The abyss. The darkness. The meaningless void that life rebels against. It stares at us. Nietzsche warned about this moment—when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. When the frameworks that make meaning possible collapse, when the principles that make reasoning together conceivable dissolve, when words lose their moorings to reality and power becomes the only truth—that’s when the abyss stares back.

It is very much staring us in the face right now.

Which brings me to Lindsey Halligan.

On November 24, 2025, a federal judge threw out Donald Trump’s prosecution of James Comey. Not because Comey was innocent. Not because the evidence was insufficient. But because the prosecutor Trump installed to indict his enemy—Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer and Trump’s personal defense attorney with zero prosecutorial experience—was never lawfully appointed as a U.S. attorney and therefore had no legal authority to bring charges at all.

Judge Cameron McGowan Currie’s ruling was devastating: Because Halligan’s appointment violated federal statute, “all actions flowing from it were unlawful exercises of executive power.” The indictment was void. And because the statute of limitations expired while Halligan pursued her invalid prosecution, Comey likely can never face the same charges again.

Trump’s attempt to weaponize the Justice Department didn’t just fail—it immunized his target. The corruption was so obvious, the execution so incompetent, that it collapsed under its own illegality.

And this is what staring into the abyss looks like in practice. Not some abstract philosophical crisis, but the concrete collapse of the frameworks that make legal reasoning possible. When you cannot distinguish between legitimate prosecution and personal vendetta, when appointment statutes become “technical” obstacles rather than constitutional constraints, when the only question is loyalty rather than legality—you’re not just breaking rules. You’re destroying the conditions that make rules intelligible.

The corruption requires the stupidity. And the stupidity reveals the abyss.

A Timeline Of Stupidity

Understanding what happened requires seeing the timeline not as a series of unfortunate errors but as the inevitable unfolding of corruption that cannot permit competence. September 20, 2025: Trump posts on Truth Social, addressing Attorney General Pam Bondi directly: “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.’”

September 22, 2025: Erik Siebert, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who had expressed doubts about prosecuting Trump’s enemies, is pushed out. Lindsey Halligan—Trump’s former personal defense attorney—is sworn in as his replacement.

September 25, 2025: Three days later, Halligan secures a two-count criminal indictment against James Comey. She is the sole prosecutor presenting to the grand jury. She later admits she did not present the case to the full grand jury.

September 30, 2025: The statute of limitations for Comey’s alleged offenses expires.

October 9, 2025: Halligan secures an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James on charges of bank fraud and false statements. Again, Halligan alone presents to the grand jury.

November 24, 2025: Judge Currie throws out both cases, ruling that Halligan’s appointment violated 28 U.S.C. § 546—the statute governing interim U.S. attorney appointments. Because Siebert had already served his 120-day term, the Justice Department could not simply install a new interim prosecutor. The power to appoint belonged to the district court, not the Attorney General. Halligan had no legal authority. Her indictments were void. And because she pursued an invalid prosecution past the statute of limitations deadline, Comey cannot be recharged.

The corruption immunized its target through its own illegality.

There Is No World In Which This Isn’t Corrupt

It is almost comedic to imagine the narrative pretzels one must jump through in order to pretend that a coherent argument can be made here, that what we are witnessing is the application of a good faith effort in pursuit of justice. You would need to explain how installing your personal defense attorney as a federal prosecutor to indict your named enemies isn’t corrupt. There is no framework that makes this defensible. The appearance of impropriety isn’t subtle—it’s the entire structure. You would need to argue that violating the appointment statute is a “technical” issue rather than a constitutional constraint. But that requires treating the law as an obstacle to be gamed rather than a framework constraining power. Once you make that move, you’ve abandoned the rule of law entirely. You would need to justify why the prosecutor indicted within three days of taking office, presenting to a partial grand jury, mere days before the statute of limitations expired. The timeline screams vindictiveness. There’s no good-faith explanation for this haste—no sudden discovery of crucial evidence, no compelling prosecutorial necessity. Just Trump’s public demand followed immediately by prosecution.

You would need to explain why, after the judge ruled the appointment unlawful, the White House “stands with” Halligan and Bondi says the ruling “does not” affect her role. This isn’t defending a good-faith legal position—it’s doubling down on the violation itself.

None of these things can be defended coherently without abandoning basic principles: that the rule of law constrains power, that procedures matter, that appointment statutes exist for reasons, that the appearance of justice matters, that constitutional constraints aren’t “technical” obstacles. The corruption required destroying these frameworks. And destroying frameworks requires stupidity—not because the people involved lack intelligence, but because intelligent defense of the indefensible is impossible.

You cannot think clearly while maintaining that personal lawyers should prosecute personal enemies, that appointment statutes are technical trivialities, that three-day indictments after presidential demands aren’t vindictive, that partial grand jury presentations are proper procedure, that immunizing your target through illegal process is winning. The framework cannot cohere. So stupidity becomes the only option. Not chosen stupidity, but necessary stupidity—the epistemic collapse that corruption requires.

The Brain Death Of Conservative Thought

When I searched for conservative responses to the Halligan appointment and prosecution, I found something more revealing than silence. I found fracture. The response wasn’t unified defense or unified condemnation—it was the complete breakdown of any coherent conservative position, revealing exactly what Jonathan Chait describes in his devastating Atlantic piece on the brain death of conservative thought.

Andrew McCarthy—former federal prosecutor, Fox News contributor, National Review writer—called the indictment “ill-conceived,” “incoherently drafted,” and “factually without foundation.” In a piece titled “With More Scrutiny, the Trump DOJ Indictment of Comey Gets Worse,” McCarthy concluded the case “should be dismissed.” On Fox News, he characterized it as “a mess” and stated “the charge itself is incoherent.” This is a conservative legal analyst, writing in National Review, appearing on Fox News, saying the prosecution was indefensible garbage.

But we should pause here to acknowledge National Review‘s broader posture in this moment. While McCarthy—a contributor—maintained intellectual honesty about the Halligan prosecution, the publication itself has been busy providing intellectual frameworks for constitutional crisis. In March 2025, they published an editorial outlining scenarios where “the executive may have a persuasive case for defying a judicial order”—a roadmap for extra-constitutional power dressed as constitutional analysis. When I critiqued this editorial, National Review senior writer Dan McLaughlin devoted an entire article to dismissing my concerns without engaging the substance, calling me “a Substack writer” and hiding behind procedural pedantry.

McLaughlin wrote: “When the courts seize powers never granted them in the Constitution, that is a usurpation of power—and arguably an even worse one than executive overreach, precisely because there are so very few remedies for it.” There’s the argument laid bare: because judicial overreach is difficult to remedy constitutionally, extra-constitutional remedies become justified. This isn’t constitutional analysis—it’s constitutional surrender dressed as principle.

So when McCarthy calls the Comey prosecution incoherent while National Review publishes frameworks for justified executive defiance of court orders, we’re watching the fracture in real time. The conservative legal analyst maintains standards while the institution provides intellectual cover for abandoning them. McCarthy says the Halligan prosecution is garbage. National Review says the executive can ignore judges. Both appear in the same publication, serving different functions in the ecosystem of conservative intellectual collapse.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board—the flagship of conservative economic thought—published an editorial after the dismissal titled “The Gang That Couldn’t Indict Straight,” mocking the administration’s incompetence. “In its rush for retribution, the Trump Administration cut corners” and “This is what happens when officials don’t follow legal procedure. They lose cases.” Not defending. Mocking.

The Federalist—which has refashioned itself from Trump-skeptical to slavishly pro-Trump under Mollie Hemingway, who dismissed Trump in 2016 as “a demagogue with no real solutions for anything at all”—did mount a defense. On November 10, it published “Evidence Contradicts Comey’s Claim His Indictment Is Political,” arguing that Halligan “backed up the charges with evidence that far surpasses what is necessary to survive a motion to dismiss.” After the dismissal, The Federalist blamed a “partisan judge” and argued the ruling represented a “judicial coup against presidential power.”

The Heritage Foundation posted a video to social media, where Roger Severino crowed that “James Comey needs to face justice. It’s long overdue” in September 2025, but produced no substantive legal defense of the Halligan appointment or prosecution procedure.

And the White House? Karoline Leavitt called the ruling “technical,” described Judge Currie as a “partisan judge,” and insisted “everybody knows that James Comey lied to Congress. It’s as clear as day.” No legal argument for why Halligan’s appointment was valid. No defense of the procedure. No engagement with the vindictive prosecution claim. Just the assertion that Comey is guilty and the judge is biased.

This isn’t silence. This is something worse. This is the complete fragmentation of conservative intellectual infrastructure into warring factions that cannot even agree on whether to defend blatantly illegal prosecutions, let alone how to defend them. You have McCarthy and The Wall Street Journal—traditional conservative legal thinkers—saying this is indefensible garbage while National Review provides blueprints for ignoring judicial authority. You have The Federalist—now fully captured by Trump—saying the judge is partisan and the prosecution was fine. You have Heritage making vague supportive noises while producing nothing substantive. You have the White House calling constitutional constraints “technical” and judges “partisan.”

Chait documents this pattern: “I regularly search for the best conservative defense of these actions. Most of the time, I find nothing.” But what I found here is more revealing than nothing. I found conservative legal analysts on Fox News and in National Review calling the prosecution “a mess” and “incoherent” while the publication employing them argues executives can defy court orders. I found The Wall Street Journal editorial board—the voice of conservative economic establishment—mocking the administration’s incompetence. And I found The Federalist abandoning any pretense of legal argument for pure tribal defense: the judge is biased, therefore the ruling is wrong.

Conservative intellectuals aren’t just silent. They’ve fractured into camps that cannot speak to each other: the traditional conservatives who maintained intellectual standards and are being pushed out or marginalized within their own publications (McCarthy calling prosecutions garbage while National Review justifies defying courts), the fully captured who defend anything Trump does through pure partisanship (Federalist), and those trying to have it both ways through vague gestures without substance (Heritage). The Halligan case didn’t produce silence. It produced a demonstration that there is no longer a conservative intellectual movement capable of coherent response. There are only fragments that used to be a movement, now unable to agree on whether openly corrupt prosecutions should be defended, condemned, or ignored—or whether the rule of law itself should be maintained or abandoned when inconvenient.

A Reckoning With 2024’s Blindspots

We should pause for a moment, however, to harken back to how The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board assessed the risk of a second Trump term before the election. Low. Probably lower risk than Kamala Harris, they reckoned.

“A second Trump term poses risks, but the question as ever is compared to what?” they wrote in October 2024. “Voters can gamble on the tumult of Trump, or the continued ascendancy of the Democratic left. We wish it was a better choice, but that’s democracy.”

They acknowledged Trump’s “character flaws” and that it “surely wouldn’t be a return to ‘normalcy.’” But: “We don’t buy the fascism fears, and we doubt Democrats really do either.” Their concern wasn’t authoritarianism but whether Trump “can successfully address the country’s urgent problems.”

The risks they identified? That Trump “has instincts but no clear philosophy of government” and his second term would be “more of a policy jump ball.” That he might pursue tariffs instead of free markets. That he surrounds himself with “grifters and provocateurs who flatter him.” That Tucker Carlson might have more influence than Jared Kushner. That it “could result in four more years of divisive partisan warfare.”

What they didn’t identify as a risk: installing personal defense attorneys as federal prosecutors to indict political enemies in violation of appointment statutes. The systematic weaponization of the Justice Department. The appointment of a Secretary of Defense who advocates war crimes and calls the Geneva Conventions “arbitrary rules.” The complete collapse of the rule of law documented in federal court ruling after federal court ruling. Federal investigations of senators for stating constitutional law.

“The authoritarian rule that Democrats and the press predicted never appeared,” they wrote confidently. “Mr. Trump was too undisciplined, and his attention span too short, to stay on one message much less stage a coup. America’s checks and balances held.”

Six months later, they’re publishing editorials titled “The Gang That Couldn’t Indict Straight,” mocking the administration for cutting corners “in its rush for retribution” and losing cases because “officials don’t follow legal procedure.”

