The 27% Club, Or: Lizard People, The Crazification Factor, and Me

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Crazification Factor!

The low rumbling in the cheap seats tells me that some of you don’t know what the Crazification Factor is, so I will explain. Sometimes known as the Keyes Constant, the Crazification Factor is a theory coined by writer Tyrone Finch in discussion with fellow writer John Rogers on his blog Kung Fu Monkey in October of 2004. The Crazification Factor holds that any politician will always have a committed and highly irrational base of 27% of people, a figure Tyrone arrived at by using the example of the 2004 Illinois Senate election of Barack Obama (D) versus Alan Keyes (R):

“Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population” [where half of the 27%] “just have worldviews which lead them to disagree with what you consider rationality” [while the other half] “are the core of the Crazification — either genuinely crazy; or so woefully misinformed about how the world works, the bases for their decision making is so flawed they may as well be crazy.”

This is a theory that I have held near and dear for every day of the last 20 years, give or take some days I slept straight through, and this post started out as a celebration of the anniversary. But as you may have noticed, the world is ending, or at least becoming even more dangerous than usual, and I’ve found myself struggling with what this theory means, if anything, or if it even needs to mean something to be worthwhile.

The original article, a discussion between John and Tyrone, starts out with something I think a lot of people have either forgotten or are too young to remember: That George W. Bush was a very stupid guy who said very stupid things. He frequently failed to make sense and was, if you will, a sort of proto Trump, and in retrospect was the next logical step in the Republican party’s series of “cult of personality” presidents that started with General Eisenhower. W was a pedigreed nepo baby without thoughts or morals and the perfect followup to the buffed, polished and Brownatoned fascist celebrity Ronald “Facts Are Stupid Things” Reagan, who was the perfect spin-off from Dick “Tanned, Rested and Ready” Nixon who, beginning in the early 1960s, started standing in the sun occasionally and getting fashion tips from Bebe Rebozo, after he learned the hard way that moist lizard skin gives off a sickening glow in the unforgiving light of a television studio.

If you were on the political blogs of the day — and I was, because I was super cool — you’d have seen endless early memes with photos of W’s shirts buttoned wrong or jokes about him almost choking to death on a pretzel bit, a story which absolutely no one with functioning brain cells believed. If you’re old as shit you may remember (but also might not, because you’re old as shit) that the long-since-disappeared political blogger billmon used to have a sidebar adorned with pretzels, which I assure everyone under the age of 65 was truly tremendous content in its day.

The W presidency was full of the kind of political ridiculousness that would be familiar to anyone today, mostly spent worrying about civilian deaths and wars while watching him stumble through his job in real time, barely coherent, frequently befuddled, while the press told you he was doing just fine, until suddenly he wasn’t. And if you were hanging around the online political scene back then you would have also seen the originals of the Moon Man and sombrero memes, somewhat fringe stuff in the mid 2000s but now being posted by official government channels, and you’d realize just how weird the current crop of American idiots are, and how they haven’t had an original thought in their lives.

In the interest of fairness, I must mention that liberals thought calling W “preznit” was high-larious and they continue to call Trump things like “tRump” or “The Papaya Putz” or whatever, so it’s not like anyone’s actually evolved over the last 20 years. Shitposters for life, all of us, which is why I was always fond of “Red Don” as a nickname, but that’s ’cause I’m all cinematic and shit.

 

 

 

The Crazification Factor owes a lot to W’s expansive idiocy, mostly forgotten these days, which may be why the theory seems to have morphed into a general belief that the country isn’t divided into halves but rather thirds, e.g. the William Pannapacker quote, “Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.” It’s an observation erroneously attributed to Werner Herzog, because Pannapacker goes by the (admittedly great) handle Werner Twertzog, and people are easily confused.

All this is to say that I firmly believe that on any given topic, not just political topics, roughly one-third of Americans are bugfuck crazy, and the fact that there are no studies to prove this does not dissuade me from this opinion, which probably makes it a bugfuck crazy opinion in and of itself. This delights me; it almost certainly does not delight you, but that’s okay.

What I also believe is that this 27% of “woefully misinformed” people is not a constant 27% but a rough figure, and it fluctuates in both numbers and individuals across all topics, something I think Tyrone hinted at in the original conversation. Most people are broadly coherent about most things, but each individual has a small set of subjects they cannot understand or, worse, cannot be reasoned with about. This means the Crazification group who believes, say, that 5G causes COVID, won’t contain the exact same group of people who believe Elvis is still alive, or that lizard people are real (except Richard Nixon, who was very real), and these people are sane on nearly every other subject.

You know the type, the co-worker who seems perfectly fine, they can do their job and are potty trained, you’ve even seen them do a little math, maybe, then out of nowhere they say they don’t believe in Canada or that the moon was invented in 1969, and you realize that even this perfectly average, generic human being has a little cachet of basic facts they’re never going to be able to grasp.

Think, again, of that guy you know who is well-rounded, he has his own credit cards and house keys, he seems to have it mostly together, and then football season arrives and his team doesn’t do so well, and he starts screaming slurs no one has heard since 1837 and trying to pay off his mortgage through a series of $5 bets on a sports app that cannot be legally downloaded without using a VPN that makes it look like his phone is in Irkutsk.

