Barack Obama has 36.9 million Twitter followers, 19.5 million of whom, it turns out, are fake. This is a very disturbing sign for Obama’s opponents, as it demonstrates just how much appeal the president still has with his key support base, namely those who identify most closely with him on a personal level – fake people.

The Daily Mail Online has analyzed the numbers and discovered that among U.S. political figures, the four Twitter accounts with the most fake followers – that is, followers who don’t really exist – are those of Barack Obama (by a landslide), Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, and the White House communications department. Those who would laugh this off as evidence of a pathetic progressive attempt to manipulate public perceptions are perhaps missing the point. Americans who care about the downfall of their country ought to be most concerned about the trend indicated here. A hitherto negligible segment of the population, non-existent humans, has found in the present U.S. administration a powerful reason to emerge from the shadows at last and become fully engaged participants in the political process. There is no clearer indication of the dangers facing America than this surge in political activity among people who do not exist, especially when one considers that this group vastly outnumbers the existent.

But why all this political enthusiasm among the unreal, all of a sudden? The answer is all too clear. In 2008, America elected its historic first fake president, thus giving hope and a lifeline to fakers everywhere: “Maybe I can participate on equal terms with real people, too.”

Consider the president – or rather, don’t. As a matter of fact, you can’t. For all intents and purposes, he doesn’t exist. The “first black president” was born of a white mother, and raised by white grandparents. Wonder what courses he took in college? Don’t – you’re not allowed to know. How did this self-described drug-addled loafer get into so many top shelf universities, seemingly transferring from one to another in mid-program effortlessly? Don’t ask – his applications and letters of acceptance are apparently national security secrets.

He was president of the Harvard Law Review, but never wrote an article for the journal. He was described even in those days as being well-liked and trusted by conservatives, in spite of being ideologically dedicated to destroying everything they believed in. His trajectory-setting first autobiography was a fake, romanticizing a spiritual kinship with a man he barely met, in language he probably couldn’t have written himself. His literary agency publicized him as Kenyan-born for sixteen years, using a short author’s bio he presumably wrote or approved himself – until the moment (in 2007) when that biographical detail ceased to function as instant credibility, and instead became grounds for instant disqualification.

His friend and colleague, Bill Ayers, was hustled off to the Sesame Street haze of “the neighborhood” when his prominence in Obama’s life became uncomfortable. The same goes for the minister who married him, but whom he cast aside easily when the views he learned from that minister became politically embarrassing. And don’t bother examining his voting record prior to becoming president. He almost never voted for or against anything. He voted “present” – that is, he checked his name on the attendance sheet and then slept through class. He ran for president not even knowing how many states are in the Union, although he himself was (presumably) born and raised in the fiftieth and final state.

But all of this was merely the preamble to his more impressive incarnation as the historic fake president. There were traces of a man – a man in hiding from adult reality – in all the fakery of his life prior to 2008. Not so after that point. For as president he became perfectly immersed in the machinery of the world’s first successful fake political philosophy, namely progressivism, which is what tyranny began calling itself when tyrants finally got over the primordial vanity of needing everyone to know the identity of their oppressor and to fear him, and realized that bloodthirsty power lust is served more effectively by a simple mask of lies.

So it is that the quest for a globally micromanaged caste system overseen by a self-aggrandizing elite has defined itself as the fight for equality; that a “movement” whose central tenets are the destruction of the private family and the perpetuation of an ever-expanding dependent underclass has proclaimed itself the natural home of “the downtrodden”; that policies explicitly designed by leading progressive intellectuals as means of undermining individualism and rationalism in favor of collectivist sentimentalism are sold to the “masses” as means of protecting “the little guy” (talk about irony!); that the systematic annihilation of private property, including its most basic instantiation, self-ownership, is represented as the granting of new rights; and that the blatant disregard for actual human life, and the willingness to permit or precipitate death, hardship and destruction for the sake of achieving or preserving illegitimate power is touted as a quest for peace and community.

Obama is the figurehead of this movement. A figurehead is, of course, a fake leader. So Obama is the fake leader of a fake political philosophy. In this role, he has fronted the fight to establish a single-payer healthcare system by gradual steps – exactly as he promised to do before he was president – but explicitly denied that this was his intention. He has overseen the growth of the U.S. federal debt to economic meltdown proportions – exactly as he promised not to do. He has left his representatives in Libya to die in a terrorist attack without lifting a finger to help, then delivered a pro forma statement lamenting their death before heading off to a campaign fundraiser in Las Vegas. He then lied about the cause of the Benghazi attack, as well as about his own initial response to it.

