Communism? I don't think so.

The Trump regime is trying to use the fear of communism to keep Republicans in power. It's just one of the venerable scare tactics that people in power have used to herd voters through the long history of the Land of the Free, but it raises a nice counterpoint.

The programs and policies offered by the so-called leftist elements of the Democratic Party represent not communism but communityism. That's not a real word, but it could be. The values of communityism take into account the needs of disparate individuals and subgroups that fall outside of a super conservative norm. Where the current attempt at dictatorship underway from the Republican Party and Donald Trump focuses strongly on white Christian nationalism and repressive control of anyone who defies the central authority of the federal government, the community focus of the better Democrats lays out a more inclusive and stronger social structure.

Corporate Democrats remain a powerful destructive force within that party. Putting the Democratic Party in control of the government would put some of those people back in power. I said they are a destructive force, but they are nowhere near as destructive a force as the current form of the Republicans, and certainly not as bad as the executive branch under Trump. They're mostly a product of a pragmatic decision by Democrats in the 1980s to get a piece of the greed money that was beginning to flourish under Reagan. It mutated rapidly into a more cynical embrace of wealth for its own sake, flavored with hints that they still cared about the common folk. For a while there, quite a few people believed in the fantasy of "wealth creation" and the idea that every new rich person was just one more win in the process of making everybody rich. It can be done! Trust your broker!

It was an exquisitely crafted Mauviel crock of shit. Some people got rich, Democrat and Republican alike, while most of the rest of us got poor. The Democrats who prospered under that system want to hold onto it despite the massive statistical and real world evidence that it was ultimately a bad thing. The rising tide did not lift all boats. It swamped a bunch of them.

Under communityism, freedom is limited the way freedom will always be limited in an actual civilization rather than a free-for-all of kill or be killed desperation. Freedom is indeed just another word for nothing left to lose. Live free or die would become a daily mantra before going out to hope that today isn't the day that someone gets the drop on you. You want absolute liberty? Start everyone naked in an undeveloped landscape and turn them loose on each other. The problem is that you will have to reset the game board every few years to make all the starts equal. Oops! Control imposed from outside. It's really easier to learn to get along like good-natured adults who understand the responsibilities of living together as well as enjoying the freedom of a cooperative and tolerant society.

Tolerance isn't the greatest word, but it will do for the moment. It can be a step toward acceptance, or it can wear out and collapse into rage and hostility when it is exhausted. Tolerance enabled the emergence of civil rights, gay rights, feminism, and multiculturalism, but it also built up stresses in the more conservative elements of society until they finally snapped. As a result, we've tumbled backward onto a pile of jagged wreckage because we pushed fragile, fundamentally frightened people beyond their limited strength.

There is no good reason for a private citizen to have billions of dollars. There is no good reason for the resources of the world to feed a few immense fortunes. There is no good reason even to be gouging so desperately at the world's resources at the expense of the future generations we keep creating. Smart kids in those generations are demanding more and more that we take a collective look at our priorities.

Humans have a long tradition of listening to the elders for wisdom. As an elder myself, I don't recommend junking the concept entirely, but I know from my own experience as a youngster that the world each generation emerges into is significantly different from the one that their parents found. Much of the change is driven by technology, but it's also influenced heavily by sheer population numbers and remaining available resources. Also, our sense of purpose has changed somewhat, and needs to change more drastically from the old "conquer nature and your neighbors" approach that drove us from prehistory through the end of the twentieth century.

My own advice as an old fart is to look at some of the abandoned technology that was better than it looked, and return to a standard of durability rather than continuing the conveyor belt of manufacturing and discarding flashy trash that performs impressively for a brief time before becoming useless. The useless items don't vanish or magically revert to their raw materials for re-use. And we have to keep buying, buying, buying, not for status but simply to be equipped for society's latest version of normal functioning. Beyond this boring assertion, I have nothing to say about how to conduct your sex life or present the body you  were born into in a way that satisfies the mind that lives within it. I don't give a shit what color you are. I read a person's affect as threatening or not, regardless of hue.

