You can see the date1, you don’t need the preamble. It’s Sunday now, and I was mercifully occupied all through yesterday. Until the evening. Then I saw.
I logged on to BlueSky (permabanned from Twitter for threatening Andy Ngo with sodomy) and immediately saw a couple of those contextless, medialess posts that suggest something big was going down. People quoting that Lenin quote (often misquoting), talking about not posting photos from some protest, vague intonations of dread, the usual for the year of our lord, 2025.
But then I started to see the footage. I saw paramilitary goons with distended guts and double chins, chins helpfully masked by the gaiters that preserve some semblance of a private life–a private life they do not deserve. I saw smoke bombs and flashbangs and rubber bullets. I saw an absolute fuckin hero get lit up by a full battalion of those hogs and then walk away, skateboard in one hand and middle finger in another.
I also started to see apocryphal (at first) posts about how the army was getting sent in. Then, the more accurate and constitutionally-regular revision that it was the CA Nat’l Guard getting activated. As troubling as that is, in itself, it’s somehow less troubling than “we’re deploying the army domestically, against US citizens.”
Even though that’s basically what we’re doing. We’re deploying the CA Nat’l Guard to police citizens while our SuperGestapo round up friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, lovers, and total strangers (their treatment as human beings doesn’t have anything to do with their relationship to you, oh selfish American). We’re deploying the military for crowd control to aid in Nazi-style disappearings.
Simple as. Plain. Period.
You need to figure out how YOU’RE gonna square that one as time goes on. I’ve already got my Karl Marx-shaped panacea, a totalizing worldview that gives me the answers I need to the questions I don’t wanna hear. But what are you gonna do? If you believed in America at all, this has gotta be pretty tough for you. Right? I mean, we’re the Nazis. That must suck if this is new to you! I’m not even being snide; it must be extremely shocking! But you gotta let the scales fall from your eyes.
It is now Tuesday after. Sunday was more of the same, Monday slightly less. But now Trump is ordering the National Guard of neighboring states to buttress his fascist potbellied goons. And calling in the Marines to do the same. There are ever so many Rubicons being crossed, with greater and greater frequency, practically daily here in June 2025. Maybe Governor Bateman will lead the glorious California Uprising and we can finally dispense with this insane venture, the United States of America. Maybe Donny Deals puts down the “insurrection” and we take another unbalanced, loping step toward capital-F Fascism.
Maybe. I’m through with predictions. Never was all too good at them, anyway. My gut sense of dread, though? That’s never led me wrong, and I dread the next few weeks.
- This got started on Sunday morning, 6/8/2025. Like most things, I didn’t finish it. ↩︎