Die Back at the Root

The Brutal Kindness of Pruning

We had snow in January, and it decimated my elephant ear plant, Bert.  I didn’t realize how bad it was until the top half of his stalk fell off. 

An elephant ear plant with an ugly, rotten trunk

So I had to perform some gruesome but necessary plant surgery, and hack off that dead, rotten trunk so the new shoots can grow.  ChatGPT told me to sprinkle cinnamon on the clean but still horrific wound as an antifungal, so I did that.  It was smelly and slimy and I felt terrible.  I learned from the book The Light  Eaters by Zoe Schlanger that plants hate to be touched.  But it was necessary.  Bert doesn’t have to waste energy on that dying stalk now.  Plants can survive even if they have to die back to the root.

 Humanity at the Brink

I think that might be what human civilization has to do: die back to the root and start over.  

I think history’s verdict will be that in the first half of the 21st century, humanity became so enamored of our technology and endless streaming entertainment that we lost touch with what was truly real.  We are about to be forcibly reminded, as climate change batters civilization to rubble with a never-ending chain of fires, floods and super-storms.  Nation-states will be unable to respond to cascading emergencies.  The insurance industry will collapse, leaving citizens and capital alike unable to recover from disasters.  Those fires and floods will bring famine, plagues and wars. 

 The Uneven Collapse to Come

Not everywhere will get knocked back to the Age of Steam.  High-tech enclaves like Shenzen and Silicon Valley will remain, full of Ais and robots.  But they will be walled from the outside world and still consume more than their share of resources.  They won’t be popular.  

It seems the only way, though.  Die back to the root.  Every structure of our society is so broken, so unjust and extractive, they may be impossible to fix.  They may just have to die.  They seem bent on it, the forces of global capital.  Sucking every last drop of blood out of Mother Earth and her people as they go.

 What Survival Might Require

Those roots we will die back to will be local – our own towns, our own people.  Food, water: the integrity of our land and waters so that we may *eat and drink.* As nation-states collapse, states and then cities will be thrown back on their own resources.   Food you can grow yourself of from the farms outside of town.  Plant-based diets to ease the burden on the Earth.  Localized power like solar cells and other renewables.  Communities looking to their own needs instead of relying on fragile long-distance networks that can be broken by catastrophe at any time.

My novel The Pono Way takes place in the 2090s, about halfway between this world and that one.  Nation-states are still hanging on, barely.  But more and more people are leaning more on their own resources, like the sea-steadings.

The Potential for Regrowth

Once a plant dies or is pruned back, it can concentrate its energy on new growth and recovery.  That is the effect of Dark Ages in human history – they clear away what is dead so something new can grow.  Old structures, old religions, old ways of seeing the world.   Humanity has made it through dark Ages before.  Never with so much at stake, but it probably felt like it at the time.  What could be worse than the Fall of Rome?  Europe and the Mediterranean nursed that wound for a thousand years.

What I hope we gain is, not a learning, but a remembering: we are not above nature, we are in it and of it.  Its flourishing is ours.  From the microbes in our guts to the mycelial networks running through every foot of living soil under our feet, to the phytoplankton in the seas.  All one, cells in the body of Our Mother.  Capitalism and its growth mindset have brought us to the brink of ruin.  I hope we realize, really internalize, believe that we’re all in this together.  Stewardship, not profit becomes the highest value. 

Creative Destruction

The lesson of the dieback is that new hope can come from the ruins.  The collision of the Old and New Worlds was a different kind of Dark Age, brutal and tragic, literally an apocalypse.  But 500 years later a nation of that New World sent men to the Moon.  The historian Yuval Harari said that, even with all its horror, the “discovery” of the New World was the most important event in human history, because it showed all humanity that things we never imagined were possible.  All wisdom was not contained in the mythic past.  We could look forward, to a new horizon.  A New World. That was an epochal change.  

My hope is that we can make it past this new Dark Age, the bitter fruit of our foolhardiness, and civilization on the other side will be better and stronger than before.  More grounded in the earth and the people around us, more wise, more just.  Using science and technology to hallow the Earth instead of despoil it.  Mother Earth is pruning us. 

