January 29, 2025

"Waiting for Godot"

The cavalry is not coming... we have to defend the democracy on our own before they complete the sovietization of our country.

On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which established the clock in 1947, set it at 89 seconds to midnight — the closest the world has ever been to that marker. Midnight represents the moment at which people will have made the Earth uninhabitable.

It’s been ten days since the MAGA regime moved into the White House, completing the comprehensive fascist takeover of the entire United States Government. It would take me probably as much time to try and summarize everything that has taken place and every measure attempted by this administration.

Here’s just a very small sample:

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov for U.S. government agencies

• President Trump to offer eight-month buyouts to all federal employees

• Trump’s Schedule F plan

• Trump administration is schedule to begin collecting DNA from immigrants

I am not going to list everything though, Boston Globe probably did the best summary of any mainstream source and still failed to clearly state that most of the actions were either illegal, unconstitutional, or both.

We are entering the 2nd Dark Age.

Which begs the question that I have seen asked a myriad times already - where are the Democrats, where’s the opposition, where are the protests?

After everything that has happened over the last 10-20 years in the American politics, waiting for the Democratic Party to get their shit together and organize an opposition to fascism is like Waiting for Godot.

Most of them, as Sarah Kendzior called them, are Vichy Dems1.

I’ve seen so many people asking, over and over, “where are the Democrats and where are all the protests?”

Lex McMenamin, of the Teen Vogue, posted “Where are all the protests?" read our series showing the legacy of both the Trump and Biden admins—from BLM in the 2010s, to Standing Rock, to George Floyd, to the Palestine encampments—as protest suppression and criminalization. politicians want to call blocking traffic and masking "terrorism."

These two questions are very much related and both practically share the answer. In similar fashion to Teen Vogue, I wrote about the protests last year, indicating that we are seeing entirely too many Democrats, centrists, liberals, and ever progressives quite openly joining the far right to put down the protests in the most fascist way imaginable.

That is because they are Vichy Dems, collaborators who are no different that the Nazis and fascists they are helping.

Even with the most recent reversal of the federal budget freeze, the President and his junta are slowly shutting the US government down2. Of course, excepting immigration and law enforcement, and military agencies and departments. That’s the story. That’s the story that should be on every front page: “He’s shutting the whole government down. He’s closing up every aspect of the United States, except the parts with the power to enforce his narcissistic whims.”

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Minority Leader Jeffries may think that it was the Democratic party leadership who achieved the reversal or that it’s the end of the matter. Fuck no. The people got it done, not the elected Democratic Vichyists. As for the matter being closed, knowing how fascism works, I would not hold my breath.

Do you want to know why I keep calling them Vichy en masse? Go through the recent votes. From dozens voting to pass the Laken Riley Act and transgender sports ban to the bunch of them in the Senate who keep voting “yay” on Trump’s nominations.

For example, all the Democrats who voted for Jim Ratcliffe as the Director of the CIA. Jim Ratcliffe!! All of them should have known better. Especially my own freshman Senator from New Jersey, Andy Kim, who voted to confirm Ratcliffe knowing full well the intelligence and security risks that this would lead to. Just a couple days letter the CIA issued a report saying that COVID came from a Chinese lab.

Well done, Senator Kim! You literally supported a QANON conspiracy.

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It’s not like the positions and policies and actions of the fascists in power are all that popular. Trump does not have a mandate, either based on the election results or the new Reuters poll that finds Americans have a negative view of most of the Trump administration's avalanche of executive actions, including the Jan. 6 pardons and his effort to limit birthright citizenship.

WaPo confirmed the original reporting from the independent journalist Marisa Kabas: per copy of memo: "The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve." Reading the original OMB memo was like I've gone back in time and read the announcements of the Politburo of КПСС (Коммунистическая партия Советского Союза).

It is the same OMB that Wired reports has Elon Musk’s lackeys taken over: “One expert found the takeover reminiscent of Stalin.”

It is a very apt comparison.

We are seeing the United States of America not just being dismantled but also getting a complete Soviet-style make over.

