Mike, this wasn’t an article. It was a psalm for the apocalypse. A liturgy for the damned, written in the language of receipts, not reverence. The way you flayed the pearl-clutchers and painted their complicity in bureaucratic beige? Divine.
The prophets used to wear sackcloth and scream on street corners. Now they write Substacks and wield hyperlinks like holy fire. And still the people sleep, lulled by bipartisan bedtime stories while ICE builds altars to algorithmic terror.
The sacred truth? We are not debating policy. We are watching Pharaoh get federal funding. And the moderates are too busy fussing over tone to notice the plagues.
Virgin Monk Boy approves this indictment. You called the secret police by name while the rest of the room practiced polite silence. May your words tattoo themselves on the insides of our skulls.
We don’t need centrism. We need exorcism. Keep going.
In 1932 the so-called moderates, so-called centrists, so-called liberals, of Weimar Germany, desperate to protect their hold on what little power they wielded, calculated that Adolf Hitler was less of a threat to that power than Ernst Thälmann.
Even the centre-left made that calculation, but unlike the moderates, centrists and liberals, the centre-left, at least some of it, learned their lesson.
Today the so-called moderates, so-called centrists, so-called liberals have seen Jeremy Corbyn as more of a threat than Boris Johnson, Jean-Luc Mélenchon as more of a threat than Marine Le Pen, and Bernie Sanders as more of a threat than Donald Trump. They see the resurgence of unions and the dispersal of economic power across the workforce as a greater threat than the accumulation of economic power in the hands of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
They see a man like David Hogg, proposing to use democratic mechanisms to elect candidates who will actually challenge right-wing authoritarianism instead of those who will merely write strongly worded Twitter posts, as a greater threat to their power than the systematic dismantling of the professional civil service and its replacement with one that will be loyal to Stephen Miller and his ilk regardless of who is formally vested with executive power.
They find the concessions that would be necessary in a left-centre governing alliance as more unpalatable than the concessions that would be necessary in a right-centre governing alliance. Even in my country Mark Carney is preferring to pass policies which Pierre Poilievre will support than which Don Davies will support, even though fear of the former led supporters of the latter to elect Carney.
Fascism is the tool that unprincipled centrists use to ensure that the principled left, who, on account of being principled, actually does pose a real threat to the continued wielding of power by those moderates, does not assume power.
People like Sanders knew that the electoral choices with which people have been faced over the last decade or so have been between a return to the reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Clement Attlee or the authoritarianism of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. The left remembers history and knows that the latter plunged the world into war while the former brought economic prosperity for the masses; the unprincipled centre sees the former as an immediate short-term threat and the latter as a remoter possibility, convinced that so long as they maintain their grip on power within their faction that another election will give them back the levers of power on a national level. The centre has once again turned to fascism to protect itself from principled reformers, now with the tools of technological surveillance and propagandisation, of social media feeds that maximise engagement over critical thinking to prevent people from seeing what is actually happening, and we will all pay the price.
I would add to this that it often seems like a lot of the so-called moderates never ask themselves why, in times like these, voters are often drawn to parties that the centrists find too extreme.
They don't ask how Le Pen and Mélenchon between them could get 45% of the vote in the first round of the 2022 French Presidential election. They don't ask how the Alternative für Deutschland, Die Linke and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht could get 35% of the vote between them in the 2025 German federal election. They don't ask how it was that a Corbyn-led Labour Party could get 40% of the vote (nearly thirteen million votes) in 2017 and over ten million votes in 2019 (though only 32% overall) while a Starmer-led Labour couldn't even get ten million votes in 2024 (but still over a third of all votes).
