Your happytalk comment for a fine summer day, Part 1:
“Let’s dispense with the pleasantries.
We are at war.
Not a shooting war.
Not yet.
But something worse in its own quiet, choking way—a technical state of civil war. The kind of war that makes cowards of rules and turns procedure into shrapnel.
And in Texas, Greg Abbott is lighting the fuse.
On August 4th, Governor Abbott announced—proudly, defiantly—that any Democratic legislator who fails to appear for a surprise session of the Texas state legislature by August 5th will see their seat declared vacant.
This, in a bald attempt to force a quorum for an unscheduled redistricting effort that would gerrymander at least five new Republican congressional seats into existence.
Five seats.
Bought not with votes, but with ink and knives.
Five seats to hold the U.S. House hostage after a 2026 election that, by all current indicators, will be a biblical catastrophe for the Republican Party.
This is not about state politics.
This is not about Texas.
This is about power.
This is about permanently tipping the balance of national representation using the architecture of a dying republic to rig the new one being born behind its back.
It is a dagger aimed at the heart of the Constitution itself—and it is being sheathed in plain sight.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California has responded in kind.
So have the governors of Illinois, Washington, New York.
They’ve declared their own intent to redraw maps, to counterbalance Abbott’s theft with a theft of their own.
And just like that, the pretense is gone.
The guardrails are being sawed off by both sides.
The game is rigged, the referees have joined the teams, and the field is splitting down the middle.
We are not drifting toward civil war.
We are being carried there—on gurneys, on motorcades, in armored trucks painted red, white, and blue and driven by men with no conscience and nothing left to lose.
Donald Trump—the increasingly frail, increasingly unhinged re-occupant of the Oval Office—has shattered the last illusions of presidential restraint.
His executive orders openly violate the Constitution.
He appoints judges who have lied under oath and dares the courts to stop him.
Senate Republicans, now functionally extinct as an institution of deliberation, confirm them without even pretending to vet.
Trump has begun personally selecting general officers in the U.S. military.
He is choosing his own warlords.
This is no longer political theatre.
This is war prep. This is banana republic shit.
And the punchline?
Half the country still thinks the Democrats are overreacting.
That we’re all just melting down because we lost a few court cases or that we’re mad we can’t get pronouns printed on our napkins.
No.
We’re reacting because we’re watching the United States be turned inside out by men who believe they should rule forever—or not at all.
Let’s be brutally clear.
This is not just about maps.
Not just about Abbott.
This is about a Republican Party that has now publicly declared—yes, publicly, and repeatedly—that if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, they will refuse to certify the election.
Full stop.
That’s not politics. That’s war-by-other-means.
The plan is as clear as it is insane: gerrymander the House, win the majority through rigged maps, then throw the 2028 election to the chamber when no consensus can be reached.
Install a Republican president—possibly Trump, God help us—by congressional fiat, regardless of the Electoral College or the popular vote.
In other words: end elections.
Cement minority rule.
Burn the scaffolding of democracy and salt the earth where the ballots used to grow.
And here’s where we land.
If one side openly declares they will never accept a Democrat in power again—and backs that declaration with action—then the only rational, ethical, and self-defensive response is to make the same declaration in return.
That’s how we arrive at a technical state of civil war.
Not with cannon fire.
Not with a shot at Fort Sumter.
But with deadlines and district lines, and governors signing paperwork like generals drawing battle maps.
And yes, it leads—eventually, inevitably—to the real thing.
Because what happens when blue states stop sending taxes to a red federal government?
What happens when governors of California, New York, and Illinois say, flat out, “We no longer recognize the authority of a president elected by gerrymandered fiat”?
What happens when National Guard units are federalized and told to act against their own citizens?
We’ve already seen it.
Federal troops in Portland.
Federal agents in unmarked vans in Minneapolis.
And now, a sitting U.S. president selecting military leadership based not on strategy, but on loyalty.
This is what a soft coup looks like.
This is how republics become dictatorships—one signed order, one packed court, one nullified election at a time.
We are standing on the edge.
And I want to be clear: I’m not even opposed to the collapse in principle.
Because unlike the Abbott crowd, I’ve thought this through.
If the United States breaks apart—and God knows, we are dangling over that edge like Wile E. Coyote holding a stick of TNT—here is what happens next:
California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada—the spine of the West—will form a new nation.
They will be joined by Illinois, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, and most of the northeastern corridor.
The population, economy, and military of this new Union will be vastly superior to anything the southern rump states can cobble together.
And yes, you can wave your little Wyoming flags, but the brutal math is this: once the U.S. Constitution is abandoned, so too is the notion that two Dakotas matter more than one California.
In the new post-America, power will come from population, productivity, and force projection.
“ Congress is a roach motel for lobbyists and performative lunatics, many of whom are openly preparing for a post-America America where the flag stays the same, but the Constitution is a ghost story told around campfires by billionaires.
And don’t give me the “but the military” argument.
As if the military isn’t just as fractured.
The military is not a monolith.
It’s a lattice of class tension and cultural divergence, a cross-section of a nation coming apart at every seam.
You think the Joint Chiefs will all salute the same president if both sides claim victory in 2028?
You think a captain from Oregon will obey the same orders as a major from Alabama if they both think they’re saving the republic?
We are one disputed election away from seeing Marine units on opposite sides of the Potomac drawing weapons on each other.
And don’t think they won’t.
We’ve trained them to kill.
But we didn’t train them who to follow once the flag splits in two and each side says it’s the real one.
That’s the thing no one’s ready for: there won’t be two Americas.
There will be twenty.
Twenty splintered visions of what the United States “really” is, each one armed and praying for the clarity of righteous bloodshed.
California won’t ask permission to secede.
It’ll just stop obeying.
Texas already pretends it’s its own country—hell, they teach their kids the Alamo was a birthright, not a graveyard.
And Florida?
Florida is the Bosnian wildcard in the whole damn deck.
Armed, enraged, half-drowning in its own hubris and sea level, it will burn and smile as it does.
Once the structure collapses—once the federal government becomes two rival groups of governors and officers and deep-state functionaries playing constitutional Calvinball, it’s over.
The nukes don’t matter.
The treaties don’t matter.
What matters is who controls the ports, who keeps the power grid on, who can move food and fuel and bullets across state lines.
There will be checkpoints.
Roadblocks.
Supply chains redrawn by governors who no longer answer to the Pentagon, because the Pentagon will be two buildings by then—one in D.C., one in Omaha, or maybe Austin, and each one claiming legitimacy over the other.
The South will remember its mythologies and try to rise again.
The North will remember its debts and try to collect.
Cities will become fortresses.
Rural counties will become militias.
Suburbs will become no-man’s-land.
And as all this happens, the dollar will collapse.
Don’t kid yourself: the global economy does not give a fuck about “We the People.”
They care about stability.
Predictability.
Trade routes and energy flows and the enforcement of contracts.
The minute they sense real domestic instability—not the threat of it, but the confirmation of it—the dollar goes down like a narcoleptic in a blackout.
And when that happens, the war isn’t theoretical anymore.
It’s material.
Because we don’t make shit here.
We import. And when the imports stop, the riots start.
You think Americans know how to wait in line for food?
You think anyone in this country has the patience for “rolling blackouts” or “fuel rations” or “shared sacrifice”?
No.
They will shoot the cashier.
They will torch the supermarket.
They will drag their neighbor into the street because someone has to bleed for the fact that their Amazon package didn’t arrive and their WiFi is down and the President is in hiding.
You want a preview?
Look at January 6th. That was the rehearsal dinner.
Look at Kenosha. Look at Minneapolis. Look at Portland.
Now multiply it by fifty.
Add drone strikes.
Add rogue governors.
Add National Guard units defecting based on Facebook memes and AM talk radio.
Add sheriffs with God complexes and militia ties.
Add cyberattacks from Russia, China, and every 20-year-old in Estonia with a grudge and a laptop.
Add nuclear weapons whose command structure is suddenly ambiguous.
Add diseases, real and manufactured, released to sow chaos by regimes eager to carve up the carcass of the American empire before someone else claims it.
Add fear. Add drought. Add fire.
Add lies.
And stir.
This isn’t a Tom Clancy novel.
This isn’t a prepper fantasy.
This is what happens when a government built on consensus loses its ability to consent.
We’ve been trained to think of civil war in terms of Gettysburg and Antietam.
But the next one won’t look like that.
It’ll look like Syria.
Like Yugoslavia.
Like Ukraine.
Like Lebanon in 1975, where Christian militias and Muslim factions and foreign powers turned one of the most beautiful countries on Earth into a graveyard that smelled of smoke and gun oil and the end of things.”
