No, you’re misunderstanding me.

They don’t attack trans people to distract from ethnically cleansing Palestine, and they don’t ethnically cleanse Palestine to distract from tearing apart the government. This isn’t a Soderbergh movie; there’s no grand unified plan where every action is actually secretly a play in a 4D chess game towards a different hidden goal.

They’re attacking trans people because they want to attack trans people. They’re ethnically cleansing Palestine because they want to ethnically cleanse Palestine. They’re tearing apart the government because they want to tear apart the government.

These are all things that they very much want to do. And along the way they’re going to collapse the US education system, destroy the welfare state, give tax breaks to billionaires, and plunder whatever money they can get for themselves because those are all things they want to do too. And they have the ability to do all of these things at once, so why wouldn’t they? What benefit is there to slowly going through their list of targets one by one?

You don’t need to conjure up a fantasy world where everything is part of some elaborate plan in order to explain this behaviour. It’s just the most obvious thing for them to do in this situation. They’re behaving completely rationally, given what their goals are.

The fact that the people opposing them refuse to care about more than one of these things at a time is just a happy accident for them. It’s more comforting to believe that everything is a distraction except for the one thing that you really want to care about, but the reality isn’t that easy. The reality is that no matter how much it sucks, someone has to care about every single one of these things, because they all matter. Doesn’t always have to be the same someone, but it has to be someone. There is no feint to disguise the main attack; you are surrounded on all sides, and it is all main attack.

But the good news is that the only reason they can afford to be this reckless is because the people opposing them really haven’t woken the fuck up what’s happening yet (and the people who have woken up are feeling pretty demoralized by everyone else’s apathy). That sounds bad, and it is, but ultimately it’s good news because their victory is not a foregone conclusion. The American people have the ability to stop these criminals if they try. It’s not too late.

I think it’s less focused than that. I think it’s “I want to make the world worse in these 10 ways. If I only get 5 of them, I’ve still managed to make the world worse, so I’m happy.”