Month: September 2025

‘Endgame Enigma:’ Contemplating The United States’ Political Future

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

We seem to be moving towards a dark future, but I can’t quite figure out what exactly that dark future is. If this was any other nation, I would say this is when Trump and MAGA begin to aggressively consolidate power and turn us into something akin to a Nazi state.

But there are a lot of complications.

The US is decentralized. It has a long tradition of democracy. And it’s really diverse both ethnically and politically.

So. I don’t know. It’s tough to figure out what the ultimate endgame of all of this bullshit is. Maybe this is just the beginning of a broader process of consolidation in the sense that more has to happen.

And, remember, MAGA could get everything it wanted — and more — if it just cooled its heels. The general macro trends in the United States are moving towards fascism and tyranny. So, if MAGA would just keep their heads about them, they could probably by around 2032 get the white, theocratic ethnostate that they seem to want so bad.

But. And this is a huge but, that’s not what seems to be going on. Trump is and always has been just a symptom of broader problems in the American political system so it could be that he will feel emboldened by the Charlie Kirk murder and really get aggressive with fucking with the 2026 and 2028 elections.

If he does so, he could be playing with fire. That’s when it could be that it will be Blues, not Reds who revolt in a big, meaningful way. It’s kind of comical — given the context of MAGA’s continued political ascent. MAGA has no reason to start a civil war when our politics are so fucked up that they can get their tyranny and autocratic state….through politics!

Anyway, I’m really worried. It just seems possible that there might be some sort of civil war or revolution and the United States will bomb itself into oblivion of its own volution. There will be a World War III, a few billion people will die from a few limited, strategic nuclear exchanges here and there and….if we’re lucky humanity will unite and work on big picture problems like global climate change.

Of course, lulz, if the technological Singularity happens around 2027, then, oh boy, all bets are off one way or another.

Charlie Kirk As MAGA’s Horst Wessel

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I really do think that MAGA is American Nazism, even if it is an ideology not of expansion but of retrenchment. For the time being, I still have a First Amendment right to make such a comparison.

Horst Wessel

And I’m definitely not joking about or celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder. His job was to do professionally what I do on this blog — give my political opinion.

But I’m talking about the “same, same, but different” dynamics of MAGAism and Nazism. The two are, in some ways, very similar. Very similar. Yes, in some ways they’re different — MAGA doesn’t want to take over the world — but in some ways they’re very similar: they both are going after the weakest elements of society in the name of the Leader.

So, back in the day, this guy named Horst Wessel died and he became THE Nazi martyr. And it doesn’t take a genius to see that Charlie Kirk is going to become something similar to MAGA. The psychological and emotional needs for both groups to have a martyr — regardless of the truth of the person’s murder — is eerily similar.

Anyway, the point is — things are going to get a lot worse now. Kirk is going to become a touchstone for MAGA going forward that is used to justify some pretty horrible things. I could see them figuring out a way to round up Trans people and put them in camps “for their own good.”

And then, presto, MAGA will expand the dragnet to regular old kooks like me and the next thing you know an ICE agent is shooting me in the back of the head in the name of Charlie Kirk. It really could happen, folks.

It’s happened before.

So I Guess The MAGA Right Is Just Going To Go With Lying About The Motives Of Charlie Kirk’s Murderer, Huh

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

This is so frustrating to write about. As I keep saying, MAGA is politically ascendant in the American political system. They’re going to get everything they want soon enough if they’re just patient.

Charlie Kirk

And, yet, here we are, with them totally ignoring the nuance of what happened to make it orthodoxy that Charlie Kirk was murdered by a radical leftist who was in a romantic relationship with a Trans person. It’s like they need this lie to exist for emotional reasons. And they say the “woke cancel culture mob” ignores the facts for emotional reasons.

Ugh.

Anyway, now the two sides are arguing over facts. The center-Left sees the nuance and says, “While he may have been living with a *potentially* Trans person, there’s no evidence he was in a relationship with them and the murderer definitely thought Kirk was too liberal.” Meanwhile, the MAGA Right is all “round up the Trans people, they’re all terrorists!”

My concern is there is going to be a breaking point not with the MAGA Right, but with the Blues. If the MAGA Right does half the things it is chomping at the bit to do, Blues might finally awake from their comatose, blase world of going to wine and cheese dinners to get, like, upset and stuff. Or, if nothing else, the traditional dynamics of a center-Left revolt / revolution might happen and everyone who is rich — conservative or not — will be given pause for thought.

But I struggle to believe any such thing will happen. And, yet, MAGA definitely looks like they’re coming after at least freedom of speech in some demonstrable manner. Potentially in some way that is some gross and ham-handed that otherwise indifferent Blues might sit up and take notice.

Who knows. I just worry. I worry that now that Charlie Kirk is a martyr to the MAGA cause that the already out-for-blood MAGA movement will begin to actually do shit in the real world to aggravate an already bad situation.

I’m Growing Alarmed For The American Trans Community

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I smell a rat. The FBI seems to be making up, out of whole cloth, some sort of connection between the person who murdered Charlie Kirk and the Trans community. It seems as though the pressure to find something, anything to fit the murder of Kirk into the required MAGA narrative is enough to cause them to just flat out lie.

The murderer’s family said point blank that he lived with them and now the FBI (and some rando FoxNews producer) are claiming he lived with a Trans girlfriend. What the what?

Add to this the growing calls to, well murder the mentally ill, and I — a member of the bonkers community — find myself growing a little worried. It doesn’t take a genius to imagine a situation where MAGA finally gets their chance to put Trans people in camps and murder them and before you know it, that particular dragnet also involves just kooks like me.

