Wall of Noise

So, hold on. We had this backwards, it turns out. Tulsi Gabbard was never a tool of the Kremlin, the whole time she was a Moonie? Excuse me, I didn’t see that coming.

CREDIT: Bernie Wrightson

Let’s try and sort this out. The actual story is that Gabbard was raised in a Hare Krishna splinter group called the Science of Identity, founded in the late 1970’s by a guy named Chris Butler. Gabbard acknowledges Butler as her spiritual guru, but says any close examination of their relationship – or of the workings of Butler’s church – are fueled by anti-Hindu religious prejudice. Be that as it may, Butler is characterized by former followers as a manipulative nutjob who lives in a room wrapped in aluminum foil, to shield him from disease.

The point here isn’t really whether or not the Science of Identity is a cult, or whether Butler himself is crazy, the point is that Gabbard has been following direction from Butler for her entire political career, beginning with her election to the Hawaii state legislature in 2002. An investigation by Jon Swaine at the Washington Post is based on some 25,000 documents leaked from inside the Butler entourage. Gabbard resigned as DNI last month, citing her husband’s health issues. I happen to think that she jumped before she was pushed - see my column below, 5-23-26 -

https://gatesd.substack.com/p/escape-from-the-planet-of-the-apes

and for a very good play-by-play of the significance of the

WaPo story, see Jay Kuo’s column, here –

Don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly happy to gloat, but I think there’s more going on here than Gabbard’s exposure as a patsy, whether it’s the Russians, or her Messiah.

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MAGA has never been coherent or consistent, and Trump has always been a vacancy, absent any animating principle or inner life. You can create him in your own image. He mirrors your desire. The difficulty is that too many distractions are competing for airtime, and Trump is sinking under the weight of his own limitations. The cargo is awash, sliding around in the hold.

Tulsi Gabbard’s fall from grace is a sign. Her resignation may or may not have been precipitated by advance knowledge of the breaking WaPo story, but now that the cat’s out of the bag, the question isn’t even her unsuitability – we’ve got Bill Pulte, and Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel and RFK, so suitable is clearly a non-issue – the real question is, Did anybody on the Trump team do the most cursory background check on her? None of these people seem remotely capable of the slightest embarrassment, but all the same, this must induce some cringe factor. They can read the skid marks.

Day before yesterday, there was a story about retired Gen. Michael Flynn, another MAGA-verse heavy. Three people have quit the board of his conservative non-profit, America’s Future, one of them a Pizzagate crazy – apparently Flynn is no longer crazy enough. Oh, and he’s now a registered agent for the Bosnian Serb republic, fast friends with one V. Putin, for a reported $100K a month. Flynn is obviously shameless, and he’s cashing in his chips.

And then, Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene have just broken ranks, repudiating not only Trump, but the Republican party. This smells of opportunism, Carlson in particular a malignant shape-shifter, but surely they’ve wet a fingertip, and raised it in the air, and felt a change in the wind. I can’t imagine either one of these people having their moment on the road to Damascus – still, something’s going on. Marjorie Taylor Greene is utterly performative, no ifs or ands, and you have to wonder what’s stirring in her reptile brain.

I’m guessing the whole movement is close to collapse. It was always about grievance. There’s an old joke, that seems to me a perfect description of Trump. He’s got Irish Alzheimer’s, he’s forgotten everything but his grudges. Somehow, the guy embodies all that strangled resentment. I don’t really care what his pathologies are - he’s never been happy, we can see that – I’m more interested in what people see in him, how they invest him with their anxieties and their insecurities, and invent a champion.

It’s not going to go away. The forces in the demographic are very strong. Trump, though, is going to die. And the thing, the Trumpiness of all this, is going to die with him. It’s a phenomenon peculiar to our time and place, the amplification of dangerous fictions to satisfy the belief systems of an entitled class, but it depends on projecting an imagined loss of privilege onto a blank screen, an empty stage, and conjuring a shape out of smoke.

Trump personifies grievance. He’s of course a symptom, not the cause; he didn’t create this moment, much as he’d like to think so. But the climate of social media, the echo chamber, confirmation bias, the reinforcement of narratives and the clickbait messaging, is here to stay.

I mean only that this one particular and very specific fraud is coming apart. The conditions that cultivated it, this petri dish of yeasty, thickening bacteria, violent and unstable, is going to allow others to breed, but I think our immediate fever is about to break. This level of incompetence and delusion can’t be sustained. I don’t know when it’s coming, but the rats are leaving a sinking ship.