Oh boy. One year from now, as I understand it, will be Election Night 2024. The thing about the next year is there are a lot of known unknowns that could potentially make these coming months some of the most momentous in American history.
Biden is very old. Trump is a man on the run from the law.
As such, it could be that there are any number of things that might happen suddenly that will change some pretty basic assumptions that we have about what we will be facing on Election Night 2024.
If we are very, very, very lucky, then we defeat Trump again and, rather than deciding to demand a National Divorce so he can escape prison, he rants a lot about “Stop The Steal 2” but…nothing happens. We manage to punt some pretty severe structural problems down the road AGAIN.
Trump is so fucking old that even though he will obviously run for president again if he loses again in 2024, he’s not, like, fucking immortal. It could be that all my fears about us turning into an autocracy like Russia will happen not in 2025, but 2029. Any Republican president that we have at this point is going to turn us into an autocracy, it’s just an issue of degree.
A lot of white (male) Americans are angry about the browning of America combined with the growing economic agency of women in the context of the white “Birth Dearth” and the secularization of the country in general. White Identity Politics just aren’t going anywhere — our transition into a minority majority nation is causing some pretty basic elements of American political life to be thrown up in the air.
Two things are generally true about me — I can’t predict the future and no one listens to me. In fact, not a lot of people even take me very seriously. But I am pretty good at making abstract concepts more concrete and also running scenarios.
With all that in mind, let’s mull how we might topple a tyrannical Second Trump Administration. The key issue is it hasn’t happened yet — and may never. So, lulz. But as recent polls indicate, we need to at least begin to contemplate what the fuck we’re going to do if Tyrant Trump gets a second chance at turning us into a Russia-style autocracy.
Now, remember, if it ends up being any other Republican then all of this is moot. Any other Republican would have the wherewithal to be sly and more orderly in their guiding us into a managed democracy. But this is Trump we’re talking about and he’s so dumb and erratic that there’s a good chance that he will really start to do some tyrannical bullshit that causes people to think seriously of something akin to a Glorious Revolution.
But there is a lot I just can’t game out.
It could be that I’m underestimating the patience of the American public. It could be that Trump really can go full tyrant and, well, lulz. He will be so legalistic about doing it that the U.S. Military will shrug and, well, there you go. As long as, in general, he doesn’t touch some basic rights like those found in the 1st Amendment, he will get a pass.
The people who might organize direct action, like a General Strike, will be too busy using their second passports to live in Europe and record their circle jerk podcasts.
Having said all that, it is clear to me that if things really did get that bad that we could use the 14 Amendment combined with a General strike to potentially entice the U. S. Miliary to depose Tyrant Trump. The argument of the Glorious Revolution would be that legally Trump was ineligible to run in the first place, so neither he — nor his running mate — are legally in office.
Now, some context.
Not only would both the United States and the entire world be in the middle of a massive clusterfuck if things get so bad that we’re talking like this, but there would be an equal and opposite reaction by MAGA. It’s not like they would just shrug and be cool with deposing their Dear Fucking Leader.
So. Any talk of combining a General Strike with the 14the Amendment is essentially advocating a civil war and I’m not prepared to do that. But I do think we all need to prepare ourselves for something astonishing to happen in the United States starting in late 2024, early 2025.
I can’t predict the future, so I suppose it’s possible that we may punt our problems down the road again, like we did in 2020. By my fear is even if we “just vote” and defeat Trump that he will, unto himself, spark a National Divorce — civil war — simply because he doesn’t want to go prison.
I continue to drift towards my goal of finishing a novel so I can query it in the fall of 2024 — just as the so-called “Fourth Turning” is going to happen. Ugh. Anyway, I also want to have a fall back “second creative track.” As such, I’ve decided that screenwriting is going to be it.
Just as I have used Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl Who Played With Fire” as my “textbook” for the novel I’m writing, so, too, do I plan to use Charlie Kaufman’s “The Enteral Sunshine of The Spotless Mind” as my “textbook” for screenwriting. I think I’m probably going to do something similar with the Star Wars screenplay at some point soon.
I need to understand how to properly read a screenplay. I’ve already found bouncing back and forth between novel writing and screenwriting has helped my writing a lot. Something about thinking about how to structure a screenplay aids in helping me see things in a different way with the novel.
