Beyond Outrage

Some thoughts on Chaos Magick, Focused Action, and Changing Reality

Reading time: don’t worry, it’s worth it!

punditman says…

Recently I was involved in an online discussion that veered off into something called chaos magic. More on that in a bit.

First consider this: For over a decade, Donald J. Trump has been living rent-free in our heads. He has colonized the collective consciousness like no other figure in recent memory.

Despite being a pathological liar, and despite the shock of the January 6 insurrection, he was able to regain power—thanks to the 77 million who voted for a seditionist felon who spins cruelty into loyalty and chaos into control.

Trump’s mendacious, incoherent, and utterly unhinged April Fool’s Day address—hailed by some commentators as the worst speech ever delivered by an American president (though many of his other speeches must be close contenders) and dubbed “the beginning of his end”—has done little to shake his grip on power, with no signs that his sycophants are about to turn on him. That said, the Iran War and its economic fallout have pushed his poll numbers to historic lows for a second-term president.

Whether this fluid situation will be enough to drive him from office—no matter the method—remains unclear.

What is clear is that with Trump 2.0, both his profound incompetence and his physical and cognitive decline are more visible than ever. Equally transparent is a central feature of his grift: manufacturing crises, then claiming credit for resolving them.

Yet all the strident opposition and earnest efforts have yet to accomplish the singular goal of keeping this cruel, law-violating dumpster fire of a man as far from the nuclear football as any reasonable country would do. And yet here we are.

Each new Trumpian outrage always arrives with the same refrain: this will surely be the thing that finally undoes him.

As Henry A. Giroux, a professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, observes:

Trump is more than a whirlwind of chaos and distraction. He is an unchecked authoritarian who poses a grave threat to democracy and the planet—a modern-day avatar of domestic terrorism. What masquerades as spectacle and turbulence is, in fact, the calculated exercise of power: a form of governance that weaponizes confusion, accelerates cruelty, and functions as a domestic analogue of terrorism, designed to intimidate, disorient, and exhaust the public into submission.

Well, it’s certainly exhausting! And it perfectly tracks with Steve Bannon’s promise to "flood the zone."

And now with the Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran, which experts across the board describe as illegal, highly reckless, destabilizing, and politically untenable—the pundit sphere is again insisting that this time he’s gone too far. Trump is wrecking the world economy! Secretary of War Crimes Pete Kegsbreath’s Pentagon is hiding the true extent of US casualties! Surely this will be his Waterloo, even if he chooses to TACO (“Trump always chickens out”) and leaves the Strait of Hormuz in Iran’s hands.

Perhaps. But then again, we’ve heard it all before.

So how did it come to this? Obviously there are political reasons: the hard reality that MAGA-infused Republicans control the House and Senate.

But is that all? Because it’s almost like a spell has been cast so that only the insane rule and anyone with a modicum of common sense is cast aside. This brings me to that online discussion that may hint at something deeper.

Chaos Magick

Social media content creator PissedMagistus recently began a post with a creepy and ominous question: “Can you believe the elites are practicing the occult and doing magic? Yes—and so are you, you’re just doing it very badly because you don’t know what you’re doing…”

He then offered a “crash course” in the history of the occult (i.e. hidden knowledge); how this knowledge was suppressed by the Catholic Church who “used to murder people for knowing stuff they weren’t supposed to know”; how secret societies preserved this knowledge; the close overlap between nobility and those with access to it; and how all of this relates to the nature of reality, the mind, manifestation, and the use of ritual.

Bear with me, the comments quickly branched in some interesting directions. What follows is an exchange between myself and a user named Colorado Chloe. (with minor edits for clarity):

colorado_chloe This is why incantations like - F Ice, Occupy, No Kings are weak magick. They are not changing moving reality they are rooted in a desire to reject reality. To really make a shift people have to protest for a new reality. A desire for a new way—a positive want. Not a rejection or reaction.

punditman @colorado_chloe Is that related to the notion that if you oppose something with force you only make it stronger but if you offer an alternative, you chart a new reality? One example from the past: “Hell no, we won’t go” (to Vietnam) vs. “Out Now” or “Bring the boys home” (we demand full withdrawal of troops). The first has the energy of an inaction. The second is an action that creates a new pathway.

