Trump's ongoing push to create an American police state once again hinges on the 'Antifa' chimera
His first attempt to overthrow democracy on Jan. 6 depended on a bogeyman who never showed, and his drive to push a police state on Democratic cities is following suit
It’s kind of strangely poignant: Videos shot by alt-right propagandist Eddie Block, embedded within the Proud Boys at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, revealed just how deeply the street-brawling thugs who attacked democracy that day were counting on the presence of antifascist opposition as their built-in excuse to commit acts of violence.
As they marched from the Washington Capitol up the Mall to the Capitol and then around it, they were heard chanting “Fuck Antifa!” throughout. Eventually this morphed into a steady chant of: “Where’s Antifa?!”
Block became so intent on seeing Black Bloc activists on the street he announded tyo his livestream: “So if you’re Antifa, come find us, ‘cuz we’re looking for you. We just wanna have a couple words with you. We won’t hurt you. Not too bad.”
Trump and his minions, who have embarked on a program intended to plunge the nation into a police state, are currently trying desperately to sell the public a narrative about the dire existential threat posed by Antifa—but are once again finding out that the threat is a pure chimera of their own concoction.
Indeed, in addition to terrorizing members of Congress with a rampaging mob, battling Antifa in the street was always part of the plan to overturn the election in January 2021. It was, in fact, an essential component. However, it never materialized—and so neither did the intended outcome.
Trump’s plans revolved around a kind of Antifa that existed only in the fevered imaginings of far-right propagandists like Andy Ngo and Tucker Carlson—one that was heavily organized, secretly funded, and intimately entwined with the politicians of the Democratic Party. Anyone who had covered the Proud Boys violence knew this, but Trump—like all fascists—insisted on believing a version of reality that had been concocted by conspiracist hatemongers and fabulists, and built his strategy for retaining the White House around it.
The plan called for Trump to use the presence of Black Bloc protesters as an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act. The fact that Antifa never showed up for their expected opposition meant that he could only invoke it against his own supporters—and that was never in the cards.
Although the January 6 insurrection was the epitome of chaos, that was largely by design. Donald Trump did not cross the Rubicon with his army on January 6 without a carefully mapped strategy in place. His entire tenure as president, for that matter, was a ceaseless litany of ways to unleash chaos for authoritarian ends, and its ending was its apotheosis.
The January 6 scheme was a classic inside-outside strategy, wherein you can achieve institutional change by operating on the inside to create the conditions for transformation, and then applying pressure from the outside to make it reach fruition, both operations achieving a kind of synergy in the process. For Trump, his minions in Congress and the White House provided the inside game, while the assembled army of right-wing extremists and conspiracist authoritarians were always intended to bring the outside game.
Trump’s inside game had both legal and political components. The legal strategy was based on a pair of memoranda by Claremont Institute fellow John Eastman, who ascended within Trump’s inner circle during his last months in office on the basis of a proposed plan to overturn the election results and keep him in office. Eastman dubiously contended in the memos that the Constitution designates the vice president as the “ultimate arbiter” of the election with the power to determine and declare the victor.
Eastman proposed that members of Congress from six battleground states where Trump’s team was attempting to contest the outcome in court—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—could object to the certification of the Electoral College ballot from their state on the basis of the legal challenges, which would draw out the debate long enough for the Republican legislatures in those states to declare alternate slates of electors. This would give Vice President Mike Pence the opportunity to assert that he had competing slates from these states, forcing him to exclude their votes, thus giving Trump a 232-222 Electoral College victory.
The plan proceeded well enough that Republican activists in each of those states filed bogus slates of electors who submitted false certificates declaring the election for Trump. (The National Archives refused to accept the unsanctioned documents.) On January 6, Eastman—who also spoke that morning at the Ellipse rally—was one of the political operators in Trump’s “War Room” at the Willard Hotel, rubbing shoulders with Roger Stone and his Oath Keepers crew and others.
