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.
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.
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.
Atlantis Fallen 