I said yesterday in reading a discussion about how ICE members are recruited that it sounds very much like how Putin is recruiting people into his military to fight against the Ukrainians. By that I mean forcing people economically into positions where they will take the jobs, and also the way that they offer them more money than they can make doing most other things, particularly now that they are taking non college grads. They are going to be making more than most teachers and nurses that is for sure.
Given that there are also people starting to fight back against ICE agents, and that ICE agents are using violence like breaking car windows to get people they want to take, it is like a battle.
And still no national strike, no massive protest in DC or anywhere in this country...what will it take to get Americans off their couch and into the streets?
It will take local organizing everywhere to gather, activate, and focus people, and leadership at the national level to coordinate all the local groups and coordinate turning them out. That’s what One Million Rising, led by Indivisible, is doing. The third online training is next Wednesday evening online. To sign up:
“ The next civil war will be digital and tribal and sudden.
It will be declared not by Lincoln but by TikTok and Fox News.
It will be fought not on battlefields, but on highways and Wi-Fi and gas lines and court dockets and supermarket aisles.
It will not be brother against brother.
It will be neighbor against neighbor, algorithm against algorithm, drone against protest, truth against power, and power against everyone.
And in the chaos, people will scream for order.
They will beg for order.
And some strongman will appear.
He won’t be Trump.
He’ll be younger.
Sharper.
Hungrier.
A Tom Cotton or a Josh Hawley or some asshole we haven’t even met yet, raised in the bowels of corporate-funded think tanks and groomed for the moment America breaks.
He’ll offer “unity.”
He’ll offer “peace.”
And he’ll take what remains of the Constitution and feed it into a shredder made of applause and fear.
He will come, and we will let him.
Because Americans are not special.
We are not immune to history.
We are not chosen.
We are not different.
We are Rome in the 5th century, decadent and divided, watching the aqueducts crumble while we chant slogans and sharpen knives.
We are the USSR in 1991, holding onto a flag while the ground splits beneath us.
We are whatever comes next, and we are not ready.
And when it comes—when the sirens replace the debates, when the tanks roll down Main Street not as a parade but as a warning—some of us will remember what we lost.
We’ll remember the dream. The idea.
We’ll remember that once, however flawed and hypocritical and blood-soaked it was, the idea of America meant something.
It meant the possibility of self-government. Of progress. Of dignity.
It meant something more than flags and guns and courts packed with perjurers.
It meant the attempt.
And now we stand at the edge of that attempt.
And we are failing.
The United States was beautiful.
At moments.
In dreams. In songs. In potential.
But it was never unbreakable.
And the people trying to bend it are forcing it to break.
So painful. So many millions of Americans who have always had pleasant, orderly lives do not want to wake up and grok that we are right at the edge of the precipice, about to lose everything we hold dear. We need millions committing nonviolent resistance in the streets, but too many are still in denial, intent on staying in the beautiful dream. We have to wake them. How do we wake them?
And if we all just rend our garments, don sackcloth, and cover ourselves in ashes? What will we have we accomplished? That "accomplishment" is exactly what you are giving voice to.
I am fully aware that too many people in this country are lazy, complacent, and don't give a fig about what "gubmint" does. And there are powerful forces that will do everything in their power to keep it that way. One problem - the "leader" is sick, old, craven, narcissistic, a felon, and not very bright. Stalin was not a stupid man, soulless, evil, but not stupid. The same can be said for Hitler. That will never be said about the Felon. The other mistake? He has surrounded himself with minor grade narcissists who are cosplaying at being heads of branches of the government and they, too, will fall. Another huge problem for MAGA? The economy. It is faltering, it is beginning to stumble. Healthcare. It is on the verge of collapse. No, people will not stand for that. Even the most obtuse dullard will feel the pain and fight back. Yes. They. Will. Their ox will have been gored.
Sorry. NO. There are more of then there are of them. We will prevail. There are voices, out there, powerful voices who are fighting back. Will it be pretty? No. Will it be bloodless? One can only hope. But, no they will not prevail. And to post it as if it is a fait accompli? Does not acknowledge the strength of this country. May I suggest you check out Simon Rosenberg and the Lincoln project and learn what other are doing to make sure your dystopian pipe dream remains just that.
I wish that had been made more obvious. My point is, and I will say it again, it is only our predicament if we let it be. We can't allow that to happen.
I hope to make this a congenial exchange and not the usual Internet tit-for-tat argument.
But I know that tomorrow is day 200 of a regime that, assuming Trump survives it, will last an agonizing 1460 days.
That means we have 93% of his regime to endure
And of course once it’s over in 2028 we all fervently hope a more benevolent regime will take power.
And, perhaps, dream of dreams, a Nuremberg-style set of trials will commence, (with Merrick Garland kept far far away from any prosecutorial duties.)
But we have a long way to go, and the real brains behind this administration at The Heritage foundation ad nauseam, have attacked this nation with blitzkrieg-like ferocity since The Vile One snatched back the reins of power, having won every swing state where nearly $1 billion was spent trying to persuade the electorates therein not to reelect a convicted felon rapist grifter insurrectionist con man vulgarian.
And the countervailing forces seem to collapse by the day: the Titans of industry who sat at the dais on inauguration day, the giant law firms only too happy to say “sir, what can we do for you?“ The revered and historic universities bowing down and asking, “How much do you need from us, sir?” The broadcast and print organs that have held sway for decades, doing the same.
And the roughly 30 to 40% of the public, who having witnessed the horror movie-level of destruction that has been wrought since January, continue to support it, many cases with great enthusiasm.
I think this unknown writer’s essay has a better than 50% chance of coming true. Republican/MAGA forces do not believe in pluralistic democracy and the rule of law. I don’t know if they ever did. There is no compromising with such people. Therefore partition is the only answer.
Nobody’s talking about rending clothing and donning sackcloth and ashes as in the Biblical phrasing. But those of us who are already active and speaking up can’t just assume/hope that when people begin to suffer personally from Dump’s Government Of Pain’s repression, that they will all naturally get active, speak out, resist, and take to the streets. As the saying goes, hope is not a plan. Simon Rosenburg is doing wonderful resisance leadership, and his folks are getting active and activating others. Sounds like you’re one of them. Yay!
I think you spoke a lot more truth than most people would ever want to hear. We don’t make things, we sell things that somebody else makes elsewhere, and that includes our food. Most people in our cities will starve when the food stops showing up in the stores. How long do you think it will take? Fresh food will be gone first then the boxed and canned that are in warehouses will finally run out. I don’t think you are far off in your analysis, we live in an incredibly complex system, that once it’s broken will not be easily repaired. Never mind the idiot in the White House, he couldn’t screw in a light bulb. The people that are orchestrating this dismantling of our way of life don’t care how many die, as long as it’s not them. They want to recreate the Middle Ages where a few families have all of the wealth and power and everyone else works for them, England still has vestiges of that system. What I think they are missing is that the rest of the world has moved on and will want no part of this madness. So many things require others to contribute unseen, when that is broken so are those many things. What you described was dire alright, it’s logic made sense, where we are on that path may be debatable still, but once the systems start failing, the process will have a life of it’s own. 🤬🤬🤬
no it's not one man, it's six criminals on the supreme court, it's all retrumpian congress people, senators and governors, it's all the super rich who won't pay their fair share in taxes and it's the ignorant magats who hate women, LGBTQ folks, Black and Brown people, and immigrants.
The GOP’s strongholds—Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas—are welfare states, net takers, dependent on federal subsidies from blue states they now propose to dominate.
They are a red velvet cake of hypocrisy baked in a kitchen paid for by liberal taxpayers.
And when those subsidies stop?
When Social Security checks don’t arrive?
When FEMA aid dries up?
When food assistance vanishes?
These states will burn—not from outside invasion, but from within.
Poor white voters, duped into culture war hysteria, will finally realize that racism doesn’t pay the rent.
And when the AC breaks, when the grocery shelves are bare, when the insulin is gone—they will riot.
The next Fort Sumter won’t be fired upon by blue coats—it’ll be torched from the inside by red ones who realize too late they were cannon fodder for a billionaire death cult.
Meanwhile, the new blue nation—call it Pacifica, call it the North American Republic, call it literally anything else—will control the nukes.
Because those bases are in California.
Those silos are in Montana and the Dakotas.
Those subs are docked in blue harbors, crewed by people with graduate degrees and no patience for neo-Confederate cosplay.
There may be some holdouts—some nukes in Texas, maybe a stray missile in Florida—but the command structure will fracture.
And the moment loyalty is divided in a nuclear state, you no longer have a country.
You have a disaster waiting for a launch code.
And you can bet NATO and the EU are watching.
So is China. So is Russia.
The new blue state will ally with Europe overnight.
The new red state?
It will be isolated.
Economically neutered.
Morally bankrupt. Internationally shunned.
Try running a nation with no money, no allies, and a citizenry trained only in rage. Let’s see how that goes.