I thought somewhat differently at the time. A stance that would have been seen by these same WSJ editorial board members as hyperbolic, with partisan blinders on.

In October 2024, three weeks before the election, I wrote: “If you are actually gullible enough to believe that Kamala Harris is a mortal threat to American capitalism, freedom of speech and democracy, as this rising fascist cabal of political power out of Silicon Valley is trying so desperately hard to convince you of, then there’s probably not much I’m going to be able to do here to convince you otherwise. But for the rest of you, who come at this from a somewhat less insular perspective, let me warn you of something: It is these people who are out for your freedom of speech and your democracy. They are literally wolves circling what they think is a dying carcass of the American political order.”

I continued: “These people are deeply fucking dangerous. They have way too much power and way too much money… what these people—from Elon Musk, to Marc Andreessen, Keith Rabois, and others—are fighting for is merely the capacity of these people to seize political power for their own ends. They believe they can run the world better, and they are prepared to do what it takes to remove their obstacles to obtaining that power…They are, in fact, 21st century fascists. Propelled by their egos of their impressive economic and technological successes, they have fallen headfirst into a dark Nietzschean, will to power frame, that if not confronted, would sunset our entire experiment in self-government.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board would have read that and dismissed it as partisan hyperbole. “We don’t buy the fascism fears,” they wrote confidently. They were sophisticated analysts weighing risks and tradeoffs. I was apparently someone who couldn’t see past partisan blinders.

A year later, the sophisticated analysts are publishing “The Gang That Couldn’t Indict Straight,” mocking vindictive prosecutions. And I’m documenting how the Secretary of Defense received $348,000 to write a book advocating war crimes while a federal prosecutor with no legal authority indicted Trump’s enemies in violation of appointment statutes while the regime opens federal investigations into senators for stating constitutional law.

The difference wasn’t intelligence or analytical sophistication. It was willingness to take seriously what was being said explicitly. When Trump promised retribution, I believed him. When Silicon Valley billionaires funded explicitly anti-democratic candidates, I believed they meant it. When people published books advocating monarchy, I believed they were serious. When Hegseth wrote that we should “rip arms off and feed them to hogs” and ignore “what other countries think” about the Geneva Conventions, I believed he would try to implement exactly that worldview.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board, with all their sophisticated analysis and careful weighing of risks, couldn’t process that someone might actually mean what they say when what they say is monstrous. Their framework assumed everyone operates within frameworks—that Trump’s rhetoric was positioning, that authoritarian positions were provocations, that threats were negotiating tactics. They looked at explicit statements of authoritarian intent and concluded: manageable risks, probably lower than Harris.

They were catastrophically wrong. Not because they lacked information but because their analytical framework couldn’t process what the information meant. When someone tells you they’re going to do something monstrous, and you have sophisticated reasons why they won’t actually do it or why it won’t be that bad, you’re not being analytical—you’re rationalizing your unwillingness to believe what you’re hearing.

This is the brain death Chait documents. Not just the inability to defend what’s happening now, but the prior failure to predict it would happen despite being told explicitly that it would. The fracture isn’t just between McCarthy calling prosecutions incoherent and The Federalist defending them, or between McCarthy maintaining standards while National Review publishes blueprints for defying courts. It’s between The Wall Street Journal in October 2024 saying “we don’t buy the fascism fears” and The Wall Street Journal in November 2025 mocking vindictive prosecutions they apparently didn’t think would happen.

And it’s between me in October 2024 saying “these people are deeply fucking dangerous” and “21st century fascists” and being dismissed as hyperbolic, and me in November 2025 documenting exactly the dangerous fascist behavior I predicted while the sophisticated analysts who dismissed me are reduced to mockery having failed to prevent what they assured us wasn’t a serious risk.

The sophisticated framework failed. Completely. Because sophistication that cannot recognize monsters when they tell you what they are isn’t sophistication at all—it’s a defense mechanism against believing uncomfortable truths. McCarthy calls it “a mess” and “incoherent.” The WSJ mocks it as incompetent. National Review justifies ignoring courts when executives find them inconvenient. But none of them predicted it would happen. None warned that installing Trump posed the risk of exactly this kind of vindictive, illegal prosecution backed by frameworks for defying judicial authority. They assured us the risks were manageable, that checks and balances would hold, that we shouldn’t buy the fascism fears.

The checks didn’t hold. The balances failed. The fascism they didn’t buy is documented in federal court rulings and federal investigations of senators for stating constitutional law. And now they’re left mocking the incompetence of prosecutions they said wouldn’t happen, defending against fears they said were overblown, criticizing or providing cover for the very administration whose risks they assured us were acceptable.

Pete Hegseth Is The Lindsey Halligan Of The Military

If Lindsey Halligan shows us what corruption looks like when it destroys legal reasoning, Pete Hegseth shows us what it looks like when it destroys military culture. The pattern is identical. When you cannot defend your position coherently, you have two options: silence or redefinition. Halligan’s defenders fractured—McCarthy and the WSJ calling it garbage while National Review justifies defying courts, The Federalist defending it tribally, Heritage gesturing vaguely. Hegseth redefines the terms entirely.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—former Fox News host, author of The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free—thinks he’s arguing with woke professors and purple-haired Portland activists about diversity training and pronouns. He’s not. He’s arguing with Dwight D. Eisenhower about the fundamental purpose of American military power. The man who led Allied forces to victory over the Nazis in World War II. The man who became president and warned America about the military-industrial complex. The man who, more than perhaps any other single figure, shaped modern American military culture into what it became in the post-war period.

Eisenhower hated war. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, the general who planned D-Day, who wrote two speeches for that day—one for success, one for failure—who bore the weight of sending tens of thousands of young men to storm beaches where German Panzer divisions waited, who carried those deaths with him for the rest of his life. He hated war. He saw it as an existential necessity when confronting evil like Adolf Hitler, something you must be capable of winning, but never something to glorify. Never something to celebrate. Never something to seek.

This is why Eisenhower changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense. Not as cosmetic rebranding but as philosophical statement: America’s military posture is defensive. We maintain the capacity for violence to deter and defeat aggression, not to celebrate brutality as masculine virtue. This principle runs deep in post-WWII military culture. The Geneva Conventions. The Uniform Code of Military Justice requiring soldiers to disobey illegal orders. The integration of legal and ethical training into military education. The understanding that while war sometimes cannot be avoided, it should never be sought, and when fought it must be constrained by law—not because law is weakness but because law is what separates civilization from barbarism.

Pete Hegseth—who received a $348,000 advance from HarperCollins to write his book—calls this “woke.”

One might take a moment to dwell on these things for more time than our scrolling-addled brains typically have patience for in this dystopic future we inhabit, because the contempt this book deserves requires documenting its actual content. On the Geneva Conventions, Hegseth writes: “What do you do if your enemy does not honor the Geneva conventions?…Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: if you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.”

He continues: “We are just fighting with one hand behind our back—and the enemy knows it…If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think?”

On LGBTQ service members: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and its repeal served as a “gateway” and “camouflage” that “opened the door for broader political and ideological changes” undermining military effectiveness. He admits he once believed “we needed everybody” when “America was at war,” but “later came to see this mindset as naive,” stating that “our good faith was used against us.”

On diversity: The Pentagon “will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything.” Regarding DEI initiatives: “Turns out, all the ‘diversity’ recruiting messages made certain kids—white kids—feel like they’re not wanted.”

On the American left: He compares them to “Jody”—military slang for someone who sleeps with a service member’s spouse while they’re deployed—writing they “stayed home and wrecked our house. America-wreckers, all of them.”

On countering extremism: “Rooting out ‘extremism,’ today’s generals push rank-and-file patriots out of their formations.”

On Confederate base names: He advocates renaming Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg because “legacy matters. My uncle served at Bragg. I served at Bragg. It breaks a generational link.”

This is the book. These are the positions. This is what the Secretary of Defense believes about the military culture he now controls.

Eisenhower, who bore the responsibility for D-Day, who understood the weight of violence better than Hegseth could imagine, who carried those deaths with him for the rest of his life—he would be horrified by someone treating war as an arena for demonstrating masculine dominance rather than as tragic necessity. The Geneva Conventions weren’t imposed by “international tribunals” to make themselves “feel better.” They were written by people who had seen what unrestrained warfare produces—the Holocaust, the systematic torture and execution of prisoners, the complete breakdown of civilization into barbarism. They were written by the victors of World War II, including American generals like Eisenhower, who understood that maintaining constraints on violence isn’t weakness but the foundation of any military culture compatible with democratic governance.

Hegseth poses the question, “who cares what other countries think?” Petulance. Flippancy. Fuck the world. We’re America, and we can do what we want!

The World Responds

Meanwhile, the world moves to diversify away from America.

There is a growing patriotic wave in China where consumers are turning away from American brands and buying local instead. At the forefront is a Gen Z movement called Guochao, which roughly translates to “national tide.” The numbers are devastating: Gucci’s online bag sales in China have dropped more than 50% compared to two years ago while local premium brand Songmont has surged 90% in the same period. Nike used to be the market leader in China for athletic wear just four years ago with 25% market share. Today they’re down to 20%, displaced by a Chinese company called Anta whose China business is now 30% larger than Nike’s. Starbucks had 34% market share in China in 2019—they’re down to 14%. Tesla’s market share just shrank to 3%, down from 8% the previous month, the lowest level in three years. BYD now leads with 23% market share.

The younger you are in China, the more you dislike the United States. This shows up in surveys. It shows up in state media. And it shows up in consumer behavior—a generation of Chinese consumers rejecting American brands for local alternatives that are increasingly competitive, increasingly innovative, increasingly aspirational.

China is Nike’s third largest market. It’s Coca-Cola’s third largest market too. It’s Tesla’s second largest market. Half of Qualcomm’s sales last year came from China. These are not peripheral relationships—American companies depend on Chinese consumers in ways that “who cares what other countries think?” simply ignores.

When Hegseth writes “who cares what other countries think?” about ignoring the Geneva Conventions, he’s not just rejecting international law. He’s rejecting the entire framework of alliances and shared values that won World War II and maintained American power through the Cold War. He’s rejecting NATO. He’s rejecting the idea that American power derives from anything other than raw capacity for violence. He’s rejecting the economic interdependence that American companies actually rely on while pretending American dominance is self-sufficient.

Eisenhower would recognize this immediately: not as the “warrior ethos” but as the petulant ignorance of someone who’s never borne responsibility for anything larger than a Fox News segment. Not as strength but as the flailing performance of weakness—the desperate insistence that we don’t need anyone else right as everyone else decides they don’t need us.

The world is watching. Not with fear of American strength but with pity for American decline. They’re building alternatives to American brands, American payment systems, American technology, American alliances. They’re diversifying away from dollar dependence. They’re creating parallel institutions. And they’re doing it faster than the people writing $348,000 books about “warrior ethos” seem to notice.

“Who cares what other countries think?” They don’t care what we think anymore. That’s the answer Hegseth can’t process. That’s the consequence his framework can’t accommodate. That’s what happens when you mistake petulance for strength and flippancy for strategy.

The difference isn’t between “strong” and “weak.” It’s between two completely incompatible understandings of what strength is for. Eisenhower’s conception: Strength exists to protect. To defend the defenseless. To win wars when they must be fought and to prevent them when possible. To bear the terrible responsibility of violence when necessary while never losing sight of violence as tragedy, not triumph. To subordinate force to law and military power to civilian democratic control. This is why Mark Kelly—Navy combat pilot, astronaut, Senator who flew combat missions and commanded the Space Shuttle—risked his career to appear in that video reminding service members they have a duty to disobey illegal orders. Not because he’s weak but because he understands what Eisenhower understood: strength without principle isn’t strength at all. It’s just capacity for harm untethered from purpose.

Hegseth’s conception: Strength exists to dominate. The strong should rule the weak. Legal constraints are obstacles imposed by effeminate elites who’ve never seen combat. “White kids” should feel wanted while others shouldn’t. LGBTQ service members accepting who they are constituted betrayal—”our good faith was used against us.” Diversity initiatives are persecution. Efforts to root out actual extremism in the ranks become attacks on “patriots.” The fact that you could “rip arms off and feed them to hogs” makes you strong. The willingness to threaten this proves masculine virtue. “Who cares what other countries think?” The Geneva Conventions are weakness. Restraint is emasculation. Law is for the weak.

