As we sit on the cusp of something our nation has never seen — the inauguration of a convicted felon as president — a dear friend called my attention to the following final paragraph of an article in the Economist entitled“The Trump Doctrine” in the January 18-24, 2025 issue:
“When the use of power is untethered by values, the result can be chaos on a global scale. If ultra-loyal, out-of-their-depth would-be disrupters like Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard are confirmed to head the Pentagon and intelligence, the chaos will spread on the inside, too. Mr. Trump is ill-suited to separate his own interests from his country’s, especially if his and his associates’ money is at stake, particularly as Elon Musk’s will be in China. By turning away from the values that made postwar America, Mr. Trump will be surrendering the single greatest strength that his despotic opponents do not possess.”
Every time I see something like this in the media I despair. These kinds of statements focusing on Donald Trump are either purposely distracting from what’s really going on or the major media are blissfully unaware of the nature of this time in our nation. Has no one read “Democracy in Chains?”
Or read a list of books that together and in sequence document how this right-wing stealth coup came to be and has taken over our country. I suspect many in my orbit are tired of me discussing these books and how the media really just doesn’t know WTF these books expose. Shall I go on?
Here we are now, with Trump the face of and puppet for the billionaire oligarchy. The founders of this conspiracy are James McGill Buchanan as the intellectual base and the Koch brothers implementing Buchanan’s vision. And if you understand the oligarchs’ strategy, including successfully co-opting the evangelicals to impose a Christian-nationalist theocracy on us, you’ll see that Texas and Florida have been the test beds for their plan, now known as Project 2025. With the triple win of the oligarch-captured Republican Party, Project 2025 will be implemented, but it’s only part of the endgame. The full fruit of our failure to stop this decades ago will be an Article V Constitutional Convention to massively roll back our our legal framework to the 1850s. This plan has flown under the radar for decades but is now in the open. This movement has its own website.
I am at a loss to see a peaceful way out of this — nor do I see how any violence can prevail when the right-wing reduces government to militarized law enforcement and “national defense.” Don’t look for anyone honoring Posse Comitatus. Don’t be surprised to see any protest shut down by force. Can you imagine A-10 Warthogs swooping down on our own people? Or tanks rolling through our cities spewing .50 caliber shots at protesters?
Oh, yes. We’ll have some waging a guerrilla war, picking off oligarchs and their proxies around the edges. Think about how much schadenfreude and folk heroism Luigi Mangione’s killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO exposed. You can be assured that sphincters were tightening and security procedures reviewed in corporate America but you can also be assured this won’t the only such act.
Yes, it’s a pessimistic and dystopian view. If you can see another scenario, I’d love to hear it.
Meanwhile, to refresh your memories, here is the list of books:
“Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America,” by award winning Duke University historian Nancy MacLean;
“Dark Money” by Jane Mayer;
“Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right” by Anne Nelson;
“The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism” by Katherine Stewart;
“Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” by Kristin Kobes Du Mez; and,
“Hiding in Plain Sight” and “They Knew” by Sarah Kendzior.
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