Los Angeles, April 2, 2026
Dear Geert—
I’ve written before about how understanding the present crisis gets harder and harder with each of these letters to European friends. And that’s simply because we are now in the moment when flooding the zone with shit has resulted in a zone that’s only shit. Flooding the zone was Trump’s on-and-off advisor Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming people’s feeds with a never-ending, accelerating combination of false statements, real actions, and deepfake red herrings to keep the opposition off balance and two steps behind. Flooding the zone took Nixon era political sabotage—or “ratfucking” as they called it– and massified it using algorithms and multiple networks.
Flooding the zone with shit sounds like an accelerationist strategy, but as implemented by Trump in his second administration, it’s only a tactic. However, it’s a tactic that when successful renders strategies inoperable, because they are so mired in fecal waste that nothing but decay and decline are possible. Kakistocracies kreate kultural katastrophes. Even spelling becomes enshittified.
Whole swathes of the US government have been decimated, the Department of Justice and the FBA are in shambles. Sectors of American science are at 50% of previous funding levels and others have been cut entirely. The future leaders of the Republican party, the staffers in their 20s and 30s who do the grunt work of campaigns and run the offices, are not just “anti-woke,” they are full-on racists/fascists/misogynists (listening to racist/fascist/misogynist podcaster Nick Fuentes all day will do that to you). These are the anonymous minions sending out memes from the White House coms office that celebrate white nationalism and create montages mixing video game footage with the slaughter of Iranian Muslims. Again, there’s no strategy left in the MAGA arsenal, only tactics.
Here in Southern California, it was an unseasonably hot winter, while the rest of the United States suffered through multiple blizzards, a relentless combination of snow, dark, and cold. Here in the sunshine, we watched the incredibly brave people of Minneapolis create a new strategy of resistance as they shifted from their trademarked “Minnesota nice” to the power of what they called “neighboring,” protecting those around them no matter who they were or where they were from—all done in bone-chilling weather. The Trump administration wears its ignorance on its sleeve, of course, so they did not understand the age-old lesson that you don’t invade a winter people in the winter.
One of the footnotes of this era will be a little man named Greg Bovino, who for a time was the director of ICE’s operations. He was a tin-pot dictator’s idea of a man of action, and he managed to bully his way through a series of disastrous incursions into American cities—on horseback, his officers swarmed a park packed with children in Los Angeles; they rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters into a residential apartment building in Chicago kicking in windows and terrorizing grandmothers; and most famously his ICE officers—masked as always—gunned down two American citizens in Minneapolis. All the while, the Napoleon-sized Bovino strutted around in a comically oversized, double breasted green greatcoat. I doubt he knows the names of the Field Marshals Hitler tasked with invading Russia (three “vons”– von Leeb, von Bock, and von Rundstedt) he was cosplaying, but he followed them, their Fuhrer, and his French inspiration into snowbound defeat.
It’s easy to blame Bovino— an Italian-American who preposterously claimed to be part Cherokee, though his family is listed on no tribal rolls—for his sadism, but you can also see him trying to perfect his backstrokes in the sea of shit that his boss, Kristi Noem mastered for the time she was in charge of the department of Homeland Security. Noem outdid Bovino on every level of narcissism, sadism, and incompetence. Noem picked up the sobriquet ICE Barbie because she posed in different costumes from cowgirl – complete with a Stetson hat—to tactical ICE gear while in full glam makeup. The indelible image of her will remain the one taken as she ostentatiously sported a gold Rolex watch in front of deportees caged in a notorious El Salvadorean prison. She and Bovino exemplified the combination of make-believe, costuming, and set-dressing that Trump introduced in his first term, and that has morphed into something indescribably cruel and dangerous in his second. What I can say, even though it will require a fair amount of exegesis, is that the kayfabe has become real.
