Welcome to the Desert of the Imaginary

On Moral Panic as Permission Structure

Earlier this week, America woke up to news that the Food and Drug Administration would no longer inspect milk. The FDA has been devastated by DOGE cuts, and the agency also operates underDepartment of Health and Human Services, whose new head, RFK, Jr., famously doesn’t believe in any public health crisis he hasn’t made up himself.

As I was contemplating a future in which I had to pick up every cup of milk with trepidation, in which I had to check the internet to make sure others hadn’t gotten sick from the jar of whatever I was about to open, in which I had to accept that the fight against preventable food borne illness was part of my job as a parent, I realized that I recognized the portrait I was painting in my mind. It was a woo woo Marin dad.

For those of my readers who are not fluent in Bay Area, Marin County is a wealthy county to the north of San Francisco, known for beautiful open spaces, excellent cheese and seafood production, and … a kind of freaked-out, oppositional, at times conspiratorial wellness culture. I should mention that this is not a large contingent of that fine county’s populace, but they appear to be more numerous there than elsewhere, even in the privileged (and often very woo woo) Bay Area. But the vacccine skepticism (and measles rates) have traditionally run high in that area — as has a sense that money can buy you out of the “corrupt” food system and the “poison” it introduces into our bodies.

It’s important to note that this group is not as marginal as you’d think. Consider Nicole Shanahan, Silicon Valley founder and ex-wife to Google co-founder Sergei Brin. Shanahan was until recently mostly known as a big-ticket democratic donor, but she early on embraced light anti-vaxx positions, and began bankrolling democratic candidates that were, let’s say, pretty far out of the mainstream (such as self-help guru and outsider candidate Marianne Williamson). This is how she became better known to a wider audience — as running mate to one Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during the 2024 election.

Shanahan has questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccines, suggested that the MMR vaccine causes autism, and warned on “X” against getting vaccinated against COVID-19. She has expressed the opinion that “chronic disease” is the real epidemic in the United States, and that “electromagnetic pollution” from cell phones is partly to blame. She has also — because these people appear congenitally unable to update their material — engaged in some light chemtrail trutherism.

Since the election, in which he and Shanahan got clobbered, Kennedy’s fortunes have improved in a way previously unheard of for third party candidates: he is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in charge of its 80,000 employees and thus the very public health apparatus he’s spent 35 years attacking. He’s in the job with a healthy assist from Shanahan: As Kennedy’s confirmation loomed in the Senate, his erstwhile running made posted a video on “X” threatening to bankroll a primary for any senator who voted against RFK.

Shannahan (and to some extent Kennedy) embody what some have taken to calling “Woo Anon” — a mélange of conspiracy thinking and wellness talking points that can sometimes sound like New Age blather and at other like a screed from the John Birch Society. Given that it is largely delivered in short clips on your phone, in inspirational tiles on your favorite influencer’s Instagram profile, that is to say in small bursts, it’s a discourse that doesn’t really have to settle on one or the other. It can flit between its various vocabularies and tropes, and doesn’t have to specify whether the “they” that’s poisoning you with seed oils is Big Business or the Jewish World Conspiracy, or whatever.

Most importantly, affectively these are the same. Kennedy and his MAHA followers may not self-identify as conservative, but their affects are recognizably those of water fluoridation conspiracists. They may not have the same feelings as MAGA on every issue, but they share the most important feeling of all: as an already-classic Onion-headline has it, “bravely frightened of everything”. Sugar, food dyes, the MMR vaccine (but oddly not measles, mumps or rubella themselves), seed oils, black pepper, pancake mix, breakfast cereal and so on.

I used to wonder what it must be like to go through life this way — thinking that everything on the breakfast aisle at your local grocery not only was unhealthy, but could in fact kill you. Well, I have a feeling, I won’t have to wonder much longer, since not doing basic food testing, no longer recalling possibly contaminated food does sound really freaking dangerous. And, most interestingly, we will get to feel the way these people feel courtesy of these very people. If RFK gets through with all of this, our fears reaching for that carton of milk that may or may not have been inspected, that may or may not have been pasteurized, that may or may not give us endless diarrhea, will resemble, in some structural way, the fear he felt reaching for milk that had been inspected, had been pasteurized, and was exceedingly unlikely to give you endless diarrhea. And I suspect that this reversal — making us feel what they have felt — is part of the point.

