Are we facing a looming Night of Long Knives? And silly oligarchist would-be 'kings.'

Things are spinning fast and anyone with sense is justifiably worried about War Secretary Pete "DF" Hegseth's demand that 800 top generals and admirals drop every other duty, in order to fly - expensively - to Quantico, congregating in a single place for an unprecedented 'meeting.'

I'll weigh in about that below... along with some advice for you in such times.... plus maybe half a dozen terms that all of you ought to Google. Tonight. But first...

Ronan Farrow dissects the farthest right groups seeking to bring down every aspect of the nation we've known. The one that I've dealt with for over a decade is the most 'intellectual' - the circle jerk of chain-masturbatory neo-monarchists whose current, disposable guru - Mencius Moldbug Yarvin - pushes the blatantly insane notion that 'democracy has failed', even as such ingrates wallow in a sea of gifts and wonders and good things poured into their laps by the most successful, free, prosperous and rapidly advancing society the world ever saw, by far. If America is currently in 'crisis' it's not because of some 'failure' or a 'generational turning.' It is for one reason only. The economy, science, jobs... everything except the cost of housing... was doing fine. No, this is a psychic-schism... phase 8 or 9 of a cultural rift - for or against modernity - that goes all the way back to 1778. See my earlier posting on phases of the Civil War. And the 'crisis' is purely sabotage.

== Fort Sumter did lead (eventually) to Appomattox ==

But back to Farrow's concise list of extreme right clusters. The others he mentions - violent thugs and Book of Revelation fetishists - largely consist of enraged males who feel left-behind by the nerds and good-natured average folks they bullied, back in middle school. A negative sum, sadistic pleasure that they seek to regain by drinking our tears.

And while they are ingrates, like the neo-monarchists, at least one can see a dismally nescient reason for their reflexive wrath.

In contrast, the Yarvinists include very rich and pretentiously well-educated 'preppers' or "accelerationists" who are plotting actively to murder a nation that gave them everything and to trigger an 'Event' that will slaughter at least 90% of the world's population.

That - and no less than that - is how they hope to prove their superiority and to restart the 6000 year feudal era of harems.

Surrounded by flatterers and sycophants, they style themselves as smarties. And some of the techies do have some narrow mental proficiency, though I could demolish their constructs in 5 minutes and offer to do so, with 5% of our net worths on the line.

And hence their cowardly isolation within a circle-jerk of lackeys and fellow ingrates who scheme to wreck us all. A Nuremberg rally from which their rationalizations distill down - effectively - into one crystal clear sound. The sound of a call summoning (eventually) a ride from Uber-Tumbrels.

== We know you ==

And so my few words to them.

We... will...remember... you.

Not just me, but tens of thousands already, with caches ready to spill to millions of wakened others. Your cult will be recalled, after the embers settle. Every one of you who survives and claims a rightful place of lordship or monarchy.

What then comes will not be A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ. The people will ally with the surviving nerds who know bio, nano, nuclear, cyber and the rest. And who know the schematics of every prepper stronghold. And yes, every name, even those who took pains to remain in shadows. (Want proof?)

We... will...remember... you.

And you will not like us when we're mad.

==========ADDENDA============

Note: Before calling this 'meeting,' DF* Hegseth fired or reassigned most of the JAGs** who advised generals what's legal. JAGs could excuse generals from illegal orders and now they are gone. (Trump also fired most of the Inspectors General in most agencies, who did the same thing on the civilian side. And dang the dems for not protecting them by law, when they had the chance!) Without JAGs, the officers coming to Quantico (at great expense) will be helpless and those who don't come will be - at minimum - fired.

And this after DF and TS have reamed out the counter-terrorism and counter-spy experts and put putative Moscow agents in charge of both. The way that Bush did before 9/11 but far more extensively.

What's going on with the Quantico meeting? A DESIGNATED SURVIVOR decapitation scenario? The Project 2025 plan involves a Reichstag Fire to excuse martial law. Or a Night of the Long Knives? The 1930s playbook is becoming explicit.

All those scenarios are lurid and likely beyond the capabilities of Dirty Fingers* Pete. But perhaps a coerced "Fuhrer Oath" swearing of loyalty to Dear Leader? Look up ALL of them up and be educated. Be ready!

At minimum it is part of the gone-mad right's all-our war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.

Faced with plummeting polls in both Russia and the USA, both Putin and Trump are getting desperate for a Hail Beezelbub play. So get canned goods. Watch harbor cams to see when the Navy puts to sea. If you see San Diego or Norfolk with no carriers in port, alert the rest of us!

