Emergencies, Real and Fictional

Don't fall for fake emergencies. When you actually catch on fire, you'll know why.

There are real emergencies in this life, like the recent wildfires. These are sudden, unexpected, and dangerous situations that a demand quick thinking and decisive action.

And then there are fictional emergencies. These are what Elaine Scarry, in Thinking in an Emergency, warns about: the “claim of emergency.” In the U.S., the claim of emergency—whether it be invasion, hyperinflation, war, or anarchy—serves to license a dictatorship.

How has MAGA made such a binding claim of emergency? Simple: It has, with Goebbels-like propaganda managed to conjure a very spooky world where autonomous thought is disallowed and disabled.

In fact, part of the reason men, powerful and powerless alike, have been pandering to Trump is that they’ve slipped inside a multiplayer online role-playing dystopia in which America is relentlessly represented as in a state of emergency.

What are commonly called “conspiracy theories” are better understood as fictional world-building. The Great Replacement Game, for example, led by far-right figures like Nick Fuentes and Sneako, is a classic thriller in which elites, manipulated by Jews, are stealthily working to disenfranchise white men.

Shirtless child rapist and far-right propagandist Andrew Tate crosses “Faces of Death” and PornHub to build a fictional world of arousing gore and violent pornography on his YouTube channel.