Worry

Neo-Nazi Trump ally Steve Bannon told The Economistmagazine in an interview Thursday that President Trump will have at least one more term in office and that the leaders of his MAGA movement have a plan to defy the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution, which says presidents can be elected to only two terms.---https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/10/27/hbff-o27.html

Any time a character like Bannon announces some apocalyptic "plan," besides checking your wallet, consider the following.

Worry is a physiological response to something that is not happening now.

Terrorism is the creation of terror for political ends. Its impact is immediate. Whatever touches it off, it has nothing to do with some future disaster or revealed conspiracy: its sole purpose is terror, and the autonomic reaction that sends us into "fight-or-flight" mode.

Then, the "Journalists" jump on it, extrapolating all the ramifications (what-ifs) we should prepare for. And of course they do, it's low-hanging fruit, a goldmine, a scoop. So what if it's reduced all journalists to the level of paparazzi?

This is the same technique used in the 45th term, when our highest officeholder tweeted on his cellphone, musing in the wee hours about nuking North Korea.

For the first time in history, one person could induce neurobiological panic in millions of people around the world. Possibly billions of people, in the same moment, in whatever time zone, went into shutdown, their breathing and heart rate altered, vision narrowed, thinking suspended: physiologically preparing the body for battle or escape. Or death.

Never in history has such a power been possible. Now it is, and since then each new bucket of attentional chum has been worse than the last, until we were so benumbed, a genocide could have been perpetrated right in front of us and we'd all just stand there slack-jawed. Wait, what? ...oh...

Now a figure made public by our screen-hits ("likes") can announce the final End of Democracy, which incidentally can't ever happen until there is a beginning of same, and the only concrete result will be a brief spike on the media markets. And an opportunity for insiders to boost sales on public attention markets. Which of course is the purpose.

"Influencer" is what such people are called. The idea is that most human beings are pretty stupid, which means, predictable. By now most of us have worked out that dick Cheney's "shock & awe" as the basic principle of propaganda. We haven't understood that it's really low-level anxiety that keeps us cowed.

Because our nervous system attempts to stabilize whenever the balance gets wobbly, developing a tolerance for repetition, dosage must be increased each time. The inevitable result is a reign of terror. This is why the administration is murdering so many people in broad daylight now: both because they must, and because they can. How many Caribbean fishing boats is it now?

This is the genocide. At this stage it is really virtual genocide: it's happening on our screens. Genocide, like the rest of modern business, depends on ratings. Israel has lost all credibility as the victim of "terrorists" in a saturated attention market, and this is dragging the US administration's ratings down with it.

Maybe that's why we're being switched over to a fresh one, Venezuela or Nigeria; because, Mexico? Seriously? Tourism is one of the few industries left standing, and the airlines are imploding under the federal bankruptcy, but you can still get to Mexico in your SUV. Whereas Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves on Earth, and Nigeria is the wholly-owned subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell or some such neofeudal fiefdom. Venezuela is mostly Roman Catholic, and Liberation Theology at that, whereas Nigeria has a fairly clear division between Muslims in the North and Christians in the South, ripe for exploitation. Heat and stir.

(Maybe all that Venezuelan oil is the result of the same impact that made human life possible in the first place, when that big rock slammed into the Earth killing everything that once ate our little furry ancestors... talk about your Divine Comedy...)

Meanwhile, the genocide machine has to find a new category of people to demonize and kill, or the Big Data eugenics bubble will burst, and the US economy will crash. The one in Sudan has been going on much longer, and still isn't selling; the one in Yemen is in its second decade, but the Saud family owns that one, despite recent American meddling. Every empire is defined by its genocides.

War with Russia is not going well for the US admin even after the customer was bait-and-switched from US to EU in an attempt to stabilize MIC revenues; war with China is out of the question if Big Tech wants to keep their screens from going blue and their planes in the air. What else? Iran? As terror-bait Iran, without nukes, pales in comparison to Israel, which tries to hold the world hostage with theirs.

Genocide is an addiction. It's collective, cyclical, and degenerative. By now it has displaced much of the American economy, the way a heroin habit displaces an addict's job, family, and basic hygiene. With addictive drugs, not only the individual junkie, but their family and their extended family are afflicted. While the others are putting up with the acute victim, or starting to complain, or throwing them out of the house, calling the cops, etc., they, too, are harboring the disease. The children are affected, their future lives in jeopardy. To repeat: genocide is an addiction.

Adductive disease is well understood in the 21st Century. The only aspect of this we still don't get has to do with scale. It never occurs to us (with a few notable exceptions) that an addict's family, not to mention the community, much less the culture, might be the real host.

This is structural. Jonas Galtung wrote about structural violence. It's not difficult to understand the idea of structural addiction. Once you start thinking in this way, it's right there.