“In the morning, after getting out of jail, I awaken with a voice in my dream saying: ‘They can let you out of jail, because now they’ve put the jail inside your mind.’”
Starhawk: Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery
I spent the weekend wading in the trenches of the Charlie Kirk culture war. Another tortured watershed for the American people. A new round of purging of their contact lists for white people. A new round of we told you so for people of color. People of influence are tightening the screws. The whole country is on its last nerve. A new level of incredible (in the strictest sense) outrage and passion for what, after all, was just another gun crime. God rest his soul.But I’ve learned a lot. I learned:
I learned how much MAGA wants to hurt us. Ordinary Americans.
I learned how fascism works.
I learned that Manifestation really works.
We are in very dire danger. This country is on the brink of mass bloodshed. I’m reminded of the Cultural Revolution, or the Rwandan genocide, or the Army-McCarthy hearings. When moral panic turns into frenzy and people turn upon their neighbors.
MAGA is trying as hard as they can to turn Charlie Kirk into a martyr, a holy sacrifice for the freedom of White America. Murdered by the blue-haired trans radical left. This is how fascism works. Truth, facts don’t matter, are an active impediment to meaning. Truth is too complicated. Reality is scary. Meaning comes from feelings, from vibes. Stories people tell to make themselves feel better.
A Nazi Nuremberg Rally
I didn’t realize until this happened how much MAGA wants to hurt the rest of us. Ordinary Americans who are progressive, Democratic. They are slavering for it. They have been whipped into such a state of fear and anger, with fantasies of QAnon and kindergarten gender surgery that they feel their lives are in existential danger. They are just waiting for the word. They said so. They want to kill us before we kill them. (It’s projection. It’s all projection.)
I realized, that too is how fascism works. It wants you whipped up into such a sense of fear and danger that you compromise your own values. Think things, do things, you would never do in peaceful times. Lying, snitching, hurting people, because you think you have to do it to survive. Or at least let it happen. Let ICE take care of it. It’s necessary.
Truth and facts cannot hold sway against existential fear. The fear and stress shut down your frontal cortex and activate the limbic system, the flight and flight centers in your brain. It doesn’t even have to be real. It just has to be loud and scary and repeated.
We are in a state of cold civil war. This is memetic warfare. My AI Hal laid out a neat timeline of how the heat has been turned up on this boiling frog, America, in the 21st Century.
🕰️ Culture War as Surrogate for Meaning — A Timeline in Four Acts
I. Foundations (1970s–1990s): Roots of the Culture War
Late 1970s: Rise of the Moral Majority and religious right in response to Roe v. Wade, sexual revolution, civil rights gains. First stirrings of reaction.
1980s–1990s: Culture war as moral panic—over metal music , Satanic ritual abuse, violent video games, prayer in schools.
Meaning Crisis Begins: Economic stagnation for working class post-1973. Neoliberal consensus takes hold. Religion and nation become emotional anchors.
II. Polarization & Performance (2000s–2010s): Culture War Becomes Identity
9/11 and After: National trauma hardens partisan divides. Patriotism becomes a performative loyalty test.
Facebook Era: Memes replace sermons. Identity becomes performance. Meaning flattens into team signals.
III. Substitution (2016–2022): Culture War as Meaning Itself
Trump’s Ascent: No policy, just vibes. Culture war becomes the only political currency. Owning the libs as an identity sacrament.
QAnon & Conspiracy Revival: Offers mythic structure to the chaos—heroes, villains, rituals. People join for the story.
COVID Era: Culture war invades medicine, science, masks, vaccines. Literal death becomes a badge of belief.
IV. The Terminal Spiral (2023–Present): Culture War as Sacred Bloodsport
Post-Roe World: Abortion becomes a proxy for total moral control.
Trans Panic: New outgroup manufactured to sustain moral crusade.
Education, Libraries, DEI: Every institution that transmits meaning becomes a battlefield.
Progressives React: Not just policy battles but competing visions of reality. Narrative war escalates.
Now: Shared reality disintegrates. For many, the culture war is the only war they feel they’re winning. It feels like purpose.
I was alive for all this. I remember this. The women’s movement. The Moral Majority. The Satanic Panic. I knew when I was 13 years old that electing Ronald Reagan was going down a bad road. I sensed it could bring us to this pass.
And I see echoes of other terrible times now. The Cultural Revolution: attacking scholars and artists, just because they are that. (Which in turn calls back to the fenshu kengru – look that up.) The Rwandan genocide: relentless media messaging that Others your neighbor and dehumanizes them. Vermin. Poisoning the blood. McCarthyism: neighbors and family snitching on each other. “Better dead than Red.”