In my country Justin Trudeau promised that 2015 would be our last federal election under the first-past-the-post electoral system. People voted for the Liberal Party on the basis of that promise. Then when a Commons committee studying electoral reform recommended a national referendum between FPTP and a mixed-member proportional representation system (albeit with no Liberal members signing onto the majority report, instead recommending a system like Australia's which still leaves a two-party structure in place, and two minority reports within the majority arguing for no change or for no referendum) Trudeau declared that there was no consensus on electoral reform (despite a majority report being issued) and we have since had three federal elections under the system he promised to abolish. When pressed on the matter, he said that he didn't want a system under which a party like Maxime Bernier's People's Party (another far-right party, not too far ideologically from the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre) could win parliamentary representation, not stopping to consider why people might be drawn to that party instead of one of the parties he considers "reasonable".
The so-called centrists will on the one hand tell people to "vote harder" while on the other hand see voter anger and voter desire for change and voter attraction to extremists (as the centrists define it) and say, to adapt the Seymour Skinner meme, "No, it's the voters who are wrong" instead of concluding that they are out of touch and not offering workable, reasonable solutions to the problems voters are facing, which drives those voters to parties offering solutions that the centre considers unworkable and unreasonable (and which might well be).
And even as the supposed centre sees both the far-left and the far-right as unreasonable, they also see the far-left as more principled and thus more of a threat, and so work to crush the left and in doing so at least tacitly ally with the far-right. As I've said before, this is fish hook theory in action.
Well well well my friends here we are. It took the Nazis years to take over; our takeover is being accomplished in months and weeks.
Reading words of the president this weekend has convinced me that he is merely a figurehead being used by the new deep state. There are many hateful men who have taken over the government. Their aim is to kill all those who object. We are already in a violent revolution.
I really think that one of the problems with this type of an article is that you have to have a higher level of intelligence to be able to interpret it. Trumper’s tend to be less educated and need things written at a much lower level. I’d love to share this, but I know that the people I would want to be able to understand. This would never be able to wrap their little pee brains around this type of logic.
Platform algorithms all but guarantee that posts like this are mostly viewed by the choir already in line with it. The irony is that the echo chamber only gets stronger with every “like” of likeminded readers.
This is absolutely one of the limiting factors in spreading Mike's brilliantly illuminated work to a wider audience. I say share it, share it far and wide, but yes, you're going to have to do some work and edit and summarise and dumb-down to make it more palatable to an audience that's accustomed to shortform video rather than essays and articles.
My scrolling finger is exhausted... I agree with comment from LA..and I wld say perhaps there are three publications here instead of one very large one ...often times.. repetitive
All of this. Thank you for continuing to articulate what I’m thinking, feeling and seeing. We’re plunging into an abyss of darkness with maybe only 25% of the population tuned into how seriously depraved this situation is.
For those tracking what’s happening day by day, we know the ship has sailed. From Trump v CASA to seeing the new ICE budget, there’s no more hope that maybe the worst is behind us. These evil fucks are just getting started. The MAGA base is rabid and believes that Trump was sent by God to rid this country of us (and non-whites). There is no meaningful opposition.
Many people, like myself, live in MAGA strongholds…and have been very vocal with our outrage. I’ve definitely upset MAGA in my immediate community. I now plan my bike rides to minimize chances of being caught alone running into a MAGA.
Now my time is spent wondering if I’m no longer
safe because I’ve said too much.
I wonder, would I be the “hysterical” one if I finally reached out to digital friends and acquaintances that live in the area to start organizing micro communities of support, communication and resources.
Simply wondering what TO DO. My conscience won’t let me accept any of this and bury my head. But it’s painfully obvious that in this environment, no one is safe. What’s the roadmap?
America values honesty, fair play, integrity. As a pathological liar and con man, Trump has never been able to command the ‘respect,’ power, and regal status he craves. He now feels these to be within his reach.
Trump is not out to make America great again. He’s out to make America grovel at his feet.
Americans need to know this. America needs to understand that this is the end game so that America can stop him.
I have resigned myself to the fact that we are going to have to kill all these fascists or be trapped in a permanent kakistocracy police state. The options now are civil war or total capitulation. Where is the line for the people? We crossed mine months ago. The rich apparently want this though so here we are. I don't know how America is going to survive this intact, it does not seem possible knowing what is to come after Ice gets all this new funding.
