The present essay continues to develop the line of reflection developed previously in my essay, “A Third Way for the Humanities”. It is recommended that you read that piece first.

1.

A few years ago I was the external member on a hiring committee charged with considering one Nathan Cofnas for a job. Cofnas, you might know, is a “race-realist” working on IQ differences across the different “races ou espèces”, as François Bernier put the matter in 1686, getting this whole race science thing off to a pretty inauspicious start. Cofnas is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy and [sic] Moral Sciences at Ghent University in Belgium. Cofnas’s funding appears to be drawn from a grant of the European Research Commission obtained prior to his arrival there by Ghent colleague Bouke de Vries. I hope those who have protested against Cofnas’s hiring, and even sought to have the decision reversed, will back off, so that he might be permitted to fail all on his own in pursuit of his meritless research program.

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1.

In March, 1697, Peter the Great set out from Moscow, along with a select group of councilors, for his so-called “Grand Embassy”, a two-year tour of Western Europe. The voyage was shrouded in secrecy and disguise, and was aimed at the strategic collection of information concerning primarily Dutch and German advances in science and technology. Through the usual gossip networks, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz would soon learn every detail of the Tsar’s early visit to the Königsberg court of the Elector of Prussia, Friedrich I, and of the time these two more-or-less Enlightened sovereigns spent together at Friedrich’s maison de plaisance or country home.

The philosopher remarks in a letter that during the visit the Tsar had been “very gay, and spoke familiarly with everyone”, and that he “approved of the gentleness [douceur] with which people conduct themselves in these [German] lands, and disapproves the cruelties of his own.”1 When the Tsar took a walk with the elector, we learn, one of the servants made a gross error of some unspecified sort in tending to this distinguished visitor. The Tsar tells the servant that if he had been in Muscovy he would have been subjected to the whip, but, since they are in a “gentle” country, he will let it pass.

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You have already been introduced to this essay’s “thesis statement”. But before coming back around to its narrow defense, we will have to do some significant ground-clearing.

I have never understood, …

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1. Universal Brainrot

We should begin with news of a disconcerting development here at our editorial offices in Quimper. It seems our interns, Augustus and Eglantine, have seized control of The Hinternet’s social media. We are completely locked out of our own Instagram account, which Gus and Eggy now seem intent on transforming into a veritable cataract of grade-A bona-fide Gen Z brainrot.

A dissenting minority on our editorial staff, including JSR himself, has argued that this twist might not turn out entirely to our detriment. Brainrot, they maintain, is really the only significant aesthetic sensibility that matters in 2026, the only that is not moribund, but is in fact likely to continue to evolve, and, within a few years, some of us are now predicting, to ramify into high and low branches, to insinuate itself into museums and fashion and the narrative arts and whatever is left of academia, to serve as the new stone on which our lapidary critics will whet their faculties of judgment. Could this be possible? Friends, as of 2026 anything is possible — anything, that is, except returning to the status quo that prevailed before the massive cultural, technological, and geopolitical reset currently underway.

And so we are coming around, at least in one of the branches of our operation, to seeing the strategic appeal of placing our bet on the youngest of the currently adult generations — whose creative fecundity, significantly aided by image- and text-generating machines, is already showing us, or at least those of us who know how to see, the rough outlines of our future. And it looks something like this:

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The closest Trumpian equivalent to Bubba’s well-timed display of New Jack Swing fluency is surely his cameo appearance in Azerbaijani post-Soviet gala-pop artist and gangster-industrialist scion Emin Agalarov’s “In Another Life (feat. Donald Trump and Miss Universe ‘13)” (2013). We can deplore the excesses of the Russiagate accusations that dominated our news headlines for so much of the later part of that same decade. It remains however the case that what we are seeing in this video is profoundly, essentially un-American, utterly incompatible with our Whitmanian spirit. You could know already, from the support that the future president lent to this gross display of Eurasianist pop kitsch, that something was deeply rotten in our Republic. Bad taste, in sufficiently concentrated dosage, can be as great a threat to our American way of life as any subversive ideology…