We need to care about racial matters now, because we have delayed reckoning with them for so long. Face it and get it over with. We can't pretend to be a colorblind society without acknowledging fully the injustices that framed everyday life and built the foundations of our precious republic. And we will never be able to pull apart the country that was made with so many disparate elements to make it into some white Anglo Saxon ninny's idea of America perfected.

Winner can't take all. The struggle to win it all will leave nothing worth having. You either believe in community or you are working toward global murder suicide. The time line for that might be long...or not. But the conclusion is inevitable. The current model of consumption is destroying the environment. Ethnic cleansing and warfare kill people and destroy places. Deportation just sends people out around the block until they eventually end up back again, if they haven't been killed somewhere enroute. Big, militarized countries controlling their spheres of influence have to repress their own people to keep order and deliver violence to the lesser countries to keep them in line. The time to choose the way forward is now. Community or hostility?

Thanks a lot, Osama bin Laden

 When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday, his speech demonstrated just how far the United States has fallen since the attacks on September 11, 2001, tipped us over the brink of fear and paranoia.

The forces behind Trump include more than just voraciously greedy billionaires. The likes of Stephen Miller care much less for riches than they do for the perceived safety of a monoculture hiding in a fortress, surrounded by a huge buffer zone of vassal states that will keep the bad brown people from hurting them.

September 11 was an act of terror, and it worked. It's been a slow-acting poison. Some consequences manifested themselves immediately, like the Patriot Act and our involvement in Afghanistan. The Iraq war was another highlight. But even without those, the internal divisions stressed by the terror attack turned into fractures that have weakened the structure of the United States almost to collapse. All of this is the result of the jelly-kneed fear of people like Stephen Miller.

The bigots posture and talk tough, but it is motivated by the desire to obliterate threats in a way that can never be possible without the complete annihilation of humanity. Fearful people invoke the use of force.

Trump, the man voted back into office by fearful people, stood before the international body formed in the aftermath of World War II to promote peace, diplomacy, and respect for human rights, and mused about obliterating Iran, bragged about kidnapping the president of Venezuela, threatened Cuba, and openly championed the concept that large, powerful, heavily militarized nations have the right to stomp on the smaller nations around them. It was a disgusting repudiation of the high principles that our country has claimed to stand for. We used to at least pretend to be the good guys.

Greed drove the plantation economy of the South. Greed drove the Native American genocide of western expansion. The elites of the South fostered racism to control their labor costs. Years later, Nazi Germany studied the treatment of Black people in the American South to inform their own white supremacy. Next thing you know, we had to go over there and help kill the monster our own policies had helped to create.

Healthy fear is sensible. It makes you alert and cautious. But fear is a continuum. Your healthy caution can mutate into paranoia. The terror and rage that swept over the United States when our bubble of invulnerability was pierced by four hijacked jetliners has led to a man who absolutely personifies greed and fear standing before the UN General Assembly and dragging our country down to the level of loudmouth dictators that everyone hates.

The Republican Party is driven more by greed than fear as they support this man. Maybe they fear him as a political influence, though that influence is waning, but in the meantime the money is good. The party had prepared itself well for his rise. Now they can't seem to pull him down. Or maybe it's just that they won't. They put party over country decades ago. I hope they show proper appreciation to Osama bin Laden for really pushing their cause. Without him, their struggle would have taken decades longer and perhaps failed completely. 

On the other side, the Democrats needed an infection like Trump to demonstrate just how bad a bargain they made when they cozied up to corporate money. I understand that they had to play the game as the game was being played in order to score at all, but instead of biting the hand that fed them in a quick and decisive way, they wavered and let the hand get a firm grip on their leash.

Meanwhile, We the People have governing to do

 As callous as it sounds, the street murder of two US citizens exercising their constitutional rights is not the biggest threat facing the country right now. The regime has made a direct assault on free and fair elections by raiding the Fulton County, Georgia, election center and seizing ballots stored under seal from the 2020 election. The contamination of evidence means that any "revelations" by the regime are automatically suspect, but don't expect that to stop them.

