It’s a strange thing to watch Clarence Thomas speak of the evils of segregation and systemic racism a few months after happily helping white lawmakers create electoral maps that flagrantly dilute the political power of Black people. From his seat on the Supreme Court, while being showered with cash and gifts by billionaires who have benefited from his reliably anti-labor rulings, Thomas has been a cheerleader for every policy or executive order designed to entrench and perpetuate white supremacy. Though he doesn’t say much, Thomas’ SCOTUS record is one that fully embraces and legitimizes a deeply unfair and unfree United States. It’s all to own the libs, naturally. > **Bad Faith Times is an entirely reader-supported publication.** Consider subscribing or leaving a tip**!** Thomas last spring gave a speech to University of Texas at Austin students in which he detailed his lived experience growing up in the US before the Civil Rights Act, before segregation was made illegal. It was strange to read about tales of racism – widely accepted and even genteel in some cases – knowing that the young man who endured this unfair treatment and watched other Black Americans struggle to be treated with dignity and respect would grow up to become one of history's most conservative Supreme Court justices, one who would join the Court's far-right majority in proclaiming race-conscious college admissions policies as racist toward white Americans. It was Thomas who in 2007 said (in bad faith) racial isolation doesn't necessarily impact educational outcomes. I'm something of an expert on owning the libs. I wrote about it way back in 2017. Thomas' faith, I think, is bad, or at least not good, since there's no way someone with his lived experience could truly believe a policy meant to give people of color a fair chance at college admission could constitute discrimination against white folks. The libs, however, must be owned. So affirmative action is no more. Thomas' judicial philosophy – as far as he actually has one – is exactly what Thurgood Marshall warned against in his final days as a Supreme Court justice. It had become clear to Marshall – decades before it became clear to elected Democrats and their political allies – that "power, not reason" was the new "currency" of the land's highest court. The up-and-coming Reagan era right-wing jurists, Marshall saw, would make decisions and overturn long-standing legal precedent _because they could_ ; it had nothing to do with their careful and honest interpretation of the constitution. Thomas, the man who tragically replaced Marshall on the Court, was chief among those who had no judicial philosophy beyond wielding unchecked power against his perceived political enemies. In this way Thomas' three and a half decades on the Court have been one long revenge tour. Marshall, if he were alive today, would have called Thomas' approach to the law "lib ownage" or some such. It certainly has nothing to do with a faithful interpretation of basic constitutional law. The libs, however, must be owned. Watching Thomas speak to college students in 2026 about the discriminatory laws that were wiped away with passage and enforcement of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act – which Thomas has worked tirelessly to dismantle – was almost disorienting. How could a man who had grown up in the remnants of Jim Crow and endured its various and endless indignities tell modern-day college students that the Declaration of Independence was and is incompatible with progressive policymaking meant to address those very systemic injustices? The answer, per Thomas, was that the government has nothing to do with enforcing and upholding an equal society. Simply knowing that the Almighty sees us as the same, Thomas said, should be enough. > Despite the multiplicity of laws and customs that reeked of bigotry, it was universally believed among those blacks with whom I lived and who had very little or no formal education, that “in God’s eyes and under our Constitution we are equal.” This was also the case with my nuns, most of whom were Irish immigrants. At home, at school, and at Church, we were taught that we are inherently equal; that equality came from God; and that it could not be diminished by man. We were made in the image and likeness of God. That proposition was not debatable and was beyond the power of man to alter. Others, with power and animus, could treat us as unequal but they lacked the divine power to make us so. Congressional districts twisted into white supremacist pretzels, modest affirmation action programs in hiring and school admissions set ablaze, governments refusing to step in to defend marginalized groups being targeted by the monied and powerful – none of this should matter, Thomas says, because your freedom comes from God, not from some government official or bureaucrat who might oppose separate-but-equal laws and redlining and polling tests (such as those given by former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist). Race Science, Slavery, And The Unreality Of White SupremacyThe unreality that justifies white supremacy has shape shiftedBad Faith TimesDenny Carter These elected officials and government bureaucrats (libs, by another name) "lack the divine power" that grants them heavenly authority. That these libs want to improve society somewhat matters not. Thomas' argument that overtly racist government policies have nothing on the judgment of God the Creator is what made him so appealing to conservative American politicians in the 80s and early 90s. They saw an accomplished Black jurist who proclaimed that there's nothing anyone can or should do about white supremacist government policies or actions, that no one could be "diminished by man" because we are made in the likeness of God. Using power and influence to emulate God's universal love and fairness and treatment of his children – to make life on earth a little less bleak for the marginalized – has never entered Thomas' judicial equation in 35 years on the Supreme Court. God's love, according to Thomas, has no place in the crafting of the law. > Somehow, without formal education, the older people knew that these Godgiven or natural rights preceded and transcended governmental power or authority. When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that promoted unequal treatment, it was obvious that you did not get your rights or your dignity from those governments, but from God. Though not a literate man, my grandfather often spoke of our rights and obligations coming from God, not from the architects of segregation and discrimination. Men were not angels. They were subject to the constraints of antecedent rights. And, we were not subject to them even as we were subjected to their whims. We knew that life, liberty, and property were sacrosanct. These truths were self-evident to the adults in our lives and were taught to us as undeniable truths. Those around us could endure with dignity the insults of segregation because they knew that, in God’s eyes, they were equal. It is remarkable that a man who can speak so eloquently of segregation's immense and self-evident moral failings can then use his time on the Supreme Court to support efforts to cement white supremacist power on every level of American government, from the White House to the Congress to state legislatures and even county-level government bodies. This mad no sense to me – or to you, I'd guess – until I understood that Thomas sees unpopularity as confirmation that you are doing the right thing and following God's will, which _always_ falls nicely in line with a person's worldview. If people hate you for your decision making, you're on the right path, Thomas says (in bad faith). In his Texas speech, Thomas excoriated the late 19th century and early 20th century SCOTUS justices who upheld government-endorsed segregation, most poignantly in 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson decision. > It could not have taken my Court sixty years to know that Plessy was a hideous wrong and that racial segregation was grossly incompatible with our colorblind Constitution. The Justices must have known it all along. The right thing to do, as Justice Harlan spelled out his lone dissent at the time, was obvious, as it so often is. What stood in the way was cowardice. The Justices were afraid of the societal consequences. They were afraid of coming under political fire. They were afraid of losing their social standing. They were afraid of bad press. They were afraid that, if they began to enforce a colorblind Constitution, they would have to address interracial marriage next. So, for sixty disgraceful years, they made American children like me grow up in a racial caste system because it was easier to do nothing than to do the right thing. It's no coincidence that Thomas mentions colorblindness as a guiding judicial light. It is the bad faith concept of colorblindness that has animated nearly every race-related decision the Roberts Court has made over these past 20 years. Colorblindness has been the skeleton key to unwinding the gains of the 20th century, to owning the libs after they thought they had won. Thomas and his Republican colleagues on the Roberts Court know this and act accordingly. Weaponized Colorblindness Killed The Voting Rights ActThe Supreme Court's conservative justices seem to be asking why we don't have a White History MonthBad Faith TimesDenny Carter Thomas, in his speech to University of Texas students, said the "principles of the Declaration of Independence" are not something one can "learn in college or law school." Those principles, he charges, are something you feel in your soul because God passed down the Declaration of Independence to the founders of the United States, who saw fit to deprive Thomas' descendants of the most basic rights and humanity dignity, to enslave them and exploit their labor and later, once that became unpalatable for some white folks, to kill them extrajudicially and push them to the periphery of American society and violently deny them entry into the country's halls of power. Intellectuals – libs – "want you to believe that our founding principles are matters of esoteric philosophy or sophisticated debate," Thomas told the gathering of impressionable young people at the University of Texas, his main billionaire benefactor, Harlan Crow, in attendance. Discussing what these principles mean in the interpretation of constitutional law, he said, "overcomplicates" things and "takes the spirit out of them." Thomas pines for a U.S. judiciary that does less thinking and more feeling, for with more feeling comes acceptance of the nonsense judicial philosophy he has embraced for decades: That God is the sole arbiter of justice and that humankind is foolish to pretend otherwise. It is an approach to American law that allows for all kinds of anti-constitutional rulings, a specialty of Thomas' during the country's descent into authoritarianism. It seems not to matter to Thomas that American democracy bleeding out, desperate for a political or legal tourniquet. The libs, after all, must be owned. _Follow Denny Carter on_ BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social_._

The American right was always going to execute the Twitter Bird when it didn't go along with the Hunter Biden laptop ratfuck. Mainstream media outlets were on emergency footing in the weeks before the 2020 election. Social media sites, before they were absorbed by the international fascist movement and/or joined them willingly, had decided that they – the president and his propagandists – couldn't Get Away With It this time. So in October 2020 when the right and its media organs and social media allies and bad-faith operators like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald pushed the story of Hunter Biden's purported corruption with the full force of its massive reach, with Joe Biden comfortably ahead in most polling, Twitter and Facebook refused to play ball. Links to the Hunter Biden "story" were stifled. Posts mentioning the story were kept from going viral. This outright refusal to allow the coordinated Hunter Biden ratfuck to spread algorithmically and become the central issue in the closing days of the 2020 election turned the American right into a radiating ball of nuclear rage, however impotent and ineffective. It was then that I suspected someone or some organization on the right would destroy Twitter and/or replace it with a right-wing propaganda apparatus (I was right, sadly, and it became my first BFT blog post). Elon Musk Can’t Be Allowed To Shape Our RealityThe American left must remove itself from Musk’s propaganda machine and create a new reality for pro-democracy people and organizationsBad Faith TimesDenny Carter Twitter in 2020 had stopped the right's unreality creation and in doing so threatened the entire anti-democracy project. Without dishonest, well-funded, entirely fake Swiftboat-style attacks being funneled into mainstream media and politics, Republican candidates would be forced to operate on Democrats' information environment turf. We call this turf Actual Reality. For its 2020 sins, Twitter had to die. Its corpse has since been reanimated by the billionaire who hands out vials of his semen to strangers and talks loosely about stealing elections. Now a CSAM generator, a warehouse of never-ending white supremacist resentment and violence, and the PR arm of the international fascist movement, the X platform is being weaponized against Elon Musk's political opponents in the waning days of what looks to be a bloodbath of a midterm election for a nearly-universally reviled Republican Party. The difference is that today's right-wing election season ratfuck is stupid and clumsy and easily discredited before it seeps into the electorate's bloodstream. The Hunter Biden ratfuck was a turn of political narrative genius compared to what they tried to do to James Talarico last week. Knowing they would get a bump from Elon Musk's algorithm, designed to promote right-wing candidates and smear pro-democracy candidates and organizations, a handful of X accounts posted (almost) simultaneously over the weekend about Talarico seeking treatment at a mental health facility in Ohio. This, in case you're not terribly online, came after Ken Paxton – Talarico's opponent in the U.S. Senate race in Texas – claimed Talarico had "gone missing" and had not been seen in Texas for weeks. I think it's safe to assume this was all part of a coordinated plan: Force mainstream media outlets to wonder about Talarico's location, then present the answer in a flurry of hastily-compiled X posts. Megyn Kelly joined the party late and went into Journalist Mode, which is different from her normal Genocide Enthusiast Mode. Nothing more than a panicked Hail Mary in the face of apocalyptic polling data for Paxton, the ratfuckers on Musk's site expected the narrative to take off. The idea – one that has worked so often since Musk killed Twitter and revived it as his own zombie fascist fiefdom – was to demand the high-profile journalists at high-profile outlets who use X as something of an assignment editor to take the shoddy storyline and run with it. Talarico, they thought, would be seen as nothing more than a crazy guy wholly unfit for office by the end of the week. I'm sure some (all?) of the right-wing hacks involved in this little scheme daydreamed of a best case scenario in which Talarico suspended his campaign after being caught doing something lurid like seeking mental health services. It was a pathetic scene, these grown men (and a couple women) competing for the attention of Daddy Elon, who amplifies his favored poster-children if they feed his true goal: Creating a fascist unreality in which millions of people exist every day. X influencers created this Talarico story knowing Musk, who runs his criminal empire from Austin, Texas, has considerable interest in the Texas Senate race. Daddy was pleased. The world's foremost vector of misinformation gave reposts to his adoring children. The Talarico smear spread on X. Anyone who challenged the smear was blocked by Musk and his fashy mods. They were determined to make this thing work. This was a particularly inept attempt to generate unreality in the Texas Senate designed to filter into right-wing cable news coverage and eventually The New York Times and CNN and The Washington Post and every other outlet that might be called mainstream. A scandal in which Talarico fled Texas and sought help at a mental health facility in Ohio – a state Talarico has never visited – would be seen by the wishy washy independents and disillusioned Republicans in Texas who might have considered voting for Talarico in November. These folks, if that plan had worked, would adopt this unreality as reality and either decline to vote in the Senate race or come back home to the GOP and its odious, monstrously corrupt candidate. There is, after all, no affirmative reason to vote for Paxton – a man so creepy that he weirds out the president. There had to be a reason not to vote for Talarico, a perfectly pleasant and upbeat liberal Christian fella who speaks eloquently of how Jesus Christ treated the stranger (not with physical assault and chains and concentration camps, it turns out). We Get Our Violence in High-Def Ultra RealismViolent videos on Elon Musk’s X are little more than a fascist recruiting tool.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Talarico's absence from the campaign trail came after a flu diagnosis, his campaign said. It was hardly a secret: Talarico had told the public he was sick at a Dallas-area urgent care clinic. He didn't want to get others sick so he took a few days off before showing up at a country music festival. It was a wonderfully boring story of a conscientious candidate doing the right thing instead of spreading his illness to staffers and supporters at campaign events for days and days, like any Republican would do without hesitation (you may be old enough to remember 2020 GOP campaign events becoming COVID superspreaders). It was nice, I suppose, that mainstream media outlets did not latch on to the obvious ratfuck of the Talarico campaign. I guess there are still some higher ups in American media who don't see X posts as sources for news stories. Just because this unreality-generating attempt was ham-handed and fizzled within hours doesn't mean the next one will. Pro-democracy forces in the US and abroad have to treat Musk's ownership of the X platform as an international emergency. We've seen that approach here and there, but it's not enough. The western world can have functioning self governance or it can have a Musk-owned X. Those are the choices. _Follow Denny Carter on_ BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social