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Here at The Hinternet we have copped, openly and repeatedly, to passing off AI-generated writing as human-generated. But we always rush to add that a far ofter-used trick in our bag is the reverse: to pass off human writing as if it were coming from a machine. Both approaches have noteworthy effects, and while the latter is more time-consuming, it is also, for now, one that usually gets results more in line with our creative vision. Still, we insist, the only thing that matters to us is the result: is this or is this not a text that will challenge, puzzle, delight, or inspire its reader, quite independently of any consideration of its ontogeny?

In what follows I will explain why I believe that far from carrying stigma, in the very near-future machine-aided or hybrid writing will be the new norm, and will bring in its train new standards of appraisal and criticism with just as much integrity as any that have been applied in any other domain of human excellence over the past many thousand years.

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1.

Unreliable sources will tell you that the French word for “fox” is renard. But this is in truth only a recent imposition (over the past 800 years or so). The correct French word is goupil, while renard, though written today in lowercase, is really a proper name, of Germanic origin. Reinhard or Reinhardt in turn has sometimes been glossed in popular etymology as “Pure of Heart”, though the truth is you just can’t get hardt from Herz, and the real meaning is something more like “strong in counsel”. It is however difficult not to read the name from the point of view of modern German, as a pairing of two attributes, rein and hart: “pure-hard”, or perhaps “so hardcore”. And curiously, given that the English core derives ultimately from the Latin cor, we seem to have arrived back where we started.

The fox anyhow is supposed to be, in medieval Europe as in Indigenous North America and elsewhere, the consummate trickster. While this is a character profile that we may naturally associate with hard-heartedness, it is much more difficult to link it with pure-heartedness, unless perhaps we draw inspiration from Kierkegaard and conceive such purity as belonging to any being who wills only one thing. Renart, the protagonist of Europe’s greatest animal epic —the medieval template for Tom and Jerry and Itchy and Scratchy and basically everything else in that venerable mode of imagining, through anthropomorphism, a comic and ultraviolent fun-house-mirror world parallel to our own— is plainly pure-hearted in at least this sense. He wills, namely, nothing but harm to those around him (perhaps with the exception of his dear wife and friend, the vixen Hermeline), and nothing but ill-gotten gains for himself.

This might be Kierkegaard’s fox but it is not Tolstoy’s or Isaiah Berlin’s: Renart does not waste his time sniffing around, now at this, now at that, but thoroughly digs in, like Tolstoy’s hedgehog, to the one thing that matters to him: pure malice.

Just how malicious is Renart? His worst deed, surely, is…

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Let me be clear that I love everyone I am about to put through the ringer. Among them pride of place surely goes to all those American collaborators and associates of mine who at this p…

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Is it not clear that we have entered an age not of the propaganda, but of the shitpost of the deed? How else do you make sense of the bullet casing, left at the site of an assassination, with the words “Notices bulge, OwO what’s this?” inscribed on it?

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In September, 2021, as regular readers will already know, I hit my head in a scooter accident. The impact shook a few things loose, and while no measurable damage appeared in the MRI, I have suspected ever since that it changed me in both subtle and profound ways. For one thing, in my previous life I had been content simply to enjoy music — to judge it, to curate it, to learn about its creators, and sometimes fully to feel it. Post-accident, I find that enjoying music is not enough. Music, I find, is now coming out of me, like sweat out of my pores, and I have no choice but to let it come out — i.e., to “make” it.

One obstacle here is that I am not a musician. Or am I? In the Categories Aristotle speaks of the musical man who is musical even when he is not making music — unlike the sitting man, who ceases to be a sitting man the instant he stands up. Could I have been a musical man for all those years, without knowing it? Are these songs seeping out of me, now, hints of a latent internal capacity that only had to be awakened? Is this capacity latent in all of us, qua human beings, while only some of us are fortunate enough to have it jostled out of us by one or several little traumas?

