So with each passing day I’m being forced to face the cruel reality which darkly looms: My country, the United States of America, is basically speed-running its way towards collapse. What does that look like? I can’t give you specifics, but I know for a fact that short of a sudden and abrupt change to either our leadership or the political institutions our leader has surrounded himself with, the world that we know and take for granted is about to come to an end.

Before I continue, I want to make one thing exceptionally clear: I’ve spent weeks thinking about what to write in this post. I have struggled with finding the right words and the right thoughts to clearly relay my ideas here. I have spent even more time trying to codify and validate those ideas for myself. As a writer who essentially has a front row seat to this horror show, I am awash in conflicting emotions that simultaneously are begging for my attention. It’s hard to not write about this topic emotionally. Very hard. That being said, I believe I have my thoughts organized enough and that I’ve spent enough time thinking this through, to accomplish my objective.

So what is my objective? My objective is to redefine the parameters for the upcoming civil war. Yes, I absolutely believe that’s where we are headed. But as it stands right now, I believe that the battle lines have been incorrectly defined. I believe this circumstance is the result of decades of propaganda and efforts on the part of the actual perpetrators in an effort to channel the easy to predict violence in a direction that points away from them.

So who are the perpetrators? That’s easy: The insanely rich. Trump is one. Musk is another. The big tech CEOs who lined up to show fealty on inauguration day are also included. A thousand others who you don’t see hamming up for the cameras are also to blame. These are the people who have laid the groundwork for the horrors we are currently experiencing and for the civil war we will all soon be taking part in. But if that war was to be fought today, it wouldn’t be fought between us and the billionaires who have spent decades embezzling every bit of money and resources they could get their grubby hands on. Rather it will be fought between the relatively poor people who are all actually the victims of their charade.

Right now that war would likely be fought between MAGA people and non-MAGA people. The common perception is that MAGA is more heavily armed, so the thousand foot analysis doesn’t favor a win by non-MAGA, at least not by default. Nevertheless this war would be one that was fought in error. MAGA isn’t the enemy. MAGA is a victim. Just like us.

Now I can already hear the kvetching. “MAGA has enabled this. MAGA voted for this. MAGA is cheering for it.” Yes those things are true. But what is also true is that MAGA is awash in decades of propaganda pushed by the likes of Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity among many many others. MAGA as a whole is a group, at least in my experience, that is scared of the world changing around them. Those changes are social and economic in nature. The rich have successfully sold them on the lie that the confusing social changes pushed by the progressive left and the populace in general are the main reason for the negative economic changes.

It doesn’t make rational sense to equate the rising price of eggs to the increase in freedom for Trans people, but it doesn’t have to. Propaganda appeals to emotional mind, not wise mind. On a base level if one thing that scares you can be blamed for another thing that scares you, that is inherently appealing because it implies that you can kill two birds with one stone. Resolve one and you resolve the other by default.

It of course won’t work out this way. Even if Trump’s fascist wet dream is allowed to continue unhindered for years to come, it will eventually collapse in on itself. A lot of this is due to the core failing within fascism which is essentially that it depends upon channeling the rage of its supporters towards a constantly rotating list of targets. It operates this way because it is inherently incapable of solving actual problems. It’s not a methodology meant to govern but rather a methodology meant to redirect and exploit. It’s an illusion. It’s like I told a good friend over email recently:

Fascism is basically a revolving door of petty hate fueled by populist frustration which is redirected towards undeserving targets who aren’t in a position to mount an effective defense. MAGA is no different from the Nazis in this regard. In the past I have wondered how the German people could let something like the rise of Hitler happen. I’m living through something very similar now and I’m still wondering how we are letting this happen. I have been enlightened a little bit though. There is a certain paralysis that comes with being an unwitting participant in such terrible times. Sure we didn’t vote for it, but that won’t matter when it comes time to tell the tale of MAGA and DJT in the history books.

Future generations will ask the exact same questions and likely not receive any answer useful or satisfactory enough to prevent a possible recurrence.

Damn shame, that.

Thus it has taken a lot of thought and consideration for me to publish the following words.

