genocide

The Punchline That Stopped Being Funny

by damagecollateral

Or: How I Learned to Stop Laughing and See the Abyss

One can be evil and colorful at the same time

There’s a moment in every con when the mark realizes he’s been had. Mine came late—embarrassingly late. I’d been riding the Trump rollercoaster for years, white-knuckling it through loop-de-loops of outrage and absurdity, telling myself it was all part of some grand American farce. The joke was on the liberals, the establishment, the whole rotten system. Trump was the whoopee cushion at the funeral of American decorum, and I was too busy laughing to notice the corpse was real.

I’ll own it: I fell for it. Not the MAGA hat stuff—I never voted for the guy—but something maybe worse. I fell for the idea that Trump was amusing. That his chaos was a kind of performance art. That beneath the carnival barker shtick was just another corrupt politician, no better or worse than the rest, just louder and more honest about it.

I was wrong.

The scales didn’t fall all at once. They peeled away in layers, like old paint on a toxic building. First came the AI videos mocking Palestinians during what can only be described as a genocide he was actively facilitating. Dark, sure, but Trump had always trafficked in dark humor, right? Then the double-cross: promising to end the siege in exchange for a dual-citizen hostage, the kind of transactional cruelty that would make a Gilded Age robber baron blush. I remember thinking, “Yeah, that’s nasty, but he’s still shaking things up, still saying things others won’t…”

The voice of the con artist’s best friend: the rationalization.

Then Jeffrey Epstein entered the picture—yes, that Epstein. In a private email that surfaced, the late pedophile and professional blackmailer wrote something that stopped me cold: “I have met some very bad people… none as bad as trump. not one decent cell in his body.”

Now, you might ask: why would I take moral guidance from Jeffrey Epstein? Fair question. But here’s the thing about monsters—they recognize their own. When a man who trafficked children for the world’s elite says someone else is worse than anyone he’s ever met, you have to at least consider the possibility that he’s not exaggerating.

That’s when I started going back through the highlight reel, except this time I wasn’t watching for the laugh lines. I was looking at where everything landed. And I had to do something I’d resisted for years: I had to open my heart to darkness. Not the metaphorical darkness of “politics I disagree with,” but the actual thing—the possibility that some people are so profoundly deformed at their core that most of us literally can’t see it. Our imaginations won’t let us. It’s too outside the normal range of human behavior.

The final nail came with Gaza. After brokering what he called a “ceasefire,” Trump executed an about-face so brazen it would have made Machiavelli nauseous. His administration strong-armed the UN Security Council into accepting a plan that essentially outsourced the genocide, giving the Israelis a breather while other nations coordinated with them to finish ethnically cleansing Gaza—or at least demilitarize it, which amounts to the same thing for a people resisting occupation after surviving what may be the holocaust of our time.

That’s when I finally saw him clearly. And I didn’t like what I saw. Not one bit.

I can already hear the chorus: “Really? Now you see it? What about ICE? The racism? The pardons for war criminals? The corruption? The election interference? The degradation of basic decency? The tariffs that destroyed farmers? The cuts to veterans’ benefits, SNAP, Medicare?”

The list is long, and it’s a valid indictment—of Trump, but also of me. Yes, I saw all of that. But not like I do now. Not with the clarity that comes from accepting what I’d been avoiding: that this isn’t just another corrupt politician. This is something else.

I think Trump knows it too. There was a moment recently when he said he doesn’t think he’ll make it to heaven. It was delivered with his usual glibness, but I heard something underneath it—a kind of acknowledgment. The presidency didn’t create his malice; it unleashed it. It gave him the power to reach his full dark potential, potential he’d had all along. The office served as both amplifier and indictment.

Here’s what I’ve learned, late though the lesson comes: Trump’s greatest trick isn’t the lies or the bluster or the norm-breaking. It’s the way he keeps you from believing he’s as bad as he actually is. The sheer scale of it, the constant motion, the circus atmosphere—it’s all camouflage. We keep looking for the punchline because we can’t accept that the joke is on us, and it isn’t funny.