The current occupant of the Oval Office has already said that he wished that he had seized ballots and voting machines in 2020 to prevent Joe Biden from taking office. Biden was confirmed as the winner of the 2020 presidential election numerous times, as the MAGA regime filed suit after suit, and lost all of them.

While much of the current brouhaha is driven by the thin-skinned and senile dictator's thirst for revenge against imagined wrongs, the forces that have slunk in under cover of his bombast have had their sights on limiting voting rights for decades. Each segment has their favorite targets: the religious right tends to want to keep women from voting. The white supremacists want to keep Black and brown people from voting. The corporatists want to keep the poors from voting.

We on the so-called left would prefer if the supporters of each and all of these enemies of liberty would stop voting that way, but I'd like to think that most of us recognize that blocking anyone's right to vote is a dangerous weapon, lest it be snatched away and used against us.

Unfortunately, we can't try to tell the oppressors that they will be no worse off, and perhaps better, by letting everyone participate. The super rich love being super rich. Falling back to merely filthy rich from obscenely rich would definitely impact their lifestyle. Insecure men who need women to be automatically subservient will have to face more and more women who have no need for them. White supremacists who want to relegate other races to a permanent underclass will have to abandon that notion. 

Elections aren't going away: authoritarian regimes need them to provide the illusion of legitimacy. Election subversion, on the other hand, is a key element in assuring that the designated winner has a comfortable margin. Deftly done, it can even give the opposition party a shred of hope that some day the system might go their way.

Close electoral margins in actual count give the regime the sense that opinion might really favor them, at least by a slim majority. That's why a big turnout is essential to lay down a number that is harder to deny and falsify. If they have to take away ballots by the truckload, it's harder to conceal than just lugging out a couple of file boxes late at night.

While we can fantasize about firefights at polling places, as MAGA supporters literally battle 2A progressives, such fireworks are highly unlikely. We've seen how voter suppression actually works: polling places scattered over hundreds of square miles; long lines; no food or water; maybe some goons in tactical gear slouching around. And ICE, if still cosplaying in full military kit and snatching people might grab as many brown voters as they can, holding them until election day is over. No need to stick their catch in camps or deport them. Just keep them from voting. Sure, there will be lawsuits, but it will be too late to change the outcome of the election.

White people should be fine as long as they (we) don't smart off or kick any taillights. But that puts a lot of responsibility on us to represent for our less privileged brothers and sisters who might be getting more shit as they try to make their way to the polls.

Maybe we reach a point where the supporters of the regime wear clothing or accessories that mark them clearly. A lot of them already do, but it's not a mandatory uniform item. If they adopt the attitude that "if you're not with us you're against us," and extend that to heavy peer pressure to wear the mark of their beast, anyone planning to vote against them will have to choke down that wardrobe choice to mask our intent.

Violence is always a possibility when dealing with people who glorify their ability to dish it out and take it. Maybe they can, maybe they can't, but it's central to their identity. Like any bully, they definitely enjoy beating up on someone they perceive as weaker. So maybe some self-dramatizing popgun patriot starts something somewhere, but it's unlikely. Don't want to risk messing up their costume.

A lot of polling places won't notice anything unusual at all. In my little town, people don't tend to put on their fight face for national elections. We save that for town meeting and school district hearings. Even then, it's been quite a few years since our last fist fight. And we don't have any brown people to exclude, even if someone was so inclined. That's one reason that so many people just chuckle about anyone who shows visible signs of getting upset at the problems we see on the news. It's still mostly theoretical to the people around here, so they treat it like a sport that may or may not interest them. That's a problem, but good luck figuring out how to instill a sense of urgency in a population so isolated for generations.

"Let's walk down and get 'em all."

 The headline of this entry is the punchline to a joke you may already know. In it, a young bull says to an older bull, "Look at all those cows down there in the pasture! Let's run down and each get us one!" The older bull answers, "Let's walk down and get 'em all."

