Los Angeles, June 4, 2025
Dear Geert—
More and more, I see what’s happening in the USA as a war on the young that they don’t even know they are fighting, much less how much they are losing. Much has been made of MAGA edgelords and the “vibeshift” towards conservatism, especially among young men. Perhaps more surprising was the move of young Latino and even Black men into the Trumpist camp, accounted for by both economic woes keeping them from buying the big ass truck of their macho dreams and a misogynoir generated by Kamala Harris, who embodied their worst nightmares of the scolding Human Resources director. Well, this first-person-shooter-playing, gonzo-porn-watching, anabolic-supplement-scarfing, Bitcoin-coveting, under-employed, and mostly white but vaguely multi-racial coalition of the overly on-line will start finding out that being chaos voters brings vastly more chaos down on them than on the older, richer cohort that continues to define the Republican party’s real power center.
Trump has established a new KKK, but this time it’s not about Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but rather the Kings of the KakiKleptoKryptotocracy he’s cementing into place. To break this down, kaki is shit, or rule by the worst, klepto is just pure theft, and krypto is the blockchain-enabled means by which the Trumpian fusion of conservatives, libertarians, nationalists, and flat-out racists are eating the seed corn of America’s future. This is the very future that is being chain sawed with every executive order, fluctuating tariff, and random cruelty that the administration throws at the wall to see if it hurts someone. In the past, only the hardest core Ayn Rand fans saw themselves as Omega men, those talented and righteous ones who’d gotten theirs and didn’t need to give anything back, much less pay forward—hence their antipathy verging on rage against the very idea of taxes. Combine with this with the even more virulent hatred of “the woke mind virus”—a third-rate locution reminiscent of B-movie sci-fi from the 1960s—in order to justify “owning the libs” as the highest goal of contemporary politics, no matter what the damage to the future.
The seed corns I’m talking about are the inheritances that allowed our present tech overlords to ascend to their own Silicon Valhallas: the trillions invested in basic research and the Internet, the rule of law that supports commerce and trade, the funding of cultural resources that can be monetized as content, even the civic and fiscal commitment to a literate and numerate population that can consume their wares.
All these factors and more combined to create the soft power, the Zivilmacht to use the German phrase, that America welded to its military might. Together these were fundamental to securing the preeminence of the American economy. This was the seedbed for the future of those young voters who have swung towards authoritarianism over the last three national US elections since 2016. As a result of their electoral choices, when it comes time for them to tend the fields, they’ll find that the generations that preceded them left the land barren, and the barn empty of anything to regenerate growth. All that these young voters—and the non-voters who were in vague sympathy with the “fun” of watching a television performer entertain them into ruin—get was the satisfaction of watching someone more powerful than them piss all over the people they don’t like.
The “adult entertainment” these dudes fap to owes a lot to a creative disruptor with the nom de porn Max Hardcore (born Paul Little, also known as Paul Steiner, died a convicted felon in 2023). In a memorable 1998 essay titled “Big Red Son,” David Foster Wallace writes about Max as the father of Gonzo porn, a genre that perpetrates “on women levels of violation and degradation that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.” Foster Wallace writes about the man, his milieu, and his entourage in a way that feels eerily appropriate to describe the slippage between Trump the man, Trump the performer, Trump the President, and the sycophants and assorted cabinet members who surround him. “Good old Max Hardcore, for instance, is a total psychopath—that’s part of his on-screen Gonzo persona—but so is the real Max/Paul Steiner. You’d almost have to have been there in that suite. Max sits holding court in his hat and pointy boots, looking at once magisterial and mindless, while his red-suited acolytes laugh on cue and a jr. high dropout shows off her valves.” Max found economically distressed girls with rough family backgrounds and took them fresh off the bus in LA to be dressed as underaged jailbait, sodomized, urinated on, fisted, and “broken” (his word), all in service of the riches, attention, and fame Max craved. He repeated his philosophy (such as one can describe flat out violent misogyny) many times in videos and interviews: “We’re not happy until you’re not happy.”
Larry Vigon, 2025
Whole swaths of MAGA have adopted this Maximal cruelty: they are gleeful about the unhappiness of those around them. The love of liberal tears has become a taste for tears period, no matter if they are shed by political opponents, immigrants, trans athletes, furloughed scientists seeking cancer cures, fired federal park rangers, or anyone else who wanders into the present administration’s crosshairs. Years of faux-tough politicians, trash-talking radio hosts, and legions of Internet trolls have modeled a coarseness that inured the new MAGA demographics to empathy, and in so doing destroyed any civic trust that might be built up, much less solidarity.
That Silicon Valley’s oligarchs went all in for Trump this time round is not interesting in and of itself other than that it reaffirms that great wealth inexorably moves its holders towards authoritarianism, if not outright fascism. It’s also a reminder, as if we needed one, that empathy is not part of the tool set needed to generate a world-dominating fortunes. That young men with precarious economic prospects at best feel drawn to the same flame as the ultra-wealthy may be testament to diminishing returns democracy is getting from education in the 21st century. Or maybe America’s addiction to get-rich-quick schemes like meme stocks, sports betting, crypto and multi-level marketing has deluded them into thinking they’re just temporarily impoverished alpha male billionaires.
What doesn’t seem to penetrate is that the new vibes and policies the young have swung towards aren’t going to do anything for them except make others in their exact cohort unhappy. Manufacturing won’t come back, what jobs get generated won’t be unionized, the safety net will become an ever more unsafe sieve, and the richest members of society will use their tax cuts to further wall themselves off from the proles via private schools, private clubs, private gates, and private security. There comes a time when even the most committed social theorist has to look at false consciousness and rebrand it as suicidal idiocy. This sort of analysis has been itself critiqued as an unwillingness to “listen to the other side,” but as we enter a post-literate, post-numerate moment best described as an ideology of feels what is there to “listen” to?
This isn’t even a Hobbesian war of all against all, it’s more like Survivor, with the wealthy and connected old as the producers, the ill-prepared young as the contestants, and a final prize that’s a sordid blend of kaki, klepto, and krypto. These young men will find that they are not really competitors at all, but merely NPCs, or non-player characters, in Trump 2.0 and his co-conspirators’ theater of cruelty. As Max Hardcore said of the actress he treated as NPCs, “By the time I’m done with them, they’re already dead inside.”
Hope you’re happy—
Peter
Peter Lunenfeld lives in California. His most recent book s City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined. He is a professor the Design Media Arts department at UCLA. His previous letters to Geert can be found here.