The retreat into satirical attacks on Trump and his supporters fuels the solidification of fascism.
We are the Joke – by Mr. Fish.
The buffoons who orchestrate fascism, with its quack science, idiocy, penchant for violence and grotesque hypermasculinity, are ripe for satire.
It is easy, as late-night comics do — and as the cabarets did for the Nazis in Berlin — to pillory the goons, misfits and mediocrities who hold power and spew fascist bile.
But this form of satire blinds opponents to its destructive power and murderous core. It ignores the real centers of power. It does not engender resistance. It engenders disdain and cynicism.
It furthers the social and political divide between us, the “enlightened” and “educated” elite, and them, the despised and ridiculed “basket of deplorables.”
There are two forms of satire. That of the educated elites, which dominates the commercial media, ridicules the foibles and pretensions of President Donald Trump and his hapless followers. This satire does not attack corporations or the war industry.
It ignores the decay and rot within our political institutions, including the Democratic Party, which created Trump. It pretends we live in a democracy. It breeds cynicism, not resistance. It is characterized by a repugnant moral and intellectual superiority and heartless demeaning of the underclass.
It fosters the social divisions and alienation that feeds fascism.
Antonio Gramsci warned that elitist satire is counterproductive. He called for a “passionate sarcasm,” which targets the machinery of power. Satire, he wrote, must excoriate the dominant myths and ideologies which buttress capitalism and fascism.
It must expose not only the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of fascism, but acknowledge the legitimate grievances of those under its spell. It must focus on the institutions that perpetuate injustice and social inequality.
“Trump has also been necessary to expose the plastic progressives, the liberal anti-Trump imperialists who, in their opposition to Trump’s deal with Iran, can only look like warmongering imperial psychopaths,” writes Nate Bear.
“From all those sharing memes on social media about surrender, from the Democrats and CNN talking heads decrying the deal, to Jimmy Kimmel dragging Trump for giving Iran back the money the U.S. stole, there is no articulation of an alternative to endlessly bombing Iran. There’s no anger from liberals over dead Iranians, or at the imperial state, at Zionism or the embedded death machinery that made this violence possible. No, they’re just embarrassed for empire. And they don’t want to recognise the limits of that empire.”
Kimmel on set in June 2022 at El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles. (White House/Erin Scott/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Elitist satire — whether on “Saturday Night Live” or other late-night shows — punches down. It seduces liberals into believing that the thugs and grifters who have taken power are too stupid and too inept to last.
There are millions of political exiles who understand how this self-delusion, this failure to take fascists seriously, is the great facilitator of fascism. They too once dismissed the goons who now run their countries as a joke.
The Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran, driven into exile by the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in her book Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century, lays out the familiar pattern:
“It begins with a movement that divides society into two: the ‘real people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite,’ and with a leader who insists they alone embody the ‘real’ people. The next step is the dissolution of truth and the prioritisation of loyalty above decency. Then shame is dismantled. The leader breaks the long-standing political and moral consensus with unprecedented relentlessness.
The longer they remain in power, the boundaries of what is acceptable begin to stretch. What once felt unthinkable or despicable gradually becomes normal. As the institutions that hold democracy together are quietly hollowed out and the very definition of democracy is rewritten as being simply majority rule, universal values — human dignity and the rule of law — are replaced with a fierce nationalism, a proud victimhood, and a rewriting of history.
Cruelty and ruthlessness are deemed just, not only in the highest echelons of politics but also trickling down to daily life. The circle of who counts as ‘us’ grows smaller, while millions of fellow citizens are recast as permanent suspects.”
Temelkuran in 2023. (Redbook888 / Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
As Temelkuran warns, Americans, like those in other nations that have been down this path, “…soothe their fears by repeating the same illusionary line, ‘The institutions will hold.’ They do not yet dare to recognize their future country, and soon, they will not be recognized as citizens unless they follow the new rules in Trump’s America.”