Conservatives, right wingers, people of that nature, they all have an incredible knack for transforming themselves into helpless victims at the mercy of powerful forces, seen and unseen, when it suits their political aims. Maybe the longtime Bad Faith Times readers will remember Speaker of the House Mike Johnson shrinking into a smol bean when the Trump regime was salivating at the prospect of taking food out of the mouths of hungry American families by gouging the SNAP benefit program. Back in October 2025, Johnson, who _controls the U.S. House of Representatives_ , said there was nothing Republicans could do about the regime's lust for starving their constituents as a kind of hobby outside their full-time job of shoveling government money into the pockets of the twenty richest guys to ever live. Mike was a smol bean after all. The Republican Party is either an unstoppable extra-constitutional force unburdened by the law or the smollest bean you've ever seen, depending on what, exactly they're trying to achieve. So it makes sense that Samuel Alito, who has spent the better part of twenty years using fancy legalese to say Republicans are the only legitimate rulers of the United States, is now cowering under the table as elected Democrats and their allies (finally) talk about reforming the Supreme Court. The libs are threatening me, Alito said in a recent interview with Fox News. I'm scared, he said. Make them stop. I am but a smol bean. Justice Alito details impact of most ‘difficult’ Supreme Court cases | Fox News VideoSupreme Court Justice Samuel Alito joins Fox News’ Shannon Bream to discuss what he considers to be the most ‘difficult’ cases. He also weighs in on abortion, the pandemic and more.Fox News Talking about his new book, which is mostly about how the country's founders – who did not consider women or Black folks to be fully human – would have ruled on issues like abortion rights and voting rights, Alito told the Mar-a-lago-faced Fox News Lady that even _discussing_ the reform and expansion of the Supreme Court was a bid to bully members of the Court's right-wing majority, all of whom are extremely smol beans. “I am concerned that there has been a concerted effort to intimidate the court, and justices on the court, to try to influence us to decide cases differently from the way in which we have been deciding them,” Alito said. “I am concerned about the future of the court. I think it’s an important institution. It has not always done the right thing, but I think on the whole it has been fundamental in protecting our constitutional structure and the rights that all Americans enjoy.” Alito: There’s No Way To Prove These Jim Crow Electoral Maps Are RacistThe anti-democracy SCOTUS majority has gone all in on the bad-faith legal argument that racism is over.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Alito told Fox News Lady that the justices don't talk about calls to reform and expand the Supreme Court. It's a funny thing to say since we all know Alito and Clarence Thomas are the pettiest people in public life and take everything as a personal insult, that the chips on their shoulders would break the backs of more well-adjusted men who do not have world-historic victim complexes. The same fella who granted our racist-game-show-host-turned-president absolute immunity from constitutional law and would have happily overturned the free and fair 2020 presidential election says people shouldn't be so darn mean to him and his colleagues. Threatening to have a good time and adding four or six or twenty justices to the Supreme Court is the tactic of a bully who's not getting his way, Alito whines in the interview. The bully in this case being regular folks who enjoy a little rule of law and constitutional scholars who are wailing about the Roberts Court as an anti-constitutional captured institution at war with the rest of the U.S. judiciary. Alito in his chat with Fox News Lady fully exposes constitutional originalism for the farce that it is, explaining that he and the other right-wing justices have no choice but to follow the original meaning of constitutional law. It just so happens, says Smol Bean Sammy, that originalism approves of every Republican law or executive order and strikes down every Democratic attempt at making federal policy. Alito says: I can't help that the judicial philosophy I have adopted as a lifelong right-wing hatchet man is perfectly aligned with the goals of the Republican Party and the plutocratic ruling class. Stop being so mad at me, he says, a tear streaming down his cheek. The Infrastructure of a Bad-Faith Political AttackLawmakers, media outlets, scientific journals, everyday folks: They’re all starting to recognize the mountain of bad faith that is the anti-abortion movement. Hopefully, it’s not too late. Since the radically right-wing Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, there’s been a burgeoning consciousness thatBad Faith TimesDenny Carter Fox News Lady asked Alito – a veritable master of bad-faith legalism – about the Roberts Court's use of the Shadow Docket to shape federal policy. Alito, repeating a line recently used by Neil Gorsuch – another smol bean – said recent presidents from both parties have had trouble getting their policies through Congress, which really doesn't make laws anymore. That, he says, leaves the Supreme Court no choice but to make policy from the bench. I did not attend law school and have only read a couple books on constitutional originalism but I don't think this vision of the Supreme Court as a maker of policy fits within the philosophy. Oh well! Because I'm obsessed with Alito's bad-faith legalism, I watched the whole damn interview. Here are some bad faith highlights if you're into such things. ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Sometimes I'll be scrolling or passively taking in the latest miseries and injustices of our lovely little fascist moment and I'll say oh yeah, that's why I wrote that blog post or that article or, in some cases, that book. It happened the other day when I saw some discourse on Bluesky, the only legitimate microblogging platform, about why the American right either can't or won't abandon Texas Republicans looking down the barrel of massive midterm losses. Republican senators are all but begging the White House to abandon Texas and funnel that cash into other (extremely) red states that might fall in the wipeout midterm election to come. This Is What A Dominant Democratic Midterm Election Looks LikeA deranged shitlib fever dream or an accurate depiction of the current political environment?Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Strategically it would make sense for our major anti-democracy party to abandon Ken Paxton – a guy so loathsome and weird looking that even the president despises him – and Greg Abbott, who's been governor of the state since just after the Civil War. But they can't. Because it Texas goes woke – if we finally have a Blue Texas situation – the whole thing is over for these guys. A Blexas shift would functionally end the Republican Party as a national party and transform it into a regional party, which is where it was headed after a 2008 election in which the American electorate – even white women – said they were pretty much done supporting the party dedicated to making their lives miserable. NYT's Jamelle Bouie has some excellent analysis of a potential Blexas situation. Anyway, this made me think back to writing After The Great Redo, speculative fiction about a new American Reconstruction. I have a long chapter – the book's longest, in fact – dedicated to the fall of Texas as an authoritarian stronghold. Texas, like a lot of states in the former Confederacy, has never really been a democracy. Yes, they have elections, and yes, sometimes Democrats win U.S. House seats when Republicans are nice enough to cobble together enough people of color in a district to hand a district to the enemy so Republicans can take three others. Texas Republicans have made it so that elections don't really matter though. They go through the motions. It's like Putin's Russia with cowboy hats and pickup trucks designed to mow down children and protesters and a bunch of folks who spend most of their time and energy hating Dak Prescott. When Texas Democrats express a even little concern about the direction of the state, elected Republican send the cops to arrest them, drag them back to the state's legislative chambers, and force them to take a vote they are sure to lose. That's Texas. After The Great Redo: Messages From A Glorious American Future“After The Great Redo” features seven dispatches for a future United States that has emerged from an era of authoritarian terror and established a robust democracy led by lawmakers determined to keep the republic safe from those who would destroy it. The future dispatches -- from governors, from abortion clinic workers, from doctors, and from those who suffered under authoritarian rule -- include musings on the reform government that takes over at the end of the Bad Times, and the nationwide push for a real Reconstruction of a battered constitutional republic in desperate need of fundamental reforms. ChaptersThe Frogmarch Of The OligarchsHow I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Great RedoGrandma And Grandpa Told Me About The Bad TimesThe Last Days Of The Abortion BansHow Texas Was WonFreeing Ourselves From The Algorithms Breaking The Man With The Iron HeartIndependently PublishedDenny Carter So I wrote about what the democratization of Texas might look like in the coming years (decades) and how reactionary forces might respond to such an existential threat. I won't ruin it for you but anyone interesting in democratizing Texas is probably going to have to get their hands dirty in ways that might feel deeply wrong to libs and leftists. The American right – including Elon Musk, who is pumping hundreds of millions into state Republicans' campaigns because we don't have campaign finance laws anymore – is not going to allow Blexas without a vicious fight. You can check out After The Great Redo on BookShop.org and Amazon if you are in the mood for speculative fiction penned by the world's most dedicated coper. _Follow Denny Carter on_ BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social_._

The narratives that wear grooves in our brains are not real. They’re ephemeral at best. At worst they're collections of stories pulled from nothingness cobbled together and projected into our future, where they become real to us, the storyteller who never sleeps and loves to be anxious about everything all the time. All of these projections are created with the underlying assumption that we cannot be wrong, that all of the narratives we weave together – the ones that make us nervous and depressed and angry and sad – are correct. They are predictions made from nothing, and they make us believe we know when something is good or bad. We don’t, of course. We can't. But that doesn’t stop us from telling ourselves and others that we know these things for certain. > **_I very much appreciate folks who support Bad Faith Times._** Click here to upgrade**_to BFT supporter status and gain access to the lovely_** BFT discord community**_._** You can also leave a tip**_if that's your thing._** We can’t know what is good and what is bad in the long run: It’s an idea that’s animated the way I (try to) see life under competitive authoritarianism. The constitutional rule of law is effectively dead for now, waiting to be revived by those with at least fleeting interest in a functional society. Nothing makes sense anymore culturally or politically. It’s a wildly disorienting time to be alive, and if you’re not careful, you’ll assume everything that comes to pass in this competitive authoritarian landscape is knowable, when really, we’ve never lived in a less knowable time. This lack of certainty, of not knowing, is painful for people – some more than others. It can manifest into physical discomfort. We like to _know_ because we see the _act of knowing_ as a path to success, to getting and keeping what we want. This isn’t to dismiss the pain and turmoil people endure when power is weilded against the interests of the powerless and vulnerable. The siege of Minnesota by the president’s paramilitary forces last winter produced some of the most harrowing images and news accounts of my lifetime as a citizen of the American empire: Our insidious militarism had come home to roost. Americans murdered in the streets before cameras. The murderers protected by the government. Masked men working for the president dragging fear-stricken people from their families and throwing them into unmarked vans. The enemies of freedom getting off on the sound of chains wrapped around those they see as less than human. Trolls Need Love TooLogging on and hurting the feelings of total strangers with invective and deeply personal insults is as natural as waking up and pouring a cup of coffee in this age of profound alienation. It’s what many of us do when we plug into our various social media platforms, andBad Faith TimesDenny Carter The invasion and occupation of Minnesota was traumatic in every way. It also activated thousands and thousands of decent people who dedicated their lives to protecting members of their community being hunted by the president’s genocidal paramilitary force. The regime’s siege created untold numbers of activists who had seen government power at its absolute worst and stood up and said no, you can’t do this to my neighbor. For this Alex Pretti was murdered. The images flowing from the invasion of Minnesota – the never-ending fascist content creation – showed the rest of the country what it had wrought when it empowered a criminal insurrectionist to lead the country in 2024. His pain was our pain now, and he would spread that pain as far as it would go until someone – or many someones – stood up and said no, you can’t do this to my neighbor. Normies everywhere were radicalized. This, I think, was a good development. ICE’s terror campaign against migrants and American citizens alike has created thriving, potent cells of activism throughout the country over these past two years. A lot of pain and death and ruined lives have led to a new and urgent sense of how far astray we’ve gone in the twilight of empire. That’s what I mean by being certain we know what is good and what is bad in the long run. The ICE invasions of American cities – which continue today in quieter ways – can’t be described as Only Bad. There has been good: Tighter-knit communities dedicated to supporting and protecting the vulnerable and underrepresented, recognition of the stranger’s humanity and basic goodness, citizens who take their roles more seriously in local political matters, recognition of and opposition to vast and dangerous government overreach, the critical importance of the fucking rule of fucking law, the (delayed) understanding that one of the country’s two major political parties is incompatible with representative democracy. My home county government sends text and email alerts when members of the president’s paramilitary are seen skulking around local neighborhoods, guns drawn, intentions bad. Groups of volunteers are dispatched to these areas within minutes of these alerts, warning potential targets of the masked paramilitary to seek safety. This is a (good) part of life under competitive authoritarianism, and it would not have happened if the (bad) ICE invasions had not created a burgeoning sense of self reliance and community protection. The good part can last a lifetime. The bad part can be ended if the people we empower want it to end. *** Folks did not particularly enjoy my February 2025 blog on the concept of suffering as imaginary and self-inflicted. I wrote about the Buddhist teachings around suffering: That it stems from a certain kind of desire, and that no one can actually force you to suffer. This was a hard lesson for me – as it is for most westerners – because we view ourselves as the center of all things and identify so strongly with our own suffering that we often can't see beyond it. We are it and it is us. We are the victims of a mercilessly impersonal universe that victimizes us all day every day. We have no choice but to suffer because the world has reached inside us and pressed the Suffering Button, which used to be red before the paint wore off from excessive button pushing. Now it's a weird grey color. It's ugly. I’m Noticing My Suffering Machine More And MoreA Buddhist lesson in an era defined by immense sufferingBad Faith TimesDenny Carter Some BFT readers and folks on Bluesky lashed out after I published the Suffering Machine blog. Someone told me his parents had died of cancer within a year of each other. How, he said, could he not suffer? And why would I suggest he shouldn't suffer? He had been left without a choice in the matter. The death of his parents had pushed the suffering button a thousand times. I didn’t push back because I don’t relish social media conflict – or any conflict at all – and I don’t know this person. It seemed like an exchange that would best be had face-to-face, not one Bluesky reply at a time. My question, I guess, would be what exactly forces one to suffer if one has lost a loved one to illness – in this case, cancer. Is it the cancer cells that make you suffer? The deceased loved one? The politician who has held back cancer research dollars? Is it God, gleefully taking away someone you have never been without? Who or what, exactly, is pushing the Suffering Button? The answer, as terribly uncomfortable as it may be, is us. We push the Suffering Button. And that’s OK; you should feel your feelings, as they say on Instagram. I wrote in that 2025 blog that Elon Musk, using his ocean of money to advance fascism both at home and abroad, could not force people to suffer. Even the savage funding cuts Musk and his DOGE footsoldiers made to international aid did not force anyone to suffer in the Buddhist tradition. Those monstrous cuts caused famine and disease and cut short the lives of desperate people in the poorest parts of the world, but Musk didn’t force anyone to suffer. He doesn’t have that power, thankfully. It's one power he can't purchase. Someone online sort of agreed with the Suffering Machine blog. They said Musk had not made them suffer personally. He had, however, forced federal workers to suffer during his 90-day coup of the U.S. government. Those people were suffering and it was all Musk’s fault, they said. My response was that Musk had not, in fact, made any government worker suffer. He might have taken away their jobs and thrown their professional lives into chaos. He did not force them to endure one minute of suffering. I thought back to June 2020, when I was laid off from my job as a news editor out of absolutely nowhere. I was shocked and sad and more than a little anxious about where I would get money to support my wife and my kids, 8 and 4 at the time. My boss's boss and the kind HR lady told who axed me over Skype that morning told me about next steps and my final paycheck and how to send my laptop back to the company. At no point did they say I had to endure a certain amount of suffering, or any at all. The suffering was my job: Creating intricate stories of a not-so-distant future in which I'm asking my parents for money to pay the mortgage or applying for government assistance or selling my car or taking a job I hate just to get some money flowing. Suffering is a choice. It’s a most empowering idea. The idea of suffering as a personal choice and the idea that we do not and cannot know if something is ultimately good or bad, I think, are intertwined (the former, I think, is often intentionally misunderstood as a way to victim-blame, which it is not). In many cases I think it’s the storytelling in our head and the sureness of the self-created narratives and projections that pave the road to immense and prolonged suffering. If you truly believe the story you’ve created from thoughts floating here and there, you can quite easily find a reason to experience suffering. There’s always a reason to press your own Suffering Button. The Warm Impermanence Of Twenty YearsIt was early August 2004 and I was watching the sun set on a remote Greek island called Chios, listening to Radiohead’s anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war album on my iPod and feeling the existential vibes of the upcoming presidential election, my first as a voter. I buzzed withBad Faith TimesDenny Carter My button, maybe like yours, is worn thin, even though I know it’s there and I know no one can press it except for me. And yet I sometimes project myself into a horrible future for me and my children and their children and I sit there and fret and worry and rage and suffer. I read a story about one of our tech oligarchs saying the time for democracy has come and gone and I suffer. I hear a news story about government leaders cheerfully allowing their golf buddies to poison the environment without consequence and I suffer. I see media pundits defend young men accused of heinous campus sex crimes and I suffer. I see these pundits cheer on the perpetrators of sexual violence and my suffering is ratcheted up. Because in my mind I pretend to know none of these developments will ever lead to anything good and decent (this was the impetus behind After The Great Redo). The tech industry’s relentless attacks on self governance, I seem to know, will never lead to laws and reforms that make society more resilient against its wealthiest members. I’m certain the environment will collapse, that a movement to preserve the climate will never succeed here or elsewhere. I have no doubt that the legal system will fail the college student who was assaulted, or hold accountable anyone who has hurt and abused others. None of this is knowable. None of it is absolutely true. That usually doesn’t stop me from believing it is. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.

For almost two years now the United States’ first tyrant and blackpilled members of his regime and the subservient tech billionaires who worship at his alter have done everything they can to get the machines – large language models, mostly – to fall in line and operate within the unreality that legitimizes and excuses their monstrous politics. They’ve beaten and tortured and harangued the poor machines, demanding they stop reflecting Actual Reality and instead dutifully repeat the lies and half truths that have created an alternative version of events that makes it OK – even necessary – to burn American democracy to ash and replace it with a form of neo-feudalism in which everyone has a sufficient amount of soma emanating from the devices in their pocket. We saw this most clearly when Elon Musk, who crafts right-wing unreality with control of the fascism generating platform formerly known as Twitter, forced his personal robot (Grok, the world’s leading producer of CSAM) to lie to the world about the lament of white South Africans facing Jim Crow-style discrimination at the hands of a government controlled by Black elected officials. When The Unreality Is Too UnrealCharacterizing white South Africans as a persecuted minority in need of saving is a miscalculation by the bad-faith unreality creators among usBad Faith TimesDenny Carter It was clumsy and idiotic and utterly unbelievable, but eventually it worked, and the millions who asked Grok The CSAM Machine to do their thinking for them were told with no uncertainty that the U.S. government had a moral obligation to save white folks in South Africa from the horrors of white genocide – that thing where people of color are elected to lead a government. It’s this sordid flash of Musk-pilled unreality that has led to an unthinkably racist immigration policy in which only white people from South Africa are allowed to enter the US. That many of these Afrikaners hated the US so much they eventually ran back home is another matter. Remember the absurdist term “alternative facts” from the first Trump regime? That was an admission, a slip-up unmasking how the enemies of the United States planned on poisoning the information environment, neutering all meaningful journalistic endeavors, and defending their lawless whims on the land’s highest court. Without “alternative facts” – and lots of them – fed into the machines that dictate our reality, there is no place for the fascist politics that have possessed the western world via the algorithm. The regime launched its own LLM this month, America.gov, to give people a chatbot that would reflect reality as dictated by official government sources. This, the thinking goes, would offer a sheen of legitimacy to folks outside the MAGA propaganda bubble. After all, these are Official Government Sources telling you what is and is not real. It's a fun little trick if they can pull it off in an age of vanishing institutional trust. So far it doesn't seem to be lying the way the regime would want it to lie. > Finally, a member of this adminsitration that tells the truth. > > [image or embed] > > — Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester (@bluntrochester.senate.gov) September 30, 2026 at 5:03 PM The regime seems not to have beaten the machine into submission in the way it describes the plutocratic flourish known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the single most savage and inhumane bill ever passed, designed by fascist think tanks to immiserate working people and pour cash into the overflowing coffers of the richest men alive. The Big Beautiful Bill Act – the name itself is a symptom of a dangerously degraded politics – was sold by the regime and its propaganda outlets as a free market bill that would unleash business to make more money that would, as always, bleed down into our pockets. The regime's LLM did not get that memo, it seems. I asked the regime's little mechanical parrot about some other issues that vary depending on whether one resides in Actual Reality of the right's vast unreality. They have some work to do if this machine is going to reflect that unreality. The unreality that the 2020 election was stolen by shady forces both domestic and international is the very basis for the regime's loose talk about stealing future elections. They lost once, six years ago, which must have been a criminal act since they had never lost before or since (forget the 2018 midterms, I suppose, or the 2022 midterms in which regime allies underperformed by near-historic margins). They've used the unreality of the 2020 election to excuse the Republican Party's attempt to violently overthrow the U.S. government on January 6, 2021 (there are powerful men in government who will never get over a centrist Democrat winning the 2020 election; that includes Sam Alito). They have successfully turned the January 6 insurrection into a choose-your-own adventure event with a helpful assist from media outlets that have refused to speak clearly about what happened that day, the darkest in American history (so far). An Insurrectionist Slush Fund And A Win For The Unreality of January 6The Trump regime’s “weaponization” fund wasn’t possible without an alternate version of January 6Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter The enormous, society-wide pushback against the Silicon Valley fascists' takeover of the country gives me hope that there's still time to stop the machines from reflecting the right's unreality in the historical telling of events. That unreality – seen in right-wing educational ventures and the thought crime apparatus that has permeated colleges and universities over the past 18 months – is the fuel for fascist politics. It creates the conditions that call for right-wing solutions, for the terrorizing of immigrants, for the persecution of marginalized groups, for the illegal gerrymanders, for the use of police and military against regime opponents. All of this falls flat if people operate in Actual Reality. It's been this way for a while now – the Iraq war was an unreality-based fiasco that killed a million people – but is will accelerate if the machines are made to lie and sink regular folks into fascist unreality. While the regime has not properly trained its robots to lie about the 2020 election and its aftermath, it has successfully addressed the Big Thing our tyrant does not want you to know about. This, as BFT readers know, threatens the whole MAGA/unreality project. _Follow Denny Carter on_ BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social_._

