The Superhero Meme and 'You're in a Cult'.

People with no discernment don't know the difference between affection and cultism.

One of the longest standing and most tiresome charges leveled against people who like Donald Trump, or who have been sympathetic towards him, is that we are in a Cult.

Again and again this charge gets made, and its an almost beautiful example of all the most common modern sins-it is based on faith and assumption, whilst attacking the idea of faith or belief held by others, it is calling people brainwashed, while being an unthinking and itself brainwashed reaction to those people. It is a very pure example of psychological projection and political hypocrisy, which surely must be the two most common routes towards tyranny.

Every time somebody says “you’re in a cult” to a Trump enthusiast, it never occurs to them at all to ponder whether those outside the MAGA movement, or filled with hatred of it, might be….in a cult themselves. That the very act of reacting so automatically and dismissively towards this group might be reflective, not of the groups illegitimacy and conditioning, but of their own conditioning and the things they themselves believe with vehement or even violent convictions that float free from any real evidential basis.

It’s my view now that mainstream positions represent two things. They represent the power of the elite, and policies and assumptions that serve the interests of the elite or that increase still further their existing wealth, power and control over the rest of us. So for example many of the mainstream and respectable positions held by politicians will simply reflect the things that are going to make money for their billionaire donors and the things that even more powerful people want to see happen.

People funded by George Soros support the policies that George Soros wants, and these are policies that will somehow make George Soros even richer and more powerful than he is at the start. And likewise with Bill Gates, or with any other billionaire investing in politics without standing for election themselves. The investor wants a return, and billionaires are almost never pure altruists.

If the funding goes to an allegedly philanthropic cause, to a scheme supposed to be purely charitable and to the benefit of all mankind, it is a fair bet today that this scheme is even more likely to be purely political, and tied directly to increasing (rather than sharing) the wealth and power of the philanthropist involved in it. All those billionaires who signed up to the Giving Pledge Bill Gates organised 20 years ago, are richer today than they were when they promised to give it all away.

The second thing that mainstream and respectable positions represent are simply the ideas that the elite hold, the ideologies they follow, and the ideas that appeal to them for some reason other than direct profit. Perhaps the billionaire political donor really sincerely believes in one of the things he also profits from. Maybe some Globalist or Leftist social position he advocates has some personal meaning for him greater than pure profit. This can be innocent or sinister in nature. He might fund a Pride event because he just so happens to be gay. But he could also fund academic studies normalizing extreme perversions that ordinary gays don’t engage in because he personally shares that kink or fetish or full scale depravity. He could fund the Pride festival not because he supports gay people being treated fairly, but because he actually wants one of the more extreme fetishes appearing in a Pride festival and normalized by a connection with gay rights.

Groups like Gays Against Groomers for example have noted the relentless expansion of the LGBTQ+ movement, its relentless promotion everywhere, and the way it conflates gay rights with things ordinary gays themselves don’t support, don’t do, and don’t want to be associated with. Gays Against Groomers don’t want to be linked to trans activism, or to the public display of extreme BDSM fetishes, or to the targeting of children with sexualized displays. They rightly note than an unwanted association with these things was one they never asked for, but now exists in many Pride events, and that this association smears and detracts from the social respect and equality they want.

If you want to be considered a normal person with equal rights, whose sexual tastes are no threat to anyone else, that becomes a little more difficult when people wearing nothing but a puppy dog leather fetish mask are shaking their genitals at children and claiming to be linked to you.

But as with everything else, social movements and radical ideas don’t get widely spread without existing money behind them. And just as it is not in the interests of children or of gay adults or of straight adults for society to be sexualizing children and normalizing sexualised child-adult interactions, it IS in the interests of a rich pervert or pedophile to fund a radical change of social attitudes in the area of his perversion.

A move to make a perversion respectable, generally comes because a pervert is powerful.

So the creeping extension of what were once equality movements that were probably justified and which represented people who were not dangerous and harmful, can often mean that the original group or issue has been highjacked and taken over by far more malign forces, and this is true with racial politics as well as with sexual identity or gender politics.

