In the end, what may most signify the MAGA movement is the laughing emoji.

While the lunatics who broke into and entered the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, then vandalized the premises as they attacked police there at the behest of then-President Donald Trump will always be handy loop-run video material, the laughing emoji will be MAGA’s lasting legacy for losers.

By itself the symbol is harmless. Non-threatening, not vulgar. But MAGA has appropriated it. So it’s become a neon sign for deplorables.

We can see the laughing emoji as encompassing the entirety and end results of MAGA mindlessness.

On the cusp of the Convicted First Felon’s next administration, the symbol is increasingly used when their Chief Thief veers from MAGA World rote. A lifetime liar, he can backtrack or zigzag with the greatest of ease. MAGA is incapable of such slippery pivots. He’s flexible with what passes for his truth at that moment.

Non-MAGA Americans are up to speed on this. We expect it. MAGA cultists hear what passes as the short-fingered vulgarian’s Gospel then exalt. A moment later he trips them up by reversing his “word.” Left stuck bare-assed in the open by their small Maximus, it takes MAGAs time to adjust to his switched reality and accept his new Gospel. Some never do because they just can’t. So let the laughing emoji suffice then proceed onto the next instance of his ridiculousness.

In the immediate emptyheaded days of the short-fingered vulgarian’s second jubilee, his panting followers breathlessly took braggarts’ victory waddles. Despite everything, including any measure of decency, a retrograde candidate campaigning on intolerance, ignorance, racism, and retribution won by appealing to primarily Anglos. Scared Anglos. Proudly dumb men. Vainly stupid women. Each of them weak, insecure, fearful of any future that deviates from their fat lazy beings. Afraid of futures that could cause them to adjust then maybe explore and discover new senses of themselves.

Likely better senses of themselves at that. After all, nowhere to go but up for MAGAs.

Besides swaying our majority population, the vile pig also somehow established a same regressive common ground with considerable portions of non-whites. The useless to themselves self-loathing portions.

He promised to drag every American and the country backwards. He got America to surrender the advances that have urged us all forward.

The campaigns between parties can be seen through a bizarro prism. Someone from outside the United States might never have known the two major parties vied for the same nation’s control.

One side spoke to Americans with adult rationales and reason. Its opponents topped whatever last adolescent gibberish pleased the crowd with even more outlandish gish. The latter didn’t bother being entertaining, much less make sense. It was simply more slop for the pigs. The oinkers were swallowing without tasting. Unable to truly digest what assailed them, the baying unthinking MAGA crowds favorably heard their intelligence being insulted.

Unfortunately, half of Americans have cast aside ability or desire to absorb what they need to hear. It is easier to accept strongly held notions no matter how wrong the beliefs than reverse our minds. A thing can be proven erroneous yet too many Americans prefer remaining nestled in the mistaken.

In Election 2024’s aftermath, it seemed the exaltation of Trumpery might never subside. Which of the scab’s idiots didn’t lard themselves with his My Ass Got Arrested attire? What jacked-up pickup owner didn’t have the swine’s bedsheet-sized flag flapping above his truck’s tailgate?

Thankfully for those of us who’d known better, who have been primed to announce “Told you so!” since 2016, the 78-year-old penile implant could not resist indulging his true self. And that resembles the scorpion of fable.

Aesop tells us that one day a scorpion wanted to cross a stream. There was no way for him to ford the running water. He spied a frog along the bank. The scorpion asked this frog to ferry him across to the opposite bank. Naturally the frog was reluctant. He feared the scorpion would sting him. The scorpion answered, “If I sting you as we cross, we’ll both drown.”

The sensible response mollified the frog.

He permitted the scorpion to climb onto his back and they proceeded across the stream. Halfway along their trip the frog felt a sting pierce his back. Before the venom paralyzed the frog, he asked the scorpion why had he stung him knowing it would drown them both. To that the scorpion could only reply, “It’s in my nature. I couldn’t help it.”

Shortly after the election, the scab announced proposals which will flatly inflict harm on working people, our economy as a whole, and vulnerable citizens. During the campaign these same proposals were swaddled in cotton candy. Free of the need to blithely dismiss concerns, okay, lie, released from any need to keep MAGA suckers happy and dumb, the truth about the extent of damage his plans will cause can now ooze.

