Coming Up Next

Things Have Changed

I'm not making a tidy lead-up into this. Here's what's up:

President Donald J. Trump has become a full nihilist and his second term is a combination of asleep-at-the-wheel delegation of rulership, and "eh, who cares" about the destruction of the nation.

The man is too old and tired. He will never admit to such even to himself because that's loser shit. What matters to him is he's the President of the United States again, and that's the world's greatest trophy. Details matter not.

Though he must be kept happy and given the impression he is the Top Man and the buck stops with him, it appears Stephen Miller is the de facto president now and he is sending marching orders to Noem, Patel, Homan, and beyond.
Stephen Miller is by all accounts a dedicated white nationalist and full-throated fascist, who I suspect has an extensive (but lost to time) posting history on /pol/ or 8chan when he was in his 20s, as I see many overlaps how he acts and what the typical "if I was in charge those fuckin' insert-slur-here would..." drivel on /pol/ was like back in those days. His intentions here are the easiest to model, just imagine him as an official high up in Nazi America in Man in the High Castle, merely replace the German memorabilia for more homegrown American exceptionalism aesthetics.

JD Vance is unimportant and is along for the ride. His job is fulfilled as the tech-right insert, and all that's left for him is to bleat IDpol tweets to trigger-the-libs whenever waves of discontent wash over him from the latest country-skewering crap his mob has wrought that he's only made aware of via Twitter. He can say things within a narrow band of acceptable speech as defined by the crowd he was inserted to, and is a useful public shit-magnet shield for both Trump and Miller on account of him looking duplicitous with former statements about Trump being shit while possessing the charisma of molding socks.

Tulsi Gabbard is effectively the MAGA diversity pick. She had clout with independents and dispossessed Bernie supporters but has no sway in reining in what's developing as she is shut out for being an outsider to MAGA. The best case for her personally is to leave and try and keep a low profile, for if she grows a conscience later on and becomes annoying to Miller et al. she will make for a useful martyr.

Noem has nothing going on up there. She is a mouthpiece for Miller and Trump.

Kash Patel can get away with whatever boy wonder trying out the jetskis on the company card shit he wants so long as he stays loyal. Homan is Bovino with more public restraint. Hegseth is slime mold in agar gel and will grow towards whatever nutrient gradient is set out in front of him, even if that means becoming Miller's attack dog to bite and snarl at former allies of the United States. He will react to any developments in the most self-preservationist way, every single time.

Colorful characters such as RFK Jr etc. that are not directly charged with security and intelligence forces in some form are not considered important for what's coming up next.

In the end, all power devolves back to Trump and Miller. As the days pass, increasingly just the latter.

How They've Changed

In Trump Term 1 there were many "neocon" and independent establishment types that acted as moderating agents that restricted how radical a plan could be proposed and implemented. Through a combination of disillusionment, ideological evolution in both MAGA and traditional Republican camps, and gossip on the hill, many of them are gone and/or did not volunteer to step up. Those loyal to Trump and the nebulous-but-increasingly-starkly-defined plan of MAGA were chosen in droves for Term 2. This has led to a decline in competence, decline in intelligence, and increase in neuroticism. In just about every nation at any point in time, strongly selecting for loyalty over competence is the death knell for that nation. It could be quick or slow, but errors compound, and error-correction is broken as that would involve not being a yesman, which has one's survival rate (either figurative or horrifyingly literal) drop to zero.

When I say destruction of the nation, I mean the architecture that makes it operate the way it does, not necessarily the infrastructure, people, and culture. In due time however, all three of those will surely and swiftly rot when that architecture is broken and remade anew.

The intent (ranging from overt malice to "who cares if it happens" depending on the person in the administration) is the elimination of any element that can be construed as woke, and what is woke will be retroactively applied as seen as convenient. The litmus test being, is it acting as a barrier or speed bump on the way to remove non-whites, queers of any form, strange people of any kind (defined by internet anti-woke idpol), and those with multicultural/non-bigoted preferences? Case in point, the latest redefining of the Second Amendment as optional, validity defined by the state when convenient. A woke had the gun, therefore it's not valid. Here, "remove" is defined anywhere between "shouldn't be calling the shots" to "i can use their remains for my garden" and many in the former camp will not pipe up as the latter become emboldened.

There is no government,

there is only some fuck telling you what you can do.

