Positive Reconstruction in 2026 - The Wildfire Rages

        In 2025, the wind blew through and knocked down anything without the backbone to stand up to it. And in on that tempest flew hot embers, which fell amongst the rubble. Like so many seeming contradictions, fire is both a blessing and a curse. Life itself depends on heat to make enzymes and proteins fold and unfold. Cooking food freed energy which our early ancestors bodies’ directed to our brains and muscles. Heat catalyzed our very existence. In the wrong circumstances, we regard fire as so dangerous we need entire teams of people to fight it. But we have tamed the flame. It forged the tools that build our cities. It is good that some looked into the flame and thought “Why not? Why shouldn’t we use it?”

Insert snarky caption here...

But there are those who stare too deeply into the flames. Those who are drawn in by the erratic dance of oxygen, heat and fuel. And in the clutches of the wrong men, fire is a weapon. A rapid expansion of heat generates the pressure that fires a bullet from a gun, or explodes a bomb, lays waste to your enemies lands. And those men have spread that flame far and wide, burning the land in search of any threat they can find to justify adding to the blaze. These men speak of building a new world, but their actions betray them, as the only tool they know. They twist the flame from giver of life and illumination, to one of terror and desolation.

The fire ignited by the regime burns brightest in communities it feels will put up the least resistance. Masked government thugs move from daylight raids in workplaces and sites where immigrants gather, to nighttime raids on homes full of sleeping people. Yes, some of those raids end badly, with citizens defending themselves and their families with whatever tools they have available. And every time, the regime uses the injuries or deaths of federal agents as proof and justification for continued crackdowns. The irony of all this, is that the stated goal of driving immigrants out of the labor force does not lead to an influx of native-born people seeking to fill those jobs. While instances of native (ie white) job seekers filing into empty meat-packing plants are loudly reported, the majority of job openings go unfilled. Some employers raise wages in hopes of filing those positions, which only encourages people to cross back over the borders to try to fill them.

But government crackdowns aren’t limited to rounding up undocumented immigrants. The continued sew-sawing of trade deals and tariff rates continues, as the regime in Washington tries to use US trade policy to punish enemies and allies abroad. The administration pushes up tariff rates on Canada for harboring political dissidents, and on Mexico for harboring drug cartels. It uses the threat of higher rates to try to push the Europeans to increase their military budgets, which is ironic considering the US military budget for 2026 is a whopping $ 1 trillion. It uses trade deals to push East Asian allies like Japan and South Korea to take more hawkish stances against China. Most of all, the regime cracks down on imports from Vietnam, as Chinese companies use the southeast Asian nation as a trans-shipment point for selling goods to the US under lower tariff penalties. All these actions both drive away foreign allies, and drive up prices on consumer goods in the US. By summer, the regime declares it is fed up with ungrateful allies, and formally pulls the United States out of NATO. In response, the EU walks away from a set of tentative trade deals, covering about 30% of global trade, with the US, which further drives up prices.

The Art of the Deal when the other side
doesn't care for your 'deal'

Baseline inflation skyrockets past the 7-9% rates posted in the wake of the Covid pandemic. And the baseline number conceals the 15-20% increases for food prices. Higher prices lead to less spending, which by the summer of 2026 leads to layoffs in the retail sector. While some of those laid off do filter over into sectors like food processing that are hiring, these meager gains are wiped out by the end of the year, as US manufacturing firms lay off hundreds of thousands of workers. The value of the dollar both internally and in foreign trade continues to plummet, making imports even more costly than the increases driven by the tariffs alone. The problem with picking trade wars with the whole world, while wrecking the labor markets inside the country, tip the country into full-blown stagflation. While official numbers won’t show it, the number of job-listings and the number of actual hirings continues to dwindle. 

All this happens as federal spending on debt service crowds out both private-sector lending AND causes the federal government to spend more on debt service than it does on the principal of the nation’s debt. By late fall, the federal government cannot pay its bills as set out by the 2025 budget, and cuts have to be made. Federal Medicaid spending, which was already slated to drop the following year, must be slashed in the current year. Doctors don’t get paid, and patients don’t get care. Nursing home managers sweat about whether they will have to close their doors and turn residents out at Christmas. By the beginning of November, flash mobs rob grocery stores for food, while hospitals and clinics have to cut staff pay and hours, leading to labor unrest in rural and urban areas. 

Wait 'til you see the 2026 wait times!

