Author: Alan Buddug

Authoritarianism Goes Hand-in-hand with Late-stage Capitalism

“Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.” -Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 1998

“One direction involves workers struggling collectively and pulling millions of impoverished people behind them. The other involves demagogues exploiting the sense of hopelessness, demoralisation, and fragmentation to direct the bitterness of one section of the impoverished mass against other sections.” -Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism, 2009

“I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time.” -Joe Biden, 2019

Back in 2021, after Biden was elected, our local people in Mid-Missouri seemed to prefer not to consider that Trump could become president again. Where, prior to the 2020 election, we’d hosted twice-weekly campfire meetings for friends worried their neighbors’ safety, by mid-November 2020, both community meetings and inquiries about firearms training had already dried up. Inquiries about joining the club also came to an end, and soon after, many of our own vetted members chose – for a variety of valid personal reasons – to leave the club, simply because the sense of urgency was no longer there. While I continued to try to read vigorously, to write for this blog, and to perform quiet service work, by 2023 I too found it all too easy to reclaim the arts & sciences life I’d enjoyed for decades prior to 2016.  

But the steadfast march of authoritarianism under capitalism, with or without Trump, is something that does not go away. I often think of capitalism’s devolution right now like a steamroller going down a long hill; a few well-placed straw bales, like four years under Biden or another four years under Harris, might slow it down, but the steamroller can’t be stopped, not until its own internal forces have played themselves out. As Harman said in the quote above, the way it plays out can be via a people’s revolution, or via authoritarianism. The aftermath of January 6th should have been our clue, because unlike 1970s America after Watergate and Vietnam, the nation as a whole never came together to repudiate January 6th; as several comrades said at the time, this gets worse before it gets better. 

And none of us should ever think that the Democratic party and their allied pundits, as they try to understand what went wrong in 2024, are ever going to understand that authoritarianism is, right now, the inevitable & necessary fellow traveler of capitalism. I looked up responses to Biden’s 2019 statement above about Trumpism being aberrant, and here are some things I found: 

Jeffrey C. Isaac, a professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington, frames Trumpism as having a good ol’ American basis in the Bill of Rights. Even while the seeds of good things like abolition and emancipation were ensconced there, so were the seeds of the KKK and the racist beliefs of people like Jefferson Davis, because these things too go along with being “independent.” Someone like Trump fits right in with this entirely American phenomenon of “elemental forces,” as another historian, Jon Meachem, has characterized them, or the “ugly American” stereotype. 

Another professor, Dan P. McAdams at Northwestern University, frames Trump as having a Christ-like appeal. “In the minds of millions,” he says, “Trump is more than a person.” Characterizing himself as a “golden god” in his own mind, Trump is, in keeping with former authoritarians like Mussolini, a “liminal” figure, a “personified entity around which mythologies are made — much more than a person could ever be, and much less.” 

There’s also the Republican-party-in-descent angle. Mehdi Hasan, a columnist and host at The Intercept and Al Jazeera English’s UpFront, characterizes Trump as the logical consequence of a Republican party that has fanned obstructionist flames since at least the 1990s; as others have similarly argued about Gingrich’s movement from that time, through the Tea Party movement, to the present, “Trump is a symptom of longstanding Republican nihilism and derangement — not the cause of it.”

All of these perspectives have some truth – Trump does embody an elemental and obstinate American sensibility of “independence” dating to the time of our foundation; he has come to embody (for many) somebody set apart from mere humans; and he is the logical outcome of a Republican party that has, finally, given into its latent longing for rightist bigotry. But none of these analyses seem to consider why Trump’s very American, liminal, and extremist-Republican views have traction, and why they have traction now. In other words, even the experts still don’t get it. 

Well… maybe one expert gets it. Shortly after the 2024 election, Bernie Sanders had this to say about the Democrats: 

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them…. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power?”

I remember volunteering for the Democrats in 2004 (simply because at the time I didn’t know what else to do). One day a rep from the local construction union walked in to confirm that the local was behind the party, and asked what the union could do to help; and I recall thinking: what is he doing here? With the snap-button flannel shirt, trucker ballcap, and tool belt he was a world away from the room of turned-out white ladies and retired university gentlemen at the volunteer headquarters. It was hard to believe that the Democrats, which by 2004 had become the party of NPR and Garrison Keillor, had ever appealed to working people like him. But I looked it up just now and to my surprise, the Democrats continued to have union support even in 2024; the bigger problem seems to be the Democrats’ inability to connect with working class people outside of the unions and their insistence on courting the same big-moneyed class that embraces Republicans. “Organized labor has many enemies in this country. Unfortunately, we also need to start worrying about our friends,” said one local president about the Democrats; “Should we start our own party and run for office ourselves?”

It is this wholehearted inability of the Democrats and the liberals to understand the plight of the working class that led that class directly into the hands of authoritarians, and in so doing, has politically enhanced the hands of billionaires, who are now 46 percent, or $1.3 trillion richer in 2024 than they were in 2020, and who now face lower tax rates and unfettered campaign finance restrictions.

And it is here, where, even as anarchists or leftist-adjacent progressives, we have to take to heart the validity of Marxian analyses. In the words of historian Robert S. Duplessis, capitalists’ profits consist of the difference between the costs of their capital inputs and the price their output receives in markets… “to gain or preserve advantage in those markets, capitalists are under continuous pressure to innovate to cut production costs.” Lowered taxes, overseas markets, lowered overseas production costs, and transfers of wealth via debt (as happened in 2008) all help to increase capital, but at some point even those options will have exhausted themselves, and capitalism will have only its own corpse to feed on. The phrase “end-stage capitalism” is thrown around quite a bit these days, but I believe that this is what it means. Rumors of capitalism’s end, like Mark Twain’s death, have been greatly exaggerated, because somehow it always magically manages (kind of like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” in the markets) to find a workaround – to find new ways of accumulating capital, to create that special “surplus value” craved by the business owners.  

But as pathways become narrowed, capitalism will start to exhaust its options. I believe that now, it is possible, that advantages from overseas production (not the overseas resources themselves, but the cost-cutting advantages from production done cheaply overseas) are playing themselves out, even as these receding global advantages continue to squeeze American wages. As climate change impacts millions – whether via forced migration, death, or crop failure – capitalism is panicking as it nears the end of its ability to eke out a surplus. People here in the US know something is wrong, but other than those directly affected by famine or warfare (who are mostly overseas, for the time being) they can’t necessarily point to exactly what it is; we in the US continue to be horrified but also perplexed by mass shootings and the deaths of despair of loved ones. In the words of Bob Dylan, we know something is happening, but we don’t know what it is, probably because it’s too big and because we are right inside of it.

Does capitalism really contain, as Marx asserted, the seeds of its own destruction? We can only hope. The first reign of Trump reminded some of the reign of Nero, but let’s not forget that while Nero died in in AD 68, the Roman empire plodded on until AD 476 – another 399 years. In the meantime, it is realist, not cynicist, to own that we are now in the times of hopelessness, demoralization, and fragmentation that Chris Harman predicted at the top of this article. If we can see things for what they are, we can stop giving money to distant elected officials and can then proceed to build our own systems –  of dual power, mutual aid, and direct action – in short, to build community – to mitigate many of the negative effects. It might mean training and learning skills like first aid and other things to help defend marginalized peoples under threat; it might mean working to help internally-displaced domestic refugees (our homeless); it might mean calling neighborhood meetings to create power, instead of defaulting to the inherently subservient notion of “speaking truth to power” that gives our initiative away to distant representatives. Whatever it may mean – and many of us will have to figure it out as we go – it’s time to make the connections to help it happen. Do it now; and if it seems hard, there are people out there who can help. Indeed, the time to start was four years ago.

Karl Marx seemed to believe that capitalism was almost over when he wrote about it in the mid to late 1800’s; now, that assumption seems absurd. In my opinion, the key to understanding the longevity of capitalism and the domination of the world by the capitalist class is the concept of the “petite bourgeoisie”.

Per Wikipedia, the petite bourgeoisie is:

a social class composed of small business owners, shopkeepers, small-scale merchants, semi-autonomous peasants, and artisans. They are named as such because their politico-economic ideological stance in times of stability is reflective of the proper haute bourgeoisie (high bourgeoisie or upper class). In regular times, the petite bourgeoisie seek to identify themselves with the haute bourgeoisie, whose bourgeois morality, conduct and lifestyle they aspire and strive to imitate.

Although Marx thought of the petite bourgeoisie primarily in terms of its desire to become the haute bourgeoisie, I think there’s a much more important aspect of the petite bourgeoisie that we need to be aware of: Specifically, the petite bourgeoisie believes that its material well-being is inextricably tied to the economy of the haute bourgeoisie. Even those members of the petite bourgeoisie who do not aspire to become the haute bourgeoisie believe this, and are therefore protective of the haute bourgeoisie. The haute bourgeoisie foster this belief and surround themselves with concentric circles of increasingly wealthy petite bourgeoisie who hold this belief that the economy of the haute bourgeoisie creates material well-being for the petite bourgeoisie — which is essentially true as long as the haute bourgeoisie see this relationship as beneficial.