And yet—and yet—this is where we are headed.
Because for too long, one side has played by the rules while the other sharpens the knives.
We have tried to compromise with arsonists.
We have let the Constitution become a suicide pact.
No more.
Because now, if we do not fight, we die.
If we play fair, we lose.
If we tell ourselves it can’t happen here, we will wake up in the ash of what once was.
Greg Abbott is trying to fire on Fort Sumter with a fountain pen and a smirk.
If we don’t match him force for force—not violence for violence, but action for action, map for map, court for court, and yes, goddamnit, declaration for declaration—then the next fight won’t be about democracy.
It will be about which side gets the tanks.
And you know what?
I say let it come.
Because I promise you: the right has not thought this through.
They think blue states are weak.
That liberal means soft.
That cities can’t fight.
But I’ve seen New Yorkers when the train’s late.
I’ve seen Californians during wildfires.
I’ve seen drag queens in Texas standing alone against armed mobs and not blinking.
You want to go to war with those people?
Be my guest.
Just don’t be surprised when they’re still standing and you’re neck-deep in the mud, wondering why the federal aid convoy never came.
Let me say it again: this is a technical civil war.
The only question left is whether it becomes a real one.
Whether maps give way to bullets.
Whether executive orders become execution orders.
And if that day comes, the outcome is not assured.
But the blame will be.
It will rest on the heads of men like Trump, like Abbott, like the perjured judges and the cowardly Senators and the hollow-eyed billionaires who looked at democracy and said, “That’s too risky—let’s buy it instead.”
But history has long arms.
And the schoolchildren they’re so terrified of?
The ones they think will be traumatized by learning about slavery?
Those kids will write the textbooks.
And they will tell the truth.
They will say that the Republican Party, faced with the loss of cultural hegemony, chose to burn the country down rather than share it.
That the right feared democracy more than death.
That in the end, they didn’t win.
They ended.
Because power isn’t loyalty.
Power is legitimacy. Power is cooperation. Power is earned.
And no matter how many judges they install, how many maps they redraw, how many parades they throw for the flag—they cannot force a country to love them.
And the United States?
The United States is not one nation.
Not really.
Hasn’t been for a very long time.
Maybe never was.
We’ve called it “united” because no one had the balls to call it anything else.
But look closer.
Really look.
Not at the myth, not at the hymns or the fireworks or the golden parchment we put under museum glass and pretend still governs us.
Look at the actual nation.
The machine.
The bones under the makeup. You’ll see it’s already split.
We are a cold war in a hot climate, a long, drunken marriage where both spouses sleep in separate bedrooms, hoarding money and muttering fantasies of murder.
Half of this country prays for rain.
The other half curses God for not sending fire.
You think this is a phase?
A tantrum?
This is the logical end of manifest destiny and the Electoral College.
This is what you get when you marry thirteen slave states to thirteen merchant ones and pretend the vows were ever sincere.
You get a monstrosity: a country stitched together by compromise, half-built on genocide, half-built on commerce, full of contradictions so profound that the entire enterprise was always going to collapse in on itself like a house made of buried lies and termite wood.
And if you don’t believe me, ask the Cherokee.
Ask the Sioux.
Ask the Japanese Americans who had their homes stolen while they sat in desert cages.
Ask the Black soldiers who liberated Europe and came home to lynch mobs.
Ask the trans kids being hunted across state lines.
Ask the women whose bodies are now the property of governors.
Ask them if this was ever one country.
Ask a gay couple in Mississippi what flag they’re saluting when they’re denied medical rights.
Ask a Black teenager in Georgia if the Constitution applies when a cop pulls up behind him.
Ask a nurse in Arizona who makes $38,000 a year and can’t afford insulin because her governor thought tax cuts for landlords were a moral obligation.
Ask the dead. Ask the poor. Ask the workers.
Ask the veterans.
This was never one country.
It was two—or more—pretending not to notice each other, because the lies were easier than the war.
But the lie is collapsing.
There is no social contract anymore—only contractual obligation.
There is no shared dream—only curated delusions, sold like corn dogs at a carnival no one wants to admit is actually a funeral.
The national anthem plays, and we’re supposed to rise, even though the flag’s draped over a coffin and the smell of decay is coming up through the floorboards.
What do you call a government where one party believes in nothing but power, and the other believes in rules the first party has openly set on fire?
You don’t call it a democracy. You don’t even call it a republic.
You call it hospice.
And hospice is where the United States now lives—quietly rotting, humming show tunes while the nurse tightens the morphine drip and checks her watch for the next coup attempt.
Because the old country—the one your parents pledged allegiance to, the one your grandfather swore oaths for, the one we were all taught to memorize and mythologize—that country is already gone.
The states don’t trust the federal government.
The Supreme Court is functionally a papal tribunal in robes, overturning majority will with smirks and footnotes.”
I've advocated that California secede for almost a year now, but there are very few takers, even though we're the fourth largest economy in the world. I think we're toast (a highly technical term) as a country. I have suggested what the head of the Green Party of Canada suggested, the state of Caskadia, CA, WA, and OR becoming the 21st province of Canada. I'd like to think that this could be non-violent, but realistically, not a chance. My American ancestry goes back to 1633 in Plymouth, but I think that means about as much to t as me being an illegal. The Supreme Court is dysfunctional, so we can't be helped... The president has not been able to appoint a single competent person to any position in his second term. The corruption is massive. We might want to consider what the oligarchs want. All of t's policies will lead to a population drop, Medicaid, no food stamps, just in time for the climate crisis and its resultant starvation. It's time to go. (You should know, the climate crisis is my main focus.)
If things become as ugly as we fear—and they’re headed there fast, I hope Cascadia will form strong diplomatic and defense alliances and trade ties with Alleghenia, comprising New England, New York, and those adjoining states such as New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, that also choose democracy over fascism. Perhaps DC will opt to join us, and the illegitimate dictator and his cabal will be forcd to decamp to Texas.
I hope we are all preparing. We should do everything we can to lessen the climate crisis. We need to think about what the billionaires/oligarchs are working for. And we should be preparing for survival.
I agree with you almost 100%. For almost a year I have advocated that California should secede. We're the fourth largest economy in the world. It's been suggested that we form "Caskadia", the 21st province of Canada, along with Oregon and Washington. I really don't want to take Nevada, but I guess we should, given some of its nuclear waste issues. It's also been suggested that Vermont and Maine join Canada. However, this idea does not seem to get any traction. Apparently people think we're going to 50 states forever and non-violent too. I like to think that a transition would be non-violent, but I don't think it's realistic, given t and his followers. I'm prepped for an earthquake, a fire, a tsunami, and a general collapse (solar, storage batteries, EVs, and a large garden.) Every day I work on this more. I have faith in California and the Bay Area. We have strong economies and Berkeley, (Oakland, San Francisco) at least, has a legacy of resistance.
It is completely horrifying. The only thing that can stop them now is massive nonviolent resistance—millions in the streets on a very frequent basis. I attend a weekly protest against ICE outside the New England regional ICE detention facility in Burlington, Mass. Multiple former detainees have attested to the shockingly bad conditions inside. But the good thing is, the protest is growing significantly, every week. Last week 313 people attended. Yesterday the count was about 450. We are completely peaceful, but our signs deplore what Trump and ICE are doing. And many of us are seniors whose first experience of protest and civil disobedience was marching against the Vietnam war. What are they going to do—arrest and brutalize a bunch of peaceful retired grandparents?? Then watch the shit really hit the fan.
That’s why we have movements. Our numbers are growing all the time. No goal is all on one person’s shoulders. No one should feel they have to put their own mental or physical health at risk. Take a well-earned break.
We’ve been completely abandoned by what used to be called the Free Press and their capitulating Networks. If you want up to the minute reporting check out Occupy Democrats and several more Podcasts on the YouTube channel. The last free reporting before they are silenced and/or disappeared…
"We’ve been completely abandoned by what used to be called the Free Press and their capitulating Networks."
BS. MSM are still reporting news.The abandonment is the readers who fled the muckraking alt press for Facebook, letting Zuck's algorithms decide what they should read. Loss of alt press readers led to loss of alt press classified advertising to Craig's List, failure of those publications, and a scattering of muckrakers to lonely cyberperches.
Yes. That is a standard abbreviation for "corporate" or "legacy" media. I never joined FB myself but have read a lot about the way it manipulates news stories.
Lucian, your column so perfectly chronicled what is happening to our country. But there can be no time for tears - just resolve to resist and fight back with every means possible. One of those is to move heaven and earth to be sure NJ and VA elect Democratic governors this year. The next most important step is for all the blue states to re-district and then get rid of every Republican congressperson in 2026. Don’t wait for Texas to complete what it is doing in reverse - start NOW to be sure the Dems control the House in 2026. And then focus on the local state legislatures and push to get more of them under Democratic control.