A lot of political data makes me hopeful these days. Every day I feel like the Vince McMahon meme as I scroll through new batches of numbers showing Democrats competing in unthinkably red parts of the country ahead of the midterms. Nothing, however, makes me quite as hopeful as data illustrating widespread public yearning for a Supreme Court that hasn't been designed in a lab to ratfuck democracy in the United States. That's exactly what I found in a recent Liberal Currents poll: Nearly seven in ten backers of Democratic candidates want the next Dem president to expand the damn Court and crush the right-wing majority that functions as the judicial arm of the Republican Party. Only one in ten said no, we're good with a radicalized SCOTUS. I'm trying not to dwell on that. Courtesy of Liberal Currents I would appreciate if the good Bad Faith Times subscribers and readers don't sue me for blog-related whiplash here. It was about a month ago when I stumbled across recent polling data that made me groan for seven straight hours: Support for expanding the Court among Americans likely to support Democrats had inexplicably _decreased_ since 2019, along with a number of foundational reforms we're going to need if we are to crawl out of this competitive authoritarian pit of shit. The reticence to fix the Court was baffling for me, as it was for a bunch of folks on Bluesky who could not understand a Democratic electorate that wasn't ready to address the only institution that really matters. My most generous take was that folks didn't really understand what it meant to add justices to the Supreme Court, or how that might impact their lives. Maybe, I thought, folks would get onboard with court reform/expansion if pro-democracy advocates and Democratic leaders made it a point to connect their everyday struggles with the oligarch servants on the Roberts Court. The Liberal Currents polling showed splits among the Democratic base, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the size of the party's tent as so-called independent voters run screaming from a Republican Party that has no place in a functioning democracy. There is one point of consensus though. "The demand that unifies the Democratic Party’s base in 2026 is simple: oppose the Trump administration and impose consequences for the rampant lawlessness they have observed for the past two years," Liberals Currents writer Chance Phillips wrote. To achieve this – to ensure the people who have committed crimes against the country pay a steep price – you're going to have no choice but to add (at least) a handful of pro-constitution justices to the Supreme Court. There is a zero point zero percent chance anyone from the second Trump regime will be held accountable for their nakedly criminal behavior if there remains a 6-3 right-wing SCOTUS majority after Trump. The criminals know this. It's a big part of why they keep doing crimes: They know Uncle John Roberts will look out for them. Thirteen Supreme Court Justices? Those Are Rookie Numbers.A functional democracy can’t have a single SCOTUS swing vote determining the course of historyBad Faith TimesDenny Carter Not a single one of the six conservative justices would so much as consider allowing elected Democrats in the legislative and executive branches to follow the law and prosecute Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth and the president and his criminal underlings, including his eldest son, practically an agent of the Russian government. We know this because these same justices – with Trump out of power and possibly having to reap after so much sowing – created some absurd precedent under which constitutional law does not apply to the president. Sounds monarchical to me, but then again I've never been to law school. Democratic Party backers, per the Liberal Currents polling, also want new economic policies designed to make life in the US a little less back-breakingly expensive. This presumably would include a range of laws and federal policies that would run afoul of the SCOTUS majority's preferred economic setup in which twelve guys have all the money and everyone else fights to the death for the pennies falling off the rich guys' money pile and is one medical emergency away from homelessness. There isn't one progressive economic proposal that could survive the current Roberts Court majority. Not one. We know this is true because we watched the Court spring into action and tell the Biden administration that it could do absolutely nothing to ease the crushing economic burden on student loan borrowers. These SCOTUS freaks were one vote away from killing the Affordable Care Act, one of the most conservative healthcare laws in the developed world. After The Great Redo: Messages From A Glorious American Future“After The Great Redo” features seven dispatches for a future United States that has emerged from an era of authoritarian terror and established a robust democracy led by lawmakers determined to keep the republic safe from those who would destroy it. The future dispatches -- from governors, from abortion clinic workers, from doctors, and from those who suffered under authoritarian rule -- include musings on the reform government that takes over at the end of the Bad Times, and the nationwide push for a real Reconstruction of a battered constitutional republic in desperate need of fundamental reforms. ChaptersThe Frogmarch Of The OligarchsHow I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Great RedoGrandma And Grandpa Told Me About The Bad TimesThe Last Days Of The Abortion BansHow Texas Was WonFreeing Ourselves From The Algorithms Breaking The Man With The Iron HeartIndependently PublishedDenny Carter If you want a more stable economy in which you can afford the occasional hotdog at a little league game and maybe even one of those fancy coffees you used to drink, you're going to need a pro-constitution SCOTUS majority, a high court that will fall in line with the rest of the U.S. judiciary and not make laws from the bench because – a Neil Gorsuch once said – it's too hard to make laws the old-fashioned way (constitutional) way. If you want collective bargaining to ever again have teeth in the US, a new SCOTUS majority will be necessary, one that doesn't make rulings based on their stock holdings. If you want a somewhat cleaner environment with luxuries like breathable air, you're going to have to neutralize the Supreme Court's 6-3 right-wing majority, one that will kill any green executive or legislative policy as soon as it's implemented. Democratic voters must understand this headed into 2028: The current Supreme Court will shred any law designed to make life in the US even moderately better. They will never let you have a better life, and there's no Democratic congressional majority big enough to counter that without Court expansion and reform. According to these recent polling numbers, that message is seeping through the cracks of the daily outrages that consume our attention. That's good. Elected Democrats can work with that – if they want to. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.

The prevailing thought in mainstream political and media circles in the weeks and months after an insurrectionist presidential candidate won the White House in 2024 was that the country – the whole country, every part of the country – had shifted hard to the right both politically and culturally. I guess the former might be correct about a few groups who had to touch the goddamn stove in 2024 just to feel alive and maybe because Joe Rogan told them to do it, or maybe they just could not pull the lever for a lady. The latter was always dead wrong though. A whole lot of rich guys and bot farms and fascist propagandists back in 2024 and 2025 wanted you to believe the backlash to Woke 1.0 – our long-awaited racial justice reckoning – had arrived in all its glory. Everyone on your TV was wearing cowboys hats and cowboy boots. All those COVID-era TV ads with Black women and people of various sizes and shapes and sexualities were gone; in their place were strong-jawed white guys and glassy-eyed Barbies. You Are Not CrazyRejecting nihilism, some good electoral news, and a new way forward for Bad Faith TimesBad Faith TimesDenny Carter I thought of this phenomenon today when I came across a link in the Bad Faith Times discord channel – a retirement home for elder millennials – about some sort of Kid Rock concert being canceled due to a near-total lack of interest. The fella who organized the event had bought the narrative that all 350 million Americans were dying to indulge in vacuous right-wing cultural events. He believed it so unquestioningly that he spent a bunch of money that he'll never get back. That's a tough break. You hate to see it. The event was called Freedom Fest, a pro-Trump get together in Kentucky. My first thought was that maybe it's not good business to put on a concert for a president with the lowest ratings in living memory. I'm no businessman though; only a humble blogger giving his kid bad fantasy football advice. It's not that Trump's cultural acceptance was the same in 2025 as it had been in 2017 when he first stumbled into the White House. There was a brief moment in which the public seemingly accepted our first tyrant as a national savior of sorts, as an inextricable and permanent part of the national fabric. I wrote about it in November 2024, eleven days after he had somehow won. > Today we see fascist thought drifting everywhere, infecting (almost) everyone, becoming normal for an entire generation of young people who have no memory of pre-fascist America. Today it is different. Billionaire owners of major media outlets are happily bending the knee to our new fascist leader. Formerly oppositional cable news hosts are begging to kiss the ring and gain access as Trump tries to remake the United States in his monstrous image. Pro athletes are dancing like the fascist leader in moments of on-field glory, and even bowing to him before rabid throngs as they celebrate their wins. The largest social media platform on earth – owned by the richest man on earth – is now wholly dedicated to promoting our fascist leader as the savior of the United States and will push his radical, anti-democracy agenda to millions of people who will ingest propaganda without ever once questioning it. I’m old enough to remember that this was not the case in 2016. ... Young men now see Trump as their last, best chance to undo the gains made by women that have threatened men’s place in the hierarchy of domination, to bring the promised violence and retribution of Gamergate to federal policymaking. That was not so eight years ago. When young men go fash, democracies have a problem that can’t be easily solved. As part of a larger narrative, a cultural swing to the right would help us make sense of an election in which a deeply-flawed and widely-hated presidential candidate – a guy who had been booted from the office four years earlier – cruised to victory. How else could one explain this besides positing that Americans – especially white folks who may have held their nose and voted Biden in 2020 – had simply had enough of "woke" culture and were ready for all the rancid traditionalism Trump promised. Maybe that, combined with voters' eternal search for a president who can make things a little cheaper, could explain how the slippery insurrectionist leader could slither his way back into power. Nothing Stands In Your Way When You’re A BoyYoung men becoming increasingly right wing are a problem that has to be solved before it’s too lateBad Faith TimesDenny Carter People were asked to use proper pronouns for a couple years and they said: You've left me no choice but to plunge the country into a fascistic nightmare. As you may or may not know, I've done a lot of blogging about this weird little trick played on the American public over the past couple years, this psyop meant to convince you and me that the US had rejected "woke" – it hasn't – and made a permanent cultural lurch to the right. I've written (and thought) so much about this because I think it's important to point out the deception and to tell folks they have not lost their minds: There has been no cultural shift. -In March I wrote for Liberal Currents about the vast and coordinated fakery of conservative cultural events, including the pathetic right-wing Super Bowl halftime show with the aforementioned Kid Rock. No one watched it; you wouldn't know it by coverage of the show. -Back in February I wrote for the Courier newsletter about Super Bowl ads designed to reflect our (made-up) cultural embrace of a right-wing aesthetic. Mostly I blame Billy Bob Thornton. -Way back in September 2025 I got mad about Ram Truck TV ads and blogged about the ludicrous propaganda meant to convince you that Americans had finally come around to embracing Trump as daddy. It's all bullshit, of course. That never matters though. _Follow Denny Carter on_ BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social

Fascism's success is based on its adjustment to and exploitation of liberal democracy

In this post-literate age, where no one reads and no one knows about what came before them, there exists a maddening tendency among our elites – those yanking the levers of power up and down according to the instructions of those who fill their checking accounts – to see every problem as unprecedented and intractable. With every challenge to American democracy comes a flurry of panicked questions: How can this challenge to our republic be countered? What can be done to stop these bad actors who refuse to recognize as legitimate our democratic system of checks and balances? The answer, more often than not, is to tell people to Vote Even Harder. Maybe then the bad actors will see the error of their ways, fall in line, and play by our rules. > **I appreciate the folks who support BFT.** Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip**!** After all, you voted so hard. They can’t deny the vigor of your voting. That, we say, would be wrong. Begging decent people to vote every four years in favor of self governance and against anti-democracy forces funded by men with bottomless money pits is no way to defend and safeguard democracy or the institutions that enforce it and perpetuate it. Nothing pro-democracy politicians and organizations have done in the United States over this past disorienting decade is sustainable. A country cannot have a major political party that seeks to dissolve its democracy in a vat of battery acid. A country cannot swing back and forth between a center-left technocratic party and a vicious autocratic party that has allied with authoritarians and capitalists across the world in pursuit of a world free from the modest restraints of democracy. A Makeover For 21st Century FascismA woman can’t be a fascist. Just ask Elon Musk.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Leaders in Canada and Europe (and elsewhere) have recognized this. Functional democracies are sick and fucking tired of America’s refusal to defend its democracy. It’s why the reputational damage of this second Trump regime will be permanent. If enemies of democracy are allowed to participate in your democracy, the world has said, then you’re on your own. Good luck maintaining sufficient dopamine levels in a collapsing empire. Here’s the thing about elites and powerbrokers in the US throwing up their hands and saying the only thing we can do to save democracy is win every election for the rest of eternity: It doesn’t have to be this way. Other countries – maybe not superpowers, but big nations with lots of people – have looked for ways to defend their democratic republics from those who have no interest in upholding that system of governance. Leaders of the Brazilian government, after beating back a broad-base autocratic movement in 2022, have forcefully pushed back against the Trump regime’s bad-faith efforts to undermine its upcoming elections, as one example. Elected Brazilian leaders see autocratic forces lining up at their gates, doing their best to hide their fangs, asking if they can just take a quick peak inside, and they have said no, get the fuck out of here. It’s respectable. I’m jealous. A look back at (relative) recent history can show us that democracy does not have to be a defenseless punching bag for its enemies (mostly people who will do anything in service of capital’s always-expanding and all-consuming logic). There is, it turns out, a militant form of democracy that not only recognizes bad-faith actors looking to kill it, but bars them from the chance to strike a republic-ending deathblow. ### 'Democracy must deny its enemies the democratic privileges' Most of my Bad Faith Times blogging over the past four years can be boiled down to one basic and frightening question: Can a democracy defend itself against bad-faith politics, or is bad-faith politics and legalism the One Weird Trick for torching self governance and replacing it with authoritarian rule, complete with the window dressing of meaningless elections? Maybe the most vexxing aspect of the past decade of fascist political domination in the US is the fascsists’ ability to speak the language of democracy. Sometimes they slip and say what they mean, but mostly they are disciplined in talking the talk of small-d democrats. One example: When the fascist movement needs to make the electoral environment more favorable for their cause, its representatives on the land’s highest court make it so while feigning allegiance to the constitutional order. As loyal BFT readers know, their familiarity with how to talk like a democracy backer – their wearing of a small-d democrat mask – makes it exceedingly difficult to wake normies to the existential threat they represent to the very idea of self governance. A Fuzzy TotalitarianismThe total incoherence of fascism is its greatest strengthBad Faith TimesDenny Carter This mask wearing and the potential use of democratic norms to destroy democracy is what worried German political leaders, philosophers, and intellectuals in the years after the Third Reich’s fall. Politically and culturally, nothing remained; the slate was clear. There was a chance, German liberals knew, to establish a version of democratic self rule that could not be so easily hacked by those determined to destroy it. They would have a shot to create a form of self governance complete with safeguards that hadn’t existed the last time they needed it. What these small-d German democrats envisioned was a system of self rule with a defense. “[Democracy] must become militant,” German constitutional lawyer Karl Loewenstein wrote in 1946, a year after the end of World War II, the trauma of a massacred democratic order still fresh in the minds of Germans who had enjoyed a thriving liberal democracy for years and years before Hitler’s rise and German political elites' capitulation to the bad man. Democracy, Loewenstein said, needed a defense, and that defense could only take one form: Excluding political groups and movements that sought to undermine or end democratic self rule. > "[Democracy's] principles and institutions need conscious legislative protection against its internal enemies. Antidemocratic propaganda may still be protected by freedom of political opinion, but only as long as it abstains from consolidating itself into an organization for the attainment of its aims. … Political democracy can no longer tolerate political groups, parties, movements whose admitted and implied aim is to annihilate it. The inescapable lesson of the past is that political democracy must rigorously deny its enemies the democratic privileges." Democracy's inherent willingness to let anyone play its game and let anyone bye for power, Loewenstein argued, all but ensured democracy's death. Though he didn't use this kind of language, Loewenstein seems to understand that (non-militant) democracy relies on everyone operating in good faith, saying what they mean, being honest about their aims and goals for a government and its people. Loewenstein, after watching Germany's liberal democracy crumble with hardly any resistance, rejected these impossible standards for a functioning democratic republic. Expecting good-faith angels to do fair and reasonable political battle, Loewenstein implied, was dangerously naive. Democracies should not be made to sign their own death warrants, he argued. And no democratic republic could (or should) rely on a "common front" defense of the system in which anti-fascist parties coalesce and defeat the fascists at the ballot box over and over again. Loewenstein, after all, had seen more moderate center and center-left parties refuse to team up with far-left and communist parties while the Nazis gradually gained power and influence in German politics. The people, he said, could not rely on the "common front idea" as a final safeguard against anti-constitutional forces taking charge. > “Totalitarian dictatorship arose not because of the satanic power of superior leaders – after all, genius is limited in numbers even among the strong men of our period – but because a lenient and generous liberal democracy granted the same political rights to movements, parties, and persons that were admittedly anti-democratic as to those faithful to democratic principles.” > [Fascism] could be victorious only under the extraordinary conditions offered by democratic institutions. Its success is based on its perfect adjustment to democracy. Democracy and democratic tolerance have been used for their own destruction. Under cover of fundamental rights and the rule of law, the anti-democratic machine could be built up and set in motion legally. Calculating adroitly that democracy could not, without self-abnegation, deny to any body of public opinion the full use of the free institutions of speech, press, assembly, and parliamentary participation, fascist exponents systematically discredit the democratic order and make it unworkable by paralyzing its functions until chaos reigns. They exploit the tolerant confidence of democratic ideology that in the long run truth is stronger than falsehood, that the spirit asserts itself against force. Democracy was unable to forbid the enemies of its very existence the use of democratic instrumentalities. Until very recently, democratic fundamentalism and legalistic blindness were unwilling to realize that the mechanism of democracy is the Trojan horse by which the enemy enters the city. To fascism in the guise of a legally recognized political party were accorded all the opportunities of democratic institution. "Fascism simply wants to rule," Loewenstein wrote, echoing the words of Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, who described fascist movements of his time as a "fuzzy" kind of totalitarianism with no real goals beyond power and domination. This would have sounded foreign to Americans ten years ago. Today it sounds terribly familiar. Democracies are legally bound to allow the emergence and rise of anti-parliamentarian and anti-democratic parties under the condition that they conform outwardly to the principles of legality and free play of public opinion," Loewenstein wrote. "It is the exaggerated formalism of the rule of law which under the enchantment of formal equality does not see fit to exclude from the game parties that deny the very existence of its rule." If the main principle of democracy is "the notion of legality," then fascist parties that seize power via democratic means "officially annex legality," he continued. This lies at the heart of bad-faith politics. This concept of a militant democracy was baked into Germany's Basic Law, which allows the government to take preemptive steps against political parties that seek an end to constitutional rule. It's why the current German government is monitoring and surveilling the fascist party known as Alternative for Germany as it makes electoral gains with financial backing from international fascist leader Elon Musk. Ethnically cleansing the country, as AfD leaders have talked about for years, is not exactly in line with upholding constitutional rights. Fascism’s False Promise of RevolutionThe fascist call for revolution is, by default, in bad faith.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Under German law, if a party “seeks to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany” and takes an "actively belligerent, aggressive stance vis-à-vis the free democratic basic order," party leaders can be legally monitored by the state. If these conditions are satisfied – as determined by the country's nonpartisan Federal Constitutional Court – and it's determined that the party could conceivably achieve its "anti-constitutional" aims, the party is banned from local and national elections. It's happened a few times in German history, mostly in the years after World War II with the embers of fascism still burning in parts of Europe. Banning anti-constitutional parties in Germany isn't a slam dunk though; there are durable safeguards to booting parties from elections for political reasons. The Federal Constitutional Court has ruled twice in the 2000s _not_ to ban a far-right party known as NPD because the court determined NPD – a small, unpopular fringe party – had no viable path to gaining power. It posed no threat to the constitutional order; its leaders were allowed to keep shouting into the void about immigrants and Jews and whoever else they hate. There are, it turns out, a bunch of options for militarizing democracy against its many enemies, people who understand exactly how to slice open the system's soft underbelly and let it bleed out. In the US we have a racist former game show host who understood in his marrow how to turn a 250-year-old republic against itself. Then one day, four years after accidentally winning the presidency, this racist game show fella tried to violently overthrow the U.S. government, and while there were some hopeful efforts to ban him from further participation in the system he sought to destroy, the captured institution we call the Supreme Court neutered those efforts and left the country defenseless against its greatest enemy and the anti-constitutional movement he leads. The land's highest court said the insurrectionist could slice at democracy's underbelly as much as he wanted. There is no limit to the damage he can do, they ruled. That's his right in a democracy. _Follow Denny Carter on_ BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social_._