So much of our new authoritarianism is about attention, about feelings, about a dark kind of empathy. As we all are far too much up in one another’s business online, “liberal tears”, triggered “snowflakes”, “OWNED” “lib professors” seem far more important to right wing feelings than actual policy. In the internet age, imagining how “they” must feel is clearly way more powerful than in previous decades. From being the most unpleasant guy at the school board meeting, to the pointlessly intimidating questioner at the end of a lecture, it is not so much about invading space as it is about having a foothold in the Other’s emotional and affective life. You can’t not think of us, these intrusions say. The one option you don’t have is the one we fear the most: not thinking about us at all.

There is something Lacanian about this, which is why I went with the Žižek-allusion in the title: the disorienting experience of the Trump restoration in 2025 is to be someone else’s funhouse mirror. Welcome to the desert of the imaginary — which I guess is where you wind up when the other guy thinks he’s taken the red pill, but is in fact in a blue pill K-hole?

“The cruelty is the point”, was one of the common refrains of the first Trump administration. What it often missed was that the cruelty also had a point. For the cruelty was supposed to constitute vengeance, was supposed to constitute atonement, for an earlier cruelty visited upon the people who voted for Trump. When you looked at it objectively, that sense of aggrievement quickly lost its legitimacy. But the sense was of course in its own way objective. They wanted their enemies to feel vis-à-vis very real threats the way they had felt about imaginary ones. Just as RFK, Jr. wants those of us who feel better having FDA scientists guarding our food supply to feel the fear and paranoia he felt via-à-vis those very FDA scientists. The objects are fundamentally different, and I don’t think we can lose sight of that. But the affects attached to those objects are homologous.

I don’t know if you heard, but I just wrote a book on “cancel culture”. “Cancel culture” was the idea that “one wrong word” would send you to a “cancel dungeon”, to the “public pillory”, that it could destroy your existence, that it would destroy higher education and democracy. That fear, as I tried to show in my book, was clearly overblown, and relied on a bunch of carceral metaphors to express what, when looked at objectively, was mostly just somewhat overheated public debate. But note what has been done since Trump took office to combat “wokeness” and “cancel culture”. Students are currently in jail for “one wrong word”; not a metaphorical jail, but an actual one. Having the wrong opinion does seem to be able to destroy your existence, and the repression brought to bear on our colleges does seem to threaten higher education and democracy as such. So, in the name of combating a thing that was always more figure of speech, or picture thinking (“I feel like I’m in prison, I feel like I’ve been deprived of my liberty,” etc.), the Trump administration is making it literal.

Back in the day, if you pointed out that cancel-cases were quite rare and often looked very different from the way they’d been reported, people would often retort that it didn’t matter. After all, the chilling effects didn’t depend on actual likelihoods. I always thought that that was an interesting argument. If all that matters is feeling-as-though, it’s almost immaterial whether or not the feeling is accurate or not. Which can serve to exaggerate something that — when looked at objectively — does not exist quite the way it’s being publicly discussed. But it can also serve to preemptively relativize and negate the real thing. Watching a writer like Thomas Chatterton Williams struggle to come up with a way to explain this process without giving up on the notion that “wokeness” from 2020 to 2025 named a real, all-consuming, and oppressive force in American politics, you get a sense for the sheer disorientation among the anti-woke set as the metaphors they turned to to describe wokeness turn literal, and are deployed in the service of anti-wokeness.

There is, as I point out in the book, a certain privilege that comes with feeling like you’re being “hounded by an inquisition”, “raped” or “executed” when in fact there’s nothing of the kind happening. You are relying for an analogy on something that is manifestly actually happening to other people as you type. What other people face for real, you can claim to experience by analogy. You are a victim, but without all the pain and anguish that would come with the actual experience. It also tends to create a false equivalence between two things — which puffs up what happens to you, but also undercuts what happened to others. I suggested in my book that those who peddled “cancel culture”-anecdotes seemed to think of them as counter-anecdotes to those of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. “I see your story about Michael Brown, who is in fact dead, and I raise you the story of Ian Buruma, who was mildly inconvenienced.”