Thoughtful and provocative. I wish you had identified some of those professional moderates though. It would be helpful—educational—to be able to evaluate their public positions in the context of your critique.
Two plus two equals four, there are 24 hours in a day, and the constitution doesn’t stop a damn thing. I see tons of articles like this where violation after violation is listed, and nothing ever happens to the violators. There is no enforcement mechanism in the document, yet people act surprised when it’s violated. It’s been violated from the start because there are no consequences for the violators, yet people think it’s magically going to start protecting individual rights any minute now. It never has and never will. The last guy implemented the no jab, no job mandate for the Trump shots. Where is that in the constitution? Where is Operation Warp Speed in the constitution? Almost every law affecting the whole country is a direct violation of the 10th amendment. I agree with what you’re writing about here but what’s going to happen to these tyrants? Nothing. Nothing ever happens. Vote them out, right? How’s that working? The system has to be dismantled or all of this, and worse, will keep happening. Why? Because there is nothing to stop it.
Do you really mean to suggest an equivalency between a public health mandate in the face of an unprecedented pandemic and the creation of a police state to disappear people into domestic and foreign gulags based on the color of their skin? That's really just another flavor of the very problem this post addresses.
By the way, the enforcement mechanism is, or at least was, that third branch of government called the judiciary. SCOTUS is obligingly working hard to take the judiciary off the board, however. Yes, the Constitution is just fish wrap with fancy signatures if no one respects it.
Mike, this wasn’t an article. It was a psalm for the apocalypse. A liturgy for the damned, written in the language of receipts, not reverence. The way you flayed the pearl-clutchers and painted their complicity in bureaucratic beige? Divine.
The prophets used to wear sackcloth and scream on street corners. Now they write Substacks and wield hyperlinks like holy fire. And still the people sleep, lulled by bipartisan bedtime stories while ICE builds altars to algorithmic terror.
The sacred truth? We are not debating policy. We are watching Pharaoh get federal funding. And the moderates are too busy fussing over tone to notice the plagues.
Virgin Monk Boy approves this indictment. You called the secret police by name while the rest of the room practiced polite silence. May your words tattoo themselves on the insides of our skulls.
We don’t need centrism. We need exorcism. Keep going.
Thank you for your brilliant commentary.
In 1932 the so-called moderates, so-called centrists, so-called liberals, of Weimar Germany, desperate to protect their hold on what little power they wielded, calculated that Adolf Hitler was less of a threat to that power than Ernst Thälmann.
Even the centre-left made that calculation, but unlike the moderates, centrists and liberals, the centre-left, at least some of it, learned their lesson.
Today the so-called moderates, so-called centrists, so-called liberals have seen Jeremy Corbyn as more of a threat than Boris Johnson, Jean-Luc Mélenchon as more of a threat than Marine Le Pen, and Bernie Sanders as more of a threat than Donald Trump. They see the resurgence of unions and the dispersal of economic power across the workforce as a greater threat than the accumulation of economic power in the hands of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
They see a man like David Hogg, proposing to use democratic mechanisms to elect candidates who will actually challenge right-wing authoritarianism instead of those who will merely write strongly worded Twitter posts, as a greater threat to their power than the systematic dismantling of the professional civil service and its replacement with one that will be loyal to Stephen Miller and his ilk regardless of who is formally vested with executive power.
They find the concessions that would be necessary in a left-centre governing alliance as more unpalatable than the concessions that would be necessary in a right-centre governing alliance. Even in my country Mark Carney is preferring to pass policies which Pierre Poilievre will support than which Don Davies will support, even though fear of the former led supporters of the latter to elect Carney.
Fascism is the tool that unprincipled centrists use to ensure that the principled left, who, on account of being principled, actually does pose a real threat to the continued wielding of power by those moderates, does not assume power.