And we get to the moment no doubt some of you have been waiting for. What happens with the midterm elections? The answer, at first, is anti-climactic. The elections go ahead as usual, though with ever-increasing voter suppression in the form of closures of polling places,  throwing hundreds of thousands of voters off the rolls, gerrymandering, and that old favorite of politicians afraid of the wrong results, ‘ballot irregularities.’ The exit polls indicate a crushing defeat for the ruling party and a sweeping landslide for the opposition. But that result only holds for a few days. The regime immediately sets about invalidating election results, claiming widespread voter and ballot fraud. Precincts with high tallies for opposition candidates see their results invalidated due to alleged security breaches. As the weeks drag on, it becomes increasingly clear that the will of the electorate will have little-to-no impact on the balance of power in Congress.

But backlash from the state doesn’t end there. While almost every other branch of government sees its funding stripped to the bone to make payments on the debt, the regime’s enforcement arm suffers no spending cuts. In the wake of such an obvious rebuke to the regime’s policies, the President orders ICE to round up and deport domestic political opponents, and anyone who might lift a finger to support them. Governors, state representatives, city councilors, dog catchers, no one is safe. Many are deported to the gulags of El Salvador, while others simply disappear into the ether. ICE doesn’t keep much paperwork, and their planes that set out across the Gulf of Mexico often turn around halfway there, returning with only the ICE agents and pilots still on board.

This may be jumping ahead a bit, but by the 10th anniversary of the Second Revolution, a rough estimate puts the number of deported undocumented immigrants at 3.2 million, about 125,000 political prisoners arrested, and nearly 500,000 homeless people forced into labor camps between 2025 and 2028. Of this number, at least 10% die either in transit or in detention. In retrospect, 2026 marks the high point of the regime’s power and the period of maximum repression.

But even as the fires of authoritarianism burn bright, methods of resistance multiply at all levels of American society. For some, this takes the form of open revolt, though it is mostly small groups, and often targeting goods and materials used by the regime. Rolling stock mysteriously breaks down only days after being taken in for service. Construction materials ordered for the building concentration camps get diverted or stolen, often sold on the black market to anyone with cash. Immigrants, both legal and not, find shelter in spare rooms, basements and attics of friends or family to avoid ICE raids. Boycotts spread, as do labor strikes. Protests and crackdowns become normal, and anyone who ends up being anyone in the political economy of the post-Revolution can point to a scar or story from one. Even as many people try to go about their lives and try to avoid the bubbling cauldron. The country fears what 2027 will bring.

Keeping It Personal - The Remainder of 2025

I'm going to use the hell out of these AI
abominations!

As a teen, Marty Jr watched his father struggle to find employment after the big box store he managed closed for good on Christmas Eve, 2008. While the family never experienced homelessness during the Great Recession, money became a lot tighter. Some of his childhood friends moved with the families in search of work, while others unofficially moved in with Marty’s family on-and-off as their home lives became increasingly unstable. Junior managed to secure scholarships and Pell grants to pay for college, and while he wanted to study linguistics, he found he had a knack for computer language. After graduation in 2015, he found work at a cybersecurity company, and soon after met Tina, the woman he wanted to marry. By 2020, Marty Junior settled into a stable family life, a sense of security which had been torn away from him as a teen. 

Then his father died. Little brother Bobby showed up drunk at the funeral. Family drama ensued. Jillian had choice words for both brothers. Their mother had a nervous breakdown. It was a mess, but at least Marty had his job and wife. With a baby, Trey, on the way, Marty moved his mother into the granny shack behind their Ann Arbor home, and put his nose to the old grindstone. By 2025, Marty is 33, now a father of two, and a member of an Elks lodge. A true pillar of the community. 

The cybersecurity firm which Marty works for recently received a fat contract from a certain government defense contractor. They’ve been tasked with monitoring social media chatter for anti-government sentiments across Michigan and northern Indiana. While others at the firm express displeasure at the intrusive nature of this surveillance, Marty loses no sleep over it. When the firm’s AI software picks up on a ‘radical’ group chat involving immigrants’ rights activists seeking to warn communities of impending ICE raids, Marty dutifully hands that information off to law enforcement. In his mind, these groups will interfere with public safety, causing the kind of chaos associated with his little brother. As America continues to destabilize and 2025 draws to a close, Marty silently promises himself he will not let the floud winds battering the nation, to disrupt his home life.

Jillian doesn’t remember much before the age of five, but remembers with terrifying clarity her kindergarten teacher breaking down as a passenger jet crashed into a tall building on TV. After that, childhood became little more than a series of crises and threat indicators. Adults transformed from gentle protectors to vengeful gods, always shouting and never taking time to explain anything. By the time Jillian enters her tween years, the Great Recession gutted those gods, reducing them to pale husks of themselves. 