Theoretically, these are the kind of people who would vote for Trump in 2024, wanting to give him a chance because they forgot he was president once already. They wouldn’t remember who was president in 2020 at all — they think it was Biden — and they believed Trump when he said, gosh, he just had no idea what Project 2025 even was, folks.

You know: Morons.

 

 

Now we’re on the verge of a second civil war, and there are plenty of you out there ready to call that hyperbole or possibly an outright lie, but I submit to you that recent events bear me out: The Department of Defense is now the War Department, members of the military will be free to make “mistakes” and commit “minor infractions” without (much) fear of punishment, the President is ordering the military to use American cities as military training grounds, and that individual cities like Chicago and New York will be occupied by the military as part of a “war from within.”

Federal immigration forces are being sent to these individual cities specifically against the will of the states in question, chasing and arresting people based on their appearance, which the United States Supreme Court has recently said is completely legal. The President has now asked Texas to send their National Guard in to Chicago as the governor of Illinois has asked them to stay away. The governor of Texas has happily agreed to the President’s request, and a federal judge has refused to grant an immediate injunction against Texas sending troops into Illinois, so they’re, as of this writing, apparently on their way.

This is not entirely without precedent, to a point. In the 1850s, President Pierce’s open support of pro-slavery border ruffians, who terrorized states in hopes of scaring voters into appointing pro-slavery legislators, amounted to federal encouragement of war between states, and has a lot of similarities to Trump’s current attempt to agitate violence between liberal and conservative states. We know where the Border Wars lead us; so, too, do we know where the current administration is trying to lead.

The general feeling, at least online, is that we’re going through this because “half of Americans approve of Trump” or similar, but the truth is that Trump doesn’t have the approval of 50% of Americans, and per Gallup, rarely has. Trump’s occasional ceiling of 49% approval only happened during his first term. While 49.8% of all votes cast in 2024 were for Trump, that doesn’t mean 49.8% of Americans approve of Trump. There were about 266,979,000 Americans of voting age in 2024, and Trump received 77,284,118 votes, meaning about 28.95% of voting-age Americans voted for Trump.

Well, there it is. The percentage of voting-age Americans who voted for Trump fits neatly into the Crazification Factor.

A tangent: A few weeks ago on Bluesky, the hot new(ish) social media site that’s always on the verge of imploding, just as every good social media site should be, a woman told me that I was a Nazi because I lived in Kansas. This proved too tempting for me to resist, so I had to ask her: How granular does this distinction go? Am I a Nazi because I used to live next door to a Chuck Baldwin fascist fanboy? Or because I live in a blue but not-blue-enough county? Because I’m in a red state? How far out do we go, geographically, to determine my Naziness? She informed me that Berlin was bombed in 1932 because it was a rural area and that pretty much fixed everything in Germany.

I was thrilled. That’s the kind of crazy I can really sink my teeth into. But I had to admit that this woman seemed about 98% normal per her social media, and is probably a good example of the floating Keyes Constant: mostly normal but not really tethered to reality in a few key areas. The notable thing here is that, on looking up her posts for this article, I saw she had corrected herself at some point, and also had started asking around about books about WWII, because she wanted to learn. She posted a few things about Nazi Germany afterwards, all correct, and quietly deleted a couple of her dumber replies to me.

Encouraging! It seems Crazification is not necessarily terminal.

Is this a good sign? I don’t know. All I know is that sure, there are patterns here, I understand there’s a lot of hate in the world and that it’s been bolstered and manipulated in the last decade or so into a concerning trend toward fascism in multiple countries, and that some variant of the Keyes Constant is surely at play, but I’m not sure knowing that helps.

What has helped, however, is understanding that the Crazification Factor is fluid, that people with Crazification of the brain (actual scientific diagnosis, don’t @ me about this) changes from topic to topic, and that Crazification is not permanent, which is probably how we found ourselves with roughly one-third of Americans believing Trump would be super great as president again a year ago, and also why a bunch of them are now telling pollsters that they regret their vote.

Look, I can’t even begin to tell you where our country is headed. Nobody can. My gut instinct is that we’ll know before Thanksgiving whether this last week has been the beginning of a second civil war or whether this was a practice run and they’ll try it again next year, or maybe The Day of the Final Cheeseburger will arrive and the entire scenario will change.

What I do know is that American culture is a little weird, and when October hits, we tend to start emotionally checking out. We’re dodging pumpkin spice shit everywhere and the holidays are rearing their festive heads, and from now until a couple days after New Year’s, we’re not a culture to be trusted. The contiguous United States is something like three million square miles and when armed fascism is only happening on, like, 100 square miles of it, it’s easy for people to go get lost in corn mazes and fall head first into the frozen turkey bin at the Piggly Wiggly and forget everything else that’s happening. By the time we sober up sometime mid-January, there’s no telling where we’ll be.

Like a lot of people, I wish I had some kind of insight that could unlock at least a little piece of the current political puzzle, and because I’m weirdly attached to the idea of the Crazification Factor and always will be, I unfairly expected it to explain something that no one can explain, at least not right now. It was always too much to ask of it to explain anything. It informs, it entertains, it’s a rule of thumb that allows us to quickly accept an aspect of an intolerable situation. It’s enough that it exists.

Both dead, neither lizards.