Let me stop using all this French, though, and get a bit more concrete. Petite bourgeoisie basically means the middle class, and haute bourgeoisie basically means the billionaire class. These labels are confusing for a couple of reasons. First, the incredibly absurd wealth of the billionaires creates a middle class with so many layers that the upper middle class can barely recognize the lower middle class as part of the same class. Second, because of the concentric circles of gradually increasing wealth (with the billionaires in the middle), it’s hard to see the break point between billionaires and the upper middle class; that’s an intentional obfuscation.

OK, so those are the two key components of this innovation that has allowed capitalism to continue:

1. The middle class believes that its material success and comfort are connected to the material success of the billionaire class. This is somewhat true, but complicated.
2. The middle class has been structured in such a way that it is hard to see the division between it and the billionaire class, making the billionaires harder to see as the source of the problem of capitalism.

For example, Brian Thompson (the former CEO of United Health) was upper middle class. His net worth was about $43 million, and he was positioned adjacent to the billionaires who most benefit from United Health’s policies. Well, that’s not entirely true because Thompson was CEO of United Health Care, which is a subsidiary of United Health Group (UHG); UHG’s CEO is actually the one adjacent to the billionaire class. When United Health Care killed people, Brian Thompson was nominally “in charge” so he gets blamed. This protects those above Thompson (including the billionaire class) who are not seen as being involved in United Health Care’s passive killings at all. Luigi Mangione could be interpreted as being as wealthy as Brian Thompson, but he’s still middle class.

The whole reason managers (including CEO’s) exist is to provide cover for the bosses above them, with the ultimate bosses being the billionaire class. This is part of those concentric circles I was talking about. The management hierarchy is a system that doesn’t necessarily reflect the physical location of the different levels of bosses. The other part of the concentric circles is physical. Billionaires physically live in places where most people are rich, so American billionaires often live in New York City or San Francisco, and billionaires generally tend to live in the United States. Even non-US-born billionaires like Elon Musk tend to live in the United States or at least have a place somewhere in the United States. US Congress is part of these concentric circles of wealth. Every member of the US Congress is a multi-millionaire, but none of them are billionaires. People in the first ring of middle class people surrounding the billionaire class work directly for them. People in the second ring work for people in the first ring.

Capitalist globalism allows for this arrangement. Were it not for globalism, then the billionaire class would be more evenly distributed all over the world, and therefore, would be more vulnerable to physical attack from the working class. The whole reason why the NYPD is the biggest and most militarized police force in the US is to protect the central rings of capitalist wealth located in New York City.

Everyone in the middle class serves the billionaire class one way or another and they are all terrified of joining the working class… which brings up a very confusing point: Aren’t middle class people also working class? Absolutely, yes, they are. At some point (Brian Thompson and other CEO’s come to mind), a person is high enough up in the capitalist hierarchy that their only function is to obfuscate the activities of the billionaire class, but they’re still working for someone in return for a paycheck. However, if that’s your only function, I don’t think anyone on the left has any concern for preserving your well-being.

In contrast, there are a lot of middle class people who are clearly working class, whether they are running a small business, working as a scientist, or managing a nursing home. All of these people have been connected to capitalism in such a way that they don’t see how they can continue to receive their moderate but comfortable income without the existence of capitalism and the billionaire class. They see the left, which clearly wants to abolish billionaires, as a material threat to their well-being.

One way those concentric circles of wealth manifest is in the middle class’s participation in the stock market. The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks. That remaining 7% of stocks are owned by people who are either working middle class or retired working middle class. They are either using the relatively meager income they receive from owning stock to survive (because they are retired) or plan to do just that at some point in the future (when they retire). In contrast to something like (hypothetically) a Social Security program that is adequately funded (by taxing the rich), this method of funding retirement means that these middle class people really need the line to go up; anything (like the left, for example) that might cause the line to go down causes them intense anxiety.

The punchline is that these middle class stockholders act as a buffer for wealthy stock holders. When the value of the stock market falls precipitously, it is the middle class stockholder that suffers. The wealthy stockholder had inside information and professional help that allowed them to dodge most of the destruction associated with the drop, and is not materially affected by their net worth dropping a few billion dollars (e.g., a person with $100 billion is completely unaffected by a drop to $97 billion or even $50 billion). In contrast, the middle class stockholder is devastated by the drop and has no means of reliably dodging such stock value drops. A crash means that a middle class retiree can’t eat. The material pain that results from such a drop creates opportunities for the billionaire class (and their minions) to snatch real estate from the middle class (e.g., a couple might be forced to sell a large home and start renting a small home so they can afford food).

How do we approach the middle class under these circumstances? Marx’s approach to the petite bourgeoisie was to simply say “fuck them” and lump them in with the haute bourgeoisie. In the context of the USA, this would mean that the left would have to actively sabotage the entire country as an act of class consciousness but also class betrayal since Americans are the international middle class. That doesn’t really help if our goal is to save our own communities here in the US.

If we try to overlay this Marxist analysis of society onto US electoral politics, then things get a little bit weird. The Democratic Party (i.e., the liberals) have a little more money and education than the Republican Party (i.e., the conservatives) but the constituents of both parties are largely middle class — especially if your analysis is at a global level. The puppet masters of both parties are the billionaire class. The Republican Party is slightly more in tune with working class Americans, and is slightly more internally democratic (ironically) than the Democratic Party, and that’s why they continue to win elections.

Convincing either middle class group to embrace the left would be a very difficult sell because they believe they need capitalism to continue their way of life; i.e., they understand that their material well-being and the possibility that they could someday join the ranks of the billionaire class are predicated on the international hierarchy of wealth that forces people in the global south to toil in poverty and sell their natural resources cheaply. Meanwhile, billionaires right now are doing everything they can to siphon away the wealth of the middle class, thus breaking the illusion that they are beneficial to working class people and creating a strong potential for dramatic social change. In other words, the billionaires are doing the work of agitating the middle class toward revolution themselves.

An important correction.

I sincerely intended to go through all of Project 2025 and give you a brief summary of each section of it and what the likely consequences would be. However, it has become abundantly clear that the MAGAs are too internally chaotic to allow for an accurate prediction of exactly how they will fuck up the United States of America and the world. In other words, I can’t tell you which parts of Project 2025 will actually happen, if any. At this point, I can’t even tell you for sure that their destruction of the USA will begin on January 20th because they have managed to break into two separate factions: on one side, white supremacist Christian nationalists, and on the other side, the right-wing oligarchs yearning to be completely free to exploit the working class. Furthermore, there’s even more opportunity for further splintering of MAGA going forward.

Project 2025 is mostly a project of the white supremacist, Christian nationalist side of MAGA, but Trump is an empty vessel with no ideology beyond whatever makes him money, keeps him out of jail, and strokes his ego. The Christian nationalists don’t seem to get it because they’ve decided that Trump is God’s instrument despite the fact that he more closely meets the Biblical model for an anti-Christ than a champion of Christianity. The billionaires, on the other hand, completely get it, and started making huge “donations” (bribes) to Trump as soon as it was clear he had won the election.

Certainly, it is still highly likely that Vance will try to pull the 25th Amendment on Trump, but I’m no longer sure they have the internal solidarity, courage, and organizing competence to actually make that happen. I think it is more likely that they whisper about it but never get around to doing it, and even if they decided to go for it, I think the odds are about even that they manage to do it versus a situation where the rebels are severely punished — i.e., possibly even sent to jail.

As Trump looks around the country and sees little resistance to his fascist rule, it seems significantly less likely that he will organize a domestic reign of terror and will instead start looking outward to Mexico, Canada, Greenland, and Panama. This is certainly no less fascistic (and the previously promised domestic reign of terror would have transitioned into outward expansion eventually anyway) but the point is that I don’t feel like I can say what will happen after Trump takes office.

The advice of our club is:

• Don’t create a situation that refocuses MAGA’s substantial animosity toward the left. Resistance should be as quiet as possible because the left does not have the numbers for a frontal assault of any kind. To be clear, “frontal assault” is a metaphor. I’m saying there’s no strategy of any kind (violent or not) that would work for the left. This is primarily because liberals are complacent cowards who will literally let the whole world burn as long as their stock portfolio keeps improving; they are not on our side.
• As the MAGAs destroy things, there will be opportunities to fill the empty niches within society created by that destruction. Watch for those to open up and take action.
• Build alliances within the left. Anyone who is, for example, creating resistance to communists and anarchists working together is harmful at best, and a possible fed. The left is 6% or less of the US population. Saying that we shouldn’t hang out with Trotskyites, for example, is just absurd, and anyone promoting that kind of divisiveness is an obvious problem. Any organization promoting that kind of thinking is a dead end for humanity.
• In contrast, if you’re going to openly support an organization, that org needs to disavow the Democratic Party.
• Keep building capacity. Make non-confrontational plans to help the people who will be damaged by whatever mayhem the MAGAs end up going with.
• Take care of yourself, meaning: Cut (or at least reduce) alcohol and other destructive drugs, get some exercise, try to eat more healthy (less sugar, more vegetables), drink water, take more breaks from the internet and media, hang out with people in real life. We need you alive, functional, and in motion.
• This list may be incomplete due to the prevalence of media censorship in the United States.