We are fighting an autocratic dictator who heads a cult - there are far more of us than of them. I am so tired of having to deal with these MAGA morons and their cult leaders but I’ll be damned if I let them take full control of OUR country and destroy the democracy we spent 249 years building, even if it has been in fits and starts.
You are right that we are in an existential crisis - let’s take action like it is.
I didn't say it is easy. It requires some effort. Talk to your family, friends and neighbors about how dire it is and what the consequences are of allowing Republicans to remain in power at the national, state and even local level; support Democratic candidates financially and in social media, and closer to election time maybe phone banking and leafletting in your local area; show up at town hall meetings and rallies; support organizations that promote civil liberties and civil rights like ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Vota Latina, GLAAD, and any number of similar organizations. Believe me, any of these organizations will have plenty of things for volunteers to help with. Like I said, there are more of us than of them, and we need to turn out to show that.
For more recent subscribers who perhaps did not see this before, I posted the link several times on here. Lucian sums it up very well, here's an excerpt:
"A new book by one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America's constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler's extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s--when the Nazis took power in Germany.
In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America's constitutional foundation in 2019--an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority--is not positioned to withstand Trump's extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, "Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?," extensively details Trump's mimicry of Hitler's pre-war rhetoric and strategies.
Neuborne doesn't make this comparison lightly. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU's national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.
"Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?" he writes. "Partly it's just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it's hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln's house. But that's not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton's mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play." ******
In comments scattered across a number of substacks and in posts I've made on bluesky, I have been using vocabulary inspired by history — similar to choices made by LKT IV today and earlier — to describe Trump's actions from the very beginning of his current regime.
"Purge" — more than once, beginning with the Friday Night Massacre of more than a dozen inspectors general.
"Night of the Long Knives" — at least once to refer to yet another of these purges.
The pardoning of 1500+ insurrectionists as creating "his brown-shirts."
"Alligator Alcatraz" as the first step toward assembling a new "gulag archipelago."
There are two things about this moment that are VERY worrisome. First, that tens of millions of our fellow citizens welcome these authoritarian/fascist developments. Second, that tens of millions of our fellow citizens are too young, or too inadequately educated in history, to understand the significance of the events _we_ are referencing with our shorthand nomenclature & allusions.
Let's keep in mind that the congressional Republicans are responsible for everything that Lucian describes. They could impeach and convict Trump. Admittedly, he could order the military to shoot anyone who tries to remove him from the White House, but that's a risk worth taking.
They are likely to bring the case to a Washington, DC grand jury. Will a Washington, DC grand jury indict? And if the GJ does indict, will a DC jury ever find these people guilty? Especially after SCOTUS made up the Trump Rule: I.e., a president cannot commit a crime if there is any way to construe his actions as being in performance of his presidential duties. This is what we Army enlisted scum used to call a pud puller.
The very same objection occurred to me. Unless they can think of a reason to convene a GJ in, say, S. Florida? Where did Obama supposedly commit treason?
After 2 1/2 centuries, I never thought the guardrails would fail despite Franklin's, "if you can keep it." We should have been a straight democracy. To hell with a republic and the Electoral College.
You understand that the Electoral College is a sop that was offered to the South in order to get them to join with the other colonies. Our country was birthed in racial ugliness and that will be its end as well. We have never confronted it, never really worked — as in "sweated the details" — to make this a color-blind society. And we will deserve what we get. Lincoln should have said "adios" to the South. We would be living in a better world now if he had.
Wow. There’s an awful lot of negativity in the comments to this post, and I get it. Take a deep breath, stand back a step or two. The U.S. is certainly a country of contradictions. And yet, as has been demonstrated time and again, if you want to start to make change, if you want to get attention, hit ‘em where it hurts - in the wallet. One way that everyone can make change is to change your buying habits. Don’t patronize the corporations that are caving to The Creature (OK, I admit, that is a bit tough to do with Amazon). Stop buying at stores and businesses that support the MAGA party line and principles. Your spending dollar holds and IMMENSE amount of power. If you change how you spend that dollar, the corporate world will recoil in fear, and in doing so, they will listen to your spending, and demand change at the highest level.
If the powers that be do not listen to those demands, then change will hasten at the ballot box. It’s been done before (hellooo, 1960’s) it can be done now.
What do we do with all the institutions public and private that have caved? Even if the tribute comes off as parody—e g, Tim Cook bearing gold—it's still support and I can't see Mac cultists backing off the way Tesla's market has evaporated. Fat lot of good that's done. The company's board just heaped billion$ more on Muck.
Lucian may be unjustifiably praising Trump when he writes that Trump "oversaw the development of the mRNA vaccine that saved the lives of millions during the COVID epidemic." Trump was in office, but did he even know about the development of the vaccine? Studies have shown that hundreds of thousands of people died because of Trump's COVID policies, such as suppressing scientific data, delaying testing, mocking and blocking mask-wearing, and convening mass gatherings where social distancing was impossible. It seems unlikely that he would have overseen the development of a vaccine if he knew of it.
We've never had a president who is a sociopath, we can't treat this as "normal" or continue with both-side-isms. Republikans won't stop until they have complete power with no opposition to their goal of destroying our economy and society. We have to stop pretending that its politics as usual. Like Kurtz concluded, the only solution is to "exterminate all the brutes."
And at this point I’m so very glad that I’m very old. I don’t know how to feel when my world has been so stable and generous, yet I will leave behind uncertainty at best, a rolling nightmare at worst.
Karen, I could have written exactly the same words that you did. Thanks for putting it so well! I suspect there are millions more who feel the same.
I'm a first-year, first-summer even, July 1946 Baby Boomer. The daughter of a couple that married during the depression and then held off having their only child (me!) until after WWII ended, because my dad was in Europe all four years as an officer in one of the US Army's super-dangerous tank-destroyer units. He survived, helped defeat fascism, and came home to live a good, productive life.
That's a story shared in one way or another by many of us, and now I fear that we are falling short. What does it say for this country that so many so willingly throw away everything our forefathers fought and (in many cases) died for? What a depressing thing to contemplate as I approach my 80th birthday next year.
And yes, I'm glad I'm old. But I feel sorrow and compassion for so many younger Americans who may never realize what they had until they lose it.
I am 78, Dad and Mom in uniform WWII...I have friends already in Ajijic Mexico! This country in dire straights...I like the author's plan of the sane states banding together!
Martha, I was born in ‘46 as well. Body parts (back mostly) giving out. Bought one of those 4 wheel roller gadgets so that I could go to protests! And I agree with Cal that us oldies need to be the loudest. We’ve done it through the decades and we’re doing it again. We need to stay loud and drive shitweasel and his coterie of magats out of DC.
Your happytalk comment for a fine summer day, Part 1:
“Let’s dispense with the pleasantries.
We are at war.
Not a shooting war.
Not yet.
But something worse in its own quiet, choking way—a technical state of civil war. The kind of war that makes cowards of rules and turns procedure into shrapnel.
And in Texas, Greg Abbott is lighting the fuse.
On August 4th, Governor Abbott announced—proudly, defiantly—that any Democratic legislator who fails to appear for a surprise session of the Texas state legislature by August 5th will see their seat declared vacant.
This, in a bald attempt to force a quorum for an unscheduled redistricting effort that would gerrymander at least five new Republican congressional seats into existence.
Five seats.
Bought not with votes, but with ink and knives.
Five seats to hold the U.S. House hostage after a 2026 election that, by all current indicators, will be a biblical catastrophe for the Republican Party.
This is not about state politics.
This is not about Texas.
This is about power.
This is about permanently tipping the balance of national representation using the architecture of a dying republic to rig the new one being born behind its back.
It is a dagger aimed at the heart of the Constitution itself—and it is being sheathed in plain sight.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California has responded in kind.
So have the governors of Illinois, Washington, New York.
They’ve declared their own intent to redraw maps, to counterbalance Abbott’s theft with a theft of their own.
And just like that, the pretense is gone.
The guardrails are being sawed off by both sides.
The game is rigged, the referees have joined the teams, and the field is splitting down the middle.
We are not drifting toward civil war.
We are being carried there—on gurneys, on motorcades, in armored trucks painted red, white, and blue and driven by men with no conscience and nothing left to lose.
Donald Trump—the increasingly frail, increasingly unhinged re-occupant of the Oval Office—has shattered the last illusions of presidential restraint.
His executive orders openly violate the Constitution.
He appoints judges who have lied under oath and dares the courts to stop him.
Senate Republicans, now functionally extinct as an institution of deliberation, confirm them without even pretending to vet.
Trump has begun personally selecting general officers in the U.S. military.
He is choosing his own warlords.
This is no longer political theatre.
This is war prep. This is banana republic shit.
And the punchline?