This fraudulent legal scheme required a political strategy to enact it, and its main architect was Steve Bannon, who called the inside-game move he planned “the Green Bay Sweep,” after the legendary football team’s Vince-Lombardi-era play that had the running back or quarterback following behind a massive phalanx of blockers to score touchdowns. What that meant in Trump’s circle was sending waves of cohorts in Congress to block the certification long enough for their “quarterback”—the vice president—to push the ball over the goal line for Trump.
Trump adviser Peter Navarro later boasted that it was “a perfect plan,” noting: “We had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”
This put Mike Pence at the center of their schemes, and Trump and his cohorts began applying massive pressure on him. Pence, however, consistently refused to play along. At a meeting with both Trump and Eastman, Pence had asked the lawyer: “Do you think I have such a power?”
When Eastman demurred that, while he might have such authority, it would be foolish to exercise it before the battleground states certified alternate slates of electors. Pence turned to Trump and said: “Did you hear that, Mr. President?” Trump did not respond, as if it had gone in one ear and out the other.
The inside game was not going to be enough to achieve Trump’s goals. That’s where the outside game and “Stop the Steal” came in.
Trump had developed an interest in his ability to declare the Insurrection Act—which essentially establishes martial law in emergency situations—over the course of the summer of 2020, during national protests over police brutality inspired by the murder of an African-American man, George Floyd, by Minneapolis police in May. He had even prepared a draft version to sign in order to call out the National Guard in Washington during protests there in early June, but was ultimately persuaded not to take the action, despite public support from Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who penned a New York Times op-ed calling on Trump to use the Act.
The idea remained an active option in Trump’s mind. Later that summer he declared that he was still considering invoking it: “Our country’s going to change,” Trump said. “We’re not supposed to go in, unless we call it an insurrection. But you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to have to look at it.”
This discussion excited the Patriot element, particularly Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who began urging Trump to use the Insurrection Act to stop Antifa through October, and then began suggesting it as a solution to Trump’s loss after the election. Most of the Oath Keepers came to Washington fully expecting the president to pull the trigger.
Trump himself was indeed preparing to use the Insurrection Act around January 6. He ordered attorneys to prepare a draft version of a National Emergency declaration, one in which the military would be permitted to seize election-related “assets”—such as voting machines and ballot boxes. The order would have authorized the Pentagon to seize election machinery in designated states. He also fired the current defense secretary and a number of key Pentagon officials and replaced them with Trump loyalists.
A PowerPoint presentation shared among the team working to overturn the election also called for Trump to declare a national emergency based on the pretext that “the Chinese systematically gained control over our election system constituting a national security emergency.” Among its recommendations was that members of Congress be briefed on “foreign interference” and that a “national security emergency” be declared. “Declare electronic voting in all states invalid,” it suggested.
Generals in the Pentagon feared that Trump was about to try to use military forces to retain power, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley. He foresaw a “nightmare scenario” in which Trump would attempt “to use the military on the streets of America to prevent the legitimate, peaceful transfer of power.” They were not alone: On January 3, all 10 then-living ex-secretaries of defense published an extraordinary letter in the Washington Post, warning: “Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”
Trump knew that there he would have a massive mob at his disposal on January 6 that he could direct to the Capitol and unleash. But he would not declare the Insurrection Act in order to use the military against his own supporters. That was where Antifa came in.
For four years, Trump had hyped the supposed existential threat of the antifascist movement, describing them as terrorists and evildoers. When he had told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his October 2020 debate with Biden, Trump had added: “But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.”
He began beating this drumbeat even more loudly after he lost the election. When the Nov. 14 “March for Trump” devolved into evening violence—primarily involving Proud Boys assaulting random protesters on the streets—Trump had again blamed it all on Antifa, tweeting:
Antifa SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back. Antifa waited until tonight, when 99% were gone, to attack innocent #MAGA people. DC Police, get going—do you job and don’t hold back!!!