This isn’t a “warrior ethos.” It’s nihilism dressed in camouflage. It’s the replacement of virtue with violence, principle with power, strength with brutality. It’s toxic masculinity in its purest distillation—not masculinity itself, which can be virtuous, but its specific corruption that treats dominance as the highest good, kindness as weakness, cruelty as clarity, and legal constraints as emasculation. Eisenhower would have recognized men like Hegseth immediately. Not as warriors but as bullies. Not as strong but as small. Not as masculine but as desperately performing masculinity to cover weakness they can’t acknowledge—the weakness of men who never bore the weight of actual command responsibility, who never had to order young men to their deaths, who never had to live with those deaths afterward, who never had to look into the eyes of mothers who would never see their sons again because of orders you gave.

Just as Halligan couldn’t defend illegal prosecutions coherently and her defenders fractured into incompatible camps, Hegseth cannot defend these positions within existing frameworks. So he redefines the terms until the framework itself dissolves. The Geneva Conventions become “arbitrary rules” imposed to make “international tribunals feel better.” Legal constraints on violence become “fighting with one hand behind our back.” Eisenhower’s defensive military culture becomes “woke” ideology undermining effectiveness. LGBTQ service members accepting who they are becomes betrayal of “good faith.” Diversity becomes discrimination against “white kids.” Countering actual extremism becomes persecution of “patriots.” The legacy of generals who fought to preserve the Union becomes worth abandoning for the legacy of generals who fought to destroy it. Restraint becomes weakness. War crimes become “winning wars according to our own rules.” Cruelty becomes strength. Alliance structures become constraints to ignore.

The Corruption Requires The Stupidity

Two cases. One shows corruption so obvious it requires fracture—conservative intellectuals unable to agree whether to defend, condemn, or ignore illegal prosecutions, splitting between those calling it garbage and those providing blueprints for defying courts entirely. One shows positions so indefensible they require redefining reality itself—war crimes become “warrior ethos,” Geneva Conventions become “arbitrary rules,” Eisenhower’s military culture becomes “woke.” Together they reveal the complete breakdown of conservative intellectual infrastructure. When you cannot defend illegal prosecutions, you fracture into warring camps calling it garbage, defending it tribally, justifying defiance of courts, or making vague gestures. When you cannot defend war crimes, you redefine war crimes as virtue. Both strategies serve the same purpose: avoiding the choice between honesty and exile.

The corruption has destroyed the conditions making thought possible. What remains is strategic silence, tribal defense without legal argument, linguistic manipulation where words mean whatever power declares them to mean, institutional cover for abandoning constitutional constraints, fracture into camps that cannot speak to each other because they no longer share even basic frameworks for evaluating whether something can be defended. Most chose these strategies. Almost none chose intellectual honesty.

And this—not some abstract philosophical crisis but the concrete collapse documented in federal court rulings and $348,000 book advances advocating war crimes and National Review editorials justifying executive defiance of judicial authority—is what the abyss looks like when it stares back at you.

And though the darkness stares, though frameworks collapse, though corruption requires stupidity and stupidity reveals the void—we can still choose to say what is true, defend what is real, and walk the wire together into whatever comes next.

Because the alternative is unthinkable. And we are not done thinking yet.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. This is an abridged and modified version of a version originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Mark Kelly—former Navy combat pilot, astronaut, sitting United States Senator—stated a simple legal fact on video: members of the US military can refuse illegal orders. Not as opinion. Not as political positioning. As established law codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and affirmed at Nuremberg when “I was following orders” was rejected as defense for war crimes.

The Trump Administration opened a federal investigation into him for saying this.

Jesse Watters praised the investigation on Fox News: “You have to make examples out of people.”

Slow down. Read that again. One more time. Let it register fully.

A sitting senator stated constitutional law. The executive branch opened an investigation into him for stating it. State propaganda praised this as making an example.

This isn’t approaching fascism. This isn’t fascism-adjacent. This is fascism—the actual thing, not the metaphor, happening in real time on national television while we debate whether calling it fascism is too divisive.

Let’s be precise about the mechanics. The Trump Administration isn’t investigating Kelly for corruption or lawbreaking. It’s investigating him for defending the principle that law constrains executive power. The investigation isn’t meant to find wrongdoing—it’s meant to intimidate through spectacle of state punishment. The message isn’t “we enforce laws” but “invoke constitutional constraints and we come for you.”

And Watters—state propagandist on the regime’s preferred network—praises this openly: “You have to make examples out of people.” That’s Goebbels. Not as hyperbole. As accurate historical parallel. Making examples means using state violence visibly enough that others learn to submit without needing to be targeted. The cruelty is the point. The intimidation is the goal. The investigation is the punishment.

Kelly defended the constitutional framework distinguishing American military forces from authoritarian ones—the framework saying law constrains power, that orders can be illegal, that service members have the duty to refuse commands violating constitutional or international law. This is why Admiral Holsey resigned over Caribbean boat strikes. He understood that following illegal orders doesn’t protect you—it implicates you.

And now the Trump Administration investigates Kelly for defending this principle while Fox News calls for him to be made an example.

Think about what this means. If you can be investigated by federal authorities for stating that military personnel can refuse illegal orders, then there are no illegal orders. If defending constitutional constraints on executive power becomes grounds for federal investigation, then constitutional constraints no longer exist. If senators can be “made examples of” for invoking established law, then law has been replaced by will.

This is the mechanism. This is how constitutional republics die. Not through formal coup or dramatic collapse but through making it dangerous to invoke constitutional protections. You don’t repeal the law protecting refusal of illegal orders—you just investigate anyone who mentions it until no one dares. You don’t ban opposition—you make examples until opposition becomes unthinkable. You don’t eliminate the Constitution—you prosecute people who cite it until citing it becomes sedition.

Eventually no one invokes it. Eventually no one remembers it protected anything. Eventually “the president ordered it” becomes sufficient justification for any action, any violation, any atrocity. That’s the world this investigation is building. That’s the world Watters is praising. That’s the world taking shape while we watch.

Kelly is doing what constitutional officers do: defending that law constrains power, that orders can be illegal, that military serves Constitution rather than personal loyalty to whoever holds office. This isn’t radical. This isn’t partisan. This is baseline constitutional governance—the floor beneath which lies only authoritarianism.

The Trump Administration is doing what authoritarian regimes do: weaponizing state power against those defending constitutional constraints, using federal investigation as punishment for opposition, making examples to terrorize others into silence.

Watters is doing what fascist propagandists do: praising political persecution on state television, normalizing investigation-as-intimidation, celebrating the “examples” that teach everyone else to submit.

This is it. This is the thing. Not the prologue, not the warning sign, but the actual consolidation of authoritarian power happening on Fox News while many Americans legislate on whether noticing this is “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

A senator stated constitutional law. The regime opened an investigation. State media praised making an example of him. And we’re supposed to worry that calling this “fascist” is too inflammatory?

The scandal isn’t the word. The scandal is that it’s accurate. They’re doing it. Openly. On television. While scolding anyone who names it as divisive.

Kelly is correct. The law is clear. Military personnel can and must refuse illegal orders. Stating this is not sedition—it’s constitutional duty.

Investigating him for stating it is not governance—it’s fascism.

Call it what it is. Without apology. Without hedge. Without the cowardice that mistakes silence for civility.

Because the alternative—the world where constitutional law becomes grounds for investigation, where “making examples” is normal, where all orders are legal because the leader gave them—that world is being built right now.

Not in some dystopian future. Today. On Fox News. By the Trump Administration.

With federal investigations and propaganda praise and audiences nodding along as if political persecution were patriotism rather than the exact thing the Founders built constitutional protections to prevent.

This is fascism.

And it’s happening.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

You know this is a spectacle, right? A show. That’s what it is. A performance for social media. With blood.

Pete Hegseth just ordered the twenty-first strike on a suspected drug boat. Three more bodies. Another video posted to X showing a vessel bursting into flames. “Three male narco-terrorists” dead, the military announces. No trial. No evidence presented. No due process. Just boats exploding on camera and bodies labeled terrorists because the Department of Defense says so.

This is governance as content creation. TikTok foreign policy. Snackable clips of military strikes designed for engagement metrics while everything that actually matters falls apart around us.

Blowing up drug-running boats in the Caribbean isn’t going to stop the flow of drugs into America. Everyone knows this. The drugs will keep coming—they always do, they always have. Different boats, different routes, same product reaching the same streets. This isn’t policy designed to solve problems. This is spectacle designed to produce feelings. The feeling that someone strong is doing strong things. The feeling that enemies are being punished. The feeling that something is being done even as nothing actually changes.

But it is illegal. Under United States law and international law. The rule of law is being killed alongside these men in these boats. Admiral Alvin Holsey—the four-star admiral overseeing these operations—resigned because the boats weren’t showing immediate hostile intent. Colombia says we’re killing their fishermen. Ecuador released survivors for lack of evidence. Congress hasn’t authorized any of this. The Constitution hasn’t been consulted. Just Hegseth ordering strikes and posting videos while the legal framework that makes civilization possible burns alongside the boats.

So they can post it on X. So they can show you what an amazing job they’re doing. While your prices rise. While the Epstein files document twenty thousand pages of connections that cannot be explained away. While the artificial intelligence market bubble exhausts its last breaths of irrational exuberance. While American citizens are illegally detained by masked federal agents and some have been shot. This is a show for social media.

Twenty-one strikes now. How many bodies for the algorithm? How many “narco-terrorists” killed without trial before someone asks to see evidence? How many boats exploding on camera before Congress remembers it’s supposed to authorize military action? The carrier arrives tomorrow. Fifteen thousand troops ready. And still no authorization. Still no debate. Just Trump saying he’s “sort of made up my mind” while Hegseth produces content.

This is what authoritarian governance looks like in the age of engagement metrics. The policy is the spectacle. The spectacle is the policy. You’re not supposed to ask whether it works. You’re supposed to watch the boats explode and feel like winning is happening. You’re supposed to see bodies labeled terrorists and feel safer. You’re supposed to consume the content and move on to the next post before you have time to ask: Where’s the evidence? Where’s the legal authority? Where’s Congress? What is this actually accomplishing besides producing clips for social media?

The boats keep exploding. The videos keep posting. The body count keeps rising. And while you watch the performance, Trump’s Epstein connections sit in those twenty thousand pages. While you debate whether the targets were really terrorists, American citizens are detained without warrants. While you argue about drugs, the Constitution collects dust and admirals resign in protest and the rule of law dies with every strike that produces another video for posting.

This is governance for the algorithm. Bodies for engagement. Military action as content strategy. Twenty-one strikes. The carrier arrives tomorrow. Eighty people dead in undeclared war. Congress silent. The Constitution ignored. Admirals resigning. The rule of law burning.

For fucking TikTok.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

I love America. You’re so fucked up. But I love you.

You’re built upon a beautiful and preposterous idea: that ordinary people—you and I—can govern ourselves. Together. Not through superior intelligence. Not through noble birth. Not through accumulated wealth. But through the messy, difficult, glorious work of reasoning together when no one has final answers and everyone has standing to speak.

Some of us have gotten really rich. Really powerful. And they’ve decided the real problem is that we dare to think we’re capable of this endeavor. This experiment in self-governance. They want to replace your Constitution and its laws with a Terms of Service Agreement. They say the “customer service” will be better. They’re the cognitive elite, you see. And the commons—us—is a tragedy. Unrestrained, we’ll vote for regulations and taxes that will slow the march of progress.

Progress toward what? For whom? Where are we going?

They think they know. Musk to Mars. Thiel to monarchy. Yarvin to corporate feudalism with better branding. A whole apparatus of Silicon Valley intellectuals convinced that democracy failed and hierarchy is the answer. That most people should accept subordinate roles. That the intelligent few should rule. That your capacity for self-governance is the problem, not the solution.