---------

* DF = Dirty Fingers because Hegseth has repeatedly and publicly said "I haven't washed my hands in over a decade." Because "Germs are a myth." And TS = Two Scoops, my nickname for a solipsist who insists that: "At dinners everyone gets one scoop of ice cream. Except me. I get two."

JAG = Judge Advocate General. Along with the inspectors and auditors, part of the ten thousand cadre of primly neutral men and women who have kept us a nation of laws. Now look up one more name: Roger Taney, to understand why we'll get no help from the Constitution's bulwark Court.

You have your google assignments, in order to actually see what's going on.

What Democrats did wrong... Three categories of rationalizing - while ignoring why they hate us.

At the end I'll cite some book and SF news, including some fun! Like part two of my comedy, The Ancient Ones.

Only now we'll return to the topic on everyone’s mind… WTF just happened?  And what should we do now?

We'll start with Nathan Gardels – editor & publisher of the excellent Noēma Magazine - who always offers interesting observations. Though, he often triggers my infamously ornery “Yes… but…” reflex and a too-long response. (Several posts here originated in rémise to Nathan.)

In a recent missive - "How to Soul-Search as a Losing Party" - appraising What Democrats did wrong, Gardels points out many valid things… while reaching a conclusion that I deem spectacularly mistaken. Taking note of how so many Black and Hispanic males abandoned the old, Rooseveltean Coalition, he joins with so many others out there, urging a campaign of gentle conciliation.

Nathan cites a raft of earnest intellectuals, as well as deliberative ‘citizens panels’ that have – in Europe – shown some success at getting participants to bridge the dogmatic gaps that divided them. Indeed, such experiments have been terrific! It is the mature approach. And it works… 

...with those who are already drawn far enough into the process to leave behind their familiarly comfortable, polemical echo chambers. Forsaking today’s media Nuremberg rallies, in order to participate. 

“(O)nce informed and empathetically exposed to the concerns of others, participants move from previously held dispositions toward a consensus.“

Indeed, that participation can be widespread! As in the Truth and Reconciliation process led by Nelson Mandela, in South Africa, and similar endeavors in Argentina and Chile, wherein vast swathes of the public – on all sides – realized they must do this… or risk losing everything.

As for it happening in today’s USA? Well, I can think of one actual, real world example. 

         

All across the nation, grand juries are selected from randomly-chosen voters and vetted for general reasonableness. In a majority of American counties, the resulting panels consist largely of fairly typical white retirees. And yet, it has been exactly those red county white retirees who – after exposure to arguments and copious evidence – have indicted so many Republican politicians and associates of a vast range of crimes.

    I’d argue that is a kind of fact-based consensus-building, even if it leads to some well-deserved pain by the fomenters of one side.

That is the first of many reasons why the masters of that side will have no interest in allowing wider versions of consensus building.

I do not see any hope of such a thing happening in today’s America, at any kind of scale.

…with one barely plausible exception.

Announcing TASAT is a go! ... and curing the Anti-Modernity Cult.

First an announcement:

TASAT is here!  Are you a sci fi nerd who remembers lots of old stories, plot twists and such? Ever wish you could apply all that expertise to something useful?

How about a project that leverages your memory bank of old stories, toward a slim but real chance of saving the world?  

We're spinning out (at last!) a beta of TASAT or There's A Story About That, a community where scifi plot-geeks like you -- (or maybe (one day) some desperate government agency!) -- get to ask: 

"What if this particular strange thing ever happens? (Maybe something like it is happening now!) Has anyone ever thought it through, in a story, across the last century of science fiction tales?"

We've designed TASAT with that question in mind. Want to see how it works? Visit TASAT.org... and maybe sign on to be one of the beta members. (We've designed it to be a minimal use of time!) And maybe - just maybe - your recollection of that obscure Andre Norton or Pohl or Vance twist might someday save the world!

== Can we defeat the defeatist cult against modernity? == 

Okay let's get back to our politically-fraught year, starting first with something fundamental.

Ensure your basic rights! Check your voter registration, especially if you live in a red state, where lots of suppression and cheat-schemes to purge voter rolls are already going on. Check several times!

And yes, in Polemical Judo I have a further recommendation: Because the Grand Cheat of gerrymandering has rendered the General Election moot in many congressional districts, the smart move is to re-register into whichever party rules the district you live in! That lets you vote in the primary, the only election that matters anymore, when it comes to Congress or the Statehouse. 

Even if it means holding your nose and accepting a label that you loathe, you'll reclaim at least a part of what was robbed from you. Moreover it will protect your registration from being purged! Word to the wise?