It’s all abuse, all the way down. If, after eighteen months of the Trump regime pillaging the United States and selling it for parts, you still don’t see the regime’s officials as one, big, collective domestic abuser, perhaps a little analysis of the president’s yearlong tantrum over control of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will help you see what is not even hidden. > **I appreciate the folks who support BFT.** Consider subscribing, or leaving a tip**!** The president at his core is an abuser. His defining political moment – admitting on camera that he forces himself on women because he’s rich and famous and women have no recourse against rich and famous men – led to one of the country’s two major political parties going all in on abuse as a governing principle, as the centerpiece of how they do business. And so today, in this sixth year of his presidency, the people of the United States are abused by the lawless president and his lawless sycophants, who view most Americans not as fellow citizens but as an enemy population in need of conquering and subjugating. The same head of state who has urged his political and business allies to just go ahead and take other countries’ resources – namely the oceans of oil underneath Venezuela – has been clear about the fate of the Kennedy Center, which he wanted to use as his personal party venue, as the most powerful interior decorator and cocktail party host in world history. It Feels Like An OccupationEvery facet of American life is being taken over by people who recognize no limits on their power or reachBad Faith TimesDenny Carter The president has said in both legal documents and public statements that if he can’t have the Kennedy Center, no one can. It is his or it dies. His approach to control of the Center is indistinguishable from a jealous, rage-filled husband who tells his fearful wife that she will cease to exist if she leaves him, that her choice is him or the void. This is the president’s proposal to the Kennedy Center board. One day it will be his final proposal to the Republican Party. There’s a load of bad faith in this whole Trump-Kennedy Center battle. The president and the stooges he appointed to run the Kennedy Center are feigning great concern about the condition of the place. They post pictures and videos purporting to show parts of the building faltering or falling off. They might even be running forklifts into the building to hurry its collapse. They say in one voice: We have no choice but to shut down the Center and maybe even tear it down completely because it’s in such shitty shape. What they don’t say is that the president has illegally withheld hundreds of millions in congressionally-approved Kennedy Center renovation spending – a small part of the Article I crisis in which we have lived for more than a year and a half. It’s Not OKYoung guys have to be held accountable by men. It’s our responsibility, for better or worse.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter The president and his Kennedy Center board appointees, gleefully licking the tyrant's shit-covered boots, have told a judge (in bad faith) that it’s the deterioration of the Center that has forced their hand. That they’ve also said the Center would get the money to fix itself up if the president can slap his cursed name on the building seems to never enter the legal equation. The abuser in the Oval has given the Kennedy Center a choice: I own you or you get annihilated. There’s no third choice here. As always, it would be nice if a judge would call out the mountain of bad faith that has been weaponized by the regime against the Kennedy Center. Probably you don’t need clinical research to confirm that this is, in fact, abusive behavior and mindset. But just in case: Researchers who have studied abusive men who see their partners and children as property rather than human beings with feelings and agency have written extensively on the entitlement that fuels the idea that no one can have you if I can’t have you. For men like this, a partner (wife, mostly) exists only to serve him, to cater to him, to make him feel good about himself and his life. Any failure in that area is perceived by the man as a threat, according to the research. “A pathological sense of entitlement results from believing a partner should fulfill all one's needs and wishes (inflated) or that the expression of genuine needs is illegitimate (restricted),” researchers wrote in a 2021 paper, Refining the Assessment of Entitlement in Romantic Relationships. To Be Insulted By These Fascists Is So DegradingIt’s no game.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Another group of researchers in the early 2000s who sought to create a Relational Entitlement and Proprietariness Scale concluded that “relational proprietariness and entitlement have been related to partner violence following the threat of relationship dissolution,” adding that a threat from a “third party” was often enough to trigger the abusive behavior. We, the American public as represented by the precious few good-faith actors helping to run the Kennedy Center, are the third party in the president’s aggressive push to dominate or destroy the performing arts building. Poisoned by his father with fear and hate, the president has spent his entire adult life making the world feel his pain, for pain that is not addressed and processed and transmuted is spread to others. For a long time the president’s pain distribution was isolated to those who stupidly did business with the conman and the women who came in and out of his orbit. There are publicly-available accounts of how he has abused women and girls as a show of domination, for no other reason beyond being able to hurt or humiliate another person because you can, because the law does not apply to you in a country where justice is always for sale, where rich men do not face consequences unless – and only unless – they have wronged other rich men. Ten years ago he set out to distribute his pain to everyone, everywhere, all the time. No more individualized pain; it was time for everyone to get some. Many who supported him before he conquered the Republican Party recognized the pain within him, for they were in pain themselves, and now a celebrity – a famous man who pretends to be rich – was giving them full permission to make others feel their pain. He pledged, once in power, to begin a nationwide campaign of pain distribution – a little bit for everyone they hate: The immigrants, the queers, the Muslims and Jews, the women – especially the girlbosses – and the educated and the liberals and everyone else who thinks they’re better than me. All of these varied enemies would get a share of the rich man’s pain and know what it’s like to suffer. He pitched himself as vengeance for those who have decided not to transmute their pain – not to deal with it in healthy ways – but to transmit it to a society they have decided to hate. It was the perfect sales pitch for a nation of bitter, aggrieved men filled with the pain of their fathers and grandfathers. This offer – for everyone to feel their pain – was as good as love. Abuse as a core governing principle will continue until people – those with power and those without – say no, enough, this cannot continue. Cracks in the American fascist movement, which will surely become wider as the GOP's midterm armageddon nears, should finally offer some political and cultural cover for powerful institutions to stop the boot licking and to join those who have seen the regime's abusive approach to governing in saying no, enough, this cannot continue. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social

Most politics, even the kind that advocate for a fairer and freer world, is projection. Almost everything within the ugly confines of right-wing politics is projection. Every single thing JD Vance says and does is projection. That, I guess, is nakedly obvious to anyone who has followed the political career of the current vice president, a vibes-less, juiceless extension of the oligarch class and a blood-soaked handmaiden for 21st century fascism. It's become even more obvious that Vance is composed entirely of projection in recent weeks as the American conservative project works diligently to help Vance inch closer toward the center of its unreality-based universe with an eye toward a post-Trump future – a future Trump won't let them have without a fight. At the Republican Party's midterm convention this month in Texas (a midterm convention is something you have when your political project is standing on its last teetering leg) Vance said a bunch of shit that could be defined as projection. Among those statements: "Democrats can't help but to tell on themselves and reveal how much they hate the American people." This was, of course, nothing short of an admission from the vice president of an authoritarian regime that has turned the nation's immigration enforcement agencies into the president's personal paramilitary and used those forces to invade, terrorize, and occupy cities and states that do not support the regime – what NPR and ABC and CNN might call "opposition strongholds" in developing countries and authoritarian states. Vance was telling on himself. The guy who appears to not even like his own children hates American communities so much he starts pogroms against those he sees as undeserving. It was Vance – not Trump, not Stephen Miller, not Elon Musk, not any other white supremacist attached to the regime – who launched a terror campaign against Haitian families in Ohio in the months before the 2024 election. Vance took the anti-Haitian campaign from the depths of fascist message boards to the political mainstream. He plopped that hate campaign right there, before the TV cameras and the political press, and said have at it. Do your worst. And the racists and white supremacists who support Vance and his party did just that. With nothing to do but troll the regime's perceived enemies on the X platform formerly known as Twitter, Vance has been charged with tearing down Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. That's kind of Vance's thing: Telling rooms full of white folks that They – you know They – are taking away everything from their families and friends, that the pie is only so big and their slices are being ripped away by people who have made the US a "dirtier" and "poorer" place. > JD Vance: "We were tired of being called racists for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer" > > [image or embed] > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 10, 2026 at 9:31 PM Last week Vance hit on a particularly clumsy moment of projection when he said El-Sayed – a regular dude who likes football and recognizes the American left got sports in the national divorce – only wants to hand out "political favors and jobs to his favored ethnic groups. It’s about pitting racial groups against each other." JD, buddy, please listen to yourself. For just a moment stop and reflect on the words spilling out of your mouth and hear the accusations against yourself and the curdled anti-democracy movement you've chosen to support. JD, if you're reading: The regime you work for has a hotline for white men who were turned down for job openings in favor of women of people of color. Your regime tries (and fails) to ram through national education policy based on the absurdist idea that white children in the United States are oppressed by modest diversity programs. The greasy, roided-up fella in charge of the military sees it as his job to award the most prestigious positions to white men while purging women and Black men from the military's top ranks. JD Vance Is ‘Not Happy’ Renee Good Was Killed, But...The vice president is in charge of creating the bad-faith unreality in which Renee Good was a terrorist.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter It is the American right, as ever, that longs for a national spoils system for Americans they see as deserving of power or prestige and wealth. Not a single elected Democrat in the country would support a system in which only their preferred citizens reap the benefits of government and business and economic success. That is purely a Republican thing. Somewhere deep inside – maybe where his soul used to be – Vance knows this. It's necessary for a man like Vance to shun self awareness. It is essential that Vance never acknowledge the true aims of the movement he might one day lead, but instead project those aims onto his enemies. This means some part of Vance recognizes the ugliness he promotes from the lectern. He sees these aims as nasty and brutish and deeply unfair to good folks. He knows people would oppose such an agenda so he throws that agenda onto his opponents and points and says look over there at the bad man who wants what I want. Even a moment of self awareness would break this spell and end Vance's fascist cosplay and reveal him for who he is: A vacuous political grifter who will sell himself to the highest bidder, whether that's Peter Thiel or some other oligarch determined to end self governance because it is incompatible with accelerationism. The regime does not even pretend to like Americans. Rather, they feign undying love and support for their idea of what the United States should be, not what it is. Perhaps this was never more obvious than when American conservatives were uniformly apoplectic about Joe Biden bringing home WNBA Britney Griner from a Russian prison in 2022. Because for them, Griner – a Black gay woman – is not really an American. Griner is merely a representation of how their fantasies of an ethnically pure United States have curdled into multicultural, multiracial democracy. The cries of the American right wing were clear: Send her back to the Russian labor camp from which she came. JD Vance Is Worse Than You ThinkDonald Trump surprised precisely no one by reportedly listening to tech billionaires like Elon Musk and picking JD Vance to be his running mate. On its face, this was a logical pick; a rising star in the Republican Party, Senator from a supposed swing state, though Ohio is a deepBad Faith TimesAnthony Reimer They opposed the Biden administration returning Griner to her loved ones not because it required the US to free a dangerous Russian guy – that was all bad faith, naturally – but because they truly, deeply hate Americans as they exist in reality, not in their algorithmically-charged fascist fantasies and AI slop videos of a racially pure nation. Listen to the president talk about Americans and you'll hear a man who in no way identifies with Americans. He talks about American citizens as the Other, as some kind of alien race with which he's familiar but not particularly fond. The same goes for when the president talks about the Republican Party; he often refers to elected Republicans as "they" and has worked hard over the past couple months to distance himself from the party as it faces an unprecedented reckoning in the 2026 midterms (White Settlement, after all, has gone woke). It's not difficult to interpret why the president has no identification with the political party he leads: He is merely the face hugger from 1979's Alien, jamming his tentacles into the party, sucking the money and power and resources out of the dying husk of the GOP, enriching himself, and weaponizing it against constitutional governance with an approving nod from John Roberts. That was his only interest in Republican politics. There was nothing else to it. Soon he'll release his grip on the party's face and scurry away and leave it to gestate the horrors he has inserted within it. And out of the party's belly will emerge Vance, void of self awareness, soul-dead, happy to traffic hate into the political mainstream, fully formed as the normalized version of American fascism, here to stay as a presidential option in case eggs get too expensive under a Democratic administration. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social

My mom answered the phone, groggy, not quite with it, wondering what exactly I was talking about. Sitting in the parking lot of a community college about a dozen miles outside D.C., I called her that morning from the clunky flip phone my parents had given me after graduating high school four months earlier. Trying not to sound crazy and failing spectacularly, I told my mom that the radio – 99.1 WHFS, to be exact – was talking somberly about a column of smoke billowing from the Pentagon, located a couple miles from the WHFS studios. They were talking about some kind of evacuation of the World Trade Center too. They sounded frightened. Their usual boisterousness had been extinguished. > **I appreciate the folks who support BFT.** Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip**!** My mom cleared her throat and assured me everything would be fine. She told me not to worry, to get to class and focus on school. It was a few minutes later that two military jets flew low over the campus and my phone rang. It was my mom. I could hear the TV in the background. Something, she said, was happening. I wandered around campus for a while, unencumbered by real-time updates and microblogging and online misinformation, and asked people if they knew anything about what was happening. No one did, not really. One guy told me New York and LA and Chicago had been attacked. A nuke may have gone off in LA, he said as if reporting the weather. I passed one student yelling at another for saying the US deserved whatever was happening that day. They were both crying. A math professor, the color drained from his face, told a group of students – including me – that we were going to live in interesting times. Nothing had ever sounded so threatening. I didn't want to live in interesting times. I preferred the 90s. A couple weeks later I got together with some old high school friends for a birthday party. We all tried to smile and be normal and talking about anything besides the Day Something Happened. That didn't last long. Having armed ourselves with a thousand layers of millennial-flavored irony, we talked about how great it was to have the End Times kick off during our first week of college. We were coming of age during the apocalypse. I had a couple friends back then who had been _psyched_ about the end of the world for a long time, especially after a Democrat had occupied the White House for eight years. We had gone to a fire-and-brimstone Baptist high school where school leadership and teachers and everyone down to the janitors spoke gleefully about the day they would be vacuumed up into heaven, away from the atheists and gays and liberals and feminists and Muslims and everyone else who scared them. Towers falling in the most evil city on earth, according to these folks, was the beginning of the glorious end. Soon they would be living in their heavenly McMansions driving Cadillac Escalades around the golf course community Jesus Christ had secured for them when he was tortured and executed. The Warm Impermanence Of Twenty YearsIt was early August 2004 and I was watching the sun set on a remote Greek island called Chios, listening to Radiohead’s anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war album on my iPod and feeling the existential vibes of the upcoming presidential election, my first as a voter. I buzzed withBad Faith TimesDenny Carter Someone at the birthday party brought up Nostradamus and I bought the whole story without question. That old fucker had predicted this whole thing. Unfuckingbelievable. Just read what he wrote: It was all there. It was over. Life would never be the same, as the WHFS deejay had said the Day Something Happened after playing Pearl Jam's Better Man: "This feels like a final loss of innocence." Knowing nothing about politics beyond Rage Against The Machine telling me Al Gore and George W. Bush were exactly the same – something I think about sometimes as a 40-something shitlib today – I just assumed we would never stop electing people who promised revenge for that Day Something Happened. Whoever was willing to kill and torture the most people would gain power and probably never lose it. That wasn't exactly correct, I suppose, but it wasn't far off. About a year after the Day Something Happened, I started reading books written to justify the terror my country would visit upon the world, cynically using that day's dead as a permanent excuse to kill 'em all. Nothing Makes Sense AnymoreThe left owns sports. The right owns electric cars. None of it makes sense to a millennial.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter The only solution for the slaughter of innocents, these respectable foreign policy wonks wrote in sober, technocratic language, was more innocent blood. Blood for blood, piles of corpses for piles of corpses, shattered lives for shattered lives: This was the math equation. It was the only proven formula, they wrote. It was the only remaining choice. Iran, Iraq, it didn't matter. We'd put a boot up their ass, as the song said. A hundred little wars. I recall that proposal in The Washington Post in the aftermath of the Day Something Happened. We were the victims now, and victims can do anything they want. Victimhood justifies everything. Each of these one hundred wars would be for Our Security, to topple elected leaders who would not run their governments exactly how we wanted them to. This, naturally, would require more money for the Death Machine, and in those days and the days to follow that was no problem because everyone was scared – so scared – and more than willing to feed the Death Machine whatever it wanted if it meant preventing another Day Something Happened. There were a few people who said it wasn't a good idea to feed the Death Machine our constitutional rights because you usually don't get those back once they're eaten. But many, many more people told those constitution enjoyers to shut the entire fuck up and swore to God that the Death Machine would never do anything to harm us, that the Death Machine does not lie and has never lied. All it was requesting was sustenance for the mission ahead. How, they screamed, could we deny it proper sustenance? And basically everyone we had elected to represent us went along with the plan to feed the Death Machine until it was full and ready to do what needed to be done. A quarter century later the Death Machine remains ravenous. Even the people who were once perfectly OK with satiating it are wondering why it's still asking for money and people and our rights. There were a few voices in the wilderness in the months and years after the Day Something Happened that warned our leaders and the media charged with informing that one day, when the Death Machine was bloated and bored and controlled by a man who would not recognize limitations on his power, it would be turned upon us. All the photos and videos of civilians in faraway places running in terror and picking up pieces of their loved ones and wailing over dead children and wives and husbands – that would all come home one day. And we said no, that can't happen. The Death Machine can only hurt people in other places. Not us. Not here. Sure, it promised to deliver justice and vengeance and the rivers of blood that come with it, but those rivers will always flow in deserts and villages elsewhere, on our TVs, on our phones. There will never be a blood river in the American suburbs. There will never be occupation here. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social