Back in my undergraduate days my senior thesis in history was an attempt to debunk the myth that Kirov would have been a better, more humane and less tyrannical leader than Stalin. Utter and complete horseshit! Deep down Kirov was a Russian ethnofascist, similar to Navalny for example, in no world would his leadership have been better for either Soviet Union/Russia nor the rest of the world. One similarity between Kirov and Stalin, IMHO, is that in the end both would have created a Russian ethnostate. Well, Stalin actually did.

It’s how he did it that is incredibly reminiscent of what we are seeing today. From election interference to abrogation and centralization of the government and erasing the pretense of separation between the government and political party.

That is the driving force behind all of the Executive Orders. Defining and establishing the bourgeoning cult of the personality of the Dear Leader who is infallible3.

This is exactly why one of the points of the tsunami of EOs was the shock and awe strategy to overwhelm emotionally and intellectually while demoralizing spiritually and gradually erasing the line between truth and facts on the one side, and propaganda on the other.

The other day, the current White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt4, in her first press conference stated that this administration believes that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional. I’ll quote Kevin Kruse: “This administration believes that the moon is made of cheese. This administration feels that there are 103 states. This administration asserts that penguins are communists. This administration thinks that Mickey Mouse did 9/11. This administration holds that mangoes are the real racists. This …” Alas, this is only as funny as my cheeky comment a year ago that given enough rope, the Republicans will seriously argue in court that US Constitution is UN-BLOODY-CONSTITUTIONAL.

Truth is no longer truth.

And that’s the point. They want and need us to not be able to distinguish truth from a lie, reality from propaganda. They claimed that each flight of deported undocumented immigrants contains ONLY hardened criminals. The deportees included two pregnant women and more than 20 children, according to Colombian Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo who said: “Being a migrant is not a crime.5"

Ask me how I know. Right, I grew up in a state exactly like that and I see the US of A slowly becoming Soviet States of America.

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It’s not the first time I’ve observe the similarity. From the overly complex civil bureaucracy to promotion of illiteracy and ignorance to the culture of obedience and work above all else. Yesterday I saw someone note that it takes a while for an American expat in a lot of European countries to adjust to essentially every business closing between 12 and 2pm. It reminded me of the very old cliche joke comparing US and European styled “out of office” responses. Also, it reminded me the very first time I was rudely awakened from my Soviet/American upbringing in Iceland, when we were turned away from being able to go into a bank when the time was 3:45pm. The reason we weren’t allowed to enter was due to that particular location closing at 4pm, which meant that employees were meant to stop working at 4pm and not at some indefinite time in the evening when all of the customers are happily gone. As you can guess it, the attitude and perspective on things like this that I’ve adopted in the United States were not any different that the ones I have grown up with in the 80s Soviet Union.

I’ve consistently stated that US is slowly transforming into a Soviet state for the past decade and been told that I am overreacting… and here we are, Republican Chair of of the House Appropriations Committee, on the record (!), stating that appropriations passed by Congress “are not a law.”

Note, also where the Congressman was when going on the record. Why do I feel like we’re going to be expected to accept as normal that Trump spends most of his time in Florida while the electeds and government representative will be expected to commute to Mar-a-lago a la Stalin in Sochi (or really any Soviet leader and his Imperial dacha)?

The chance that the folks at OMB and really all over the current administration have no bloody idea what the fuck they are doing is quite high. That’s expected because the people behind all of this, the Stephen Millers and the Chris Rufos and the Elon Musks, who surround Trump, are proud ignoramuses who literally have no idea how things actually work. They can speak platitudes and overwhelm the discourse with lies, misinformation and propaganda, but they have no idea how anything actually works. If you are really curious, I dare you to search for what Marc Andreesen recently said about AI’s impact on wages.

When they actually do achieve the intended goals, like Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the in-real-time pivot from Substack are getting the results - silencing decent, shutting down independent media and voices.

What does that remind me off? Let me think. Oh, right, the country I grew up in. Where censorship has been practically perfected.