People like Sanders knew that the electoral choices with which people have been faced over the last decade or so have been between a return to the reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Clement Attlee or the authoritarianism of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. The left remembers history and knows that the latter plunged the world into war while the former brought economic prosperity for the masses; the unprincipled centre sees the former as an immediate short-term threat and the latter as a remoter possibility, convinced that so long as they maintain their grip on power within their faction that another election will give them back the levers of power on a national level. The centre has once again turned to fascism to protect itself from principled reformers, now with the tools of technological surveillance and propagandisation, of social media feeds that maximise engagement over critical thinking to prevent people from seeing what is actually happening, and we will all pay the price.
I would add to this that it often seems like a lot of the so-called moderates never ask themselves why, in times like these, voters are often drawn to parties that the centrists find too extreme.
They don't ask how Le Pen and Mélenchon between them could get 45% of the vote in the first round of the 2022 French Presidential election. They don't ask how the Alternative für Deutschland, Die Linke and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht could get 35% of the vote between them in the 2025 German federal election. They don't ask how it was that a Corbyn-led Labour Party could get 40% of the vote (nearly thirteen million votes) in 2017 and over ten million votes in 2019 (though only 32% overall) while a Starmer-led Labour couldn't even get ten million votes in 2024 (but still over a third of all votes).
In my country Justin Trudeau promised that 2015 would be our last federal election under the first-past-the-post electoral system. People voted for the Liberal Party on the basis of that promise. Then when a Commons committee studying electoral reform recommended a national referendum between FPTP and a mixed-member proportional representation system (albeit with no Liberal members signing onto the majority report, instead recommending a system like Australia's which still leaves a two-party structure in place, and two minority reports within the majority arguing for no change or for no referendum) Trudeau declared that there was no consensus on electoral reform (despite a majority report being issued) and we have since had three federal elections under the system he promised to abolish. When pressed on the matter, he said that he didn't want a system under which a party like Maxime Bernier's People's Party (another far-right party, not too far ideologically from the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre) could win parliamentary representation, not stopping to consider why people might be drawn to that party instead of one of the parties he considers "reasonable".
The so-called centrists will on the one hand tell people to "vote harder" while on the other hand see voter anger and voter desire for change and voter attraction to extremists (as the centrists define it) and say, to adapt the Seymour Skinner meme, "No, it's the voters who are wrong" instead of concluding that they are out of touch and not offering workable, reasonable solutions to the problems voters are facing, which drives those voters to parties offering solutions that the centre considers unworkable and unreasonable (and which might well be).
And even as the supposed centre sees both the far-left and the far-right as unreasonable, they also see the far-left as more principled and thus more of a threat, and so work to crush the left and in doing so at least tacitly ally with the far-right. As I've said before, this is fish hook theory in action.
Well well well my friends here we are. It took the Nazis years to take over; our takeover is being accomplished in months and weeks.
Reading words of the president this weekend has convinced me that he is merely a figurehead being used by the new deep state. There are many hateful men who have taken over the government. Their aim is to kill all those who object. We are already in a violent revolution.
What will next week bring? God only knows.
He is a puppet and always has been. Leonard Leo and Peter Thiel are running this show behind the scenes.
I really think that one of the problems with this type of an article is that you have to have a higher level of intelligence to be able to interpret it. Trumper’s tend to be less educated and need things written at a much lower level. I’d love to share this, but I know that the people I would want to be able to understand. This would never be able to wrap their little pee brains around this type of logic.
Platform algorithms all but guarantee that posts like this are mostly viewed by the choir already in line with it. The irony is that the echo chamber only gets stronger with every “like” of likeminded readers.
And so it goes …
This is absolutely one of the limiting factors in spreading Mike's brilliantly illuminated work to a wider audience. I say share it, share it far and wide, but yes, you're going to have to do some work and edit and summarise and dumb-down to make it more palatable to an audience that's accustomed to shortform video rather than essays and articles.