So stop being distracted by the antics. Stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. Stop telling yourself it’s all part of some complex strategy or that he’s “just playing politics.” That’s the con. You’re the mark. Believe he’s a deeply bad person and start seeing his actions in that light. Not because it’s politically convenient, but because it’s true.

The rollercoaster is still running. The question is whether you’re going to keep riding it, or finally get off and look at what it’s built on.

I got off. Late, yes. Too late, probably. But I got off.

The ground is steadier here, if lonelier. And from here, you can see the whole machine for what it is: not a ride at all, but a wreck in slow motion, with Trump’s grinning face painted on the front car as it hurtles toward something none of us should want to see.

The Gaza Pause That Isn’t

by damagecollateral

They’re calling it a breakthrough. A triumph of diplomacy. The latest example of American leadership bringing peace to the Middle East, or some such hogwash.

Let’s cut through the victory-lap fog: this ceasefire isn’t about ending anything. It’s about managing the optics of a 77-year-old project that’s been running on autopilot since the Nakba. The deal everyone’s celebrating is really just a calibration—turning down the volume on ethnic cleansing from a scream to a whisper, dialing back to the pre-October 7th simmer that didn’t make quite so many people uncomfortable at brunch.

What’s actually changed on the ground? Let me count the ways: nothing, nothing, and nothing.

Gaza remains an open-air prison. The West Bank is still a patchwork of checkpoints and settlements where armed zealots terrorize families with impunity. Palestinians live under a surveillance state that makes the Stasi look like mall security. And Israeli officials keep saying, out loud, with cameras rolling, that there will never be a Palestinian state—a detail that somehow never makes it into the “path to peace” coverage.

Oh, and Gaza? It’s rubble. Flattened. Block after block of what used to be homes, hospitals, schools—gone.

But sure, let’s pop the champagne.

The kicker? Israel’s already violating the agreement. Five Palestinians dead today. Aid trucks stopped at the border. The usual script. While Gazans understandably grab any respite they can get from the nightmare, the rest of us have zero reason to pretend this represents progress.

Don’t believe the hype. This isn’t Washington riding in on a white horse to save Palestinians from Israeli bombs. This is the U.S. and Europe throwing themselves in front of a runaway train – one they built, fueled, and waved goodbye to as it left the station.

The real story? Israel was about to become ungovernable for its Western sponsors.

In recent weeks, the global backlash hit critical mass. Hundreds of thousands were flooding European streets every weekend, not in scattered protests but in coordinated eruptions of rage. In Italy, the government was staring down the barrel of an actual political crisis. These weren’t your standard-issue marches-that-change-nothing. People were done.

Meanwhile, aid flotillas kept multiplying in the Mediterranean, each one a floating middle finger to the official narrative, magnetic poles for thousands of people who’d had enough of doom-scrolling genocide from their living rooms. The couch-to-action pipeline was real, and it was accelerating.

The imperial brain trust looked at the board and realized Israel had painted itself into a corner so tight that the whole regional chessboard was about to flip. That’s what this “peace deal” is actually about – damage control for the alliance, not mercy for the dead.

The American foreign policy establishment is engaged in a grotesque, self-fellating victory lap, pumping out grandiose “peace” announcements like a pharmaceutical company distributing free samples of Xanax. This isn’t celebration—it’s sedation. It’s a calculated dose of institutional Valium, mainlined directly into the cerebral cortex of an global public that was getting dangerously close to giving a damn.

The game here is transparent if you squint even a little: they need us to exhale, high-five each other about “getting the win,” and then zombie-walk back to our regularly scheduled programming. The pressure worked—actual, real pressure from normal human beings who briefly remembered they’re supposed to have opinions about whether we incinerate strangers on the other side of the planet. So naturally, the Blob is betting we’ll do what we always do: declare victory and go home, precisely at the moment when not going home actually matters.

It’s the oldest trick in the Washington playbook. Give the plebes just enough of a “win” to shut them up, then resume operations while they’re still drunk on their own sense of accomplishment.

Don’t take the bait.