There are few certainties in this godforsaken world, but one of them is this: if you put Mehdi Hasan in a room with twenty MAGA mutants, you will need a mop and a priest when he’s done. Jubilee’s Surrounded proved this in biblical proportions. Mehdi walked into that bloodsport with nothing but his brain, his spine, and his bottomless well of contempt for idiots, and emerged with twenty scalps. He didn’t just win—he committed a rhetorical genocide on the gathered disciples of Trump, who had all apparently mistaken their Facebook comment section for a valid worldview. Hasan didn’t argue, he vivisected. He took their nationalist ramblings, their fascist winks, their “I’m just asking questions” dogshit, and vaporized it with the precision of a laser-guided missile made of Oxford commas. The rest of us just watched, mesmerized, while he danced circles around these future footnotes in the obituary of democracy.
CONNOR: THE SELF-PITYING FASCIST IN A GOOF TROOP T-SHIRT
And then there was Connor. Oh, Connor. A man so devoid of shame he looked into the camera, shrugged his doughy shoulders, and proudly declared himself a fascist. Not in a confused, roundabout, “oops, that slipped” way, but with the enthusiasm of a man who thinks Carl Schmitt was the life of every party. When pressed on whether he cared about being called a Nazi, Connor chuckled, like he’d just farted in a library and was proud of the acoustics.
His indifference was only matched by his stupidity, as if calling himself a fascist on camera was just good old-fashioned brand management. This is a man who sat on YouTube and basically said, “Persecuting Jews? Bad. But…shrug emoji.” Then he went home, checked his employment status—surprise, motherfucker, you’re unemployed—and decided the best next step was to pass the hat on a Christian crowdfunding site for bigots, where he raised nearly twenty thousand dollars. For being fired for being a fascist. Because if there’s one thing racists love more than tiki torches, it’s paying other racists for embarrassing themselves in public.
A VIOLIN TOO SMALL TO BE DETECTED BY GOD
Naturally, Connor needed the world’s smallest violin to accompany his wailing. But friends, the violin we need for this moment cannot exist. Not because we lack the will, but because physics itself would weep and quit. Nanotechnology, in all its infinite promise, cannot shrink a violin to the quantum scale required to score Connor’s pity parade. You could hand this assignment to a team of nanotech wizards at MIT, and they’d weep into their lab coats before inventing a device that simply flips Connor the middle finger at the molecular level. We’re talking a violin so small it would need to be played by neutrinos. A bow strung with the regrets of dead fascists. A soundboard made from the collective eye-roll of every Jew, Muslim, gay person, and decent human Connor casually dismissed on his climb to nowhere. Even then, even if we managed to bend space-time and handcraft a violin beneath the Planck scale, it would still be too large, too grand, too dignified to play for this whimpering excuse of a man.
CONNOR’S DONORS: MAY YOUR WALLETS BURN
And then there’s the people who donated. Oh, you sad, flaccid little men in threadbare Pepe the Frog hoodies. Imagine seeing Connor, a smirking thumb in human form, proudly declare his fascism, fail in public, lose his job, and your response is: “I must finance this hero’s recovery!” You sent money to a guy who thinks book burning is an underappreciated pastime.
You forked over cash like medieval peasants offering gruel to a leper king, and for what? So Connor can buy more books about the glories of autocracy, or maybe just a few packs of Hot Pockets to fuel his next livestream of incoherent Nazi-adjacent drivel? Every one of you who donated should have your bank accounts audited by a panel of Holocaust survivors. Your grandchildren should inherit nothing but the receipt of your shame, laminated and embossed, as a warning that grandpa was once so colossally stupid he paid a Nazi to stay unemployed.
NO TECHNOLOGY CAN SHRINK AN EGO THIS MASSIVE
The cruelest limitation of nanotechnology is not that it can’t build us a microscopic violin—it’s that it can’t compress an ego like Connor’s. Here is a man whose self-regard is so bloated it has moons. He got fired for proudly waving the fascist flag, yet paints himself the martyr, the victim of a cruel world that simply refuses to let him cosplay as a dictator without consequences. Nanotech can splice atoms, but it can’t deflate the helium balloon of Connor’s ego. It can’t miniaturize the sheer density of entitlement required to think that being a Catholic straight man entitles you to a consequence-free life of open fascism, funded by a brigade of half-literate keyboard warriors. Science has limitations. Connor’s delusion does not.
MEHDI HASAN: THE CURE FOR STUPID
So here we remain, in the wake of a debate where Mehdi Hasan did more damage to fascism in ninety minutes than an entire decade of New York Times editorials. Hasan is the intellectual equivalent of a plague of locusts devouring every last lie, leaving only the bleached bones of bad ideas. He doesn’t debate; he demolishes, rebuilds, and leaves you grateful for the destruction. And Connor? Connor is still out there, somewhere, presumably counting his pity money, googling “can I get unemployment if I’m an unemployed fascist,” and waiting for nanotechnology to deliver him a violin small enough to drown out the sound of his own mediocrity.
Spoiler: it won’t come. Science isn’t in the business of enabling clowns. That’s what Connor’s donors are for.
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This post has been syndicated from Closer to the Edge, where it was published under this address.