They’ll tell you it’s inevitable. That fighting it is naive. That efficiency matters more than agency. That optimization beats dignity. That customer service under enlightened technocratic rule will be better than the messy democracy you’re clinging to.

To hell with that.

Our nation must be defended, of course. China and Russia are real threats. But in meeting those threats, we cannot lose the very thing that makes us different from them. The reason there is a line in the sand. The reason an American soldier would lay down their life. For freedom. For liberty. For the preposterous idea that ordinary people can govern themselves.

Not so some fucking oligarch can tell us that hierarchy is inevitable. Not so feudalism with Wi-Fi can replace the Constitution with terms of service. Not so the “cognitive elite” can optimize us into subjects.

I’d rather wait in line at the DMV with missing ceiling tiles than take a knee before these men.

Because here’s what they don’t understand—what they cannot understand because their frameworks won’t allow it: the inefficiency is the point. The messiness is the point. The fact that democracy is slower and harder and more uncertain than rule by superior intelligence—that’s not a bug. That’s what makes it worth defending.

When you govern yourself, you make mistakes. You argue. You compromise. You change your mind. You live with decisions made by people you disagree with. You accept that your superior insight doesn’t grant you authority over others. You do the hard work of reasoning together across difference.

They say: inefficiency. I say: human dignity.

The oligarchs look at this and see waste. I look at it and see everything worth fighting for.

They want to sell you the idea that surrendering agency will make your life better. That if you just accept your place in the hierarchy, the people at the top will take care of you. That democracy is too hard, too messy, too slow for the challenges we face.

This is the oldest tyranny dressed in the newest language. It’s the same thing every authoritarian in history has offered: surrender your freedom and I’ll give you security. Accept my rule and I’ll solve your problems. Trust me to decide and you won’t have to do the hard work of deciding together.

Every time, it’s a lie. Not because the authoritarians are uniquely evil—though some are—but because the bargain itself is corrupt. You cannot trade freedom for security and get either. You cannot accept hierarchy and keep dignity. You cannot surrender self-governance and remain free.

America, you’re built on the idea that this bargain is bullshit. That ordinary people figuring it out together beats extraordinary people deciding for everyone. That the mess and uncertainty and difficulty of democracy is the price of being human rather than being managed.

Some days I look at you and despair. At how close you are to surrendering what makes you worth defending. At how many people are ready to trade your beautiful preposterous idea for the promise of better customer service. At how the oligarchs have convinced half the country that their own capacity for self-governance is the problem.

But then I see the governors who won’t bend. The representatives calling for new leadership. The millions who took to the streets saying “no kings.” The jury in D.C. that refused to enforce political prosecutions. The judges still building factual records and defending constitutional constraints. The ordinary people who keep showing up, keep organizing, keep insisting that they have standing to determine their collective fate.

And I remember: you’re not your worst impulses. You’re not your oligarchs or your authoritarians or your accommodating establishment. You’re the idea that ordinary people can govern themselves. And that idea—however battered, however threatened—is still alive because enough people refuse to surrender it.

The fight ahead is existential. The oligarchs aren’t going to stop because we ask nicely. The authoritarians aren’t going to respect norms they’ve explicitly rejected. The establishment isn’t going to fight power because fighting costs more than managing.

It’s going to take genuine resistance. Sustained organizing. Economic power used against economic power. Democratic institutions defended by people willing to use them. Governors who fight. Representatives who mean what they say. Citizens who refuse to become subjects.

It’s going to require accepting that some things are worth the mess, the uncertainty, the inefficiency. That self-governance is harder than being ruled but that the difficulty is what makes it dignified. That waiting in line at the DMV with missing ceiling tiles is preferable to kneeling before men who think your capacity for self-governance is the obstacle to their vision of progress.

America, I love you. You’re so fucked up. But the idea you’re built on—that ordinary people can govern themselves together—is the most beautiful and preposterous thing humans have ever attempted.

Some want to replace it with hierarchy. With feudalism dressed as innovation. With Terms of Service where the Constitution used to be.

I say: Let them try. Let them make their case. Let them explain why surrendering your agency will make you free.

And then let us make ours: that you are capable. That self-governance is possible. That dignity requires the right to fail rather than the security of being managed. That freedom means doing the hard work of reasoning together rather than accepting the easy comfort of being ruled by your betters.

The wire still holds. Not because the forces trying to break it are weak—they’re not. But because enough people remember what you’re built on and refuse to trade it for better customer service.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And ordinary people can govern themselves if they choose to do the work.

I choose the work. I choose the mess. I choose you—beautiful, preposterous, fucked-up America, built on an idea worth defending even when defending it costs everything.

May love carry us home. Not as escape but as reminder that what we’re fighting for—the right to govern ourselves together despite our flaws—is worth more than all the efficiency and optimization the oligarchs can offer.

The circus continues. But the idea at its center—your idea, America—is still ours to defend or surrender.

I know which I choose.

The question is: do you?

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

After forty days. Forty days of the longest government shutdown in American history. Forty days of Democrats saying this is the line—healthcare for twenty-two million Americans. Forty days of holding firm while Republicans bet Democrats would break first.

Chuck Schumer just taught Donald Trump that hostage-taking works.

Not because he had to. Because the framework he operates within cannot imagine doing what this moment requires: actually fighting power instead of managing accommodation to it.

Eight Democratic senators voted to end the shutdown last night. The deal they cut? A “guaranteed vote” next month on ACA subsidies that everyone—including Chuck Schumer—knows won’t pass. They traded their only leverage for a promise they know is worthless. They held the line for forty days, then surrendered for nothing.

The base is in open revolt. Gavin Newsom’s response was one word: “Pathetic.” JB Pritzker called it “an empty promise.” AOC reminded everyone that “working people want leaders whose word means something.” Chris Murphy admitted plainly: “There’s no way to sugarcoat what happened tonight.”

And Ro Khanna did what needed doing: he called for Schumer’s removal as Senate minority leader.

This isn’t just fury at a bad deal. This is recognition that the Democratic establishment is operating within a dead framework that keeps producing the same result: managed decline wrapped in sophisticated justifications.

Schumer’s calculation was pure technocratic management. The shutdown polls badly. Healthcare polls well. Get a vote scheduled, minimize political damage, trust that Republicans will take the blame when premiums skyrocket. Classic establishment thinking: read the focus groups, calculate the risk, optimize for damage control.

What he cannot see—what the framework literally prevents him from seeing—is that the fight itself mattered more than any deal. That people weren’t asking for better negotiating tactics. They were asking for proof that Democrats would hold the line on something. Anything. After Chicago. After ICE raids. After warrantless mass detentions. After watching Trump systematically dismantle constitutional constraints.

This was the test. Forty days to prove Democrats could fight power instead of accommodating it. And Schumer folded.

Symone Sanders got it immediately: “The hostage taking worked.” That’s the lesson Trump learned last night. That’s why Chris Murphy is right to fear Trump gets stronger, not weaker. When you teach authoritarians that threatening to hurt people produces Democratic capitulation, you haven’t minimized damage—you’ve guaranteed more hostage situations.

The establishment will produce sophisticated analysis explaining why this was actually strategic. They’ll point to the guaranteed vote, the federal worker protections, the political positioning for next month. They’ll treat this as a temporary setback in normal political competition.

But this isn’t normal political competition. This is one side attempting regime change while the other pretends it’s just another negotiation requiring careful positioning.

The base understands what Schumer cannot: you cannot manage your way out of authoritarian consolidation. You cannot focus-group your way to resistance. You cannot optimize yourself into fighting power when your entire framework is built on accommodating it.

The governors get it. Newsom fighting homeowner cartels in California. Pritzker calling out empty promises. They’re not waiting for Senate leadership to figure out what time it is. They’re building the alternative: liberal populism that actually fights concentrated power instead of explaining why fighting is unstrategic.

The progressive caucus gets it. AOC reminding everyone that people’s lives depend on Democrats keeping their word. Khanna calling for new leadership. James Talarico declaring “this moment demands fighters, not folders.”

Even establishment voices like Murphy understand something fundamental broke last night. When your own senator has to record a video saying “there’s no way to sugarcoat this” and “I’m angry—like you”—that’s not spin control. That’s recognition that the base has decided the framework is dead.

Forty days was long enough to prove Democrats could fight. Long enough to make Trump pay a political price for hostage-taking. Long enough to show working people that their leaders’ word means something.

Chuck Schumer surrendered all of that for a vote next month that won’t pass.

He doesn’t know what time it is. But the base does. The governors do. The progressive caucus does. And they’re done waiting for him to figure it out.

The dead framework just folded. Time to storm the castle.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Within twenty-four hours of Republicans getting crushed in elections they’d convinced themselves were winnable, Fox News deployed the counter-move.

Not denial—the losses were too visible for that. Bret Baier had already explained to Fox & Friends viewers how bad it was. “It’s a big loss,” he said. Not just the results, but “the spreads are surprising.”

Not acceptance—that would threaten the narrative that MAGA represents the inevitable American future.

Instead, on Wednesday night’s edition of The Ingraham Angle, Laura Ingraham offered viewers a reframe so brazen it became an on-screen graphic:

“By Winning, Democrats Are Actually Losing.”

The emperor has no clothes. And what makes this moment pedagogically valuable is that lots of people are noticing simultaneously. The propaganda is at its most naked. Which means we can analyze how it works precisely when it’s failing to work.

When You Can See It

Propaganda works by being invisible. The best propaganda doesn’t feel like propaganda—it feels like common sense, like the way things obviously are, like what everyone already knows.

When propaganda becomes visible as propaganda, it loses most of its power. Once you can see the strings, the puppet stops being convincing.

Ingraham just made the strings visible. Not through some subtle slip, but by putting “By Winning, Democrats Are Actually Losing” on screen as a graphic. This is propaganda’s nightmare scenario: the mechanism exposed precisely when it’s most desperately needed.

Let’s break down the structure so you can recognize it when it’s less obvious:

The Core Move: Reality Inversion

When observable reality contradicts your narrative decisively, you have limited options. Denial becomes impossible when the contradiction is too visible. Acceptance destroys the narrative you need to maintain.

So you invert: acknowledge the reality while controlling what it means. Transform the evidence that contradicts your narrative into evidence that confirms it.

Ingraham’s version:

• Democrats won—can’t deny.
• But their policies will fail—contestable.
• So people will flee to red states—contestable.
• Which means Democratic victory produces Republican benefit—inversion complete.
• Therefore by winning, they’re actually losing—reality inverted.

Good propaganda makes this subtle. It spends weeks establishing premises. It lets viewers do the inversion themselves through implication.

But Ingraham had twenty-four hours. The fracture was fresh. The narrative needed immediate repair. So she just… said it. Put it on screen. Made it a graphic.

That’s not sophisticated propaganda. That’s desperate propaganda. And desperate propaganda exposes its mechanics because it doesn’t have time for subtlety.

The Terror of Being Seen

Here’s what you need to understand about what this moment means for Laura Ingraham, for Fox News, for the entire propaganda infrastructure:

Their power depends on invisibility.

Not invisibility of the network—everyone knows Fox News exists, knows it’s conservative. That’s not the invisibility that matters.

The invisibility that matters is the machinery itself. The mechanisms through which they shape perception, manufacture consensus, control interpretation. Those need to be invisible or they stop working.

When you can see someone trying to make you believe something, you become resistant to believing it. Persuasion operates through the illusion of discovery—you think you’re arriving at conclusions independently when really you’re being guided there. Once you see the guidance, the spell breaks.

Ingraham just made the guidance visible. And this is terrifying for propagandists because once people see the machinery, they start seeing it everywhere.

If you can see Ingraham inverting reality to maintain narrative, you might start asking: what else has been inverted? When they said the economy was terrible while data showed recovery—was that reality inversion too? When they said protests weren’t representative—was that the same move? When they said Trump’s felony conviction would help him—was that the same desperate gymnastics?

One visible instance threatens to illuminate the entire structure. Recognition cascades backward through everything you’ve believed. This is the propagandist’s nightmare.

