This is the most consequential thing I have ever written, and so the audio is unpaywalled today
The year is 2019. You wake up, stretch, brush your teeth. Go into the kitchen, pour yourself some cereal, check the news, and see….this:
This can’t be real, you think, but you click through anyway. You learn that the city of Chicago, Illinois, is “brace[d] for a possible military deployment” — what?! — and that ICE agents had conducted a “night raid” on an apartment complex in South Chicago. They’ve arrested 30 to 40 people — wait, 30 to 40? They won’t even tell us how many? They won’t even tell us their names?!
Your cereal sits soggy and forgotten as you learn that ICE had no specific warrants, that they simply raided the entire building, zip-tied its occupants, and ran their information to see if any warrants existed.
Neighbors like Eboni Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs.
“They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,” Watson said. “That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’”
You feel sick to your stomach. What kind of twisted madman would hack ABC news and post something this awful? Who would even imagine this kind of story, never mind go to the trouble of writing it up like a news article? Just some 4Chan weirdo, you tell yourself as you open your New York Times app:
Hundreds?! What the fuck?
You click through and learn that Trump has apparently been threatening to invade Chicago for over a month. Someting about out-of-control crime that doesn’t at all match the picture accompanying the article: federal agents in body armor walking down a sunny, peaceful street a few blocks away from the Magnificent Mile. Your mouth falls open as you read:
The Border Patrol official said that snipers rapelled down from helicopters on top of the apartment complex, as a precaution from potential violence.”
You switch over to your message app and text your cousin, the one who enlisted last year. “Hey, what’s the name of that thing you do in the 101st Airborne Division?” Three dots appear, and then: “You mean the thing where we drop out of helicopters? Air Assault. Why?”
You copy and paste the phrase into Google. “As an air assault-focused unit, the [101st Airborne] division must be ready at a moment’s notice to plan, coordinate, and execute brigade-size air assault operations capable of seizing key terrain in support of operational objectives,” you read. There’s a quote from some general: “Our mission is to provide highly trained, disciplined and fit air assault forces…capable of discriminate, agile and adaptive operations to engage enemy force or to seize and hold key terrain.”
That’s a military tactic. Used in Chicago.
It seems unlikely that someone has hacked both ABC and the New York Times, but you decide to check the local Chicago news just to be sure. You open your browser, search for the Chicago Sun-Times, and see:
Your hands are shaking as you text your cousin back. “Are…we in the middle of a civil war?”
If this sounds exaggerated or absurd to you here and now, in 2025, you’re right, but not in the direction you might think. None of these articles actually made it onto the front page of any of these papers. The New York Times article fell off their home page completely by noon. We are used to these things by now — so used to them that we can’t see what anyone from 2019 could tell you immediately:
We are no longer on the path to civil war. That war has already begun.
Yesterday, I wrote about some of the things Trump said to America’s highest-ranking military officers on Tuesday. How he plans to use our cities as a training ground for our armed forces, how he intends to invade us, one city at a time, until all unrest is crushed. I wrote about ICE’s escalating abductions and brutality without due process or oversight or limits of any kind, all across this nation, every day.
I wrote about NSPM-7, which commands America’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to treat mainstream progressive beliefs as “indica of violence” — things like “anti-Americanism” and “extremism on gender.” This memorandum explicitly directs these agencies to target people and organizations who espouse such beliefs, even if they have committed no crime — all while the Trump administration lays rhetorical ground for declaring the Democratic party a terrorist organization.
Thanks to the government shutdown, only two branches of government remain functional — the executive branch and the judiciary. Trump made no effort to keep the government open; in fact, he did everything he could to ensure the budget measure failed. The traditional negotiations and frenetic rounds of last-minute voting were completely absent this time, save for a single eleventh-hour meeting between Trump and the two soggy rolls of paper towels that lead the Senate and House minorities. The President did not negotiate or take the discussion seriously; he instead offered Schumer and Jeffries Trump 2028 hats. A few hours later, he posted a deepfake on Truth Social that featured Schumer and a mustachioed, sombrero-wearing Jeffries addressing voters while the Mexican Hat Dance plays in the background.
“We h ave no voters left because of our woke trans bullshit. Not even Black people want to vote for us anymore. Even Latinos hate us. So we need new voters. And if we give all these illegal aliens free healthcare, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us. They can’t even speak English, so they won’t realize we’re just a bunch of woke pieces of shit, you know?”
-Fake Chuck Schumer
The next day, Trump Truthed a clip of Hakeem Jeffries calling the original video disgusting and racist, then used AI to restore the sombrero, insert a Trump mariachi band into the background, and play the Mexican Hat Dance again. I don’t even know what to say about this except that no one is ever going to understand this era of history, not even the people who lived through it.
These are not videos you post if you’re trying to avert a shutdown. These are the videos you post if you’re trying to guarantee one. For weeks now, when asked about the shutdown, Trump has responded that it’s going to be the Democrats’ fault when it happens — no Art of the Deal rhetoric, just groundwork for laying blame.