Whatever happens, we know it will be stupid and economically destructive. The Democratic Party is very good at managing a capitalist economy to allow the oligarchs to continue to get more and more absurdly rich while keeping the “labor resources” from suffering enough to incite a revolution. With the Democrats being largely irrelevant, and none of the MAGAs having any skill in running any kind of economy, the economic outcome, specifically, is bound to be very bad, and might actually create some solidarity among working class people. I just don’t think anyone can provide any details on that, and I don’t think we can say for sure whether anything else Trump promised will come to pass.

Good luck out there!

The title is a famous African proverb; I know “African” is an absurd generality, but I’m not seeing where, exactly, it is from. I feel like that simple saying is all you need to know to understand school shooters. When most children are neglected, you get a society where most people are ready to burn it all down, including the place where they themselves are standing, and that is where we are. I just read the “manifesto” of the Wisconsin school shooter (specifically, the December 16, 2024 Abundant Life Christian School shooter) and I have a few thoughts about it.

The Incel Phenomenon

I’ve seen people talking about “female incels” before and I must admit I didn’t pay much attention to it. I think we’ve really misunderstood the phenomenon because we allowed incels themselves to define the problem as sexual in nature. I know that the best practice is to allow the affected person to define the issues affecting them, but it seems like the very nature of incels might limit their ability to understand their own situation. It seems like a person who is severely under-socialized may not only lack the skills to enter into meaningful human relationships (which exacerbates the problem) but also may not fully understand what it is they are missing. As a result, male incels are defining the problem as “involuntary celibacy” when really, the problem is that they lack meaningful relationships with other people. They’ve been effectively shunned by society, but they are also shunning it right back.

Gender and Mass Shootings

I’m sure everyone is aware that mass shooters are almost always male in terms of both gender and sex. I think it is easy to presume that this is because of sex (i.e., because of testosterone) rather than gender (i.e., the way society treats people who are perceived as male). However, it seems like mass shootings are motivated by alienation from and disgust with society, and that they are almost always suicidal (with suicide being one of the goals of the mass shooting). These kinds of feelings are not caused by chromosomes but rather by how society treats a person. It just happens to be true that American society neglects boys more than it neglects girls.

PS: The Abundant Life Christian School shooter was not trans; her online boyfriend was also not trans.

All Mass Shooters are Nazis

A mass shooting is just fascist ideology taken to the logical extreme by a sole practitioner. Fascism is an ideology born of abuse, neglect, and the desperation they create within a person that turns into hatred over time. Not only did the Abundant Life Christian School shooter espouse fascist ideology, but she had a list of fascist heroes that she loved:

• Pekka Eric Auvinen: Perpetrator of the Jokela (Finland) school shooting, made references to a “white revolution” and other far right ideas
• Arda Küçükyetim: Perpetrator of the attack on Tepebaşı Mosque in Eskişehir, Turkey, was clearly a fascist
• Vladislav Roslyakov: Perpetrator of the Kerch Polytechnic College massacre in Kerch, Ukraine; a clear ideology was never determined (I’ll get back to this).
• Harris and Klebold: The Columbine shooters are less obvious with their fascist ideology, but the clues are there, such as calling a Black student the n-word before killing him.
• Patrick Woods Crucius: The Walmart shooter whose explicit mission was to kill “Mexicans”; he was convicted of hate crimes.
• Guilherme Taucci: Perpetrator of the Suzano massacre in São Paulo, Brazil; a Nazi sympathizer (i.e., a nazi).

In 5 of these 6 cases, there’s a clear link to fascist ideology, but that isn’t really why I’m saying that all mass shooters are nazis. Fascism doesn’t really care who the enemy is, as long as there is one, and then it attempts to destroy that enemy with a sense of justice in doing so. Fascism usually starts by targeting a vulnerable group, like Black people, trans people, or Muslims, but then a successful fascist movement inevitably expands until it becomes a nihilistic battle royale. Mass shooters just skip right to the nihilistic battle royale. They are the purest form of fascism.

Human Beings are Social Animals

Don’t worry, I’m going to blame capitalism for all of this, but just saying, “Capitalism did it,” really isn’t anywhere close to sufficient. In fact, it might even be possible for a relatively small number of people to own the means of production without having fascism, but in practice, capitalism always causes fascism because capitalism always seems to make the same choices about important details.

The concept of the “alpha wolf” came from a 1977 study of a captive wolf pack. Later, scientists determined that the social hierarchy (and the toxic behavior that came with it) were caused by the wolves having been taken away from wolf society and forced into a stressful situation (captivity) with strangers. Naturally-occurring wolf packs do not work that way and are instead made up of family groups.

Similarly, studies that showed addictive behavior with rats were partially disproved later on because the addictive behavior only happens with rats who have been isolated from rat society and stuck in a weird box with ready access to addictive drugs.

In essence, any human being (or other social animal) that is abused and neglected is going to develop predictable behavior that is both self-destructive and that prohibits them from developing healthy relationships with other people. Just like pit bull terriers are not naturally aggressive, there’s nothing natural about a person becoming a fascist, but in either case, there are well understood processes that lead to the negative outcome.

If you’ve been neglected and abused enough that you have developed an all-consuming hatred, then a group of people that want to punish the world with horrific violence seems like the closest you can get to a loving family. At the same time, though, such a person struggles to develop real solidarity with any other person, and will just as gleefully destroy someone on their own side under the right circumstances. Sure, “Not all abuse victims become nazis,” but they don’t become healthy people, either. Once a society based on neglect and abuse has been established, its members will not have the social skills necessary to reform it into something healthy. In fact, they will spend all their cognitive resources coping with the toxicity of that society and their own personal trauma.

American Capitalist Society

In American capitalist society, the first thing that happens to a person is that they are taken away from their mother into another room where a stranger quantitatively evaluates them. This is because the relationship between the baby and their mother has no value under capitalism, and everything (including human beings) must be quantified. If the person is male, the next thing is that part of their dick is cut off. This amputation is because a bean counter once noticed that Jewish soldiers were catching fewer STD’s, and since STD’s caused inefficiency within the military, those in charge decided that all males should be circumcised. (The STD rate had nothing to do with circumcision, it turns out.)

The parents adjust to having a newborn with very little societal support — sometimes none at all (for reasons I will explain below). Next, children are separated from their mothers because the parents must both go to work for 8 hours a day (the father typically never had any time away from work to spend with the baby). Under capitalism, work always happens away from your family. The children are stored with some strangers who are paid and who don’t really care about the children (certainly not as much as their parents would have); this storage of children is a major industry in the USA and a major financial burden for new families.

Meanwhile, the parents are spending their days in a completely authoritarian world governed by rules that seem arbitrary at best; whatever their job is, the purpose of their job is to maximize profits for a capitalist. While on the job, the various workers are physically and psychologically isolated from one another. The separation of an office, cubicle, or delivery van is just as effective as the separation of a loud factory floor where everyone is too busy to have a conversation. Their managers will demand miracles of them so that shareholder profits can continue to increase.

In the evenings, this family of neglected and abused individuals comes back together briefly, but their relationships between each other are already damaged. The parents are typically on some kind of drugs (e.g., alcohol, weed, SSRI’s, anti-anxiety meds, etc.); if the child hasn’t been completely docile at daycare, the child will also be given pharmaceuticals. They spend their time together consuming media — so, typically, not really “together” at all.

The child is eventually sent to a large school where they know almost no one. Their social skills are poor if not self-destructive. The main point of schools in the United States is to store children so their parents can work; education is a secondary concern despite the wishes of the teachers. The education is meant to create a viable workforce, not to make them better people, or informed voters. Not only is the feedstock of the US school system problematic (because the scenario I described above does not result in children who are ready for school), but money for education keeps getting cut (as a benefit to the wealthy) so schools don’t have enough resources to deal with these unprepared and anti-social children.

As adults, American children typically end up moving away from their families; a mobile labor resource pool is very important for the health of the economy of the rich, so they make it important for your economy, too. For people who go straight into the workforce after high school, this is either because they must move to be close to their job or because they can’t afford homes near their parents. For those who attend college, the college is typically not in the same city as their parents, and then, of course, they have to move again after they get their degree — frequently to another state — because that’s where the job is. In some cases, Americans will move far away in an attempt to escape their social problems, which naturally follow them to the new location.

