So after 41 days of government shutdown, the longest on record, Democrats caved on the continuing resolution to fund the government. They acquired nothing that they had wanted, especially maintaining the healthcare subsidies, except a “promise“ to vote on the subsidies in December – a promise that will be broken, of course.
The vote was taken late on Sunday night, in the hopes people wouldn’t learn about it until it was done. Eight Senate moderates (corporatists) were chosen to fall on their swords, because they are not up for election next year. Long enough for the citizenry to forget this betrayal.
Congressman Ro Khanna called on Chuck Schumer to step down as Senate Minority Leader. Supposedly he, Schumer, was against this move by the moderates. But if you can’t even whip the votes of your own party, you cannot save democracy. You need to go. AOC may come for his seat.
The progressive Internet and media convulsed. Jon Stewart’s monologue tonight was just him screaming “I can’t fucking believe it!” interspersed with jokes. Independent Internet media like Meidas Touch are going bananas.
Nobody can fucking believe it. This is a collapse, an utter failure, a betrayal. Democrats put America through over a month of hardship for absolutely nothing, nothing at all. Less than a week after the Blue Wave special elections. After 8 million people marching for No Kings. The citizenry told Congressional Democrats in no uncertain terms that we want them to fight for our democracy. Instead they folded like an umbrella.
One has to ask – if three-quarters of the citizenry wants something to happen (extend the subsidies), and it doesn’t, how can we call that democracy?
Answer: it’s not.
There is a lesson to be learned from this debacle. The lesson is that Congressional Democratic leadership does not represent the citizenry. They represent their lobbyists and corporate donors. That is who is behind this collapse. The stock market is starting to waver. The airlines want their Thanksgiving travel. Walmart wants its SNAP monies again, to support their workers and take from their customers. They’re all afraid of the upcoming Black Friday boycott. Senate Dems just showed us who they truly work for.
The response needs to be a grassroots uprising to take over the party from the corporatists. No mercy. They are not our representatives. They are our enemies. There isn’t time to build out the infrastructure or secure funding for a new third party, just a year till the midterms. And third parties seldom work in the American system anyway. The extant Democratic Party structure is what we need. Starting at the county level, citizen leaders take over the local Democratic Party structure, and uses it to support progressive, fiery young candidates who will take no corporate money but truly represent the people. And elect those candidates so they will strike down Citizens United with legislation and do everything else in the New New Deal to shore up our democracy.
We can’t wait any longer. We the People have been the last line of defense for democracy through the entire Trump era. Now we need to go on the offense. Because there’s another lesson to be learned. These people, politicians, are willing to let us starve and die while they play their power games. It’s a matter of survival.
I had to wrestle down my social anxiety to do it, but we (my husband and I) went to the No Kings rally this weekend.
Selfie!
I’m so glad we did it. It wasn’t a protest as much as a hangout. People gathering with costumes and signs to say, “We’re not okay with this. And we’re not afraid of you.”
You know New Orleanians are going to be creative.
CNBC was correct to name it a street party vibe. It certainly was in New Orleans. Drums, music, crazy costumes. Kind of a festival vibe, but a serious festival. Deep play. Play for now, but it will turn serious if needed.
My favorite inflated animal costume: the Axolotl!
Almost seven million people turned out to say “No kings in America.” Ordinary people like me, you. Us. There were no serious incidents nationwide. In New York City and Washington, DC, there were no injuries or arrests arising from the protest. There were no gun incidents.
Old farts can rant about the “radical violent leftists” of their youth. Half a century ago. Things have changed.
Progressives, leftists, Democrats are not the violent ones in this moment. Not the gun nuts. Not the ones who spawn shooter after mass shooter.
Now, it’s the Christian Nationalists, the militant white supremacists. Ultra-right and ultra dangerous.
I rant. The march made me — us — feel good. Feel hopeful. We’re not alone in seeing how crazy this all is.
No Kings!
Let’s hang onto that feeling and let it fuel our resistance until the next big action. The next will be even bigger.
I feel a simmering anger at the way Reconstruction was taught to me, even in higher education. I majored in history, but even in our advanced classes, the truth was glossed over. Reconstruction was not taught as the dismal failure that it was, where the South successfully threw off the first attempt at multi-racial democracy with sustained violence and corruption. The federal government just gave up, and the Lost Cause myth and Jim Crow were allowed to flourish.
If we’d been taught that better, we might have an understanding of what’s happening now. On one level, the Civil War never ended. The battle over whether America is a white apartheid state or not has yet to be decided.
We are in an active state of civil war right now. MAGA fascist Washington against blue states and cities. You may not know, because the newsmedia is not covering it as the emergency it is.
On September 30, ICE assaulted a Chicago apartment building in the dead of night with Blackhawk attack helicopters, rappelling down onto the building, smashing the windows, dragging the occupants out, some naked, shackling them in rental vans. At the end of the multi-hour siege, ICE claimed to have arrested several “gang members.” But no warrants were ever displayed. No badges. No rights.
FOTUS calls it “training.” But it is a demonstration of State power against American civilians, citizens. Those FOTUS calls “the enemy within.” Ordinary Americans who didn’t vote for him.
The newsmedia folds it into the default “culture war” narrative. No! This is war war! Military units and munitions deployed against American civilians in American cities because they displease the Dear Leader. The “both sides” framing obscures the asymmetry of State violence.
Confederates called it “Redemption” when they toppled Reconstruction. Now MAGA claims to be “making America great” as they dismantle democracy and wage war on their fellow citizens.