colorado_chloe @punditman Yes- 100%…no one wants to know this but the right has powerful magick and some of it is chaos magick that keeps the left weak. As long as the left focuses on Trump and is reactive—he will have all the power. That is why he can do anything as insane as it is—lies and corruption and get away with it. It’s a tool to simply keep the left from invoking a desire. MAGA means magician.

punditman @colorado_chloe Interesting. Yes, a lot of online portals I follow are just 24/7 anti-Trump to the point where it just gets exhausting to listen to even though it’s an echo chamber that I mostly agree with. It’s a relentless tirade of energy all focused in one direction, which by the way, happens to make some of them a nice pay day. So the rage is also incentivized. And the answer is always the same: vote your way out, by putting the Dems back in and restore sanity, which in a way serves as a gatekeeper to systemic and paradigmatic change.

We have a similar dynamic in Canada happening, where I think a vast majority despise Trump (or pretend they do) especially since he has been threatening and undermining us but because the Liberals are in power we’re not allowed to critique Carney, or Trudeau before him, because of the threat from Maple MAGA on the right. Again, a lot of the energy is reactive, rather than proactive.

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At that point I was intrigued by what Colorado Chloe meant by the MAGA right using chaos magic successfully as a way to strategically shape public attention. Whether she meant it literally or metaphorically was unclear.

Chaos magick is a modern, experimental magical practice that treats belief itself as a tool rather than a fixed truth. Instead of following set rituals, doctrines, or authorities, practitioners mix and match symbols, systems, and techniques that work for them, using focused attention and intention to influence perception and experience. It emphasizes flexibility, individual creativity, and results over dogma. Attention itself becomes a force; what is focused on and sustained can shape reality as it is experienced.

I cannot do justice to this rather esoteric topic here—this article goes much deeper—but I did find plenty of evidence of the alt-right's links to this occult philosophy as Colorado Chloe described.

She also suggested that the constant outrage against Trump—the endless cycle of scandal, investigation, denunciation, and his regularly predicted imminent demise—may function less as a check on his power than as a source of it. What if it serves to reinforce the centrality of the figure who is being denounced?

In that sense, the resistance to Trump has not failed for lack of effort. Perhaps it has failed, thus far, because it remains fixed on this single axis and each “this will be his end” only reboots the cycle?

A politics defined mainly by opposition risks becoming dependent on what it opposes. It draws energy from it, organizes itself around it, and, in a strange way, helps sustain it. Trump clearly thrives on being the center of attention.

In practical terms, this is not to say people shouldn’t engage, or resist. On the contrary. But the question is how?

In a recent MSNBC op ed, Ja’han Jones makes an adjacent argument about the massive “No Kings” protests. Their scale may be deep and wide and historic, Jones notes, “But something is missing. There is an absence of friction. The contained and routinized choreography of these demonstrations every few months is central to their mass appeal. Paradoxically, it is also what limits their power.”

In other words, scale alone does not translate into power. One-day eruptions of outrage need to be converted into sustained, organized pressure. Without that, these intermittent waves risk becoming a kind of ritualized emotional release, only to crash up against the shore of entrenched power.

History suggests what’s missing is not passion but direction. Jones points to the Civil Rights Movement, which not only protested segregation; it made concrete demands—integration, voting rights, federal enforcement.

Jones also points to Minnesota activists as a stronger model. Minneapolis protesters resisted ICE agents through focused civil disobedience— surveilling their movements and tracking their raids, warning immigrant communities, disrupting the economy, and using noise to interfere with agents’ operations. This defiance was met with vicious repression, but it was widely broadcast and offered a glimpse of what cities under unchecked federal power might look like. After weeks of bad press, escalating tension and the deaths of two protesters, Trump was forced to retreat as his poll numbers on immigration tanked.

Union movements have done the same. Strikes are not just outbursts of anger, but leverage tied to specific demands and gains.

The magick is the ability to have a focused vision of an alternative world and then organize relentlessly to bring it about.

Therein lies a politics that asserts a reality independent of its antagonists.

Hopefully, such a vision can be realized on a much broader scale. Otherwise, the understandable outrage against Trump will persist, while the figure at the center remains exactly where he is—raging across the globe like an uncontrolled tsunami, consuming our mental real estate and feasting on all the attention with his deluded sense of grandeur.

So, America, while he continues to wreak havoc—not that I’m telling you what to do—but how about an extended national general strike… or is it a general national strike? Decide on a name first. 😉

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