Comedians such as Kimmel function like the cabaret star, Fritz Grünbaum, who during Nazism, once quipped when the power went out during a performance: “I can’t see a thing, not a single thing; I must have stumbled into National Socialist culture.” Grünbaum would eventually find himself in the Dachau concentration camp — along with other actors, performers and satirists — where he died of tuberculosis.
The Nazis moved swiftly to close the cabarets — along with all institutions that defied Nazi control — and replaced them with mindless variety shows. They hated mockery as much as Trump, who after Stephen Colbert’s final show, gloated that Colbert was “finished” and called him a “total jerk.”
Trump also shared an AI-generated video of himself throwing Colbert into a dumpster, slamming down the lid and dancing. Trump wrote that Colbert’s exit was the “beginning of the end” for other late night hosts.
Grünbaum, second from left, in front of Die Hölle cabaret in Vienna, circa 1908. (From “Das Cabaret ist mein Ruin”/ Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Jokes about dictators in totalitarian regimes are a criminal offense. Satire is permissible in fascist states only when employed to mock political opponents and demonized minorities. It is not permissible when directed at centers of power.
As Gramsci pointed out, the consolidation of power by fascists requires them to win the “cultural battle,” by dominating the public discourse, policing language — including satire — and redefining social, cultural and political norms.
Elitist satire is a pressure-release valve. But because it refuses to confront the roots of America’s political, social and cultural degeneration — which preceded the Trump presidency — it solidifies the fascist project it seeks to destroy.
It reduces the catastrophe to the clown show around Trump: the sycophantic cabinet secretaries, ICE Barbie or Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s bizarre war on medical science.
It does not address our failed democratic institutions — the academy, elections, courts, Congress, or the media. It deflects attention from the billionaires and corporations that have slashed regulation, imposed austerity and deindustrialization and distorted the economic and political system to facilitate the largest upward transfer of wealth in U.S. history.
It does not address the murderous war industry or the domestic security apparatus that makes us the most watched, monitored, spied upon, tracked and photographed population in human history.
This elitist satire simplifies the complex social, economic and political forces we must dismantle. It ignores or pays deference to the subterranean forces that created Trump. Gramsci’s “passionate sarcasm” is too revolutionary and too truthful to be broadcast on media conglomerates such as CBS.
“Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted in [his sermon] “Humor and Faith.”
“Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence which threaten the very meaning of our life. There is no laughter in the holy of holies,” Niebuhr continued. “There laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humor is fulfilled by faith.”
When satire is the end point, it is deleterious. It masks what is coming. It must be, as Niebuhr pointed out, the entry point. It must push us, as Gramsci understood, into hard analysis and the organization of mass movements that alone can save us from tyranny.
It must cease to play into the hands of a polarized nation, one where opposing factions write each other off as irredeemable. It must acknowledge that given the gravity before us, laughter is not enough.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
This article is from Scheerpost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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“Elitist satire is a pressure-release valve.” Chris Hedges.
….Not for nothin’; but, “Leaving a Reply” is a pressure-release valve.” LeoSun. TY, CN!
*Two steps forward to advance, one step backward to check. “When satire is the end point, it is deleterious.” Hence, Critical thinking lives matter!!! i.e., “Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively & skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” (w.w.w.)
…..“The Joke Is On Us. The retreat into satirical attacks on Trump and his supporters fuels the solidification of fascism.” Chris Hedges.
IMO, Chris Hedges & Mr. Fish, offer a master class in “believing in your own voice” i.e., “It must cease to play into the hands of a polarized nation, one where opposing factions write each other off as irredeemable. It must acknowledge that given the gravity before us, laughter is not enough.” Chris Hedges 6.22.26
No doubt, all reflections pooling in Trump’s “Blooming Algae” pond, dead ducks, citations, fences, i.e., “a temporary rule by military authorities, imposed on a civilian population especially in time of war or when civil authority has broken down,” i.e., Martial Law, is here!