The “find out phase” is almost upon us.

As usual, only the wealthy are spared. And, of course, only the wealthy will benefit.

Actually, shouldn’t the laughing emoji be the rarefied rich’s symbol? MAGA dopes resort to it because the precariousness of their self-made quicksand is starting to seep into muttonheads. By unthinkingly following the Queens mook, the glory MAGA dupes believed prevailed during “the good old days” is dissipating. It’s always somebody else’s “good old days.” Never fails. The people who lived through them then will now in honest moments admit today is better.

If there was anything good about the “good old days,” there was often some group beneath the segment being shit on from above they could in turn shit on. Certainly if they were black, Mexican, or Native American. What’s old remains constant in the United States. While the hate is nowhere near as pervasive as it once was, there are still sizable crowds of Anglos whose sole reason for taking up space and polluting air is shitting on the darker complected.

That certainly isn’t good. However, MAGA esteem building also isn’t refined.

When I hear Elon Musk and other MAGA morons gas about inflation, or when someone of an age who should really know better complains about social security’s low rate of return, the laughing emoji immediately comes to mind.

Musk, henceforth the Afrikaner, references inflation just because it’s an easy concept for his listeners to confuse. Particularly when he claims government spending creates the inflation which burdens consumers.

It’s easy for the term to drive them astray because none of them realize they themselves are what propels inflation. Or if they do, don’t want to admit they’re the problem behind their road rage.

Everybody wants a raise, right? I have yet to learn of any working person who’s declined a raise. I’m sure it’s happened. But that person likely wound up straitjacketed inside a rubber room.

Wages and salaries are inflation’s main causes. And yes, consumer goods, commodities also contribute, but mostly it’s our desire for more folding green across palms. Salaries can’t be raised without products, good, services also costing more. Look at it as items on shelves, vehicles for sale in lots, comestibles in grocery stores becoming higher priced to improve employees’ compensation.

More money must come from somewhere. No. It’s not a spiral. It’s a wheel. The rodents are always the last to know.

The Afrikaner doesn’t bother mentioning that because blaming government has never been heavy lifting. Despite most MAGAs living in reduced circumstances if it weren’t for the sustenance provided by the authorities they claim constrict them, some elected or appointed official on Planet Washington D.C. is nonetheless stifling them. Yeah. That’s how obtuse dull obese audiences with lard between their ears have become from watching Fox Kennel or Newsmax.

Moreover, it best benefits the Afrikaner and other rapacious members of the avaricious wealthy to paint government as the villain. If they keep repeating “government is bad/unfettered capitalism is good” incessantly enough, the dummies hearing this will become the flatfoot soldiers in a pasty flabby army that’ll cut their own fat throats for the rarefied in our Second Gilded Age.

Don’t laugh. As Americans have seen, contributors who are barely making ends meet are donating to causes of the rich. Or as we should see it those with the least discretionary income are paying for their own degradation.

The Afrikaner and others making themselves suitable candidates for tumbrels want to severely cut or abolish altogether safety nets, financial rules, health regulations that prevent society from being susceptible, okay, victims, to capricious profit-making. They have weighed rewards to be gained against society being degraded. If we must root around in the mud for them to amass more gold, fine, so be it. Yes. That’s how little we mean to them.

Is the above an exaggeration? Listening to the Afrikaner and to a lesser extent Vivek Ramaswamy, their calculations regarding squeezing federal expenditures in order to cannibalize America never addresses the human elements. No mention of the hordes of employees to be sacrificed to fulfill their schemes.

What happens to those suddenly cashiered people? Does anyone really expect private sector corporate America to absorb upwards to several hundred thousand suddenly at-sea jobseekers? And the way both cash-money bros bray about taking cleavers to programs which traditionally soften those crashes will further transform the dislocations into trying to survive jungle camp.

Thus far remarkable in all discussions regarding the Afrikaner’s and Vivek’s nefarious plans for federal workforce reductions is they’ve completely excised people from their calculations. Flesh and blood human beings have been rendered into mere statistics. In pencil for easier erasing. Each sees people as ore that will be milled to extract the few bits of what’s precious.