To be clear, I am not talking about talent — as I am about to show you, I have none. I am talking, in the first instance, about a capacity, something comparable, perhaps, to the capacity to perceive mental images; and in the second instance I am talking about a desire, comparable to the desire to take a pencil in hand and to draw the images one sees. I find the desire more surprising than the capacity — I often feel, these days, like the folks in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) who find themselves instinctively sculpting clay models of the site to which the aliens are calling them. I mean, I’ve just got to make this stuff.

The music churns up in me willy-nilly: the melodies, the lyrics. The difficult part comes in trying to translate what I am hearing in there, to get it out of me and into the world, a process for which I have no training at all, and, I have found, no real natural aptitude either. Europeans, who all seem to have received proper musical educations earlier in their lives, have often told me that to be able to discern a note means automatically to be able to reproduce it. But that’s just not how this American experiences music. I can’t sing at all, and I can just barely play the guitar or the piano to pick out melodies. Sometimes, if I have a melody in my head, I will press piano keys one by one, or at random, until I happen to find the note I was hearing. I have to count from middle C in order then to learn what note it actually is.

I also have lyrics for the melodies, which usually appear spontaneously in my head around the moment of the first appearance of the melody, though sometimes I write them first and then only later do I find the music to put them to. Writing lyrics is not like writing poetry, no matter how much the vapid poptimists are eager these days to analyze some mediocre Taylor Swift couplet as if it were Edna St. Vincent Millay. When it comes to song lyrics, at least the kind that pop up in my head, a fair amount of cliché is welcome — pure banalities like “Say you’ll be mine” and even “Ooh baby” that aren’t so much language in their own right as recycled fragments of the human cultural history that these songs in my head are in some deep sense “about”. Again, with due credit to David Lynch — in the 21st century, you do not issue the hortation to “do the Loco-Motion” out of any real expectation to see your friends doing the Loco-Motion. You hortate because it helps to move you into a mode of aesthetic receptivity that is at the same time a hard reckoning with the artistic legacies of post-war mass entertainment.

I have been obsessed recently with the Cuban classical guitarist and composer Leo Brouwer — a musical man if there ever was one. I must have watched this performance a hundred times by now, and each time I have detected some new subtlety to astound me and to make me wish to watch again. (I also love his look, and the Cuban revolutionary mural behind him.) Brouwer went on to a prolific career as a film composer, and in several interviews has presented himself as an absolute master of his craft, working according to the highest standards and the most stringent idea of what his compositions ought to be doing. One by one he dismisses as unnecessary, as frivolous, as cliché, the most familiar features of a musical work: rhythm, melody, dramaturgy — you don’t need any of it! What is left over at the end of this process —his film scores—, does not sound particularly lush or lively, but the artist keeps his integrity intact. This is not quite Adorno telling us to eat our vegetables, that modern music, if it is to succeed at what it is trying to do, must sound unpleasant; it is not quite that, but pretty close.

“The general public recognizes [certain chords] as something nice”, Brouwer reflects in one interview. But “the abuse of something nice becomes a banality.” Perhaps, yet it seems to me that in pop music, perhaps somewhat as in the joke drawn out so long that it becomes unfunny and then funny again, to continue to abuse certain well-chosen banalities can sometimes bring them back again from the ridiculous to the sublime. Even “Ooh baby” can never be lost forever.

So I admit that the music in my head is banal, cliché-ridden, worthy of scorn from Leo Brouwer. I also think it’s beautiful. Because it’s beautiful, I struggle to get it out, and what comes out is only ever a dim after-echo of what I had originally heard. On a few occasions I have managed to get out something that at least sounds, melodically, like the internal original —the work itself?—, simply by pecking patiently away at the keyboard or the fretboard. But when I have not been able to do that, I have, recently, found myself turning to technological aids to bring to life what I cannot.