And yes, it may take 500 years. But the civilization that grows out of that dieback should be the one that can take us to the stars. Just like Bert will grow back as luxurious as before.  This after all is why I write speculative fiction; to look at the future and see how we can change it for the better.  Or what happens if we don’t. 

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This Destruction Is All for Nothing

This is one of those moments where you have to take a step back and ask—
What are we even doing?

Why is this happening?

There’s no war.
No Depression.
No invasion.
No great crisis demanding all this destruction.

We’re not reacting to catastrophe.
We’re choosing it.
Burning it all down for no good reason.

Manufactured panic.
Internet goblins.
Drag queen story hour.
Book bans.
And now, the civil service—gutted. Careers destroyed.
All for a lie.

Because some angry, scared white men would rather burn the country down that share it equitably.

I recorded this video because I couldn’t keep quiet.

Lincoln said:

> “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

And here we are.

This isn’t a righteous uprising.
It’s a tantrum.
And if we don’t say it plain, they’ll take everything with them.

It’s not about freedom.
It’s not about safety.
It’s not about survival.

It’s all for nothing.

This was hard to record.
But I had to say it.
The video’s below.

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In Praise of Public Service

It’s not easy to get a federal job. My husband Sam tried for years. The positions are highly competitive, requiring aptitude tests, education, and experience. These are not people who just stumbled into a cushy gig. They are professionals. They are competent. And they have dedicated themselves, often quietly, to the running of our society.

The Civil Service Bloodbath

Mass firings. Loyalty tests. Lifelong careers destroyed overnight. I have words about the current DOGE bloodbath in the Federal Civil Service.

It’s being handled very cavalierly by Elon and his crew of coding dweebs, and by the national press. Let me set the record straight.

The current concept of the “deep state” is either a mass of dead-eyed zombies nursing a paycheck, or a cabal of evil conspirators who are behind everything bad. But no, these are ordinary people, doing their jobs, usually for way less money than they would get in the private sector, because they care about it. Because they want to be of service.

Why Public Service Mattered to Me

My career in the public library mattered to me because it was about helping people and just giving them information, when it seems everything else in society is trying to restrict it. And it didn’t answer to the almighty dollar. It wasn’t about money. Because not everything is reducible to the bottom line. Government is not a profit-making enterprise.

Who Gets Hired and Why

There’s not much deadwood in the Federal civil service. Those are desirable jobs, even if they don’t pay as much: job security, retirement, healthcare. You have to be trained, educated. Know your shit. And you have to be prepared to wait a long time for your job application and hiring process to grind its way through the bureaucracy.

And they offer something else the private sector doesn’t: the opportunity to be of service. The Forest Service, the Postal Service, farm inspectors. There are a fair number of military veterans in the Federal ranks, because they want to continue to be of service. And they are non-partisan. Parties in power switch back and forth, individual workers have their own personal beliefs, but the work still goes on. The mail still has to be delivered. Farms still have to be inspected. The National Weather Service predicts storms. Who’s in the White House doesn’t change any of that.

Bureaucracy: The Hidden Backbone of Society

It’s human nature to bitch about how slow and useless the bureaucracy is – but when it stops working altogether: when the water stops flowing, when FEMA doesn’t come, when another salmonella outbreak occurs, people start screaming. These services are the scaffolding of modern civilized life. I think it’s better they are run by people who aren’t trying to make a profit.

How Public Service Changed Me

My time as a civil servant in the public library made me both a more compassionate and tougher person. More compassionate, because I came to see how ruthlessly human beings are used by “the system” here in the USA. Drained of their economic productivity and cast aside. And how so many people start and live their lives behind the eight ball for absolutely no fault of their own, just bad luck. Public services are supposed to help those people, not further exploit them.

But also tougher, because I needed a thick skin to embody the institutional authority that made people abide by the rules. Enforcing those rules made me more of a hardass, not less – because I came to see how enforcing “the rules” was actually the best way to ensure all the resources the library has to give were shared as equitably as possible. Everyone thinks they’re special, an exception to the rules. But if everybody’s special, nobody is, and human affairs descends into a morass of whimsy and favoritism. I feel that strongly. (The exception being those cases of actual humanitarian need. No, you can’t use the phone, but the little kid who needs to call his Mom to come get him, can.)