But it gets worse for them. Because propaganda doesn’t just require individual belief—it requires collective suspension of disbelief. It needs to be socially reinforced. Your family believes it, your neighbors believe it, your social media feed confirms it. When everyone around you accepts the frame, questioning it feels crazy. That social reinforcement is what makes propaganda sticky.

But when lots of people simultaneously notice the emperor has no clothes, that reinforcement fractures. If you think you’re alone in seeing the absurdity, you might doubt yourself. But if you suspect lots of people are simultaneously recognizing it—if Twitter is mocking it, if even conservative commentators seem skeptical, if your Fox-watching uncle texts you “that was weird”—then the collective suspension of disbelief cracks.

That’s what propagandists fear most. Not individual disbelief—that can be isolated, dismissed. But mass simultaneous recognition that the machinery is visible, the narrative is constructed, the consensus is manufactured.

When lots of people at once see the strings, the puppet show ends.

The Prostrators and the Propagandists

Laura Ingraham trying to convince viewers that Democratic victories are actually defeats would be merely pathetic if it existed in isolation. But it doesn’t.

She’s performing this desperate reality inversion while Tim Cook presents a gold-plated tribute in the Oval Office like some feudal vassal paying homage to his lord. While Zuckerberg congratulates Trump. While Bezos killed the Post endorsement then offered “extraordinary” praise. While Marc Andreessen proclaims “morning in America”—liberation from the terrible oppression of having to pretend to care about other people at dinner parties.

The propagandists and the prostrators serve the same master: the simulation of MAGA inevitability. Ingraham maintains it through reality inversion. The tech oligarchs maintain it through strategic submission.

And both have soiled their reputations into the annals of history with the same calculation: that bending the knee is wisdom, that accommodation is strategy, that surrendering dignity is just being realistic about power.

They’re wrong. And Tuesday night proved it.

The Economic Royalists Chose This

Let’s be clear about what happened after November 2024. These weren’t small business owners protecting their livelihoods. These were some of the wealthiest, most powerful people on the planet—people with resources to resist, with platforms to speak truth, with security that ordinary people don’t have—choosing to prostrate themselves.

Tim Cook didn’t need to perform feudal tribute. Apple has more cash reserves than most countries’ GDP. Cook could have maintained dignified distance. He chose submission instead.

Bezos owns the Washington Post—a paper with “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its motto. He killed their endorsement, then offered extraordinary praise to Trump. He has wealth that makes him effectively untouchable. He chose to touch his forehead to the ground anyway.

These aren’t victims. These are people who looked at Trump’s explicit authoritarianism and decided their wealth and power would be safer if they signaled submission early.

They made a bet: MAGA represents the inevitable future, resistance is futile, accommodation is wisdom.

Tuesday night, reality called that bet. And they lost.

The Sociopaths Are Shocked

What links Ingraham’s desperate propaganda and Cook’s feudal tribute is the same fundamental miscalculation: they thought everyone would become what they are.

The propagandists thought everyone would accept obvious inversions if delivered confidently enough. The prostrators thought everyone would bend the knee once they demonstrated it was safe to do so. Both groups convinced themselves that cynicism is realism, that principles are obstacles, that most people are just waiting for permission to abandon dignity.

They were shocked to discover: no. Most people aren’t sociopaths. Most people won’t accept that winning means losing. Most people won’t prostrate themselves to authoritarians just because billionaires did it first.

The propagandists control the platforms. The prostrators control the wealth. Together they manufacture consensus, shape information flows, fund the campaigns, own the infrastructure.

And they still lost. Because manufactured consensus only works until lived experience contradicts it. Because reality has veto power. Because most people can still recognize that two plus two equals four even when Laura Ingraham explains otherwise and Tim Cook nods along.

What Tuesday Night Means for the Prostrators

The propagandists are scrambling to repair the simulation because their credibility depends on narrative maintenance. But what about the prostrators?

It means their bet is failing. The calculation that MAGA inevitability made accommodation wise—that’s looking shaky.

Because here’s the thing about authoritarian systems: they don’t reward early submission. They despise it. Trump publicly humiliated Musk despite Musk’s hundreds of millions in support. You think Tim Cook’s golden tribute bought him security? It bought him contempt—Trump’s and ours.

The prostrators thought they were being strategic. They were being cowards. And now they’re trapped. Having soiled their reputations through public submission, they can’t easily reverse course. Having signaled that they’ll bend to power, they’ve marked themselves as bendable.

And the simulation they bent to support is fracturing. Which means they prostrated themselves to a future that might not arrive. They surrendered dignity for security in an order that’s proving less inevitable than claimed.

What This Teaches Us About All Propaganda

This moment is valuable precisely because the propaganda is so naked. When you can see the machinery clearly in one instance, you can start recognizing it everywhere:

Watch for acknowledgment followed by inversion. “Yes that happened, but it actually means the opposite because…”

Notice predictions stated as certainties. “Will fail” becomes “are failures.” Grammar converts uncertainty into inevitability.

Track coherence debt. How many special exceptions does accepting this require? How much explaining away of observable reality?

Test predictions. Inversions depend on future consequences. Did those consequences happen? When they don’t, does the framework adjust or create new explanations?

Check alternative frameworks. Does this interpretation require believing this source exclusively? What would someone outside this information silo conclude?

Ask what’s being protected. Inversions happen when reality threatens something desperately needed. What narrative does this inversion protect?

These aren’t just tools for analyzing Fox News. They’re tools for analyzing all propaganda—including propaganda that aligns with your values, that comes from sources you trust, that feels like common sense.

Because left-wing propaganda exists too. Technocratic propaganda. Progressive propaganda. The structure is the same even when the content differs.

Learning to see propaganda when it’s naked—when it’s obviously desperate—teaches you to see it when it’s sophisticated.

Two Plus Two Equals Four

There are truths that survive every inversion, every sophisticated reframing, every attempt to make reality mean its opposite.

Democrats won elections in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York. That’s what winning is—getting more votes, your candidates taking office.

You can predict those victories will lead to bad governance. You can work to defeat those officials in future elections. You can argue their policies will fail.

But you cannot make victory into defeat through definitional gymnastics. You cannot invert observable reality through prediction about what it might eventually mean.

When Fox News puts “By Winning, Democrats Are Actually Losing” on screen, they’re not offering analysis. They’re attempting reality maintenance for viewers whose framework just got contradicted.

The sophistication of the attempt doesn’t make it true. The confidence with which it’s delivered doesn’t make it coherent. The fact that some people accept it doesn’t make it correspond to reality.

Two plus two equals four. Democrats winning elections means Republicans lost. And no amount of propagandistic inversion changes that, no matter how desperately the simulation needs it to.

The Wire Still Holds

The simulation fractured when Republicans lost decisively. Laura Ingraham’s attempt to repair it through naked reality inversion is evidence of fragility, not strength.

You don’t need to tell people that winning is actually losing unless losing threatens your entire framework. You don’t make the propaganda machinery visible unless you’re desperate enough that visibility is worth the risk.

The terror for propagandists isn’t that this particular inversion might fail. It’s that lots of people are simultaneously seeing the machinery. That once you see propaganda as propaganda, you start seeing it everywhere. That recognition cascades backward through everything you’ve believed.

The wire is holding. Not because Fox News isn’t powerful—they are. The inversion will work on some viewers. The simulation will partially reconstruct.

But when propaganda becomes naked, when the machinery is visible, when lots of people simultaneously notice the emperor has no clothes—that’s when resistance becomes possible. Not because you’ve won, but because you can finally see clearly what you’re fighting.

And understanding their desperation—seeing how scared they are—is strategic intelligence. They’re not operating from strength. They’re scrambling. The propagandists are deploying naked reality inversion. The prostrators are doubling down on bets that are already failing.

That’s when they’re most dangerous. Desperation produces escalation. But it’s also when they’re most vulnerable. Because every desperate move that fails to restore the simulation reveals further fragility.

May Love Carry Us Home

The cognitive technology for recognizing propaganda isn’t just intellectual—it’s grounded in love for what’s real.

Love for truth that withstands inversion. Love for your own capacity to see clearly even when powerful forces try to make you doubt what you observe. Love for people trying to maintain coherence in hostile information environments.

That love is what makes you resist when Laura Ingraham explains that winning is losing. Not because propaganda doesn’t work on you—it works on everyone sometimes. But because when it becomes visible, when you can see someone trying to make you believe the impossible, love for truth is what lets you say: no. I see what you’re doing. And I choose reality instead.

The machinery is visible. The emperor has no clothes. Lots of people are noticing simultaneously. And that recognition—that moment when propaganda reveals itself as propaganda—is where resistance begins.

Not in never being manipulated. But in seeing manipulation when it happens. Not in being immune to propaganda. But in recognizing it when the machinery becomes visible and choosing truth over the inversion.

Two plus two equals four. Winning means winning. And we can see you trying to tell us otherwise, Laura. We can see the strings. And once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

The circus continues. But this time, we’re watching the performance with clear eyes. And that clarity—that refusal to accept obvious inversion—is how the wire holds.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Tuesday, Republicans got crushed in elections across New Jersey, Virginia, and New York. Not close races. Not razor-thin margins. Massive defeats in states they’d convinced themselves were winnable after Trump’s 2024 victory.

Bret Baier—on Fox News, to Fox & Friends—had to explain to his audience how bad it was. “It’s a big loss,” he said. Not just the results, but “the spreads are surprising.” Young women “overwhelmingly” supported Democrats based on the economy and “those ICE images.” Based on how they “feel about the economy” versus “how Wall Street’s doing.”

Trump posted cryptically: “AND SO IT BEGINS.”

He’s right. Something has begun. Just not what he thinks.

The simulation is collapsing.

Not literal Matrix-style unreality. Something more precise and insidious: the manufactured consensus that authoritarianism was inevitable, that resistance was futile, that most people had become—or would become—what the sociopaths are.

After November 2024, they built an entire world out of lies. Silicon Valley CEOs who’d backed Harris immediately bent the knee. Zuckerberg congratulating Trump. Bezos killing the Post endorsement then offering “extraordinary” praise. Tim Cook presenting gold-plated tribute in the Oval Office like some feudal vassal paying homage to his lord.

My friends transformed into MAGA supporters. Not before the election—after. Weather vanes turning with the wind. People who calculated that MAGA had won the culture war and wanted to be on the winning side. They didn’t believe—they capitulated.

The triumphalists declared it complete. Musk proclaimed it “inevitable.” Bannon celebrated “full-spectrum dominance.” Andreessen announced “morning in America”—liberation from the terrible oppression of having to pretend to care about other people at dinner parties. The wealthy sociopath’s dream made manifest: a world where cruelty doesn’t even require justification anymore, where kindness itself becomes the performance and contempt becomes authenticity.

They expected universal capitulation. They thought everyone would become what they are. They were wrong.

The protests started smaller than 2016, and the triumphalists crowed about liberal demoralization. See? They said. Resistance is dead. Accommodation is wisdom. But they weren’t watching the actual trajectory. From February to April, protests grew over sixteen-fold. Tesla’s market value dropped precipitously, aided by sustained consumer boycotts. Artists refused cooperation. Museums defended autonomy. Universities resisted federal interference.

But the simulation held. The platforms they controlled kept amplifying the narrative: resistance is failing, Trump is consolidating, the fight is over. Every algorithm calibrated to make resistance seem isolated and futile, every feed curated to make you feel alone in your outrage.

Until Tuesday.

When the votes came in, Fox News had to explain to its own audience that Republicans lost. Badly. Not in spite of Trump’s power, but because of what Trump’s power is doing to people. The manufactured consensus that authoritarianism was inevitable met reality, and reality said: No.

Manufactured consensus only works until lived experience contradicts it. Tuesday, lived experience voted. That’s what collapsed the simulation.

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Look at what they’ve been building, what they’ve been selling, what they’ve been trying to make you believe.