And what I really want to write about today is how that part of the effort is going. I have found, in short, that some of our new tech prostheses are really quite powerful in aiding the only-latently-musical to be fully musical, to manifest our internal music to others. These prostheses are at the same time bringing about a transformation in the way we experience music that is at least as significant as anything that has occurred since the dawn of the recording era. This transformation is exciting, destabilizing, and worrisome all at once. Especially as concerns those tools that rely on artificial intelligence, I have found, technology is giving us something far worse than the “banalities” Brouwer despises.

The music I hear inside of me is, in the end, reprocessed human culture — it is the organic filtering, channeling, and recomposition of the sounds of other human beings, mostly American ones, mostly from the 20th century, sounds that were themselves often, in their initial production, enhanced or vehicled by new technologies, but that continued to testify to a clear origin in the human creative drive. AI music is different. It is, rather, the ground-up and reprocessed waste of mass human culture — the part that got wiped off, and left recordings, footage, tape, film, and data as its trace.

I found my way to Mureka, a subscription-based AI music platform, and I got myself a monthly pro plan. My idea was that I could upload recordings of myself humming or singing these little tunes of mine, so that it might then process them and make them into something appealing. I had expected that there would be a digital keyboard, and that I could supplement or correct any notes that were not entirely to my liking, that I could improve upon the original with small adjustments, some of which might require at least some competent musical input on my part, compelling me, I anticipated, to rise to the challenge and to improve in my musical ability.

In fact I had no opportunity to provide any such thing.

A big part of the problem is that if you upload a tune, the AI can only give you something that is like that tune, since to give you the tune itself, just as you had wanted it, could violate copyright protections on existing songs. Let’s say, simply for the sake of illustration, I upload an audio file of myself singing Miami Sound Machine’s 1985 hit, “Conga”, such as the following:

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0.

In recent months I have often felt somewhat like that library janitor in “One for the Books”, a 1986 episode of the Spielberg-produced TV series Amazing Stories, who acquires the ability osmotically to absorb the information on the stacks surrounding him. He collapses, ultimately, like the victim of a lightning-strike. His mortal brain just can’t take it, you see.

I’m not sure my mortal brain can take it either. But at least until I collapse, or the world collapses, I do believe that we are now in the midst of the most significant cognitive revolution in the history of our species — not just a revolution in our “prosthetic knowledge”, where we can in some qualified sense be said potentially to “know” whatever fact we might be able to access within five seconds or so of pulling out our phones, but a revolution in the sense of being able, now, to absorb a significantly expanded body of learning into our God-given wetware, which then quickly becomes integrated with the totality of our internal resources for making sense of the world.

In sum, I don’t know how you’re using AI, or whether you can relate to this experience, but as for me, at least, I cannot shake the feeling that we are not only conjuring a superintelligence into being; we are also coming to share, ourselves, as individual human beings, in that same superintelligence. To be clear —pace Nick Bostrom and, more recently, Mark Zuckerberg—, I personally do not believe the notion of machine superintelligence, considered independently of the way human beings are interacting with the machines, is coherent in the least. Yet I do think the term is at least helpful in understanding the transformation of the human mind itself that is already occurring as a result of the sudden proliferation of these new cognitive prostheses. We are the ones who are becoming superintelligent; “machine superintelligence” is a misnomer, but it does point to something real.

In partial demonstration of this claim, below the fold I provide some “receipts”, in the form of two pdf documents, well over 500 pages in total, containing the transcripts of my exchanges, this past month alone, with ChatGPT and DeepSeek (some pages have been deleted that contained personal information; I sincerely I hope I found them all!).