Ha ha, right? It's about getting laid. It's also not so subtly predatory in its depiction of male-female relations, but that's not today's focus. Today we look at its aspect of low-key patience.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that the current regime in the White House needs to, "recalibrate and maybe work from a different direction to ensure they get back to get what they wanted to begin with -- and that is to remove people from the country."

It's a chillingly broad statement. Stephen Miller wants to remove more than half -- way more than half -- of the total population to get to the sparsely settled white homeland he has been pushing the regime to build for him. Steve Bannon regularly promotes the "great replacement theory" that views the immigration of non-white people into Europe and North America as a planned long game to outnumber and eventually overcome the white variant of human coloration. Abbott did not specify the number of people to remove. He merely suggested that a more methodical approach without the theatrics of military strikes on apartment buildings and street executions by short-tempered federal employees would yield a better result and not threaten Republican electoral chances as much.

The Republican campaign to purge people of a darker hue began with shock and awe demonstrations like the abduction of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others, to get a lot of immigrants, illegal and otherwise, to pack up and leave on their own, saving the regime money and enhancing their prestige as irresistible power. They have stuck with it, escalated, and poured money into it, long past the time when it was obviously generating resistance more than surrender.

A methodical, quiet campaign might seem to take longer than running in with flash-bangs, tear gas, pepper spray, and the occasional head shot, but it's their only chance. And the goal of sending 100 million people away is just ridiculous. However, they probably hope that a high aspiration will pull their actual results higher than if they truly concentrated on the worst of the worst and sifted only for violent criminals and non-white fraudsters. The shock and awe campaign gave a quick shot of deportations -- many of them completely improper and indefensible -- but it's losing traction now. A quieter approach below the threshold of public notice might have sent fewer people away initially, but could keep on disappearing individuals without arousing the massive public backlash that the atrocities in Minnesota have finally inspired.

There was pushback from the start, but the street executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti pushed it over the top. Particularly the murder of Pretti highlighted that the regime has no use for either of the first two amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. They'd already taken a big steaming dump on the fourth and fifth. They could snarkily claim that a federal agent making a snap decision to shoot someone dead in the street constitutes a very speedy and public trial as promised in the sixth, but a whole lot of other due process elements are missing. When the goons disarmed a legally permitted gun owner and then shot him, they kicked the biggest hornet's nest in American society.

It may be too late to spin this shit tornado down to a mere swirl of dust in a vacant lot. The damage is done. The current regime aspires to absolute tyranny. The stupid Supreme Court and their stupid "unitary executive theory" guaranteed that any president could become a dictator. They knew that the candidate under their banner had said that he wanted to be a dictator. No one should have been surprised when he immediately set out to be one. Forget "day one."

Even as allies of the dictator fall away, take note that they don't fall far. They used the current occupant of the Oval Office to get their brand of authoritarianism into power. They still want to rule rather than represent, because they know better than you do. Freedom does not come from God or any natural order. Freedom comes from them as they see fit to dole it out to you.

Any libertarian or outright anarchist will chime in at this point to say that the same principle applies to any rules or laws from a government with the power to field law enforcement agencies. Don't tell me I can't dump my waste oil right on the ground. The soil is sandy and soaks it right up! No problem! We have to walk a careful balance between letting people make their own decisions on the basis of their intelligence and morals, and limiting the damage caused by the multitude who have neither one. All are equal before the law, but that doesn't mean that the law should be powerless. Violators should be prosecuted.

Our elected legislators make the laws. We have to pay close attention to how those laws are worded and applied. Citizen government makes us all part of it. Big government? I'll say. Even if you demolish the formal structure, we are all governing each other in the aftermath, without a referee. Government is inescapable. Small government is far more dangerous than a full-size, every-adult-included representative democracy.

We'd all love to set it and forget it and devote ourselves to daily gratification of our impulses, but that is -- sadly -- completely impossible. It's like putting your SUV on cruise control and then hopping into the middle row seats to watch a video.