If they are lucky, they manage to enter into a relationship with one other person, but that relationship will be predictably difficult given how the individuals who make up the couple were raised. They will express their affection for one another primarily by buying each other things.

In any case, they end up in a “neighborhood” where they don’t know anyone, and the neighbors they do meet are fellow Americans — i.e., neglected and abused people with poor social skills — so the idea of creating relationships with them is not very appealing. In fact, they look out at all these hostile people surrounding them and think, “I need to be armed!” Those that end up getting paid well enough will move to a different neighborhood or city, effectively resetting the process of creating a community for themselves. They will hope to attain a home that is big enough for their entire extended family, but only their small nuclear family will reside there.

Once these adults are fully isolated from one another, the only thing left to do is have a baby or get a pet. If they just get a pet, though, everyone from their mother to Elon Musk’s mother will be pressuring them to have a baby. Honestly, are these people even equipped to have a cat? Even a rat requires a healthy society to be happy, after all. Anyway, if they do decide to have a child, the pregnancy is overseen by a medical system whose primary goal is to maximize profits rather than provide good care. The mother will be forced to give birth at 40 weeks despite initial pregnancies taking more like 41 (or even 42!) weeks. She will be forced to lay on her back for the convenience of the doctor during the delivery. Then, they will take the baby away and cut off part of his dick.

It would be funny if it weren’t so fucking bleak.

Conclusion

Every American child is, effectively, a shunned child, but given random variation in their lives, not all of them end up being mass murderers. However, even those who don’t end up being mass murderers will typically end up supporting the US government’s machine of oppression and empire in some way or another. In other words, we are all mass murderers by proxy. Americans are a people obsessed with “burning it all down” — the only disagreement is really what “it” is and whether to participate actively in the arson. The optimists in American society are looking to how much money they can make from the fire or from rebuilding after this itera

Ben Shapiro and Amy Klobuchar are on the same side.

Ben Shapiro is the far-right influencer with the nasally voice who talks about men not being manly enough but stays home with his kids while his wife works outside the home. Amy Klobuchar is the medium-right (honestly, she might be far-right) politician currently representing Minnesota in the Senate who ran for President in 2017. One is a MAGA Republican, the other is a faithful Democratic Party member.

Neither is on your side.

I can say that with absolute confidence because of how they each responded to the assassination of psychopathic mass murderer Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare. I should probably clarify why I would define Brian Thompson as a psychopathic mass murderer. United Healthcare is responsible for the deaths of many thousands of Americans thanks to their policy of rejecting 32% of all health insurance claims; they also recently implemented an AI system that rejects 90% of claims. This kills people. Brian Thompson, as CEO, was ultimately responsible for those deaths. The only valid debate is whether he’s a mass murderer or serial killer. Yes, those murders were legal; does that make it better?

For anyone on the left, or anyone who cares about people more than money (which may very well be an important distinction), there are two valid responses. One valid response would be, “Murder is wrong and I don’t condone violence, but I can’t get very excited about this particular murder because of the horrific history of the deceased.” At the other extreme of viewpoints that are either leftist or the least bit empathic to the American working class would be, “This is a good start.” That is not how Ben Shapiro responded. That is also not how Amy Klobuchar responded.

Both of them responded with some variation of, “How dare you?!” — as if this assassination of a mass-murderering CEO was the most unacceptable thing to have happened in the last 5 years in the United States of America. If you consider the real context of the USA, that’s just absurd, even by the standards of bootlickers. Ben Shapiro and Amy Klobuchar have a lot more in common with each other than they have with you or any of Brian Thompson’s victims.

Here’s a link to The Young Turks (TYT) episode on Ben Shapiro’s reaction and his audience’s reaction to him. Below is what Amy Klobuchar said on Twitter and BlueSky (she deleted the BlueSky post in response to people telling her to go fuck herself).

This is a horrifying and shocking act of violence. My thoughts are with Brian Thompson’s family and loved ones and all those working at United Healthcare in Minnesota.

Is it, Amy? Is it horrifying? I mean, relative to what Brian Thompson did? Is it shocking? At all? Given what Americans have been putting up with for decades, it seems more “inevitable” than “shocking”. Personally, I’m wondering why it didn’t happen sooner. I’m picking on Ben Shapiro and Amy Klobuchar, but they are merely two data points in a deluge of shit takes from both Democratic and Republican party representatives.

JFK once said:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

On that note, here is the statement we’ve been reading at meetings with other organizations since the election:

Our club does not believe there will be a 2026 or 2028 election in the sense of a fair competition between the two major parties that is winnable by Democratic party candidates. Moreover, we do not support the Democratic Party. Given that we are having an indeterminate period of one-party rule, we believe it is best to shift away from electoral politics and instead toward mutual aid and direct action, including community defense. We do not support the Democratic Party winning elections unless they can remove pro-capitalism individuals from leadership positions within their party and break with the policy of putting the needs of major donors above the needs of working-class people. We are not Democrats, and we have never been Democrats. Since the Reagan administration, the Democratic Party has moved further and further to the right. We have learned again and again that it will throw working class people and any marginalized group under the bus, even going so far as to support genocide, to attempt to attract moderate Republicans. Since only a tiny percentage of Republican voters will ever vote for Democrats, this is not only a betrayal of all working-class people, but a losing strategy. The association of the Democratic Party with “the left” is an incomprehension that damages both the left and the Democratic Party, given it’s clear goal of gaining wealthy people as constituents.

The Democratic Party is not on the side of the American people. Democrats like to say that Republican voters are “voting against their self-interest”. Well, guess what: When you vote for a Democrat, you are also voting against your self-interest. Moreover, you are voting for cruelty just like people who vote for the Republican are voting for cruelty. The lesser evil is still evil, and I’m not convinced that loyal Democratic Party voters appreciate the fact that the Democratic Party is evil.

Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
~ Hannah Arendt

I’m not going to editorialize about the actual assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but I think it is important to look at the reactions of American elites and their mouthpieces (i.e., the mainstream media) in contrast to the reactions of many millions of working class people because it really encapsulates our current political reality. I will also give you a rundown on why the assassin’s weapon malfunctioned since so many people are talking about it.

Both conservative and liberal media outlets are united in their condemnation of violence against elites; this should not be surprising, but at the same time, this is a moment where theory meets reality in an extremely parsimonious way. As you would expect, the Democrats are either condemning violence or staying quiet, which yet again proves that they are not “the left” in any sense. The leftist response would include something to the effect of “this violence is the natural consequence of material conditions” regardless of whether they condemn violence, but Democrats have specifically not said that; they’ve only condemned the violence. As far as I can tell, Republican politicians are simply keeping their mouths shut about it.

Meanwhile, normal people are celebrating the assassination, and even making fan art of the assassin. A post about the assassination by UnitedHealth Group on Facebook currently has about 5000 sympathetic responses and 70,000 laughing emoji responses. Someone placed a helium balloon at the site of the assassination with the “CEO Down” and smiling star meme on it, and the Daily Mail tried (and failed) to make it into a terrifying harbinger for their audience (i.e., they imply that the assassin is a threat to the Daily Mail’s audience).

A noteworthy exception to all this would be this article from the Independent:
When a medical insurance CEO was gunned down in the street, some people celebrated his death. What does this tell us about American healthcare?

What this gets down to is that most people agree with leftist positions on most things, they’ve just been deeply confused by propaganda that has successfully pointed their anger in the wrong direction. Once anger is pointed in the wrong direction, conflicts between different groups of people become real problems. While I’m certainly frustrated with the 80% of Americans who don’t think politics are important enough to deserve their attention, I can also sympathize with anyone having trouble finding truth in the sea of disinformation we are all swimming in.

If you present someone with a political choice, and make sure to strip the options of their official political labels, people consistently choose the leftist option. We see this in Missouri all the time. If you ask people whether we should make abortion legal or raise the minimum wage, they make the right choice, but when it comes down to choosing the Republican or the Democrat — well, there was never a right choice, was there.

Stephen Colbert once said, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” or something like that as a joke against conservatives, but it wasn’t true. Reality, in fact, has a clear leftist bias. Those moments where neoliberals or conservatives are correct happen because they have chosen to move left, not because they were true to their stated political ideology.

What is particularly interesting about the Democrats moving from liberal to neoliberal during the 1980’s is that neoliberalism fails to understand the purpose of social democracy — namely, to provide working class people with enough material success that they never choose to start executing the elites in the streets. Put another way, the primary purpose of social democracy is to protect the elites. This is why many (possibly most) leftists are hostile towards social democrats (e.g., Bernie Sanders, AOC) despite the other benefits of social democracy (like a reasonable degree of comfort and security for working class people).

