Just to state the painfully obvious: The “Signalgate” controversy broke this past Monday, March 24th. It’s now Friday, so five full days have gone by since it began. In five days, I think it’s safe to say that 99.44% of mainstream discussion on this controversy has focused on the Trump Administration’s inappropriately having used Signal to discuss war plans, stupidly having mistakenly put Jeffrey Goldberg on the chat, and then immorally having lied about it. Not even 1% of the remainder has focused on any deeper question of moral substance: Why are we bombing Yemen? Is it justifiable to do so?

It’s taken as self-evident by the intellectual elites of this country, Democrat or Republican, that if “we” are bombing someone, it’s ipso facto justifiable to do so. Likewise, if “we” kill 53 people in a bombing, either they deserved it, or it doesn’t matter whether they deserved it. And if “we” are facilitating a genocide and/or ethnic cleansing in the process, well, that’s just how things go. This is as much as to say that the people who regard themselves, or are widely regarded by others, as the “thought leaders” of this country have literally zero sense of the nature of moral judgment as such.

As far as they’re concerned, civic engagement requires moral inversion: Fixate on the trivial; ignore the colossal. Condemn the venial; excuse the atrocious. Get lost in technicalities; evade the blatantly obvious. It seems a lost cause to point out that people who think this way have fundamentally lost touch with moral reality. But they have. It equally seems a lost cause to suggest that when they insist on engaging in moral discourse, the rest of us have no reason to listen to them. Yet they insist on talking, and expecting to be taken seriously.

The Democrats I know get angry when I suggest that there’s not much daylight between the modal Democrat and the modal Republican. How dare I? How dare I compare ordinary, decent people with MAGA fascists?

Because the truth is, there’s not that much difference between them. There’s not that much difference between MAGA psychosis and a person who thinks that complicity in genocide is an injustice on par with breaking a military protocol. Even if you don’t happen to think that our bombing Yemen is a form of complicity in genocide, the difference in the gravity of the two things is, or should be, transparent to any cognitively functioning adult. And yet it’s not. No one is much exercised by the bombing of Yemen. But people can’t seem to shut the fuck up about Hegseth’s using Signal, and putting Goldberg on the chat.

When the issue was the proxy war in Ukraine, it was liberals, not conservatives, who went out of their way to resurrect the Cold War rhetoric of loyalty and treason, and demand adherence to their half-assed, unargued, dogmatically pro-NATO and pro-war party line. Without denying for a moment the unmitigated evil of Trump’s Palestine policy, the fact remains that the genocide mostly happened under Biden-Harris’s watch, and the ceasefire (such as it was) was brought about by Trump. No further proof is needed of the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party, and virtually all of its membership. There isn’t time or energy enough in a mortal life to line up the proofs over and above that.

In the months before the election, Democrats from my mom on down wagged their finger at me for voting for Jill Stein. Won’t I regret it when Trump is elected? Won’t I see how much worse he’ll be? Isn’t third-party voting just virtue signaling? Isn’t it a luxury we can’t afford right now? Won’t I this and won’t I that?

The answer is no I won’t, and no, I don’t. In fact, if anything, the nation’s descent into fascism has cured my lifelong insomnia. Nothing surprises me any more, so I sleep well. I’m happy to have disengaged from a polity as sick and deranged as the United States of America, and happy to leave the resolution of its problems to the sages who claim to have the solutions. Because it’s only too obvious that they themselves are the biggest part of the problem.

You can call yourselves the proud citizens of the country bombing Yemen, verklempt over the Signal controversy but indifferent to what’s happening in Yemen. I’m happy to maintain the unbridgeable gap between myself and anyone of that description. But don’t get mad when I equate you with the people you claim to hate so much. The truth is, you all look the same to me–which sounds awfully mean until you realize that it’s exactly the way all those Yemeni corpses must look to you.