What if there's no secret plan?
To quote Heath Ledger as The Joker:
After both House and Senate voted to release the Epstein files, and Donald Trump signed the bill into law, the chatter immediately turned to, "They won't release anything. It'll all just be blacked out."
But answer me this: Has anything this regime done smack of planning? Of careful deliberation? Of some grand, master strategy?
No, my friends. To quote another film:
The idea that a lumpen like Stephen Miller could organize a thousand year fascist Reich is farcical beyond belief. Pete Hegseth? Pam Biondi? Duck Lips Kristi Noem? The only reason they're in their positions is because they landed the Mother of all Trifectas. They hit it lucky on the ponies. But luck is just that: it's blind, and it doesn't stay with you for long. Your luck will run out. And the speed with which it will run out is directly correlated to your intelligence or lack thereof.
We are all traumatized. We watched our voters re-elect a monster who said he would do monstrous things. We saw our fellow-citizens either vote for this evil, vote for a third party, or wallow in indolent apathy and not make a choice one way or the other. (Of course, not making a choice is a default choice for the Bad Things.) You and I and everyone we know has a right to be suffering trauma from last November.
But, again, this is not Weimar Germany. There, Germans wanted a strongman. It was just a matter of whether it would be a Nazi or a Communist. In spite of the results last year, Americans don't actually want that. Are American voters lazy? Yes. Are they woefully uninformed? Also yes. Do they vote out of pique? That's something happening all across the West. But it doesn't mean that they want Hitler 2.0. Americans made a very bad choice, and I will forever vote shame them. But we have this ability to self-correct. We saw that in the recent off-year elections, where Democrats ran the table across the board. We see this in the latest NPR/Marist poll, showing Democrats with a 13-point lead in the generic congressional ballot. Hell, even Texas is in play.
The doomscrollers were sure that Trump and the Republicans would have an Enabling Act on the first day of his presidency. Where is it? Because what we've seen is the GOP trying to force its agenda as quickly as it can and failing and flailing. ICE is being run out of cities it's tried to occupy. Courts are slapping down the Trump regime. The military is being reminded by Democratic lawmakers that its duty is to the Constitution, not the president. Charlotte, a city with a large Black and Latino population, was the latest target for "immigration enforcement." It didn't even last a week.
It's not even that we can beat them. They beat themselves. The James Comey case may be thrown out because, well, there wasn't an actual indictment voted on by the grand jury. These are morons. Fascism, communism, all extremism attracts the losers, the ones who think they should rule the world, the ones assured of their own world-historical genius and power. And at least in the West that just doesn't work. Westerners are accustomed to not being serfs, to not believing the lies which the Party insists on. And, again, these people are imbeciles.
Yes, they will do much damage, much as a child left alone unsupervised can set fire to a house. But the damage won't be irreparable, because they don't have the intelligence to hold onto their gains. It's Madlibs fascism, nonsensical, unplanned. We will rebuild. And part of that rebuilding is to push through Constitutional amendments to codify the "gentlemen's agreements" which were what had prevailed in our Republic's history and kept the country running. Because agreements such as those rely on both sides believing in them. Republicans no longer do.
It will be a long fight. It will be a fight even more momentous than that of the Civil War. But I'm starting to believe that the aftermath of these troubled times will be a new birth of freedom. God watches over children, fools, and this rambunctious experiment. I'm not willing to give up on it.