MAGA is so smug about it, too. They’re like, “Ah-ha! We have finally found what we need to murder Trans people in cold blood.”

The interesting thing to me is what happens to ICE. The purview of ICE is going to expand at some point into something more along the lines of the SS. Form follows function and all that. It’s just a matter of time.

I Haven’t Given Up Hope Of Writing A Thriller Series That Is An Homage To Stieg Larsson

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I still have a three novel series that would be an homage to Stieg Larsson rolling around in my mind. But, for the time being, I’m focusing on this scifi dramedy I’m currently working on.

I just can’t, apparently, focus on more than on novel at a time for time being, so, I’m focusing on the easier to write novel at the moment

But once that’s done, I’m going to return to the thriller series I’ve been working on. But it won’t be six novels, it’ll just be three. Which, I guess, I what it should have been all along. Sigh.

…A Fuzzy ASI Movie Idea….

By Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here’s a premise for a movie. What if an ASI pops out, takes over all of our nuclear weapons…but we can’t seem to communicate with it in any traditional manner? Maybe it talks only in music videos or something.

That would be an interesting movie.

Folks, There’s Not Going To Be A Second American Civil War Until Blues Get Enraged Enough To Start One — & Even Then, It’ll Probably Be A Revolution

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ok, a history lesson. The case could be made that the American Civil War started because the slave holders of the South felt that the free-labor North was sufficiently ascendant that they had no choice but to leave the Union.

And, now, we face a similar situation between the slumbering Blues and the hyperbonkers MAGA. The Blues are still pretty laid back, despite how insane MAGA has become after the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk. And, what’s more, MAGA is politically ascendant — they have no reason to resort to political violence to get what they want.

If MAGA just cools their heels for a few years, the United States will become Trumplandia and that will be that. I would even go so far as to say they don’t even have to fuck with free-and-fair elections. The macro trends of the United States point towards us becoming an autocratic, tyrannical state within a decade of our own volition.

But MAGA is fucking greedy and so it’s very possible that they will fuck with the 2026 and or the 2028 elections to the point that Blues grow enraged. Now, I have my doubts about a “National Divorce” started by Blues. A revolution, however, I could see happening.

Combine pissed off Blues with astonishing income inequality and the usual dynamics of a center-Left revolution could very well come into play. Then the two sides bomb each other into oblivion and we take 40 or more years to pull ourselves out of the rubble of what used to be the USA.

And, in the meantime, the world will move on — probably WW3 will start — and maybe, just maybe, once everything is sorted out in about 20 years, humans might collectively work on things like global climate change.

But that is obviously the most optimistic of outcomes. It could be, lulz, MAGA wins and the US, have many millions of dead, turns into a MAGA version of Iran.

Anyway….good luck?

America Seems To Have Civil War On The Brain At The Moment

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I think all of us need to calm the fuck down. There’s not going to be a civil war. There’s not going to be a revolution. At least, not anytime soon.

As I keep saying, I could see one happening in 2026 or 2028 if Trump really aggressively fucked with the elections. That’s the kind of thing that would piss Blues off enough that there might be a civil war or revolution on their part.

But, really, I think all this talk of civil war — which, honestly, I don’t know how much is genuine and how much is produced by Russian bots — says more about the hysterical nature of MAGA than anything else. MAGA is so overwrought in their rhetoric these days that they grasp for the absolute worst thing they can think of, which just happens to be a civil war.

As it stands, MAGA has absolutely no reason to start a civil war. They, as a political movement, are ascendant and, lulz, why would they want to risk losing a civil war? So, really, all this civil war talk on the part of MAGA is more about them daydreaming about being able to murder people like me in cold blood without any legal ramifications.

That’s it — MAGA talks about civil war because they want to murder center-Left people without having to go to prison.

But, as of right now, at least, Blues, who would actually start a civil war in self-defense, seem willing to take the continued abuse by MAGA cocksuckers. When Blues decide they’ve had enough and fight fire with fire, THEN we have a civil war or revolution.

To say it would be horrible is an understatement. There might be a race war in the South. Both sides would use WMD. Many millions of people would die in some potentially horrific ways.

Hopefully, neither Reds nor Blues will have any reason to actually go for each other’s throats in the real world. Hopefully.

I May Have Finished A Solid Second Draft Outline

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have been using AI to craft an outline for the second draft of this scifi dramedy I’ve been working on. I’ve vowed to myself not to use AI to do anything beyond this for the second draft.

After I have a solid second draft outline, everything is going to be just me.

I think I may read and watch other people’s stuff some more before I sit down and actually write out extended scene summaries. I also want to study structural stuff a little bit more as well.

But, in general, I think I may have stumbled across a vision for the second draft. The only issue is that the novel kind of turns into a techno-thriller in the second half, which is not at all what my original vision was.

And, yet, I get it. I understand why the AIs I’ve been working with went in that direction. It makes sense in the context of the directives I gave it. Now, I just need to brood and hope my lingering teeth issues don’t grow so dire that I’m too distracted to do anything until it gets fixed.

Ugh.

‘Sad Individual’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

A MAGA-type who is one of the few remaining MAGA Facebook friends I have called me a “sad individual” for not engaging his occasional stray comment on my anti-MAGA rants.

As I told him in my response — I don’t engage him because I like him. If I didn’t like him, I would engage him and then we would inevitable start screaming at each other and one of us would unfriend the other.

So, there you go.

He was also upset that I hadn’t “done anything for my fellow man.”

This was, I have to say, kind of stings. I’m kind of too poor to do anything for “my fellow man.” If I had money, then, yeah, I would donate to the poor or something. In fact, I would probably be something of a patron of the arts if I had more than just enough money to feed myself.

Anyway.