DOGE Firings Are an Attack on Civil Society

Look at the chaos going on with DOGE now. The propaganda is that Elon is only firing “probationary employees,” a bunch of noobs who aren’t needed. But any time you get promoted or change jobs in the civil service, you go back on “probation” for periods as long as two years. The effect of these mass DOGE firings has been to kneecap the federal civil service at every level and across the country, to disable its ability to resist Trumpian autocracy. And to rob a lot of people of their beloved careers in which they had worked decades, with no warning and for no good reason. In fact, bad ones. To consolidate personal power. Replace bureaucrats with Trumpian loyalists. Undermine public trust in the government and institutions.

Respect the Work, Defend the Workers

See the DOGE foolishness for what it really is – an attack on civilized society. On the people who keep the gears of the country turning. You don’t notice those gears when the machine is working. But when it breaks – when the roads wash out, the checks stop coming, you want us bureaucrats there, doing our jobs in service of you, the American people.

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Art as Resistance: Writing in Troubling Times

I’m doing good work on Majestic Seventeen, my current project. Creeping forward 500 words at a time. “The End” has assumed the nature of the horizon: an abstract concept that recedes before you, never attained. It’s a big book!

But I write because I don’t know what else to do.

When the World Feels Like It’s Burning

It’s hard to articulate even to ourselves how bananas and terrible everything is right now. Oligarchs crashing the entire world economy to enrich themselves further. Law-abiding people being detained and disappeared. A dipshit narcissist tech nerd chainsawing the federal government for no good reason as far as I can see. Meaning and reality themselves totter under the weight of lies and conspiracy theories. And that doesn’t even touch on the endemic problems that fester in the background — climate change, inequality. The wheels are just coming off our civilization.

This is why I write speculative fiction. To try to imagine something different, something better. Hope arising in the ruins, from lost Atlantis, from America. I have personal experience with that, rising from ruins. Hurricane Katrina. This year is the twentieth anniversary. It always shows up in my work and it will show up in a big way this year.

I watched this ruination for a while. My entire career. Public librarianship gives you a raw faceful every day of the structural injustice and endemic heartlessness of our society. You work with people who have been failed by society in every possible way. Deliberately, methodically. Then kicked when they’re down. The “digital divide” just exacerbated that over the last thirty years. Requiring computer literacy and expensive technology from people who were functionally illiterate, the first of the many ways society failed them. Having to go online to apply for a job at Walmart. It isn’t right. The public library has been the finger in the dike of that flood of injustice all along.

The year of the pandemic, I had a health crisis of my own, and when early retirement was offered as a cost saving measure for city government, I took it. So I could turn my attention to writing. Before I died.

Art Is Not a Luxury. It’s a Spell.

I pulled an Oracle card today, from the World Shamans Oracle, and the card was Orpheus. The tragic, mad poet-sage who could move the stones to weep with his song. Appropriate since I was going to work on this very blog post. The guidebook says, “Poetry is a form of shamanism that takes place in language; each word acquires value in the verses and has the power to re-enchant the world.”



That’s what I’m trying to do, why my writing feels as much a spiritual practice to me as creativity. Re-enchant the world. Western culture is absolutely desperate to re-enchant the world. I state that in my Artist’s Statement: I write “pulpy, entertaining speculative fiction that also advocates progressive values, and interrogates structures of power and belief. My goal is to entertain people by telling tales of other worlds, which help them think how we could manifest a better world here and now. ”

In times like these, art is not just entertainment or a luxury. Not an escape. It is resistance. It is survival. Do you remember how desperately we clung to art through the Covid pandemic lockdown? It was the only thing that got us through. Shows, comedy, music. Even baking bread like it was a blessed sacrament. That is what I learned from the pandemic: art is non-negotiable.

Art is life.

The Power of Naming

If shamans are healers, I’m not a healer of bodies, but of meaning. Telling stories that help bind up the wounds of civilization. The Pono Way is about solarpunk, DIY resistance to imperialism and the dangers of xenophobia. Even people who don’t like the book get the message. Daughter of Atlas is about the collapse of imperialism and the danger of ecological destruction. Majestic Seventeen is turning out to be about facing down systems of power, control, and belief. Yes, they’re all adventure speculative fiction, but I hope they’re more than just that.

