McKenosha

US politics seems now consumed again a modernistic insurrection. Historical (rather than theoretical) postmodernity is a ruling order of depersonalized and delocalized actors connected by (mostly abstract) business transactions. But the interests of business are, contra Marx, most of the time out of sync with each other; the system of global liberalism does not march in lockstep. This renders it fundamentally vulnerable to external synchronizing factors. Synchronization signifies: “fire together, wire together”.

Consider Q, which is to say, Sokal politics rebooted. Sokalian modernity was epitomized by the purity of science, mishandled by sophistic barbarians; Q-modernity is epitomized by the purity of children, menaced by pedophile networks. This is also the case of McKenosha, where Wakanda is destroyed by white supremacy. Of course, “we have never been modern”; the 16- and 17-year olds abused by Epstein have never been children (yet: exploitation of teens by grown adults was, in the past, held in check by sexual repression; the pill ruins everything). Q is validated by the deracinating process of “globalist” politics that joins the Clintons to British royalty both in Pleasure Island and the WTO. In the very same way, McKenosha is validated by the way the urban warfare cookie crumbles.

But pay attention, what matters each time is not the content of their fantasies and goals, but their resonance to ongoing events. Of course, under the regime of peak history, almost every event is ongoing; the count of finished or future events is exceedingly small. To single out police violence (or the discovery of lolita sex slaves; or whatever else) risks endorsing the very availability-heuristics that blinds and/or favors the resonance of Q or McKenosha. Theory is drowned by the deafening beat of these threads — themselves out of sync with each other, save for the quilting point that synchronizes and signifies them: Trump.

Still, the resonance to their resonance is strange and invites scrutiny. American-style antiracism goes global; if you, in Croatia or Guatemala, didn’t know quite for sure who were your local elites, you can tell by their stilted FIFA-style locution on this matter. This is even stranger in places like Brazil which have their own (close to orthogonal to the US configuration) issues that don’t naturally fit the Nike/BLM mold. McKenosha is synchronized by law enforcement excess, and social engineering agencies throughout the world are synchronized by McKenosha. In two years more, racial exploitation in Brazil will have been fully erased by a poor dublagem of its Hollywood counterpart. How can Zumbi, the slave-owning Black king of the Palmares rebellion, ever compete with Black Panther? Wakanda further erases recent ethnic cleansing in Africa, Tutsis, pygmies. American culture seems to binge-eat on modernity and excrete baudrillardian postmodern simulacra.

On the other hand, Q also seems to be going global. This should be puzzling, since Q is the theory that mr. Trump has been effecting a secret-in-plain-sight agenda to purge elite pedophiles and undo manifold conspiracies that kept people (temporarily embarassed Free People) down. But while McKenosha demands a single-minded vision of white supremacy as structurally integral conspiracy, Q is additive and adhesive; it integrates the “post-rational” thinking of MLM semicults and radical, Alexander Supertramp-type individualists alike, and many more. In Germany, we’re told, Q is all about how the elite lies about Covid. And while McKenosha can, in principle, be refuted with relative simplicity (if the arena for refutations were ever set up), Q is fluid, distributed and barely synchronizing enough to subsist. McKenosha is a single Cartesian proposition; it is feared for its quick Maoist rise; but it’s ultimately brittle. To survive, it will need increasing propping up by social engineering agencies in the US itself, which will have to look to the world for best practices.

I’d like to tell you to hold your breath until it blows over, but under conditions of peak history, it won’t. Nothing ever will. The way out is to the top. Loudness will beat loudness until (in the asemic horizon) nothing is signifiable anymore.