Neoliberals have entered into a fantasy where they believe they have such mastery of propaganda (e.g., the media) and violence (e.g., the police) that they no longer have to fear the people, and it just isn’t true. The only way to engage in the kind of unrestrained capitalism (including control of the cudgel of government by elites) we’re experiencing now without evoking a violent response from the average person would be to somehow hide reality from us all. They’re trying to figure out how to do just that; Grimes calls it “the simulation”. Yes, they’re trying to stuff us all into the matrix. I don’t think it will work.

The only thing neoliberal and conservative elites have succeeded in doing prior to the CEO assassination has been to misdirect that violence toward marginalized people. I don’t just mean people of color, women, or the LGBTQ community. Rural and working class white, Christian men are also marginalized in hypercapitalist America. In fact, nearly everyone is marginalized by neoliberalism. This misdirection causes social chaos and electoral outcomes that the elites do not expect (because they believe in neoliberalism).

All of this suggests quite strongly that the left can win. The key is probably to be explicit and honest about concrete changes that we want, and then promote those ideas rather than trying to promote a particular leftist ideology or political system. One of the few useful comments we’ve received on our posts was from a guy saying, essentially, “I agree with most of what you say, but socialism doesn’t work.” People need the details of what we actually want to do in order to see past the fog of anti-left propaganda. You can’t just say you want “socialism” because most Americans don’t know what that means, and — let’s be clear — most leftists don’t have a clear and practical conception of what that means in the context of the USA.

Now, regarding the handgun malfunctions. The guy seems to be fairly experienced with handguns. He has the whole “tap, rack, reassess” procedure down, but that doesn’t make him what I would call a “professional assassin” in the sense of a John Wick or James Bond. A professional assassin would have understood the relationship between a suppressor and a handgun that uses the Browning tilting-barrel method of operation and would have adjusted his equipment to eliminate those malfunctions. Specifically, he could have used a gun that used a different method of operation or he could have used a Nielsen Device, also known as a “booster”, to make the gun run correctly.

The reason a suppressor will usually cause failures with a Browning tilting-barrel handgun is because of how those guns work. When the gun first fires, there’s a great deal of pressure and that keeps the barrel and slide locked together until the bullet has left the barrel; this delay reduces felt recoil relative to a direct (undelayed) blowback gun. Then, there’s still enough force to push the slide back, but not enough to keep the barrel and slide physically locked together, so the barrel moves back very slightly and tips up in the front and down in the back (this tilt is what unlocks the barrel from the slide). Because they are no longer connected to each other, the slide reciprocates fully and loads a new round.

However, if there’s a big honkin’ weight on the front of your barrel, it can neither tip nor move very slightly backward to the degree it was meant to. That slows down the slide’s movement, causes extra wear to the slide and barrel, and causes a malfunction. The video below explains this in detail, along with a nice solution to the problem.

The issue is less likely to have been bad ammunition or subsonic ammunition because we know that the weight issue is so consistently a problem. A suppressor actually increases back pressure in the gun, which makes it more likely to cycle subsonic ammunition successfully (actual results would vary depending on the details of the ammunition, gun, and suppressor). But please consider that if the shooter chose subsonic ammunition without testing that specific ammunition (and changing to a weaker recoil spring to compensate) then that, again, points to the shooter not being a “professional assassin” in the way we commonly think about that.

It’s probably worse than you think.

1. Trump will probably be replaced by Vance.

The initial government that is being cobbled together by the MAGAs is largely guided by Donald Trump’s giant ego and tiny intellect. As a result, it looks like a random assortment of ass-kissing clowns, and yes, they will completely destroy the federal government as we know it. None of this will be concerning to Trump’s supporters because they believe that educated professionals don’t really know anything more than they do about how to run a government. The upside of such an arrangement is that it is possible for a celebrity to finagle an audience with his majesty, and by using common sense and facts, as well as a strong dose of flattery, get him to do the right thing. In addition, he isn’t a Christian, so he may be resistant to theocratic actions.

However, it is extremely likely that Vice-president Vance (and the Christian nationalists who back him) will be playing the 25th Amendment card on Trump. The 25th Amendment says, among other things, that if the Vice-president and a majority of the cabinet declare in writing that the President is unable to fulfill his duties (for example, because he has age-related senility), the Vice-president can take over the role of President. Then, the replacement of the President becomes permanent if approved by 2/3 of both houses of Congress. Someone other than Vance would likely confirm that they have the votes before Vance took that first step.

We know that they are planning to do this because they said that Kamala Harris would do this to Biden. Remember: Every accusation you hear from fascists is a confession.

When they decide to ditch Trump will depend on how things are going with their project. If they’re getting everything they want from Trump, then they won’t replace him, and he will even be valuable as a scapegoat for them in the future, but I’m convinced that his erratic behavior will get in their way and it will make sense to mutiny.

A Vance administration would switch from clown show to hardcore Christian nationalism. That might be a different version of a clown show if you’re someone who is really good at finding the humor in dark situations.

2. The rules no longer matter.

I am seeing a lot of people talking about how standard procedures, operating rules, and the law are effectively guardrails that will control what the Trump (or Vance) administration can do. That’s not true at all. If you’re doing this, you are experiencing the “bargaining” stage of grief. Because Trump has been granted God Mode by the Supreme Court, the rules absolutely do not matter. Trump (or Vance!) can literally do anything they want, and they will not be bargained with. Trump can literally remove anyone who tells him no. Sure, sure — “we” should “fight” — just keep in mind that the normal political maneuvering that we are used to is unlikely to be effective.

Literally, the only thing holding them back right now is Trump himself, and Trump is likely to be removed, as I said above.

Similarly, elections are no longer a way to get ourselves out of this. There are a lot of Democrats spending a lot of time proposing what they can do to win in 2026 and 2028 — many, in fact, saying that the answer is to move even further to the right. However, there’s absolutely no indication that any component of the MAGAs is interested in allowing the Democrats a chance at winning back any of the power they just lost, and — importantly — they have the ability to deny them that opportunity. They absolutely do not care about the rules, procedures or laws that Democrats care about.

3. Citizenship weaponized

Under a Vance administration, citizenship would definitely be weaponized, but even under Trump, we’re likely to see significant weaponizing of citizenship.

In essence, people will lose their citizenship status in the sense of being protected by the Bill of Rights, including the right to vote; Christian nationalists do not consider their enemies to be US citizens. It is very likely that women will lose all of their civil rights; Christian nationalists believe a woman’s legal status should be connected to her father or husband. Other groups, such as liberals, atheists, LGBTQ people, Muslims, and Jews would also be likely to lose their civil rights. Some groups, such as Black men, would technically retain their civil rights, but the selective enforcement of the law that allows Black people to be abused currently would go into overdrive. The MAGAs have already said that people will be denaturalized — i.e., that legal US citizens will lose their citizenship. People assume that this only applies to immigrants and their children, but if they succeed in doing this to naturalized immigrants and their children, they will expand the program to apply to others on their list of enemies.

As I mentioned above, the normal rules, procedures and laws that would prevent this will not work. If their plan fails, it will not be because of those factors.

Right now, prisoner pay varies from state to state, varying from nothing in some states, to a few cents per hour in others. California is exceptional in that it pays around $35/hour, but that isn’t what these Christian Nationalists will want. While slavery was never truly made illegal in the US (thanks to the wording of the 13th Amendment), this policy will allow them to expand the pool of potential slaves from primarily Black men to anyone they don’t like.

In addition to all these new slaves — many of which will be what we call “skilled” workers — there will be the fact that many of these denaturalized people might be allowed to stay relatively free in the US, but they will not have the civil rights protections of the Christian nationalist class. That means they can be severely underpaid, abused, and even killed without much consequence.

4. A Christian nationalist USA would be horrific

Yes, very much like Handmaid’s Tale, but Handmaid’s Tale only covers the experience of women under a Christian nationalist theocracy. That is not a criticism of Margaret Atwood — there’s only so much you can reasonably cover in a novel and still have an engaging story.

If you take an honest look at the history of Christianity and governance, you’ll see that there have been a variety of relationships between Christians and government. Sometimes, they take the position that church and state should be separate; sometimes, they take the position that Christians should fight for the rights of marginalized people against an abusive state; and sometimes, they are the abusive state. This particular group, the Christian nationalist, is of the latter type. They have already been very clear about what they plan to do to the various “enemies of God”.

Project 2025 is only the first step in their plan.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have sufficiently accepted the dilemma we face in terms of the human relationship to our habitat, the Earth. Dr. William Rees explains why this lack of understand is essentially guaranteed to end industrial-technical civilization incrementally over the next 25 years, culminating in a population of no more than 2 billion people by 2125, and perhaps far fewer.

Dr. William Rees is an ecologist, ecological economist, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. He researches global ecological trends with special interests in cities as vulnerable components of the human ecosystem and in psycho-cognitive barriers to societal change.