Right now some fucks are telling you what you must do, and almost across the board it's stuff that would've immediately spawned investigation committees to broadly start prosecuting attempts to tear up the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and destroy the American way of life. It's known he gazes upon Putin's capacities to squish opposition with fondness, but lately the parallels to early Putin's Russia have been galling.

Firehoses of shit blasted on the airwaves so nobody knows what the fuck is going on. Whataboutisms and he-said-she-said and bringing into question the legitimacy of what used to be core American values. Normalization of blatant lying about innocuous civilian events to paper over major administrative fuck-ups with no sign of backing down. Always blaming on outside threats. Demanding punishment on others to distract from flaws at home or in the regime. And the opposition from the Dems has been not significant enough in most cases, because they're trying to avoid saying the quiet part out loud (that widespread arrests and prosecutions of lawbreakers in the administration) as they've done the calculus in their head and have switched from thinking "they're not going to let there be another election" as a useful re-election cudgel to nervously biting their lip that it might be a real threat.

But what of the general American public? I wish I was more upbeat about their chances, but I think the infrastructure for the state to cage its peoples has been built over the last 25 years in the aftermath of 9/11, and this is now the closure of the cage door. Here's how I see it:

The Forecast

There will be (or is currently) positioning to remove the ability for opposition to fight back in all relevant channels.

For example,

Organization and communication is disrupted by loyalists purchasing and running social media organizations to have overt control over algorithmic feeds, to add more no-no words to shadowban accounts or help classify types of verboten anti-MAGA content, to spawn and/or to rent more LLM disinformation and disorder-causing user accounts on those and other not-yet-explicitly-co-opted platforms. The bots are extremely powerful tools as they disrupt human prosocial group dynamics, as they nitpick comments, demoralize, and have the average user (who is unfortunately not schizophrenically paranoid enough for this brave new world) believe the public is considerably more supportive of this un-American horribleness.

Further development and weaponization of social interaction and connection graphs, combined with a set of tools intelligence agencies have access to that if you laid it all out to the average person would unfortunately make one sound like an unmedicated schizophrenic. They will build threat scores and profiles to know who are the most likely to cause trouble for the regime because of their successful planning, organizational, social skills. Suppressing protests with a hail of bullets is not preferred and will make their conception of peace more expensive in the long run. Inspiring fear is useful but scrambling seed crystals of revolutionary intent long enough to get entrenched by screwing with competent opposition members both known and yet-to-bloom is far more effective.
Admittedly this part is more speculative as I do not have a birds-eye view of the internals of these organizations, but the incentive is there and ultimately depends on spook agencies having mostly unsympathetic-to-MAGA skilled personnel and management. I am not optimistic on that front now, and as time progresses my forecast becomes more dour.

The press will continue to be greatly penalized both on an organizational and soon viciously personal level for covering events in a manner unfavorable to the regime. This will go beyond revoked access and public lambasting, and past occasional skirmishes where a reporter gets nailed by a baton or less-lethal round in the heat of street clashes. Unveiled death threats will be sent in DMs and no longer have the offending account closed for violation of TOS, and reports to the FBI from local police will be quietly ignored. Merely a couple high profile events where a reporter has been found dead or tortured in some way, whose investigation is comically botched and results in no arrests all while members of the administration make snide comments about the victims, will dramatically chill any concerted efforts to raise the alarm about what's happening.
Deplatforming of television comedians might go from "attempted" to "successful" and will quickly learn to not pipe up on social media accounts either. Content creators both traditional and new-media will be lavished with support if they remain loyal to the regime. They will not support all changes rolled out, but there will be a rolling Overton window that allows inconsequential disagreement to give the illusion of dissent and integrity, just as is seen in Russia. Trying to step out of that will be punishing enough that what principles a creator has will be superceded by the pain of revoked access, funding, and the threat of being offered to the wolves of both loyalist extremists or as bait for the resistance opposition, rearing to tear apart a collaborationist.

