FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE KINGDOM OF COWARDS

There is a smell in the air of this country—an acrid, chemical stench that seeps into the lungs and lingers in the bloodstream like a curse. It is the smell of decay, of institutions rotting from the inside, of power without restraint and cruelty without consequence. This is the United States of America in the Year of Our Lord 2025: a pathetic carnival of cowards, strongmen, bootlickers, Christian nationalists, billionaire ghouls, and sniveling authoritarian wannabes who mistake violence for strength and obedience for patriotism. And against this backdrop, tens of millions of citizens can feel the same thing Hunter S. Thompson felt on November 22 1963—fear and loathing, in doses large enough to poison a nation.

Before Thompson ever scratched pen to paper, the phrase “fear and loathing”—or at least close variants of it—had already crept through the corridors of English literature and beyond. It whispers in translations of medieval Icelandic sagas: the warrior-poet grimly declares, “Fighting fills me/with fear and loathing”, over the clash of blades in the frozen north. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the language echoes the same mortal terror and disgust as boys on an island regress into savagery. The phrase held ancient associations with dread and moral revulsion long before it became Thompson’s personal rally-cry. What he did was not invent the terms, but fuse them into a nuclear core of American political diagnosis.

And so when Thompson wrote—“…much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder”—on the night JFK died, he was not merely weaving clever phraseology. He was tapping into a deep, resonant language of human horror and moral collapse, and redirecting it at the rotting heart of American power. That letter, written on November 22 1963, from Woody Creek, marked the first known time Thompson used those exact words together. From there the phrase would explode into books, journalism, myth. But in that instant it was private, raw, wounded—a diagnosis scribbled in grief.

Back then, it was the shock of a president murdered in broad daylight that shattered the myth of American decency. Today, it is something slower, uglier, and more humiliating: the American experiment bleeding out not from a single bullet, but from a thousand cowardly cuts. We now live under a spray-tanned fascist buffoon who stumbled his way into authoritarianism not through genius, but through the sheer incompetence, apathy, and moral bankruptcy of the people who should have stopped him. This was not an overthrow. It was a surrender.

It’s fitting, then, that the phrase first surfaced in a moment of national trauma. On the night John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a young Hunter S. Thompson felt the country slipping He felt the sickness under the surface, and he named it before most people could even comprehend it. Later, he would turn “Fear and Loathing” into literature, into journalism, into a worldview. But it began as a diagnosis.

Sixty-two years later, the diagnosis stands. The patient is worse.

Because what is fascism if not a government built on fear—fear of the outsider, the neighbor, the protester, the journalist, the immigrant, the dissenter—and loathing—loathing of the weak, the different, the questioning, the disobedient, the free? Trump doesn’t govern. He intimidates. He doesn’t persuade. He threatens. He doesn’t lead. He degrades, distracts, and destroys. He is not a president. He is a parasite with a podium.

And look around: the infection has spread. We have a Congress full of trembling sycophants afraid of mean tweets, afraid of primary challenges, afraid of losing donor money, afraid of their own base, afraid of their own shadows. State legislatures passing decrees like medieval church edicts written by middle-school hall monitors. Armed vigilantes who think the Constitution is a gun manual. Evangelical authoritarians trying to legislate their nightmares into God’s will. Judges who rule not by law, but by tribe. Police departments salivating for broader powers. Governors begging for troops. Propagandists posing as journalists. And millions of Americans who somehow believe they are the oppressed majority, bravely punching down at whichever group their cult leader tells them to hate on any given day.

Fear and loathing. Everywhere you look.

Hunter didn’t live to see this. But he saw where we were heading. He understood the uniquely American talent for wrapping fascism in sequins, slogans, and fireworks. He knew the danger wasn’t jackboots and uniforms—it was apathy, boredom, and television. It was the smiling tyrant. And he knew that once that kind of man ever tasted real power, the country would either rise up or roll over.

Well. We are now finding out which it is.

But here is the part the bastards never understand: fear and loathing are not signs of surrender. They are signs of awakening. Disgust is the immune system of democracy. Revulsion can be fuel. Outrage can be oxygen. A population that can still feel horror has not gone numb—and numbness, not rebellion, is what every would-be tyrant dreams of.

So yes—be afraid. Be disgusted. Feel the loathing in your bones. Because that means you are still alive, still human, still capable of drawing a line. Fear is not the enemy. Apathy is.

If Hunter were here, he would not be hiding in the mountains. He would be on the streets, on the page, on the warpath, hurling words like bricks through the stained glass of corrupt churches and cowardly institutions. And he would tell us what we already know: the only cure for fear and loathing is confrontation.

Not tomorrow. Not in theory. Not in whispers.

Now.

Because this country has already handed itself to a madman twice, and that was two times too many. If we don’t impeach and remove him now, then we will have earned the coward’s kingdom that follows.

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