A brief overview of what we can expect from the second MAGA administration

Project 2025 is around 900 pages long, but it is broken up into subsections regarding each part of the federal government that the MAGAs intend to convert into a vehicle for the promotion of their culture. I’ll be going over Project 2025 section by section over the next couple of months, but first, I wanted to offer something like a coherent overview of what to expect. A lot of the changes that we will see will be odd little bureaucratic changes that are working toward a system that promotes their ideology; this is what Project 2025 focuses on. We will also see some changes and trends that are not in Project 2025, but that simply follow logically from what we know the Christian Nationalist position to be.

1. The Economy

Since the beginning of the neoliberal era (which may be either be when Reagan took office or when Bill Clinton took office depending on your analysis), the Democratic Party has been far better at managing a capitalist economy than the Republican Party. There’s been a clear cycle where the Republicans trash the economy by transferring money from the working class and giving it to the rich, sabotage assistance programs that might help working class people get a leg up, cut regulations that allow capitalism to function predictably and somewhat safely, and dramatically increase the national debt. Then, the Democrats get control of the government and somewhat repair the damage, but get blamed for what the Republicans did, because those repairs take time.

This reflects both well and poorly on the Democrats because their skill at growing the economy comes at the expense of everything else. They are unable to prioritize the things that really matter, including, for example, the ability of our planet to sustain human life, or not doing genocide, or authentically valuing children, families, and communities. They had almost gotten to the point during the Biden administration where their influence would have started to aid working class people (obviously, they had to help the economy of the rich first) when the election happened.

Without a doubt, this next MAGA administration will wreck the economy. If you make less than $100,000 as a household, you will definitely be in big trouble, and there will be many people in the upper middle class who are going to lose their jobs as essential bureaucratic functions are stripped out of the federal government. Importantly, though, this wreckage may not become evident until closer to 2028. In the short term, it might seem great from the average American’s perspective.

The MAGA administration will fuck around with trade in such a way that the products we get from China will become expensive. I would not be surprised if consumer electronics doubled in price.

The MAGA administration will end all federal government incentives for clean energy, including EV tax credits.

The MAGA administration will destroy the economic safety net just when Americans need it most.

The number of homeless people will skyrocket, and the number of people dying as a result of homelessness will skyrocket.

2. Women’s Rights

It would be extremely surprising if the new MAGA administration did not push through a national abortion ban. I’m not going to hypothesize about how they might do that, but it does look like they will have majority control of all branches of government as well as the President having been granted God Mode by the Supreme Court. In the short term, they will not, however, ban sterilization procedures, which will become even more wildly popular than they are now. Birth control will become more and more difficult to obtain; if things are going well for the MAGAs, birth control will be made illegal (they will claim it is abortion).

Programs to assist families living poverty will be cut dramatically, and that will end up affecting women more than men since women are more often the custodial parent in families where the parents are not married. If things are going well for MAGAs, they are likely to make no-fault divorce illegal, and may be able to make all divorce illegal, which ultimately will force many a woman (and her children) to continue to live with an abuser.

For women who believe trans women are a threat to them in bathrooms and women’s sports, the new MAGA administration will be beneficial in eliminating those supposed problems.

In the short term, I do not think they will go after a woman’s right to hold a job and control a bank account or credit card, but that will certainly come next if things are going well for them. However, protections for rape and gender-based discrimination will be revoked in a long process that can be expected to conclude with a dramatic drop in the number of women holding jobs, especially in red states. This will, in turn, dramatically harm the ability of businesses and organizations to function, which will in turn exacerbate the ongoing damage to the economy.

On the up side, I think the MAGAs could be convinced to use tax money to provide a stipend to stay-at-home mothers. Indeed, Project 2025 mentions providing “support” for women as caregivers, both as caregivers to children but also as caregivers to elderly relatives. This is something that the Democrats were not capable of considering because of their devotion to neoliberal capitalism (which treats all workers as identical cogs in the machine) and pantsuit feminism (which is a capitalist version of feminism that values working outside the home far above caregiving).

3. LGBTQ Rights

There’s no hope on this front. They will slowly grind down all the protections for LGBTQ people until there is nothing left. Medical options for trans youth, including puberty blockers, will likely become illegal. Trans youth will be actively outed to their parents by schools and other institutions, and we’re likely to see parents of trans youth referred to the authorities in red states. For adult trans people, insurance will likely stop covering anything related to your transition (if it ever covered that).

If you are trans or gender nonconforming (i.e., you do not perfectly fit the bizarrely specific conservative beauty standards for women), I recommend that you work towards carrying a gun in public so you can defend yourself from an attack should you need to use the restroom. For trans men and women, you may end up in a legal situation where you are forced to use the wrong bathroom.

Depending on where you live, it could become very difficult to get a job if you are out as an LGBTQ person, or even if something about your appearance makes people suspect you might be LGBTQ.

4. Protections Based on Race, Ethnicity, and Religion

Protections based on race, ethnicity, national origin and religion will be eliminated through legislation but primarily through changes in the executive branch and re-interpretation of the Constitution. This will take a while. They will claim that protections based on race, ethnicity and national origin discriminate against white Americans, and they will claim that the First Amendment refers exclusively to religious freedom for Christians.

MAGAs will continue to use prisoners for slave labor, and will likely increase the percentage of the population that is incarcerated back to 2008 levels or higher. The US is already the world record holder in that regard, but I bet MAGA can beat that record. They never hated the Soviet gulag system in and of itself, they just hated the fact that it was nazis who were sent there.

5. The Environment

I expect a net increase in carbon emissions under this MAGA administration. On one hand, the wrecking of the economy would be expected to reduce the amount of carbon produced, but on the other hand, they’ve made it clear that they will destroy all regulations related to pollution. Renewable energy makes a lot of economic sense, and my guess is that while the MAGAs will try to stack the deck against renewables, they’ll continue to be embraced by many corporations, and, similarly, EVs will still be in demand.

Let’s be clear: the Democrats were never going to save us from climate change; this is just an escalation rather than a change of direction. The biggest change you will see is the environmental devastation we’ve previously outsourced to the global south appearing right here in the USA. If we’re being honest, isn’t that where it belongs?

6. Food and Water Safety

Food and water safety will get dramatically worse under this new administration. Moreover, mechanisms for reporting food and water safety issues will be hobbled, so it will be less likely that you will find out that your cinnamon has lead in it (for example). You’ll just keep using the tainted food without every discovering you were being poisoned. In addition to the direct misery this will cause human beings, it will also contribute to the ongoing destruction of the US economy; lead-poisoned people make terrible workers, it turns out.

7. Education and Libraries

Education is not currently funded well enough to overcome the cultural and economic problems we face in the US. Quality education is not really something that capitalists can make money off of, so it doesn’t get the kind of investment it needs. Shortages in certain kinds of workers are dealt with by increasing the number of H1B visas rather than by investing more in education. To be fair, the feed stock of our educational institutions is already resistant to education when it arrives in kindergarten classrooms, so the funding that would have been required to improve the citizenry would have been immense.

Under this new MAGA regime, however, it will become far, far worse. Fascism thrives in a culture of ignorance, and so it alters its environment specifically to make people more stupid. The content of education will be reduced to a tasteless gruel consisting of conservative propaganda and sterilized STEM. Eventually, sex education will be eliminated, teen pregnancy will skyrocket. Wealthy school districts will be able to afford to ignore federal meddling and some will choose to retain effective, objective educational programs, but most private schools are religious, and they will have more funding (on average) than public schools. In some areas, there simply will not be schools, and the idiots living there will “home school” their kids; tragically, you can only teach someone what you know, and if you know nothing, that’s what you can teach.

Public libraries and school libraries will be sanitized. Any books or librarians that do not support the conservative cultural agenda will be removed. Yes, it will start with controversial books about sexuality, but eventually, they will ban books on things like Keynesian economics, democracy, and Hinduism.

As a result of all this, the US will continue to fall behind the rest of the world in terms of education and technological advancement, but at a faster rate than prior to the MAGA takeover. If you thought the COVID generation was damaged, wait until you see the people emerging from MAGA’s version of education.

8. Violence and Crime

As poverty increases, we can expect incidents of violence and crime to increase. Undoubtedly, money allocated to law enforcement will increase dramatically, but, mysteriously, crime will not decrease as a result (it’s not mysterious — police do not prevent crime). The increase in domestic violence may be truly staggering.

9. Gun Rights

The MAGAs are likely to eliminate restrictions on suppressors and short-barreled rifles and shotguns. I don’t yet have an opinion on what they will do about machine guns. I’m not sure if they will eliminate the background check system; in the long term, they may retain it, but repurpose it to prevent “leftists” (Democrats) and “pedophiles” (LGBTQ people) from buying guns. The effect of these changes will be minimal.