The judicial arm and all its processing members will be simultaneously overwhelmed, defanged, and shown to be impotent. This is already in the early stages where infractions by former agencies that are now morphing into MAGA paramilitary squads break the law with impunity.
People are already kidnapped and shipped off without due process (read: "we're here to figure out, are you actually guilty?") to foreign gulags, and even when it's shown without a shadow of a doubt there was no legitimate reason to treat them as a criminal, the victim will be punished in harsh and unusual ways for having the gall of making agents of the state look bad.
Access to a lawyer or even simply the family knowing the whereabouts of someone detained is currently purely optional for many immigrants, and soon, US citizens who are unaligned with the regime. All done in total disregard of court rulings, restraining orders, and so forth. Lawyers and judges will burn out from the apocalyptic increase in workload, reduction in necessary evidence and information to carry out their duties, while stochastic terrorism that results in those that work in law and the judiciary dead will be egged on by members in the administration, with rapid backing and manufacturing of consent by right-wing content creators and loyalist corporate press.
The perception that the rule of law can protect regular people against the state and its ardent supporters will evaporate within a short amount of time.

Those that worked in government pre-2025 will be turfed out or promoted explicitly based on loyalty to the regime. Those who worked in agencies with at least partially legitimate mandates whose structure has since been perverted to secure power (e.g. DHS, FBI, NSA, CIA, ICE, and CBP), will have the choice of trying to limit the worst of their new czars cruelties by performing their work in as upstanding and conscientious of a manner as they can given the circumstances, or leave.
Most will leave. The combination of peer pressure from outside (friends, family, aghast by developments) or within (not slavish enough to the cause) will drain the spirit and health of most in that position, how could it not?
In order to shore up this eroding base of competence, the qualifications for entry will plummet, save for one: ideological loyalty. There's been suspicion that many squadristi that threaten and brutalize within HSI/CBP ranks are perhaps former Proud Boys or January 6 attendants, and that's likely slightly true, but this exchange of group participants will accelerate greatly. The call to battle has been received well and clear, and many are gleeful they can finally sign up to clean shop under leadership that will let them indulge in their violence fetish against undesirables.

There is a non-zero chance that they will try and derail, remove, and tamper with the midterm elections. This has gone beyond yapping and now appears actionable. If they try it, they will get away with it. The exact same playbook will be used, where MAGA loyalist-converted agencies loudly proclaim law and order, break said law and order doing whatever they want, anybody criticizing or fighting back against it will be lied about, threatened, detained, or perhaps even killed. Any outcome that involves a large swing to the Dems will be contested as fraud. Any outcome where ballots are stuffed or voters are intimidated or disenfranchised will be ignored or lied about or smugly championed. There will be examples where they do not win, but declare that they did anyway, because the only way they could've lost is because subversives of (insert minority group here) tampered with the outcome. "What are you going to do about it? We have the guns you dumb cuck." The moderate and sensible playbook will be to try and throw it to the courts to hash it out, but the outcomes will be ignored or delayed with rapid-fire stunlocking appeals, as they continue to entrench themselves.

Where's The Pause Button

It appears that President Trump is, inferred from the obfuscation and blocking efforts, some form of pedophile sex pest. We don't know for certain because his controlled agencies have stonewalled and broken the law indiscriminately even when the Epstein files were ordered by Congress to be released. Then they kidnapped the president of Venezuela in a blitz operation. Then emboldened they threatened to do so to the leaders of Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico. Then a mom just back from dropping her kid off at school, fleeing the masked armed squadristi clawing at her car door was murdered, multiple shots fired by one of the masked agents who spat "fucking bitch." She was then lied about and the executioner defended unequivocally as the MAGA content machine and regime spin machine powered up to accuse her of being a terrorist lesbian soldier of some sort. Barely a few days later the regime opened its drooling jaws, baring fangs at a long-standing close ally for having the gall of not handing over their sovereign territory despite the fact that for the last 80 years it had functioned as a free US military installation site at any time anyway. Europe and Canada began eyeing their old friend worryingly with the same disposition as discovering the suited businessman in a zombie movie had just revealed their sweats and tremors aren't from food poisoning but that they'd been bitten, and frantically went about setting deals and putting up defensive protocols accordingly.

Not two weeks later after the Killing of Good, the squadristi again manhandled, threw to the ground, disarmed, and then executed a VA nurse in cold blood with ten rapid shots in his back Sicario-style, for he dared to put himself between their militarized might and the woman they assaulted. Had recordings from all different angles and distances not been shared all around the country and the world, their attempts to smear him as a terrorist murderer intent on doing maximum damage might not have aroused the American Citizen from their uneasy slumber. A token demotion of a particularly grating Geshtapo-cosplayer was all that half the country fedposting-on-main provided, while ICE/CBP/HSI enforcement actions continued unabated, as Pretti's murderer was reassigned without suspension, and no inquiry into civil rights violations will be allowed.
They will investigate themselves to see if they did anything wrong. You can feel the shit-eating grin soaking their words.