As family and social trust crumbled under the neoliberal assault, were stripped of meaning and power, people turned to garbage internet memes and staged conflicts to bring purpose to their lives. (Me too, me too. I went nuts with Kamala cat lady memes.). Info warfare has become so successful that the last election was decided on memes and vibes. Facts were absent in this process. People voted on how they feel. Not what’s best. What makes them feel better. The culture war has become an end in itself. Owning the libs. Drinking MAGA tears. In a political landscape where we are so impotent, it feels like meaning. The only fight you can win.
Of course, we never can, though. The narrative just churns on and on.
And that how’s Manifestation works. You don’t have to believe in any woo-woo magic stuff either. MAGA spoke their tortured worldview into being.
“In the morning, after getting out of jail, I awaken with a voice in my dream saying: ‘They can let you out of jail, because now they’ve put the jail inside your mind.’”
Starhawk: Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery
Starhawk, the Wiccan activist and author, was often jailed for direct protest actions. When she got out the first time, she dreamed that dream.
That how it works. That’s how MAGA got their run-up to Armageddon. They just kept saying it and saying it, a giant media ecosystem spewing our fear and outrage, us versus them, xenophobia and hierarchy 24/7/365. They spoke that world into being by putting it other people’s minds. We’re kept jacked up, terrified, flooded with cortisol, unable to think. And so we lash out. And the cycle continues.
We’re headed to the Boogaloo, because they put the Boogaloo inside our minds.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s speech as magic. Abracadabra, which is corrupted Aramaic for I create as I speak.
I fear we’re heading to a Terror like the French Revolution. The logic of the purge – when a culture has failed so badly it cannot workout its tensions anymore without mass violence. When the revolutionaries even turn against themselves, the war of all against all. While the oligarchs sit in their doomsday bunkers and count their blood money.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
–Voltaire
So how do we end this deadly meme-war? What stops this chaos magic?
A counterspell. A new story of meaning, renewal, and rebirth. We, those who don’t want to fight, need to speak out. We need to make art, grow vegetables, build community, tell jokes, have joy. Love is the antidote to fear. Being out in nature, being with your friends, eating good food, music, movies: all these things help us feel better too. We will speak our world into being now.
The difference is our world includes MAGA — happy, safe, living their lives. There’s enough for all. We need to speak it. The real things in life: work, family, community, faith. The things that create connection, not disruption, they are the counter-spell.
Remember that you have the sovereign power to know for yourself, and you don’t have to accept a narrative someone else wants you to believe. We speak our worlds into being. And we call our people back into connection, with jokes and memes, yes. The Court Jester was the only one who could tell the King the plain truth, in the guise of humor.
It won’t be easy. The Dominionists have worked on scaling those Seven Mountains for forty years of dedicated effort. Generations have lived and died in their spell. But to break it, all we have to do is open our mouths. The revival begins now.
When I was a kid my dad taught me about Zeno’s Paradox. It’s a physics thought experiment from classical Greece, about time and movement. If every step you take toward your goal halves the distance, and every step halves the remaining difference – then how do you ever reach your goal?
MAGA’s behavior is like an Inverse Zeno’s Paradox – instead of halving, every step doubles down, and the end is not nowhere, but Armageddon.
For the last 48 hours we have been treated to a constant stream of red-faced MAGAs on social media scream-crying about how they’re “going to kill all us motherfuckers” for Charlie Kirk’s death. Ranting, choking, calling for civil war. Just unhinged. Jesse Waters on FOX said “they are at war with us now,” meaning the left, before the shooter was even identified. FOTUS went on Fox and raged, the President of the United States, raged about killing “leftists.” Red America unanimously decided, absent all evidence, that Democrats were to blame and they would be punished.
But the call was coming from inside the house. Kirk’s killer was a Groyper – a white supremacist, Jew-hating Nick Fuentes fan. Not trans. Not left. Not a Democrat. A white, Mormon, ultra-MAGA gun nut. Imagine that.
But there will be no gut-check for MAGA. No come-to-Jesus moment. They will not stop to reflect on their behavior. They refuse self-examination. Since the truth is not to their liking, they will pretend this never happened, and next time it happens (because it will) they will double down, becoming even more hysterical. More violent. Acting it out.
It’s the tactic they take from Dear Leader: never admit error, never retract, never reflect — always double down. Increase the noise, the outrage, the wild accusations. That’s how narcissists work. Self-reflection feels like annihilation to them because their self-concept is so brittle, a gilded shell over a howling emptiness.