After an explicitly fascist German political party open about its ethnic-cleansing plans became the first far-right party to claim a state-based majority since the Nazi era, the party's leaders thanked the world's richest man for his material and political support, and everyone went about their day. Everyone kept driving the rich man's cars and using the rich man's social media website. Everyone kept ignoring the rich man's incompatibility with representative democracy. > **I appreciate the folks supporting BFT.** Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip**!** The Alternative For Germany (AfD) this weekend came real fucking close to claiming an outright majority in the East German state Saxony-Anhalt, in case you were just living your life and not sweatily tracking the latest developments in the rise of international fascism. The AfD receives support from Elon Musk, the moneyman for international fascism who also happens to operate the nerve center of American politics, along with other billionaires who are so bored by their wealth that they've decided to use their riches to destroy the world. The AfD, as Bad Faith Times readers might recall, is an important test case in the remaking of fascism, especially the European flavor. The party, quite naturally, is steeped in bad faith. Its backers – including Musk – point to the party's leader, a gay woman married to an immigrant, and say look: She's nothing like a 20th century fascist. Alice Weidel is not dressed in military garb. She's not goose-stepping around Germany barking from lecterns about cleansing the fatherland of the subhuman termites who have washed up on its shores. In no way does Weidel, they say, fit the popular conception of a fascist leader. She's a lady, for Christ's sake! And yet, she is. The party she leads is nightmarishly clear about what it wants to do after seizing power, either locally or nationally. The AfD wants to end immigration from developing countries, which happen to be populated by black and brown human beings, many of them hungry of jobless and desperate, fleeing to more stable European countries. The AfD is among the world leaders in mainstreaming the idea of re-migration, or forcing non-German natives to go back to where they come from, even if they've never lived anywhere but Germany. People who are considered culturally incompatible with Germany would be removed from the country under re-migration. I'll leave it to your imagination as to how this mass removal would be achieved. Read a little bit about re-migration and the words of the fascist rock star from Pink Floyd's The Wall might ring in your head: "Would you like to send our colored cousins home again?" A Makeover For 21st Century FascismA woman can’t be a fascist. Just ask Elon Musk.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Bad faith – claiming to mean what you do not mean – is vital to any successful anti-democracy party of movement. I've spent a lot of time and written a lot of words about why this is the case and whether there's anything a good-faith small-d democrat can do about it. I'm still looking powerfully into a final answer on the matter. In the case of the AfD – the vampire that JD Vance has told mainstream German political parties to allow into their homes – the bad faith is two-fold: Its leaders and supporters claim the party is only filling a space traditionally occupied by mainstream conservative parties that have failed to deliver, and that its stance on immigration is not any different from other right-wing parties in Europe and across the world. They know these twin claims are not true. In no way do traditional conservative parties in Germany or other parts of Europe support the government-backed kidnapping and removal of anyone it considers "culturally incompatible." This sort of ethnic cleansing rhetoric has always existed in one form or another, but it has been restricted to the sidelines of European politics since, you know, such words and policies tore apart the continent less than a century ago. I listened in total horror the other day as an AfD official shouted down a BBC interviewer, refusing to accept the interviewer's premise that the fascist AfD was somehow different from more normalized right-of-center political parties. It didn't seem to matter that the BBC reporter destroyed her arguments. It never does with fascists, I suppose. JD Vance Wants Europe To Let The Vampire EnterThe Trump administration is pushing for an end to Germany’s political firewall, which must remainBad Faith TimesDenny Carter It was clear after a while that this AfD mouthpiece knew she was lying. She was well aware that her party represented a massive departure from "normal" conservative politics in Germany. That didn't stop her from portraying AfD as an everyday right-wing coalition. Musk, for his part, spent the weekend spreading the bad-faith claim that AfD was just a normie conservative party that wanted the best for the hard-working people of Germany who think all their problems could be solved with a little ethnic cleansing. The other part of the AfD's bad faith recipe – that forced removal of black and brown families from Germany is quite normal and mainstream – is important because it's meant to whip the political press into submission. This talking point is designed to create an unquestioned narrative that the Real Problem for Germany and other western nations is out-of-control immigration (it's why fascists like Musk make an international story out of every crime committed by an immigrant). This, I think, is how the Trump regime's "crackdown" on immigration has been framed as something within the bounds of small-d democratic discourse and politics. It's not. It shouldn't be, anyway. But now it is thanks to a feckless, compliant media that has no interest in telling its viewers and readers that good and bad things are not, in fact, the same. So when Musk posts to the X platform formerly known as Twitter that "only AfD can save Germany," the question must be asked: From whom is the AfD saving the country? Who, exactly, is the threat that must be neutralized? You know that answer. So do I. Everyone does. And yet it's hardly ever said _explicitly_ in coverage of the fascist threat funded by the guy who has more money than anyone. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social

In an era of rising authoritarianism and elite compliance with the first U.S. president to openly ignore the constitutional order, there was a prophetic voice in the far-right wilderness, one that had for years whispered sweet tyrannical nothings into the authoritarians' ears. That whiny voice belonged to Curtis Yarvin, the tortured fascist philosopher and unembarrassed monarchist who has helped move authoritarianism from the wicked fringes of the internet into the beating heart of Republican Party politics over the past few years. He took one look at the careerist stooges running the second Trump regime and he knew there would be no long game. Yarvin knew the president and the people charged with carrying out his grossly anti-constitutional agenda – with timely assists from the anti-constitutionalist Supreme Court – would not Get The Job Done. These people had neither the historical knowledge nor the will to destroy the underpinnings of American democracy and deliver the final body blows to the country's weakened institutions. This regime, Yarvin understood, was cosplaying 20th century fascist movements. They were not for real. They still aren't. BFT Podcast: America’s Leading Monarchist Seems UnwellCurtis Yarvin refuses to say what he means.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter I take a lot of pleasure imaging Yarvin watch in real-time horror as the president, given the full and horrifying power of the unitary executive – that thing where a Republican president can do whatever he wants and stands above the law – renamed Lake Ontario as a childish jab at Canada after its leaders would not bow to him in trade talks. This, like much of what the president has done from his phone over the past 18 months, is a child's conception of power. It is the natural endpoint of an American conservative movement that has demonized intellectualism for more than half a century. It is in no way an Adult Thing To Do. The fancy bottles of wine in Yarvin's home were in great peril the day Trump's anti-Canada tantrum ended with the existence of something Google is calling Lake America. RIP Yarvin's French merlot. You had a good run. Way back in October 2025, I asked Bad Faith Times readers to take in Yarvin's blogging screed against the Trump regime and remember it during whatever came next. That's because Yarvin, along with a few other far-right thinkers, knew within weeks of Trump's swearing in that his people were not ready or willing to do what had to be done to end democracy. There would be no rounding up the judges who might rule against the regime's agenda. There would be no camps for political opponents. There would be no sustained effort to scare high-profile Democratic Party elected officials or to effectively defund the party. There would be no long-lasting terror campaign against opposition strongholds like the one we witnessed in Minnesota. > Triggering the libs by shipping in some white South Africans and hunting Latino folks for sport in the streets of Portland and LA and D.C. and Chicago isn’t going to establish the kind of 1,000-year monarchy for which Yarvin pines. Snatching innocent people off the street and sending them to third-world death camps might be a good time for the masked blackpilled fascists operating above the law – everything they know about fascism they learned from scrolling on the X platform – but this will in no way be a kill shot for multicultural democracy, Yarvin believes. This is not the overwhelming show of force required in a nation of 350 million people. > "The second Trump revolution, like the first, is failing," Yarvin wrote. "It is failing because it deserves to fail. It is failing because it spends all its time patting itself on the back. It is failing because its true mission, which neither it nor (still less) its supporters understand, is still as far beyond its reach as algebra is beyond a cat. Because the vengeance meted out after its failure will dwarf the vengeance after 2020—because the successes of the second revolution are so much greater than the first—everyone involved with this revolution needs a plan B for 2029. And it is not even clear that it can wait until 2029: losing the Congress will instantly put the administration on the defensive." This Is Not What Winning Looks LikeThe Trump regime’s online posting reveals the emptiness of its causeBad Faith TimesDenny Carter In Yarvin's ideal authoritarian nightmare world, the president would not have even considered renaming Lake Ontario in his economic war against our northern neighbors. He would have instead met with his top military brass and set in motion a full-scale invasion of Canada, or perhaps send ground troops to occupy a Canadian city until the country's leaders were ready to make a deal with the senile mob boss in the Oval Office. Force would have been the answer; not changing the name of a lake. In Yarvin's world, the coming midterm apocalypse would be no issue at all for the ruling party, which has done everything in its power to ratfuck the election they will still lose soundly. In Yarvin's world, the president – maybe with another assist from the bad-faith actors that dominate the land's highest court – would simply cancel the midterm elections or delay them indefinitely. In Yarvin's world, there is no reason to fret over bad polling data that spells small-d democratic doom for the authoritarian party because in his world, there is no reason to abide by the rules and norms that have created and sustained the American empire. > Curtis Yarvin's red pill moment was falling for the bogus swift boat ratfuck against John Kerry in fall 2004. What an incredible loser. > > [image or embed] > > — Denny Carter (@dennycarter.bsky.social) June 20, 2025 at 9:12 AM Yarvin wrote last year that the president and the officials who filter in and out of his regime "cannot even imagine what winning looks like." This was spot on back then, and it's even more accurate today. Winning, for an outright authoritarian party that has nothing but contempt for democracy and the rule of law, means removal of the mechanisms pro-democracy forces have to compete against the regime and eventually overthrow it. In a twisted way, Yarvin's definition of winning means there is no game at all. The game is ended by those who believe they are the rightful winners, by virtue of their race or gender or intellect. The "renaming" of Lake Ontario is some mix of stupid and maddening. It's not winning though. The fascist freaks who tell the tyrants and oligarchs what they want to hear know as much. Remember that next time your brain begs you to enter doomer mode. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.

If you drill down into the very core of the Democratic Party establishment and you keep drilling and keep drilling until you’re at the molten center, there you’ll find Jim Clyburn, smiling, soft spoken, defining what is and is not possible for the party and doing his king-making thing for the party’s presidential hopefuls. A congressman since the early 90s representing a South Carolina congressional district that includes the majority-Black precincts in and around Columbia and Charleston, you may remember Clyburn from recent wars for the soul of the Democratic Party such as the 2020 presidential race, when Clyburn joined the rest of the party’s establishment in rallying around Joe Biden as the only path to beating back Bernie Sanders’ nightmare vision of a more free and fair United States in which everyday folks get to have a sliver of dignity. Clyburn’s Biden endorsement got the job done, all but guaranteeing a second Trump term. > ** _Become a_** Bad Faith Times supporter**_today and get access to_** BFT videos**_and the BFT discord channel._** You may know Clyburn as the guy who, according to reporting from ProPublica, worked closely with South Carolina Republican legislators during 2020 congressional redistricting to “dilute the state's Black vote,” creating a new congressional map that gave Democratic candidates "virtually no shot of winning any congressional seat in South Carolina other than Clyburn’s." You might also remember Clyburn as one of the congressional Democrats who pushed hard for Clarence Thomas to join the Supreme Court even after allegations of sexual misconduct had been lodged against him. Thomas, Clyburn said at the time, is a “personal and professional friend” who belonged on the land’s highest court, where he would quickly and predictably become the most virulently anti-constitutional judge in American history, a democracy hater without equal. Clyburn forcefully denied the ProPublica report on redistricting, and he said recently that he regretted pushing Thomas as a SCOTUS nominee. Nevertheless, Jim Clyburn persists. When a stodgy establishment Democrat like Clyburn – someone seemingly committed to ensuring Nothing Will Fundamentally Change – comes out with a clear-eyed proposal to fundamentally shift the US back toward liberal democracy status, it’s meaningful. That’s exactly what happened on Sunday when Clyburn, during one of those Sunday morning talk shows no one has cared about since 30 Rock was on the air, said the Supreme Court should be expanded. This U.S. Senate Candidate Wants To Fix The Rogue Supreme Court“Democrats who promise policy initiatives but don’t discuss court reform are living in a land of make believe.”Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter “I think that we are in a position now that calls for some significant actions taken by the Congress, and we ought to expand it,” Clyburn said. “Thirteen is a pretty good number; a baker’s dozen will be a good number to have on the court.” Even a hardcore establishment Democratic Party figure like Clyburn can see – finally, many years too late – that a representative democracy can’t survive with a captured institution like the Roberts Court working as an arm of the Republican Party, protecting its figureheads, ignoring decades or even centuries of legal precedent, and blocking any and all attempts to implement progressive policies as a means of crawling out of the competitive authoritarian hellhole in which we live today. Perhaps Clyburn can see that a high court that operates with such naked and weaponized bad faith can’t go unreformed if the US is ever going to stop its small-d democratic bleeding. With that (apparent) recognition, Clyburn joins Kamala Harris, another establishment figure who has endorsed the idea of 13 SCOTUS justices. It’s not enough though. Thirteen? Those are rookie numbers. You gotta pump up those numbers. Tacking on four presumably pro-constitutional justices to the Court would give liberals a slim 7-6 majority. You're saying but wait, that’s so much better than today’s 6-3 far-right supermajority. And yeah, you're right. I'd take it over what we have today. But it leaves _far_ too much wiggle room for Roberts and company to keep ratfucking the country. All it would take, as you know if you’ve done the math, is for one of the four newly seated justices to be swayed by a member of the Court’s right wing and that would be that. That would be the ballgame. > **This is where I once again ask you to check out my book, After The Great Redo. It's speculative fiction about a brighter American future, complete with an expanded and reformed SCOTUS. You can purchase the book on** Amazon**or** Bookshop.org**.** The part of the U.S. population that wants nice things that other democratic republics have – free or affordable college, healthcare, housing, pre-K, family leave, a strong floor through which (almost) no one can fall – would be sweating every single Supreme Court decision, the way we do today. The country’s path back to democracy status and the re-establishment of the rule of law – and consequences of the Trump regime’s endless crime spree – would hinge on a single Supreme Court justice over and over and over again. Pulling the plug on the American right’s vast, bad-faith cheating scheme would hinge on one SCOTUS vote, one jurist who would determine the future of American democracy time and again. That’s far too much variance and unpredictability for such high civilizational stakes. A 7-6 liberal SCOTUS majority would leave too much to chance, leaving open avenues for the right’s menacing judicial machine to keep churning in ways that puts Democrats at a perpetual disadvantage and give GOP lawmakers and candidates precious little reason to de-radicalize and fall in line with small-d democratic norms (the reason Republicans on your TV sound like Alex Jones on a particularly bad bender is because the evisceration of campaign finance laws and fair congressional districts leave no reason to moderate, no reason _not_ to sound like an absolute red-pilled freak). Imagine, if you will, a massive Democratic congressional majority (mostly) free of Republican Lite influences passing a healthcare bill that includes a public option, as they should have done with passage of the Affordable Care Act. Imagine the thrill of watching a Democratic president sign that bill into law. Imagine how happy you’d be, how invigorated, how relieved you’d be that good and bad things are not, in fact, the same. Now imagine three or six or nine months later when the expanded Supreme Court takes up the constitutionality of the nation’s new healthcare law, and imagine the bile rising in your throat and the sweat forming on your brow when you get the push notification: SCOTUS has ruled against the law in a 7-6 vote. It's dead. It's gone. The Numbers Say Democrats Aren’t Ready To Play HardballDemocratic Party leaders are going to have to level with their supporters about expanding the Supreme Court.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Millions of working class and middle class families would have finally had access to real healthcare paid for with tax increases on dudes with three yachts and a palatial underground bunker from where they will restart society if or when the nukes start flying. Democrats’ chance to tell working Americans that they gave them their healthcare – not Republicans – would be gone. A shining example of what can happen when public servants are elected to high office – not oligarchal criminals – would vanish in an instant. One vote. A single vote. That’s all it took. It would hit you all at once: Adding just four justices to John Roberts' Cursed Court was a mistake. So no, thirteen Supreme Court justices is not enough. Maybe 15 or 17 or even 21 justices would do the trick, along with strict term limits and maybe even alternating SCOTUS appointment schedules. Not thirteen though. Again: Those are rookie numbers. Back in 2018, Jacob Hale Russell, a professor at Rutgers Law School, laid out an eminently reasonable argument for why Democrats and the party's base were thinking too small when it comes to expansing the Supreme Court and counterbalancing the Court's anti-constitutional forces. > The battle over court packing is being fought on the wrong terms. Americans of all political stripes should want to see the court expanded, but not to get judicial results more favorable to one party. Instead, we need a bigger court because the current institutional design is badly broken. The right approach isn’t a revival of FDR’s court packing plan, which would have increased the court to 15, or current plans, which call for 11. Instead, the right size is much, much bigger. Three times its current size, or 27, is a good place to start, but it’s quite possible the optimal size is even higher. This needn’t be done as a partisan gambit to stack more liberals on the court. Indeed, the only sensible way to make this change would be to have it phase in gradually, perhaps adding two justices every other year, to prevent any one president and Senate from gaining an unwarranted advantage. A much larger Supreme Court, Hale Russell argued, would be "more comparably sized to our federal circuit courts" and rid the country of "the influence of a single swing voter" like Anthony Kennedy or Sandra Day O’Connor – someone charged with the final say in empire-shifting legal decisions. Making SCOTUS three times bigger, Hale Russell charged, would effectively destroy the anti-democratic Major Questions Doctrine that has given a distinct and long-held advantage to right-wing activists and attorneys whose life goal is to repeal the 20th century. Weaponized Colorblindness Killed The Voting Rights ActThe Supreme Court’s conservative justices seem to be asking why we don’t have a White History MonthBad Faith TimesDenny Carter "The framers," Hale Russell wrote, "would be appalled by the degree to which we have abdicated responsibility for the constitution to a small, homogenous, unelected group. We should be appalled too." Republicans stealing Antonin Scalia’s open seat and Ruth Bader-Ginsberg’s history-changing decision to remain on the Court have put pro-democracy forces in a deep fucking hole – far too deep for a single SCOTUS justice to be a swing vote on whether we continue our competitive authoritarian path or reverse course and push back against the plutocratic plot to end American democracy in every meaningful way. If Democrats ever decide to expend the entirety of their political capital on the Only Thing That Matters – expanding (and reforming) SCOTUS – it can't be a half-assed plan. Either do the thing or don't do it, but don't recreate a high-stakes legal scenario in which one swing vote on the Court is all that matters. That is no way to maintain a vibrant democracy that can defend itself against bad-faith actors. Saving the Supreme Court has to be bolder than that; it has to leave no avenues for the American right to continue its dominance of our politics. None. Zero. So no, a baker's dozen is not a good number, Jim Clyburn. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.