Anyway, something about the fall / winter season coming (along with a lot of more darkness) has caused me to feel a little unnerved. I’m still faraway, so close with the novel. It’s fun to just totally switch gears on a creative level and read about something completely different and new, while staying within the general writing skillset.
I hate the fact that I don’t have enough structure in my life. I have a rather idyllic situation going on at the moment and I spend way too much of my time just daydreaming and drifting towards my goal.
What’s more, I know damn well that this unusual — a great — situation that I find myself in can last for only so long. Something is going to throw everything out of whack soon enough and I’ll be smarting that I didn’t squeeze out every once of creativity I could when I had the opportunity.
I wonder what it will be. Maybe it will be The Fourth Turning, maybe it will be having to go underground when weaponized ICE agents start to hunt me down for thinking ding-dong Tyrant Trump is a fucking cocksucker.
We’re now almost exactly a year away from one of the most election days in American history. At the moment, it seems, we’re careening towards a crisis not seen since 1860. This crisis could manifest itself in one of several ways.
The most obvious way is, lulz, we simply drift into autocracy with our eyes wide open and shrug as we transition from the halfway situation of being an “anocracy” to full blown autocracy. Trump is re-elected, he goes full tyrant and there’s no reaction on the part of the majority of the population. Of course, that doesn’t mention the 1 million smug Twitter liberals who will flee the country en masse as soon as it’s clear Trump is going to transition us into autocracy.
That scenario, for the time being, seems to be the most likely one.
Alas, there are some other, far darker scenarios that we have to contend with.
One scenario is Trump is re-elected, goes full tyrant and, well, he gets so absolutely bad that there is some sort of “Glorious Revolution” on the part of the populace — maybe with the help of the U.S. Military. I could see the organizers of such a coup using a novel — to say the least — interpretation of the 14th Amendment insurrection clause to kick Trump to the curb by saying he was never legitimately president to begin with.
That might be the legal fig leaf that would allow the New Patriots to get the job done and still be able to sleep at night. But there would be a spectrum with this scenario, with there being a “light touch” revolt that has the specific aim of getting rid of Trump all the way to a far more general collapse of the country because MAGA freaks out.
But, wait, there’s more.
Another situation would be Trump loses, and starts to demand a National Divorce with the specific intent of him personally avoiding going to jail. Then we have a repeat of 1860-1861 with states leave the Union one by one and a massive fucking clusterfuck.
Meanwhile, there is a small chance that rather than wait until Trump goes full tyrant, Blues freak out and do something akin to a civil war / revolution of their own starting as soon as Trump is named the winner.
But my thinking on this has evolved. I no longer think that Blues would cause a civil war. A revolution, maybe, but not a civil war. It’s just the temperament of Blues to want to start a new nation. Blues like me just want to reform and remake the nation that we have.
One last thing — never underestimate the possibility that Reds will, once Trump is in office, begin the process of calling a Constitutional Convention. I think that’s a real possibility.
Anyway. Good luck. You’ve got a year. Use it wisely.
In general, Americans are collectively pretty chill. It takes a whole lot to rile us up. We’re not French, after all. In fact, the last time we really got ornery was in the late 1960s, early 1970s in the context of the Vietnam War. Once The Draft ended, then, lulz, everyone just wanted to shake their booty and being politically engaged was a thing of the past.
A book I really enjoyed as a young man is William Safire’s “Freedom,” which is a huge tome of a novel that deals with the early days of the Civil War leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation. The book deals with what I would call “Radical Moderates.” This is epitomized by when one of the characters says, “We’re all Abolitionists now.”
The average person in 2023 has no comprehension as to how radical freeing the slaves being a war aim was in 1862. So, in a sense, if you want to know what a Radical Moderate is, just think of how President Lincoln only gradually warmed up to the idea of freeing the slaves.
ANYWAY.
The point of all that is — if Trump goes totally bonkers and full tyrant, what happens? Anything? All the signs point to Trump winning in 2024 and then, in a very, very fucking erratic manner, shoving tyranny down the throats of Americans in an unprecedented manner.
And, as an aside, remember — if Trump does happen to lose, there’s really good chance that he will single-handedly provoke a civil war in an effort to avoid going to jail. Let that sink in.
