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.
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.
I think this is a very clearly written article, which is not hard to understand. There are people who are caught in the maga cult (I recommend going on leavingmaga.org, started by a former maga member who found his way out and is helping others who are questioning) - they are capable of change and intellectual thought, but it really is a cult and so has to be dealt with as such. . We want to welcome them as they start questioning the party line and even break away, and the liberal elitism belittling people's intelligence alienates (even me, a liberal!)
I hope that plenty of the centrist liberals to whom it is targeted see the point and alter their discourse, journalism, etc. and stand up for our democracy!!!
That is true to a point. But it is still worth spreading the word and perhaps 'dumbing down' the language and shortening the length so that the general public can hopefully understand what is going on.
Well said. Let’s also not forget we have what is outlined in this piece for one (of many) simple reasons - a large portion of American citizens WANT what is outlined.
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 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.
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.
Does the choice truly remain with us? Or did the choice happen over two decades ago, when America was frightened and gave up freedom for security? We have been walking a tightrope both domestically and globally for a long time, and fascists have been playing the Long Con for far longer than that.
News became entertainment, more pervasive than scripted 'reality' TV, filled with opinions that people simply took for facts. Truth is no longer a philosophy, but rather what the loudest voices say it is, because they dislike the facts. American civilization has become rooted in convenience, entitlement, and, unironically, a lack of civility. Science, like 24 hours in a day, and math, like two plus two are four, are too hard for people, and so they make up their fallacies to counter hard thoughts that they cannot understand.
The outcome will not be a recovery of the old civilization. It will be the people capable of handling hard realities and difficult thoughts, building a new civilization, building on the ashes of the Old America. Those who cannot think for themselves will depend on those who can to provide the basics, provide safety. Like Blanche DuBois, many will be dependent on the kindness of strangers in the coming days, and I pray that they learn a lesson about trusting those who offer too much softness and too many false promises.
The garb adopted by ICE members is reminiscent of the ‘Black and Tans’, a paramilitary auxiliary to the police during Ireland’s war of independence 100 years ago. Recruited from demobbed WW1 veterans, they got their name because no proper uniforms were available, so they wore the navy trousers of the police and khaki tunics of the regular army. The nickname was borrowed from a famous 18th century pack of hounds in southwest Ireland. The ‘tans’ had neither the authority of the police, nor the relative discipline of the regular army. Their role was to carry out reprisals for IRA actions and terrorise the civilian population. Uniforms, or the lack of them, tell us something about accountability.
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
Excellent article. As someone who has studied the history of the struggle for democracy and the backlashes into Authoritarianism it has suffered, I've said this is where things are heading since Trump's campaign started in 2015, and I've been called an alarmist fear monger every step of the way here, and have seen media dismiss any notion that this is anything more than a slightly differently branded Republican party. But every time, the worst of my predictions has been what came to pass.
I'm not alone in this, several scholars with much greater credentials and more knowledge has made the same analysis, with some even, knowing what happens to the intelligentsia during such authoritarian shifts, leaving the country.
And the worst part is, this is far from the peak of evil. When regimes like this one manages to fortify their power, there's no limit to the evil. Once media has been either scilenced or corrupted, intellectuals made to leave or go silent out of fear and the people either scared into submission or resignation - outside of those unwaveringly in favor of the regime, that is, when all opposition has been squashed, the floodgates can be opened in earnest and there's no reason to believe it will be any less horiffic than what has happened historically.
The core problem- the democrats are beholden to money from AIPAC. Jeffries took over 900,000 dollars from them last year. I donated to the David Hogg project to primary these old school corrupt corporate fake lefties
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.
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.
And so it goes …
I think this is a very clearly written article, which is not hard to understand. There are people who are caught in the maga cult (I recommend going on leavingmaga.org, started by a former maga member who found his way out and is helping others who are questioning) - they are capable of change and intellectual thought, but it really is a cult and so has to be dealt with as such. . We want to welcome them as they start questioning the party line and even break away, and the liberal elitism belittling people's intelligence alienates (even me, a liberal!)
I hope that plenty of the centrist liberals to whom it is targeted see the point and alter their discourse, journalism, etc. and stand up for our democracy!!!
That is true to a point. But it is still worth spreading the word and perhaps 'dumbing down' the language and shortening the length so that the general public can hopefully understand what is going on.
Well said. Let’s also not forget we have what is outlined in this piece for one (of many) simple reasons - a large portion of American citizens WANT what is outlined.
There is that. It’s so hard to rationalize the hate . . . it’s easier to blame it on intellect
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.
ICE, Secret Police, Gestapo - no matter what you call them, the goal is the same. Terrorize anyone that dares challenge the authoritarian regime.
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.
Brilliant, Mike. Exactly what needed to be said.
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
Does the choice truly remain with us? Or did the choice happen over two decades ago, when America was frightened and gave up freedom for security? We have been walking a tightrope both domestically and globally for a long time, and fascists have been playing the Long Con for far longer than that.
News became entertainment, more pervasive than scripted 'reality' TV, filled with opinions that people simply took for facts. Truth is no longer a philosophy, but rather what the loudest voices say it is, because they dislike the facts. American civilization has become rooted in convenience, entitlement, and, unironically, a lack of civility. Science, like 24 hours in a day, and math, like two plus two are four, are too hard for people, and so they make up their fallacies to counter hard thoughts that they cannot understand.
The outcome will not be a recovery of the old civilization. It will be the people capable of handling hard realities and difficult thoughts, building a new civilization, building on the ashes of the Old America. Those who cannot think for themselves will depend on those who can to provide the basics, provide safety. Like Blanche DuBois, many will be dependent on the kindness of strangers in the coming days, and I pray that they learn a lesson about trusting those who offer too much softness and too many false promises.
The garb adopted by ICE members is reminiscent of the ‘Black and Tans’, a paramilitary auxiliary to the police during Ireland’s war of independence 100 years ago. Recruited from demobbed WW1 veterans, they got their name because no proper uniforms were available, so they wore the navy trousers of the police and khaki tunics of the regular army. The nickname was borrowed from a famous 18th century pack of hounds in southwest Ireland. The ‘tans’ had neither the authority of the police, nor the relative discipline of the regular army. Their role was to carry out reprisals for IRA actions and terrorise the civilian population. Uniforms, or the lack of them, tell us something about accountability.
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
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
Thank you for this factual, devastating article. 😢
Excellent article. As someone who has studied the history of the struggle for democracy and the backlashes into Authoritarianism it has suffered, I've said this is where things are heading since Trump's campaign started in 2015, and I've been called an alarmist fear monger every step of the way here, and have seen media dismiss any notion that this is anything more than a slightly differently branded Republican party. But every time, the worst of my predictions has been what came to pass.
I'm not alone in this, several scholars with much greater credentials and more knowledge has made the same analysis, with some even, knowing what happens to the intelligentsia during such authoritarian shifts, leaving the country.
And the worst part is, this is far from the peak of evil. When regimes like this one manages to fortify their power, there's no limit to the evil. Once media has been either scilenced or corrupted, intellectuals made to leave or go silent out of fear and the people either scared into submission or resignation - outside of those unwaveringly in favor of the regime, that is, when all opposition has been squashed, the floodgates can be opened in earnest and there's no reason to believe it will be any less horiffic than what has happened historically.
Big Brother has been here for decades now.
The core problem- the democrats are beholden to money from AIPAC. Jeffries took over 900,000 dollars from them last year. I donated to the David Hogg project to primary these old school corrupt corporate fake lefties