Once again, Mr. Fish paints the times, reflecting “We are the Joke”. Hence, MEMO TO: POTUS, “A positive critic is better than a hypocrite. Mr. Trump, your mission is to REPENT!!!” TY. FM: LeoSun
Yes, satire alone masks solutions: to defeat tyranny we need analysis and understanding/education of the legitimate concerns of opposition. The joke must sympathize with the deceived, satirizing mistakes of their opponents as well.
As Chris Hedges notes, satire must attack the corporations and war industry, the institutional and partisan rot masked by pretenses of democracy. To breed resistance we must shun superiority and sympathize with the underclass.
I appreciated the subtle causal analysis in this article. It names with clarity the forces shaping the current state of world affairs. Yet alongside this necessary diagnosis, I feel it is also important to offer a wider and more positive view of the moment humanity is living through. Beneath the visible turmoil, there are deeper movements at work — movements that point not only to decline, but to a profound reorientation in human consciousness.
With that in mind, I would like to share an alternative perspective, one that speaks to the underlying causes of these global shifts and to the possibilities emerging through them…
There are moments in the long arc of human evolution when the accumulated weight of untruth becomes unsustainable. We are living at such a turning point. What we are witnessing now is not merely political decay but the cracking of an entire psychic architecture built on separation, extraction, and the worship of the personal self.
When the inner life of a civilization becomes hollow, its outer forms naturally follow. The volcanic decline of truth and goodness is not the cause but the symptom — the outward sign that the old organizing principles can no longer hold the world together. In such times, distortion rises to the surface because it has nowhere left to hide.
Beneath this turbulence, I’m convinced that a deeper movement is underway. Humanity is being pressed — sometimes gently, sometimes violently — toward a more inclusive field of consciousness. The collapse of shared meaning, the corrosion of institutions, the rise of cruelty and spectacle: these are the convulsions of a species outgrowing its adolescence. The old structures are failing because they were built on a narrow sense of self, on the illusion that one can thrive while others suffer. As that illusion disintegrates inevitably, the collective shadow erupts, not to destroy us, but to force a reckoning with what we have refused to see.
And yet, within the very same field, something finer is emerging. Quietly, often invisibly, many are awakening to a deeper coherence — a recognition that truth is not an opinion but a vibration, and that goodness is not a moral stance but a natural expression of a more soul-ful identity. The world is not falling apart; it is shedding a skin. What looks like decline is the clearing of a dirty path.
The task now is not to despair at the darkness but to stand in the subtle light rising beneath it, and to become, each in our own way, a point of stability for what is trying to be born. We are living at a turning point in the life of humanity. Something new is moving under the surface of world events, and it is essential that we learn to recognize its signs wherever they appear — often quietly, often in unexpected places.
Yes, Annette Morgan, this isn’t new, “The old structures are failing because” a building of sand falls even as it is being built, i.e., “The oligarchic and military elites have a handmaiden in the Oval Office, and he won’t be ousted as long as he serves their interests.” Chris Hedges, JANUARY 28, 2018.
EIGHT (8) Years, Later, JUNE 24, 2026, “The Beast” Trump-Vance, Inc., LIVES! Color him bloody, f/burnt-orange! Aka the Antichrist, “Trump provides the daily entertainment; the elites handle the business of looting, exploiting and destroying.”
Point blank & Period! “Once democratic institutions are hollowed out, a process begun before the election of Trump, despotism is inevitable. The press is shackled. Corruption and theft take place on a massive scale. The rights and needs of citizens are irrelevant.Dissent is criminalized. Militarized police monitor, seize and detain Americans without probable cause. The rituals of democracy become farce. This is the road we are traveling. It is a road that leads to internal collapse and tyranny, and we are very far down it.” 1.28.18, Chris Hedges/Mr. Fish @ hxxps://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-useful-idiocy-of-donald-trump/
Concluding,“Everybody, one. Everybody, two. Everybody, FREE! Fk Trump’s-Vance’s, Inc. fascism! All Hail, stability, prosperity, peace on earth!!! “Pray for Birdies.”
