The cultural contradictions of fascism

So my campus was one of at least a half dozen universities that got swatted yesterday and Sunday:

A terrifying text message sent students running for cover, barricading themselves in bathrooms and knocking over chairs in the frantic rush to hide from the active shooter reported on their university campus.

Then, a few hours later and 700 miles away, it happened again.

Reports of active shooters wielding assault rifles on campus sent excited students preparing for a new school year at Villanova University in Pennsylvania and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga into lockdown as law enforcement officers surged to the schools to assess the threats. Students hid behind walls, locked themselves into dorm rooms and frantically texted loved ones.

The CU-Boulder incident featured a call that there was an active shooter at the main library, apparently with gunshot sounds in the background. We got seven alerts about it (shelter in place etc.) over a three-hour period, although the first one wasn’t until around 6 PM so I suppose relatively few faculty were on campus. But of course all the residential students, of which there are many thousands, were duly frightened, although they’ve all been doing active shooter drills since they were in kindergarten, because America that’s why.

As I’ve pointed out only a tiny percentage of firearm homicides in the US are mass public shootings, and an even tinier percentage are mass shootings at schools and universities. But that’s not the point. The point is terror — “few victims, many observers” — and it works, for certain values of working. One of those values is to create an amorphous sense of the dread of imminent violence, even though overall homicide rates in the US are probably lower now than they’ve been at any time in the last 60 years.

One of classic fascistic features of Trumpism is that it simultaneously affirms that America is an extremely dangerous place, where murderous Others are lurking around every corner, especially in our supposedly anarchic cities, while at the very same time affirming that we have also entered a golden age, in which crime and violence are disappearing rapidly, because of the protection afforded us by the Leader.

This kind of flagrant logical and empirical contradiction is swallowed by the masses, because in an age of pervasive propaganda contradiction is also intentionally pervasive. Such contradictions imbue the polity with a sense that they live in a world of total deceit, where nothing can be trusted, especially any fancy statistics from the Government, to the extent the Government maintains any ability to contradict the Leader.