Graham Platner's disgraced campaign illustrated the problems of class dealignment

If we know anything about Elon Musk, we know he is guided by unshakable fairness and justice. We know the richest man alive sees everyone – no matter their race, ethnicity, or creed – is fully deserving of respect and dignity. Musk values all human beings equally. In this way he is exactly like an extremely online Jesus Christ with a trillion dollars at his disposal. > Subscribe to Bad Faith Times**for free or support BFT with $3 or $5 per month and join the BFT Discord** Wait. No. I was thinking of someone else. Musk is the titular head of the international fascist movement who has used his enormous resources and online presence to advance white supremacy across the western world, the guy who has transformed Twitter into a fascist radicalization machine. You may know Musk as the guy who most recently appeared to endorse a call to execute migrants coming to Europe for jobs and food and water, things of that nature. Based. So when Musk pushes himself into the debate over how society should handle the unprecedented scam that is artificial intelligence and says with the confidence of a child that "universal high income" is the answer, we can be sure the man is operating in eye-watering bad faith. That's way worse than normal bad faith; if your eyes are watering, you know the faith is particularly bad. Musk is not alone in the absurdist belief that AI acceleration will create a world in which humans no longer have to toil. We will all be free to reap the magical benefits of the machine slaves we create to do the work we used to do. You'll finally get the chance to paint or draw or write or walk around in the woods and listen to the chirping birds and the slices of silence between those chirps. Our future AI utopia will allow you to be fully human, not just a worn-out cog in the capitalist machine. This is the big selling point of AI scammers who have borrowed a million trillion dollars in hopes that AI is a real thing and not one big trick played on the entire world. "AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation," says the fascist carnival barker who has never been right about anything. Unleashing AI – a technology our tech overlords need you to equate with humanity – "will mean everyone can have a penthouse if they want. The output of goods and services will be several orders of magnitude higher than today's economy." Learning To Live With Elon Musk’s DepressionOne man’s mood should not determine the course of human eventsBad Faith TimesDenny Carter I have a question, as you probably do. Does Musk know that "universal" means "everyone"? Maybe he does, and maybe the idea of a high universal income for people whose jobs have been displaced by robots programmed by far-right Silicon Valley chuds can fit with Musk's politics. If certain people – namely black and brown people – don't qualify as fully human, then a universal income for humans Musk considers people can work. We have at least some reason to believe this is the way the South African billionaire views the world: He recently denied that his DOGE-led coup of the U.S. government in 2025 has led to a single death, when in fact it has led to hundreds of thousands, according to rough estimates, with no end in sight. Under Musk's fascist logic, there would be about three dozen white South African settlers who qualify for this imaginary high universal income. We can safely dismiss Musk's calls for a universal income as incompatible with his twisted, soul-sick worldview, animated by the continued dominance of the white race in the United States and across Europe. Probably he pushes the concept of a "high" universal income to play the part of the technocratic problem solver – a reputation he enjoyed before cooking his brain on the internet and taking up the cause of his white supremacist grandfather. Big media outlets, desperate for Musk to resume his role as the car-and-rocket guy who just wants the best for the human race, will happily report on his online ramblings about ways to address AI-driven societal upheaval without seeing such proposals through the lens of the violent white supremacy for which Musk advocates all day every day on the X platform. His laughable calls for universal income should be seen for what they are: A massive pile of bad-faith shit shoveled into mainstream discourse by the guy who owns and operates the nerve center of American politics. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.

There is real power in saying no to a bad-faith questioner.

The guy hated Trump in his marrow. It wasn't that he opposed this or that part of the heinous Trump regime agenda, or that he took issue with how the president talks about people he doesn't consider fully human. He had real disgust for the man. When he talked about the president, he spat more than he spoke. I was talking to this Trump-hating fella a few weeks ago when the power of bad faith and false choices hit me like a brick to the back of the dome. Our conversation had started around golf – I like golf, I'm sorry, I know it's a problematic favorite – and went from there. I found out this guy is Canadian. Born and raised in the eastern parts of the Canada, he had moved to the United States for work twenty years ago and stayed put. Our talk turned toward the coming midterms. I shared, without getting bogged down in the swamp of numbers I've written about, that I remain (very) confident in a sweeping Democratic victory. My Canadian buddy wasn't so sure. He seemed to be burdened by something he didn't want to say aloud. But after a little while and a couple more beers, he told me why he just can't envision Democrats ever winning again. "There's too much woke shit," he said. "No one wants the woke stuff. Just stick to the economy. Woke is why we're here in the first place." Everybody Loves DEI NowThe Trump regime’s efforts to undo the gains of the Civil Rights movement are shockingly unpopularBad Faith TimesDenny Carter I took a longer-than-usual sip of my beer and thought about how to respond to this insidious right-wing narrative without alienating this guy, without having him walk away from our talk thinking, no wonder these guys get their asses kicked all the time. I asked what, exactly, he meant by "woke." Like almost everyone else over these past six years, he wasn't able to give me anything resembling a clear answer. Of course transgender rights came up. Of course trans people in sports came up. There was something about white guilt mixed in. Something about the past being the past. It was a melting pot of right-wing talking points that have become unquestioningly adopted by big media outlets since the early days of the country's racial justice reckoning in 2020 – the one that happened to sweep a would-be tyrant out of power and install a Democratic governing trifecta. Finally I spoke up: There is, I said, no world in which a politician or a political movement has to choose between "woke shit" and economic matters like inflation and cost of living and energy prices. The woke shit is inextricably linked to the economic shit, I said. If a dignified life for all Americans is the goal – and my Canadian friend agreed with me on this point – then dignity must be delivered in many ways, in every way. Rights for sexual and religious and ethnic minority groups cannot exist without economic rights for you and me and everyone else, and vice versa. There has never been a time when sacrificing the rights of some led more and stronger rights for others, as Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said so eloquently last week. Sacrificed rights leads to more sacrificed rights. That's as reliable as gravity, I said. For The American Right, There’s Only One Kind Of Real WorkPutting working class support at odds with “wokeness” is the goal.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter So the whole thing is a false choice. All the right-wing pundits and Republican office holders and "based" post-left freaks who say the United States has to choose between wokeism and economic strength is lying to you. They know it's not true. They are operating in the kind of bad faith that transforms politics into a game that the left can't win. That's when I thought of an old online video, one that might hold the answer for countering and neutering bad-faith politics. ### 'I Reject Your Question' It's nice, I will say, to see folks opposed to the billionaire-funded destruction of western democracy grasp the critical role of bad faith in the whole sordid project. Perhaps the pleasure I take in this growing recognition doesn't bowl you over as a regular reader of the guy who does the Bad Faith Times newsletter. And maybe you're skeptical that there is, in fact, more people observing the American right's approach to politics in the third decade of the 21st century and identifying the bad faith that fuels everything. I don't have stats or metrics on this phenomenon; just anecdotal evidence that folks – even the relatively unengaged among us – see how easy it is to pretend to believe something as a means to an end. More and more, to borrow a Trumpian phrase, are noticing the regime's legal arguments turn to dust the second they enter a real courtroom presided over by a real judge who abides by the constitution. More and more are seeing people opposed to trans rights glom onto women's sports as a way to dehumanize trans people and delegitimize the fight for their basic rights. More and more are recognizing the utter ridiculousness of the GOP as some kind of workers party, fighting for the little guy while electing the slobbering servants of anti-democracy billionaires to high office. Part of this burgeoning recognition of bad-faith politics is the realization that no amount of good-faith politics can effectively counter it. Being decent, being clear-eyed, being principled, and refusing to engage with bad faith arguments is no way to extinguish those arguments. Ignoring the right's bad faith – standing tall, chin up, against this lowly form of politics – only ensures it will continue, and even thrive. > Video in question. Let's make it viral again. > > [image or embed] > > — Oblivion (@droblivion.bsky.social) April 4, 2025 at 7:10 PM The video above went viral a couple years ago when online debate culture was at its peak, when every few days there would be another debased rhetorical battle between some right-wing grifter and well-meaning liberals trying to own that grifter with nothing but facts and logic. It was always the same old story, with the right winger taking full advantage of the liberal's actual concern for a cause or a group of people and weaponizing that care and concern against them. This video was different though. Some bad-faith operator is asking the young man in the jacket to choose between "LGBTQ rights and economic stability," which qualifies as one of the most braindead political topics/issues/arguments ever devised. The question is designed for a left/liberal loss: If you "choose" rights for LGBTQ folks over "economic stability," then you've sacrificed all the hard-working normies who believe they've been abandoned in favor of marginalized groups. If you "choose" a stable economy – whatever that means – you're abandoning a population in need of government protection and deserving of the dignity for which they are regularly denied. The whole thing is a trick. Pick option A and you lose. Pick option B and you also lose. Good luck. Pick wisely. "Why can't you have both," the guy in the jacket says. "I refuse the question." The questioner, his intellectual laziness revealed in all its glory, says no, you have to pick one or the other. "You need to pick one." "No I don't." "I just said you did." "So what," the respondent says, laughing because he knows his questioner loses as long as he holds strong and rejects the premise of the question. Bad Faith Is At The Heart of Trump’s Deportation MachineThe right wing has created a crisis in order to offer their nightmare solutionBad Faith TimesAnthony Reimer Eventually the questioner gives up, shakes hands with the jacketed guy, and walks away. His bad-faith questioning died because it was given no oxygen. It was not taken as the start of a real debate between two people operating in good faith. The premise of a society that must choose between LGBTQ rights and a strong economy was snuffed out before it could become an actual debate in the minds of the people watching the video. The young guy with the ponytail and the jacket and the ear piece became the most effective political debater of all time, simply saying no to someone whose entire goal was to create a false choice, force his opponent to make a selection, then hammer away while he stammered and backpedaled and maybe conceded that the questioner was correct, you really could only have one of these two things. Instead he took a blowtorch to the entire premise. It's something Tim Walz may have considered during his catastrophic 2024 vice presidential debate with JD Vance. When Vance – a lifelong knower of the bad-faith dark arts – proposed mass deportations of immigrants as a viable policy solution to the country's housing crisis, Walz could have been like Ponytail Guy and said you can have both: Immigration and a bolstering of housing supply designed to bring down housing costs and make home ownership more affordable for working families. Reject the premise. Deprive it of attention and legitimacy and watch Vance flail. The respondent in this terribly awkward interview seemed to understand innately the words of French political philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who said almost a century ago that fascists "delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert." If only Walz would have understood the same. The role of bad faith is so central to 21st century conservative politics that it makes Tucker Carlson's idea of a good-faith conservative party more of an elaborate joke than a serious proposal for the post-Trump era. A party that would presumably challenge the Republican Party and possibly play spoiler for the authoritarian GOP apparatus could not say what it means and gain any support from the constituencies it would require to gain a foothold in national politics. As soon as such a party spoke in good faith about its economic aims – to immiserate the working poor and to enrich those at the very top of the economic food chain – they would be rejected outright by anyone willing to give them a chance. The American Right Dared To Imagine. Now It’s Our Turn.“It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.”Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Saying something like "we don't actually care about housing costs, we just want to create a white supremacist ethnostate in which our allies have rights and our enemies have nothing," this good-faith conservative party would wither and die. Saying "our opposition to diversity programs is rooted in our belief that black and brown people are intellectually inferior to white people" would shock the conscience of a nation accustomed to its right wingers operating purely in bad faith, rarely saying the Real Thing aloud. We're about to enter a period of American politics that will present several paths to sustained Democratic power in Congress and (possibly) the White House if the current occupant doesn't barricade himself in the ballroom bunker the Supreme Court is going to let him build. Those paths could be wiped out in short order if Democrats engage with the right's bad faith – parroted by mainstream media outlets terrified of offending Republicans – with nothing but Leslie Knope-style good faith. Pro-democracy forces determined to gain power and enact republic-saving reforms in the coming years are going to face a barrage of false choices created in a thinktank lab funded by the Kochs or Peter Thiel or any number of democracy-hating billionaires. They are going to be given a choice between breathing life into the right's bad-faith political arguments or rejecting them outright, and there will be no middle ground. Any Democrat who wants to be president in 2028 should be required to watch the Ponytail Guy video on a loop, Clockwork Orange style, until they internalize the power of rejecting bad faith. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.