10. Israel

If Trump continues to be the President, which I don’t think we can count on, he may not be as enthusiastic about sending billions of dollars in weaponry to Israel. He’s likely to take a more hostile approach to Israel, in the sense of telling them to stop fucking around and “finish the job”; they won’t be able to deliver on that without getting billions more in weapons, and that would piss Trump off. We do know that he is looking forward to clearing Muslims out of Gaza so he can build a hotel there.

I would not be surprised at all to see the MAGAs demand that Israel rebuild the temple in Jerusalem in return for more military aid. Remember that MAGAs are led by Christian Evangelicals, a group of people who desperately want to usher in the end of the world, but in exactly the right way according to their fucked-up version of Christianity. Rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem would likely require that the Dome of the Rock (the third most holy site for Islam) be destroyed which would likely start a regional war.

It is unclear whether Trump would bomb Iran or get the US involved in a regional war, because Iran is now in a coalition with Russia, Trump loves Russia, and Russia may ask him not to do that. Trump is generally averse to participation in foreign wars because it is expensive and his feeble intellect fails to grasp how foreign wars are materially beneficial to the imperial core. He probably doesn’t even understand that there’s an empire.

In any case, Israel is in much greater danger with a MAGA administration in control of the US, at least partially because the Israeli government is an extreme danger to Israel and the MAGAs are likely to encourage it to do stupid shit. It is certainly possible that the situation with Israel could turn into a world war, but the Democrat’s position on Israel wasn’t much better in that regard.

11. Ukraine

Russia will take Ukraine.

12. Global Influence

US influence on global politics is likely to fall like a rock. With the US government looking completely idiotic and Trump actively pulling US resources from important global political organizations (like NATO), other governments will look elsewhere for support, like to Europe, China, Russia, etc. Most countries will completely lose faith in US leadership. Chinese leadership will take advantage of the chaos and idiocy in the US and attempt to fill the void in international politics. The MAGAs are threatened by China’s ascendancy and will probably try to get people excited about going to war with China, but they will likely be distracted by domestic affairs, and will be turning American military might inward — they may even pull troops out of some of the approximately 800 US military bases on foreign soil to deal with any domestic conflict (i.e., protests that they will call terrorism) but especially to deal with the “bloody” mass deportation program that Trump promised.

13. Immigration

That mass deportation promise was probably Trump’s most popular idea, so it seems unlikely that they’ll be able to avoid doing it. MAGAs literally believe that millions of rapists are streaming across the southern border and raping white women. It will be interesting, let’s say, to see if they go after naturalized immigrants or limit their violent deportations to actual illegal immigrants. I would not be surprised to see certain corporations exempted from the deportations so they can keep using illegal immigrants to prop up their profits, because the immigrants were never actually the point. It’s possible that MAGAs could leverage the “bloody” mass deportation program to remove political enemies from the country, specifically; i.e., people who are native-born could find themselves stateless and stuck in a foreign country with no money. The MAGAs plan to throw a tremendous amount of money at border infrastructure, including Trump’s wall.

14. Reorganizing the Federal Bureaucracy

The MAGAs will assure that every federal agency is under their complete control by replacing all managers with MAGAs. Low-level workers that do not comply will be fired. Some of the changes that they will be making to the organization of federal bureaucracy are a waste of time and won’t really change anything. It’s in the nature of the conservative mind to completely fail at organizing anything (because they don’t understand logical hierarchy), so they’re doing things like putting FEMA within the Department of Transportation. To be fair, though, splitting the Secret Service into a security detail under the DOJ and a financial enforcement detail under the Department of the Treasury does make sense. I just think we will end up with a bureaucracy that is more disorganized, just disorganized in different ways than it is now, after wasting a lot of time and energy on those changes, and it is probably the chaos that is the point, because chaos is easily leveraged to make change.

15. AI

Under a MAGA-controlled US government, the process of weaponizing AI and similar automation against American citizens will accelerate using dramatically increased law enforcement funding. Unlike liberals, conservatives (i.e., fascists) understand power and will want to have direct control of the means of violence. This would include things like the automated gun turrets used in Israel and South Korea, and the automated robot soldiers like the dog-bot with the gun on its back, but it would also include using AI as an internet-based tool to discover and disrupt any organizations trying to resist the MAGA agenda.

16. MAGA Crimes

The various crimes of Trump and his MAGA supporters will simply go away.

CONCLUSION

Our “democratic institutions” cannot hold up against a President who has been granted the power to literally kill anyone he wants as long as he claims his action was job-related, and who can pardon the individuals who actually got their hands dirty. The 2028 election is unlikely to happen, and we will see what kind of strategies MAGA will use to disrupt it during the 2026 midterm elections. Every time the MAGAs make a change to how the US government functions, liberals will cry about it, and MAGAs will enjoy their tears. I doubt Elon Musk’s involvement in this process will change things much; his motivation for getting involved is primarily just so more people are forced to look at him because that is the kind of asshole that he is.

The elites are just going to let this all happen even though they have tools at their disposal to stop it. Stopping it would create chaos that would hurt the ability of the elites to make money, and letting it happen introduces opportunities for higher profits. The Biden administration, specifically, though blessed with God Mode from the Supreme Court, will not do anything to stop it.

In the end, the MAGA plan to steal the 2024 election was wholly unnecessary — or so it seems. Trump won handily, even managing to win the popular vote, which is an infrequent thing for a Republican candidate for President. I’m not yet ready to talk about how the left might respond to this in terms of community defense, and I might never post about that, but I can talk about what went wrong.

1. The Democratic Party does not understand unaffiliated voters.

Online, there’s already a lot of blame being pointed at “the left” and the way it is framed is really interesting. It is very clear that Democrats (as in voters who identify as Democrats) still do not understand the very simple concept that not everyone who votes for a Democrat for President identifies as a Democrat. It’s the same on the Republican side — not everyone who votes for the Republican for President identifies as a Republican. The American electoral system makes it so that only 2 parties are viable, so people who do not like those two parties must either vote for someone they don’t like, or effectively negate their vote (by either voting for an nonviable candidate or not voting). Voting for Kamala Harris does not necessarily mean you were a Harris supporter.

The typical challenge for the 2 viable parties is to appeal to these unaffiliated voters enough to win a majority of the votes. Yes, some of those unaffiliated voters have a coherent political worldview (like, for example, some kind of leftism or, alternatively, libertarianism), but most of them hold views that are disorganized and eclectic. The important thing, though, is that just because someone votes for a Democrat for President once doesn’t mean they are a Democrat and it doesn’t mean you can count on them to vote for a Democrat next time. Similarly, just because someone votes for a Republican once doesn’t mean they are a Republican. If you understand that the two major parties are highly offensive to most people, then this should be easy to understand, but self-described Democrats do not seem to understand this. They do not get that their party is disgusting.

In fact, Democrats seem to believe that if an unaffiliated person votes for the Republican then they are a Republican, and then if that person later votes for a Democrat, they have become a Democrat. Furthermore, it seems like the Democratic imagination is not able to muster enough empathy to accept the fact that other economic and political realities are possible. They can’t imagine past the current organization of this one country and their own attitudes toward it. Perhaps it is that lack of imagination that makes anything other that “Republican” or “Democrat” seem like a terrifying void to them.

This lack of imagination is probably the biggest part of why the Democrats lost. They imagine everyone who doesn’t like Trump as being a Democrat, and owing the Democratic party their vote, even though the Democrats have made it abundantly clear that they owe unaffiliated people nothing — because they clearly believe that they are perfect. I don’t believe that there will be a valid Presidential election in 2028, but if it happens, we will see the Democrats make the same mistake regarding unaffiliated voters that they made this time. They have learned nothing.

Part of the problem is that Democrats and Republicans both imagine a flat line that represents every possibly political position, with Democrats being on the left and Republicans being on the right. In fact, they imagine the far left edge of that line being the same as the far left edge of the Democratic party. Similarly, they imagine the far right edge of that line being the same as the far right edge of the Republican party. This is not true at all. In reality, Democrats represent a position within an ideology called “liberalism” (which is pro-capitalism), and Republicans represent a position within an ideology called “Christian Nationalism” (which is not necessarily pro-capitalism). (I’m not actually sure what to call the Republican worldview, but I thought that was close enough.) Both parties are right-wing (e.g., in favor of genocide, imperialism, and human suffering), but their narratives about values and reality are wildly different.

What do you do if you reject capitalism, genocide, imperialism, and human suffering as legitimate sociopolitical positions? You either don’t vote or you vote against the viable party that you hate the most.

2. The Democrats have limits placed on them by the donor class that prevent them from appealing to working class people.

A big part of why the Democrats are incapable of appealing to these unaffiliated voters is because they’ve had limits placed upon them by their biggest donors. Numerous Democratic party politicians have admitted as much, saying that big election donations are crucial to winning and thus require them to suck up to big donors, and those big donors have a clear agenda — primarily, to remain big, so to speak. Why are those big donations crucial to winning? That question leads to my next point.

