The laughter weapon

In the episode of the original Star Trek "The Day of the Dove," a malevolent alien entity traps 38 members of the Enterprise crew on board the ship -- along with 38 Klingons.

It sets them up with weapons, convenient grievances (some of which were manufactured by the entity, who can manipulate memories), and a preternatural ability to heal from wounds.  As it turns out, the entity feeds on rage.  It's set up the ship as a feeding station, fueling the anger of the Federation and Klingon crew, getting them to fight with each other so it can gain strength.

The end of the episode is interesting -- especially in light of recent events.  Kirk and Spock realize that the creature is promoting their fury for its own malign purposes, and the only way to defeat it is to refuse to play the game.  In the end, what works best is laughing at it.  Faced with derisive laughter, it is defeated by being starved of what it needed most, which is fear and anger.

I was immediately reminded of "The Day of the Dove" by the discombobulation we're seeing amongst the GOP over being labeled "weird."  The parallels are obvious.  The GOP message has been nothing if not consistent; keep voters angry and scared.  Keep your eye on those depraved atheists and LGBTQ+ people, they warn.  Watch out for the influence of Jews and Muslims.  Look out for the caravans of illegal immigrants, which, strangely enough, never seem to arrive.  (The rhetoric that illegal immigration has increased is false; illegal immigration has been level since 2007.  I'm not saying it's not a problem, but the idea that the Democrats have opened the borders simply isn't true.)  

What the recent "call 'em weird" approach has highlighted is that fascism is, at its heart, humorless, arrogant, and deadly serious.  I remember thinking back in 2016 that what needed to happen was that during one of Trump's speeches, when he uttered one of his countless lunatic pronouncements, the entire room should have burst out in a deafening uproar of laughter.  Trump doesn't mind an argument; he positively thrives on being combative.

But being laughed at?

No wannabe dictator can survive that.

It's already flooding social media.  Over at Bluesky, it's taken the form of "The Republicans have been the party of normalcy my entire life, especially when..."

• "... MTG and Lauren Boebert got into a vicious argument over Jewish space lasers."
• "... Donald Trump apparently believed that he could change the path of a hurricane by drawing on the forecast map with a Sharpie marker."
• "... Trump created trading cards depicting himself as various superheroes."
• "... Louie Gohmert claimed that the Democrats want to jail all Christians for belonging to a hate group."  (Despite the fact that about seventy percent of Americans self-identify as Christian.)
• "... Trump confuses 'asylum seeker' with 'insane asylum' and keeps bringing up Hannibal Lecter and acting as if he's a real person."
• "... DJT Jr. championed the views of Dr. Stella Immanuel, who believes that gynecological problems are caused by having sex with demons."  (Yes, this is actually what she believes, and Trump Jr. did support her enthusiastically -- I wrote about it here a couple of years ago.)

And so on and so forth.  

Lest you think I'm exaggerating by calling them would-be fascist dictators, though, you might want to familiarize yourself with Project 2025, which sets the agenda for a second Trump presidency -- and which, despite Trump's recent efforts to backpedal, remains closely aligned with the MAGA leadership's goals.  In fact, Trump's running mate, J. D. Vance, has multiple connections to Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who is one of Project 2025's main architects.  Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts's upcoming book, Dawn's Early Light, and includes in it a thinly-veiled call to violence: "It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine.  But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets."

So I'm serious when I say they're scrapping for a fight.  But what they do not seem to have been prepared for is the simple response of ridicule.

I'm not saying that ridicule is enough; but pointing out to undecided voters that these people are not just dangerous, they're downright crazy, seems to be helping.  It pulls the teeth of their main weapon, which is convincing everyone that (1) we're in danger, and (2) the GOP are the ones who know how to fix what they just now made us all scared of.  It's no wonder that the Nazis suppressed comics and satirists; Hitler preferred to be worshiped, but failing that, was fine being feared.

But the one thing he couldn't tolerate was not being taken seriously.

Trump is cut from much the same cloth.  Perhaps fortunately, he lacks the brains of a Hitler, Mao, Stalin, or Mussolini, and that's not even taking into account the signs in the last year that he's experiencing some profound cognitive decline.  And to be clear, laughing at him and his cronies doesn't mean we shouldn't treat the threat they represent as if it weren't real.  Like in the science fiction setting of "The Day of the Dove," the fact that the solution was to laugh at the entity didn't obviate the need to address the danger it represented.  MAGA, just like the nameless creature in Star Trek, is perfectly happy to incite their followers to bloodshed in order to fulfill their goals.

It's just that the best option at this point is to keep the focus on the fact that at their core, they're total nutjobs.  These people are so extreme that if I were to hop a time machine and go back ten years, and write a novel detailing what's happened in those ten years, my publisher would reject it out of hand on the basis of being ridiculously implausible.

I'll end with another fictional reference -- this from C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength.  Toward the end, the main character, Mark Studdock, has been accused of murder and imprisoned in the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, where he is being worked upon (with the desired end of brainwashing him completely) by the sinister Dr. Frost.  Frost, like the MAGA leaders, is a humorless, desperately arrogant man, who demands that others treat him with the seriousness and deference he feels he merits, despite his actions being nothing short of fatuous.  Mark realizes the solution, but too late, given that he's a captive, and at the mercy of Frost and his cronies.  Lewis writes, "Often Mark felt that one good roar of coarse laughter would have blown away the whole atmosphere of the thing; but laughter was unhappily out of the question."

Luckily for rational voters in the United States it's not out of the question for us.  So keep laughing... and for heaven's sake, vote this November.

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