In the minds of Trump and his rabid supporters, Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement had become inextricably intertwined, gradually becoming the same “violent left” threat. When Trump’s supporters gathered in D.C. for another “Stop the Steal” rally on Dec. 12, they again engaged in random street violence with counterprotesters—and then attacked two African-American churches that bore BLM banners, vandalizing the buildings and then tearing the banners and setting them aflame. (These acts later led to the arrest of Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio when he returned to D.C. to participate in the January 6 events.)
On January 5, Trump signed a resolution urging Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to designate Antifa a “terrorist organization.” “The violence spurred on by Antifa — such as hurling projectiles and incendiary devices at police, burning vehicles, and violently confronting police in defiance of local curfews — is dangerous to human life and to the fabric of our Nation,” the memorandum read. “These violent acts undermine the rights of peaceful protestors and destroy the lives, liberty, and property of the people of this Nation, especially those most vulnerable.”
Trump supporters eagerly prepared for their designated enemies to turn out in force, and shared “sightings” of them in the days leading up to them. On Parler, a prominent QAnon account posted a photo of two black tour buses featuring the Black Lives Matter slogan on their sides, warning:
To all the Patriots in Washington DC, Virginia, MD. Let us know where BLM and Antifa buses are staying, give us addresses and pictures. We will send to Proudboys. We need to get them before they go out to the streets, this will make all patriots safer at the March … January 6, 2021.
There was just one flaw with all these plans. Antifascists were able to see Trump’s scheme from miles away, and encouraged all their colleagues to avoid the capital city on Jan. 6. On social media, they shared hashtags like #DontTakeTheBait and #January6TrumpTrap that spread the word.
One widely shared meme showed a bear trap, with the text: “On January 6th in Washington DC the Proud Boys are cordially inviting you to be part of Donald Trump and Roger Stone’s plan to destroy American democracy.”
Antifascists and their sympathizers posted multiple warnings:
DC: STAY HOME JAN 6TH. Do NOT engage with these idiots or go there to counter protest. They will be starting trouble on the streets so that martial law can be a thing. Bust his plan.
trump is openly inciting violence. Don’t let him use you in his coup attempt. Stay away from DC. Don’t get in the way of cops and the National Guard doing their jobs.
They’re already there. Don’t go to DC. This will only get bigger tomorrow.
Why nobody should counterprotest in DC Wednesday: “Never interfere with your enemy when he is occupied with destroying himself.”—Napoleon Bonaparte
So when the mob gathered on the National Mall on January 6 and headed toward the Capitol, they encountered no resistance from any counterprotesters, much to their surprise. Oath Keepers and Proud Boys alike had been warning each other for weeks to prepare for Antifa or BLM violence. Instead, the only resistance they encountered came from Capitol Police.
The first key step in Trump’s plan—for Pence to play along and decline to accept the ballots from the key battleground states—fell apart when Pence did his constitutional duty and certified the Electoral College vote in the Senate. Then, Trump’s plans to use intended violence between his army of “Patriots” and Antifa as the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act vanished back into the mists of their imaginations.
The pro-Trump right-wing media and his defenders on social media were prepared to trot out the presence of violent antifascists on Jan. 6 as justification for whatever Trump did. On Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show, guest host Todd Herman said as the scenes from the insurrection unfolded: “It’s probably not Trump supporters who would do that. Antifa, BLM, that’s what they do. Right?” The right-wing Washington Times ran a story falsely claiming that a facial-recognition firm had identified activists in the crowd at the Capitol as Antifa (it was corrected about 24 hours later). Fox News talk-show hosts like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity suggested on national TV that night that Antifa might somehow be to blame, and the claim was made all day on Fox.
“We did have some warning that there might be antifa elements masquerading as Trump supporters in advance of the attack on the Capitol,” Mo Brooks told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs.
When it became clear, however, that he couldn’t blame Antifa for the violence, Trump’s options for overturning the election had shrunk down to a simple and clear one: For the insurrectionists to successfully stop the Electoral College ballot count—and to do it in a way that could forestall the proceeding indefinitely. In other words, for them to succeed in their frenzied desire to get not merely terrorize Congress, but to get their hands on members and lynch them.