The technocratic liberals built their simulation of competent management. “The data shows everything is fine. Trust the analysis. Wait for Republicans to overreach.” They treat democracy as an optimization problem, citizens as data points. They look at aggregate metrics—GDP growth, stock market performance—and conclude everything is working while people experience catastrophic precarity. When you say “I’m struggling,” they respond “actually the data shows recovery is strong” as if your lived experience is a statistical error requiring correction. This isn’t bad communication. This is the technocratic frame revealing itself as fundamentally broken.

The neo-reactionaries built intellectual infrastructure for natural hierarchy. Peter Thiel writing that democracy and freedom are incompatible. Curtis Yarvin publishing blueprints for monarchy. JD Vance—now Vice President—citing Andrew Jackson’s defiance of judicial review as a model, talking about going “extra-constitutional.” They’re not hiding this. They’re publishing it. They’re proud of it. They think they’re the brave truth-tellers who see through democratic delusion to the natural order of dominance.

The sociopaths convinced themselves their framework was correct. Shaun Maguire donating to Clinton in 2016 because he was “scared out of my mind about Trump,” then donating $300,000 to Trump in 2024 after his felony conviction—not because Trump changed but because Maguire decided principles were the obstacle. When Erika Kirk offered forgiveness at her husband’s memorial, Trump mocked it and the crowd erupted in delighted laughter. They were celebrating the rejection of grace itself.

After November 2024, they thought they’d proven their framework. That winning without kindness proved kindness is weakness. That seizing power without morality proved morality is performance. They built an entire simulation around that proof.

And the fascist executive deployed federal power not to govern but to dominate. ICE at the Super Bowl to intimidate Latino cultural celebration. Warrantless mass detentions in Chicago—federal agents detaining American citizens without individualized probable cause, children zip-tied together, people sorted by race. American cities described as “military training grounds.” Stephen Miller calling judicial review “insurrection.”

Their simulation said performance of dominance equals actual consolidation. That threats produce submission. That fear guarantees compliance.

Every simulation met the same reality Tuesday: it’s collapsing. Every lie met the truth. Every manufactured consensus met actual human choice. And the people who built their entire world out of those lies are about to learn what happens when reality vetoes the simulation.

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This is what should terrify them: they own Twitter, they influence Facebook, they’re capturing traditional media. They have unprecedented control over information flows. They thought this meant they controlled outcomes.

They were wrong.

Simulation only works when reality doesn’t contradict it too obviously. You can manufacture consensus that resistance is failing when resistance is invisible. You can create the appearance of overwhelming support when people can’t see evidence otherwise.

But you cannot simulate away your own groceries costing more. You cannot simulate away federal agents conducting warrantless mass detentions in your city. You cannot simulate away ICE deployed to cultural events you attend. You cannot simulate away economic precarity while billionaires build 90,000-square-foot ballrooms funded by oligarchs etching their names into the people’s house. You cannot simulate away your electricity bill going up to fund AI systems you didn’t ask for.

Reality has veto power over simulation. Eventually. Always. No matter how many platforms you own, no matter how sophisticated your algorithms, no matter how much you’ve invested in manufacturing consensus.

The oligarchs thought owning platforms meant controlling reality. They’re learning the difference. Platforms control information flow. Reality controls lived experience. And when the gap between simulated consensus and lived experience becomes too large, the simulation collapses.

This is why their project was always fragile. Not because they’re weak—they’re not. But because simulations require maintenance against reality, and reality keeps happening regardless of what oligarchs want.

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While Republicans got crushed Tuesday, something else emerged that should make every tech oligarch nervous. Eighty percent of consumers worry about data centers driving up their electricity bills, according to recent surveys.

This isn’t abstract environmental concern. This is “my power bill is going up to fund Altman’s AGI fantasy” rage waiting to happen.

Data centers now consume roughly four percent of U.S. electricity—estimates suggest this could reach six to twelve percent by 2028, according to projections from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And Sam Altman admits he doesn’t even know how much power AI will need. As he concedes, AI’s future power needs are unknowable. Yet locked-in contracts risk raising household bills today to fund bets that might never pay off. “If a very cheap form of energy comes online soon at mass scale, then a lot of people are going to be extremely burned with existing contracts they’ve signed.”

Read that again. They’re gambling with the electrical grid. They’re driving up your power bills. They’re making massive infrastructure investments. And they admit they don’t know if any of it will work. This is speculative extraction made concrete. Your electricity bill subsidizing oligarchic bets on computational supremacy.

And most people are “more concerned than excited” about AI, according to Pew surveys. Employers are wielding it to cut headcount rather than augment productivity.

Add this to federal agents terrorizing communities. Add this to grocery bills rising while Wall Street celebrates. Add this to housing costs making home ownership impossible. Add this to economic precarity while oligarchs build ballrooms with your tribute.

Popular rage at extraction is becoming politically operational. Young women voting against Republicans based on “those ICE images” and economic concerns that include energy prices. The material reality of what oligarchic rule actually means—not abstract threats to democracy but concrete increases to your power bill so Sam Altman can pursue projects he admits might not work.

The simulation required people to believe AI was serving them. Tuesday suggested they’re starting to see it’s extracting from them instead.

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Tuesday night I watched CNN analysts pearl-clutch over Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech in New York. Not divisive enough, apparently—or too divisive, depending on which pundit. They were horrified he gave Trump “the middle finger.” They wanted conciliatory messaging. They wanted him to reach across the aisle. They wanted him to moderate his tone.

Never mind that Trump and his officials have threatened to strip Mamdani of his citizenship. Never mind that Shaun Maguire called him a liar advancing an “Islamist agenda.” Never mind that Stephen Miller has called judicial review “insurrection” and that ICE has conducted warrantless mass detentions of people who look like Mamdani.

The analysts wanted conciliation. They wanted prose, not poetry. They wanted him to understand that Muslims who win elections are supposed to apologize for winning.

Here’s what Mamdani said instead:

“This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.”

And then he explained exactly what he meant. Not threats. Not violence. Policy.

“We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.”

This is what they cannot tolerate. Not rudeness. Not divisiveness. Not lack of decorum. Fighting back through democratic power used to break the concentrations that produced Trump in the first place.

The CNN analysts want him to play by rules that no longer exist. To extend courtesy to people threatening to strip his citizenship. To moderate his ambitions so he doesn’t offend sensibilities of people who think Muslims shouldn’t hold power at all. To accept that the price of access to power is agreeing not to actually use it.

But Mamdani didn’t run to access power. He ran to wield it. “To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: This city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.” Not can be yours if you’re properly deferential. Not might be yours if you moderate your expectations. Is yours. Right now. Through democratic choice exercised despite every dollar spent to prevent it.

“No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.”

That’s the line that broke their brains. Not because it’s divisive but because it names what they need unnamed. That you can traffic in Islamophobia and lose. That Muslim immigrants can not only vote but win. That working people can not only organize but govern. That the simulation claiming oligarchic rule is inevitable just collapsed in the city that produced Trump himself.

“After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”

This is what they mean when they say he’s divisive. He’s dividing power from those who’ve hoarded it. He’s dividing dignity from those who’ve denied it to others. He’s dividing the future from the past where people like him were supposed to accept subordinate status gratefully.

The analysts wanted prose. Mamdani gave them poetry and a governing agenda. They wanted moderation. He gave them rent freezes, free buses, universal child care. They wanted conciliation with people threatening his citizenship. He said: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”

The simulation required that Muslims who win elections apologize for it. That democratic socialists moderate their ambitions. That young brown men with accents know their place. That anyone threatening to actually use democratic power to break oligarchic concentrations understands the unspoken rules limiting how far you’re allowed to go.

Mamdani gave them four words instead: Turn the volume up.

This is what the collapse of the simulation looks like. Not just winning. Winning without apologizing. Winning and immediately announcing you’re going to use the power you just won. Winning and naming exactly whose power you’re going to challenge and why. Winning and refusing to pretend that the people who tried to destroy you deserve your deference now that you’ve beaten them.

The CNN analysts are terrified because they can see what comes next. If you can win in New York while being openly Muslim, openly socialist, openly aligned with working people against oligarchs—if you can win while promising to actually fight concentrated power rather than manage it—if you can win without apologizing for any of it and then immediately announce you’re turning the volume up—then the rules they’ve spent their careers defending don’t exist anymore. Then the simulation they’ve helped maintain just collapsed. Then everything they told you was impossible is happening right in front of them.

The conciliatory message they demanded? Here it is:

“Together, we’re going to freeze the rent. Together, we’re going to make buses fast and free. Together, we’re going to deliver universal child care.”

That’s the conciliation. With the people who elected him. With the working people who’ve been told power doesn’t belong in their hands.

There is no conciliation with oligarchs who funded tens of millions in attack ads. No reaching across the aisle to people who suggested he practices religious deception. No moderation of ambitions to make comfortable people feel less threatened. No apology for winning.

“The conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate. I am young. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”

This is what they cannot tolerate. Not the policies—those can be negotiated, compromised away. The refusal to apologize. The insistence that power won democratically should be used rather than hoarded politely. The clarity that you don’t defeat oligarchy through conciliatory gestures but through dismantling the conditions that produced it.

Mamdani looked at those rules and said: Turn the volume up.

That’s what Tuesday proved. That’s what happens when the simulation collapses and someone refuses to help rebuild it.

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The doomers who declared the fight over after November 2024, who treated every authoritarian move as proof of inevitable consolidation—they were unknowingly maintaining the simulation. Not through malice but through genuine despair that itself became accommodation.

When you declare “it’s 1933, consolidation is complete, resistance is futile,” you validate the authoritarian narrative. You discourage mobilization. You make the simulation self-fulfilling. You become part of the machinery of manufactured consensus, another voice telling people that fighting back is pointless.

The doomers measured the wrong thing. They saw oligarchs bending the knee and concluded everyone would bend. They saw establishment accommodation and decided resistance was dead. They saw platform control consolidating and assumed manufactured consensus would hold.

What they missed: protests growing over sixteen-fold from February to April. Tesla’s market capitalization dropping amid boycotts and other market pressures. Cultural institutions defending autonomy. Universities collectively resisting. And now, massive electoral defeats that prove the simulation was always false.

The simulation of inevitable authoritarian victory required people to believe it was inevitable. Despair maintained the simulation. Fear became the enforcement mechanism. And everyone who surrendered to that despair, everyone who counseled acceptance—they were doing the oligarchs’ work for them.

Tuesday shattered that. Tuesday proved that sustained organizing works even when every doomer said it wouldn’t. Tuesday showed that most people haven’t become sociopaths even when every cynic said they would.

The doomers were wrong. Not about the threats being real—those are real. But about resistance being futile. About accommodation being wisdom. About the fight being over.

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Tuesday validates something that should reshape how we think about politics. Defend the framework—courts, rights, process—and fight the concentrations—monopoly, captured platforms, extractive grids. That combination wins.

Not “liberal” as progressive cultural positions. Liberal as the framework that makes democratic self-governance possible: constitutional constraints, rule of law, democratic process, free expression. The institutional space where people can reason together when no one has privileged access to truth.

Not “populism” as demagoguery. Populism as fighting concentrated interests—using democratic power to break economic concentrations, returning agency to citizens, delivering material wins that make people’s lives tangibly better.

Young women voting based on “those ICE images” and economic concerns aren’t making separate calculations. They’re recognizing that federal agents terrorizing communities and economic structures serving oligarchs while abandoning workers are the same problem: concentrated power—governmental and economic—dominating everyone else.

This is what voters responded to. Not careful positioning between technocratic management and authoritarian force. Rejection of both. Rejection of the entire framework that says ordinary people need to be managed by experts or dominated by strongmen.

They’re saying: We don’t want experts telling us the economy is good when we’re struggling. We don’t want federal agents terrorizing our communities. We don’t want oligarchs rigging the system. We don’t want our power bills going up to fund speculative AI projects. We want leaders who will fight concentrated power—governmental and economic—using democratic means.

That’s not the simulation either side was selling. That’s reality breaking through. That’s the actual democratic impulse that both technocracy and authoritarianism claim is impossible, proving them both wrong simultaneously.