Jillian always with the good hair. In every timeline

The sense that her family life was dying combined with the teenage urge to leave, to explore. Jillian spent hours wandering the mordibund mall at the edge of town. running her hands along metal railings, inhaling the stale air in search of a taste of the lost innocence of what must have been a simple, or at least more optimistic time. In this temple to American consumerism, she listened to the hushed conversations of older kids about the before times. How beautiful the 90s must have been.

In high school, Jillian made the mistake of doing well on standardized tests. Offer letters showed up, enticing her to apply to this or that university. Her mother’s trembling hands gripped hers, imploring her to make something of herself. With her father’s health failing, Jillian heard in her mother’s desperate voice a clarion call; “This world is ill, and you must tend to it.”

Earning a pre-med bachelors only took Jillian three years, but she had a full scholarship, so she took a fourth year to finish a dual degree in French language and literature. But as the acceptance letters from medical schools flooded in, with them came cost estimates, and lighter offers of financial aid. Jillian began to dread those letters, until one arrived from a medical school in Quebec. Nervously, Jenny took an entrance exam in French, which she barely passed. Two years into med school, her father died. The funeral became, in her mind, a liberating event, for nothing tethered her to Michigan any more. She considered staying in Canada. 

But life comes at you fast, and by 2025, Jenny found herself wrapping up residency and opening a non-profit clinic in a poor corner of Ohio with her husband. Chris had a knack for business, and figured he would be able to make the dire economics of running a doctor’s office work. The newlyweds hired a few friends to help run the place and put out their shingle. While the clinic stayed (barely) in the black, their creditors informed Jillian the clinic’s debt had been sold to a private equity firm. The new bosses were not the same as the old ones, and soon demanded cost-cutting measures and fatter profit margins. They told Jillian that marginalized communities don’t turn a profit, and that her clinic needed to turn away Medicaid patients, as many were set to lose their benefits in the near future. The clinic New Years Eve party was a somber affair. 

Younger brother Bobby starts 2025 as he does every new year since his father’s death; young, dumb, drunk and in love. Or at least in some approximation of it. The lessons he took from his father’s funeral five years earlier have only been reinforced over the years; drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. At least in adulthood, Bobby found a stability and joy which eluded him as a child.

That is a man's beard. No soi bois at the train yard!

The youngest of Marty’s kids, Bobby barely remembers his as a happy, healthy man. After the big box store closed, his father spent the next twelve years working himself to death. Quite literally. The loss of health insurance and the lackluster coverage available through Bobby’s mother’s employer, left him with untreated diabetes barely treated. And working. Always covering shifts at the burger joint he co-owned with an old friend. Bobby would pretend to be asleep when his dad would finally get home, or when he would leave early in the morning. After high school graduation, Bobby stayed at home, working odd jobs and temp jobs and jobs neighbors didn’t want to do. In the back of his mind, he suspected that if he left his mother alone for any length of time, she might disappear too. Then Covid hit, and he stopped pretending. Indeed, he rarely slept. The realization he’d squandered what little time his father had to give him kept him up at night. 

When his older brother sold the house to cover their father’s medical bills, Bobby moved in with a pair of high school buddies working in Detroit. Bobby sees the same set of friends, or interacts with them through online avatars. And he manages his love life through an online dating app. Everything in his life resides on his phone, but an event in early 2025 plants more than a seed of doubt in his head.

Marty Junior visited him in Detroit, and left a USB with Bobby. On it, Junior had catalogued and categorized the entirety of Bobby’s online presence for the past year. And around the thumb drive, he’d wrapped a note, asking Bobby if dad would have expected more from his favorite son.

The incident was almost enough for Bobby to pick up the phone and actually call his older brother. To call him out. But before he can work up the courage, as he scrolls through the online footprint of his life, an IP address catches his eye. Bobby begins digging, and discovers that his brother’s data collection routed through a server farm in Utah, and that the only data storage facility anywhere nearby, is operated by the NSA. Bobby always knew his brother worked in cybersecurity, but this revelation starts him down a rabbithole, kindling in him a sense of paranoia he didn’t know he had. 