He is the nominal leader of the push to expand rights-violating regulations of personal and commercial behavior in the name of a fake scientific theory – what would you call a theory whose proponents have changed its name, its predictions, and even its fundamental hypothesis? – about a drastic manmade alteration of the planet that the theory’s own advocates admit isn’t actually happening. He was presented to the world as a model of America’s transcendence of racial division, and yet has made more explicit statements designed to instigate racial tensions and hostility than perhaps any previous president. He is the mouthpiece of a political movement that seeks to maintain comprehensive records of every human being’s telephone and electronic communications, health condition, daily habits, sexual activity, and whereabouts – and yet objects to demands that people provide identification before voting, on the grounds that this is unnecessarily intrusive and intimidating.

He has supported the Muslim Brotherhood, a fake religious organization dedicated to the destruction of representative government, Western civilization, freedom of speech, and women, and an organization that has just been outlawed (again) in its home country, even while Obama was demanding its “equal” participation in that country’s political reconfiguration – a reconfiguration necessitated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s own attempt to entrap the country in the suffocating box of sharia law.

Now I ask you, if you did not exist, but wished to stand up and be counted anyway, could you choose a better faction with which to align yourself than the Obama administration, a better cause to join than progressivism? The defining characteristic of a non-existent person is, of course, his unreality. And who represents the cause of unreality more vigorously than President Obama? Though some of his opponents have not yet accepted the post-modern truth of this man, it has for some time been apparent that the reason we do not know “who he really is” is the most obvious reason of all – he really isn’t.

He talks about his sons, who do not exist. He tells elaborate stories of his youth which simply never happened. He relates imaginary tales of his own mother’s dying days. When asked what he did during a national security emergency, he describes abstract instructions he supposedly gave which are completely incongruous with the circumstances he is being asked to describe.

Barack Obama perfectly represents the zeitgeist: glossy but empty, the well-creased pant leg with no living being inside. He is loved by pop celebrities and pseudo-intellectuals, from Beyoncé to David Brooks – the two groups of people who make their living at creating surfaces with no substance. They see that he is, as Brooks so revealingly put it in 2008, “one of us.” A fake.

So dismiss Barack Obama’s 19.5 million fake Twitter followers, or his wife’s 1.9 million (the second highest total) at your peril. There are more of them than there are of you, and they are on the vanguard of mankind’s descent into the abyss, while you are mere dust being swept up in the wind of this downward spiral.

Am I foolish to imagine the non-existent can have any effect on anything? You ask such a question in an age in which the most powerful office on Earth is currently occupied by one of them? An age in which the wealthiest nation in history is in debt up to its next four generations’ eyeballs? An age in which the world’s last fortress of liberty is now history’s most advanced surveillance state? An age in which the nation of cowboys and frontiersmen has been reduced to standing by meekly at airports while its wives, daughters and grandmothers have their (formerly) private parts manually probed by the government? An age in which the only nation ever explicitly founded on the principle that a man has a right to be alive and preserve himself is in the process of turning that man’s physical existence over to the disinterested calculations and whims of a medical bureaucracy?

Don’t make me laugh. It is precisely the existent – those with moral substance, a finite physical reality they feel obliged to preserve, those who wish to work, take responsibility for themselves and their own loved ones, and have thoughts not pre-packaged in the mass retardation factory of public education – whose value, voice, and practical decision-making authority are in decline. And if the existent are on the way out, who does that leave in the driver’s seat?

That’s right: Barack Obama and his millions of Twitter followers, more than half of whom are “his people,” namely fakes. You are living through something rarely seen on this Earth. This is the age of the Void: we are under the global control of a fake philosophy, ruled by fake leaders who give fake “great orations,” and justify their actions with fake histories and fake science. There is no place for reality here – for the true, the good, and the beautiful. Lies, consciencelessness, and the aesthetic of ugliness have won the day. In short, Being is on the wane. If you don’t exist, this is your moment.

(This article first appeared at American Thinker.)