Gaslit by reality
By 
Things are feeling very dark this morning in vibeland, so you’re going to join me here.
(1) The FBI seizing voting machines from 2020 in Fulton County, Georgia, is a massive red flag in re the midterms. This is a practically open admission on the part of the Trump regime that it’s going to criminalize attempting to remove it from office via elections. The Savvy response to this is that oh it’s just Trump being Trump, with his obsession that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The please get your head out of your ass response is, everything that Trump has done since January 6, 2021, when he tried to overthrown the government, has signaled in the clearest possible way that he’s not going to be OK with losing any more elections.
(2) The Gauleiter of Oxyland, J.D. Vance, has ordered ICE to make Springfield, Ohio, Haitian-free.
(3) Trump’s perspective on his ongoing shredding of the Constitution and the US Code in order to make himself a Putin-style pluto-autocrat — this is a precise description of what’s going on this country at this moment — is that he has concluded that nobody is going to stop him from doing it, so why wouldn’t he do it?
If it was not apparent by now, President Trump made it clear in his interview with The New York Times on Wednesday that it did not bother him if his family’s global moneymaking spree this past year raised concerns about whether his financial interests were influencing his administration’s official actions.
He said his family had restrained its international business activity during his first term, specifically to allay such worries, and got nothing but criticism.
“I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it,” he said. “I didn’t have to do that. And it’s really unfair to them.”
He added, “I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”
This is in reference to his looting of the nation for his personal enrichment, but it also describes his attitude toward things like the 100+ federal court orders that DHS has violated in Minnesota in the last month.
“Nobody cares” means “nobody is stopping me,” and in fact no one is stopping him, because what’s necessary to stop him is not something that the political opposition — which makes up, either actively or passively, a large majority of that part of the nation that is insufficiently narcotized to still have an opinion on the matter — is still unwilling to do.
Many people in the Schumer thread below are still very clearly in the normative state mind frame, where it makes sense to proceed as if politics as usual — deals, compromises, legislation etc. — provide a path out of this dark wood. I find it difficult to imagine that, given the trajectory of things, which are hurtling toward the imposition of the prerogative state,* that this could be true, but like apparently everyone else I’m powerless to do anything at the moment but watch, or I suppose blog, which is a kind of collective watching and witnessing, which is better than nothing.
Related note: Claims that a politician is a secret agent of the Israeli government, because that politician is Jewish and supports the state of Israel, aren’t acceptable here.
*See E. Fraenkel, The Dual State, pp. xiii, 3, 71 (1941) (describing theway in which the creation of a “Prerogative State” where the Executive“exercises unlimited arbitrariness . . . unchecked by any legal guarantees” is incompatible with the rule of law).
Footnote to Jackson dissent in June, 2025 case.