| >It is heartbreaking what happened to a generation of men. Uh-huh. Which of these predictions made in 2015/2016 came true by 2020 when Donald Trump left office? * Donald Trump will cause a stock market crash. * Donald Trump will start WWIII. * Donald Trump will kill or jail journalists, leftists, and members of the LGBTQ community. * Donald Trump will ban all Muslims from entering the country. * Donald Trump will never allow another election to occur as he will become dictator for life. * Donald Trump will create internment camps for immigrants. * Donald Trump will outlaw gay marriage. * Donald Trump will ban abortion nationwide and institute a Handmaid's Tale-type dystopia. The answer? None of them. I await the replies that these aren't the same thing and they all Really Happened or are Totally About to Happen: >"I'm going to admit I was wrong about the timeline on all 10 things," he assured me. >"See how you prefaced it?" I said. "You're just saying that you're wrong about the timeline." >"Why am I going to abandon the truth?" he insisted. "I can't abandon the truth." You can also see the mirror-image of Q-anon currently alive and fermenting at /r/somethingiswrong2024 on reddit. This isn't a male issue (or female) or a right wing (or left) issue or a social media (or mass media) issue. It's a perennial human issue. It preceded mass media. It succeeded mass media. It will succeed social media. One apocalypse or another has been at hand for more 2,500 years, always heralded by mouth-foaming prophets with dire predictions of imminent disaster. And their failure to materialize always blindly waved away by certain demographics of the earnest and gullible. And there's always a Qoholeth to every Jeremiah shouting as loudly "Nothing ever happens." Babylon didn't fall for centuries after its prediction of imminent destruction. Jesus didn't come back in that generation's lifetime. The Mashiach is absent. The Mahdi is missing. Capitalism is still around and the Proles still in chains. There has been no Malthusian Great Starvation. There are still snows on Kilimanjaro. Obama remains an American citizen. Trump remains an American rather than Russian liability. JFK Jr is still dead. Kamala Harris still lost. If there's one lesson to be perennially learned, it's that there's nothing perfectible about humans and their relation to culture. The delusional will always be with us and they'll always claim it's really the other side that is deluded, akshually. |
Further, the 2016 list wouldn't have possibly guessed "will badly mishandle a pandemic, turning the US into one of its worst victims", but that is indeed what happened. He didn't outlaw gay marriage, but he did ban trans people from the military.
We did benefit from one important thing: his incompetence prevented him from accomplishing much of anything in his term. He has now had time to prepare -- or rather, the right-wing think tanks have had time to prepare. He's implementing their priorities as fast as he can.