In the new catechism of American reaction, liberty means obedience. The ritual is simple: hand on heart, salute, murmur your reverence. Fail in this act and you are marked a heretic, an enemy of the people, guilty of thought-crime against the cult.

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Attila the Trump is busy laying gold leaf in his outhouse while the barbarians are already inside the gate. The décor is Vegas kitsch, but the mood is late-imperial Rome: a carnival of distraction while the foundations crack. Nero fiddled, Caligula made his horse, Incitatus, a senator, Trump applies gilt to the latrine—each tyrant finding his own grotesque hobby as their world collapses around them. 

But this is no ordinary sack of the city. The besiegers were invited in. They sit on congressional committees, fill statehouses, and beam nightly from Fox studios. And what has stirred their blood recently? Not famine, not plague, not foreign invasion, but the curious passion play of perpetual victimhood. Charlie Kirk, a fixture in the grievance economy, has been elevated to near-martyrdom status in the culture wars—not through any arrows of persecution, but through the theatrical amplification of minor slights into existential threats. 

The Machinery of Manufactured Martyrdom 

In the new catechism of American reaction, liberty means obedience. The ritual is simple: hand on heart, salute, murmur your reverence. Fail in this act and you are marked a heretic, an enemy of the people, guilty of thought-crime against the cult. In Orwellian inversion, freedom of speech becomes the duty to parrot; freedom of conscience becomes the obligation to genuflect. Joseph McCarthy would indeed recognize this playbook instantly; salute its refinement. 

Kirk’s memorial/rally/revival perfectly encapsulates this phenomenon. Trump entered the stage to fireworks, accompanied by Lee Greenwood’s live rendition of “God Bless the USA,” transforming what should have been a solemn occasion into a campaign rally. This wasn’t mourning—it was political theater, complete with pyrotechnics and patriotic soundtrack. 

The Gospel According to Grievance 

Trump’s recent statements reveal the true nature of this movement. His declaration that he hates Democrats; “I cannot stand them”, isn’t an aberration but the logical endpoint of a politics that treats opposition as treason. When he praised Kirk by falsely declaring, “He did not hate his opponents… That’s where I differ,” Trump accidentally revealed the authoritarian heart of his project: the explicit rejection of democratic pluralism. Such repudiation reprises McCarthy’s dream: a political movement where loyalty is measured not by adherence to constitutional principles, but by the intensity of hatred for designated enemies. The senator from Wisconsin could only dream of the vast machinery that now exists to transform political opponents into existential threats requiring elimination rather than engagement. 

The Fireworks of Fascism 

There’s something deeply unsettling about fireworks at a memorial service; a confusion of celebration with mourning that speaks to the movement’s deeper confusion of performance with governance. This is politics as entertainment, democracy as reality show, where the line between genuine emotion and manufactured spectacle is erased entirely.  

Yet the pageantry serves a purpose beyond mere theatrics. When political events become religious ceremonies complete with martyrs, saints, and ritualised hatred of heretics, democratic deliberation becomes impossible. Citizens are no longer fellow Americans with different priorities; they are believers and infidels in a holy war. 

The Infrastructure of Intolerance 

What makes Trump’s moment particularly dangerous is the sophisticated infrastructure now supporting this politics of hatred. Unlike the McCarthy era, when opposition could organize through independent institutions, today’s authoritarians have built an ecosystem that spans traditional media, social platforms, and government itself. 

The transformation of Charlie Kirk from political activist to secular saint illustrates this machinery at work. Through careful orchestration of outrage, amplification of grievance, and ritualised displays of loyalty, ordinary political figures become untouchable icons whose criticism constitutes blasphemy. 

The Golden Toilet Throne 

Meanwhile, Attila the Trump reclines, resplendent in his golden outhouse, attended by priests of grievance. He is a Liberace Nero, an emperor of tat, gilding the privy while the republic is sold off in pieces. His open declarations of hatred for half the electorate represent not a momentary lapse but a fundamental abdication of democratic leadership in favor of tribal authoritarianism. 

If Plato warned us that democracy decays into tyranny when demagogues flatter the mob, and Juvenal asked “who watches the watchmen?” “Nobody”, seems to be the answer in today’s America. Americans are too busy participating in the liturgy of grievance, complete with fireworks and freedom songs, to give a fig for their constitutional and human rights. 

The McCarthyist Revival 

Joseph McCarthy would not only recognize this moment, he’d marvel at its sophistication. Where the Wisconsin senator had to rely on congressional hearings and newspaper coverage, today’s mega-demagogues and their Murdochs command an entire media ecosystem designed to amplify their message and silence dissent. 

The parallels are striking: the same creation of enemy lists, the same demand for loyalty oaths (now called “salutes”), the same transformation of political opposition into treasonous conspiracy. But today’s version is more insidious because it operates through the forms of democracy while gouging out its substance, as media companies gouge the creative talent to which they, originally, owe their very existence. 

The Republic Half-Gone 

Is this the last straw for freedom of speech and thought in America? Not yet; but the danger lies in the machinery of outrage that can transform minor political figures into sacred martyrs, golden toilets into thrones, and liberty itself into a compulsory act of reverence. 

When the pageantry of grievance becomes the national liturgy, when fireworks accompany memorial services, when presidents declare their hatred for half the citizenry, the republic is already half-gone. Up shit-creek in a barbed wire canoe. What remains is the form without the substance, the ritual without the meaning, the performance without the purpose. 

The question is not whether American democracy will survive this assault, but whether Americans still remember what they’re supposed to be defending. When the barbarians are already inside the gate, and the emperor is too busy gilding his throne to notice, the only hope lies in citizens who still believe that democracy is worth more than a fireworks display. 

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