This played a decisive role in the failure of the D.C. National Guard—which Trump commands, and had placed on standby—to show up to resist the insurrection until over three hours after the Capitol had first been breached, and Capitol Police had requested their deployment. All during the afternoon, the departing president resisted pleas from his staff, his confidants, and his congressional allies to stand up and stop the violence.
Many of them texted his chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Donald Trump Jr. was especially agitated: “He’s got to condemn this [shit] ASAP,” he wrote. “I’m pushing it hard. I agree,” Meadows responded.
“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” popular Fox News host Laura Ingraham texted Meadows. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
One of Trump’s favorite Fox co-hosts, Brian Kilmeade, urged Meadows to “please get him on TV,” warning the violence was “destroying everything you have accomplished.” Trump’s close confidant at Fox, Sean Hannity, asked Meadows whether Trump could “make a statement” and “ask people to leave the Capitol.” Still, nothing happened.
House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, one of Trump’s closest allies in Congress, kept trying to reach the president by phone, and eventually did. Rep. Jamie Herrera-Butler of Washington was privy to the exchange.
“When McCarthy finally reached the president on Jan. 6 and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot, the president initially repeated the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol,” Herrera-Butler later explained. “McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump supporters. That’s when, according to McCarthy, the president said, ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’”
Finally, after it became clear that members of Congress had been safely evacuated and were planning to return later that evening to complete the certification of the vote, and a combined force of Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan officers had successfully shut down the violence and began clearing the Capitol, the word came down for the National Guard to deploy.
A little while later, Trump finally made his public plea to the mob: He tweeted a video downplaying the events of day and sympathizing with his followers: “I know your pain. I know your hurt.” He added, “But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”
An hour later, he tweeted out a justification for the violence:
These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!
***
Of course, neither Trump nor any of his defenders ever acknowledged that Antifa was a no-show that day, largely because that might have entailed recognizing that to the extent that it exists, it is an amorphous movement with no underlying or unifying organization, that its actual numbers as a self-identified movement are quite small, and that it has never expressed any identification with or support for Democratic Party politicians like Joe Biden.
Far simpler was to simply keep reiterating evidence-free claims that somehow Antifa was secretly responsible for the violence of Jan. 6. Their Republican audience had already made abundantly clear that it has a boundless appetite for risibly false claims concocted to justify their own violence and authoritarianism. After all, rather than acknowledge what the entire nation had seen on Jan. 6, congressional Republicans continued to deny that the riotous mob attempt to stop the counting of the Electoral College ballots was an insurrection, instead comparing it to harmless Capitol tourists.
It became somewhat confusing. On days when they were trying to pin the blame for the violence on anyone else—variously Antifa and the FBI, depending on whose conspiracy theory was being promoted—the attack on the Capitol was innately a horrible thing. On days when they were claiming it was just an ordinary protest where no one got hurt, the perpetrators were just patriotic God-fearing Amuricans.
What became clear in all this was that the fuzzy public understanding of just what exactly comprised Antifa made them a more useful public enemy than one whose boundaries and organizations were known—that it was much easier to demonize an entity that people barely understood into the embodiment of pure evil itself. Thus during his years out of power, Trump and his MAGA army continued to make use of Antifa as an amorphous enemy foil behind whom he could organize his authoritarian plans to regain power.
In particular, he and his allies continued to claim that Antifa was a domestic-terrorist organization, one whose activities at anti-police protests in the summer of 2020 more than justified thew outbreak of protest violence on Jan. 6. At a 2021 congressional hearing on domestic terrorism focusing on the Capitol assault, that was precisely the line of argument trotted out by Republicans, who brought Andy Ngo to testify on their behalf.