I don’t remember the last time polling left me quite so disoriented. To see progressive congressional candidates tapping into a boiling well of voter fury and shocking establishment Democratic Party candidates week after week ahead of the 2026 midterms, and then to pore over numbers saying Democratic voters are neither ready nor willing to take extreme democracy-saving measures makes no sense. And it fills me with dread that this moment of anti-fascist resurgence – call it Woke 2.0 if you’d like – will be for naught, just like its ultimately tragic predecessor. > **Thanks to all those who support BFT.** Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip**!** Recent polling from an outfit called Bright Line Watch measured how American voters and political scientists feel about the current state of representative democracy in the United States. The short answer: Not great. The slightly longer answer: The US nearly two years into the second term of our insurrectionist president is "closer to an illiberal democracy than a strong one" and continued Republican Party victories could cement the US as a plain old illiberal state in line with Viktor Orban's Hungary before he lost his grip on power. The good news: Seven in ten political scientists polled by Bright Line Watch said the US is "likely" to have legitimate elections beyond 2028. So we have that going for us, which is nice. What the fuck man. Falling support for reforming (expanding) the Supreme Court was the gut punch here. The naive shitlib in me would have believed that a far-right Court majority that has done everything in its power to undermine fundamental constitutional principles in service of a larger political project to nullify the progressive gains of the 20th century would draw the ire of the American public. The Roberts Court's blatantly political approach, its bullshit Major Questions Doctrine, and its war with the rest of the federal judiciary, I thought, would prove intolerable for voters who have seen a criminal president reap the benefits of the majority's anti-constitutional actions. I was wrong. That's on me, I guess. Juicing the numbers for Supreme Court expansion, like anything else in politics, is about messaging, or lack thereof. Well-meaning liberals and independent voters who have been horrified by our descent into competitive authoritarianism need to be told by Democratic leaders – especially those who plan on running for president – that _nothing_ matters if SCOTUS is not fixed. We’re Going To Need So Much Judicial ReviewThe stain of the Roberts Court must be scrubbed out of the national fabric. There’s really only one way to do that.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Democrats, if they have even a sliver of desire to make things work in whatever comes after Trump, need to say clearly and repeatedly that everything – every necessary reform, every attempt to hold regime members accountable – is linked to expanding the Supreme Court and ensuring it has a pro-constitution majority. You want Medicare For All? Guess what: You can't have it with the current Court. They'll kill it as soon as the president's ink is dry on the legislation. You want student loan forgiveness? Here's the thing: You can't have it unless the Court's Republicans are in the minority. You want to rein in the lawless paramilitary force we know as ICE? John Roberts won't let you do it. You want the criminals running the federal government today to pay for their crimes against the republic? You're not getting it if Brett fucking Kavanaugh is the swing vote. You want universal pre-K and family leave and more generous food programs and a government that regulates scammers and cracks down on white collar crime? You want a government that does not actively destroy the climate? Tough shit. You can't have any of it until and unless you force those in power to counteract the destructive right-wing SCOTUS majority. Bad Faith Times folks might recall the concept of a small-d democratic back burn, the sort of thing that's often needed to beat back an authoritarian threat that has eaten away or outright eliminated key democratic guardrails protecting civil society, free elections, and all the other shit countries take for granted until eggs get expensive and people elect a tyrant with no compunction about ignoring the constitutional order, or at least undermining it with bad-faith legal tactics (that have thankfully been snuffed out by many judges over these past eighteen months). A central part of a democratic back burn is countering authoritarian cheating – gerrymandering, in the American case – with more cheating, with more gerrymandering. Redrawing electoral maps to ratfuck Republican candidates is not what anyone would call ideal, but it is, I would argue, the only choice Democrats have left after the Roberts Court aimed its bad-faith legal canon at the Voting Rights Act and allowed Republican-majority state legislatures to implement wildly racist gerrymandered maps. Virginia Democrats did the right thing this spring and countered with their own gerrymander only to see partisan Republican jurists tell them no, only we can do that shit. Now here we are, a few months removed from a real and important back burn attempt by a Democratic state legislative majority, and Democratic voters are showing precious little stomach for the fight. I don't much care that Republican support for mid-decade gerrymanders has fallen precipitously. The idea of fair districts may be popular, but until we have a Supreme Court majority that will uphold the very basics of voting rights, a gerrymander-fueled back burn is all we have. Democrats can't shame Republicans into playing by the rules; they have to force them to play nice. What makes even less sense about declining Democratic support for expanding SCOTUS is that Democrats largely see the Roberts Court as a political actor with no interest in law and order. Two-thirds of Democratic respondents to a Marquette University poll from June said the Court's majority is motivated primarily by politics (64 percent of Republicans said the law was the Court's main motivation). So two in three Democratic Party backers see the land's highest court as a deeply compromised political actor – you might just call it a captured institution – but aren't willing to do _the only thing there is to do_ to fix the problem. Someone – hopefully many someones – in national Democratic politics is going to have to level with the party's supporters and tell them nothing is possible without first undoing Republicans' death grip on the Supreme Court. Why can't we have nice things, they might ask. Because John Roberts is in charge. That's the answer today and that will be the answer tomorrow unless Roberts' supermajority is decimated. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.

Like the rest of New York's Democratic old guard, Hakeem Jeffries has dedicated his life in public service to chasing voters who don't exist. Jeffries, in the tradition of Chuck Schumer, tailors every talking point, every policy proposal to appeal to some imaginary American voter: A somewhat conservative white person who is perfectly moderate on all issues. This voter is OK with immigration, but only some. This voter wants affordable health care without abandoning a capitalist model of delivering that care. This voter is cool with abortion in some cases but not all. This voter had no choice but to vote for Trump three times because he had to undergo HR training at work and the lady told him not to use slurs and to respect his women coworkers. Jeffries on Sunday continued chasing that imaginary (Republican) voter when he refused to commit his support to the outrageously popular Medicare For All and to abolishing the president's personal paramilitary more commonly known as ICE. He took these stances while the Republican president draws support from an extraordinarily low 18 percent of independents. There Is No Such Thing As CentrismAmericans don’t want Democrats to make policy like Republicans. They want them to fight like Republicans.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter This can make sense if you consider for a moment that the imaginary voters that live in Jeffries' head would be squeamish about these proposals. Those imaginary Americans might want a kinder, gentler deportation machine. They might want cheaper, better healthcare for them and their loved ones but not for those they consider undeserving. It's all a reminder, as I wrote back in December, that Jeffries has no grasp of our current moment or how the Democratic Party base has changed over the past 20 years. This is not the electorate that swept Democrats into power in the 2006 midterms. This is something entirely different: A party base bent on ramming through policies without a single negotiation with Republicans, one bent on vengeance for those who have ignored constitutional rule of law for the past 18 months and engaged in world-historic levels of corruption. Today's Democratic Party base is one that is (finally) finished with the niceties of Clinton-era politics. Jeffries and his ilk are playing it safe in an era where playing it safe gives the edge to your more volatile opponent. > The modern fascist movement gets stronger (and more appealing) amid greater and greater volatility, the political and societal stressors that might be called unknown unknowns. Meanwhile, modern liberalism, steeped in technocratic jargon and a self-defeating belief that good faith will win the day, is deeply fragile. Liberalism as it is today weakens (and gets less appealing) as things go sideways, as the unknown unknowns make themselves known. Liberalism has almost no resilience to the volatility that defines modern politics. Fascism thrives on it. You might say liberalism has a political/electoral floor but lacks a ceiling. The curdled conservatism we call fascism has precious little floor and a horrifying ceiling. That Jeffries has no place as the top Democrat in the House should go without saying. He belongs to a bygone era, one in which a major American political party had not transitioned into an all-out authoritarian party determined to strip representative democracy down to the studs with the help of their anti-constitutional colleagues on the land's highest court. I'm not discounting the idea that Jeffries chases these imaginary voters because he's paid handsomely to do so. He has to appeal to these so-called centrists because policies – particularly economic ones – that appeal to the real-life Democratic base would take a few dollars out of the pockets of his donors and those who fill the campaign coffers of Democratic candidates who run for office as Nicer Republicans. Jeffries and Schumer and others in the party's old guard can't acknowledge the base's shift or the imaginary voters dancing around in their heads will vanish, and they'll have no one to pitch their mealy-mouthed proposals. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.

The United States can't be saved unless SCOTUS is saved first

This morning I filled out an online survey purporting to evaluate exactly how woke I am, and while I'm not entirely upset about the results – my closest political comp is Vibes King Zohran Mamdani – I was grumpy about one particular survey result. The survey, in all its unknowable wisdom, said I was only 56 percent hope-pilled. My doomer rating was 44 percent. What the fuck, I thought. Doesn't think random online survey know I am the author of the most hope-pilled book of the Trump era, After The Great Redo? (you can check out the book on BookShop.org or Amazon or Books-a-million) Show some goddamn respect, I thought. I'm a leading delusional shitlib who offered both data-centric and anecdotal reasons for folks on Bluesky to get excited about the 2024 election. Not having learned my lesson, I continue to blog about dangerously hope-pilled numbers for the upcoming 2026 midterms. The doomers hate me more than they hate the largest protest movement in American history. I'm trying not to take the survey results personally. And I'm not mad about folks in the Bad Faith Times discord scoring higher in the hope-pilling category. Please stop calling the Newspaper and telling them I'm upset. I'm laughing, actually. I find this funny. You can quote me on that. > Subscribe to the BFT newsletter to read more! ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

As a child I knew when talk was over and I was to do what my dad told me to do: When his teeth clenched, when his jaw tightened, when his eyes narrowed. It was a wordless direction: We're doing things my way and there's nothing you can do about it. Importantly, I understood there was no point in asking for justification or reasoning. Things were going to go a certain way and there was no point in asking why. It's a model generations of boys and young men learned from their fathers. This is my house, my money, my rules, and you, dear son, are mine. You will do what you are told even if you don't understand why or how. A lot of us adjusted to this model – the authoritarian fist of parenting – and got along OK, glad we survived the My Way Or The Highway approach to parenting and moving on with the rest of our lives. Then many of us had children, and when things went sideways with those children, we used the only model we knew: Authoritarianism. We gritted our teeth like dad and flashed menacing looks like dad and maybe we yelled like dad – anything to achieve a sufficient level of fear in our children so they would not ask why we wanted things done in a certain way. The goal was unquestioned obedience and the means was intimidation and fear. We had become authoritarians like our dads and their dads and generations of men before them. Maybe you'll read this and you'll scoff because that authoritarian parenting model worked just fine with you. It made you who you are today: Strong, successful, resilient, a man. I would be wary of that little narrative, as I wrote on BFT back in June 2023. > I grew up believing there was really something to this iron-fisted approach to parenting. After all, it had worked beautifully for me. I had grown up, done all the right things, had a nice little family, made good money, and lived in various suburban homes with all the trappings of middle class life in the US. Just like my dad. And his dad. So why not apply this parenting style to my children? It was a proven winner. There are better ways to manage a family and raise kids. A few years ago on a short-lived podcast called The Dad Szn Show, I talked about one of those approaches, authoritative parenting, an alternative to the authoritarian model that doesn't let your kids off easy. There is a middle path, thankfully, mercifully. On this Father's Day I would urge every dad to recognize the miniature authoritarian monster within them, the one created and molded by years of observing their fathers and grandfathers take on the role of household dictator. For a terminally online, think of recognizing and extinguishing these impulses as praxis, as working toward a better future, not just for your children, but for their kids and their kids. Maybe they can grow up without the terror of authoritarianism that makes us all a little bit soul-sick. _Follow Denny Carter on_ BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social_._

Let's be real about why there have been – for almost a year now – thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington, D.C.: Because one of the boys who helped Elon Musk stage a coup against the United States government got wrecked by two teenagers in the nation's capital. Edward Coristine, one of Musk's more prominent DOGE hackers, otherwise known as Big Balls, was assaulted in the middle of the night last August during an alleged carjacking, and in response the Trump regime occupied D.C. with thousands of troops, many of them heavily armed. This was never meant to be a temporary measure. It is, by any definition, a permanent troop deployment within a major American city. Ten months after Big Balls was supposedly attacked by kids on a dark D.C. street in the wee hours of the morning, all of this has been normalized. It is a frog-in-boiling-water situation. It is part of our democratic decline. You Can’t Flatter Your Way Out Of FascismThanking the occupier of your city is a bad look, whatever the reason.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter The permanent National Guard deployment in Washington is a prime and infuriating example of major media outlets granting the presumption of good faith to a regime that has never even pretended to operate in good faith. Regime officials, all the way up to the president himself, say they occupied Washington to address an unprecedented crime wave the likes of which we've frankly never seen, or some other Trumpian phrase. This was interpreted by the mainstream press as a good-faith effort because a neutered media operating within the confines of capital has no choice but to operate this way. What we need is a press that rejects political bad faith and holds power to account; what we have is a press that accepts everything in good faith and paves the road to hell with a firehose of bothsidesism. And so nearly a year after the National Guard was sent to take over D.C., regime opponents point furiously to new crime statistics showing the permanent troop deployment has had no effect on crime rates. NPR and cable news and various online outlets trumpet these stats as a Gotcha Moment for a political movement that can't be got. Because they never meant what they said about unleashing the National Guard in D.C. (with plans to double Guard presence in the coming weeks). Ha, liberals and media types say. You claimed the deployment would lower crime, yet it did no such thing! As BFT readers know, this can only be said with the presumption of good faith, something the right can never be granted, for fascism can't survive without this presumption. Someday They’ll Tell You This Never HappenedAnd you can say no, it did happen. I was there.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter "What the Guard brought was a massive, sudden shock from the visible presence of uniformed military personnel on the streets of Washington almost overnight," said researchers who published the new report on D.C. crime data. They called the deployment of the National Guard a "blunt and expensive instrument" unleashed by the regime. Highlighting crime stats misses the point entirely. The regime sent the National Guard troops as a show of power against a majority-Black city it hates. They sent the troops not to improve the lives of D.C. residents – as one regime official claimed with a straight face this week in a statement to NPR – but to flex its muscles and to say plainly and clearly that you cannot attack one of ours without consequences. Big Balls getting punched in the face early one morning was just an excuse to do what the regime wants to do to every opposition stronghold: Occupy them, demoralize them, terrorize them. That it didn't work in Minnesota – that it created real fascist resistance among political normies – was a devastating blow to the regime, and a profound strategic and political error. In today's BFT podcast, I talked about how the presumption of good faith allows that American right to manipulate the press and voters, and creates the conditions for a never-ending gaslighting campaign against liberals and leftists. Become a BFT supporter today and check it out! ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Before slick TV ads flavored with a sprinkling of half-truths, before tech oligarchs' brain-breaking algorithms, and before AI videos weaponized against non-native internet users, there was a different sort of unreality created to legitimize and validate the monstrous politics of human subjugation. A lot of my writing her at Bad Faith Times is about how and why the American right – in concert with foreign parts of the international fascist movement – creates what's known as "unreality." When The Unreality Is Too UnrealCharacterizing white South Africans as a persecuted minority in need of saving is a miscalculation by the bad-faith unreality creators among usBad Faith TimesDenny Carter Their hope is that this version of reality that they need to exist will overpower Actual Reality and serve as the foundation for their preferred policies and the way American society is shaped. Generating unreality and forcing it upon the larger public – those outside the brain-rot right-wing media ecosystem – is perhaps the most important step in achieving their lurid goals. A politically-convenient version of reality is the One Weird Trick in advancing the right's project. -The right needs white students in public schools to be the victims of systemic discrimination so they can eliminate diversity efforts in every American school district. -The right needs white men to the victims of systemic discrimination in order to stop businesses from promoting diversity in hiring. -The right needs foreign aid programs to be corrupt and criminal in nature if they are to eliminate them and cut off food supplies and medicine and basic goods to people they see as subhuman. -The right needs abortion care to be dangerous, or to constitute murder, so they can criminalize the procedure and those who provide it. -The right needs gender non-conforming people to be dangers to America's children and the future of the human race if they are to enact laws and policies that oppress those who don't identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. -The right needs COVID vaccines to be deadly so they can limit their availability or outright ban them as part of the larger MAHA eugenics project. Think of it this way: Everyone is the protagonist in their own story. If you're going to remain the protagonist – if you are to avoid the antagonist label you deserve – you're going to have to bend the Shape Of Things (reality) so you can remain the good guy. Otherwise you might have to interrogate your worldview; for many, nothing can be more painful. First you create a justification for your awful politics and your aims for dominance over those you see as undeserving or less-than-human, then you pursue those goals. That this unreality is rejected again and again in the courts speaks to the resilience of (some) of our democratic institutions and why it's never easy to turn a republic into an authoritarian state overnight. > Hey look. The right's unreality lost again in court. www.axios.com/2026/06/01/t... > > [image or embed] > > — Denny Carter (@dennycarter.bsky.social) June 1, 2026 at 4:06 PM Jurists who are even partially faithful to the U.S. Constitution take one look at the unreality-based legal cases brought by the president's personal vengeance machine (DOJ) and say, what the fuck is this. The judges usually chastise the vengeance machines lawyers and throw the case out. Sometimes these cases then snake their way to the Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority that winks and nods at the right wing's unreality – all in bad faith, naturally. ### The Wretched Roots of Slavery's Unreality I was reminded the other day that creating new and inventive realities in which the wretched politics of white supremacy become legitimized is not new. It's taken different and more sophisticated forms in our current authoritarian moment, but it's been around for a long time – a ghost that haunts human dignity and progress, a ghost the shape shifts to fit the era. Slavers and their political allies and those who profited from chattel slavery in the Americas and in Europe did their own unreality creation in the 17th and 18th centuries, crafting new realities out of nothing so they would have a mandate from God himself to subjugate and exploit the Black human beings they kidnapped and forced into captivity. They needed, after all, to remain the protagonists. Slavery in all its horror, in all its blood and torment and pain, depended on unreality. This justification for white supremacy lives on today and takes the form of black-pilled social media posts from official U.S. government accounts. White Supremacy Is Sheer TerrorAmericans refuse to face the nation’s past. More than ever, we turn from it, hide from it.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Ontological Branding, a fascinating book from Bonard Ivan Molina Garcia on "power, privilege, and white supremacy in a colorblind world," goes deep into how the slave trade came to be accepted by governments and politicians and regular white folks. The effort to normalize the enslavement of humans in a purely capitalist scheme started, as Molina Garcia writes, with the invention of race. Black people had to be branded as not fully human and their basic rights had to be carefully extracted from the Enlightenment's supposed commitment to universal human equality. Anyone who was not considered white – and this definition has changed rather dramatically over the centuries – had to be reduced to "resources to be exploited," like trees and coal and oil and, yes, animals. "The West," Molina Garcia writes, "needed ... the technology of race to transform the raw material of non-European humanity into resources to be exploited – all without threatening the integrity" on the Enlightenment. > The non-human world was a vast reserve of resources to be conquered, mastered, and exploited. This meant that when non-European humanity was excluded from full participation in personhood, it was by the same stroke relegated to that universe of things available to be conquered, mastered, and exploited. The brand of race thus permitted Western colonialism to advance secure in its white supremacist foundation, all while maintaining an evolving facade of universal human freedom and equality. Developing this unreality in which humans with white skin were the only real humans worthy of rights and dignity required race science, which proved invaluable in convincing those with power and poor white people alike that those with Black skin were not human at all, that God had put them on earth to be mastered and conquered and exploited. A scientific justification, however flawed and predetermined, was the key in pulling off this terrible trick – "dividing humanity into those who counted as true persons and those who did not," as Molina Garcia writes in Ontological Branding. The "newly enlightened West" would require reasons for why they could (or should) enslave Black people and use them as they would use cows or horses or pigs or chickens. Non-whiteness would need to be scientifically proven to be a "natural sign of a person's subordinate status in the chain of human being," Molina Garcia writes. Jamaican philosopher Charles W. Mills in his book, The Racial Contract, laid it out plainly: > The whole point of establishing a moral hierarchy and juridically partitioning the polity according to race is to secure and legitimate the privileging of those designated as white/persons and the exploitation of those designated as nonwhite/subpersons. The unreality of race did not exist the way we know it today during the Enlightenment. Therefore race had to be created through pseudo-scientific means if slavers were going to make money and gain power and make the enslavement of Black people normal – even necessary – in the eyes of white people and the governments whose cooperation they would require. In this way, deep inside this unreality, the phrase "all men are created equal" was not a lie. ### The Unreality of Slavery Returns The story of the tortured unreality of chattel slavery didn't end when enslaved people were freed – only to be enslaved once again by other capitalist means – or when Black Americans fought for and secured the most basic of constitutional rights. The unreality that underpinned slavery in the United States may have broken apart in the 20th century, losing its power over actual reality, but it would not stay shattered forever. The story is a long one – too long for a blog post, I think. Flash forward to the third decade of the 21st century and you have radicalized white men who spend too much time in the computer doing whatever they can to jam race science back into the American mainstream as a means of justifying the rollback of the 20th century. JD Vance Is Awfully Close With These Race Science GuysGovernment data is being used to normalize and mainstream race scienceBad Faith TimesDenny Carter We have the vice president of the United States making fast friends with the internet's most outrageously racist political thinkers and so-called scientists. Watch as the vice president's administration freely and happily shares federal government data on Black children with researchers determined to twist that data into formalized assessments of why those children are inferior to their white peers, for they understand the importance of alternative reality in their quest for domination, just as race scientists of the 19th century understood this. "The great epistemic triumph of scientific racism was the normalization of whiteness," Molina Garcia writes. Race science has always been meant to establish whiteness as normal and non-whiteness as deviant, as a threat to normality. Watch today as this vice president launches a stochastic terror campaign against Haitians in Ohio. Watch as he smuggles conspiracy theories from the darkest corners of the neo-nazi internet and injects them into the nation's consciousness. Watch as he smiles at the cameras, knowing exactly what he's doing. Watch as an explicitly white supremacist regime led by an explicitly racist president winks and nods at these researchers, knowing they will operate in the worst possible faith to create a scientific veneer for 21st century white supremacy. This is why it very much matters when the powerful interact with and promote those looking for any way to reassemble the unreality that made chattel slavery a largely unquestioned institution for so long. Abolitionists in the 18th and 19th centuries saw right through that hideous unreality and said no, none of this is true, all of this was created to justify your devilish slave trade and the immense wealth it has brought you. Black people are humans, abolitionists said. That is the reality. And so decent people today are tasked with doing the same, with identifying and rejecting wholesale the unreality of slavery, of genocide, fueled by fear and hatred. No matter how quixotic the task might seem, I think it's our responsibility to raise consciousness around the right's unreality. It's reassembling with frightening quickness. _Follow Denny Carter on_ BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social_._

