To address the challenge presented by the new Republican Party, the Democratic Party has been replaced by a bevy of comedians.
The challenge began in 2017 when President Donald Trump made psychopathy cool. Henceforth the Republicans became informally known as the Psycho Clown Posse. Trump capitalized on the press’s bad press, further demonizing journalists whom the American public already trusted less than lawyers and politicians.
Trump’s real enemy, however, was the truth about reality. The press was only the messenger, and because the President’s narcissism detached him from external reality, the press was always the bearer of bad news about how Trump’s grandiose schemes crashed on the shores of a world that’s naturally indifferent to him.
Declaring war on that world for the unforgivable sin of not loving Trump as much as he loves himself, the President created an alternative reality, using Fox News, Alex Jones’ conspiracy theories, shameless advisors and spokespeople, and his personal Twitter account to create a carnival culture that captured the public’s imagination.
The Democrats were caught flatfooted by this turn of events. Liberal pundits assumed they could counter Republican fantasies merely by pointing out the facts. When the public preferred to believe the fantasies, such as that Barak Obama is a Muslim communist, that Trump had the largest inauguration audience, that millions voted illegally for Hillary Clinton, or that the press is the enemy of the American people, Democrats startled Republicans by searching for the switch on the back of their necks which they believed must have got stuck in the wrong position.
As one Democratic senator explained, “We’re all robots, of course, so the Republicans’ logic circuits must be broken. All we have to do is reset their software so they can appreciate the value of facts, statistics, and other forms of accurate information.”
When in 2018 it turned out there’s no such switch on the back of Americans’ necks, and people are more like irrational animals than logic-loving Vulcans or robots, the Democrats fell out of favour, losing seats in that year’s congressional election.
Comedians came to the rescue, using satire and parody rather than history or science to unsettle Americans about the embarrassing state of their society. As one of the leaders of the Comedian Party explained, “Our philosophy is simple: when you’re dealing with an insane opponent, stop playing by the old rules and pretending you can appeal to reality to trump his fantasy. Instead, you take for granted that the truth is on your side, and you ridicule the daylights out of the psycho clowns until they can no longer be taken seriously and their circus becomes a sideshow.”
In 2019 Stephen Miller and Kellyanne Conway continued to practice the political clown’s art of agnotology, which is the spreading of disinformation and doubt for the purpose of gaslighting the public, of persuading them to accept a world of “alternative facts,” as Conway inadvertently called it. The Comedians responded by mocking the Psycho Clown Party for the banality of its lies.
“The trick is to switch from epistemology to aesthetics,” said one comedian. “You don’t tackle a psychopathic clown’s self-congratulatory rants as if they were rational statements. You go after them as works of fiction. And the thing about psycho clowns and hack agnotologists is that their fiction stinks—on purely literary grounds.”
