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 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.
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.
Today, August 1st, is the pagan Sabbat of Lammas, known as the first harvest. It is a bittersweet Sabbat, a time to give thanks for abundance while also acknowledging sacrifice. Grain must be cut down just as it ripens. Every loaf of bread carries that paradox: life transformed by death. “Corn and grain, corn and grain, all that falls shall rise again.”
My teacher Athena says Lammas is when you look around at your crops and orchards and assess how the year has gone. It’s a spiritual accounting, a time to reckon with what you’ve sown and what you’re reaping. .
Well. Look around at America right now. Tribalism has reached murderous levels. The ecomony is in the toilet. The world is shunning America: see the empty sidewalks of the Las Vegas Strip. It’s hard to feel much joy in this harvest. One man’s brokenness is wrecking the whole country. We’ve tied our fate to someone fundamentally unfit to lead, and the results are everywhere: fear, cruelty, decay. It’s always easier to destroy than create.
Lammas doesn’t let us look away from that. It says: here is your harvest. This is what comes of the choices we’ve made, the power we’ve allowed one man to hoard. The weakness of our institutions.
For years Lammas was my absolute least favorite day of the year. Because it is the festival when it is evident the year is more than half over. It arrived every year with a sense of panic: the year was almost gone! And I hadn’t done what I wanted to do!
When I retired and turned to writing as my main pursuit, I no longer felt that panic. Because I was doing what I intended. Writing is what I wanted to do, even if every day is a struggle.
I do feel panic when I think about the state of the country. But I feel that every day.
So let us remember, Lammas also points forward. It is a time for gratitude. For those who resist. For our many friends around the world who are praying and hoping for us. For those things we still have and must protect: free speech and freedom of assembly.
The second harvest hasn’t happened yet. There’s still time to tend what’s left, and to decide what to plant for next year. What sacrifices we’re willing to make so that there will be a next year worth living in.
I hope you all have a bountiful Lammas. and a more bountiful one next year.
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.
This was a hell of a weekend. I hardly feel like I know up from down right now. Huge protests, tiny parades, political murder, American patriotism. Personal family stuff. A neck-snapping series of events.
Two things are staying with me this Monday night. I don’t know if they relate, or how they do, except perhaps they show the two poles of events in America this past weekend.
First, every time I see that video clip of the old tank squeaking down the street in Fotus’ limp-dick parade, I feel such a hot stab of mixed shame and glee that I burst out laughing – the kind of laugh that’s forced out of you as a defense mechanism.
Shame, because it hurts to see the United States Army brought that low, used like that. Glee, because it’s exactly what Fotus deserves, a creaky-ass vintage tank creeping alone along the street, while the few people there watch in dead silence. An absurd, pathetic failure. Instant karma. This is why we don’t have these sorts of parades in the United States anyway. They’re stupid and lame.
The second thing is the … I guess the lack of shock I feel at the political assassinations in Minnesota. Which by any normal metric is completely shocking and beyond the pale. A civil society with the rule of law does not use violence to resolve political disputes. Horrifying!
But we have been beyond the pale for quite a while now.
This is the way things are now. MAGA has been nursing and inculcating violence, poltical violence, for ten years. They’ve told themselves Democrats are commie devil-worshippers and deserve what they get. They’ve postured with their guns and cosplayed as warriors when half of them are on disability. They have actively seeded and stoked these sentiments all across the country while denying all responsibility.
I don’t know how we put that genie back in the bottle. I don’t know that we do, not in my lifetime. These people have been cultivating their rage, their violence, their sense of grievance for a decade now. It’s no surprise when it bursts out as actual violence.
But on the other hand there were the No Kings marches, where America stood up and flipped the big double bird to our wannabee dictator. Even in Minnesota, where the citizens had been advised to stay home because the assassin was still at large, they defied fear and showed up by the thousands.
I hope the world saw. All this bullshit is against our will. The majority of America does not want this. We want to end it. My intuition has always been, there are more good people than bad in the world. But the bad people do an outsized amount of damage. Right now the bad people are very loud and violent. But we have to remember they are a minority. A sick, broken minority. But this is a democracy, and we intend to keep it.
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.
Atlantis Fallen 