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Putin is paralyzed by the conservative corrosion that comes from staying in power too long. He sees the opportunity to accept Trump’s advances, partly reintegrate with the West, use that to undermine Western democracies from within. He can’t take it. Too rigid. Too defensive. The dictator who restored Russia to imperial glory can’t make the strategic move that would consolidate it because the psychology that gained him power has destroyed his capacity to use it strategically.

Trump is performing dominance rather than building institutions. Humiliating Musk publicly. Threatening Vance. Conducting arbitrary displays of power that prevent the stable hierarchies authoritarianism requires to consolidate. When millions of Americans took to the streets in “No Kings” protests, Trump posted AI memes depicting himself as king and declared they were “not representative of the people of our country.” Seven million Americans. Not representative. This is narcissistic performance mistaking mockery for power.

Musk discovered that wealth buys subordination, not partnership. The richest man on the planet reduced to rage-tweeting after Trump demonstrated he’s subject, not equal. Every other billionaire watching that humiliation and calculating: that could be me. The system I’m funding to crush others will eventually crush me too.

Tuesday added decisive evidence. They can’t maintain simulations when reality contradicts them too obviously. The triumphalists expected universal capitulation. They got massive electoral defeats. The simulation of inevitable victory met reality: it was never inevitable.

And authoritarian psychology can’t process this. They can’t accept being wrong. They can’t admit the simulation was false. They can’t recognize that most people aren’t sociopaths and won’t become sociopaths.

So they’ll escalate. Authoritarians escalate when performance fails. That isn’t consolidation; it’s a tell.

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The simulation is collapsing. They will try to restore it through force. When authoritarians discover that performance doesn’t produce submission—when oligarchs learn that owning platforms doesn’t control outcomes—when sociopaths realize most people won’t become what they are—they escalate.

More aggressive use of federal power. ICE raids will intensify. Warrantless detentions will expand. The threats to use military force against American cities will move closer to implementation. Stephen Miller calling judicial review “insurrection” will become operational policy—openly defying courts, testing how far they can go.

More sophisticated platform manipulation. The oligarchs will study what went wrong. They’ll refine the algorithms. They’ll deploy AI more aggressively. They’ll try to rebuild the simulation using every tool they control.

More explicit threats. Trump mocking protesters with AI sewage memes was performance. What comes next will be more direct. Threatening investigations of opposition. Using federal agencies against political enemies. Making the costs of resistance tangible and personal.

More oligarchic capture. Tuesday showed controlling platforms isn’t enough when people’s lived experience contradicts the simulation. So they’ll try to control more. More media. More institutions. More economic leverage. The protection racket will become explicit: capitulate or face consequences.

More desperate attempts to fragment resistance. They’ll sow division within opposition coalitions. They’ll amplify conflict between progressive and moderate Democrats. They’ll fund primary challenges against anyone who doesn’t accommodate.

This is the pattern when simulations collapse. The people invested don’t accept reality—they try to force reality to conform through escalating coercion. They double down. They raise the stakes. They try to rebuild the simulation through fear since consensus failed.

The threat is genuine. The escalation is real. The danger is existential. They have enormous resources. Real power. Actual tools of coercion.

But here’s what makes them fragile: every escalation that doesn’t produce submission reveals their weakness. Every threat that doesn’t generate compliance shows they’re not as strong as claimed. Every display of force that produces more resistance proves the simulation was always false. They’re trapped in a death spiral where force reveals fragility reveals more force, and Tuesday started that spiral in a way they can’t stop because they can’t accept that they were wrong.

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The simulation is collapsing. That’s when this gets most dangerous. They will escalate. This will get worse before it gets better. The threat is real. The stakes are existential.

But Tuesday proved the simulation was false. They’re not as strong as they claimed. Resistance is not futile. Most people haven’t become what they are.

Hold both truths. The danger is real and resistance can work. The escalation is coming and it emerges from fragility, not strength.

Keep organizing. Build alternatives. Live well so you can last. When they escalate, name it as weakness—not fate.

Sustain the organizing that’s working. This trajectory matters because it proves sustained organizing produces outcomes even when oligarchs control platforms and authoritarians control government. Don’t let the coming escalation fragment what’s working. They want resistance to collapse into reactive outrage. Maintain the discipline. Keep building power through participation.

Build resilience for the long fight because this is years, not months. You cannot sustain resistance through constant crisis response. You need grounding in what makes life worth defending—relationships, beauty, work that matters, dignity maintained under pressure. Living well is not retreat from resistance. It’s the foundation making resistance sustainable. The person who protests and organizes and fights and then comes home and loves their children well—that person can sustain this for years. The person who lets fear fragment them burns out. They want you fragmented. They want you exhausted. Living well is resistance because maintaining your humanity is refusal.

Expose the escalation as evidence of fragility. When they lash out, name it clearly: They’re escalating not because they’re winning but because Tuesday proved they’re losing. Every aggressive move, every threat—these aren’t signs of consolidation, they’re signs of fragility. Make that visible. Help people see that escalation emerges from weakness.

Make the connections explicit because your power bill going up, federal agents in your city, groceries costing more, housing unaffordable, oligarchs building ballrooms—these aren’t separate problems. They’re the same problem. Concentrated power extracting from everyone else while claiming it serves the common good. Tuesday proved voters are starting to connect these dots. Keep making the pattern visible.

Build alternatives to oligarchic infrastructure because they control the platforms but platforms aren’t reality. People are organizing in physical space. Building networks that don’t depend on billionaires’ servers. Creating economic alternatives through boycotts and mutual aid. Defending institutional autonomy. Accelerate this. Every network built outside oligarchic control is infrastructure for sustained resistance they can’t shut down.

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The simulation is collapsing. Reality is reasserting itself. And we get to choose whether to recognize that or surrender to the reconstruction of the lie.

The doomers will say Tuesday changes nothing. That one election doesn’t matter. That they’ll escalate and win anyway. They’ll maintain the simulation through pessimism the way oligarchs try to maintain it through platform control—by making you believe fighting back is pointless.

The optimists will say Tuesday proves everything is fine. That institutions are holding. That normal politics will contain threats. They’ll treat Tuesday as return to normalcy rather than breakthrough requiring sustained intensification.

Both are wrong because both refuse to see what Tuesday actually proves. The simulation of inevitable authoritarianism was false. The manufactured consensus that resistance was futile was false. Reality vetoed the simulation. Not completely. Not everywhere. Not permanently. But decisively enough to prove the simulation was always fragile, that reality always had veto power, that we always had more agency than they wanted us to believe.

But the simulation was never reality. It was manufactured consensus maintained through platform control, elite accommodation, and cultivated despair. And manufacturing consensus is easier than manufacturing reality, which means they will try to rebuild it through force.

Whether that works depends on whether enough people recognize what Tuesday proved—the simulation was always fragile, reality always had veto power, we always had more agency than they wanted us to believe.

They need you to doubt what you saw Tuesday. They need you to question whether it matters. They need you to accept that they’ll just escalate until resistance becomes impossible. They need you to believe the simulation even after reality contradicted it because if you keep believing, you make their victory inevitable through your own surrender.

That’s the choice. See what Tuesday proved or accept the lie they’ll try to rebuild.

Two plus two equals four.

There are simple truths that withstand every simulation, every manipulation, every sophisticated argument for why you should doubt what you know.

Federal agents conducting warrantless mass detentions violates the Fourth Amendment. Using ICE as cultural enforcement is authoritarian. Treating American cities as “military training grounds” is fascist rhetoric. Young women voting based on “those ICE images” are recognizing reality. Your electricity bill going up to fund speculative AI projects serves oligarchic extraction. Massive Republican defeats after Trump’s 2024 victory prove the simulation was false.

Most people still recognize these truths even when oligarchs control platforms and authoritarians control government. Tuesday proved it. The simulation collapsed when it met reality because these truths are weight-bearing. They hold. They cannot be spun away or optimized out of existence or threatened into nonexistence.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And no amount of platform control, no sophistication of manipulation, no escalation of threats can make these truths less true or make people stop recognizing them.

Tuesday proved the simulation was false. Today we choose whether to fight from that truth or surrender to the reconstruction of the lie. There is no neutrality. Your choice—made through action or inaction, through organizing or accommodating—determines whether the simulation gets rebuilt or whether reality continues to assert its veto.

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The simulation is collapsing. That’s the wire starting to fray. The manufactured consensus that authoritarianism was inevitable—that’s what’s breaking down. The triumphalist narrative that resistance was futile—that’s what Tuesday shattered.

But fraying isn’t breaking. They will try to repair the simulation through force. They will escalate to make reality match what they claimed was inevitable. They will lash out because Tuesday proved they’re not as strong as they claimed.

Whether the wire holds depends on whether we keep walking it. Consciously. Understanding what we’re doing and why. Together. This isn’t individual heroism, this is sustained collective action. With discipline. Not reactive outrage but organized power-building that compounds. With resilience. Maintaining what makes resistance sustainable. With clarity. Recognizing escalation as evidence of fragility, not strength.

The wire is holding. But only because people are choosing to walk it despite every force conspiring to make them fall. The wire holds through conscious choice to keep walking it together even when everything tells you to stop.

May love carry us home.

Not as sentiment but as practice. Not as naivety but as recognition that the only force strong enough to sustain resistance across the years this will require is love for what we’re defending. Not weakness but the disciplined refusal to become what we’re fighting.

Because the sociopaths are shocked that most people aren’t sociopaths. The simulation is collapsing because reality kept asserting itself. Tuesday proved that sustained organizing works. But the sociopaths will try to prove their simulation was correct through escalated force. They will make the costs of resistance tangible and personal. They will try to make you become what they are through fear.

Love is what prevents that transformation. Not love as feeling but love as commitment. To children who deserve a world where democracy works. To communities that deserve safety without terrorization. To dignity that belongs to everyone. To truth that matters even when platforms lie. To justice that requires fighting concentrated power. To beauty that persists. To each other—sustaining solidarity when everything conspires to fragment it.

That love is what makes resistance sustainable when fear would make it collapse. That love is what kept people organizing while the doomers counseled surrender. That love is what produced Tuesday’s results. That love is what will sustain the fight when the escalation comes and the threats become personal.

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Jefferson warned that humans accommodate tyranny. For a while it was sufferable. Federal agents in Chicago. Children zip-tied. ICE at the Super Bowl. American cities as “military training grounds.” Economic precarity while oligarchs build ballrooms. Power bills rising to fund AI speculation. Each violation normalized. Each evil deemed bearable.

Tuesday, voters said: no further. Not everywhere. Not uniformly. But in enough places, in decisive margins, to prove that the sufferable has become insufferable for enough people to start changing outcomes.

The ground approaches only if we let it. And Tuesday proved we don’t have to let it. They will escalate. They will lash out. They will try to make you afraid. But Tuesday proved what’s been evident all along: most people haven’t become sociopaths. And when reality contradicts simulation decisively enough, reality wins.

The simulation is collapsing. Hold the center. Walk the wire. Build the alternatives. Sustain the organizing. Maintain your humanity. Choose love over fear. Choose clarity over despair. Choose sustained resistance over accommodation masquerading as wisdom.

The wire still holds. Not because the forces trying to break it are weak but because enough people have chosen to walk it together. Not because victory is guaranteed but because the alternative—surrender to oligarchic rule by people who admit they’re gambling with your power bills to fund projects they admit might not work—is unthinkable.

Two plus two equals four. The simulation is collapsing. And we get to choose whether reality continues to veto manufactured consensus or whether fear rebuilds what truth tore down.

Choose reality. Choose resistance. Choose each other.

The circus continues. And this time, we’re changing the show.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Bari Weiss walked into 60 Minutes and asked the staff: “Why does the country think you’re biased?”

The question stunned them into awkward silence. And it should have—not because it caught them off guard, but because it reveals everything wrong with what passes for journalistic sophistication in our moment.

Let’s be precise about what Weiss is doing. She’s not asking whether 60 Minutes is actually biased. She’s not evaluating their coverage against standards of accuracy, fairness, or adherence to facts. She’s asking why “the country” perceives bias—which treats that perception as fact requiring accommodation regardless of whether the perception corresponds to reality.

