Donald Trump just posted a video of Somali people enjoying the Mall of America to the soundtrack of “Mad World” because he is a bigoted POS
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 6, 2026 at 12:35 AM
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That's obviously Trump's idea of a dystopian hellscape. But a few hours before that, Trump gave us another glimpse into his own nightmares, re-posting this tweet of a woman washing her bedding with fire hydrant water at what I assume is a homeless encampment in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles fire hydrants seem to be working just fine now pic.twitter.com/xCCfYXTHHD
— One Bad Dude (@OneBadDude_) April 4, 2026
Then yesterday afternoon -- as he pondered whether to commit war crimes by destroying critical civilian infrastructure in Iran -- Trump gave us the flip side of his nightmares, with two posts of colorized footage from the past:
Trump shares footage of old New York and PARIS after his press briefing on Iran pic.twitter.com/n5JjYfaXbU
— RT (@RT_com) April 6, 2026
The message of these videos, and the L.A. and Mall of America videos, is obvious: In a bygone era, our cities were utopias where well-dressed white people strolled peacefully, and there wasn't a black or brown or Muslim or poor person in sight. This is an idea that right-wingers find captivating -- and plausible, so much so that the right-wing actor Kevin Sorbo recently humilated himself by tweeting this:
Look at this video of NYC in 1975, see how peaceful it was?
— Kevin Sorbo (@ksorbs) April 5, 2026
Look at how everybody seems to be enjoying their lives, and not contrast it to today. Our country has been ruined.pic.twitter.com/KiqGcmEnp9
Those of us who lived in the city in the 1970s could have told Sorbo that New York in that era was broke, crumbling, and crime-ridden. It's richer and safer now. There were 1,645 homicides in the city in 1975. There were only 305 last year.
You might have seen that Kevin Sorbo tweet. What you probably don't know is that a day before he posted it, American AF, aka @iAnonPatriot -- the same right-wing tweeter whose Mall of America tweet was picked up by Trump -- posted the New York City clip Sorbo used, but with an explicitly anti-Muslim message.
Footage of NYC in the 1970s is going viral..
— American AF 🇺🇸 (@iAnonPatriot) April 3, 2026
Not a single Muslim in sight — it was perfect. pic.twitter.com/MAMFSJLkli
Right-wingers look at the world and see only utopias and hellscapes. A utopia is a place where everybody looks and thinks like them. A hellscape is any environment where some people aren't exactly like them, or do things they don't like -- wear clothes they disapprove of, practice a religion they don't practice, cope with adversity in a way they find unsightly.
This is why right-wingers love AI slop. AI can create images in which enemies are vanquished brutes, Donald Trump is a young, muscular conqueror, and Jesus looks on and approves. Everything in an AI image is exactly the way the creator wants it to be. That's how right-wingers think the world should work -- and could work.
Those of us who lean left and live in cities know that our environment is flawed. We see the flaws every day. We also see the good things. Sometimes we love the balance and sometimes we hate it, but we don't think a place has to be perfect to be good.
We don't like the way our right-wing fellow citizens vote, but we favor government policies that would help them, too, like universal health coverage. Right-wingers, by contrast, look at us and think:
Trump's warning to Iran right now sound like a variant on that: Imagine no Iran.
God help us.
— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) April 7, 2026 at 8:14 AM
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Trump thinks that if he bombs Iran back to the Stone Age, the Persian equivalent of the Paris and New York videos above might magically emerge.
At least he's not promising to build Trump Tehran, complete with a gold statue of himself.
Did I say that right-wingers believe that everything is either a hellscape or (their idea of) a utopia? That's what I mean.
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