3. American voters are awash in pro-capitalist propaganda and distractions and are resistant to education.

American voters are catastrophically ignorant of politics and economics. On the surface, you would think that the United States would have a fantastic educational system simply because it is the center of an empire and all the world’s resources flow toward it. However, Americans are awash in right-wing, pro-capitalist propaganda from capitalist corporations, right-wing think tanks, and even from the government itself (specifically, but not limited to, the CIA; see Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders). Individual Americans who seem to be a bit more savvy are typically just more saturated with that propaganda and thus more familiar with the details of its narratives.

In fact, propaganda must be at its most ubiquitous within the imperial core because the purpose of the core is to provide the most safety and stability for those at the top of the imperial hierarchy — they physically live in the core. The rich can just drop bombs on Iraq if the Iraqis act up, but they can’t do that in New York City because they live there. While most of that propaganda is not meant to promote the Republican (Christian Nationalist) worldview, it does create a situation where people who are unsatisfied with the current system (i.e., most working class people) don’t really have anywhere else to turn. Sure, they could turn to the authentic left, but the information they typically have available to them (all produced by pro-capitalist propagandists) does not allow for that option to make sense.

This problem is manifested in the kinds of comments about the left that you typically see online and in traditional media:

• “Communism obviously doesn’t work.”
• “All the third party candidates seem like they’re on drugs.”
• “Communism failed.”
• “Anarchists want to burn everything down.”
• “That third party candidate is obviously working for Russia to elect Trump.”
• “People are inherently selfish, so the ideas of leftists are unworkable.”

To make matters worse, nonsense media saturates American culture, creating a huge amount of distraction that takes away from the cognitive resources people have available to attend to politics. There are plenty of people who can name all the Marvel movies but can’t tell you anything true about American politics. American news media presents a simplistic and sterilized view of the world, which ends up being just another distraction from reality with pro-capitalist, pro-colonial, and pro-war messaging embedded within. Even Heather Cox Richardson is ultimately a distraction and a purveyor of propaganda.

Under these conditions of near-total political ignorance and hard limits on what positions the Democratic party can take, successful political messaging comes down to saturating media with simplistic ideas. Any idea that cannot be transmitted simplistically or that does not fit within the accepted paradigm (as defined by all this right-wing propaganda) will not be successfully received by these simple voters. This year, even days before the election, there were a substantial number of voters who did not know who was running for President! (Google searches for “who is running for president” spiked dramatically during the 24 hours before the election.) Reaching all those ignorant, simple voters requires a huge amount of money.

Propaganda isn’t the only reason that Americans are so ignorant of politics and economics, though. The USA also has a culture of narcissism which prevents people from learning new things. Science fiction author Isaac Asimov explained this in his famous quote:

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

Narcissists quite literally believe that their opinion is just as valid as a fact, no matter how legitimate the source of that fact; they call this “common sense”. When faced with a fact that they don’t like, or that doesn’t fit their (propaganda-formed) worldview, they will simply dismiss it and call it an opinion. In essence, for the average American, an opinion is any idea that they don’t like, and a fact is any idea that they do like. Under those circumstances, a person like Trump has an enormous advantage because he will literally say anything his audience wants to hear.

The problem is much deeper, though, because it prevents many Americans from succeeding in an educational environment. While I wouldn’t ever suggest that everything taught in American schools is true, it is more true and certainly more complex and nuanced than whatever students brought with them to school. However, when the teacher says something that doesn’t mesh easily with an American student’s preconceptions, they immediately reject it as unworthy of the mental effort required to integrate it into their worldview.

For example, I can say that although historical white people did horrible things (like slavery and colonialism), the actions of historical white people do not directly reflect on the moral standing of today’s white people as long as we come to a nuanced understanding of those historical actions, condemn those that were immoral, and refuse to repeat those mistakes… but that is really complicated, and it still indicates that historical white people are bad. Narcissists generate self-esteem primarily through group memberships rather than their actions, so white people will typically find this idea about historical white people to be completely unacceptable and reject it. They will not attempt to integrate it into their worldview. In a classroom, this manifests in students shutting down and failing to learn the material. It often also manifests in demands from angry parents to end “woke” schooling.

In contrast, the kinds of ideas that win elections are:

• I like you.
• I am on your side.
• I am tall.
• I will protect you.
• I will help you have material success.
• I will punish the bad people.
• I represent a group of people who are competent.
• I am physically fit.
• I represent your aspirations for yourself.

Instead, what we got from the Democrats regarding the economy (as one example) was something like, “Hi there, I’m a wealthy person compared to you, but I want you to know that the economy is getting better based on this line going up, which doesn’t affect you at all because you don’t have enough money to own stocks.” Regardless of how true their message was, it was just too complicated and made no sense in its more simplistic form. To be clear, it was not entirely true (because the Democrats always have to put the wealthy first), but the Republican message was a much bolder lie — a very simple lie that was more compatible with the average American’s worldview. Instead of disagreeing with their constituency by saying that everything is great, or things are getting better, Republicans agree with the complaint and deflect it toward immigrants, Democrats, Jews, etc. In fact, they offer multiple groups to blame so that the simple narcissist can accept the parts of the message that make sense and just ignore the rest.

Indeed, it appears as if poor messaging regarding the economy was the reason Harris lost.

4. Democrats do not understand immigrants, or any group of marginalized people.

From the Democratic perspective, the Republican position on immigration should be very repulsive to American citizens who are immigrants. However, immigrants don’t like to think of themselves as immigrants for a few reasons. First off, immigrants are not generally thought of positively. They want to be thought of as Americans, not immigrants. Third, the immigrant status of those individuals is not the thing about themselves that they most value; it does not speak to their aspirations or self-worth. They’d rather think of themselves as Catholics, or small business owners, or essential workers. Fourth, Americans who immigrated here from other countries have the same kinds of complaints that other Americans have — they don’t have any complaint relative to immigration because that is in the past for them. Fifth, the kinds of people that want to become Americans are generally going to be the worst kinds of people in terms of only thinking about themselves. If they were people who thought about others or cared about other people like them, they wouldn’t have abandoned their home country, and they would not have seen going to the US as a good idea.

This is also true of any group of marginalized people. Think about it: Who would want to have being “marginalized” (regardless of how you put it) as a significant part of their identity. Nobody wants to be the victim; they want to be the winner, the main character, and so forth. This concept is all the more important in the US because US culture is based on selfishness, but even the best people do not want to be reduced to a single characteristic that is widely believed to be detrimental. For one thing, they’re sick of hearing about it. This is why so many immigrants Americanize their names — they are tired of being treated as different.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this — because we’ve heard this from the groups of people that Democrats thought they could win over — is that people assume that a criticism leveled against a group that they technically belong to does not apply to them. If Republicans say, “Immigrants are entering the country illegally!” then they naturally assume this does not apply to them because they did it legally, and they naturally dislike this hypothetical illegal immigrant as much if not more than a person who is not an immigrant would. This makes perfect sense. Never mind that the entire immigration issue was created as a dog whistle to appeal to white supremacists. The immigrant is not a white supremacist, so they can’t hear the dog whistle. Similarly, “I will do something about violent crime,” is a dog whistle about people of color, but if you are a person of color, you just hear the plaintext message, and everyone is concerned about violent crime. Just saying, “Crime is at a 50-year low,” (i.e., “your fears are unfounded”) is not effective.

In summary:

1. The Democrats failed to appeal to unaffiliated voters and unaffiliated potential voters.
2. Democrats have limits placed on them by the donor class that prevent them from appealing to working class people.
3. American voters are unable to receive nuanced or complex arguments, giving Republicans an enormous advantage.
4. Democrats do not understand how to appeal to minority/marginalized voters.

In my opinion, these are structural problems that are part of the essence of the Democratic party and cannot be overcome. To overcome them, the Democrats would have to:

1. Genuinely appeal to working class people, including thinking outside the box (of capitalism) in terms of economic solutions.
2. End their financial relationship with wealthy donors.
3. De-emphasize identity politics, and focus on a positive narrative that appeals to everyone.
4. Find a means of delivering simple messages to more people, including finding a candidate for President that is relatively unproblematic and easily recognizable by all Americans.

However, it really does look like 2024 was the last normal American election. Moving forward, we should expect elections to be more like the staged events that we see in places like Russia. Even if the Democratic party were to completely reform itself, it wouldn’t matter, because it will never again be given the opportunity to succeed again. If you understand the Democrats, I think you’ll agree that this situation will be fine with them. They’ll go ahead and raise millions of dollars for campaigns and talk about how they’re fighting for you, it just won’t work, so they won’t have to engage in that complex dance where they say that they’re progressive but then have to somehow always fail in order to satisfy the donor class.

Please stop giving money to the Democratic Party.