I watched the Wheedle take another man
Gone. Gone, the damage done
I've seen the Wheedle and the damage done
A little part of it in every Republican
But every trump junkie’s like a settin’ sun(with apologies to Neil Young)
There’s something happening here in America, and what it is—well, is becoming increasingly clear.
If the mass incarceration of African Americans, resulting in the Land of the Free having the highest percentage of its population in the world in prison, is not enough to demonstrate the abject failure (for all except the owners of private, for-profit prisons) of the “War on Drugs,” the current epidemic of addiction to a relatively new and extraordinarily addictive drug should be.
It is, to say the least, interesting that many of the people who want to keep prohibitions on marijuana use, oppose the consumption of alcohol and so on, because they cloud users’ minds and leave them incapable of thinking clearly, have themselves been consuming large dosages of a mind-altering narcotic that twists their brains far more than the drugs they strenuously oppose.
That extraordinarily powerful hallucinogen of choice among present-day rightwing Americans is called Trumpism or, for short, Trump. It is often referred to by pushers on the street as TFG. Its principal effect is to make the mind see everything as in a mirror—the reverse of reality. The number of Trump junkies—Americans who are addicted to this horrible drug—is far higher than that for any other drug in the nation’s history.
Addicts often present with a paranoia that strikes deep as it creeps into their lives and makes them always afraid.
Unlike most other drugs, which are ingested, inhaled, or injected, TFG enters the addict through the ears and eyes.
It appears that a substantial percentage of TFG that reaches American addicts is being trafficked into the United States by a shadowy Budapest-based organization known as the CPAC Cartel. Since early 2022, it has picked up much of the business that theretofore had been supplied by the Moscow-based Putin Cartel, which has fallen on hard times.
While foreign traffickers still do a brisk business in the US, since about 2015, most of the stream has been produced domestically. Surprisingly, much of the vast supply is thought to originate not in mobile labs in trailers in New Mexico, but in gold-plated luxury buildings in West Palm Beach, Manhattan (New York, not Kansas), and—oddly—a golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
For reasons still under scientific study, white males seem to be much more susceptible to becoming addicted to Trumpism than other categories of humans.
There appears to be a strong correlation between areas ravaged by opioid addiction and a high rate of addiction to the trump drug.
Addiction to TFG appears to be closely associated with such other addictions as FNC, OAN, RAV, and TPUSA.
The consequences for those who become addicts to this horrible drug can be devastating. Here are a few examples of unfortunate people who have been hooked on TFG:
The most notable effects of TFG are that those who take it are in a constant state of rage and, as already noted. that they see everything as if in a mirror, reversed from what those things are in the real world. A few examples: Addicts see accurate reporting as “fake news,” seditionists as “patriots,” insurrectionists as “unfairly persecuted tourists,” legitimate inquiries into wrongdoing as “witch hunts,” authoritarians as "the “Freedom Caucus,” an ignoramus as a “very stable genius,” the strongest economy in a half century as “an economic catastrophe,” promoting lawlessness and chaos as “law and order,” the most corrupt administration in American history as “draining the swamp,” and on and on. Most fundamentally, they see truth as lies and lies as truth.
The drug appears to have an especially powerful effect on the brains of self-proclaimed Christians, erasing from their brains all the actual teachings of Jesus and replacing them with a few lines from Leviticus and reversing the words of Jesus recorded in the Gospels.
Addicts are prone to an odd affinity to the letter Q.
The only known cure is exposure to truth and facts, but those who have become addicted to TFG are remarkably resistant to such treatments.
NOTE: My times they are a-changin’. I have just retired after teaching for, they tell me (I’m thinking of demanding a recount), a half century, at Millsaps College. I’ll miss the classroom and stimulating discussions with students, but my life won’t change that much, as I have for decades spent most of my time writing.
One thing that will change, though, is our income. Without my teaching salary, I need a new source of revenue. A patron or group of patrons establishing a fund to support my writing would be nice, but that’s not in the cards. Therefore, I have decided to start taking paid subscriptions to my Substack essays. I don’t want to keep anyone from reading them free, but for those who can afford a paid subscription, I hope you will do so. There will also occasionally be a premium essay that is only available to paid subscribers.