a predator.
Sometimes the critique of the MeidasTouch Network is that our language is over the top, that it’s hyperbolic.
I hear it all the time. “Hell isn’t really breaking loose, Ben.” “This isn’t a disaster.” “He isn’t behaving like a lunatic.” “Stop using the word fascist.”
My response, and it’s something I’ve been talking about in the interviews I’ve been doing for the book, is that being afraid of sounding hyperbolic is how we got here.
People thought this was not a big deal. This is normal. This is just the other side of the political equation.
No. The words I’m using are not strong enough to capture the irreparable damage being done, the sickness of our country under this regime.
That’s why from day one we’ve called the regime the regime.
We’ve called Donald Trump a sexual predator. We’ve called him a vile, demonic piece of trash. We’ve called him a felon.
And we use that language not for clicks. Quite the contrary. It’s how we fortify ourselves, and our minds, against becoming victims of a mass psychosis that normalizes this behavior.
We’ve had Dr. Bandy Lee on the MeidasTouch Network. She appears regularly on Anthony Davis’s weekend show.
Dr. Lee is a psychiatrist who has taught at Yale and Harvard, and one of the things she explains is that when you accept and normalize mental illness or psychotic behavior in a family member, it actually infects you.
You start making excuses for the behavior of someone close to you, and in doing so, you start acting like it.
She extrapolates that to a mass psychosis.
When a country makes excuses for a malignant narcissist, a deeply sick head of state, when it tries to filter his behavior through a normal lens, it actually breaks the country. People start accepting those traits, and then taking them on.
That’s why, at the beginning of our videos, we say you’re about to watch a sexual predator, a deviant, a criminal, a felon, a bankrupt loser. It’s a way to acknowledge, every single time, that this is not normal.
WTF is a rallying cry.
Part of getting out of this hell is recognizing that the hell we’re in is real. It is not a hyperbolic extrapolation.
What authoritarians and fascists will always do is create a hypothetical world where they’re saving you. We wouldn’t have a country if we didn’t do these things. We’d be in an even worse hell if it weren’t for us. They invent a fake hypothetical future and a fake hypothetical past, while they’re the ones actually breaking the present.
That’s part of the brainwashing. So we have to recognize the behavior at play, and we have to call it out with moral clarity.
I also get asked: is WTF America?! just another election book?
Absolutely not. It’s the opposite of an election book. It’s a book about getting out of this hell through generational change, through an understanding of systems, and about building those systems across generations to fight back.
If we just bounce from one election to the next, it’s like bringing a butter knife to a nuclear fight against global authoritarian forces.
We have to build systems, international links and alliances, and we have to grow independent media.
Anyway, that’s one of the observations we make in WTF America?!
We’d love to know what you think, and we’d love to know if you got your copy.
Call your local bookstore and tell them to order more.
Let’s keep getting the word out.
Thanks, everybody.
— Ben
Call it what it is: WRONG.
People thought Hillary was hyperbolic too. “Basket of deplorables” we can now identify as the rabid MAGA. And Trump has definitely shown himself to be “Putin’s puppet.”