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Now, if we lived in a world of good taste, Molly would be a multimillionaire by now and this wouldn’t be an issue, but as things are Molly’s young son is facing some formidable medical issues and she has turned to her public to help her cover the expenses involved in treating them. We will therefore donate the entire amount of any new annual subscription to The Hinternet generated by the present post. It’s win-win-win: Molly comes closer to her fundraising goal, you get to read past the paywall, not just today but for an entire year, and we get to do something good for someone else for a change (alternatively, you may go directly to her fundraising page). —JSR

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1. “There’s a ghost here”

The other day I got it into my head to ask ChatGPT: “What’s my social class?” I told it all the relevant information — not only my income and education levels and so on, but those of my sibling, and of our parents; my grandparents’ various occupations; my total wealth in investments and savings; and so on. Here is the succinct determination it gave me:

Based on the detailed information you’ve provided, your position is best understood as somewhere in the upper-middle class, with significant ambivalences and tensions related to social origins, cultural capital, and economic security.

It then fleshed out this judgment more fully, as follows:

You embody a form of upper-middle-class status marked by high educational and cultural capital but moderate economic capital and a socially mobile, somewhat precarious position. Your experience reflects the complexity of contemporary class structures, where education and wealth do not always guarantee the psychological security or social confidence associated with class “belonging.”

I protested. This didn’t seem right to me. I insisted that I am in fact much more low-class than the LLM had pegged me to be, citing, most importantly, the legacy of a certain Ken Smith (1940-2016), and the way it seems, at each moment of my life, to weigh on me:

In my mind my life trajectory seems most comparable to my father’s: starting from fairly humble origins (though his more humble than mine), having some career success, but with the threat of slippage never far at all. That’s why, no matter how far I climb, I always basically presume that I will similarly end up, in my last years, as he did, in a flea-bag motel outside of Guadalajara.

ChatGPT went on to speak of the “scarcity mindset”, and of “precarious habitus”, and of other notions that sociologists have introduced to complicate our facile slotting of individuals into well-defined classes simply in view of their incomes and educations. It told me that perhaps instead of defining my status through the raw numbers of my modest investments, I should take some of that money and use it towards projects that give a sense of deep meaning and fulfillment to me (reader, I am doing that — it’s called The Hinternet).

Then I insisted to my inanimate interlocutor that “none of these pursuits can cure me of my existential feeling of being permanently a member of the precariat”. And this is where things got weird. For some reason, and I have no idea why, ChatGPT went all neo-Derridean on me:

There is a kind of class hauntology that money can’t exorcise: even when you have some material comfort, the felt reality of precarity —of instability, of having to earn your right to exist every day— can remain untouched. Especially if you’ve internalized a life story, like your father’s or your own early trajectory, where the fall from comfort to desperation feels not just possible but likely.

To which, I:

Hey whoah — hauntology?! Who told you to start talking like Mark Fisher? Isn’t that a tad too modishly theoretical for our discussion?

To which, in turn, it:

Fair point, and I take the jab — maybe a bit of fog-machine language slipped in where it wasn’t entirely welcome.

And then, a few lines later, it added this observation, from the first sight of which I still have not quite recovered:

I said “hauntology” because there’s a ghost here: not a philosophical specter, but your father in that motel.

Not since the Oracle at Delphi, I do not think, has an inanimate entity ever done quite so much to contribute to a human being’s project of self-knowledge.

But things get spookier still…

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1.

I strongly recommend reading Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral”, an essay-review in the most recent New Yorker, and also to read Nadia Asparouhova’s Antimemetics, which serves as the essay’s main focus. I gave a critical notice of Nadia’s book a few weeks ago, which she kindly had sent to me, and which I am reading now. The present essay is not a review of it, as I have not fully absorbed its argument or followed out its several threads.

I had a long and stimulating conversation with Gideon in, I believe, 2021, when I was finishing work on The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. That book was published the following year, which means that, in 2025, it is already entirely irrelevant to any effort to make sense of the world we currently inhabit. Gideon remained one of only two people in my Skype contacts, until that platform was phased out last month. I wouldn’t know how to contact him now if I were to wish to do so (it’s probably not that hard, but my point here is not literal).