And the Trump administration was ready as soon as the shutdown hit. I received an email from the VA explaining how the shutdown impacts my healthcare. “Unfortunately, Democrats are blocking this Continuing Resolution in the U.S. Senate due to unrelated policy demands,” it said — which is relatively tame compared to what some other agencies are doing:
“It’s like a Choose Your Own Hatch Act Violation,” WUSA9 investigative reporter Jordan Fischer wrote when he posted these screenshots. The Hatch Act is a law passed in 1939 that prohibits the civil service from doing…well...exactly this.
But laws don’t really matter anymore.
My friends, there is no ambiguity here. No plausible deniability as far as where we stand. Soldiers in our streets, policies that link dissent to terrorism, the dismemberment of our legal system and our constitutional democratic republic: The Executive Branch has declared war on the American people. Which means we’re now at war, whether we want to be or not.
The only choice that remains to us, to paraphrase Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, is whether or not we fight back. And we must fight back — now, immediately, before these stories cease to make the headlines at all.
I am not calling for political violence or armed resistance. Blue cities have a far more powerful weapon in their arsenal than any martial weapon: we have money. Not just some money, or a lot of money, but damn near all the money.
In 2024, 90 percent of America’s $29.3 trillion GDP came from urban areas. Over $2.3 trillion of that money came directly from New York City alone — nearly eight percent, all by itself. Our ports provide a gateway into the world economy, imports and exports alike. We hear a lot about how America’s farmers keep the cities fed, and a lot less about how the taxes paid on that 90 percent share of GDP flow from our blue cities into their red, red countryside
Russ Vought plans to withhold $18 billion of NYC’s federal infrastructure funding because he doesn’t want it used for “unconstitutional DEI principles.” Very cool: have we considered withholding our $320 billion dollars of annual federal tax revenue? The Trump administration doesn’t want to fund our infrastructure? Fntastic: let’s stop allowing them to use that infrastructure, deprive them of our ports and our rail lines. LA, Chicago, Portland and every other blue city can and should do the same, whether Trump has gotten to them yet or not.
I could not be more serious. There is no pathway back to normal, solid ground where norms and laws have meaning. An administration that executes Air Assault operations in downtown Chicago and officially declares that progressive views on immigration, race, gender, and sexuality “foment political violence” is not going to respect the midterm results. I have tried to be gentle these last few months but at this point I’m going to need you to open your fucking eyes and see the world around you. Nine months is too long to be stuck in the denial stage.
Our only three options are violence, acquiescence, or economic sanctions. I don’t want violence, and acquiescence is out of the question. So let’s kick them where it hurts: right in the economy.
The logistics of economic defiance are formidable. Federal tax revenue goes directly to the federal government; it does not pass through the hands of the state. Our governors and legislative bodies will therefore have to get creative and put in the hard work necessary to either intercept federal taxes or nullify them. They will have to figure out how best to block federal use of our ports while still using them to supply our cities with necessities. But federal laws no longer apply to anyone, apparently, and I believe we can find a way. Most importantly, we can do these things without help or approval from the national Democratic party, which is good, because those chucklefucks are worse than useless.
Trump won’t take this kind of rebellion lying down. He may try to starve us out (which we would need to prepare for) or send active duty military into our streets to force our compliance at gunpoint. These actions would send us spiraling into an economic crisis that would make the Great Depression look like a market correction. It’s a nightmare scenario that I would prefer to avoid, but again: we are already at war, whether we want to be or not. Winning a war involves suffering and destruction: preferably the enemy’s but inevitably your own. There is no other way to win.
We cannot allow ourselves to grow silent and scared, heads bowed and eyes forward, inured to the pain and suffering of those around us. We cannot allow ourselves to become accustomed to night raids and terror campaigns and people disappearing into the Florida swamp like those 1800 human beings who simply vanished after Alligator Alcatraz shut down — another story that barely broke the headlines and vanished almost immediately.
It’s so easy to forget. We have already changed so much since 2019, all of us. We have already lost something we’ll never get back, not all the way — it will be up to our children and our children’s children to fully reclaim it. ICE’s military raid on a Chicago apartment building barely cracked the news yesterday. George Floyd’s murder, which galvanized this nation five short years ago, wouldn’t stand a chance.
We are not just fighting for our neighbors. We are not fighting for abstract concepts of justice or freedom, or even for our lives. We are fighting for our selves, for the sanctity of our own souls. I will not become a dead-eyed corpse shambling through the wreckage of America. No sacrifice is too great. No price is too high.
America’s founders came to the same conclusion 249 years ago. Flawed as they were, they refused to bow their heads or bend the knee. We have a saying from our revolutionary past that encapsulates this sentiment, though two and a half centuries of causal use have trivialized and reduced its meaning. It was the final line of a speech, and that speech is as true today as it was when first spoken in the Virginia capital.
Let us not, I beseech you sir, deceive ourselves. We have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded…
…There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free-- if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending--if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained--we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us!
They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot?…
It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace-- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me: Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death!
I saw the future when I was watching everything unfolding in Portland. We’re here. A general strike is desperately needed.
2019 is the year I left the U.S. for Sweden, because I thought things were going the wrong way. What’s actually happened is so much worse than what I foresaw, and so much faster.