Here we go

This roller coaster has climbed the hill, we're all strapped in, and the ride is about to start

As I write this, I’m looking at a foot plus of snow outside that I have to shovel out of the way to get to where I need to go, and am struck by the appropriateness of that metaphor.

It’s just over one year into the Trump regime, and we’re in the end stages of the installation of a durable fascist regime atop the corpse of the republic, and having just seen two murders under color of law in the last few weeks, it seems they’re preparing to speed run the last few steps.

The window on slowing or stopping this is about shut now, we’ve still got no real national coordination of labor and resources we’d need to mount an effective long term resistance, so it looks like the odds are in their favor for the moment.

Propaganda maintenance costs legitimacy

But they’re also in a very precarious spot, made evident by the new phenomenon of conservative gun nuts who spent the last two decades giving thoughts and prayers to school shooting victims as an acceptable cost to keep weapons capable of fighting the government if it went rogue, who celebrated the Bundy standoff and later occupation of a federal building, who cheered Kyle Rittenhouse, all of a sudden want you to know that a 9mm pistol with a red dot is a military grade dangerous weapon and he had TWO MAGAZINES!?

Suddenly the “dead kids are the price for me to own an AR15” crowd are real fucking serious about the risks of armed people wandering about carrying concealed, but only when “obstructing federal officers”, criminal acts such as helping an old lady who got pushed by a confederate mall cop.

This all has a cost, not in cognitive dissonance, but in exhaustion and loss of the zealous thrall that is now nearing a fever pitch, which means that the regime has to build the fear that justifies their taking of power, create threats to demonstrate the power being used, and then propaganda to make the MAGA Classic cult loudly proclaim their thoughts on NATO, Greenland, immigrants, antifa, and the gender police.

Building narrative as a replacement community

This works generally well when it’s not diametrically opposed to the old dogma, NATO was orthogonal to most of the agenda but they made that abrupt turn based on the seeds planted in the first term, but when it’s stuff like anti-gun propaganda it’s going to cause some of the MAGA base to say “wait a second” and think critically, which is the one thing they CANNOT do if they want to finish the coup.

What they need to win is to get the base so fervent and so scared and so loudly demanding the oppression become complete so that they act as an armor for the movement, preventing others from resisting and engaging in false narrative spreading and general intimidation of “paid leftist agitators” to other us as they have other undesirable minorities.

This builds both a reality outside our own in which they continue to nurture belief in the narrative over objective truth, have it reinforced and celebrated by leaders and community, and have a deep and hard to break connection between the movement and the members.

It locks them in because questioning it breaks the illusion, and the baked in response to anyone breaking the illusion is shunning, so it’s almost like asking them to break out of the matrix, only to be dumped down the tubes to the waste tank, and if there’s no Nebuchadnezzar to pick them up then there’s no chance they’d willingly break out of the illusion.

Rut ro

But even with all these hooks into the base, there’s still a finite supply of zealous fervor, it can be fueled up and turbocharged with more violence and spectacle from the state, but it has a limited shelf life, and they know this, which is why they are moving so fast and faster every day.

We’re approaching the point in the exponential acceleration of the coup is going to be a straight up line, as Lenin said “there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen”, and we’re having some fucking decades right now for sure.

But this also exposes the weakness, if they can’t get lifted over the bar and eliminate the last few ties to the old republic, they’ll falter and probably fall over, since the actual administration is packed with morons, assholes, fools, and narcissists, and they’ll implode soon if not protected by a durable fascist regime openly operating.

Delay is Defeat for fascism

In many cases of failed right wing takeovers of various countries, the speed of action and compliance of the masses are the critical measures of success or failure, and right now we’re all in on speed and completely paralyzed on compliance.

Delaying them from being able to carry out their false flag actions will make it hard to justify the extreme measures we’re about to see implemented to deal with the “emergency” created by ICE malfeasance, and if we can prevent the last phase from being completed, that makes getting them out and replaced with a legitimate government much less dangerous.

They have to make every move bring them to the goal, the latest murder is so brazen that it’s having a big impact on the narrative lock-in, if we can avoid any more ICE attacks then they can’t generate cause to shut down congress or whatever the emergency decree will be.

That would leave them unable to clear the barrier to completely seize power, but we’d still have a lot of work fixing political stagnation and a lack of viable political party, but those can be fixed if we’re smart about avoiding that last big show and final crank of the wheel.

ICE has to be seen as an illegitimate paramilitary

Because that’s what it is, and Democrats can whinge all day about how we “need ICE” and “deportations the right way were fine”, but this was always a shitty system full of shitty people doing shitty things because shitty politicians wanted to use the threat of terrorists and immigrants to let them build a paramilitary force larger than the fucking Marine Corps.

DOGE cut the legs off every other agency, Trump’s appointees are paralyzing the federal machinery, all that is really working are military and ICE and they’re being used as the regime’s stormtroopers, and they cannot be allowed to operate or even be in our communities.

I’m going to start going to all my governor’s reeelection events to ask her to use the guard and state police to evict ICE entirely from the state, and arrest/prosecute any who have committed crimes under color of law.

If we can get one governor or sheriff to take the initiative to say “these dangerous goons can’t come here”, then a domino effect can be induced, and we can seriously undercut the legitimacy and operational range of these Proud Boys with armored cars.

They’ve set the tone, we’ve got to adjust

This phase will end with bloodshed, I wish there was a way to avert it but we are locked in and the bad guys have a plan that’s going to crush workers while they finish looting the country and economy out from under us, and we’ve got to be ready for that.

Avoiding conflict is the best strategy, but it’s going to be harder now that summary execution in the street is allowed and celebrated, so make sure you’re aware of the risk that going out now carries, and be safe by moving in groups.

I think we should remain as peaceful and nonviolent as they are to us, and hope that we can get them in a few more cases of bad optics clearly showing them as who they are, to build up more popular political support to push them out of our government.

This is the moment when we’re going to find out if America really is what it has always claimed to be, or if that was just another piece of false narrative impressed in us since birth, and more importantly for each of us to find out if we are what we’ve always claimed to be.