"The Rise of the American Idiot"

"The world’s idiot army is being desensitized, habituated, to mass death, to violence on a surreal scale. The world’s demagogues — Trump, Bolsonaro, etc — they aren’t letting death on a mass scale happen and regretting it. They’re revelling in it. Why? Because they know if they can get people to cross this last line, then anything is possible.

It’s one thing to get people to vote against their own healthcare, retirement, education, income, savings — as Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, Farage all did. It’s another — much greater one — to bring people to the point that mass death doesn’t register anymore. Then, if you’re a demagogue, you can manipulate and twist a country any way you like.

Once people have accepted the level of degradation of mass death, there is no further kind of degradation left. They have been dehumanized fully, finally. That is why the demagogues of the world are letting the pandemic rage. Just as any abuser knows that his victim being hurt is good for him, so too the demagogues know that a pandemic is a powerful weapon, too."

The Rise of the American Idiot