Is MAGA a third-world political cult?

[dorankj]

Don't congratulate yourself, it's AI just with your fever dream prompting. I find it poor writing and completely weak premise, just like your COVID info or anything else you cling to.

[mister_coffee]

For someone who hates my writing so much Ken sure is spending a lot of time and effort following it. LOLz.

[dorankj]

If this passes at good writing AI has a long way to go! (And the premises are a utter joke made by a obvious mor*n)

[mister_coffee]

## Act III: Gavin Newsom

By late spring of 2027, things were rough in California. Another wave of large wildfires had burnt through the San Jacinto mountains east of Los Angeles, causing a great deal of property damage but fortunately few fatalities. Federal firefighting operations at this point were largely nonexistent and what did exist wasn’t very functional so the entire effort landed on Cal Fire and local fire departments. Which mostly managed to do okay.

In May of 2027 California had been in a continuous state of emergency for almost two years. It wasn’t the only state with that distinction. That month Governor Newsom asked the federal government for disaster assistance. Their reply was that he had been “very unfair” to Donald Trump and that until he apologized there wouldn’t be any help. And there probably wouldn’t be any help then.

So he was left with very little choice.

On June 19th, 2027 Governor Newsom announced a new package of emergency measures:

1. Temporary suspension of the federal tariffs for goods destined for California.
2. Temporary impoundment of federal withholding tax from employers in California. To be repaid when the federal government freed up emergency aid for the state.
3. Federal personnel, in particular customs officers and other federal law enforcement officers, would be paid out of the impounded tax revenues. Other federal employees might also be paid out of those funds in time.

These measures by themselves were clearly unconstitutional, and Newsom acknowledged that. He also said that the constitution was not a suicide pact and these were necessary emergency measures to protect public order and safety in an extraordinary situation.

These measures were very popular in California and people seemed hopeful for the first time in a very long time. At the same time a flurry of lawsuits attempted to stop what the state government was trying to do. A few managed to enact preliminary injunctions that Newsom promptly ignored.

In the following weeks the states of Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii joined with California enacting similar measures. They also formed a “Pacific States Compact” to cooperate with each other.

In July, three hundred FBI officers and US Marshals flew into Sacramento to arrest Newsom. Ten thousand people formed a human shield around the governor’s mansion. The FBI agents and Marshals left empty handed. By this point nearly all federal employees in California (and Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii) were being paid by the respective states. Some of them had not been paid in months before the states took over their salaries.

It was becoming increasingly unclear who exactly they worked for.

The economic effects in the Pacific States were immediate and dramatic. Businesses reopened and went on a hiring spree. Goods that had not been available for years were suddenly on store shelves, if not in large quantities at least they were there.

At this point Newsom was easily the most popular politician in the country.

There were attempts at negotiations. A delegation from the four Pacific States was promptly arrested for treason when they arrived in Washington DC. Later negotiations were made by conference call.

After one such call, the White House claimed that Newsom and Ferguson (WA governor) were “clearly intoxicated” during the call and that all four of the governors were out of their minds.

The California State Government promptly replied by releasing the unredacted audio of the entire conference call. In that call a tired-sounding Trump tried to cajole and threaten that Pacific States, then just complained they were being so very unfair to him. The President sounded weak and out of it. All four governors sounded like they were stone cold sober.

The White House released a blistering response simultaneously claiming the entire audio was fake and that the governors had acted in bad faith by releasing the contents of a confidential negotiation. Anonymous sources at the White House confirmed that the audio recordings were accurate.

In a Truth Social post at 3:30am, Trump announced a full trade embargo against California “effective immediately”.

That next day Gavin Newsom announced the opening of free trade negotiations with Canada and Mexico. In the following days trade delegations from the Pacific States would visit Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Australia.

[dorankj]

Or you could read Ayn Rand. "One Second After" was pretty good.

[PAL]

And how things might go in the future is to take a good look at how life might be. To be prepared, if one can in any number of scenarios.
I know, money is not the end all.