Far to the south, in Memphis, Tennessee, Jenny’s granddaughter Allison starts 2025 in a much different place. Not just geographically, but much lower down the class structure from even perpetually-feels-broke Bobby. At 17, Allison spends this year twiddling her thumbs, biding her time until graduation in May. But after graduation, she has no prospects, no hope, no vision for any kind of future for herself beyond staring at the screen of a smart phone until she dies. Her mother Ruby lords the phone bill over her, demanding good grades and quiet from her daughter whenever she’s home. Allison cannot think of it as home, as the landlord vacuums up whatever spare money the family can scrape together. Grandma Jenny jokes that the man must live between their couch cushions, because he always seems to know when the three have any extra money in their pockets. 

"Generic white girl graduates generic high school"
AI is the future, man! I'm telling ya!

Allison graduates with decent grades, and toys with the idea of attending community college, but tuition keeps rising, and the idea of going into debt to pay for an education seems darkly funny to her. When her two friends ask why she doesn’t enroll too, Allison jokes that if she’d had to pay for the first twelve years of school, she’d be suing the shit out of the school district to get her money back. Then the trio get drawn back into endless scrolling.

On the longest day of the year, something snaps inside the young woman. The AC hasn’t worked at their apartment in weeks, and Allison hasn’t felt good all summer, and at once realizes why. Every summer, Grandma Jenny used to take her to a pool at least once. Allison hasn’t gotten to glide through the water in five years, and she’s sick of feeling hot and sweaty every day. So she dares her friends to follow her into the fountain at the park. The other two girls refuse, so to prove nothing bad will happen, Allison tosses her little backpack at them and jumps in. She gets in ten minutes of splashing around before a cop pulls her out of the lukewarm water.

After a perfunctory dressing down, the cop informs her that he’s not going to ticket her for being a dumbass. He says it in a way that implies Allison should be grateful, but instead it pisses her off, and she starts shouting insults at the man. Before he can decide if he’s going to arrest her after all, her friends drag Allison home, all the while chastising her for acting like a little girl. When she gets home and changes, Allison discovers that her phone was still in her back pocket for the swim, not in her backpack as she thought.

With no money to replace it, Allison realizes she will have to find something to do with her time, so she walks down the street and takes a job as a waitress at a fried-chicken restaurant. As the months go by, she saves up enough money to buy a new phone, but when faced with the price tag she balks. Something deeper in her changed since that day in the fountain. The lack of a smart phone gave her something she didn’t know she’d lacked - free time. When she walks to work, she can think instead of streaming a podcast. When she’s at home, she can read a magazine or, heaven forbid, crack open one of Grandma Jenny’s harlequin romance novels. Most of all, Jenny finds herself actually talking to people: people at the bus stop, customers at work, her friends, even, most embarrassingly, her own family. As 2025 draws to a close, Allison plans to take a road trip with her friends Dora and Tasha, down to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve. But the day after Christmas, she shows up at Dora’s house to find the half of the family missing. Dora and her two younger siblings are on their own, made orphans by zealous ICE agents. Allison and Tasha cancel their plans and help their friend try to locate her parents.

Positive Reconstruction in 2025 - A Foul Wind Approaches

In keeping with the theme of four, we will present the next four years through the four elements: wind, fire, earth and water. Like the four cardinal directions (north, south, east and west), or the four states of matter (gas, liquid, solid and plasma), the four elements allow us an opportunity to frame the coming catastrophe in a way familiar to the ancients. And in so doing, remind us that humans have lived through such times before. If we listen to the land and our collective memory, we will get through this, and might even end up better off for it. 

You can't have one without the others.

         On the Great Plains of North America, we feel the wind ever-present. It shuffles dirt from here to there. Scatters dry leaves just to mock those foolish enough to think raking them worth their time. When it hits your home at just the right angle, it howls and moans through the rafters, raising hairs on the back of the neck. When the spring air moves thick with dew across the land, the wind brings replenishing rain. But in the dry times, the wind brings more than just desiccation and decay. A strong wind can spread a wildfire 200 feet a minute or more. To rejuvenate the land, nature decrees it first must burn. And woe to those who think they can catch the wind. For those who set the winds loose, never control where they blow. A foul wind surely blows through the land today. It dries the plants and soil. One simply has to walk outside to get a whiff of the acrid smell of smoke on the breeze. And we know what will follow it…

Something wicked this way comes...

The second half of the year plays out much like the first half. Controversial take, we know. But what do you want from a government led by an infirm old man and gray suits in corporate boardrooms. The ‘anti-illegal immigrant’ raids continue unabated. More families ripped apart, more ‘administrative errors’ dumping US citizens into concentration camps alongside those the administration believes don’t belong here. In this climate of intimidation and fear, big media companies reach merger settlements with the government. Effectively, they pony up a ‘pay to play’ tax; they pay the Feds a regulatory fee and they get to break every anti-trust law and regulation. Those running the big banks would probably shake their heads and wonder what took the media companies so long to figure out how the game is played.