Kayfabe comes to us from professional wrestling. While the rest of the world has Olympic grappling, the US has had an immensely popular entertainment that looks like a sport but that is really a series of male acrobatics in the service of soap operas for boys and the men who think like them. “Professional wrestling” is scripted combat featuring “faces” (pretty boy heroes) versus “heels” (villains, often identified with nefarious “others”). The scripts offer the excitement of conflict but with long story arcs, and reliable moments of catharsis (the reliability comes from the script, unlike the unpredictability of “real” sport). But to keep to the script no matter what the “reality” required a code of silence, an omerta shared between wrestlers, promoters and the friendly press, and accepted by the fans. The term for this is “kayfabe” and it was in use for almost 50 years, from the 1930s through the 1980s. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the fact or convention of presenting staged events, performances, and competitors’ rivalries as if they were authentic or spontaneous,” but the key aspect of all of this is the suspension of disbelief.
If there was one person who introduced kayfabe to the masses it was George Raymond Wagner, an itinerant wrestler from the dowdy Midwest circuit who ended up in Los Angeles in the 1950s at the very advent of television’s triumph, and transformed himself into the biggest star wrestling had ever seen. “Gorgeous George” was a flamboyant heel in peroxided hair, who sprayed the ring with a disinfectant he said was “Chanel #10” – “why be half safe”—before flinging trinkets to the crowd and strutting around the ring with the theatrical flair of a seasoned drag queen. Gorgeous George became one of the most famous figures on early television, literally driving the sale of home receivers, and thereby one of the most famous Americans of his time. Not entirely surprisingly, he died young of alcoholism, broke and mostly forgotten. Regardless of his personal failings, to honor his impact on the “sport,” in 2010 he was posthumously inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame.
Three years later, another peroxide blonde, makeup-wearing, German American heel was voted into that same hall of fame. Unlike Gorgeous George, though, the entertainer known as Donald J. Trump would also be elected to the office of president not once but twice. Trump was inducted into the “Celebrity” section (wing?) of the Hall of Fame because his casinos had hosted multiple matches, and he himself “wrestled” with the bombastic owner/promoter of the WWE, Vince McMahon in what was billed as the “Battle of the Billionaires.” So as not to lose this letter’s fecal focus, it should be noted—in the spirit of wrestling’s ever spiraling storylines— that the very same Vince Macmahon has since resigned from WWE after being accused of shitting into the mouth of a female junior executive during coerced, nonconsensual sex. It should be doubly noted that Vince’s wife, Linda Macmahon (they are separated at this point, but still somehow married), is Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, tasked for the past year with shutting down and dismantling the very agency she directs.
But back to kayfabe. There are times in a match when the “work” or entertainment is interrupted by something real, a wrestler hits too hard, gets too mad, or somehow goes against the script. That moment is known as the “shoot.” Last year, Southern California saw a disastrous shoot in the middle of the kayfabe when the mixed martial artist Raja Jackson was invited to participate in a match with professional wrestler Stuart Smith. Smith, who wrestles under the name “Syko Stu,” had crushed a beer can on Jackson’ head (just the sort of histrionics wrestling fans love) during a pre-match livestream earlier, but the MMA fighter took this as an actual act of disrespect. So, after climbing into the ring, Jackson took Syko Stu to the mat and punched him 23 times, rendering the wrestler unconscious. Smith was sent to the hospital and Jackson went to prison on assault charges. Just before the fight, Jackson bellowed “You just can’t hit a can on my face… This shit isn’t going to be scripted.”
The kayfabe of Trump’s first term in office was endless, there was the wall that wasn’t built, the massive tax cuts for the middle class that never happened, the promise that “Obamacare” would repealed and replaced by something better, the restoration of American factory jobs in a period that saw net losses, and on and on. It was a terrible four years, but the unreality of Trump’s first term cushioned the nation, and the world from the worst of its intentions.
Yet, the second term has seen the “shoot” triumphant, it’s not kayfabe anymore, the zone’s been flooded with a stream of atrocities from the mass roundups of “illegals,” to the construction of concentration camps with names like Alligator Alcatraz and the Speedway Slammer, to the kidnapping of foreign leaders and the wholesale and unexamined, much less explained bombings of other countries regardless of entirely logical outcomes. It really does seem like the Trump administration was surprised that Iran closed the Straight of Hormuz and choked off much of the world’s oil supply. Lately, pundits and comics in the US have been repeating the same tired observations that war is God’s way of teaching America geography and that in conflict, the enemy gets a vote. What they don’t seem to grasp is that the world won’t be forgetting any of this, no matter what happens in the 2026 midterms or the 2028 presidential election, Europeans now realize that there’s a hardcore of one third of US voters who actively support the end of the Atlantic alliance and loathe the very idea of NATO. 80 years of security, peace, and prosperity squandered with no grand strategy at all.