I recall Gideon telling me at the time that when he started working the tech beat some years before, people were still talking about Facebook, Google, and the others as if these were scrappy underdog start-ups, even though they were already by then some of the largest corporations in the world. Today it seems, analogously, people are still talking about the tech companies as if they were some of the largest corporations in the world, when they have already long since morphed into world-shaping empires. Coca-Cola might have given some tweeners a buzz and caused them to stay up past their bedtimes, but it never came close to reshaping humanity in its own image.

Regular readers of The Hinternet will know that I am ambivalent about the transformations our most recent tech revolution has wrought. Obviously, I do not avoid the internet. I hate it when people with short attention spans glance at my work and quickly surmise that I must be a “Luddite”. The Luddites were engaged in a focused uprising of organized labor, with concrete objectives that only made sense in their local setting. If there’s another thing regular readers will know about me, it’s that I’m definitely not much of a labor activist. How could I be? I’m a recluse, and that is a form of life that is definitionally incompatible with the task of “organizing”. I belong to a union by default, but I don’t like the aesthetics of the e-mails they send me —they look cheap and inelegant—, and I always delete them without reading. Do I think Ned Ludd (if he in fact existed) and his gang were right or not to smash up those steam engines? I don’t doubt they had their reasons. Did their action do anything to slow the spread of all the other dark satanic mills —as William Blake already understood the modest smoke-belching factories of the early industrial revolution to be— across the face of the earth? No, of course not.

Anyhow the machines that interest me most are not steam engines or gas engines, but reckoning engines, and my basic view is that these should be neither smashed nor worshipped. A zoomed-out perspective on our current revolution in information technology tells me that, like pretty much everything human beings do, and like Leonard Cohen’s description of shooting heroin, it’s doing “some good”, and “some harm” — almost as if it were operating according to a hidden law ensuring, at every instant of human history, that all our efforts will balance out to exactly zero, that the old problems we solve with our innovations will be exactly compensated by the new problems they generate.

Like Jac Mullen in his piece of a few days ago on the long history of literacy at both its starting and its endpoints —namely, in ancient Mesopotamia and in the present moment—, I see information-technology revolutions as bringing about the consolidation of state power, in the first instance, as great leaps forward for the control of human subjects, even if inevitably these also eventually become tools in the ever-expanding repertoire of those same human subjects for the expression of their interiority, and therefore ultimately for the assertion of their freedom.

Jac rightly suggests that, if our current technological revolution is going to recapitulate the ancient progression that we see in the technology of writing, from state control to expansion of individual freedom, then it is going to have to do so at a much sped-up pace. We don’t have a millennium to wait for AI truly to start empowering ordinary human beings, rather than constraining them and reducing the range of their autonomy. We’ve got to make sure that’s built into our emerging AI-based political order, like, now. We’ve got to be alert to the threats and promises of this new technology, in a way that it would have been unreasonable to expect some hapless Sumerian wine-merchant to have been the first time he ever saw a record of his recent transactions pressed into a clay tablet.

In contrast with Jac, the revolution I spend most of my time mining for historical rhymes is not the one that occurred in ancient Mesopotamia, but in early modern Europe, with the arrival of the printing press (I know moveable type was already in use in East Asia centuries before, but the context of its use was different, and mostly contained within specific narrow spheres of human activity). Would the world have been better off if Gutenberg had never “launched” his “product”? It is plain enough to me that it was this product that delivered to us —not as a distal cause, but more or less directly— such familiar features of the modern world as the nation-state, democracy, a secularized public sphere, and, ultimately, such monuments of the expression of interiority as the modern novel. It also brought us several centuries of war, persecution, imperialism, genocide… In short, it really shook things up.

One image to which I often return, likely thanks to Hilary Mantel, is the scene of a bonfire execution, in England, circa 1530, of some poor smuggler who had carried copies of Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible across the Channel. That smuggler was involved in a process that ultimately could never be suppressed — the rendering of religious truth into the “vulgar” national languages, which in turn makes it accessible to a great number of people without the intermediation of ecclesiastical authorities, which in turn stimulates new discoveries and development of the power of ordinary individuals to frame the project of their own lives, which ultimately leads to the ideal of individual rational autonomy that has profoundly shaped the way we think about ourselves for the past few centuries. It would of course have been small comfort to the smuggler to inform him of his role in this historical process as the flames began to lick at his feet. And similarly for the countless other people whose lives were squelched, or rendered unbearable, by the large-scale historical transformations that the printing revolution unleashed.