Tariffs continue to get slapped on, then taken off, countries and industries at the dear leader’s whims. Which in effect means people’s taxes fluctuate month to month, or even week to week. All while the power to tax and set budgets is supposed to reside with Congress. The dangers in letting the President raise his own funds from taxes levied without the consent of the governed, sets the country up for the kind of crisis which triggered the English Civil War. To make that very long story way too short, Charles I didn’t want to call a Parliament to raise taxes, so he invented legal fictions for raising taxes on his own. In perhaps the most notorious example, Charles tried to impose ‘ship money’ taxes on English counties which did not, in fact, lie on the coast. That an English county without access to the sea should be expected to pay money to the crown in lieu of building ships for the defense of its non-existent coastline appeared as absurd to 17th century Englishmen as the national-security case being made today.

But back to the present. In modern America, we are told citizens must now pay import taxes on goods from all over the world. Why? Because fentanyl might come from some of those countries, therefore we have a national emergency which requires raising everyone’s taxes. But the money raised won’t go to pay for drug treatment or interdiction. Instead, it will pay for tax cuts for the rich. The important part appears to be that the executive can raise funds without the consent or oversight of Congress. 

History isn't even trying to be subtle.

On top of the inconsistent justifications involved, the regime's tax, opps, tariff policy, gets portrayed to the media as cunning and good negotiating. But for most sectors, it has quickly become an excuse to raise prices. Just as supply chain issues in the wake of the Covid pandemic became an excuse to raise prices. Whether or not current price hikes count as greedflation is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, but the effect on prices is not ambiguous; they go up, and don’t come back down. 

These higher prices don’t just make households poorer though. They also slow economic activity, dampening demand for goods and services. And when that happens, the rich are content to make less profit, right? Nope. Employers cut back hours, then start firing people. The job market cools off, with fewer openings posted and even fewer actual hirings taking place. This isn’t to say that overall unemployment rises, though. Many people look for work off the books, moving into a gray zone of cash-only employment. Between counting only people unemployed for 6 months and including those actively seeking work, the rate remains relatively low, ticking up only a bit to 5%.

 And as this happens, the regime leans hard on the Federal Reserve to drop interest rates by expanding the money supply. This both fuels inflation, mostly in assets, while also pushing the value of the dollar lower. Year to date, the dollar has dropped 9% against a basket of currencies. By the end of the year, the dollar will have dropped another 6% against the standard basket of currencies, ending the year 15% lower.

Importantly, the rising cost of debt service in the bond market begins to attract investment. Money that might have been lent to a small business start up or to a large firm looking to expand domestic production dries up. After all, the government is legally obligated to pay its debts, while for profit businesses can always fail and go bankrupt. Thus, as prices rise and send a potential signal that there’s money to be made producing goods here in the US, many businesses can’t find the capital to make those investments. 

         And how do the people respond to all this, in the optimistic scenario?

"Why boycott? It never changed anything!" 
- some neo-liberal think piece writer, late 2025.

Americans respond by NOT doing the thing Americans seem to love the most; they refuse to buy things from companies that collaborate with the regime. This achieves two goals: it hits the bottom lines of companies Americans perceive as directly benefitting from the current regime, and it allows people to re-localize their economies, buying from friends and neighbors. Better than simply ‘voting harder’, boycotts hit corporate bottom lines immediately, and cannot be easily manipulated or meddled with, unlike elections. Initially, finding local substitutes for typical big box slop feels alien and uncomfortable for many, but as the boycotts go on, Americans come to understand what they lost when they traded in the corner store for the franchise. In some corners of the country, people even begin liking interacting with fellow citizens they might have otherwise never met. We know this last bit is a little rosy, but we did promise a positive vision, didn’t we?

On a less cheery note, more Americans find themselves forced to hide undocumented immigrants, green-card holders, and even naturalized citizens. Even as individuals and families find refuges, the reason for this doesn't go away. The streets are not safe for anyone of the wrong skin tone, and, in some instances, for people who speak out against the government. The climactic moment of the year comes in late December. With the election of a self-described democratic socialist and naturalized US citizen as mayor of America’s largest city, the regime feels compelled to act. ICE agents descend on New York City just before Christmas with a mission to arrest the mayor-elect. The city explodes in days of rioting. More ominously, the NYPD fractures, with half of the force supporting the actions of the Feds, and the other half refusing to work with them. In an act of supreme cowardice, the New York state government refuses to intervene or even protest the Federal government’s actions. After days of warrantless searching, thousands of injuries, and a billion dollars of property damage, ICE cannot locate the mayor-elect. On New Year's Eve, he posts a video to social media showing him formally requesting political asylum in Canada. 

