This is what galled me the most about Usama bin Kevin: anytime he had to substantively defend his position about some wild conspiracy he'd heard about and was now forcing upon me, he would claim he was joking. After laughing off the thing that couldn't be explained, he'd move on to the next piece of nonsense he'd read on ZeroHedge or heard on InfoWars that day. He claimed that when he went too far, like yelling "Build the Wall" while standing next to me at a baseball game, that his words were satirical.

I tried to be a friend to him for many years, but realized that the friend I once knew died the moment InfoWars wormed into his brain and rotted it from the inside out. He was a shell of a person, and I was just a prop in his performance art piece about how he was the smartest person in the room.

We haven't spoken since October 2020, and I don't miss him. I still think about him because an allegedly decent person becoming a hateful fascist is one of the most baffling things I've ever witnessed. I'm still trying to make sense of it.

It's One Long Joke:

For them it’s fun, this hate stripped bare of pretense, these reckless words, this callous mockery of serious people and serious issues and human suffering.

He starts by telling Hasan he doesn’t care if Trump is defying the constitution because he is against democracy and favors what he calls autocracy, though later it becomes clear he just heard some incel fascist podcaster say the word once and doesn’t really know what it means because he is defined by his incuriosity and in constant search for concepts that validate the ugliness in his soul and his roaring self loathing.

This Connor guy – looking like the Joker if the Joker had ever written a 4,000-word essay on why the lady M&M should have wider hips – tells Hasan he’s a fan of the Second Amendment but doesn’t care if Trump violates every other constitutional amendment.

“Quite frankly,” says Connor, a guy who looks like he’s called the Statue of Liberty a slut, “if Trump is anti-constitution, good, and I think he should go further.”

The only answer to such monstrous behavior is brutal fascist assault, according to Connor, who looks like a guy who was asked by his mother not to talk about the size of Lola Bunny’s breasts around the Thanksgiving dinner table.

Sartre wrote far far more elegantly than the CEO of Bad Faith Times about the crushing disadvantage of caring about anything and functioning as the adult trying and failing to corral the careless exploits of the fascist. It is always the fascist who says with a wry smile: It’s you who claims to care about shit. I don’t care about anything. I’m free to adopt any stance at any time, to use any topic as a blood-soaked cudgel against my opponents. I can pretend to care about the sexual exploitation of children to attack my enemies as groomers; I can pretend to care about equal treatment under the law to say white people face systemic discrimination; I can pretend to care about something as niche as bail reform when my right-wing cult heroes start going to prison. I’m a chameleon with an AR-15, they tell us. You’re a sloth with dull pencil. Keep believing in things and see where that gets you.

"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge,” Sartre said. “But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." The right-wing attention hogs in Hasan’s video tell him time and again that they know he has to use his words responsibly because he believes words matter. They seem to take pleasure in this because, as Satre said a century ago, they can sit back and “play.” Hasan at times appears ridiculous thanks to his debate opponents’ total lack of seriousness and refusal to engage intellectually (they were never taught how to do this, or that it’s even possible). None of these people “seek to persuade” Hasan or any anti-fascist opponents who might stumble upon the video online. They seek only to “disconcert.” In modern parlance, they seek to trigger the libs – the beating heart of their ghastly anti-politics.

Sartre characterized antisemitism and fascism as direct products of "revanchist petit bourgeois rage" emanating from people who see themselves as the rightful inheritors of the nation (in Sartre's case, France) who deserve an eternal spot at the top of the hierarchy of oppression.

It is much easier to be a fascist than it is to be a decent person. It's always easier to be bad and thoughtless than it is to be good and thoughtful.