In a shocking-even-for-him interview with reporters from the New York Times, after American troops captured Venezuela’s President Maduro and brought him back in chains to the United States, Trump responded to a question about whether there was a limit to his powers: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Trump is truly an AI slop remix of Walter Benjamin and Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a dark angel of history floating backwards in a fecal sea of his own making.
The past year has seen the Overton window of acceptable political opinion shift not just rightward, but literally open wide to accept the oceans of shit that now constitutes our political discourse. I’ve already mentioned Nick Fuentes, the half-Mexican, gay virgin incel leader of the Groyper movement who once dined at Mar a Lago with Ye (the artist born Kanye West) and Donald J. Trump (who had yet to be inaugurated for his second term). On his interminable show, “America First,” Fuentes blurs the boundaries between kayfabe and the shoot when he claims “having sex with women is gay,” that “Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part” to achieve a “paradise,” and that “Hitler was fucking cool.” His mostly male audience laps it up because they can always claim that they were in it for the lols, even as they wallow in the sewage.
Yet perhaps even more emblematic of the moment is Candace Owens, who has risen steadily up the ranks of the conservative commentariat over the last decade. At first, she played the convert grift, with a near instant shift from progressive to conservative views in 2017, claiming that as a Black woman she came to understand “that liberals were actually the racists.” She has grown her audience with an increasingly paranoid mix of old-fashioned antisemitism and an embrace of true crime narratives that garner her a massive female following. The assassination of the podcaster Charlie Kirk in the fall of 2025 offered her the opportunity to braid these two strains, claiming that not only was Israeli intelligence involved in his murder, but that his wife Erika Kirk was also somehow involved. Cherchez les Juifs! Cherchez le femme. Cherchez la vérité.
If antisemitism has long been the socialism of fools, then Owens’ paranoid style is the emerging hermeneutics of suspicious fools. One of her catch phrases is “We Don’t Know-Know, But We Know,” and she sells a fair amount of merch—tees, sweat shirts, mugs—emblazoned with this motto. You can trace this phrase’s origins to the start of the anti-vax moment, when figures like Playboy Playmate turned comic actress Jenny McCarthy claimed that far more than doctors or epidemiologists, “moms know” how to treat the illnesses their children face (she said her son’s autism resulted from a measles vaccination, but that she “cured” him with vitamins, supplements, and a detox from metals and candida). “We don’t know-know but we know” is the triumph of the gut over the intellect, of emotion over reason, of volume over value.
Rather than accept this dismal state of affairs, I’ll close with two anecdotes. The first from my own teaching here in Los Angeles. I had the students in my Design Research class do a remix of the classic Whole Earth Catalog from the 1960s. They were to create “tools for living” for the 21st century environments that they move through. It was both shocking and heartwarming to see how many of them described basic human interactions as their goals, from pausing their Spotify lists to listen to music live with friends, to making person-to-person connections with other students in their dorms, to ouching grass in multiplicities of ways. I felt like Vasari listening to a group of apprentices in Milanese and Venetian ateliers talking about rediscovering classical techniques in painting and casting from a millennium before. But my students were literally desperate for affordances that our generation just saw as living, not tools for living, a mere quarter of a century ago.
There are glimmerings that the tide may be turning. Here in LA, a young woman sued Meta and Google for her social media addiction. Mark Zuckerberg testified in defense of Facebook and Instagram but the jury awarded the plaintiff 3 million dollars in damages. We don’t know-know exactly what happened in the jury room, and how the tech billionaire’s comments were taken, but we do know that the Los Angeles Times deadpanned that “The percentage of adults who view [Zuckerberg] very favorably is on par with the share who believe the Earth is flat or that aliens live among us.”
Klaatu barada nikto–
Peter