Sic Transit Gloria Monday

The rapture will happen tomorrow, according to South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela and the dimwits of RaptureTok, when all Christian true believers will be taken up bodily into heaven—a kind of taking-back Tuesday if you will,¹ after which the world will be made Brand New, as the prophesy has foretold. So I guess that means today is Sic Transit Gloria Monday and the biggest gloria currently undergoing a sick transit is American democracy, which has been de facto over for a while now but today it’s TNR official, with Michael Tomasky declaring that “It’s Happened: The United States of America Is No Longer a Democracy.” R.I.P. to us, it wasn’t great for anyone but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

In 2016, as Hillary Clinton (not in the government at the time) was running to succeed Barack Obama as president, her husband Bill (also not in the government at the time) chatted with Obama’s attorney general Loretta Lynch at the airport in Phoenix, cursing our political discourse with the word “tarmac” forever. No one even agrees what the conversation was about but it provoked a “Political Furor” according to the New York Times and made big dumb Jim Comey “lose faith” in the Justice Department, which prompted his rogue announcement of the F.B.I.’s Hillary Clinton investigation which in turn gave us BUT HER EMAILS and arguably tipped the race in Trump’s favor.

“Even in terms of judgment,” said candidate Donald Trump at the time, concerned as he always is about the independence of the Justice Department, “how bad of judgment is it for him or for her to do this? Who would do this?” The implication, supposedly, was that Bill Clinton somehow scared Loretta Lynch off from investigating his wife, using the great powers he had as, I don’t know, just a guy? That was the scandal. That was the tenuous chain of suppositions that tarnished the Justice Department so badly we had to abandon democracy in response. Anyway on Saturday, Trump posted this:

That’s a public message from the President ordering the Attorney General to investigate and prosecute three of his political enemies. Is that bad? Who can say. Perhaps “History of Rome” podcaster Mike Duncan, who talked to Rolling Stone’s Nikki McCann Ramirez about whether this is the beginning of the end for the United States (spoiler: yes) and whether the fall of Rome was this stupid:

We’re transitioning from a perfectly functional society to a society of snitches, according to Liz Lopatto or what David Roth called “The United States of Snitches.” And even more bad news from The Onion, struggling to keep ahead of a reality relentlessly pre-satirizing itself: “Report: You To Be Fired For Reading This Headline About Charlie Kirk.” The only people in the MAGA empire safe from snitches are the actual criminals, like border czar and medical reference illustration for the word “bagman” Tom Homan who, according to MSNBC’s Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian, took $50,000 in cash from undercover F.B.I. agents “in a bag from the restaurant chain Cava” in September, 2024. That case was shut down by googley eyed Trump F.B.I. head Kash Patel and ageless ghoul from the outer dark Emil Bove after a careful review and determination that bribery is ok if you’re one of us.

Things sure seem bad! Our whole media is owned by approximately three dudes now, who all need to keep endlessly merging and divesting to maintain the illusion that there’s still economic activity happening in the sector. Tiktok, ironically one of the last remaining non-oligarch-controlled media companies, is about to get raptured and replaced in the U.S. with an Ellison/Murdoch administered right-wing zombie of itself. But none of this has anything to do with what people like or want. ABC putting Jimmy Kimmel on hiatus in the face of a government threat to exercise merger leverage was so unpopular that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation posted on Instagram about receiving “hundreds of complaints about [Kimmel’s] show being cancelled, many citing concerns about free speech and the First Amendment to the US Constitution.” ABC’s craven capitulation to FCC pressure even drew sharp criticism from the FCC.

G. Elliott Morris wrote that all these companies are making a fundamental mistake by not realizing how unpopular Trump is, and how much their business goals have diverged from what their alleged customers want:

It’s easy to feel despair about everything—I feel despair about everything right now. But the truth is that Trump is underwater on every issue and with every demographic group, and none of these are the actions of a strong regime with broad popular support. Bullying Jimmy Kimmel off the air? Jimmy Kimmel? Loser shit. Canonizing Charlie Kirk? Weird loser shit. Normal people still don’t know who Charlie Kirk is, nor do they care. Sinclair bailed on its planned Charlie Kirk documentary Friday, dumping it on Youtube and running Celebrity Family Feud instead. The Youtube video currently has under 69,000 views after three days, and judging by the comment section they were all hate-watches.

So look, whether the rapture happens tomorrow or not, just remember: things are often chopped and cooked, before they’re served and ate.

Today’s Song: Brand New, “Jesus Christ”

P.S.: Niko Stratis: “The second time I ever came out as trans, it was in an Arby’s drive-through in Alberta on a flip-phone in the height of the oil boom.” Stratis didn’t come out to the Arby’s drive-through employee, which is what I went into this essay thinking was gonna happen, but that doesn’t detract from how good it is.

P.P.S.: They found the TIME CRYSTALS???

P.P.P.S: Remember when you were a kid and you wrote a letter to your best friend and it always had an ever increasing string of P’s before the final S because you just couldn’t quite bring yourself to stop writing? There was always one more thing you had to say even though it was so late and you had school the next day and you already knew you’d be exhausted and the bus ride would be hell? Maybe not, maybe that was a distinct experience that belonged to a specific time and place, maybe you were too young or too old, maybe you didn’t have the kind of stable access to pens and paper and friends that I was blessed with, or the lack of access to the internet that my generation was blessed with. But if you can imagine it, please know that you’re the friend that I’m burrowed under the covers with a flashlight still writing to because I can’t make myself stop. We’re only gonna be able to get through this together.

1  Or even if you won’t.