The other side of the coin is the centralization of power and especially enforcement and armed agencies. Any authoritarian regime, but especially a fascist one, absolutely relies on the ability to crush the dissent and physically brutalize and subjugate the population in order to start witch-hunts for anyone perceived as enemy.

Enemy of the People.

The real Purge, just like in 1936 Soviet Union, begins. U.S. Attorney Opens Investigation Into Justice Dept.’s Jan. 6 Cases: this is authoritarian neo-fascism built on the Russian ethnostate template.

The people who came to power last week do NOT believe in anything whatsoever. All they have is extreme selfishness of entitled privileged rich white kids who believe the world owes them praise and admiration for simply existing. They immediately become hysterical and go into toddler-like tantrums if a woman or a person of color somehow ends up having a right to even exist without their approval and permission6. The irony about consent is not lost on me.

Thus it does not take much to psychoanalyze them and understand what makes them tick. It’s the seemingly normal and decent people that seem to shock many. However, it’s the same darn story as every time before: people choose fascism because it tells them they deserve to be at the top regardless of merit simply because they are better than “others.” The people choosing Trump are choosing him because they think he's telling them they will be on top, even if it at times it looks like they are trying to simply save their own arse.

The acceptance and corroboration sometimes presents in entirely absurd terms. Politico has never been good but the recent article from Jack Blanchard, is bloody something!

I'm sorry but did the motherfucker actually say that fascist takeover is "democracy in action??"

If only he was the only one!

The surrender to the Dear Leader is far and wide, from Vichy Dems to NYT, WaPo, and even <checks notes> Jacobin??

Jacobin’s about face is no different then when liberals and/or progressives don’t care about the war on porn. Obscenity laws were one of the first acts of the Nazis in Germany. Obscenity laws are the first step in banning ALL “degenerate” art. They have already been saying that drag queens and trans people are sex predators. That queer books are porn. The definition of the “degenerate" and “art” are both exquisitely flexible, especially to demagogues.

Especially the Dear Leader type demagogues.

This is exactly why Trump is expected to announce ending funding for public schools if they teach factual history, e.g. not written in a Sharpie.

A president is not a dictator, the job description is to execute the law, not decide it.

I don’t know if California Secretary of State Shirley Weber really did announce a campaign to gather signatures for the state potential secession. I am not going to look it up. Like I did not look up the background on the OMB top lawyer who apparently is using work email for some questionable legal activities7. There’s entirely too much. It is overwhelming.

Yet, we fight fascism not because we will win, to paraphrase Nean-Paul Sartre, we fight fascism because it is fascism. If it’s true, I understand the perspective of Secretary Weber and likely many Californians, but that seems like an easy way out, especially with how deeply ingrained the techbro fascists8 are in the state.

Professor Aparna Nair wrote: “I feel so many ways about the many centrists, liberals and some self-proclaimed progressives who got on this anti-DEI bandwagon for their own reasons. Fuck all of you--and yes, now I think about it most of these die-hard anti-DEI people were/are cis abled men.” She is, of course, absolutely right. Having spent nearly 8 years in DEI functions within the corporate world, I know very well how in many cases the essential and critical ideas were corrupted and co-opted, and soon became the target for the entire fascist movement.

Reading this quote reminded me of President Petro's statement, perhaps the very first time a head of state self-referenced One Hundred Years of Solitude, where he plainly said: “I don’t want slave owners on Colombia’s side, we already had many and we freed ourselves.”

I know that everything Trump is doing right now is to transform the U.S. into a white Christian nationalist ethnostate akin to Putin’s Russia and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Dems, those proverbial centrists and whatnot, clearly want to see all of the things the fascists are doing, they just don’t want to be the ones actually doing them.

We cannot rely on the corroborator Vichy party.

We cannot rely on the mainstream media quickly evolving into being a loyal uncompromising loudspeaker for the new Goebbels machine.

Waiting on them is akin waiting for Godot.

We can only do this ourselves before we are all shipped to GULAGs for this sort of samizdat, something that I am sure is right around the corner.