This is false balance perfected. The sophisticated move that treats “Trump and his allies say you’re biased” as equivalent evidence to actual journalistic practice. The epistemic surrender that makes public opinion—shaped by coordinated disinformation campaigns, algorithmic manipulation, and deliberate attacks on legitimate journalism—into the arbiter of what counts as fair coverage.

When the President calls judicial review “insurrection,” when his advisers threaten to ignore court rulings, when federal agents conduct warrantless mass detentions—60 Minutes covering these facts isn’t bias. It’s journalism. And when Trump and his allies attack that coverage as partisan, the proper response isn’t “how do we address these perceptions?” It’s “we report what’s happening.”

But Weiss has built a career on reframing accommodation as courage. Her brand rests on the premise that mainstream journalism, academia, and cultural institutions have been captured by the left and need correction toward “balance.” This framework treats asymmetric reality as if it were symmetric controversy—and what the New York Times reports about her first weeks at CBS reveals how this plays out in practice.

She’s reportedly personally booking Netanyahu, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff—architects of Trump’s Middle East policy—while urging executives to identify newsroom leakers. And she’s asking a newsroom that views itself as nonpartisan to justify why coordinated attacks on them have gained traction. She’s not asking whether Netanyahu’s government has committed actions worthy of critical coverage or whether Trump’s peace plan deserves scrutiny beyond its architects’ preferred framing—she’s ensuring powerful right-wing figures get platforms while shifting the burden from those making false claims to those reporting facts.

This matters because even journalists who genuinely believe they’re defending fairness can fall into this trap. The frame is seductive: “Both sides claim bias, therefore the truth must be somewhere in the middle.” But this only works when both sides operate in good faith. When one side systematically attacks any accountability journalism as partisan while the other tries to report accurately, splitting the difference doesn’t produce balance—it produces capitulation.

The question “why does the country think you’re biased?” does something structurally insidious regardless of Weiss’s intentions. It treats coordinated attacks on legitimate journalism as evidence requiring response rather than as bad-faith manipulation requiring exposure. It makes perceived bias—manufactured through deliberate campaigns—into a problem journalism must solve by changing coverage rather than a weapon journalism must resist by maintaining standards.

The danger isn’t that journalists become propagandists overnight—it’s that they internalize propaganda’s logic while believing they’re protecting neutrality.

This is precisely how authoritarian movements capture journalism without needing to shut it down. You don’t need to close newspapers when you can convince editors that “balance” means giving equal weight to demonstrable lies and documented facts. You don’t need to jail journalists when you can make them internalize the frame that reporting what’s actually happening is “partisan” if it makes one side look bad.

The 60 Minutes staff should have answered her question directly: “The country thinks we’re biased because a coordinated disinformation infrastructure has spent decades attacking any journalism that holds Republican power accountable as ‘liberal media bias,’ and you’re now amplifying that frame by treating their attacks as legitimate concerns requiring our accommodation rather than as bad-faith manipulation requiring our resistance.”

But they sat in stunned silence instead. Because Weiss is now their boss. And her early choices clarify what she values: access to powerful right-wing newsmakers, concern about perceptions shaped by those attacking journalism, and the sophisticated frame that treats “both sides say the other is biased” as evidence requiring split-the-difference coverage.

This is how journalism dies. Not through crude censorship but through sophisticated editors who convince themselves that accommodation of authoritarian narratives is “balance,” that platforming power without sufficient scrutiny is “access,” that treating coordinated attacks as legitimate criticism is “taking concerns seriously.”

Two plus two equals four. Federal agents conducting warrantless mass detentions violates the Fourth Amendment. Stephen Miller calling judicial review “insurrection” is authoritarian rejection of constitutional governance. Covering these facts is journalism. Treating coverage of these facts as evidence of bias is surrender.

Bari Weiss is editor-in-chief of CBS News. And her first major act was asking the network’s flagship program to justify why they’re perceived as biased for doing their jobs. That tells you everything about what she’ll demand they stop doing—and why her version of “balance” is just authoritarianism with better branding.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Sequoia Capital just showed us exactly what “institutional neutrality” means—when billions are at stake.

Sumaiya Balbale—the firm’s chief operating officer, a Shake Shack board member, someone “well regarded internally and by the start-ups she worked with as an experienced operating executive”—resigned in August after complaining about partner Shaun Maguire’s Islamophobic posts. Senior partners declined to discipline him, citing free speech. Her position became untenable. She left.

Maguire stays. Because his bet on SpaceX netted Sequoia roughly $4 billion on paper—earning him “a lot of rope” at the firm.

Let’s be precise about what happened. Maguire wrote on X that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.”

This wasn’t his first offense. He’d endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party—prompting London-based partner Luciana Lixandru to publicly distance herself, writing she felt “compelled” to share that “extremism on either side” is dangerous. He’d endorsed Tommy Robinson, a convicted criminal and UK anti-immigration activist. He’d accumulated enough controversial statements that more than 1,000 founders and tech employees signed an open letter demanding discipline.

Balbale—a practicing Muslim who has spoken publicly about how her gender, ethnicity, and faith shaped her career—complained to senior partners. They told her Maguire was exercising free speech. She resigned. Balbale walked out not because she couldn’t handle internal bias, but because the firm chose not to act. That tells you everything.

The asymmetry reveals the calculation.

When your COO complains that a partner’s Islamophobia creates a hostile environment, the firm’s version of “institutional neutrality” means she leaves. When that partner’s posts cause private complaints from portfolio company executives and institutional investors, when Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds say “he is not welcome here,” when a financier calls his behavior “a humiliation”—institutional neutrality means he stays.

Because SpaceX returns are good.

This isn’t neutrality. This is a choice about whose value to the firm matters more. And Sequoia decided: $4 billion in paper gains from betting on Elon Musk outweigh retaining your chief operating officer, maintaining relationships with Middle Eastern capital, and avoiding the reputational damage of 1,000+ founders demanding accountability.

Managing partner Roelof Botha—who has described the firm’s approach as “institutional neutrality” where “staff are entitled to their own positions”—held an all-hands meeting to “keep peace internally” while “trying to limit wider fallout by not commenting publicly.” Translation: we know this is indefensible, we’re hoping it blows over, and we’re not taking action because Maguire’s returns matter more than our stated principles.

But neutrality would mean consistent standards. It would mean either everyone can post inflammatory political content without consequence, or no one can. What Sequoia actually practices is selective tolerance calibrated to financial returns and network positioning.

Maguire replied to Lixandru’s criticism of his AfD endorsement: “One of the beautiful things about Sequoia is that we’re comfortable disagreeing with each other. Personally I think it’s the secret to the firm’s historical investment success.”

That framing is instructive. “Disagreement” suggests a marketplace of ideas where different perspectives coexist productively. But when one person endorses far-right extremists and another says that’s dangerous, and the firm protects the first while losing the second—that’s not comfortable disagreement. That’s a choice about which positions are tolerable.

One Middle Eastern financier told the Financial Times: “You work for your limited partners and founders, you are entrusted with serious capital by investors. This is not good for the brand.”

Except it might be exactly the brand Sequoia is building—one aligned with what many observers see as the Musk/Thiel ecosystem where democracy is treated as failed experiment and hierarchy as inevitable solution. Losing Middle Eastern LPs becomes acceptable if you’re gaining position in networks where SpaceX access and Musk proximity matter more than sovereign wealth fund relationships.

This case is specific to Sequoia, but it suggests a broader pattern emerging across Silicon Valley venture capital—where political tolerance gets calibrated to returns, where “institutional neutrality” becomes cover for protecting positions that serve certain networks, where the choice between principle and profit consistently resolves the same way.

Sumaiya Balbale walking out the door while Shaun Maguire keeps his partnership isn’t a scandal Sequoia is managing. It’s a decision Sequoia made—about whose presence matters, whose complaints count, and which political positions are compatible with partnership.

The firm decided a Muslim COO objecting to Islamophobia was more expendable than a partner whose extremism alienates sovereign wealth funds but who made them billions betting on Elon Musk.

Sequoia didn’t remain neutral. It sided. And the side it chose is clear: profit first, principle second. Fair enough. But that’s not neutral.

It’s a choice.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Elon Musk is having a very bad week. The man who bought Twitter for $44 billion to secure unaccountable power over public discourse is discovering what unaccountable power actually looks like when wielded by someone who understands dominance better than he does.

Trump just stripped SpaceX of a government contract and handed it to Jeff Bezos. Musk’s response? Rage-tweeting at Trump officials, including the immortal question “why are you gay”—the rhetorical sophistication we’ve come to expect from the richest man-child on the planet having a public meltdown because Daddy won’t give him what he wants.

This isn’t just delicious schadenfreude, though it is that. This is the neo-reactionary project—the Silicon Valley movement to restore hierarchy and reject democratic constraints—consuming its architects in real-time. A perfect demonstration that the oligarchs funding authoritarian politics fundamentally misunderstood what they were building.

They thought they were buying hierarchy with themselves at the top. They’re discovering that authoritarian hierarchy doesn’t work that way. It requires constant demonstration of dominance through arbitrary humiliation of subordinates. There are no stable positions. No guaranteed seats at the table. No amount of money that exempts you from being the example.

Musk thought he’d bought partnership. He bought the privilege of being degraded publicly.

This is what Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin and the entire Silicon Valley neo-reactionary apparatus never quite explained to their fellow travelers: In the systems they’re building, someone has to be subordinate. The hierarchy they’re restoring doesn’t stop conveniently at their own necks. And Trump—whatever else he is—understands this instinctively. He knows that power in authoritarian systems isn’t demonstrated through competent governance or policy achievement. It’s demonstrated through the arbitrary exercise of dominance over those who thought themselves powerful.

Musk genuinely believed his wealth made him Trump’s equal. That his “genius” and his billions and his control of critical infrastructure (Twitter, SpaceX, Starlink) secured him a permanent seat at the table. He thought he was Roy Cohn but permanent. He thought “First Buddy” meant something.

He’s learning what Roy Cohn learned: You’re useful until you’re not. And when you’re not, the humiliation is public, arbitrary, and designed to demonstrate to everyone else what happens when you forget your place.

The contract going to Bezos isn’t about SpaceX’s technical capabilities or cost-effectiveness or any rational criterion. That’s the point. It’s about Trump demonstrating he can take from Musk and give to his rival for no reason except to show he can. And Musk—for all his billions, for all his companies, for all his supposed genius—can do exactly nothing except tweet impotently while the adults laugh at him.

This is the system they built. This is what they wanted—rule by the strong, unencumbered by democratic constraints, where power flows from dominance rather than from consent. They just thought they’d be the ones doing the dominating.

Here’s what makes it particularly delicious: Musk can’t even exit. All that crypto-libertarian fantasy about “exit” and seasteading and network states—it was always cope. You can’t exit power when the person wielding it controls access to the government contracts your companies depend on, the regulatory environment your businesses operate in, and the geopolitical decisions that determine whether your satellites stay in orbit.

Thiel’s dictum that “competition is for losers” works when you’re the monopolist. But Trump is the ultimate monopolist—of attention, of dominance, of the willingness to humiliate anyone anywhere for any reason. There’s no competing with that. Only submitting or being destroyed.

And Musk will submit. He’ll apologize. He’ll grovel. He’ll delete the tweets and post something obsequious about how President Trump is making brilliant decisions for America. Because the alternative is watching everything he’s built get systematically dismantled by someone who understands that in authoritarian systems, the point isn’t good governance—it’s demonstrating who’s subordinate.

The man who bought Twitter because he wanted absolute control is learning what absolute control actually means when someone else has it. The irony would be poetic if it weren’t so terrifying. Because this isn’t just about Musk’s bruised ego. This is about oligarchs discovering that the authoritarian systems they funded don’t stop at the people they don’t like. Hierarchy has teeth. And those teeth point in every direction.

Ask yourself: in the system you’re part of, are you ever really at the top—or always potentially the subordinate? The architects of neo-feudalism are learning the answer the hard way.

This is what authoritarian dominance looks like—cultivated by the powerful, weaponized by the dominant, and turned back on its architects.

Welcome to the world you built, Elon. How’s it feel?

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.