This is where I note that general macro political trends are for the United States to drift (peacefully) into autocracy. It’s a gimmie at this point. Now, in late 2023, the United States is an “anocracy” or even, maybe, an autocracy without an autocrat.
So, if any other Republican was in Trump’s position, we would simply wake up on day 20 years from now — or less — and wonder why the United States is invading Canada to free it from the “woke mind virus.” But this is Trump we’re talking about.
He’s so stupid, lazy and idiotic that what should be a historical gimmie, could turn into a massive fucking clusterfuck. But, again, this all raises the question — how tyrannical can Trump get before there’s some sort of “Glorious Revolution” lead by Radical Moderates?
And, remember, pushing things to the limit is kind of Trump’s thing. The man has been a one man stress test to our entire political system, ranging from the courts to the election process itself. So, yeah, I could see Trump going stark raving mad and tyrannical at some point in his second term to the point that, say, there’s a General Strike of some sort that might bring the nation to its knees.
This, of course, raises an interesting idea — might the U.S. Military step in? I don’t think so. And, yet, if Trump was running around demanding the U.S. Military to do things to the domestic population that were clearly illegal and un Constitutional….maybe they would step in?
An interesting way that Trump might be deposed is the an novel use of the 14th Amendment. Remember, the Radical Republicans of Reconstruction were able to fuck with the South for a few years by saying the did not have a “republican form of government.” As such, if Trump went crazy and started to do things that the U.S. Military simply could not brook, it’s at least possible that the legal fig leaf that would be used would be that Trump was illegally in office to begin with because he was in violation of the 14th Amendment.
But all of that is just a speculative daydream at the moment. I think that while Trump is likely to go full bonkers tyrant the moment he’s in office again, that, in the end, he’ll solve all his problems with the U.S. Military by demanding a Constitutional Convention that rewrites the Constitution in the likeliness of MAGA.
If that happens, may God have mercery on all our souls.
I have no special insight into anything, but I was alive in 2016. And Republicans made it clear in the days leading up to the 2016 Election that lulz, they were fully prepared to simply not allow ANYONE to fill a SCOTUS vacancy unless they were MAGA.
As such, Twitter liberals need to shut the fuck up about “Oh, if only Hillary Clinton had won in 2016.” Trump is nothing more than a symptom of some severe macro problems in the American political system that would have caused SOMEONE like him to become president starting early as 2016 and no later than 2024.
In some respects, you can’t even “blame” Obama for Trump. The forces that allowed Bill Clinton to win in 1992 also caused Trump to come into being. In general, America’s fucked because of the forces that bring down all empires sooner or later.
The only question in my mind at the moment is are we going to somehow pull off a third hat trick and — after some turbulence starting in late 2024, early 2025 — renew our democratic traditions and grow even stronger. Or are we going to slouch into a MAGA autocracy. Or, worse yet, we bomb ourselves into oblivion without any clear endgame.
But the point remains — Twitter liberals are being crybabies to pine for some alternative universe where Hillary Clinton won in 2016. I remember the passion that the Trump Train had behind it in 2016. If he had lost, we wouldn’t know what a horrible president he would be and he would definitely win in 2020. So, all the horrible shit that happened in 2017 – 2021 would just have been punted down the road four years.
The thing about Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson is the more I learn about him, the more I know my conservative relatives — whom I love dearly — will love, love love him. I would even go so far as to suggest that they will soon be chomping at the bit for malignant ding-dong Trump to name the Speaker his 2024 veep choice.
The thing about MAGA Mike is he’s pretty much just your typical modern MAGA person. A solid 38% of the electorate loooooooves what he has to say on the culture wars and the “vibes” that are tearing the country at the moment.
After much, much, much, much time brooding over what the fuck is going wrong with America on a systemic basis, I think I may have it figured out. A combination of growing income inequality, the browning of America and women’s economic agency is tearing the country apart on an existential basis.
The browning of America is really key to America’s instability because it feeds into a white identity politics narrative. America is zooming towards a tipping point where we’re kind of like South Africa in the sense that a minority of the country controls a majority of the political and economic power. This is a very fucked up situation, no matter which nation it happens to occur in.
Anyway, we’re reaching a moment in time when Americans collectively figure out what our future will be for generations to come. Do we become an autocratic MAGA state of blood and soil, or do we allow things like the browning of America and women becoming economic equals happen as they should?