The thick paragraph of text just above encompasses less than four weeks of events, and didn't even cover that the independence of the Federal Reserve that keeps the US currency in its global reserve status was outright threatened as the Trump regime brought frivolous but serious charges against Jerome Powell for having the gall of not YOLOing financial policy and ruining the nation's future to make Trump look good. Hard-nosed market analysts and institutions are aghast and increasingly believe that future is already ruined and have fled to precious metals to their added value of trillions, where louder whispers are considering that hyperinflation may be a real risk as even Blackrock came out and stated that bonds may no longer be a safe haven asset. The ostensibly pro-markets party and candidate are copying much that led to the economic deterioration of mid-20th century Argentina. And the dumbshit Canadian plane bans just happened. It's all so tiresome.

A New Episode Every Day

The thing about outrage about one thing is it's hard to maintain if you have a finite amount of hours in the day. You have limited attention to provide, and your memory of what new awfulness occurred is changing constantly, getting rewritten and fucked with by all these multiple clanging alarms and blatant institutional-backed gaslighting about what's real or not.

What is shocking now will become normalized. What you should be concerned about will be tapped into place by indistinguishable-from-human bot accounts and captured press. Basic rights will be considered suggestions, not applicable to those defined as outsiders to the cause. Someone on the inside will probably realize they screwed up backing this horse and try to reverse, they will be too late, unsuccessful, and made an example of. Armed resistance will not be able to grow from a few lone wolf cases without being rapidly catalogued and dealt with by dragnet surveillance deployed indiscriminately and more powerful and bizarre than anything Snowden made us aware of. That probably comes after consensus updates that the economy is now truly fucked, but will be used as justification for brutal localized crackdowns and reprisals. The wealthy will shut up and take it or be rewarded for embracing the cause. At this stage I don't think it's out of the question that a false flag attack will be used to justify the invasion, occupation, and equivalent of annexation of either Danish, Canadian, Mexican, other Latin American territory, or for brutal occupation of non-loyalist stronghold states and cities. It would be too useful to distract against failures by idiot rulers closer to home, to justify disposing any pretense of not being a police state.

Cliffhanger

Does the military have an allergic reaction and initiate a coup? Would heads popped from afar slow their roll? Will Trump's vanity threatened by souring public opinion make him hook Miller by his ankles, hung out to dry? What if it is all a reality TV show again with kooky subplots and it all simmers down as democratic processes creak but withstand the storm?

If American liberal democracy holds and power transfers, that will be the best case scenario. But things won't be amazing on the other side though. Assuming a whole bunch of crazy shit doesn't go down that throws a wrench in the works (yeah. fuck.) what you have to look forward on the other side is everyone no longer trusting that they should treat you as the world's reserve currency. Or that you can handle being the world police. Or worthy of immigrating to and dedicating building a life there and adding one's talents there for fear the next pendulum swing ends with them dead. Or that its industrial and technological might can compare to the blaring cyberpunk glitz of a rapidly modernizing and comparatively mild-mannered China. As you close in on 50 trillion in debt and a roaring deficit, the struggle to meet payments with the atrophied economy, and emotional malaise afflicts the droves of people now structurally unemployed by automation and economic depression.

Epilogue

Those that communicate on behalf of this administration, thankfully, are not subtle. That directness is refreshing, in a fucked-up-oh-god kinda way. Manifest Destiny and barely-reworded honest-to-god NSDAP-poasting on Department of Labor socials. There's even a fucking AI slop video of the President, titled King Trump, in a fighter jet over cities unloading sewage tanks of shit on protestors in the streets.

So it's fitting that they chose to propagandize with the Werner Herzog clip on that lone penguin. It stays stays behind as the herd waddle off to the sea to catch fish. But not that bird. They're to choose the different path, and head straight into the unknown depths. Beyond what is deemed sensible, away from the possibility of help and care.

They idolize going their own way. But, it's not just them. To their leg they've chained the rest of the United States of America, with deranged muttering about returning it to glory. They shamble against the wind as it picks up, into the storm.

What can one say of the future, when frozen dead by the ice.

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