[mister_coffee]

## Act II: A Polar Vortex and a Government Agency Nobody has ever heard of

The Office of Critical Infrastructure Monitoring was a small organization within the Department of Commerce. Very few people had ever heard of it and even fewer had a clue what it actually did. It was formed after 9/11 in an effort to have tools in place to look for attacks on critical infrastructure. After the power outages of August 2003 the Office was tasked with providing monitoring software and a web site to monitor the health of the power grid.

That software was produced on time and under budget in March of 2005 and went live after a couple of months of testing. This was a remarkably successful, if small, government project at a time when most people were convinced the federal government couldn’t add two numbers together.

OCIM and its tiny staff (never more than about thirty people) kept that product and several other tools available with quiet and economy for many years. The power grid monitoring software was so good that most grid operators used its data as part of their day-to-day operations to keep their grids balanced and the electricity on.

In April of 2025 our friend Prince Hairy landed at the Department of Commerce and he immediately set his eyes on OCIM. He laid off all but three of the staff, replacing the rest with a couple of contract workers. He also pulled up Chat-GPT and made a few modifications to the running software. He pushed those untested, unreviewed changes onto the production systems then promptly went back to Fremont and his old job at Tesla.

On January 11th, 2027 an intense Polar Vortex storm settled over the upper midwest. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana were the hardest hit, with the temperatures staying below 0F for several days and not rising above freezing for almost ten days.

At the same time, the power grid monitoring software at OCIM started to gradually fail. As of the writing of this history we still don’t know exactly why it failed. It is theorized that parts of the system modified by Chat-GPT and Prince Hairy never considered how the grids might react when encountering extremely cold temperatures. Thus contradictory information was sent out to other power grids about what was going on. Then the respective power grids attempted to balance the electrical load with bad information. This led to a cascade of power outages and catastrophic equipment failures across most of the United States.

In the next twelve hours, nearly all of the power grids in the lower 48 failed. Most of them only were out for a few hours. Some places were out for longer.

Texas was a weird special case. For historical reasons, most of the Texas power grid wasn’t connected to the power grids in the rest of the United States. But it was still connected enough. Power stayed on in Dallas for almost a full day before a cascading series of power failures raced across Texas. In some remote parts of Texas it took almost two weeks for power to be restored.

In the upper midwest, in the grip of the strongest Polar Vortex in decades, the power was often completely out for ten days.

Almost a million people froze to death in their own homes. Communications were completely out to large parts of each affected state. In the aftermath, millions of homes were rendered uninhabitable due to damage from frozen pipes and flooding when the freeze ended.

The insurance losses alone were estimated at $500 billion.

Several large cities, including Chicago and Milwaukee, had to be partially evacuated until power and other utilities could be fully restored. All told in late January over ten million Americans were displaced. Canada even offered to help, but the Administration either didn’t care or wasn’t interested so refused the offers of assistance.

All of the hard-hit states were screaming for federal assistance. Very little came and what came was given out grudgingly. Blue states and states with Democratic governors got no assistance at all.

[mister_coffee]

Well, if you don't like it I don't see anyone holding a gun to your head forcing you to read it.

For me, writing it all down makes it easier to explore ideas about how things might go in the near future. Honestly that is more what this is about for me than making any money.

[dorankj]

It looks like it's AIs book, he's just giving it his conspiracy theory start.

[PAL]

This is a book of fiction. He's trying to make a buck, that's all.

[dorankj]

Now future horribles are what you peddle? And you say others further conspiracy theories and are crazy?!

[mister_coffee]

## Intermezzio: Meanwhile, at the Pentagon

After the November 2026 riots, the Pentagon was at a crossroads. There was widespread disgust and no small amount of shame at the role the Army had played in the riots. In some cases it was felt that there needed to be prosecutions for some of the atrocities that had been committed, often on live video, in places like Manhattan and Atlanta.

The Administration was adamantly opposed to any such prosecutions and shut the idea down, hard. Which only made the situation within the military worse. The military wasn’t quite in a state of mutiny but they weren’t very interested in following illegal or insane orders, either.