ICE, Secret Police, Gestapo - no matter what you call them, the goal is the same. Terrorize anyone that dares challenge the authoritarian regime.
Brilliant, Mike. Exactly what needed to be said.
My scrolling finger is exhausted... I agree with comment from LA..and I wld say perhaps there are three publications here instead of one very large one ...often times.. repetitive
All of this. Thank you for continuing to articulate what I’m thinking, feeling and seeing. We’re plunging into an abyss of darkness with maybe only 25% of the population tuned into how seriously depraved this situation is.
For those tracking what’s happening day by day, we know the ship has sailed. From Trump v CASA to seeing the new ICE budget, there’s no more hope that maybe the worst is behind us. These evil fucks are just getting started. The MAGA base is rabid and believes that Trump was sent by God to rid this country of us (and non-whites). There is no meaningful opposition.
Many people, like myself, live in MAGA strongholds…and have been very vocal with our outrage. I’ve definitely upset MAGA in my immediate community. I now plan my bike rides to minimize chances of being caught alone running into a MAGA.
Now my time is spent wondering if I’m no longer
safe because I’ve said too much.
I wonder, would I be the “hysterical” one if I finally reached out to digital friends and acquaintances that live in the area to start organizing micro communities of support, communication and resources.
Simply wondering what TO DO. My conscience won’t let me accept any of this and bury my head. But it’s painfully obvious that in this environment, no one is safe. What’s the roadmap?
Great post!
Donald Trump just really, really hates America.
America values honesty, fair play, integrity. As a pathological liar and con man, Trump has never been able to command the ‘respect,’ power, and regal status he craves. He now feels these to be within his reach.
Trump is not out to make America great again. He’s out to make America grovel at his feet.
Americans need to know this. America needs to understand that this is the end game so that America can stop him.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jonthinks/p/donald-trump-hates-america?r=mrvx1&utm_medium=ios
Beautiful. Again. Every post. I appreciate these articles. Please keep going. I promote you on my newsletter: https://markbrose.substack.com/p/pro-democracy-news-75
I have resigned myself to the fact that we are going to have to kill all these fascists or be trapped in a permanent kakistocracy police state. The options now are civil war or total capitulation. Where is the line for the people? We crossed mine months ago. The rich apparently want this though so here we are. I don't know how America is going to survive this intact, it does not seem possible knowing what is to come after Ice gets all this new funding.
So, now what?
I see them.
Boomer white lady protesting is important, but certainly not enough.
Thoughtful and provocative. I wish you had identified some of those professional moderates though. It would be helpful—educational—to be able to evaluate their public positions in the context of your critique.
Try starting (as this post did) with the New York Times.
Two plus two equals four, there are 24 hours in a day, and the constitution doesn’t stop a damn thing. I see tons of articles like this where violation after violation is listed, and nothing ever happens to the violators. There is no enforcement mechanism in the document, yet people act surprised when it’s violated. It’s been violated from the start because there are no consequences for the violators, yet people think it’s magically going to start protecting individual rights any minute now. It never has and never will. The last guy implemented the no jab, no job mandate for the Trump shots. Where is that in the constitution? Where is Operation Warp Speed in the constitution? Almost every law affecting the whole country is a direct violation of the 10th amendment. I agree with what you’re writing about here but what’s going to happen to these tyrants? Nothing. Nothing ever happens. Vote them out, right? How’s that working? The system has to be dismantled or all of this, and worse, will keep happening. Why? Because there is nothing to stop it.
Do you really mean to suggest an equivalency between a public health mandate in the face of an unprecedented pandemic and the creation of a police state to disappear people into domestic and foreign gulags based on the color of their skin? That's really just another flavor of the very problem this post addresses.
By the way, the enforcement mechanism is, or at least was, that third branch of government called the judiciary. SCOTUS is obligingly working hard to take the judiciary off the board, however. Yes, the Constitution is just fish wrap with fancy signatures if no one respects it.