Democrats are mom, Republicans are absentee dad, and the American electorate and media is the child who enjoys dad's lax rules and desperately pines for dad's love and sometimes runs back to mom for safety and reassurance, for fixing. It's a supremely fucked up situation. But you knew that. Central to Republican appeal in the third decade of the 21st century is the party's promise that you can say and do whatever you want when they're in charge. Go ahead, use the r-slur, as a treat. Engage in all manner of vicious and dehuamizating racial and ethnic stereotypes if that makes you happy. Talk openly about women as baby factories who shouldn't have bodily autonomy and certainly shouldn't have a say in how the home or the country are run. Dad will let you do all that while dad goes on a crime spree and blows the family's money and leaves the family in ruins. He did it last time. He'll do it again. But at least you got to say some slurs in public. At least you got to be the worst version of yourself. That, dear child, is dad's version of freedom. I guess this has been on my mind for a while. Mom, meanwhile, works tirelessly to keep things running, to make a schedule and abide by it and ensure everyone's needs are being met while dad is off doing who knows what with who knows who with no regard for anyone but himself. Mom works a day job and comes home to work her second unpaid job: Cooking, cleaning, organizing, being everything to everyone. And she watches as her child ignores all this and gets hurt by dad and inexplicably wants nothing more than his love. Maybe this is because the child knows they have mom's love already. That has to be it, mom thinks, mom hopes. The child comes back to mom when dad has done something mom views as unforgivable. Make it better, the child cries out. Make it hurt less. Clean up the mess dad has created for me. Make me whole again. So mom does all this, knowing the child will one day be back in her arms, tears and snot streaming everywhere, their world in tatters, begging to be comforted. Things, mom knows, will need to be fixed again. I’m Begging The Democrats To Watch TVAmericans are raving with praise for a show about a billionaire family being tormented and killed by a saucy little demon and Democrats are shying away from an Eat The Rich ethos. That millions of Americans are titillated by the suffering of the wealthy on their TV screens apparently meansBad Faith TimesDenny Carter With this mom-as-Democrat and dad-as-Republican dynamic comes an expectation that mom is reasonable – centrist, you might say – and even-keeled and polite. In no way can mom lash out or say what she means. Total emotional dysregulation is dad's thing. Mom must protect everyone's feelings all the time. So when mom curses – when she says something that could be interpreted as mean – it's a big fucking deal. The official Democratic Party X account this week called Trump toady Stephen Miller an "ugly fuck" and told Miller to shut up after Miller said James Talarico was the first transgender Senate candidate from Texas (conservatives scientifically can't be funny because they can only punch down, and punching down is never funny). Katie Miller, Stephen's wife, later called this "violent rhetoric." The person who posted the retort to Miller thankfully did not back down. The Democratic Party's social media team using the f-word was treated by mainstream press outlets as a small-scale scandal. Mom had cursed. Mom had acted a little bit like dad. The Republican president and his outwardly fascist allies in Congress and in the media take to social media every day to call for ethnic cleansing and genocide and all manner of violence against their political enemies, both real and imagined. Senator Tom Cotton once came out and said the National Guard should mow down anyone agitating for civil rights in the US. The president threatens every couple weeks to drop nukes on countries that aren't doing what he wants them to do. These are treated as non-stories. Because this is dad, and dad is just like that. He's a little crazy and doesn't think about what he says and sometimes doesn't mean what he says, though you never know when that is, exactly. Dad has a quick temper and won't put up with any shit from anyone. He doesn't care about anyone but himself but he might love you if you try hard enough. The one thing we know about dad is that he will hurt you if you don't do what he says. That's who he is: He's dad. Part of life in this authoritarian phase is watching media outlets, like the country itself, beg and plead dad (Trump) to be good, to be kind, to be respectable and decent and a leader for everyone, while knowing mom is somewhere in the background waiting for her chance to make things right once again. This is the impetus behind the whole "today is the day Trump became president" meme: People in positions of power wanting dad to be something he's not and to care about something bigger than himself and his desires. Be the dad we deserve, they cry out. And Trump replies: I am. On today's BFT podcast – available to all BFT supporters – I talk about why a Stephen Miller quote inspired me, the bad faith of birth rate worries, and why liberals and the left need to lighten up if we're ever going to entice folks to stop standing on the sideline. ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Democrats are mom, Republicans are absentee dad, and the American electorate and media is the child who enjoys dad's lax rules and desperately pines for dad's love and sometimes runs back to mom for safety and reassurance, for fixing. It's a supremely fucked up situation. But you knew that. Central to Republican appeal in the third decade of the 21st century is the party's promise that you can say and do whatever you want when they're in charge. Go ahead, use the r-slur, as a treat. Engage in all manner of vicious and dehuamizating racial and ethnic stereotypes if that makes you happy. Talk openly about women as baby factories who shouldn't have bodily autonomy and certainly shouldn't have a say in how the home or the country are run. Dad will let you do all that while dad goes on a crime spree and blows the family's money and leaves the family in ruins. He did it last time. He'll do it again. But at least you got to say some slurs in public. At least you got to be the worst version of yourself. That, dear child, is dad's version of freedom. I guess this has been on my mind for a while. Mom, meanwhile, works tirelessly to keep things running, to make a schedule and abide by it and ensure everyone's needs are being met while dad is off doing who knows what with who knows who with no regard for anyone but himself. Mom works a day job and comes home to work her second unpaid job: Cooking, cleaning, organizing, being everything to everyone. And she watches as her child ignores all this and gets hurt by dad and inexplicably wants nothing more than his love. Maybe this is because the child knows they have mom's love already. That has to be it, mom thinks, mom hopes. The child comes back to mom when dad has done something mom views as unforgivable. Make it better, the child cries out. Make it hurt less. Clean up the mess dad has created for me. Make me whole again. So mom does all this, knowing the child will one day be back in her arms, tears and snot streaming everywhere, their world in tatters, begging to be comforted. Things, mom knows, will need to be fixed again. I’m Begging The Democrats To Watch TVAmericans are raving with praise for a show about a billionaire family being tormented and killed by a saucy little demon and Democrats are shying away from an Eat The Rich ethos. That millions of Americans are titillated by the suffering of the wealthy on their TV screens apparently meansBad Faith TimesDenny Carter With this mom-as-Democrat and dad-as-Republican dynamic comes an expectation that mom is reasonable – centrist, you might say – and even-keeled and polite. In no way can mom lash out or say what she means. Total emotional dysregulation is dad's thing. Mom must protect everyone's feelings all the time. So when mom curses – when she says something that could be interpreted as mean – it's a big fucking deal. The official Democratic Party X account this week called Trump toady Stephen Miller an "ugly fuck" and told Miller to shut up after Miller said James Talarico was the first transgender Senate candidate from Texas (conservatives scientifically can't be funny because they can only punch down, and punching down is never funny). Katie Miller, Stephen's wife, later called this "violent rhetoric." The person who posted the retort to Miller thankfully did not back down. The Democratic Party's social media team using the f-word was treated by mainstream press outlets as a small-scale scandal. Mom had cursed. Mom had acted a little bit like dad. The Republican president and his outwardly fascist allies in Congress and in the media take to social media every day to call for ethnic cleansing and genocide and all manner of violence against their political enemies, both real and imagined. Senator Tom Cotton once came out and said the National Guard should mow down anyone agitating for civil rights in the US. The president threatens every couple weeks to drop nukes on countries that aren't doing what he wants them to do. These are treated as non-stories. Because this is dad, and dad is just like that. He's a little crazy and doesn't think about what he says and sometimes doesn't mean what he says, though you never know when that is, exactly. Dad has a quick temper and won't put up with any shit from anyone. He doesn't care about anyone but himself but he might love you if you try hard enough. The one thing we know about dad is that he will hurt you if you don't do what he says. That's who he is: He's dad. Part of life in this authoritarian phase is watching media outlets, like the country itself, beg and plead dad (Trump) to be good, to be kind, to be respectable and decent and a leader for everyone, while knowing mom is somewhere in the background waiting for her chance to make things right once again. This is the impetus behind the whole "today is the day Trump became president" meme: People in positions of power wanting dad to be something he's not and to care about something bigger than himself and his desires. Be the dad we deserve, they cry out. And Trump replies: I am. On today's BFT podcast – available to all BFT supporters – I talk about why a Stephen Miller quote inspired me, the bad faith of birth rate worries, and why liberals and the left need to lighten up if we're ever going to entice folks to stop standing on the sideline. ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

A part of the ever-expanding universe of BFT content, I thought I'd do a post-blog video each week with some extra thoughts/takes/rantings that didn't quite make it into the blog post itself. We'll call them "stray thoughts" because that sounds better. It's not entirely new to BFT, as longtime readers might recall when I could not stop writing about the American left getting patriotism in the national divorce. The Bad Faith Of Pro-Natalism Is Uglier Than You Know“Anytime someone wants to have a conversation about pro-natalism, they really want to have a conversation about white supremacy.”Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter Today's video focuses on my recent post on the bad faith inherent in pro-natalism, and why it's probably not a great idea for liberals and leftists to join fascists in doing that thing where you tell every woman to have eleven babies. I touched on the economic thought that underpins pro-natalism and another way to think about human reproduction, as detailed here by my third favorite Japanese Marxist philosopher. Usually these videos are going to be available only to Bad Faith Times supporters, who also have access to the weekly BFT podcast. Today, I thought, I'd offer the video to everyone just in case you wanted to check it out and – using a complex algorithm – determine if you're "into it." I will look powerfully into making this video slightly less blurry next week.

An economy understander might tell me there are legitimate reasons to fret about plunging worldwide birth rates since it looks like we're going to need a trillion working age people to support generations that are going to live to 120 with the power of protein and avoidance of seed oils. And maybe that's right. Human beings probably weren't meant to live as long as they do today, and certainly not as long as the'll live in the future, when everyone in the middle and upper classes of developed nations will be drowning in the fountain of youth, and, of course, avoiding seed oils at all costs. So maybe there is something to the well-meaning folks who have had years-long panic attacks over declining birth rates in every part of the world (these conversations usually make sure to look away from the inhumanity of capitalism). > **If you enjoy Bad Faith Times blog posts and would like to** access the weekly BFT podcast**and our lovely BFT discord community, considering signing up as a** BFT supporter**!** The main driver of birth rate fretting has always been white supremacy though. To deny that is to grant the presumption of good faith to all the far-right billionaires and shady online influencers and quack doctors who have had public freak outs about low birth rates over the past decade. Some of them have made declining birth rates their entire personality, even their profession. The Incredibly Gross Bad Faith of Birth Rate WorriesLet’s call the birth rate worries what they are: Fretting that the white supremacist hierarchy could one day be toppled through sheer numbersBad Faith TimesDenny Carter Elon Musk goes around handing out vials of his semen to women because he's so worried about falling birth rates "in the west," which is and always has been fascist shorthand for "among white people." Musk's birth rate worries, as I wrote about in September 2023, are probably the most obvious to decipher as a bad-faith effort to promote an increase of white birth rates and _only_ white birth rates. That almost every major "pro-natalist" influencer on the internet is white – and that all of them are complete freaks – should give away the game. If you somehow remain skeptical, consider Dr. Oz's recent comments about one in three American families being "underbabied" – a phrase that splashes a little cuteness onto the otherwise hideous white supremacist ideological aims at the center of the right's birth rate obsession. Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) had a killer rebuttal to Oz's "underbabied" nonsense. Yet there remain writers and commentators on the left who join the right in saying something must be done about the lack of babies around here. Liberal and left-wing panic about falling birth rates can take an existential form (if every family doesn't have seven kids the human race will die out in our lifetimes) or an economic form (the never-ending expansion that defines capital needs more humans to be born and fed into its machine). Folks on the left lending legitimacy to such an ugly ideology that has been shaped by thrumming white supremacist anxiety is, in one blogger's estimation, a mistake, an unforced error, even if these liberal/left types mean well. That doesn't really matter when you're joining Elon Musk's thinly-veiled cause to secure the existence of the white race and push women – always pregnant, always pumping out babies for Musk and his ilk – out of the public sphere and far away from power in politics, academia, and business. It's not that those with liberal/left politics aren't allowed to fret and write and talk about birth rates crashing in developed countries all over the world. There needs to be a distinction though, one that separates left-wing birth rate concerns with the more popular and well-known right-wing worries, based entirely on the nightmare of a world in which white people do not sit atop the hierarchy of oppression. Tressie McMillan Cottom, a professor, sociologist, and New York Times columnist, laid out the bad-faith case against birth rate concerns during a recent public forum in which she ripped the MAHA movement's hyper-focus on birth rate statistics. McMillan Cottom was asked for her thoughts on the left's involvement with pro-natalist messaging, and her answer exposed the whole ugly project. Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd.bsky.social)An audience member asked me about leftist pronatalism.Bluesky SocialTressie McMillan Cottom "Despite having a great amount of upward social mobility in my life" both academically and professionally, she said, "I have never, ever, ever, ever had anyone encourage me to have children. And as long as that is the case – that our concern about birth rates is a conversation only being had with white women, or women with proximity to whiteness in the case of some ethnic minorities, I would say that anytime someone wants to have a conversation about pro-natalism, they really want to have a conversation with you about white supremacy." "No one," McMillan Cottom added, "is encouraging Black women to have more babies." The entire pro-natalist world revolves around surgically-altered white people urging families of unspecified races to have more kids. Almost none of this baby-crazy discourse – unless I've missed something – revolves around Latino and Black and Asian women. If the white supremacist wing of the pro-natalist crowd could be honest about their anxieties and their goals, I would think they might support unfettered abortion access for women of color and total abortion bans for white ladies. That would get the job done. The anxiety of the pro-natalist radicals screaming at you from your social media timelines every day is not unfounded. In 2025, for the first time ever, white births made up less than 50 percent of births in the United States (49.6 percent, to be precise). This is the nightmare of generations of white supremacists in the US and abroad, and it's what brings them together as an international fascist force. All of the fascist Eastern European strongmen, including the recently-ousted Viktor Orban, are obsessed with the continued dominance of the white race across the developed world (Orban offered lavish benefits for Hungarian women to have more babies, all for naught). The monsters running under the banner of the UK's Reform Party talk incessantly about juicing birth rates. Same goes for the far-right parties in Germany, as their leaders make fast friends with Musk and Trump regime officials. Every fascist leader who seized power in the 20th century wouldn't shut the fuck up about women having more babies. Pro-natalism is their thing: It binds the far right together through history and across the world. Those on the left who have good-natured concern about declining birth rates should be careful in boosting this messaging and making the pro-natalist movement appear normal and even bipartisan or apolitical. No one, as McMillan Cottom said, is asking Black women to have more kids. Until this changes – until birth rate concerns are rooted in something other than bone-shaking white fear – the pro-natalist movement has to be granted the presumption of bad faith. _Follow Denny Carter on_ Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.