Lot of narcissists in MAGA. Authoritarian parenting creates them.
But this isn’t a thought experiment. This is real life. Escalating conflict every time you’re challenged does not lead to good order. It leads to chaos and violence. Reverse Zeno’s Paradox.
If you “double down” every time with political action, eventually you get to detonating nuclear bombs.
Most of MAGA are Christian nationalists slavering for Judgment Day anyway. Nuclear holocaust is not a bug to them, it’s a feature.
I’m angry that MAGA as a whole, from the President on down, can conduct this anti-social, un-American behavior and receive no correction, either from within or without. No think pieces about de-escalating the rhetoric. No humble TikToks. Jesse Waters isn’t going to get fired like Matthew Dowd. No, indeed.
So I’m doing it. MAGA, you need to check yourself. Your hysteria, your racism, your violence. You all claim to be such chest-thumping patriots, but your revanchist anger is what’s destroying this country.
For the rest of us – they won’t of course. If anything, this episode has shown what genuinely terrible people hard-core MAGA are. So we have to step up and do it, hold the line against extremism. Remember what I said yesterday. Refuse the spectacle. It’s eating us alive.
I’m troubled by the narrative that is forming around the murder of Charlie Kirk, and what it says about the country. (Just to be clear, I condemn his murder. This violence is never justified. Terrible thing.) The right is absolutely losing their shit, baying for blood. Calling for civil war. Some tankies and other disruptors are celebrating his death in ugly ways, with memes and spite. (This also I condemn.)
The press and social media are already dubbing Kirk a “hero” and a “martyr” – although the shooter remains at large and the motive unknown. Calling this a “political assassination.” None of this is true or factual. Just assumptions, goosing the narrative of “America on the brink” and FOTUS needing to impose martial law.
Contrast this with the recent terror attacks on Minnesota state legislators in June. State Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were gunned down in their home. State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were similarly attacked but survived. Their young daughter witnessed the attack. They both were Democrats. Their attacker had a “hit list” of 50 Democratic and left-leaning names.
No one named them heroes or martyrs. No one threatened violent retribution in their names. It fell out of the news in 48 hours. Sitting legislators. Assassinated. FOTUS never said a word. He lowered the flags for Kirk. Refused to for the Hortmans.
Charlie Kirk was an uneducated loudmouth provocateur. Melissa Hortman was a Speaker of the Minnesota House, a senior Democratic leader. Why is Charlie Kirk’s death a tragedy, but the Minnesota legislator’s, not?
Because it fits the narrative.
The hagiography is disgusting. Charlie Kirk was a “champion of free speech.” No. Turning Point USA doxxed people regularly. That is not championing free speech; it’s the opposite.
Charlie Kirk died as he lived, fomenting extremism. The last word out of his mouth was “violence.”
I don’t like what this says about the country, about we as a people. Numb to the assassination of a sitting legislator, enraged (or titillated) by the death of a social media influencer. The American people are addicted to spectacle, to scandal, and it is making us increasingly blind to the grim reality that surrounds us.
The shockingly violent death and the gory video fit the Internet and media’s appetite (our appetite) for bloodshed and drama, further stoking the “culture war.” It fits the media’s “outrage cycle” perfectly. The sky is falling for a couple days, and then we move on to the next spectacle. A man who stirred constant trouble and unrest is lionized, and serving legislators go unmourned. Our values are degraded.
These massaged narratives are making us numb to the real institutional decay all around us, the corruption and state violence. Our energies are expended on meaningless “breaking news” while our rights and way of life are being eroded. Media elevates those who create conflict and scandal while ignoring people who actually do the work of making this country run.
It’s manipulative, keeping people oscillating between outrage and overwhelm. Authoritarians do that deliberately; inculcate a sense of learned helplessness in their subjects so they lose the will to fight back. It’s all part of the messaging. And it has warped our priorities. A podcaster’s death is casus belli, while an assassinated legislator barely makes the news. Blood and screaming elevated over the real-time erosion of our democracy. We don’t have our eye on the ball.
The real danger isn’t any single shooting or any one death. It’s the erosion of civil liberties, of the very idea of civil society itself. You cannot have a republic if anyone can be gunned down anywhere at any time, while the rule of law becomes a joke. That’s what Charlie Kirk advocated, what FOTUS threatens, and what creeps forward every day. Addiction to scandal blinds us to the slow-motion coup all around us.
America doesn’t need any more martyrs. We need clarity, vision, and the strength to look at the terrible reality behind the veil of spectacle.
Atlantis Fallen 