Even more numb from the neck up than MAGAs believing government alone causes inflation are those who’ve bought billionaires’ claims that social security funds should be dumped into the stock market. As they pie-in-the-sky prophesy, returns will be magnificent. Whenever Americans of certain ages hear this verbal snake oil, we know exactly why social security funds are absolutely segregated from private investiture.

Should those funds mingle in the market, and are devoured by downward market activity, there’ll be nothing to restore the lost amounts. Not one dollar. The FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), the agency responsible for guaranteeing bank deposits, does not extend the same towards investments. Every investor understands the money he or she or his or her organization socks into the market could be forfeited. Indeed, behind the brilliance of great rewards lurks the specter of terrible losses.

Hence, despite low yields the shortsighted find frustrating, the reason why social security revenues don’t circulate on Wall Street. The market can sink. Social security will remain afloat.

The number who endured the Great Depression and those of us who learned from them dwindles. Time reaps each group.

The first’s diminishment is accelerating. The second simultaneously was forewarned as well as beneficiaries of the safeguards that followed. It is that latter which has kept the same sort of ravenous wolves from subsequent American generations’ doors. Today we run the risk of dismantling the mechanisms which have protected Americans, the things that have allowed us to thrive in assuredness.

Financiers and billionaires see our time ripe to lay us bare. Every day there are fewer voices who can convince elected and appointed officials why banking and market rules and regulations enacted after the Depression then further bolstered as time passed should be strengthened, not loosened. Decade after decade without threat has let money perils fade. Right now, disastrous national financial ruin is as worrisome as the denouement of an Aesop’s Fable.

Of course. We’ve been spared worry because of vigilant measures.

Billionaires and financiers have persuaded the badly informed among voters that once the cumbersome rules and regulations are removed, Americans throughout our land will enjoy an economic dynamo never seen before. That is unlikely. The “hindrances” are the only devices that keep penury and poverty at bay for countless Americans. Bankers or brokers are never first concerned for depositors or investors. They’re out to maximize shareholders’, executives’, and their own profits. If that results in accountholders left adrift or high and dry, well, how unfortunate.

Which is how it was before the advent of social security and imposition of stringent rules on financial practices. Until those acts passed, American depositors and investors were at the mercies of swindlers they had to trust. Nefarious results could and did leave tens of millions broke and destitute. Moneymen did so then because no real authority existed to brake them.

We have that oversight now. We have had it for our nation’s longest stretch of prosperity. But financiers and billionaires who are already making money hand over fist want to obtain more sets of hands and fists to accumulate even greater amounts of obscenely fabulous wealth. All at our expense.

MAGAs only hear lovely siren calls of easy money once preventative hurdles have been shoved aside. They’ve never heard, have never learned, and certainly have never lived through any privation. Which is what would befall countless Americans if the whammies of privatizing social security funds, eliminating financial sector checks, and shredding the safety net were to occur.

Earlier generations had no recourse other than gutting it out. They could never fathom comprehensive government rescue. In the almost century since the Depression, we have. Its creation has softened our lives to the point where most of us can lead our days blithely.

The rarefied rich above us don’t care if their greedy designs ruin Americans and America. To those like the Afrikaner and Vivek, President-elect Pay for Play, their sycophants, the thought has yet to and never will crease their greasy brows.

Is America one generation closer to forsaking the diligence which has retained her solvency? Are our immediate successors the ones who’ll lack enough simple native guile to protect their financial selves? Or will they be so taken in by the glittering blandishments of ruthless moguls perched at their doors they’ll allow them entry?

Like vampires. Bloodsuckers cannot enter homes to wreak damage upon any inhabitants until they’re first invited inside. Our undead cannot drain money unless the victims acquiesce.

And after MAGA is financially bled white, then asked or left to wonder how it befell them, dupes who already cannot respond to the contrary or contradictory, will resort to their standby, the signal which indicates self-awareness of having been had, of having been left in the lurch, of having been hung out to dry … the laughing emoji.