But the key point is that what everyone considers normal tends to be determined first by the ruling class, by the elite, who then force a change on the rest of society. It is the elite who ultimately decide what is normal, what is positive, and what is criminal, with changes one way or the other that aren’t directed by the elite requiring very large scale public protest. That was true of gaining gay rights, and would today be true of stopping Pride festivals and stopping Pride displays and propaganda throughout society. The ordinary person, including a gay person, who tries to stop a Pride march by his own initiative would of course be arrested, as he would if discovered tearing down Pride flags or posters or covering over streets decorated by the local authorities with Pride rainbow colors.

In London, because of the peculiarities and contradictions of the things that the Globalist elite insist on, the ordinary British citizen can go from a location or a date where there are LGBTQ+ symbols plastered everywhere, to the next day or the next street being bedecked with symbols supporting Islam everywhere. A globalist led city becomes a place where imported Muslim populations wave Hamas flags and are probably pretty keen on the idea of gays being thrown from rooftops, AND a place where creepy men in fetish wear or drag are supposed to be clapped and celebrated as they wave their dicks at children or queue up for the women’s toilets. People like Sadiq Khan, a Globalist Muslim, will fund both in one way or another and pretend that both are normal, that having both is ‘vibrant diversity’ and ‘our strength’.

But it does not take a Globalist Muslim to create these weird conditions. ANY Globalist led city is where these two extremes are both presented as normal, whilst the vast majority of us who are suspicious of both are, if we voice any objection, described as extremists.

If it’s contradictory in this fashion, if its inimical to the traditional world you inherited and to your interests and values today, you can be certain that it is being pressed and promoted either because it makes money for the Globalist elite, or it distracts from their own crimes, or it normalizes their own tastes and fetishes, or it makes them feel superior and worthy to endorse and earns them credit and respect from other members of the Globalist elite when they do endorse it.

So that’s the mainstream, respectable world that calls MAGA a cult. A place where a whole host of contradictory and malign things are normalised and where many people support that without thinking or after being brainwashed…..in other words, a bigger cult.

People who look at a traditional national flag and say ‘flag shagger’ or ‘it’s offensive to minorities’ will raise a thousand different new flags on command, whether those are rainbow LGBTQ+ ones or Hamas ones or ones supporting Ukraine. People who call MAGA a Cult will take their children to a Taylor Swift concert to receive friendship bracelets with weird affirming messages or chant along with stage led ‘affirmations’ that consist of feminist slogans and a celebrity and media attention based cult of personality.

For me, one of the quickest ways to discern the difference between an admiration and a cult is the seriousness of the whole thing, the capacity for humor in the movement you are talking about, and the nature of whether its the movement or its critics that tend to be deadly serious and use violence. We can’t discern what is a cult by mainstream judgement or media judgement or by internet sneers that haven’t been backed by any rational thought.

Asking if the movement can laugh at itself, and if the movement receives or dishes out violence and hate, is far more effective than asking biased mainstream sources to tell us what behaviors and groups are cult like. Mainstream sources will never acknowledge how extreme the mainstream has become.

One of the things that has been around for awhile is what we might call Trump Art (the Trumpist School? The Orange Period?). This takes two forms, pro Trump and anti Trump. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of examples of both. Trump of course has his own merchandising and has, in typical fashion, been quick to use merchandising of his image to fund his campaigns. This is a man who made his name his brand, and valued that brand very highly. But most of the proliferation of Trumpist Art has come from others. His supporters have painted posters, created memes, played with his image time and again. Those who hate him have done the same.

People who hate or oppose Trump have created giant inflatables designed to criticize or humiliate him. They have flown huge Trump Baby blimps over marches through multiple capital cities. They have worn knitted pussy hats referencing a comment he made in a private conversation. They have used the Trump Baby image everywhere, including repeatedly on The Simpsons. Endless hack cartoonists have repeated critical versions of him, no doubt more than any other modern figure.

Yet oddly all these negative images and obsession on Trump have never been described as cult-like, even though it clearly is. If you make a person the target of your Orwellian Five Minute Hate cycles, clearly you are the ones acting in a totalitarian or cultish manner, since you are mythologizing your opponent and casting them in the role of Most Hated, Most Evil non-person.

And if this Anti Trump Art comes alongside thousands of negative and hysterical articles and a running 24/7 mainstream media campaign of hate lasting nearly a decade, it directly recalls for an objective observer (let alone a Trump supporter) the propaganda efforts of totalitarian regimes. If people are holding up his severed head as commentary or ‘satire’, and later people are trying to assassinate him, is it his supporters who are a dangerous cult prone to political violence? REALLY? Isn’t that coming from the side that hates him?