And similarly, again, it is perfectly reasonable, without claiming to know the precise course of future events, to expect that countless people are likewise going to be snuffed out, tortured, immiserated, and otherwise inconvenienced in the course of the broad historical process our current information revolution has initiated. It’s going to get ugly. It’s already getting ugly. And just like the imagined Sumerian wine-merchant, who shrugged and went right back to his business the first time he saw a cuneiform representation of, say, “jug” or “ladle”, it may be that we are not yet sufficiently attuned to all the new ways this ugliness is going to manifest itself — that we cannot yet see all the ways our new technologies threaten us, because we have no historical experience, yet, that could possibly have prepared us. There are some true threats, indeed, that seem to remain largely off of our cultural radar, and outside of the cultural discourse.

Below I would like to introduce you to one of them.

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1.

If only there were a website run on the same principle as isabevigodadead.com, that could tell us with a simple yes-or-no answer whether the US has finally lapsed into fascism. That question, unfortunately, however much we would like for it to present itself in binary form, has in the real world more the character of a Rorschach test, in which anyone can see anything. I myself believe that Trump and his boyars often say things that qualify as fascist, or that would, if we could attribute to them sufficient historical awareness of the import of the ideas they are channeling. But that’s asking a lot. These days people just say whatever, and that, as we’ll see below, is the true defining feature, and the true novelty, of our political moment.

I remain convinced of the essential stability of the claim, articulated already in the early days of Trump’s first term, that his reign is one of “malevolence tempered by incompetence”. The first 100 days of the second administration were indeed bold, and seemed to have something of the quality of a big-budget sequel to what had initially been an indie film unexpectedly elevated to the status of a hit. But even this earnest attempt by Trump 2 to be as scary as possible right out of the gates, seems, although it was surely the most sincere effort at instigating a fascoid cultural revolution in my lifetime, by now mostly to have fizzled. Markets, courts, and polls —the ultimate instruments for interpreting what passes for reality in our society— all prove, again, to have veto power over unviable initiatives.

For Trump himself it’s no big deal either way. He reverses course, declares victory no matter what ends up happening; his opponents hate him exactly as much as before, and his supporters fail to notice. Some genuine atrocities are committed — the abduction of Rümeysa Öztürk is, so far, for me the most horrifying of them. But neither Homeland Security nor any shadier agency is yet sending the intellectuals to labor camps, there is no particular hostility to people who wear eyeglasses, and US citizens who are holders of endowed chairs at Yale University, to all appearances, are still able, if they choose, to do their jobs, as they understand them, without significant fear of persecution.

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Over the past decade I’ve had the peculiar experience, each time I return to the United States, of discovering that that country is, against all expectation, still there. It is the only country I really know, the only one whose metabolism I share, and so this perpetual rediscovery of its enduring reality should come, one might suppose, as a relief to me. Instead I always end up feeling as if the proof it so reliably delivers of its existence, with just the form and quality my exile dreams attribute to it, is itself a refutation of the faith I have in it.

This is the opposite of how things usually work. Empirical proof is supposed to buttress faith, not weaken it. Perhaps what this proof really establishes, then, is that a country just isn’t the sort of thing one ought to have faith in. My sophisticated readers will already know that a country is but an imagined community, a tax-extracting shakedown that legitimizes itself through fine-tuned myths, a collective illusion that it is the duty of the intellectual and the cosmopolitan to see right through.

But what can I say? These are my people. Here, now, upon just having returned from my first visit to the United States since the beginning of the Trump Restoration, is how I find they are faring…

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