My Lane is the Highway

I reference this more in my post My Lane is the Highway. I don’t need to write to put food on the table. I can let my ideas expand, experiment with different forms, different shades in the prism of speculative fiction. I write to entertain people but also make them think. Before anything new arises in the world, someone has to imagine it. I can do that.

The world we have now didn’t arise from natural selection or the invisible hand of the market. It was deliberately made, and it is working as intended. Extracting wealth and blood from the masses to gorge the billionaires. It can be unmade. All this suffering isn’t necessary. We can do better.

A Closing Incantation

So I write, because it is one thing I can control, and contribute, when the world is collapsing around me. Even at the end of empires, life still goes on. People still work and earn money. They still need entertainment. Spec Fic has always been a Trojan horse to sneak in new ideas, on the pages of pulp magazines and the panels of comic books.

My pen is my wand. My book is my spell. I sing for a better world. Creating something when the world is falling down is an act of defiant hope.

So what do you sing? What is your spell? How are you going to re-enchant the world? It needs you to dream a new dream, now more than ever. Join me.

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An Update and Thoughts on Disclosure

TIME FOR AN UPDATE. I am still grinding away on my UAP novel, Majestic-Seventeen. It’s so huge! But I really love it, I am going to wrestle this beast down.

But today I want to talk about something I think I’ve seen in my wide-ranging research that might be worth some further discussion.

I think I’ve figured out what might be happening behind the scenes with UFO Disclosure. And I don’t like it. Let me explain.

The Return of the Space Gods?

To begin, having read Sekret Machines:War when it came out recently, I’m open to the idea that there have been times in the past when the UFO Intelligence(s) was more visible in ordinary human affairs: the age of the legendary god-kings, the Zep Tepi; the Tuatha de Dannaan who retreated to the hollow hills, the Hindu Devas and the ancient battles of the Ramayana etc. “Star people.” Times when they moved among us, ordinary humans, as the mystic tall Shining Ones, teaching but also taunting us.

I think it’s possible they even created us, but that’s for another blog post.

New Age of Contact, or Just Another Mask?

I think they are preparing to do that again: reenter our lives as visible, awesome presences. But do it in the guise of our peaceful, enlightened “space brothers.” The “Pleiadeans.” The “Galactic Council of Light.” All that woo-woo Dolores Cannon stuff. A futuristic, shiny, technophilic space fantasy. We can’t believe in angels or djinn anymore, but we CAN believe in advanced, benevolent SPACE ALIENS. (See the work of Diana Pasulka.) It’s all just another mask of Magonia.

They could totally pull it off — they have been seeding the ideas in human culture since Roswell or before. They have the glowing ships, the tall perfect humans, energy medicine, free energy. They can make us see whatever they want. They could make us believe we travelled to other worlds if they wanted to. The longest con. If they commit to the bit, they could keep this up for centuries.

They’re shape changers; there is already a whole mythology of lion people, bird people, mantids … a Star Trek future for those who believe. But why now? Why this way?

Why Now?

I think because they can’t wait any longer. For 80 years they have been telling us through the “contactee” movement to clean up our act. Quite killing the earth and each other. Put away those nukes, they’re just too dangerous.

But we haven’t. We are poisoning the whole Earth, poisoning the oceans, where they seem to live now. We are an existential threat to the entire biosphere. We are endangering their survival because they live here too. In whatever liminal way, they still are part of this earth, as we are. And they are moving to protect it.

But I don’t like the people they seem to be choosing to be the messengers.

The Wrong Messengers

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison. Curtis Yarvin’s techno-fascists. The Nazi-adjacent camp of Disclosure, as it turns out. Hell, those guys may be *licensing* free energy technology from the Space Brothers. The Others (as I call them in my book) may approve of the techno-authoritarian surveillance state this crowd envisions. Those “Nordics” or Tall Whites– the tall, blond, jacked supermen — might be Space Nazis after all! Imagine that.

A lot of the lightworker/Starseed chatter on social media is about Space X and crypto and creating a new transhumanist future. This isn’t some fringe movement. It’s a well-funded ideological shift, and it’s happening right now.

It’s allied to Thiel’s plans, it seems to me. I think Thiel’s contingent is going to use Disclosure to force crypto on us, too — “the Space Brothers only accept blockchain.” And I think a lot of ordinary people will be ruined. I feel that none of these forces have the well-being of humanity in mind.

