Trying to Drink from a Fire Hydrant

or Keeping up with Bad News in Broligarchy America

I usually try to write a piece weekly, but last week I simply couldn't find words. Not for lack of them, no, just the opposite. I suffered the presence of a verbal diarrhea absolutely impossible to present in a linear written fashion. And who would want to come across a written piece like that? It sounds like something that should be quarantined; it's just as nasty and unhinged as it sounds.

It struck me that this is exactly where the current administration wants our head-space to be. They want to continue with a seeming never-ending onslaught of dismal news so it's impossible to truly attack any one of the factors. They rely on that part of our brain that freezes rather than fights. The sad fact is that it's been very effective. You'd really never know a coup has taken place if you were to talk to most Americans. They are getting progressively angrier, even in red state strongholds, but you'd be hard pressed to find more than 1 out of 10 who even have an inkling that perhaps a business coup has occurred with Musk, Thiel, Yarvin and Vance at the helm.

It is heartening to see the town halls in red areas exhibit raw anger towards the feckless yes men, however. Republican politicians have brazenly appeared, only to exhibit shock that the locals are restless. The grifter politicians typically howl and leave the meetings early, lest they have to answer for their repugnant behavior. Places like Georgia, Kansas, Idaho—they have all been witness to a growing resentment in these town halls. It's quite sad that so many individuals in these areas don't really care about injustice until it hits home, but we will take what we can get.

The demonization of federal workers, the dismantling of the VA, airlines now feeling like a scary way to travel, the shutting down of agricultural subsidy and grants.…..it's all rolling downhill with accumulating speed. Even the most obtuse are starting to realize they are going to be caught in that snowball. It's just beginning.

The dismantling of Medicaid will be a real eye opener for the numerous families who have elderly family members in long term care. A majority of this care in America is paid for by Medicaid and if the funding is shut down, untold numbers of family members will likely be booted out of the nursing home. Now the techno-feudalists will be fine with this, of course. They probably think the wimmin-folk can simply stay home and take on the care of these individuals, but of course our economy requires pretty much everyone to work at least one full-time job. I'm not sure who is supposed to take care of elderly family members with dementia in the home, but perhaps this is all just part of the broader eugenics movement that this current crop of oligarchs seems to be so enchanted with. These are the situations that will wake even your most hardcore rural Trump backer, because you see, this will actually affect them. The trick will be keeping these angry people from lashing out at all the wrong people.

Other notable situations that will finally fall on the radar of the traditional “conservatives” in rural areas will be the shock they experience when they try to do a vacation in a National Park this year. Most likely they won't even be able to get in due to the mass firings of the workers tasked with keeping these natural wonders protected and open for visitors. Of course, the eventual plan will be reopening these places as Grand Canyon Trump Plaza and the cost will be prohibitively large to gain entry. That seems to be the deal—the broligarchs take over and Trump is their leader in name only—but he gets to profit wildly off the federal copper stripping. How about a nice escalator down to the bottom of the canyon with a golf course irrigated by the Colorado? If you think I'm joking, I most certainly am not. Look at the deranged AI Trump put out in regard to his Gaza plans. It's ludicrous and hideous, and we unfortunately live in a time when both of those characteristics are winning out.

In much the same manner of deconstruction and privatization, they want to make education more expensive and limited for the working class. The public schools are to be defunded and replaced with reactionary Evangelical madrassas style learning. All this will do is limit our pool of educated individuals. The next great thinker will not obtain the education needed to fulfill their potential. In effect they are making sure their wealthy class is the only one that will be in leadership positions--ever. This creates a class stratification that will only enhance the undeserving nepo-babies. Every accusation is a confession and their railing about DEI is beyond ironic when we see how they are trying to unfairly select only for rich white men. This is them selecting for hemophilia in the Russian Court with these techniques.

I have been considering what one can do in this environment. We all have only so many hours of the day, what with trying to simply exist and all. That said, I do think we can look to history for some ideas on how to proceed. The great anarchist thinkers of the past have given us clear indications what it means to be human and what inherent rights we all need to think of as our baselines. Of course, the word anarchy is pretty much a non-starter to use with the “normies”. We need to pull in vast numbers of individuals who don't have the ability to parse out the semantics of it all. I think we need to start referring to the basic tenet of mutual aid as the topic and let the word anarchy go. They were able to subvert it and 95% of the population thinks it means trashing things with aggressive abandon. We want the opposite of that, clearly. We need to be as clear eyed as they are in terms of getting what we want and how to go about it.

If we are to think in terms of mutual aid, there are definitely current local groups practicing these behaviors under that term, but they are overwhelmingly leftist college town creations (not that there is anything wrong with that). In this world of disintegrating federal power, it will come down to locals to take care of each other and to build something of worth from the ground up on a much larger scale, however. “Mutual aid” is a great term to even bring in the conservatives. I live in a red state and they are idiotically obsessed with someone getting something for nothing. This is quite ironic because rural areas are typically over-represented in their need for programs like Medicaid that keep their critical access facilities open, but they simply don't get it. They are all brave yeoman farmers, not taking in any assistance from others (except for all those programs that do keep them afloat). But that said, the concept of mutual assistance is valid, and they will understand it.

I think the Democrats need to be gone of course, they are simply time and money wasters, but something like a Mutual Aid party might be an excellent replacement. Not necessarily to run for office in likely hacked elections, but to make life better on the ground locally for citizens. Unified groups with similar goals....... obviously, again—these ideas are nothing new, but expanding them into population groups who have previously identified as Republican or Democrat certainly is a new direction.

This is just a seed, and we all need to begin to think out what we can do locally to enact these needed changes and to simply help one another during the current very planned out dark times. If we all keep trying to drink in the news from that fire hydrant and slap aimlessly at the terrible policies, we won't accomplish much of anything, and that is by design. Yes, we can keep fighting them, but the major goal should be working out how we can survive locally. For this reason, it's going to be up to us to bring the concept of mutual aid to a wider audience and to flesh out what this will look like going forward.