The regime celebrates by installing the runner-up as mayor. In response, many New York businesses cease withholding Federal taxes from their employees’ paychecks in protest. Strikes and work slowdowns follow. Renegade city utility workers shut off services to Federal buildings across the city. The regime’s actions drew condemnation in the United Nations. In response, the US State Department announces that Canada will be added to this list of state sponsors of terror. The Canadian military is put on high alert in the event of a US incursion, but the regime elects not to test the resolve of their northern neighbor. Instead of invasion, the regime in Washington announces that the US will withdraw from NATO AND the UN the following year.

This wasn't the first image that came up when I searched "angry Canada,'
but it was the best.

Next week, we will check in on Marty Jr, Allison, Bobby and Jillian, and see how this timeline treats the kids and grandkids of our protagonists from Inequality by Design, which comes out August 25th in print and e-book. And it's available for pre-order now!

Positive Reconstruction and the Four Horsemen of the Dumbpocalypse

In the interest of literary allusion, let’s call the four trends discussed last week the Four Horsemen of the Dumbpocalypse. Make no mistake, what’s being done to our country is dumb, as well as revealing the nature of the oligarchy which rules us. In many ways, the American people today are much like the Christians of first-century Rome - ruled by elites we feel powerless to challenge. And the oligarchy wants to bring about the destruction of the state and the creation of feudal technocracy. Don’t take my word for it, read what their so-called thought leaders write! 

With that in mind, it is our guess that these horsemen have been set loose quite intentionally. They seek to lay waste to this country to build a world run by unaccountable CEOs and mass surveillance. It appears their blueprint is a version of what Russia experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union; a plummeting living standards, combined with dirt cheap assets to be bought up by the oligarchs, while reinforcing the internal security state to crush domestic dissent and maintain an illusion of power and authority.

Without further ado, let’s meet the four horsemen of the dumbpocalypse!

The Horsemen: A Rendering in Crayon and Ink. Circa 2025. Artist Unknown

ICE: The White Horse a.k.a. Conquest

Then I saw when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder, "Come!" I looked, and behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.

• Revelations 6:1-2

Just as everyone lives as the hero of their own story, so do the agents of state power view themselves as the upholders of law and order. They’re working for the glory of Rome, I mean, Making America Great Again, so It’s appropriate, I suppose, that those building a white ethno-state would be associated with the white horse. No one these days is trying to be particularly subtle… I did not know this, but in the original Greek, this horseman is named Zelos. Translation, the first horseman is ‘zealous’ and revels in conquest and glory for the empire.

Over the past months, we’ve watched the administration transform ICE from a duplicate enforcement agency (it was created in 2002 to do the job USCPB already did, meaning it’s a duplicate agency), into an unaccountable secret police force. With the recently passed budget, ICE funding goes from about $20 billion to $180 billion, making it better funded than the US Marine Corps. On top of that, the current regime allows ICE to operate outside the law, with little-to-no accountability. They’ve already built one concentration camp and have been given a mandate to fill it, in addition to the numerous private prisons they currently operate. Alligator Auschwitz gets billed as a pass-through facility, which would be funny if it wasn’t a human rights violation in the making, but the regime also sends deportees to gulags in El Salvador, thus outsourcing prison jobs and making a mockery of both their claims to be making America safe and bringing good-paying jobs back to America. 

If ICE were a starter kit for dictators, it would be the deluxe package, with human rights abuses thrown in for free! And if you feel that this won’t affect you, we know they’re already deporting naturalized citizens. Do you really think a lawless agency operated by a man-child who told a reporter they’re looking at suspending habeas corpus, would hesitate to start snatching US citizens off the street if the dear leader said so?

I suspect that turning ICE into a secret police force, thus ripping off whatever veneer remains on the notion that all the policing going on in the US is ‘for your protection,’ will make people MORE likely to resort to radical action in the face of state repression. The counterpoint to this argument would be that Americans are fat, lazy cowards who won’t stand up for themselves. Or put more charitably, we’ve got enough nice things we won’t want to see broken by taking on a heavily armed and increasingly repressive state. 