Is the dangerously totalitarian approach to a political opponent coming from MAGA and Trump, or from the people who started describing him as Hitler before he had even served a term in office, the people who have tried to fine and imprison him on imaginary charges, and the people who were demonising him on Time covers and similar publications as ‘literally Hitler’ or as ‘a giant baby’ rather than debating his policy positions like grown up adults themselves?

Which side has tried to ban, silence, imprison and ultimately kill, which side?

So it’s in this context that Trump’s alleged cult of personality must be viewed. The demonic, hate Trump cult started BEFORE the heroic, love Trump response. A common theme of pro Trump art and imagery, whether in memes or posters or in paintings or on tshirts, has been the depiction of Trump as a larger than life Superhero figure. Why did that theme develop? Why has it been so popular?

The “you are in a cult” charge pretends that theme was there first, but it wasn’t. Trump was already a celebrity, a name, a public figure, when he decided to enter politics. He had a popular base of people who liked The Apprentice. He had some people, a smaller number, who had lost out in business dealings with him and hated him for that. And he had a broad number of friends and acquaintances, many of whom were Democrats, many of whom expressed admiration of him, and some of whom became his most virulent critics. But nobody was painting pictures of him as a superhero. When Trump broke with the Democrat Party and challenged their power (elite power and elite policies) he INSTANTLY became a figure of hate. The anti Trump stuff was churning off the presses that same day. Hilary and Oprah went from urging him to enter politics and musing about what a great President he could be to warning people he was a Russian agent or a Hitler clone and laughing at the absurdity of him running that same day.

Because he did not run for the Democrats. Because they felt betrayed. Because he had broken the elite pact-which is that everyone shares the opinions and policies of the elite to remain among the elite, whether they call themselves Democrats or Republicans.

The superhero theme came later. The Warhammer 40K God-Emperor Trump stuff came later. The depictions of Trump as a hero who could not be defeated came AFTER the entire mainstream and the Deep State threw everything they had, legal, economic, political, cultural and criminal, into stopping him and AFTER it failed to force him out of politics or back under control. And the clips showing Trump as a Matrix hero moving aside bullets by sheer willpower, came AFTER somebody tried to kill him.

Their hate built his legend, not MAGA followers being prone to demagoguery (Trump supporters generally forgive him for being a poor speaker). Their attempts to remove him made him mythic. That’s why MAGA instantly recycles the things that were supposed to destroy him and don’t, like the perp photo. Trump has an instinct for gestures and reactions that people will love, but the opportunity to deploy that political instinct comes from the determination of the other side to destroy him by any means necessary. They are constantly letting him become iconic. As, of course, his reaction to being shot became the most powerful American political photo of the 21st century so far.

People love him for his resistance, endurance, and perseverance in the face of extremism from those who hate him, they don’t love him because they themselves (or Trump) are extremists. Trump’s entire existence is a political and cultural reaction-as all Populism is. The mainstream went mad first, and Trump signaled that he would oppose it. So the mainstream went more mad, and Trump showed that he would survive it and endure it. And THAT is what the Superhero stuff is about.

A Trump supporter is relieved that he survived when he says ‘this guy eats bullets’. He doesn’t literally mean that. It’s a metaphor for courage, a courage that could only be fully revealed because the other side are extremists and full of hate and violence.

Nobody on the Trump side thinks he is actually a superhero. But the things thrown at him are things they know would break many other people. They admire resisting that. They appreciate resisting that on their behalf. So the overblown and ridiculous Superhero imagery is affectionate and humorous, referencing BOTH a real appreciation of real qualities AND a kind of loving, teasing commentary on the man’s own bombastic hyperbole and self-assessments. When this sort of thing emerges naturally, organically, and with good humour it is the very opposite of a cult.

Because all the hate has given real reasons to feel this way, as have some of the actual achievements. It’s an exaggeration that knows it is an exaggeration, and is laughing at the hate that built it and made it necessary. Trump supporters know how much Trump critics hate this stuff. But Trump supporters are saying ‘OK, if you are going to show the man as Hitler or Satan and he’s done right by me, I’ll show him as Superman or God. Let’s see how you like that’.