Is it time to start sleeping in our clothes?

 With Vice President JD Vance threatening that ICE will begin "door to door operations," and the rogue agency clearly targeting anyone even slightly uncooperative with the regime, maybe those of us who are at all vocal in opposition need to start sleeping in our clothes. Especially in colder climates, who wants to be dragged out in their PJs for the humiliating spectacle of being cuffed and stuffed, carted away to a mysterious fate by secret police?

Keep some sturdy slip-on footwear beside the bed to complete your ensemble. And be mindful of how your nightly moisturizing routine might make you look to the cameras.

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!! Likewise, you may have no hint that the all-seeing eye of the regime has settled upon little old you. Dress for the weather outside, in case you have to face it unexpectedly.

Lots of apocalypticists and general preparedness advocates have kept a "go bag" handy for years. Unless you plan to beat feet through the back door as the agents kick down the front one, don't expect to be able to retain a handy kit of personal possessions after your arrest. You'll probably have a shaved head and an orange jumpsuit within hours. But, for the sake of dignity and protection from the weather, stay suited up at all times, in anticipation of your time in transit to that fate.

Even if they just pop the door and shoot you in the face, you want to look good. On the other hand, in the case of summary execution, sporting the flannel pajamas, mug of cocoa, and fleece blanket will get the point across that maybe you aren't such a terrorist mastermind after all.

Everything in political violence is for emotional effect. That's why we keep our protests scrupulously nonviolent. They call us a threat, we show up in goofy costumes, or cheerfully assure them that we're not mad at them. And they shoot someone in the face. Who looks like a threat now? All of this posturing from the regime on one side and positioning from the opposition on the other is ultimately to persuade the sideline public that they want to support one side or the other. Do you prefer the goofballs in frog suits who want to share a living wage and universal health care, or the masked, armed, angry men who want to shoot you because you don't grovel quickly and thoroughly enough?

The vast majority of us do not have to worry about the goon squad kicking our door in and dragging one or more family members away. But no one has perfect immunity. Just because it probably won't be you does not mean that it never could. Certainly the percentage of people who should be subject to home invasion by law enforcement, after thorough investigation and under a valid warrant, is minuscule. There were already enough mistakes before the current regime decided to make it a regular occurrence. They're being sloppy both in preparation and in accountability afterward, because the people in power don't really care about accuracy. They care about intimidation, about maintaining order by making obedience seem like wisdom and self defense.

It will always be an emergency with Trump

 Over the years, the US presidency has accumulated more and more emergency powers. The overarching law we have heard about recently is the Insurrection Act, which originated with legislation passed in 1792, and evolved through 1871, according to an article on the website of the Brennan Center for Justice. But further presidential autonomy seems to collect naturally during any national crisis. The most recent massive infusion followed the national bowel-watering panic induced by the terrorist attacks on 9-11-2001.

Humans are simple-minded creatures. I say this as a human. It's easy to fall into the idea that the President is the most powerful official in the country. In fact, as the Constitution is written, Congress is the dominant branch. Wonder why government seems to be such an unproductive mess? We were literally designed to be run by committee -- a really big committee, gathered from a wide and varied nation where the voters know very little about how their fellow citizens live in other parts of it.

As a result of the time lag in Congress to negotiate actions, and the natural human tendency to identify a single leader, even Supreme Court justices fall into the belief that the power of the President should be absolute.

Enter the con man, mob boss, silver spoon baby grown into a massively self-centered adult-size body with a 12-year-old's understanding of history. And the Supreme Court has made him untouchable. His word is law, sort of. He spews out executive orders like royal decrees, and his Congress does not challenge him. Some of them are now, because he finally did something that might make the rich poorer, but even that effort faces headwinds from MAGA faithful and jelly-kneed Republicans who still think that facing a primary challenge is the worst thing that can happen to them.