Ten years ago, I might have agreed with this sentiment. After all, we watched both Democrat and Republican administrations turn the weapons of the empire against the American people. And instead of pushback, the media justified these violations of the Bill of Rights as acceptable in the context of the War on Terror. When the Bush administration kidnapped ‘terrorists’ and held them indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, they weren’t targeting US citizens. (except that one time…) When the Obama administration used drones to kill Afghans 8,000 miles away, they weren’t targeting US citizens (wait, they did that too?).

How long will Americans be able to call ourselves the land of the free while being, in fact, quite unfree on our own streets?

Tariff - The Red Horse a.k.a. War

When He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, "Come". And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from Earth, and that men would slay one another; and a great sword was given to him.

• Revelations 6:3-4

Second, the regime has ramped up the class war, disguised as a trade war. By placing large tariffs on the roughly $3.5 trillion in goods and services imports to the US, the regime instituted one of the largest tax increases in US history. And those taxes will be felt most by everyone outside the richest ZIP codes. This escalation of the class war will not only make imported goods more expensive because of higher taxation, it is coupled with policy intended to drive down the value of the US dollar abroad.

Against a basket of currencies, the US dollar has dropped 10% over the last six months, and down 6% over the last year. A stronger dollar makes the cost of imports cheaper, and the great many things the US imports at lower prices allows meager incomes to stretch further. Additionally, 10% isn’t necessarily a huge drop, and, in a different context, would go unnoticed by much of the population. But 2025 is not ‘a different context.’

At the same time the dollar loses value and drives up the costs of imports, the current regime keeps slapping tariffs on imports, driving their cost up even more. And not just on economies we might consider rivals, but on allies and friendly trade partners. And on goods like copper, which we don’t produce here, because we mined all the cheap sources. This will make new construction of houses and businesses more expensive, at the same time the demand for new housing and construction of factories to supply domestic manufactured alternatives to imports is also on the rise. Truly, we are living through the dumbpocalypse. 

As the trade war turned class war drives down the value of the dollar and drives up the prices of imports, Americans will experience a real decline in standards of living. To be clear, we’ve been experiencing that for decades, but the sudden drop due to costlier imports will be acutely felt. A sharp rise in the cost of imports due to a collapse in the value of the Russian rouble led straight to the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. But let’s not jump straight to the Petrograd Soviet yet. After all, this is supposed to be a positive scenario.

 All this comes at a time when real wages continue to decline. Apologists for the regime would say that this will stimulate demand for domestic production of goods, which might be manageable if the government or private sector were spending money to build industrial facilities. Even if the government and private sector spending where there, the regime is driving up the cost of building out the industrial base, as mentioned above. Instead of well-crafted industrial policy, Congress pulled funding from industrial policies put in place under the previous president, and just passed a massive tax cut for the rich.

If the wake of the 2008 financial crisis is any indication, the rich will use the gains from their tax break to buy up assets, rather than invest in industries which may, or may not, receive tariff protection. In effect, both imported consumer goods AND assets, like housing, will go up in price, as wages remain stagnant. Speaking of which, let’s look at the third horseman.

Stagflation - The Black Horse a.k.a. “Famine” 

I When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, "Come". I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine"

• Revelation 6:5-6

*said in an Austin Powers voice* 

“Stagflation is back, baby!”

Based on the bitter feelings old folks catch about President Carter, it wasn’t any fun in the 70s, and won’t be this time. For those who missed this lesson in economics because you weren’t alive at the time, stagflation describes a situation in which an economy experiences BOTH above-average inflation and a decline in hiring or job creation. In short, even if you can get a job, it won’t pay you near as much as it did the year before. 

Funnily enough, our current situation almost mirrors the aforementioned passages from Revelations. As the regime’s policies bring about stagflation, making necessities like “wheat and barley” more expensive, the regime specifically exempted tech imports from the tariffs placed on Chinese imports to keep luxuries like ‘oil and wine’ from becoming prohibitively expensive. God forbid we inconvenience the rich even in the slightest. But back to the economics of it all! 

Currently, the rate of inflation in the US is still above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of  2% or lower, and will probably go higher due to the trade war. At the same time, the rate of new private-sector hiring dropped into negative territory in June, and had been declining before then. Add to that the 250,000 federal employees which have been laid off over the last few months, who will cut back their spending while they look for new jobs, and you have a recipe for declining wages and rising prices.