Donald Rumsfeld was often attacked for his strange use of language as in ‘known unknowns’.
This is hardly the most obvious criticism to make of him.
TY, Tony! Ohm to the “Known” Skiing. Lunch. Rummy!!! *GREETING Rumsfeld IN TAOS, MARCH 13, 2007, JEFF CONANT. (The Friends’ Morning Ski run done! Time for Lunch!)
… Jeff Conant w/friends glide in to the restaurant, @ the base of the ski-hill, unbuckle their skis & head in; BUT, “before I (Jeff) entered, I was stopped in my tracks when, from the corner of my eye I noticed a familiar-looking white-haired and bespectacled old man sitting with two others at an outdoor table. Among those whose names are regularly invoked as testament to Taos’s celebrity appeal is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and, indeed, here I was, face to face with Rummy himself. Knowing that the former Secretary of Defense frequented the Taos Ski Valley, I had fantasized this moment many times. To my good fortune I was surprisingly prepared to greet him.
I halted and took a step towards the table where he sat, not five feet away. I stood up tall on my ski boots and looked him right in the eye. I raised my voice so everyone within earshot could hear, and I said, “Well lookee here! If it isn’t Donald Rumsfeld, our favorite local war criminal!” Jeff Conant. He and his guests looked up. Rumsfeld himself looked exasperated. His two guests just stared at me in reproach. So rude! I shook my head, looking him in the eye still, and I said,
…..“Mister Rumsfeld, you have killed so many people, you have murdered and tortured so many people, that it makes me sick to think about it.” After Jeff’s encounter w/Secret Service, Mr. Rumsfeld looks at Conant & asks, “What’s your name?” “I told him my name (well, my first name). He scoffed and said, in a gesture reminiscent of the middle-school playground, “That figures.” The former Secretary of Defense of the most powerful country on earth couldn’t come up with anything intelligent to say to me. And even if he could, I didn’t want to hear it. So I continued.
…..“I just have to say, we know you are a torturer, and a murderer, and there is a growing number of people in this country who would like nothing better than to see you spend the rest of your days rotting in a prison cell.” Secret Service agents began “moving” in. “I don’t remember if they said anything, but the thought of the high-caliber pistols tucked into their ski jackets was enough to get me to move along, as it were. I turned my back on them and entered the building. With my adrenaline racing I stopped and shouted, as loud as I could:
…..“Hey everybody, Donald Rumsfeld’s outside. If anyone wants to tell him what you think of his war, now’s your chance. A real live war criminal, right here!!” I turned and pointed towards Rumsfeld’s party. “He’s right over there!” Jeff Conant
All hail, Jeff Conant’s 2007 “channeling” Antonio Gramsci & Chris Hedges, using his voice, “[exposing] not only the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of fascism, but acknowledging the legitimate grievances of those under its spell. It must focus on the institutions that perpetuate injustice and social inequality.”
Concluding, Critical Thinking lives matter!!! TY, Tony, et al. “Keep it Lit!”
* hxxps://www.counterpunch.org/2007/03/13/greeting-rumsfeld-in-taos/
Well done Mr. Chris Hedges?
Your several points regarding pretensive opposition disguised as silly ridicule are not the stuff of the classical satire of Lenny Bruce and Mort Saul, or the genial cultural insight of George Carlin’s wit.
However, I must thank you most for the inclusion of a taste of the wisdom born of experience by a fellow writer: It deserves to be carefully read at least one more time.
“The Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran, driven into exile by the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in her book Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century, lays out the familiar pattern:”
“It begins with a movement that divides society into two: the ‘real people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite,’ and with a leader who insists they alone embody the ‘real’ people. The next step is the dissolution of truth and the prioritization of loyalty above decency. Then shame is dismantled. The leader breaks the long-standing political and moral consensus with unprecedented relentlessness.