Trump is himself an emergency. His election was quite possibly a mortal wound to this country. We won't know for a little while yet. According to a post I saw yesterday on social media, he will probably invoke the Insurrection Act on April 20, giving himself the power to use the US military against US citizens on home soil. The lengthy post laid out the dire consequences of this action. Basically, get ready for a lot of arrests and show trials of high profile Trump opponents, a clamp down on all forms of journalism, immediate harsh restrictions on free expression, and the roundup of millions of uncooperative people. Protests will be infiltrated by impostors who will initiate violence, justifying violent response by the activated military forces. Lots of people will disappear. All of those mean-looking people who march with swastika flags will suddenly be deputized to bust heads officially.

In other words, we will undergo a parallel to the first days of Hitler's power, followed by a climate of forced agreement maintained by deadly force. Execution for treason will be common, and swiftly administered. Treason means any criticism of the regime.

Authoritarians depend on official violence and the fear of it to compel citizens to obey. The loudmouths with the AR-15s and tactical gear who have been braying about tyranny will do nothing to fight it now, because they never really wanted liberty for all, only for their own narrow beliefs. They don't believe in freedom. They believe that might makes right. So they will make up the citizen militias that energetically crush the liberty of anyone who strays from the permitted roles and behaviors of the dictatorship.

Trump's arrival in the Oval Office for his second grab at the wealth of the country guaranteed a cascade of emergencies. He overlooks most of them, because they're hitting little people. No reason to skip a grotesque party at Maga Lardo or miss a round of golf because some peasants just suffered tornado damage or flooding. The increasing negative emotions in the country give him more power, because so many people have been so well trained to blame the wrong actors for their troubles. Their emergencies set the stage for whatever event the administration chooses as the excuse to unleash the full power of government sanctioned violence against its own citizens.

Trump is just a symptom and a tool of two major promoters of authoritarian government: theocracy and technocracy. The Christian nationalists want boys to be boys and girls to be girls who grow up to be men and women who understand their places under a God whose words and motives vary at the convenience of whoever is in charge at the time. The technocrats think that the world should be run by emotionless people who aspire to be machines. Both groups have a central idea of what our human purpose should be. Neither of them think that it's "to have fun."

When Jimmy Carter called for nationwide introspection at the end of the 1970s, he was just repeating the age-old human question: Why are we here? Humans used to fight over territory and resources. That period merged with the long spell in which we fought over ideas. Those ideas usually hinged on who should control territory and resources in the name of what god or philosophy. Most people seem to prefer the periods between conflicts, but a percentage of humans enjoys war, destruction, cruelty, torture, and killing. There may be a majority opinion, but there is no universal standard. The violent minority -- known by their passionate embrace of firearms -- has long railed against democracy, because they each only have one vote but they have 30 rounds in the magazine. No fair!

The same social media post warning about Trump invoking the Insurrection Act on April 20 said that Project 2025 had called for invoking it on the first day of his term. Many of us expected something like that. Reality seldom follows the script exactly. It was better politics for the administration to bumble and stumble toward a full crackdown. It looks more organic that way, less plotted. He doesn't have to satisfy voters to win reelection, but he does have an easier time if the population believes that "he's only doing what he has to do to protect us." He's promoting the general welfare and providing for the common defense. His Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Homeland Security will attest to that. Coincidentally, they're both on the advisory panel who will recommend for or against invoking that Insurrection Act.

If your vision of humanity's future is a soft-focused, congenial anarchy in which we're each free to be whatever benign thing we want to be, understand that even that will need some organization like the government institutions that we had, to assure that needs are met. The mob currently in power stands for the exact opposite. Their view is regimented, narrow, and not afraid to hurt you. They will do that with or without something as drastic as the Insurrection Act.

We're rapidly approaching the "or die" part

 As the current regime sprints toward totalitarian control, its agents have seized and detained legal permanent residents as well as immigrants and visitors either with visa issues or simply suspected of them. Plane loads of people have been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process. Citizens of other countries have been held in ICE facilities and US prisons without explanation, or with flimsy ones.