 With fewer jobs and stagnating wages, we can look forward to even more economic pain than the country experienced in the 1970s. For starters, at that time most consumer goods were still made in the USA. Also, we weren’t fighting a trade war with literally everyone at the time. Granted, people probably wanted to fight a real war with OPEC over high oil prices, but that’s beside the point. In the 70s, Congress was not pursuing a policy of cutting spending that benefits Americans in favor of tax cuts that benefit the very, very few. For now, get used to higher prices generally, fewer jobs, lower wages, AND more expensive imports. The upside, I suppose, is that people will have to get good at reducing, reusing and recycling, so the economy might be a bit greener. Speaking of green, one translation of the color of the next horse isn’t just pale, but pallidus, or pallid, as in the green-yellow color of a corpse…

Debt - The Pale Horse a.k.a. Death

When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.

• Revelations 6:7-8

Lest we be accused of hyperbole, make no mistake; driving up the nation's debt to finance tax cuts for the rich, while cutting spending on programs American citizens actually benefit from, WILL cause deaths. Many, many deaths. But to reach that conclusion, come with us on one last dreary journey through the minutiae of fiscal policy.

 

We should say up front that the problem won’t just come from cutting federal programs and services combined with debt piled up by cutting taxes. We can expect a sharp increase in interest payments on the debt, ie, the cost of debt service. This process is already underway, as bond ratings agencies have downgraded US government debt several times over the last year. These downgrades drive up interest paid on the debt, as those lending the government money want a higher return in case the government were to default on the underlying debt. Assuming the government still wants to pay for agencies like ICE while having to spend more on debt service, Congress will be forced to cut spending elsewhere. As discretionary spending continues to fall, this leaves cuts to defense spending, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

We should add that not all government debt is bad. We, as a society, get returns on investments in health care, education and infrastructure, even if those returns aren’t always literal repayment of debt. Instead, those returns often show up in terms of longer life expectancy, scientific advancement or greater economic activity. The current lack of investment in those fields which most benefit the most Americans, will probably shave percentages off GDP growth over the coming years. And kill people. We know what happens in societies that don’t invest in vaccines and public health. But back to the dollars and cents.

Congress took a hatchet to Medicaid this spring, though those cuts won’t kick in until after the 2026 midterms. While it may be bold of me to assume there will be any more free and fair elections, clearly the ruling party in Congress feels there will be. But when those cuts do kick in, forecasters expect literally tens of thousands of Americans to prematurely die due to more expensive health care. At the same time, these cuts will likely bankrupt rural and urban hospitals alike. And this says nothing of the potential risks of cutting CDC, NWS and NOAA funding at a time of resurgent infectious diseases and a more unstable climate. Look at what recently happened in the Texas hill country, keeping in mind that funding cuts to the Weather Service and state cuts to local responder agency funding, and tell me with a straight face that these fiscal policies do not resemble the approach of a Pale Rider, with Hell following close behind.

This begs the question, which big-ticket item will be up next on the chopping block? And how will the various populations affected by those cuts react to those cuts?

This version is way better than that crayon sketch up there!
But it's a bit too gloomy. 

Before We Turn the Horsemen Loose…

… we want to thank you for making it this far. We promised an optimistic scenario, and so far, this series of posts have read as litany of chaos and class warfare. Fear not, dear reader, for this story has a much happier ending than the Book of Revelations. Or maybe I'm not reading the final book of the Bible correctly? Seriously. It’s great that Jesus comes back and establishes the New Jerusalem at the end, but did it really require quite so many trials and tribulations? 

There are additional trends which will happen in the background, but may not have impacts quite as overt as those mentioned above. Watch labor force participation. In the 60s and 70s we saw a demographic shift as women entered the workforce. Now we are seeing labor force participation dropping. Why are they dropping out? Where are they going? Also, student loan and credit card debt continue to drag down household income and average earnings. As with workforce participation, increasing household debt will drive the sense of desperation that puts people in a revolutionary mood… 

And all of this will happen against a backdrop of increased Federal spending on debt service, which, historically speaking, crowds out private sector lending. And if those payments on interest on the debt reach levels that threaten the fiscal solvency of the government, what happens? Besides a further cratering of the value of the dollar and the monetary foundation of our country coming into serious question for the first time since the 1861-1865 Civil War?

We could have written entire posts about each of the aforementioned trends. Indeed, people have written entire books on the subjects of government repression, disastrous tariff policies, stagflation and government debt default. Our goal here is to tell a story, and the factors driving the story can’t get too much in the way of pushing the narrative forward, and ask the question, what happens when, sooner or later, Americans feel they have nothing to lose?

Our guess is that people will get up off the couch and lash out at anyone who seems like a good target. And with the current regime driving the news cycle and loudly claiming they are in complete control of everything going on in the country, they will likely make a very inviting target. And that’s where we will start the narrative next time.