Half the country still thinks the Democrats are overreacting.
That we’re all just melting down because we lost a few court cases or that we’re mad we can’t get pronouns printed on our napkins.
No.
We’re reacting because we’re watching the United States be turned inside out by men who believe they should rule forever—or not at all.
Let’s be brutally clear.
This is not just about maps.
Not just about Abbott.
This is about a Republican Party that has now publicly declared—yes, publicly, and repeatedly—that if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, they will refuse to certify the election.
Full stop.
That’s not politics. That’s war-by-other-means.
The plan is as clear as it is insane: gerrymander the House, win the majority through rigged maps, then throw the 2028 election to the chamber when no consensus can be reached.
Install a Republican president—possibly Trump, God help us—by congressional fiat, regardless of the Electoral College or the popular vote.
In other words: end elections.
Cement minority rule.
Burn the scaffolding of democracy and salt the earth where the ballots used to grow.
And here’s where we land.
If one side openly declares they will never accept a Democrat in power again—and backs that declaration with action—then the only rational, ethical, and self-defensive response is to make the same declaration in return.
That’s how we arrive at a technical state of civil war.
Not with cannon fire.
Not with a shot at Fort Sumter.
But with deadlines and district lines, and governors signing paperwork like generals drawing battle maps.
And yes, it leads—eventually, inevitably—to the real thing.
Because what happens when blue states stop sending taxes to a red federal government?
What happens when governors of California, New York, and Illinois say, flat out, “We no longer recognize the authority of a president elected by gerrymandered fiat”?
What happens when National Guard units are federalized and told to act against their own citizens?
We’ve already seen it.
Federal troops in Portland.
Federal agents in unmarked vans in Minneapolis.
And now, a sitting U.S. president selecting military leadership based not on strategy, but on loyalty.
This is what a soft coup looks like.
This is how republics become dictatorships—one signed order, one packed court, one nullified election at a time.
We are standing on the edge.
And I want to be clear: I’m not even opposed to the collapse in principle.
Because unlike the Abbott crowd, I’ve thought this through.
If the United States breaks apart—and God knows, we are dangling over that edge like Wile E. Coyote holding a stick of TNT—here is what happens next:
California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada—the spine of the West—will form a new nation.
They will be joined by Illinois, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, and most of the northeastern corridor.
The population, economy, and military of this new Union will be vastly superior to anything the southern rump states can cobble together.
And yes, you can wave your little Wyoming flags, but the brutal math is this: once the U.S. Constitution is abandoned, so too is the notion that two Dakotas matter more than one California.
In the new post-America, power will come from population, productivity, and force projection.
Which means: the south is screwed.
(Continued…)
Part 3:
“ Congress is a roach motel for lobbyists and performative lunatics, many of whom are openly preparing for a post-America America where the flag stays the same, but the Constitution is a ghost story told around campfires by billionaires.
And don’t give me the “but the military” argument.
As if the military isn’t just as fractured.
The military is not a monolith.
It’s a lattice of class tension and cultural divergence, a cross-section of a nation coming apart at every seam.
You think the Joint Chiefs will all salute the same president if both sides claim victory in 2028?
You think a captain from Oregon will obey the same orders as a major from Alabama if they both think they’re saving the republic?
We are one disputed election away from seeing Marine units on opposite sides of the Potomac drawing weapons on each other.
And don’t think they won’t.
We’ve trained them to kill.
But we didn’t train them who to follow once the flag splits in two and each side says it’s the real one.
That’s the thing no one’s ready for: there won’t be two Americas.
There will be twenty.
Twenty splintered visions of what the United States “really” is, each one armed and praying for the clarity of righteous bloodshed.
California won’t ask permission to secede.
It’ll just stop obeying.
Texas already pretends it’s its own country—hell, they teach their kids the Alamo was a birthright, not a graveyard.
And Florida?
Florida is the Bosnian wildcard in the whole damn deck.
Armed, enraged, half-drowning in its own hubris and sea level, it will burn and smile as it does.
Once the structure collapses—once the federal government becomes two rival groups of governors and officers and deep-state functionaries playing constitutional Calvinball, it’s over.
The nukes don’t matter.
The treaties don’t matter.
What matters is who controls the ports, who keeps the power grid on, who can move food and fuel and bullets across state lines.
There will be checkpoints.
Roadblocks.
Supply chains redrawn by governors who no longer answer to the Pentagon, because the Pentagon will be two buildings by then—one in D.C., one in Omaha, or maybe Austin, and each one claiming legitimacy over the other.
The South will remember its mythologies and try to rise again.
The North will remember its debts and try to collect.
Cities will become fortresses.
Rural counties will become militias.
Suburbs will become no-man’s-land.
And as all this happens, the dollar will collapse.
Don’t kid yourself: the global economy does not give a fuck about “We the People.”
They care about stability.
Predictability.
Trade routes and energy flows and the enforcement of contracts.
The minute they sense real domestic instability—not the threat of it, but the confirmation of it—the dollar goes down like a narcoleptic in a blackout.
And when that happens, the war isn’t theoretical anymore.
It’s material.
Because we don’t make shit here.
We import. And when the imports stop, the riots start.
You think Americans know how to wait in line for food?
You think anyone in this country has the patience for “rolling blackouts” or “fuel rations” or “shared sacrifice”?
No.
They will shoot the cashier.
They will torch the supermarket.
They will drag their neighbor into the street because someone has to bleed for the fact that their Amazon package didn’t arrive and their WiFi is down and the President is in hiding.
You want a preview?
Look at January 6th. That was the rehearsal dinner.
Look at Kenosha. Look at Minneapolis. Look at Portland.
Now multiply it by fifty.
Add drone strikes.
Add rogue governors.
Add National Guard units defecting based on Facebook memes and AM talk radio.
Add sheriffs with God complexes and militia ties.
Add cyberattacks from Russia, China, and every 20-year-old in Estonia with a grudge and a laptop.
Add nuclear weapons whose command structure is suddenly ambiguous.
Add diseases, real and manufactured, released to sow chaos by regimes eager to carve up the carcass of the American empire before someone else claims it.
Add fear. Add drought. Add fire.
Add lies.
And stir.
This isn’t a Tom Clancy novel.
This isn’t a prepper fantasy.
This is what happens when a government built on consensus loses its ability to consent.
We’ve been trained to think of civil war in terms of Gettysburg and Antietam.
But the next one won’t look like that.
It’ll look like Syria.
Like Yugoslavia.
Like Ukraine.
Like Lebanon in 1975, where Christian militias and Muslim factions and foreign powers turned one of the most beautiful countries on Earth into a graveyard that smelled of smoke and gun oil and the end of things.”
I think you've got a very accurate crystal ball. Glad I"m old.
I said yesterday in reading a discussion about how ICE members are recruited that it sounds very much like how Putin is recruiting people into his military to fight against the Ukrainians. By that I mean forcing people economically into positions where they will take the jobs, and also the way that they offer them more money than they can make doing most other things, particularly now that they are taking non college grads. They are going to be making more than most teachers and nurses that is for sure.
Given that there are also people starting to fight back against ICE agents, and that ICE agents are using violence like breaking car windows to get people they want to take, it is like a battle.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/08/texas-ice-agents-ambush
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/us-citizens-jailed-ice-los-angeles
I hope that it deescalates, but it seems that it will be the opposite. This is war in our country, and we would be wise to recognize it.
I hope your very dark and persuasive portrayal of the worst possible outcome does not come to pass.
Wow is that grim! But unfortunately, I can’t say it won’t happen here. It can.
And it is!
Stark. Accurate.
Good summation of what the future holds for a republic destroyed by our billionaire oligarchic overlords SoTired!!
Bravo right on!
And still no national strike, no massive protest in DC or anywhere in this country...what will it take to get Americans off their couch and into the streets?
It will take local organizing everywhere to gather, activate, and focus people, and leadership at the national level to coordinate all the local groups and coordinate turning them out. That’s what One Million Rising, led by Indivisible, is doing. The third online training is next Wednesday evening online. To sign up:
https://mobilize.us/s/jLiDvI
The first two trainings are available online and well worth watching:
Training 1: https://act.indivisible.org/go/843524?t=9&akid=119729%2E3013837%2EIkobpk
Training 2: https://act.indivisible.org/go/843525?t=10&akid=119729%2E3013837%2EIkobpk
Part4: (last one:
“ The next civil war will be digital and tribal and sudden.
It will be declared not by Lincoln but by TikTok and Fox News.
It will be fought not on battlefields, but on highways and Wi-Fi and gas lines and court dockets and supermarket aisles.
It will not be brother against brother.
It will be neighbor against neighbor, algorithm against algorithm, drone against protest, truth against power, and power against everyone.
And in the chaos, people will scream for order.
They will beg for order.
And some strongman will appear.