The longer they remain in power, the boundaries of what is acceptable begin to stretch. What once felt unthinkable or despicable gradually becomes normal. As the institutions that hold democracy together are quietly hollowed out and the very definition of democracy is rewritten as being simply majority rule, universal values — human dignity and the rule of law — are replaced with a fierce nationalism, a proud victimhood, and a rewriting of history.
Cruelty and ruthlessness are deemed just, not only in the highest echelons of politics but also trickling down to daily life. The circle of who counts as ‘us’ grows smaller, while millions of fellow citizens are recast as permanent suspects.”
The BIG joke is on them.
They’re all gonna die. Just like us.
And you know what? Being dead is forever.
Yeah really. My father used to say “you’re a long time dead”. I never forget those words. That’s why i try to make the most of this little life i have by living within nature.
Good onya Valerie.
After all, we are Nature
isn’t the – sad, infuriating! – point that they do an awful lot
of damage to millions, if not billions, of people before they,
too, part. and that they should be prevented from doing so?
preferably long before they part.
I was with you all the way until the end of the article, which posited “faith” as the cure. I spit on “faith”. Faith is like looking at an empty plate and expecting to see food there, thinking that if you stare at the plate long enough, a miracle will happen. Humans have been betrayed by this “faith” scam for millennia.
I’m with you on that Carolyn.
Faith can also be problem as in the GWB crusade that gave a reprieve from Jeb but so did a religious appearing deal to hold up a culture war Supreme Court nomination prior to nomination plus a feminist.
That may have spawned a counter religious attempt to shut down their inadvertent result with overkill . then they switched to orthodox blame on Russia and the other dox.
Then when another woman threatens they switch all over again. It is kind of a JFK thing that then switch to Nixon in favor of French colonial rule. Triangular religious strangulation of secular rule may have a correlation with Germany and anti-communism too as well as witch hunts for the Cold War.
Ladies & Gentlemen,
Obviously, FAITH is more than a “belief in God OR in the doctrines or teachings of religion.”
…..FAITH is TRUST in someone or something. FAITH is ILLUSIVE. Hebrews 11:1 reads as follows: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.“
“Religious people often think of faith as confidence based on a perceived degree of warrant, [OR] evidence, [While OTHERS] who are more skeptical of religion tend to think of faith as belief without evidence. According to Thomas Aquinas, FAITH is “an act of the intellect assenting to the truth at the command of the will” i.e., An Act of Faith, “Lending him the money to start his own business;” A Giant Leap of Faith, “For us to believe that Trump-Vance, Inc., tells us the truth requires a giant leap of faith;” Faith in God, “Nothing is more important, to him/her.” “Her/His faith has given her/him the courage to deal with this tragedy.” (www)
According to Hallmark, “Faith is the place between the way things are & the good things that are sure to come.” Pray for Birdies!!!
Well said LeoSun!
As an octogenarian observer, it seems this excellent article regarding the effects of cursory satire may deserve an equally relevant discussion. Methinks Jon Stewart’s political satire and public activism may be more acceptable to Mr. Hedges.
The phrase “no articulation of an alternative” hits squarely.
Having no real electoral alternative (within the US, though apparently this problem is broader) pushes the idea of solution outside the Overton Window into radical or unthinkable status. One either considers nonviolence, violence, direct disobedience, and workable combinations of the three, or else one keeps eating lunch.
No joy in Mudville, it seems.
Punching down is to engage in cowardly evasion and deflection.
Always punch up.
Always.
The trouble is hitting something when “punching up”. My left hooks and right crosses come up empty…6 million No Kings demo, then 8 million w/o result, anti Nam war, anti Gaza genocide actions produce no changes. Swing to hit, damnit. The MIC, SCOTUS, the two party swindle, etc.
Absolutely correct. Peace.