The Eternal Tricksters

Magic, intention, psionics, whatever it is, is just a tool. A force. It can be used for good or ill. Very horrible people can be powerful sorcerers. “Service to self” as the Ra Material says. I just don’t get a good vibe from it. And I’m not the only one. Patternstellstories.com say the same, and Ryan at Post Disclosure World seems to be leaning in this direction too.

Like I said, another mask of Magonia. The ancient tricksters who tease and manipulate us might be starting up in a new guise. The channeled ET being Bashar says, “the era of open contact has begun.”

High Strangeness is Growing

UAP sightings have gone way up. Harassing our militaries. The drone/orb swarms continue, under the news radar. Lots of people are reporting dreams about UAP, aliens. The Las Vegas aliens story was oddly timed. High strangeness is ramping up. Disclosure is rumored to be dropping in 2027, Tom DeLonge and John Ramirez’s ten-year timeline.

Use discernment when contemplating the Phenomenon. Remember these beings are tricksters. That’s not an insult; it’s just their nature. So, keep your eyes on the skies — but remember they may not really be from there at all. The greatest deception is the one we yearn to believe.

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That’s My Dad

I haven’t been able to get this out of my head, so I’m getting it down.

I’m sure you’re aware of Gus Walz’s big moment at the Democratic Convention:

A young man, overwhelmed with love and pride as his dad accepts the Vice Presidential nomination. It was a beautiful moment, pure emotion. Pure love. M heart squeezed as I watched.

So I knew instantly MAGA was going to come for him.

The leading edge haters did — Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza (who is a convicted felon by the way). The usual bottom feeders, calling him “a puffy beta,” “weird” and a “soy boy.” Just mocking and dragging this young man for loving his dad. He’s only 17.

But they were quickly checked by people pointing out Gus is neurodivergent. He has a learning disorder and anxiety. Mocking the disabled is still too much for rank and file MAGA, although their Dear Leader. can do it with impunity.

Remember this?

Some MAGA complained that they were “tricked” into mocking Gus. Because they “didn’t know” he was disabled. Like this fine specimen.

The Walz family has spoken publicly about Gus’s challenges and how they help him navigate them. It took a lot for him to be there in that huge stadium full of screaming people at all — as someone with anxiety as well, I know. I would have melted down. With fear, not happiness.

But here’s the thing — it doesn’t matter if Gus is neurodivergent OR NOT. Being overwhelmed with love for your father at his proudest moment is PERFECTLY NORMAL HUMAN EMOTION. There is nothing strange or unnatural about it. We should all hope to be so loved.

And you just don’t mock people like that. You just don’t. * It’s cruel. It’s small. It’s ugly.

All sorts of grown-ass people who should know better mocked a teenage boy publicly on the Internet. For *showing emotion.*

This is the worldview MAGA and Project 2025 want to bring us. This kind of “Biblical man- and womanhood.” I’m horrified by the vision of human relations they espouse. Where men are supposed to be some kind of emotionless brutes who only speak with their fists or their dick. The only acceptable emotions are rage and lust.

And women are — well, property, basically. Livestock. Breeders. Look at the landscape post-Dobbs: women who could have a brief, safe medical procedure and go on to live their lives and have more children, are dying or having their fertility forever destroyed. The right fetishizes baby-making, but don’t care if women are killed and mutilated when it goes wrong. Why do they hold our lives so cheaply?

Trump and Co. will strip women of the right to vote if they can. They flat-out say so. Peter Thiel, Posobiec, Fuentes. It’s in there.

Black men will be next.

This is the world a vote for Trump will bring us. Shitty little white men imposing their thwarted desires to be “strong” and “powerful” on the whole nation, by color of law if they can. By force if they can’t.**

These people are not mentally healthy. My husband laughed at me when I implicated “abusive parenting,” but Google “blanket training” and see if you agree with him, or with me.

Emotionally mature and stable people know, like Vice President Harris said, that leadership is truly marked not by who you beat down, but who lift up. VP Harris and Coach Walz have lifted a lot of people in their lives.

We can’t let these broken people, who can’t even recognize real love when they see it., run the country. Vote for Gus’s dad and his running mate on November 8.