He won’t be Trump.
He’ll be younger.
Sharper.
Hungrier.
A Tom Cotton or a Josh Hawley or some asshole we haven’t even met yet, raised in the bowels of corporate-funded think tanks and groomed for the moment America breaks.
He’ll offer “unity.”
He’ll offer “peace.”
And he’ll take what remains of the Constitution and feed it into a shredder made of applause and fear.
He will come, and we will let him.
Because Americans are not special.
We are not immune to history.
We are not chosen.
We are not different.
We are Rome in the 5th century, decadent and divided, watching the aqueducts crumble while we chant slogans and sharpen knives.
We are the USSR in 1991, holding onto a flag while the ground splits beneath us.
We are whatever comes next, and we are not ready.
And when it comes—when the sirens replace the debates, when the tanks roll down Main Street not as a parade but as a warning—some of us will remember what we lost.
We’ll remember the dream. The idea.
We’ll remember that once, however flawed and hypocritical and blood-soaked it was, the idea of America meant something.
It meant the possibility of self-government. Of progress. Of dignity.
It meant something more than flags and guns and courts packed with perjurers.
It meant the attempt.
And now we stand at the edge of that attempt.
And we are failing.
The United States was beautiful.
At moments.
In dreams. In songs. In potential.
But it was never unbreakable.
And the people trying to bend it are forcing it to break.
I never thought I’d live to see it.
But now I worry we all will.
So tell me…
Am I lying?”
So painful. So many millions of Americans who have always had pleasant, orderly lives do not want to wake up and grok that we are right at the edge of the precipice, about to lose everything we hold dear. We need millions committing nonviolent resistance in the streets, but too many are still in denial, intent on staying in the beautiful dream. We have to wake them. How do we wake them?
If history is any guide, we can't and we won't.
“Non-violent resistance” will no longer be possible with the National guard and the military quelling any protests.
And if we all just rend our garments, don sackcloth, and cover ourselves in ashes? What will we have we accomplished? That "accomplishment" is exactly what you are giving voice to.
I am fully aware that too many people in this country are lazy, complacent, and don't give a fig about what "gubmint" does. And there are powerful forces that will do everything in their power to keep it that way. One problem - the "leader" is sick, old, craven, narcissistic, a felon, and not very bright. Stalin was not a stupid man, soulless, evil, but not stupid. The same can be said for Hitler. That will never be said about the Felon. The other mistake? He has surrounded himself with minor grade narcissists who are cosplaying at being heads of branches of the government and they, too, will fall. Another huge problem for MAGA? The economy. It is faltering, it is beginning to stumble. Healthcare. It is on the verge of collapse. No, people will not stand for that. Even the most obtuse dullard will feel the pain and fight back. Yes. They. Will. Their ox will have been gored.
Sorry. NO. There are more of then there are of them. We will prevail. There are voices, out there, powerful voices who are fighting back. Will it be pretty? No. Will it be bloodless? One can only hope. But, no they will not prevail. And to post it as if it is a fait accompli? Does not acknowledge the strength of this country. May I suggest you check out Simon Rosenberg and the Lincoln project and learn what other are doing to make sure your dystopian pipe dream remains just that.
Ms. Dearnaley: I copied this little essay from someone else who posted it anonymously. This is not my dystopian vision of the future.
However, I think it’s a fine piece of writing that articulates our predicament powerfully.
I certainly hope you’re right and that we’re not headed down this road — but we might be…
I wish that had been made more obvious. My point is, and I will say it again, it is only our predicament if we let it be. We can't allow that to happen.
I hope to make this a congenial exchange and not the usual Internet tit-for-tat argument.
But I know that tomorrow is day 200 of a regime that, assuming Trump survives it, will last an agonizing 1460 days.
That means we have 93% of his regime to endure
And of course once it’s over in 2028 we all fervently hope a more benevolent regime will take power.
And, perhaps, dream of dreams, a Nuremberg-style set of trials will commence, (with Merrick Garland kept far far away from any prosecutorial duties.)
But we have a long way to go, and the real brains behind this administration at The Heritage foundation ad nauseam, have attacked this nation with blitzkrieg-like ferocity since The Vile One snatched back the reins of power, having won every swing state where nearly $1 billion was spent trying to persuade the electorates therein not to reelect a convicted felon rapist grifter insurrectionist con man vulgarian.
And the countervailing forces seem to collapse by the day: the Titans of industry who sat at the dais on inauguration day, the giant law firms only too happy to say “sir, what can we do for you?“ The revered and historic universities bowing down and asking, “How much do you need from us, sir?” The broadcast and print organs that have held sway for decades, doing the same.
And the roughly 30 to 40% of the public, who having witnessed the horror movie-level of destruction that has been wrought since January, continue to support it, many cases with great enthusiasm.
It is not a pretty picture…
I think this unknown writer’s essay has a better than 50% chance of coming true. Republican/MAGA forces do not believe in pluralistic democracy and the rule of law. I don’t know if they ever did. There is no compromising with such people. Therefore partition is the only answer.
I’m afraid we are well on our way…
Nobody’s talking about rending clothing and donning sackcloth and ashes as in the Biblical phrasing. But those of us who are already active and speaking up can’t just assume/hope that when people begin to suffer personally from Dump’s Government Of Pain’s repression, that they will all naturally get active, speak out, resist, and take to the streets. As the saying goes, hope is not a plan. Simon Rosenburg is doing wonderful resisance leadership, and his folks are getting active and activating others. Sounds like you’re one of them. Yay!
I think you spoke a lot more truth than most people would ever want to hear. We don’t make things, we sell things that somebody else makes elsewhere, and that includes our food. Most people in our cities will starve when the food stops showing up in the stores. How long do you think it will take? Fresh food will be gone first then the boxed and canned that are in warehouses will finally run out. I don’t think you are far off in your analysis, we live in an incredibly complex system, that once it’s broken will not be easily repaired. Never mind the idiot in the White House, he couldn’t screw in a light bulb. The people that are orchestrating this dismantling of our way of life don’t care how many die, as long as it’s not them. They want to recreate the Middle Ages where a few families have all of the wealth and power and everyone else works for them, England still has vestiges of that system. What I think they are missing is that the rest of the world has moved on and will want no part of this madness. So many things require others to contribute unseen, when that is broken so are those many things. What you described was dire alright, it’s logic made sense, where we are on that path may be debatable still, but once the systems start failing, the process will have a life of it’s own. 🤬🤬🤬
And all because of one man. No you're not lying. You're just carrying the situation to its inevitable outcome unless.....
no it's not one man, it's six criminals on the supreme court, it's all retrumpian congress people, senators and governors, it's all the super rich who won't pay their fair share in taxes and it's the ignorant magats who hate women, LGBTQ folks, Black and Brown people, and immigrants.
Spot on!
no
Who is the author, if not you?
Part 2:
“ Which means: the south is screwed.
The GOP’s strongholds—Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas—are welfare states, net takers, dependent on federal subsidies from blue states they now propose to dominate.
They are a red velvet cake of hypocrisy baked in a kitchen paid for by liberal taxpayers.
And when those subsidies stop?
When Social Security checks don’t arrive?
When FEMA aid dries up?
When food assistance vanishes?
These states will burn—not from outside invasion, but from within.
Poor white voters, duped into culture war hysteria, will finally realize that racism doesn’t pay the rent.
And when the AC breaks, when the grocery shelves are bare, when the insulin is gone—they will riot.
The next Fort Sumter won’t be fired upon by blue coats—it’ll be torched from the inside by red ones who realize too late they were cannon fodder for a billionaire death cult.
Meanwhile, the new blue nation—call it Pacifica, call it the North American Republic, call it literally anything else—will control the nukes.
Because those bases are in California.
Those silos are in Montana and the Dakotas.
Those subs are docked in blue harbors, crewed by people with graduate degrees and no patience for neo-Confederate cosplay.
There may be some holdouts—some nukes in Texas, maybe a stray missile in Florida—but the command structure will fracture.
And the moment loyalty is divided in a nuclear state, you no longer have a country.
You have a disaster waiting for a launch code.
And you can bet NATO and the EU are watching.
So is China. So is Russia.
The new blue state will ally with Europe overnight.
The new red state?
It will be isolated.
Economically neutered.
Morally bankrupt. Internationally shunned.
Try running a nation with no money, no allies, and a citizenry trained only in rage. Let’s see how that goes.
And yet—and yet—this is where we are headed.
Because for too long, one side has played by the rules while the other sharpens the knives.
We have tried to compromise with arsonists.
We have let the Constitution become a suicide pact.
No more.
Because now, if we do not fight, we die.
If we play fair, we lose.
If we tell ourselves it can’t happen here, we will wake up in the ash of what once was.
Greg Abbott is trying to fire on Fort Sumter with a fountain pen and a smirk.