Ngo’s testimony was indistinguishable from one of his talks promoting his “wildly dishonest” book, in which he depicts “Antifa” as an existential threat to America. Primarily, he repeatedly described summer 2020’s 120 day-long string of protests against police brutality in Portland—none of which he actually attended, but instead relied on others’ reports for his coverage—as “riots,” and insisted that this was terrorism and fundamentally no different than the Jan. 6 insurrection in nature:
For more than 120 recurring days, Antifa carried out nightly riots targeting federal, county, and private property. They developed a riot apparatus that included streams of funding for accommodation, travel, riot gear and weapons. This resulted in murder, hundreds of arson attacks, mass injuries, and mass property destruction. To put that into context for those here today, similar actions that occurred at the Capitol Hill riot on January 6, 2021, were repeated every night months on end in the Pacific Northwest.
In reality, no known antifascist entity was involved in those protests, which were almost entirely organized by Black Lives Matter and its offshoots, none of whom have any known antifascist affiliations, as well as various anarchist collectives.
Ngo and his sponsors’ testimony obliterated the reality that the motive for whatever violence occurred the summer of 2020 was anger at police brutality and a demand for change in American policing, while the motive for the Jan. 6 insurrection was to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election by stopping American democratic processes from occurring. The former motive is about demanding a democratic change of civic norms, while the latter motive was purely partisan politics intended to overturn the entire system of government. In defining terrorism, motivation and intent are the determinative factors.
Domestic terrorism is an entirely different phenomenon from protest violence, which has never been included in any terrorism database. Protest violence is usuallyas it was that summer—an outcome of interactions between protesters exercising their free speech and police forces using aggressive tactics against them; the 2020 summer protests were acutely so because the police themselves were the primary object of the protests, particularly in Portland.
Terrorism, in contrast, comprises preplanned acts of violence directed at political targets with the intention of striking fear into the larger populace. Both protest violence and terrorism are political in nature, but their core nature is fundamentally very different, particularly when it comes to intent.
After all, a 2020 domestic terrorism database found that between 2017 and 2019, right-wing extremists committed a total of 49 acts of terror that resulted in 145 deaths. Antifascists, in contrast, were responsible for exactly one case of domestic terrorism, and the only death that resulted from that case was the perpetrator’s. Black Lives Matter activists were connected to zero cases of domestic terrorism.
As Tennessee congressman Steve Cohen noted: “It’s like comparing a forest fire to someone with a match.”
Nonetheless, it was unsurprising that when Trump’s antidemocratic insurgency—one that was brought into being on Jan. 6 and then hardened over the ensuing months and years—returned him to power, he would again resort to conjuring up his favorites all-purpose bogeyman as the point of the spear in his drive to impose an authoritarian police state on a barely-cognizant American public.
This is why Trump has been sending troops and ICE agents to urban liberal centers around the nation, with the focus finally coming to rest, once again, on Portland. Late last month, Trump issued an edict declaring Antifa a “domestic terror organization.”
At about the same time, the Department of Justice removed a study into political violence in America by the National Institute for Justice which concluded that far-right extremism outpaced “all other types of violent extremism”. DOJ spokespersons have refused to answer questions about its removal.
“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the report concluded. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
Of course, Trump (like all authoritarians) operates in a vacuum unencumbered by facts and reality. At the same time that he was announcing a fresh incursion by his federalized MAGA army into Portland—ostensibly to defend ICE facilities from antifascist protesters—he paraded his top anti-Antifa minions before the press in Washington spouting the usual nonsense and accidentally revealing just how evidence-free their claims actually are.
Homeland Security’s Kristi Noem, who had observed the situation in Portland firsthand, boldly claimed that “a person we arrested recently in Portland was a girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa, and we are hoping that as we go after her, interview her and prosecute her, we will get more and more information about the network and how we can root them out and eliminate them from the existence of American society.”
The supplicant press in attendance that day did not, of course, ask Noem how they could have arrested the girlfriend of a cofounder of a movement that originated in the 1920s and has never had an identifiable leader or national figure, let alone just what crimes the person they had arrested was being charged with. Then again, a majority of them in fact were right-wing social-media influencers like Ngo and noted hoaxter Katie Daviscourt—people whose entire careers were built around hyperinflating the Antifa “threat” in the gullible mainstream media.