*Except fascists. Mocking them is essential.

**Expect violence leading up to and on the Election Day. That’s a whole separate thing.

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For Love of Country

So I’m sitting here this morning rewatching the Democratic National Convention Roll Call, and I’m just weeping for love of country. The Roll Call starts at about 1:20:00. I don’t know how to link that, sorry.

But this is a wake and bake kind of day, and I’m retired and can do things like sit and watch a political convention all day. So take that into account.

I’m watching it on YouTube. As you see above. If you just want to watch it, it’s live-streaming on practically every social platform: YouTube, Facebook, even X.* Even Twitch. That’s how I’ve been watching. It’s great.

I should have mentioned it sooner. But there are still a couple days of convention left, and you can replay it and catch up. No commentary. ZERO spin or slant. Just the actual process of the convention itself. If you’re fed up with the “MSM” for our various reasons, ditch it and watch this beautiful celebration of democracy for yourself.

No overpaid talking heads flapping their yaps, creating their narratives, telling us we didn’t see what we all just saw. And it’s not slow or dull. It moves along at a fine clip. It is a stage production after all, and these people, unlike the GQP, are professionals. Watch it and see the diversity of the United States. This is the real America.

The idea of staging the Roll Call as some kind of geriatric rave was strangely genius. It has a live DJ with the most GenX playlist ever. But people were hyped and it moved along and it was genuinely emotional to see our country actually represented. The party grunts, the people who plan and execute these things, must all be GenX now. If we end up as kingmakers in the background, that seems strangely appropriate, doesn’t it?

I’ll have more to say about the power of live video in the future. But for now, if you’re sick of the media bullshit, watch the process of party-level democracy for yourself. It’s fun.

  • I’m not giving those sons of bitches any clicks.
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It Has To Be Said

So I watched a bit of Donald Trump’s “economic policy press conference” — via YouTube, not cable news.

Nobody is saying what needs to be said, so I’m saying it: He’s lost his mind.

That was two hours of insane, contentless raving, while the “press” stands there and says nothing. The same old ideas he has fixed in his rotting brain: windmills kill birds. Hordes of “migrants.” Barack Obama. No “policies,” no answers to “questions,” just mania. The stress of his criminal career crashing down around him while he “tries to run for office” has been too much for him. He needs a 5150.

The press hounded Joe Biden for being slow of speech until he was forced to step down. But they run hours of Trump’s deranged ramblings and say NOTHING.

It’s clear now the Fourth Estate has turned against democracy. Treat it accordingly.

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One for History

Joe Biden is going to go down as one of our greatest Presidents. His record is impeccable. He saved us from Covid, saved our economy. He revitalized NATO and roused the world to defend Ukraine. He revivified American manufacturing. The biggest climate legislation ever. And he is voluntarily stepping away from power not once but twice. Choosing to not seek re-election, and advancing a plan to rein in the Supreme Court. Instead of going batshit with his new immunity.

I think in 100 years he will be as beloved as FDR.

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DYSTOPIA

What we get after the United States ends has been a staple of science fiction prognostication as long as there has been science fiction. My own book THE PONO WAY describes a balkanized United States, also another staple. There’s the New Confederacy, the Lone Star Republic, Deseret, the Cascade States, whose dissolution drives the action of the book, and the rump end of the old United States in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. I mean, you can see it happening, can’t you? Enough people decide to take a powder on the Union. I don’t know that we’ll fight another horrific war to save it.

Another staple is an American Empire, a paranoid, xenophobic military dictatorship where the President of the United States has the powers of a Caesar. This is positively hoary. I think the movie escape from New York features that. This, too, we can clearly visualize happening: a Potemkin democracy where citizens “vote,” Congress “passes laws,” but the outcomes are predetermined by The Powers That Be.

But I always wondered how we got to that point. When in these dystopias did the American people lose their freedom, and how?

Well now we know how. A corrupt, captured Supreme Court paves the way for it, dismantling the rule of law and the core principle that no man is above it. Stripping citizens of the rights that they enjoy. Forcing their fascist beliefs on the nation under color of law. It’s the consequence when Karl Popper’s Paradox is not heeded: the intolerant use the machinery of tolerance to dismantle a tolerant society. We’re seeing it happen right now in real time. Nobody is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.

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