Sometime in late November or early December the US Northern Command put into effect what became known as “case Manchuria”. This was a plan to render the US nuclear arsenal safe and unusable in the event that the President had taken leave of his senses or was under the control of a foreign power. So very quietly and with little fanfare the US military unilaterally disabled their most powerful weapons.

There also were the ongoing and gradually deteriorating issues with federal payments. Military payrolls were often affected with corresponding impacts on morale. The USS *Ronald Reagan* had to cut short a deployment after a near-mutiny in the engineering department. The investigations afterwards found that most of the sailors had not been paid for three months.

During the November Riots, there were a handful of alarming reports about drone attacks against police or military units. These attacks hadn’t produced many casualties and were largely unnoticed by the news media. But nobody had a clear idea of who was behind these attacks or where they were getting the drones. Law enforcement officers in particular were very frightened of these drones and had very little idea of how to deal with the problem, to the point that in some cities police officers refused to go out on patrol for fear of drone attacks. Both HSI, FBI, and the DIA were trying to figure out what was going on here, but the daily chaos and repeated calls for more warm bodies for riot suppression got in the way of developing any intelligence on what was actually going on.

[mister_coffee]

IF a book comes out I'd be glad to give you a signed copy.

Right now this is just some stuff I have been playing with for a few months, primarily as an outlet for my own dark thoughts.

[PAL]

When is your book coming out and can I get a signed copy?

[mister_coffee]

## Intermezzio: Prince Hairy and Chat-GPT

“Prince Hairy” was an interesting and in many ways larger-than-life character. At 25 years old, the former Tesla Engineer was part of Elon Musk’s DOGE effort. He first landed at Treasury where he and others worked “modernizing” the ancient and arcane Federal Payments System.

One of the “cost saving” measures he introduced was to use an online monitoring service instead of having staff do the monitoring. This let him eliminate three full-time positions and replace them with an on-call consultant.

When interviewed from federal prison later on, Prince Hairy couldn’t explain why he made the changes to the payments system that he did. Or why he thought it was a good idea to let Chat-GPT-4 assist him in making those changes. But that is exactly what he did. And then he pushed the untested and unreviewed changes made by an AI to the production system and moved on to do more work at the Department of Commerce. But that is another story.

Things seemed fine, at first. In one remarkable irony to this whole story, one of the first federal payments that the system erroneously rejected was one for the online monitoring service, which immediately canceled the service. So there was no one monitoring the slow deterioration of federal payments and it took several months before anyone realized that anything was wrong.

At first, it seemed like a minor problem. Seemingly at random payments would be rejected. A benefit check, a federal worker’s pay, payment for a contractor. Someone would complain and the payment would be re-ran and it would be fine.

Slowly, over time, the problems became more frequent. What once had been a handful of rejected payments per day had snowballed into hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands.

But Prince Hairy wasn’t done and would soon strike again.

[PAL]

Now I am wondering what they were about to find out.
It's kill all of the sparrows, because they were eating the grains. So all the sparrows were eliminated. But guess what else likes the grain. Locusts. And guess what eats the locusts-sparrows.
China shot themselves in the foot on that one. This is a true story.

[mister_coffee]

Fortress America, or another Hermit Kingdom?

By September 2026, the repeated trade wars and "liberation days" had clearly taken their toll. Trade with the United States, except for a handful of tiny countries, had been reduced to a trickle. Foreign investors had decided this new United States was a bad investment risk, and what had been a quiet and orderly move to reduce exposure turned into a panicky rush for the exits by summer of 2026. Financial markets predictably collapsed.

Due to the shutdown in trade, millions of Americans were newly unemployed. At the same time, many goods and products Americans depended upon for everyday life were either not available at all or were ruinously expensive. A used HP laptop that might have cost $500 new in 2024 could be sold for nearly ten times that amount. When it was even available, coffee beans were over $100 per pound. The Mexican cartels were now smuggling most of the coffee Americans could still get into the United States. Things like avocados and winter strawberries were just not available at all.

The Administration's public responses to this were mostly exhortations to "toughen up" and greasy reassurances that the hard times were only temporary. A few times when it looked like public discontent was getting out of hand they inconsistently either attempted to buy people off or cracked down brutally.

