Reality is exceptionally mundane. I watched contrapoints video about conspiracies last night, and I was struck over and over again by this idea. Reality is boring. Why did Elon Musk decide to surround himself with 19 year old boys in his little DOGE club? Because that’s exactly how he sees himself. He surrounds himself with very young, very online/techy men because he sees himself as a very young, very online /techy man. He sees himself as a popular frat boy. The outsider in politics. I guarantee you he tells them when he sleeps with someone. They absolutely have group chats where they all talk amongst themselves and include him the same way. He’s just a delusional divorced man who is almost universally hated by people who aren’t either literally paid to like him or incentivised to like him because of his politics and position of power.

There are literally millions of men like him in America alone. Most of them are his followers. Why does he have the position of power that he does? Cause he fucking paid for it. That’s all. It’s exceptionally boring. It’s melodrama in its finest. America dies not with a hammer blow but with the slow whistle of air leaving a bike tire. It’s anticlimactic. It’s mundane hollow reality. It’s a story told a thousand times before. Egotistic racist divorced man is promoted to management of an office. A few months later, after thoroughly ruining everything, the office is closed for good. Life is empty. The glory we were told was there never existed. The climactic final battle is largely fictional.

Resistance isn’t really about grand fights or sweeping upheaval. It’s about changing material conditions for people. Helping those who need it. Organizing communities and building solidarity. Sweeping upheaval comes as a consequence of those things, but isn’t itself a conscious focus. We remember revolutions for their sweeping upheavals, for their bloody final battles. But that wasn’t what people in those movements had been working for. We don’t talk about the growing class solidarity in the face of repeated violence from the ruling class over decades. The disillusionment people feel from their rights being lost. We ignore those things cause they don’t make good stories to tell in the moment. Resistance itself is (mostly) boring labor and nuisance civil disobedience.