If we don’t match him force for force—not violence for violence, but action for action, map for map, court for court, and yes, goddamnit, declaration for declaration—then the next fight won’t be about democracy.
It will be about which side gets the tanks.
And you know what?
I say let it come.
Because I promise you: the right has not thought this through.
They think blue states are weak.
That liberal means soft.
That cities can’t fight.
But I’ve seen New Yorkers when the train’s late.
I’ve seen Californians during wildfires.
I’ve seen drag queens in Texas standing alone against armed mobs and not blinking.
You want to go to war with those people?
Be my guest.
Just don’t be surprised when they’re still standing and you’re neck-deep in the mud, wondering why the federal aid convoy never came.
Let me say it again: this is a technical civil war.
The only question left is whether it becomes a real one.
Whether maps give way to bullets.
Whether executive orders become execution orders.
And if that day comes, the outcome is not assured.
But the blame will be.
It will rest on the heads of men like Trump, like Abbott, like the perjured judges and the cowardly Senators and the hollow-eyed billionaires who looked at democracy and said, “That’s too risky—let’s buy it instead.”
But history has long arms.
And the schoolchildren they’re so terrified of?
The ones they think will be traumatized by learning about slavery?
Those kids will write the textbooks.
And they will tell the truth.
They will say that the Republican Party, faced with the loss of cultural hegemony, chose to burn the country down rather than share it.
That the right feared democracy more than death.
That in the end, they didn’t win.
They ended.
Because power isn’t loyalty.
Power is legitimacy. Power is cooperation. Power is earned.
And no matter how many judges they install, how many maps they redraw, how many parades they throw for the flag—they cannot force a country to love them.
And the United States?
The United States is not one nation.
Not really.
Hasn’t been for a very long time.
Maybe never was.
We’ve called it “united” because no one had the balls to call it anything else.
But look closer.
Really look.
Not at the myth, not at the hymns or the fireworks or the golden parchment we put under museum glass and pretend still governs us.
Look at the actual nation.
The machine.
The bones under the makeup. You’ll see it’s already split.
We are a cold war in a hot climate, a long, drunken marriage where both spouses sleep in separate bedrooms, hoarding money and muttering fantasies of murder.
Half of this country prays for rain.
The other half curses God for not sending fire.
You think this is a phase?
A tantrum?
This is the logical end of manifest destiny and the Electoral College.
This is what you get when you marry thirteen slave states to thirteen merchant ones and pretend the vows were ever sincere.
You get a monstrosity: a country stitched together by compromise, half-built on genocide, half-built on commerce, full of contradictions so profound that the entire enterprise was always going to collapse in on itself like a house made of buried lies and termite wood.
And if you don’t believe me, ask the Cherokee.
Ask the Sioux.
Ask the Japanese Americans who had their homes stolen while they sat in desert cages.
Ask the Black soldiers who liberated Europe and came home to lynch mobs.
Ask the trans kids being hunted across state lines.
Ask the women whose bodies are now the property of governors.
Ask them if this was ever one country.
Ask a gay couple in Mississippi what flag they’re saluting when they’re denied medical rights.
Ask a Black teenager in Georgia if the Constitution applies when a cop pulls up behind him.
Ask a nurse in Arizona who makes $38,000 a year and can’t afford insulin because her governor thought tax cuts for landlords were a moral obligation.
Ask the dead. Ask the poor. Ask the workers.
Ask the veterans.
This was never one country.
It was two—or more—pretending not to notice each other, because the lies were easier than the war.
But the lie is collapsing.
There is no social contract anymore—only contractual obligation.
There is no shared dream—only curated delusions, sold like corn dogs at a carnival no one wants to admit is actually a funeral.
The national anthem plays, and we’re supposed to rise, even though the flag’s draped over a coffin and the smell of decay is coming up through the floorboards.
What do you call a government where one party believes in nothing but power, and the other believes in rules the first party has openly set on fire?
You don’t call it a democracy. You don’t even call it a republic.
You call it hospice.
And hospice is where the United States now lives—quietly rotting, humming show tunes while the nurse tightens the morphine drip and checks her watch for the next coup attempt.
Because the old country—the one your parents pledged allegiance to, the one your grandfather swore oaths for, the one we were all taught to memorize and mythologize—that country is already gone.
The states don’t trust the federal government.
The Supreme Court is functionally a papal tribunal in robes, overturning majority will with smirks and footnotes.”
Dear Madness,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRZ54VTYN2A
especially minutes 9-11
I've advocated that California secede for almost a year now, but there are very few takers, even though we're the fourth largest economy in the world. I think we're toast (a highly technical term) as a country. I have suggested what the head of the Green Party of Canada suggested, the state of Caskadia, CA, WA, and OR becoming the 21st province of Canada. I'd like to think that this could be non-violent, but realistically, not a chance. My American ancestry goes back to 1633 in Plymouth, but I think that means about as much to t as me being an illegal. The Supreme Court is dysfunctional, so we can't be helped... The president has not been able to appoint a single competent person to any position in his second term. The corruption is massive. We might want to consider what the oligarchs want. All of t's policies will lead to a population drop, Medicaid, no food stamps, just in time for the climate crisis and its resultant starvation. It's time to go. (You should know, the climate crisis is my main focus.)
If things become as ugly as we fear—and they’re headed there fast, I hope Cascadia will form strong diplomatic and defense alliances and trade ties with Alleghenia, comprising New England, New York, and those adjoining states such as New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, that also choose democracy over fascism. Perhaps DC will opt to join us, and the illegitimate dictator and his cabal will be forcd to decamp to Texas.
I hope we are all preparing. We should do everything we can to lessen the climate crisis. We need to think about what the billionaires/oligarchs are working for. And we should be preparing for survival.
Dear Madness,
I agree with you almost 100%. For almost a year I have advocated that California should secede. We're the fourth largest economy in the world. It's been suggested that we form "Caskadia", the 21st province of Canada, along with Oregon and Washington. I really don't want to take Nevada, but I guess we should, given some of its nuclear waste issues. It's also been suggested that Vermont and Maine join Canada. However, this idea does not seem to get any traction. Apparently people think we're going to 50 states forever and non-violent too. I like to think that a transition would be non-violent, but I don't think it's realistic, given t and his followers. I'm prepped for an earthquake, a fire, a tsunami, and a general collapse (solar, storage batteries, EVs, and a large garden.) Every day I work on this more. I have faith in California and the Bay Area. We have strong economies and Berkeley, (Oakland, San Francisco) at least, has a legacy of resistance.
It’s the same divide, isn’t it? It’s always been there.
Dark but true.
WOW!
Exceptional post So Tired, sadly true from my perspective!!
It is completely horrifying. The only thing that can stop them now is massive nonviolent resistance—millions in the streets on a very frequent basis. I attend a weekly protest against ICE outside the New England regional ICE detention facility in Burlington, Mass. Multiple former detainees have attested to the shockingly bad conditions inside. But the good thing is, the protest is growing significantly, every week. Last week 313 people attended. Yesterday the count was about 450. We are completely peaceful, but our signs deplore what Trump and ICE are doing. And many of us are seniors whose first experience of protest and civil disobedience was marching against the Vietnam war. What are they going to do—arrest and brutalize a bunch of peaceful retired grandparents?? Then watch the shit really hit the fan.
My favorite protest sign said:
Fascism Isn’t a Fairy Tale
It’s Happening, Here
Apathy Kills
Find Your Moral Courage
Please Join Us
We’ve done that and what difference did it make?
I’ve done it all…protests, letters, postcards, contributions, volunteerism.
I’m reaching my tapping out moment for my own sanity.
That’s why we have movements. Our numbers are growing all the time. No goal is all on one person’s shoulders. No one should feel they have to put their own mental or physical health at risk. Take a well-earned break.
We’ve been completely abandoned by what used to be called the Free Press and their capitulating Networks. If you want up to the minute reporting check out Occupy Democrats and several more Podcasts on the YouTube channel. The last free reporting before they are silenced and/or disappeared…
"We’ve been completely abandoned by what used to be called the Free Press and their capitulating Networks."
BS. MSM are still reporting news.The abandonment is the readers who fled the muckraking alt press for Facebook, letting Zuck's algorithms decide what they should read. Loss of alt press readers led to loss of alt press classified advertising to Craig's List, failure of those publications, and a scattering of muckrakers to lonely cyberperches.
What is MSM? Do you mean Main Stream Media? Can’t speak for Facebook, been off that for years.
Yes. That is a standard abbreviation for "corporate" or "legacy" media. I never joined FB myself but have read a lot about the way it manipulates news stories.
I see. Like ABC news?
NEW March on Washington!
The answer to your question is "yes".