She then went on to claim—again with zero evidence—that Antifa was equal in threat to international terrorist and criminal organizations:
This network of antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TDA (Tren de Aragua), as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them. They are just as dangerous, they have an agenda to destroy us just like the other terrorists we’ve dealt with for many many years, and today is the day we have a president that won’t tolerate and will stand up and fight for the American people.
Trump himself commended the roomful of propagandists posing as journalists—accidentally revealing just how short of evidence the entire law-enforcement operation against Antifa actually is:
Any of the funders? Do you know their names? ‘Cause if you do, I’d like you to give them to Kash or Pam or Kristi. I’m sure you do. As soon as you can. That’s all of you. Because you probably know the names after a certain period of time. You tend to find out. But these are people who do not have good intentions for the country—it’s treasonous probably, so.
A normal antiterrorism operation, of course, would already have such facts well in hand and would not have to rely on the extremely dubious evidence conjured up by conspiracist partisans. But such is the state of Trump’s anti-Antifa intiative—whose entire purpose, of course, is to provide some kind of plausible facade for his ongoing attempts to impose authoritarian control over Democratic cities.
Attorney General Pam Bondi later went on Fox News to rant about the dire threat from the “violent left”:
And antifa—you’ve heard Trump say, multiple times, they are organized, they are a criminal organization, and they’re very organized. You’re seeing people out there carrying thousands of signs that all match—prebought, pre-put together—they’re organized, and someone is funding it. We’re going to get to the funding of antifa, we’re going to get to the root of antifa, and we are going to find and charge all of those people causing this chaos in Portland and all these other cities across our country. Talk to all the influencers who have been threatened and beat up and their lives threatened from antifa members. It’s going to stop under Donald Trump.
Transportation Sean Duffy similarly complained on Fox News that the Saturday “No Kings” rallies were actually an Antifa operation:
The No Kings protest—it’s really frustrating, Maria, this is part of antifa paid protesters, it begs the question who’s funding it, but Democrats want to wait for a big rally of a No Kinga protest, but the bottom line is, who’s running the show in the Senate?
Longtime conspiracist figure Glenn Beck likewise revealed this week on his program just how bereft the DOJ, FBI, and DHS are when it comes to having a factual basis for their wild claims regarding citizens who in every other regard are engaging in protected free speech—namely, they have Beck and his team, whose history of groundless accusations runs steadily over the past two decades, providing them with their only “facts” and “evidence”:
“We dove in head first, and we analyzed the Antifa network, and we went from the street thugs to the support groups and eventually to the funding. To say the FBI was interested in this might be an understatement,” Beck said. “It is so clear to me that they are exploring all angles of this and they are talking to anyone and everyone that can give them any kind of information.”
“How do I know? Saturday, I get a phone call,” Beck continued, recalling the conversation.
“‘The director would like to send over some agents to speak to you, Glenn.’ I’m like, ‘The director? FBI agents?’ ‘Yes, you said some things that they need to talk to you about.’”
Trump may still be itching to invoke the Insurrection Act and try to implement a permanent police state in America under the pretense of protecting us from the dire threat of Antifa frogs and naked bicyclists. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin insisted that “these unsightly tactics won’t stop us or slow us down.”
“In a bizarre effort to obstruct ICE law enforcement, agitators are now laying in the street naked to stage ‘die-ins’ to block roads in front of ICE facilities,” she told Fox News Digital. “Our law enforcement will continue to remove murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists out of our country.”
But he may once again find his options foreclose by the rising tide of mockery his authoritarian initiatives have inspired.
“The juxtaposition of this moment is what’s resonating,” said Whitney Phillips, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, told the New York Times. “This moment is dangerous. It’s violent. It’s also absurd.”
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Fever Dream.