“Whether Major Hasan, who uses a wheelchair, will be shot sitting down or strapped upright to face the firing squad is unclear.” — The New York Times, Oct 7, 2026

When Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that the execution of Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan would be livestreamed, it felt like a particularly unsettling next step in the direction of dystopia. After finding out public opinion was strongly against it, the Trump administration has now backed down from this ghoulish plan, but the fact that it was seriously considered does not bode well. Every day the newspaper is full of fresh cruelties, from the attempt to deport a member of Congress to the Bureau of Land Management allowing the use of cyanide land mines to kill animals. What’s next? Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless The USA” as dissidents are hanged during the Super Bowl halftime show? With a flyover by the Blue Angels? Will Fox News have exclusive streaming rights, with postmortem commentary by The Five? As with the MMA ring erected on the South Lawn of the White House earlier this year, or the AI-generated video Donald Trump tweeted (sorry, “truthed”) showing him crapping on his critics, this feels like one of those moments when our dark reality is outpacing our ability to satirize it.

Depressed by the fact that “live-streamed execution” is now a phrase describing a real thing proposed at the highest level of government in our country, I decided to rewatch the 20-year-old satirical film that is sometimes claimed to have predicted our times, or become “a documentary,” Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. Idiocracy is about a dystopian future where everyone has stopped reading, the president is a wrestling champion, the environment has been trashed, Big Business runs everything, and the average person spends most of their waking hours in front of a screen, incapable of communication substantially beyond a grunt. There are public executions, although they are conducted using monster trucks. You can see why there have been plenty of articles this year claiming that Idiocracy predicted the future.

The satire in Idiocracy is not subtle. Garbage has piled up in the streets, trashy advertising is everywhere (“If you don’t smoke Tarrlytons… Fuck you!”), and human conversation has been reduced to saying things like “I like money” or “I like sex.” The people of the future watch a film just called Ass, consisting of nothing but a 90-minute shot of a flatulating rectum. (It is said to have swept the Oscars.) The most popular show on television consists of a man being repeatedly injured in the testicles (it’s called Ow! My Balls!) Water fountains produce nothing but a sports drink called Brawndo (“The Thirst Mutilator”), which is also used for crop irrigation, a practice that has caused a global food shortage.

The film pokes fun at hyper-capitalism. In the hospital waiting room there are slot machines (“Win free medical care!”) and the doctor keeps a cash register on his desk. (I can’t remember, is this a thing in our world yet?) You can go to law school at a Costco or buy sex at a Starbucks. People are paid if they’re willing to repeat the phrase “brought to you by Carl’s Jr.” in casual conversation.

The plot is largely beside the point. An average man (Luke Wilson) is frozen in an experiment, wakes up in the future, tries to get back home, ends up fleeing the police, gets stuck in the future and has to save the people from their own stupidity. Eventually (spoiler) he is made President of the United States. The end.

One of the central criticisms of Idiocracy is that it seems smug and elitist. There is an uncomfortable eugenic note to the premise: the introduction explains that over many generations, smart people (depicted as bourgeois) had fewer children than stupid people (depicted as poor white rednecks) and thus the world’s intellect declined. But as I noticed what Idiocracy did and did not capture about our times, I wasn’t so much bothered by the idea that stupidity had increased. Instead, it felt like the problem with Idiocracy is that “stupidity” really isn’t the source of our troubles.

Idiocracy came out during the Bush presidency, and it was popular at the time to make fun of W. for his stupidity. (There were the classic “Bushisms,” like “Is our children learning?” or “Put food on your family.”) But Bush’s most heinous crimes had nothing to do with a lack of raw intelligence. Nobody thought that Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice were “stupid,” but they, along with Bush, were the architects of a catastrophic illegal war that ended up leading to as many as a million deaths. You can say the war wasn’t very “smart,” but it was also the product of a callous indifference to human life. And it’s perfectly possible to be very “smart” and make self-interested decisions that inflict boundless human misery on others. Richard Nixon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin—I don’t know how these men would perform on IQ tests, possibly quite well, but they share a willingness to use atrocious violence and violate the laws of war in order to achieve their national objectives. Give me a benign stupid president over a vicious one any day.

In fact, that’s basically what the people of Idiocracy have. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (played wonderfully by Terry Crews) seems to be just about the best person that the dumbed-down future could hope to have in charge. He has some qualities of leadership and appears to be genuinely invested in the welfare of the country, even if he has turned the State of the Union into something resembling a WWE event. (Which I’m sure Trump would have done if he had the power.) The people of the “idiocracy” aren’t actively malicious, they just don’t know what they’re doing. Even the CEO of the Brawndo corporation seems like a hapless dolt rather than a scheming capitalist.

Mike Judge’s satire has always been a bit gentle in that way. Idiocracy appears at first to be scathing, but Judge’s worlds don’t tend to have villains. In Office Space, a look at cubicle life from the point of view of beleaguered white collar workers, even the consultants brought in to conduct layoffs (“the Bobs”) are rather likable. Judge apparently felt that Office Space had seemed too pro-worker, because he said of his next workplace comedy film 2009’s much less successful Extract:

Office Space was told from the point of view of the employees looking up at management as the ‘bad guys.’ This is told from the point of view of the owner of the place and the workers are a big pain in the butt to him. I think partly it was inspired by that point in my life where I suddenly had a large number of people working for me and realizing you can’t be a ‘cool guy boss’. It just doesn’t work. So this is my more sympathetic take on the boss.

King of the Hill, of course, is warm-hearted and kind towards its Republican patriarch, Hank Hill, and even the conspiracy-loving doomsday prepper Dale Gribble. (The short-lived The Goode Family, about liberals, was a little less kind.) Judge’s Silicon Valley did portray the hypocrisy of the selfish Silicon Valley tech overlords who brand themselves as world-savers, but there too it’s just hard not to like the characters. For a satirist, he is just not quite harsh enough for my taste. I prefer the way films like Don’t Look Up or Starship Troopers skewer, respectively, the tech elite and nationalism, because Adam McKay and Paul Verhoeven expose the deep moral rot in the worlds they depict. Even the public executions in Idiocracy seem to occur mostly because people like explosions and monster trucks, not because they are morally twisted. The Idiocracy universe is one of affable morons, not sadists.

Our own world, however, is absolutely governed by sadists. Pete Hegseth is a malicious racist who believes in torture and detests the laws of war. Marco Rubio is relishing the starvation of Cuba. The Trump administration blew up an elementary school and then lied about it. We don’t live in stupid times, we live in evil times. Idiocracy was not a documentary. We are not ruled by people who mean well but simply have no idea what they’re doing, but by people who know full well what they are doing, and do it anyway, because they like watching people get thrown into cages by masked ICE agents. Idiocracy has prisons and public executions and is saturated by advertising, but only because people don’t know any better. Our leaders do know better, and do not care.

Give me President Camacho any day over Donald Trump.

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