But it is important to the functioning of these discourses that people convinced themselves that these were in fact equivalent — on some level. It probably involved taking some people and their lives more seriously than others; it probably involved power’s inability to empathize with the powerless; it probably thrived on a pervasive culture in the West to conceive of itself as on the receiving end of violence (from terrorism, immigration, trade imbalances etc.) while being completely insensate to the much greater violence routinely emanating from the West in the opposite directions. Whatever the case, the point is that these equivalencies are both (a) in fact false, the two things objectively are not equivalent, and (b) in fact experienced as equivalent.

Are you afraid of losing your job over some anti-DEI crusade? Are you an American worker who gets the feeling other employees think of them as a “diversity hire” and will be purged as such? Are you worried that your non-white children will have to enter into ultra-white spaces that make zero affordances for people like them to receive any education or professional advancement in the US? Well, in some way you are experiencing what a lot of white conservatives felt themselves to be experiencing. You’re not the funhouse version of their fears. Their fake experience was the funhouse version of what they are now visiting upon you.

They thought that their white sons would not get into Berkeley because some “underqualified Black person” would have a red carpet rolled out to them. They thought that “one wrong word” or “twenty seconds of action” would see their beautiful boy drummed out of college unfairly. They were worried that their children would stumble disorientedly through a world made by woke Marxist transsexuals where they had to speak Swahili and respect trigger warnings and safe spaces. None of these things were true: their children attended white-dominated universities in which consequences for the privileged were exceedingly rare (though I suppose there sometimes were consequences). But you’re now living through the flipped version of their fears. They want those they fixated on to worry they won’t get a job due to their race, gender, sexuality, to mirror the fear they felt (even if that fear had no basis in reality).

For my book I looked at a lot of lists of cancel victims. These were always pretty threadbare, and a real mix of things: some cases were indeed pretty bad, and mishandled by the institution. A lot felt like they distorted what was going on. Some were flat-out made up. These incidents were usually submitted by users with minimal fact checking, so that mix felt both inevitable and sort of intentional. In any event, the numbers were inevitably in the high three figures. The lists of disappeared people, the lists of students thrown out of the country for engaging in speech, dwarf those numbers, and this government has been in office for just short of 100 days. I think we are right to consider these two sets of trackers side by side. Not because one represents a mirror of the other, not because one constitutes a response to the other. But because some people clearly experience or regard them as all of those things.

I suppose in at least some of the cases I mentioned one could turn it around and say: the sense of victimhood was a permission structure for victimizing others. That doesn’t seem to hold true for the milk-example, however. In yet other cases, especially where complaints about “wokeness” and “cancel culture” were really reactions to critiques of rape culture, there was something preemptive about these metaphors: they framed as violence the kinds of accusations that might come up about the writer deploying them. When I wrote that “cancel culture stories are #MeToo for people who are afraid of #MeToo”, I meant that in the macro as well as in the micro. Yes, it was discomfort with a culture listening to the type of people you thought, you had in fact always been taught, were not worth listening to. But in some cases I’m sure it was a desire to cast as a free speech issue (and a defense of democracy) if that one person should ever come forward with their story about you.

There’s a line in Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” that I’m very fond of: “German history prides itself on having travelled a road which no other nation in the whole of history has ever travelled before, or ever will again. We have shared the restorations of modern nations without ever having shared their revolutions.” This ability, to have a counterrevolution to a revolution that was mostly in your own inflamed fantasy, seems key to US politics these days. People want to roll back a push to defund the police that in fact never occurred. They want to stop a coddling of criminals and “the homeless” that is not in evidence. And they want restored hierarchies that were at best mildly inconvenienced.

The administration and its allies, and even those who simply claim that this is the pendulum swinging in “the other direction”, that this is a natural “response” to the excesses of wokeness, want you to be afraid of getting censored by the government as much as they recently hallucinated (and in some cases still hallucinate?) being censored by you. These are people who were bravely afraid of everything. Now they want you to feel that way, but for real. They’re acting out the fantasies contained in their moral panics, but as revenge. Perhaps some of their moral panics were always, or were persuasive only as, anticipations of their revenge.