The wrecking crew of DOGE continues to demolish the professional portions of government agencies, while executive orders illegally halt funding to entities that the regime considers a threat to their authority. In other words, the Bill of Rights is being canceled. As long as white supremacists can say ignorant things, and no one comes for the guns (yet), the mainstream media and the loudest voices on the Internet insist that everything is fine. Freedom of speech and the right to bear arms are the only things that matter to people who specialize in hurtful speech and violence.

Major corporations and even law firms roll over for the advancing dictatorship.

The connect the dots diagram of the Turd Reich takes ever more obvious shape while legal remedies bog down in the courts. Protests gather. The regime ignores both. Once a person has been disappeared, they're hard to bring back. Gone is gone. So the regime can continue to sweep up people while the opposition fumbles for a response.

When situations like this in the past finally led to war, the "bad guys" always scored early victories. The Confederacy won all of the early battles of the Civil War. Germany and its allies entrenched themselves across Europe in World War I. Most dramatically, in World War II, the Axis powers took control of Europe, and the Japanese took control of most of the the Pacific, and required years of bloodshed to dislodge.

War has changed since the Second World War. It's unlikely that the major nuclear armed powers would unleash the full murder-suicide firestorm of a full exchange. But there could be limited strikes, and plenty of drones and conventional munitions that can kill lots of small, squishy humans thoroughly enough.

Meanwhile, on North America, the budding fascist regime in Washington envisions the empire that the enslavers imagined when they launched the Civil War: white supremacy from Cape Horn in Chile to Nunavut, Canada. Maybe they haven't thought it through that far, but I'll bet that someone at the Heritage Foundation has.

The problems with that come down to personnel. There simply aren't enough white people to dominate all of the non-white people that stand in the way of that fever dream. Enthusiastic breeders are doing their best, but it's not going to be enough.

Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a "national divorce" in 2023. She suggested that the country divide up by red and blue states. Various ideologically fractured maps of the United States have circulated for years. Because the United States itself was formed by carving out territory and choosing an ideology for it, the idea seems feasible. However it ignores factors that made the American experiment possible in its day. Everything took longer. Distance mattered more. And the abundant resources of the land area funded the independent existence of the country in a way that would be nearly impossible to duplicate. This is especially true if those resources are divided up among hostile smaller countries carved out of the corpse of the once-great nation.

The opposition to the Lands of the Free -- formerly the singular Land of the Free -- are unified groups under Russian and Chinese control. Both of those countries and their client states make no pretense of valuing the individual lives of their citizens or offering them much in the way of freedom. And their citizens are accustomed to this. Guided by fatalism, they go along, get along. Large numbers may be expended in military and industrial actions that their governments choose. They may not like it, but they can't imagine life any other way. With the United States gone, the last beacon of hope goes out.

If the United States holds together as a fascist state for the sake of the survival of its brand name without any of the signature freedom and democracy that had made it attractive to free thinkers the world over, it might hold its place in the uneasy triangle of hostile posturing that would shape reality for the generations born into it. If the country breaks up into little countries, each defining freedom in their own way, all of those countries will face diplomatic pressures from Russia and China. Each one will have to fund and equip its defenses and manage its economy. Each in turn will be easily picked off by the unified forces of the larger powers, no matter how unhappy the citizens of those powers might be. The self-proclaimed "free" will most likely be the ones doing the bulk of the dying.

Efforts to oppose the regime now might succeed. Some opponents of the current fascist coup will probably die. Some in custody probably already have. That death toll is nothing compared to what will happen if the situation here festers into actual revolution. And breaking into smaller nations will inevitably lead to either the end of freedom in them or their eradication.

Freedom for all ultimately comes down to mutual consent. We decide that we want that, as a species. Anything short of that sets the stage for endless war and the ultimate defeat of freedom as a concept at all. It ends either with the victors marching in lockstep to whatever goals their leaders assign, or everyone gone. As long as we're willing to kill each other, killers will always win. Maybe they're the "good killers." Maybe they're the "bad killers." In either case, the dead are still dead. The murderer always gets away with the crime, because the victim is still dead even if the perpetrator stands trial.