Just as Trump was depicted as Hitler BEFORE he had done anything, so too was MAGA depicted as a cult BEFORE they fully embraced the idea that Trump is a hero and DESPITE their ability to recognize that the man has flaws. Plenty of people in the MAGA movement have complained about things Trump has got wrong, and someone with a Trump Superhero image may also be someone who boos Trump when he praises the COVID vaccines (Trump had to gradually drop this line because of the amount of push back he was getting from his supposed cultists). Both Trump and other key figures have repeatedly said that MAGA must be more than just Trump, a line of thought that has been consistently ignored by anyone outside the movement when discussing it.

It’s also remarkable and needs reiterating how organic the Trump as Hero or Superhero theme is. Trump is very quick to exploit it, but he didn’t create it. The point about a political cult of personality as associated with a traditional fascist, Nazi or Communist leader is that the cult like elements are deliberately created-they are consciously directed propaganda. There’s none of that in the Trump Hero imagery-people started supplying that themselves, often in direct rebuttal of the hate. Marketing it afterwards is not the same as creating it. In most cases ordinary people create it, and future Trump marketing responds to it.

Of course, more importantly than that, the totalitarian cult of personality is directly linked to totalitarian measures, to imprisoning political opponents, to restricting free speech, to controlling the media, to militarism and martial law and to tyranny at home and war abroad. In the Trump case, NONE of these totalitarian features exist, whereas they do exist in the measures and policies of his ‘respectable’ opponents. Which is what makes the Robert Reich line of approach on all this so absurd, as it projects things the Democrats are actually doing as things Trump will do if you vote for him (despite him not doing any of them last time).

Now, as Joe Biden is missing with COVID, dumped from the 2024 race, and possibly dead or dying according to the more lurid speculations (which might or might not be true), we see a new branch of hagiography for Joe (instantly Sainted, Deified and Described as God by a mainstream that, remember, doesn’t like cults…). AND we see a sudden slew of Kamala Super Hero memes and images. Kamala holding the torch of Liberty. Kamala in Super Girl attire. Kamala holding a burnished shield like Captain America.

All from the side that doesn’t like cults. All from the side that worries about a Cult of Personality.

All from the side that doesn’t show the slightest hint of humor or affectionate teasing in this theme, and hasn’t had the level of murderous hate and political persecution directed at them with official support that would explain the desire to consider a leader in such glowing terms.

What has Kamala actually done in the last three or four years, or in all the years since she no longer had to give head to get ahead? What did Joe deliver other than disasters like the Afghanistan withdrawal? Where is Joe and Kamala’s Abraham Accords? Did the Middle East get better after Trump was ousted, or worse? Did inflation get better, or worse? Did relations with Russia and the containment of Russia and China get better, or worse? Did the US border get better, or worse? Did Trump lock up hundreds of Democrats on false charges, or did Joe and Kamala lock up hundreds of Republicans on false charges?

Who acted as a tyrant, and who survived tyranny? Who do the street thugs and rioters tend to support, and who do the assassins tend to support?

Who has earned hyperbolic praise that comes organically and naturally from supporters showing affection and humor, and who has that same imagery supplied to them automatically, but in deadly seriousness, as a privilege one might say, of identity, of skin color and gender and in the total absence of any notable achievements or personal qualities or courage in the face of hate?

Somebody told me that I was a moron and a fanatic and that both sides were a danger to others because both sides were totalitarians who deify their leaders. The Trump Hero and the Kamala Hero are both constructed images. But I say that not discerning the difference between an affection that the powerless offer to a defender with a smile, and the imagery of propaganda that is instantly given to a person supported by a regime already in place and by an ideology that grants this worship automatically to ‘strong black women’ for innate characteristics, is being blind to the difference between hope for an escape from corruption, and corruption describing itself as the politics of hope.

Maybe we all need heroes, but that doesn’t mean all heroes are fake. Maybe one who earns it from ordinary people after a decade of hate from the media, really is better than one who has it conferred on them by the media the very same day they announce their candidacy. Maybe there is such a thing as an organic hero, whose rise comes despite the opposition of the ruling class, and a synthetic hero, whose rise is ordered and conferred by the ruling class.