I have a fear, of course, that we’re going to “take it to the streets,” if you will. We’re going to have at it against each other in our struggle to figure out what type of America we want to be. If Trump becomes POTUS again in 2025, the possibility of a Blue “Glorious Revolution” and a reactionary counter-revolution on the part of MAGA grows by leaps and bounds.
But if it’s NOT Trump who is our MAGA POTUS, then I think we simply shrug and become an autocratic white Christian ethnostate with a thin gloss of lingering 1st Amendment rights.
I hate violence. Hell, I hate conflict of any sort. But, as we enter being about one year away from the so-called “Fourth Turning,” I find myself thinking about what might be the BEST case scenario in a huge, massive clusterfuck.
Now, in real terms, I think the United States just slipping peacefully into autocracy is probably the absolute best scenario of a wide rage of really shitty outcomes. And, yet, if you think about what might be best if we want to remain a functioning democracy, there is the “Glorious Revolution” option.
This is all very speculative and I still can’t really game it out, but, in general, this would be where things get so fucking bad under Tyrant Trump that the 60% of the American population that wants to remain the “land of the free” rises up and brings Trump down, MAYBE with the help of the U.S. Military.
But it would go something like this — starting in January 2025, Tyrant Trump lives up to his name and he’s so full of hate and the need for revenge that a lot of common folk who, to date, have lulzed Trump’s tyrannical inclinations will sit up and take notice.
I think of these people as political “Radical Moderates” As such, even though about 1 million smug Twitter liberals will have left the country by that point, enough of us Poors join forces that we manage to bring Tyrant Trump’s tyrannical regime to its knees.
I could see not only mass protests as things got progressively worst under Tyrant Trump, but maybe, just maybe, that unicorn of American political levers — the General Strike. Americans are so chill — even under duress — that it’s really difficult to imagine something as out of the ordinary as a General Strike.
But we live in unprecedented times. And, according to political science, all you need is a motivated 5% of the population to bring down the government. So, it’s easy to imagine if Trump somehow managed to sign a complete, and total, ban on abortion of any sort in the context of pulling out of NATO and South Korea and God only knows what the fuck else, that women, if nothing else, might collectively decide to YOLO it and just not go into work until Trump is out of power.
Now, before this seems like too rosy a scenario, there would obviously be an equal and opposite reaction on the part of MAGA if, say, Congress was actually thinking of doing something about Trump. So, things would really be totally chaotic as the two sides tore the country apart.
What might START as a “Glorious Revolution” against Tyrant Trump, might endup as just a regular old fucking Second American Civil War.
So, as I mentioned before, lulz. I guess I’m cool with us slipping peacefully into a MAGA-themed autocracy.
If you believe — as I do — that they’re rushing towards a future that is very similar to that imagined in the movie “Her,” then, well, it definitely seems as though Apple would be the company to make it happen.
They don’t have a profitable search engine business to protect and they have gobs and gobs and gobs of money to throw at creating a top-tier LLM. And, what’s more, they are at the forefront of XR technology with their Vision Pro.
But, as I always say, I can’t predict the future. I have no idea what is going to happen. And, yet, I would suggest you keep an eye on what Apple does in the next 18 months with XR and LLM.
I think it’s at least possible that were about to have a thunderclap of innovation around the fusion of XR and LLM technologies to such an extent that it might cause a severe recession and the loss of millions of jobs. But, we’ll see, I guess.
“Pres Biden walked back into WH at 6:58 after nearly 90 min handing out candy. It was chilly 58 degrees & he was likely soaked from nonstop rain. Even those with umbrellas on the lawn were drenched & cold. No aides brought out an umbrella for their almost 81-yo.”
Steven Nelson
I saw a headline from a Voice Of America correspondent that suggested President Biden left his handing out of Halloween candy tonight drenched from a hours-long cold rain.
William Henry Harrison This makes me extremely uneasy because, well, you know. He’s 80 years old and that’s just the type of dumb decision that fell William Henry Harrison. This has long been a concern of mine. And it only gets worse because of how the new Speaker of The House is known as “MAGA Mike.”
Something wicked, this way comes. If, God forbid, something happens to Biden, and if those blind items about a Harris sex tape are real and it comes out…then, well, we got President MAGA Mike on our hands.
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