All it was going to take was one spark and the whole thing was going to blow up.

On October 5th, 2026 a spark finally ignited that firestorm. In Sparks, Nevada, 27 year old Darren Hines was shot by local police after shoplifting two boxes of cereal and a bag of oranges. He, his wife, and their two children had been living in their car since Darren and his wife had lost their jobs in April. The following day over 10_000 people were protesting in nearby Reno. A boycott of several businesses and a general strike followed. By the end of the week there were related protests in cities all over the country.

Several other similar and ugly incidents happened in the following days. These triggered even more protests. While most of the protests were peaceful, in some cities the protests turned ugly and violent with extensive loss of life and destruction of property.

The administration was caught flat-footed by this turn of events. Contradictory instructions and guidance was handed out to federal law enforcement ranging from "it is a local issue, stay out of it" to "hit back hard and fast at rioters" with predictable results: more chaos. There were multiple bloody and confusing incidents all through October. Though with 20/20 hindsight it was just foreshadowing the horror to come. Some states called up their national guard, which became a very important point later on.

On November 3rd, 2026 President Trump made an announcement both on Truth Social and in a brief video message. In the announcement he declared a "state of national emergency", suspended the elections on that very day, ordered "rioters and insurrectionists" to disperse, called up the national guard, and ominously warned of "retaliation" if the riots continued. This order predictably created more chaos. The polls were already opened and people were already voting, so the elections weren't really ever suspended. But in many parts of the United States we still do not know the results of the 2026 election. The protests continued and in some areas it seemed like even more people showed up. The National Guard call-up was a mess. Due to an obscure provision in the law most state national guards can only be called up once, so the federal call-up was moot in many states. California and New York both had already called up their national guard.

By this time nearly every city with a population of 100_000 or more in the United States was facing nearly continuous protests. Some states and quite a few cities had reached a kind of uneasy truce with the protestors. Those areas had relatively little unrest but they were few and far between.

Two weeks after the announcement, the Administration struck back. Or tried to. Their plans had assumed that all of the National Guard would be available but that was obviously not the case. In Los Angeles federal law enforcement and elements of the Army were forced to stand down in the presence of over two million people, which outnumbered the Army and law enforcement by a factor of almost 100.

In New York it didn't go quite as well. Elements of the 10th Mountain Division and various federal law enforcement agencies, backed by the NYPD, were overwhelmed by over a million protestors in what turned into a bloody riot in midtown Manhattan. Several thousand US troops and law enforcement were casualties, and civilian casualties were over 100_000. The surviving military and law enforcement elements were forced to withdraw from New York City to New Jersey.

In other parts of the country the results were often less catastrophic. Federal forces were able to, barely, restore order in Washington DC, Knoxville, and Atlanta. With considerable destruction of property and loss of life.

We still don't have complete figures (they are still finding bodies in Atlanta) but the best estimates is the November crackdown cost the lives of over 10_000 servicemen and law enforcement officers and over 250_000 civilians. More soldiers lost their lives in November 2026 than had in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined.

As 2026 drew to a close in the smoldering cities of this new America, an uneasy, frightened, and exhausted nation asked itself, "what else can possibly go wrong?"

They were about to find out.

[mister_coffee]

This article articulates well a lot of things I've been seeing and thinking:

https://drewpavlou.substack.com/p/maga- ... hird-world

Honestly, the right way to think about MAGA is through the lens of Maoism and other Third Worldist political movements and personality cults. It uniquely draws upon the dumbest, shittiest and most repulsive parts of each: Peron’s economic illiteracy; Mao’s ideological wars on reality; Juche’s exaltation of economic pain and hardship in service of national self-reliance; Idi Amin’s ethnic expulsions of minority groups.

I believe that the central motivating force behind the movement is a rejection of the Enlightenment and liberal modernity. In place of reason it exalts superstition, magical thinking and primitive suspicion of anything beyond direct experience. It is the ideology of the medieval peasant, the goat herder, the cab driver who blames all world problems on the Jews. Its motivating essence is simple: ‘‘Burn anything I can’t understand.’’