YOU NEED TO WAKE THE FUCK UP!
This is real. This is happening now. Our military is turned against us. Our rights are being shredded. FOTUS is selling FOTUS 2028 hats. We could end our lives with this country in a state of squalid unfreedom.
Don’t wait for permission to be alarmed. You won’t get it. The powers that be want us to be docile, distracted lambs to the slaughter. Don’t let the quotidian grind numb you to what is happening. The cold war of American history has become hot again. Don’t deny it! We have to fight however we can.
This time, we have to finish it once and for all. Our descendants shouldn’t have to fight this war again in another hundred years. If Nathan Bedford Forrest had danced at the end of a rope, he wouldn’t have been around to found the Ku Klux Klan. The decent, democratic people of this country can’t make the same mistake again.
“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.
finally wrestle back our democracy, whether this year or next year or thirty years from now, I think we will deserve – and should expect – to be rewarded for our heroic efforts. Organizing, resisting, defending the rule of law. That means deep structural change to reform the government and support the citizenry going into the future. No more bailing a leaky boat.
It’s time for some kind of New Deal.
Teddy Roosevelt in his time had the Square Deal. FDR stepped it up with the New Deal. LBJ had the Great Society. We need a new impulse of this reforming movement. A MAJOR one.
AOC tried the Green New Deal, but that became a lighting rod for kneejerk partisanship. I can’t think of a better name than the Gen-X inflected term the New New Deal. No bullshit. Everyone knows what it means. It is time to repair the damage done by forty years of Republican sabotage of the New Deal. The rot started with Reagan with his supply-side fantasy economics and dog-whistled white supremacy. He courted Christian fanatics as voting blocs but did the bidding of the Heritage Foundation. The super-rich. Starve the public good to engorge the already wealthy, and imply it is godly to do so. “Greed is good.” Now, forty years later, we are suffering the effects of those policies, political and economic. It’s too expensive, too perilous for an ordinary person to just live a life.
The New New Deal
We need to repair and rebalance our government to make it properly democratic and build a social safety net that supports democracy into the future. This is all doable and well within the bounds of the Constitution.
Here are what I think are the top ten things that should be in any kind of New New Deal.
1. Universal Voting Rights and Election Integrity
One human, one vote, freely and fairly. It’s time to stop messing around with the fundamentals of democracy. End gerrymandering, universal voter registration, paper ballots. Election Day as a national holiday. Restore the Voting Rights Act. Hell, make voting required by law. It works in Australia.
2. Federal Funding of Federal Elections
End reliance on private money by providing full public funding for all federal campaigns; ban super PACs and dark money. If it takes an Amendment to ensure that, we do it.
3.Overturn Citizens United
Get dark money out of politics altogether. It is corrosive to the entire system. It allowed the propaganda to spread that brought us to this pass. Money does not equal speech. Restore strict limits on campaign contributions and require full transparency for all political spending. Maybe even put it on a blockchain.
4. Abolish the Electoral College
Again, this will take a Constitutional Amendment, but it is essential for repair of our republic. The EC is a relic of slavery, and it has extravagantly failed to do what it was ostensibly supposed to do: prevent the election of a tyrannical madman. The President must be chosen by direct popular vote like any properly democratic country.
5. Expand the House of Representatives.
The House of Representatives was last expanded in 1913, over a century ago. The population has almost tripled since then. And that was back in the age of rail; we are in the age of Zoom. Enlarging the house is not against the Constitution. It used to be done regularly. It will make the House more responsive to the People, as it was intended to be.
6. Reform the Supreme Court
What was supposed to be the bulwark of the rule of law has been completely captured. It needs dramatic reform. A binding code of ethics for the Justices, and 18-year term limits are necessary repairs. Also enlarge the size of the court to 13, to meet the number of District Courts.
7. Universal Basic income
It is time for the explosion of productivity released by the Industrial and Computer Revolutions to be returned to those who actually produced it, the workers. We did the labor that allowed this current grotesque explosion of wealth to emerge (cue Jeff Bezos). We deserve our cut. And that goes double for the oncoming singularity of wealth and innovation to be released by the AI Revolution. There is enough for everyone. Stop telling us there isn’t. We see it all around us.
8. Universal Access to High-Quality Public Education
An informed, educated citizenry is essential to a functioning democracy. People who understand what’s at stake and are not swayed by memes and vibes. Fully fund public K–12 and higher education; invest in trade schools, ensure civic education and critical thinking are at the core.
9. Strengthen Labor Rights and Collective Bargaining
Capital without the check of Labor will consume the world. The oligarchs have forgotten that we the people do the labor and buy the products that make them wealthy. Protect the right to unionize, restore collective bargaining, and enforce fair labor standards for all workers.
10. Restore the Fairness Doctrine
In whatever 21st century guise it requires. We need to reestablish it in spirit — the news needs to be established as a public good again, not a source of revenue. The Founding Fathers recognized the importance of a free press. We need to do the same. That educated citizenry needs professional news organizations delivering factual, balanced information. As it is, it’s nothing but a dopamine extractor.
My question is, why not swing for the fences? We are not fighting so damn hard to restore the old, broken status quo. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City shows us that. It’s time to really dig in and fix what’s been broken our entire adult lives.
There are my suggestions for a New New Deal for the American people. What are your ideas? The time to plan is now. We have the means. Let’s have the will.
Atlantis Fallen 