Lucian, your column so perfectly chronicled what is happening to our country. But there can be no time for tears - just resolve to resist and fight back with every means possible. One of those is to move heaven and earth to be sure NJ and VA elect Democratic governors this year. The next most important step is for all the blue states to re-district and then get rid of every Republican congressperson in 2026. Don’t wait for Texas to complete what it is doing in reverse - start NOW to be sure the Dems control the House in 2026. And then focus on the local state legislatures and push to get more of them under Democratic control.
We are fighting an autocratic dictator who heads a cult - there are far more of us than of them. I am so tired of having to deal with these MAGA morons and their cult leaders but I’ll be damned if I let them take full control of OUR country and destroy the democracy we spent 249 years building, even if it has been in fits and starts.
You are right that we are in an existential crisis - let’s take action like it is.
And in response to your call to arms, I…..wait for it….hit the like button. Wtf can we actually do? Can I do?
I didn't say it is easy. It requires some effort. Talk to your family, friends and neighbors about how dire it is and what the consequences are of allowing Republicans to remain in power at the national, state and even local level; support Democratic candidates financially and in social media, and closer to election time maybe phone banking and leafletting in your local area; show up at town hall meetings and rallies; support organizations that promote civil liberties and civil rights like ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Vota Latina, GLAAD, and any number of similar organizations. Believe me, any of these organizations will have plenty of things for volunteers to help with. Like I said, there are more of us than of them, and we need to turn out to show that.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/09/leading-civil-rights-lawyer-shows-20-ways-trump-copying-hitlers-early-rhetoric-and
For more recent subscribers who perhaps did not see this before, I posted the link several times on here. Lucian sums it up very well, here's an excerpt:
"A new book by one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America's constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler's extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s--when the Nazis took power in Germany.
In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America's constitutional foundation in 2019--an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority--is not positioned to withstand Trump's extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, "Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?," extensively details Trump's mimicry of Hitler's pre-war rhetoric and strategies.
Neuborne doesn't make this comparison lightly. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU's national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.
"Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?" he writes. "Partly it's just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it's hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln's house. But that's not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton's mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play." ******
In comments scattered across a number of substacks and in posts I've made on bluesky, I have been using vocabulary inspired by history — similar to choices made by LKT IV today and earlier — to describe Trump's actions from the very beginning of his current regime.
"Purge" — more than once, beginning with the Friday Night Massacre of more than a dozen inspectors general.
"Night of the Long Knives" — at least once to refer to yet another of these purges.
The pardoning of 1500+ insurrectionists as creating "his brown-shirts."
"Alligator Alcatraz" as the first step toward assembling a new "gulag archipelago."
There are two things about this moment that are VERY worrisome. First, that tens of millions of our fellow citizens welcome these authoritarian/fascist developments. Second, that tens of millions of our fellow citizens are too young, or too inadequately educated in history, to understand the significance of the events _we_ are referencing with our shorthand nomenclature & allusions.
Let's keep in mind that the congressional Republicans are responsible for everything that Lucian describes. They could impeach and convict Trump. Admittedly, he could order the military to shoot anyone who tries to remove him from the White House, but that's a risk worth taking.
Absolutely! They are 100% scum of the earth.
They are likely to bring the case to a Washington, DC grand jury. Will a Washington, DC grand jury indict? And if the GJ does indict, will a DC jury ever find these people guilty? Especially after SCOTUS made up the Trump Rule: I.e., a president cannot commit a crime if there is any way to construe his actions as being in performance of his presidential duties. This is what we Army enlisted scum used to call a pud puller.
The very same objection occurred to me. Unless they can think of a reason to convene a GJ in, say, S. Florida? Where did Obama supposedly commit treason?
It should make us cry. An embarrassment to everyone who ever served our nation. And like Stalin they will all be pariahs.
After 2 1/2 centuries, I never thought the guardrails would fail despite Franklin's, "if you can keep it." We should have been a straight democracy. To hell with a republic and the Electoral College.
You understand that the Electoral College is a sop that was offered to the South in order to get them to join with the other colonies. Our country was birthed in racial ugliness and that will be its end as well. We have never confronted it, never really worked — as in "sweated the details" — to make this a color-blind society. And we will deserve what we get. Lincoln should have said "adios" to the South. We would be living in a better world now if he had.
I have often said that Lincoln's mistake was bringing the South back into the Union.
Lincoln failed. No one wants to say it but it's true.
Wow. There’s an awful lot of negativity in the comments to this post, and I get it. Take a deep breath, stand back a step or two. The U.S. is certainly a country of contradictions. And yet, as has been demonstrated time and again, if you want to start to make change, if you want to get attention, hit ‘em where it hurts - in the wallet. One way that everyone can make change is to change your buying habits. Don’t patronize the corporations that are caving to The Creature (OK, I admit, that is a bit tough to do with Amazon). Stop buying at stores and businesses that support the MAGA party line and principles. Your spending dollar holds and IMMENSE amount of power. If you change how you spend that dollar, the corporate world will recoil in fear, and in doing so, they will listen to your spending, and demand change at the highest level.
If the powers that be do not listen to those demands, then change will hasten at the ballot box. It’s been done before (hellooo, 1960’s) it can be done now.
Ken, it's easier than I thought to delete Amazon from my life and my credit card is better for it
What do we do with all the institutions public and private that have caved? Even if the tribute comes off as parody—e g, Tim Cook bearing gold—it's still support and I can't see Mac cultists backing off the way Tesla's market has evaporated. Fat lot of good that's done. The company's board just heaped billion$ more on Muck.
Lucian may be unjustifiably praising Trump when he writes that Trump "oversaw the development of the mRNA vaccine that saved the lives of millions during the COVID epidemic." Trump was in office, but did he even know about the development of the vaccine? Studies have shown that hundreds of thousands of people died because of Trump's COVID policies, such as suppressing scientific data, delaying testing, mocking and blocking mask-wearing, and convening mass gatherings where social distancing was impossible. It seems unlikely that he would have overseen the development of a vaccine if he knew of it.
He did appoint Operation Warp Speed with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
When told to. He certainly wouldn't do such a thing now.
1. Why would ANY officer of the law want/need a mask?
2. What kind of person hides his identity when we works? Ummm?
KKK
If you don't know, I can't help you.
It’s a total horror show.
We've never had a president who is a sociopath, we can't treat this as "normal" or continue with both-side-isms. Republikans won't stop until they have complete power with no opposition to their goal of destroying our economy and society. We have to stop pretending that its politics as usual. Like Kurtz concluded, the only solution is to "exterminate all the brutes."
He is a psychopath.
RFK jr is a sociaphah.
Hegseth is a moron
Miller yearns to be A Himmler.
And at this point I’m so very glad that I’m very old. I don’t know how to feel when my world has been so stable and generous, yet I will leave behind uncertainty at best, a rolling nightmare at worst.
So sad....but I hope I live long enough to see sanity restored to our world.
Karen, I could have written exactly the same words that you did. Thanks for putting it so well! I suspect there are millions more who feel the same.
I'm a first-year, first-summer even, July 1946 Baby Boomer. The daughter of a couple that married during the depression and then held off having their only child (me!) until after WWII ended, because my dad was in Europe all four years as an officer in one of the US Army's super-dangerous tank-destroyer units. He survived, helped defeat fascism, and came home to live a good, productive life.
That's a story shared in one way or another by many of us, and now I fear that we are falling short. What does it say for this country that so many so willingly throw away everything our forefathers fought and (in many cases) died for? What a depressing thing to contemplate as I approach my 80th birthday next year.
And yes, I'm glad I'm old. But I feel sorrow and compassion for so many younger Americans who may never realize what they had until they lose it.
Us old folks need to be the loudest voices opposing tyrants and their henchmen.
I am 78, Dad and Mom in uniform WWII...I have friends already in Ajijic Mexico! This country in dire straights...I like the author's plan of the sane states banding together!
Martha, I was born in ‘46 as well. Body parts (back mostly) giving out. Bought one of those 4 wheel roller gadgets so that I could go to protests! And I agree with Cal that us oldies need to be the loudest. We’ve done it through the decades and we’re doing it again. We need to stay loud and drive shitweasel and his coterie of magats out of DC.
Drumpf surrounds himself with idiots so he will look like the smartest guy in the room.
To date Donald and Valdimir have been a tag team.
So far Donald has been letting Valdimir win the wrestling matches..
Beware the Martial arms expert, XI Jinping tossing them both out of the ring.
Sun Tzu
Hard to figure out who’s the Babyface and who’s the Heel, especially when they’re both assholes…
So far Trump still looks dumber but more dangerous. This and stupid is a bad combination
As long as cockroaches exist he will never be the smartest guy in the room 🤷♂️
GEheime STAatsPOlizei
WHAT CAN WE DO? How do we stop this madness? I can’t read about this distraction any more- I need to know what to do!!!