MAGA is not to blame Link to heading

Part of me wants to blame them. A large part of me in fact. In an effort to emphasize just how much I have struggled with this post, originally it was going to be called something along the lines of, “MAGA cannot be forgiven”. Then it became, “MAGA must earn their forgiveness” but as I put more time and thought into it, I began to realize the uncomfortable truth of what was actually happening here. I was being goaded by the the same type of propaganda that MAGA has been. Only in my case my rage at decades of progressives being stymied by the spineless and ineffectual centrist core of the Democrat party along with their consistent inability and seeming unwillingness to prevent our decline as a nation was being directed at MAGA itself.

So let’s hit the reset button here. MAGA is scared. That much is clear. They are scared of a changing world and being pummelled with things they do not comprehend. The exact same thing is true of myself and the like-minded progressive / socially-liberal people I know. We are scared. We are also scared of a changing world and being pummelled with things we do not comprehend. The only difference between us right now is that MAGA’s fear has been redirected to LGBT+ people, proponents of DEI programs and liberals in general and our fear is being redirected to MAGA.

Who benefits from this? Billionaires, thats who.

When everything goes to shit, they’ll swoop in with their accumulated resources and seek to usurp control. They will then capitalize on the resulting chaos to acquire even more resources while leveraging those resources against us in such a way that they will then be able to rebuild a new society that works even more in their favor than the one we have today does. Make no mistake, they have spent years hoarding money, materials, building bunkers and putting together private security forces. They are prepared for what is coming and that’s primarily because they have spent a great deal of time and effort engineering it.

How aware is Trump of this? I honestly don’t know. My gut feeling is that he’s basically a useful idiot. Rich enough thanks to his daddy and his numerous schemes to technically be part of the club but dumb enough to not realize that he’s just a useful albeit talentless nepo-baby. The other ultra rich people in his orbit however… they know exactly what they are doing. Musk doubly so. Trump’s primary value to them is whatever charismatic quality he has that inspires MAGA to follow him. That’s something the rest of them don’t have. For the moment, they need it. Soon, they won’t.

I sincerely hope that when the time comes for our civil war, we’ll be aware enough to point our rage to the portion of the population that has actually earned it. Let’s reclaim all of the resources and wealth that these non-quite-human greed machines have scrounged away. Instead of starving because they have decided that the profit margin on eggs is too low for their tastes, let’s reclaim those facilities in their entirety. Let’s deny our self-appointed Lords their feudal rights by ceasing to function as Vassals dressed in rags and instead make their lives a living hell by grabbing our torches and pitchforks so that we can storm their castles. We need to bring this battle out of our town squares and onto their doorstep.

So after that diatribe you may be wondering whether or not I’m a communist. Hardly. Communism is a pit of unmitigated failure that romanticizes human nature and then allows itself to be exploited by the first strongman who comes along who happens to be aware of that. That being what it is, some variation upon a capitalistic system with democratic underpinnings is probably the best we’ll be able to do. However at some point, we need a form of this system that eliminates the aberrations that the current version has birthed: Ultra rich individuals and corporations who wield enough power that they can realistically dictate the course of our very lives.

Every day we suffer under the yoke of these tyrants. It happens every time you are forced to watch an ad for shit you don’t want to buy. It happens every time you are forced to pay more for something because some rich asshole wasn’t making enough money. It happens every time you buy something only to find out that this time the portions were just a little less because that extra penny of margin put a million more dollars into some billionaire’s pocket on the aggregate. It happens every time you file a health insurance claim for services or medicine that you need to survive and get turned down for some reason they can’t even be bothered to explain.

Are you tired of it? Because I sure as fuck am. I refuse to let these parasites redirect my rage ever again. MAGA will return to the fold once the negative impacts of what Trump, Musk and the rest of these traitorous scum are doing are made stunningly clear to everybody and I personally don’t think that will take much longer but I do reserve the right to be wrong as timelines are notoriously difficult to predict in my experience. One way or another eventually there will come a point of no return on this path into the evolving nightmare in which we’ll have to make a choice: Who to run down first.

I plead with all of you: Let it be the billionaires. If we cut the heads off this hydra, it will die. Good riddance.