== Seriously? This flies with... anybody? ==

Former U.S. President Donald Trump blasted the scale of U.S. support for Ukraine and said that if he is reelected in November he would immediately "have that settled."

Sure, big boy. Pretty much everyone by now can see: there are zero differences on overall agenda between today’s Foxite/MAGAs and Vladimir Putin -- who, along with his Kremlin staffed by 5000 “ex” commissars -- grew up reciting Leninist catechisms, five times a day.  Only then they swapped their hammer-sickle pins for czarist symbols -- and suddenly the U.S. right fell in love with them! (Like Don and Kim.)

Dig it. Putin called the fall of the USSR ‘history’s worst tragedy.’ He openly swore revenge  vs. all US fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service …

…to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror… the heroes who are now raged against by Kremlin stooges in the USA.  Putin’s quisling Fifth Column in America.  Today’s commies.

Again. Today's 'conservatives' rail against... the FBI?  The Intel agencies and military? Now, who would want this situation more than giggling Putin? Tell me how the MAGA enemies list differs, even slightly from that of the slightly relabeled KGB?

Today's GOP is Vlad's dream come true.  And we know who the real commies are.

== Immature speculation? ==

Though one wonders about competence when the recent Trump rally shooter climbed to a roof in plain sight of shouting onlookers. Never mind that. From initial appearances (“he was bullied every day”) the fellow is most likely just another white weasel with a gun and desperation to be somebody. 

Which is one more argument for my longtime suggestion: that dopey, attention seeking monsters should be punished in the best way, by name-erasure. See my "Erastratos Effect" proposal.

Bill Maher also riffed on this, less informatively but with wider circulation. 

(In comments I will cite a scenario for the barely-touching 'graze' wound suffered by Donald Trump. Physically this alternative is vastly more plausible than such a grazing bullet wound would be. But is it more plausible as a real-life theory? No, I think not. Still, a close examination of the wound...?)

== A Sunflower for Ukraine! == 

Oh, but here’s my response to DT’s proposed – Putin-ordered – betrayal of Ukraine. See the sunflower I grew? Close to 6 meters (20 feet) tall. Slava Ukraine! Long live the brave and free Ukrainian people. 

And may peace and freedom and light come to all Russians, as well. 

Which may happen, if WE choose sanity, first.

== What’s fundamental about the treason alliance against the Enlightenment Experiment… and hence America ==

The confederate coalition against everything the Enlightenment West stands for has two components. The oligarchs who own the movement … and the masses of what we now call 'MAGAs' and who Robert Heinlein described as ‘know nothings.’

The first component consists of the elites who control – or who think they control - today’s undead monster that’s taken over the Party of Lincoln. These elites are a mélange of inheritance brats, casino mafiosi, hedge lords, incest CEOs, "ex" commissars and openly avowed commissars (differing only in their lapel pins) and murder sheiks. All of them are united in one goal: restoring 6000 years of dismal feudalism. They’ve had a lot of victories along this path. For example, the chief outcome of “Supply Side” never-ever-once-correct “voodoo economics” has been skyrocketing wealth disparities around the globe. Now surging past French Revolution levels. (Learn the word 'tumbrels,' guys.)

Despite their many victories, these elites know that world citizens could wake up, at any moment. They must complete their conversion of the globe back to inheritance status before all the world’s young people fully acculturate with rambunctious individualism. Moreover, the oligarchs know there is one major obstacle blocking their full takeover. 

Rule of law, enforced equally and governed by facts. Hence, in order to achieve their goal, they must suppress the defenders of fact-based rule-of-law. The nerd castes. 

They must stir all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on Terror. (All the western strengths who Vlad Putin openly blames for the fall of the USSR.)

Which brings up the second component of the anti-modernity cult. This one is vastly larger… the MAGA /confederate ground troops in their millions. They share the same agenda, only in the opposite order. Their top wish (as Robert Heinlein explains) is suppression of nerds, not out of self-interested rivalry, like the oligarch masters, but out of basic, cultural hate. (Not all of it unjustified!  As I describe elsewhere.) 

The want to humiliate the university, fact-wielding smartypants! And in order to get that, they’ll gladly help the oligarchy achieve restored feudal rule by inheritance brats.  

Same goals, in slightly different order.

I just explained for you the devil’s bargain between our would-be lords and their vassals. It is exactly the same as in 1778 when Cornwallis went South to find more tories who supported the King… or in the 1860s when a million poor whites marched off to fight and die for their plantation lord class oppressors. Or when Appalachians - who owe FDR and the Democrats absolutely freaking everything - now spit in the eyes of those who helped them out of Deliverance hell.

As Heinlein describes, it's a cultural thing. And yes, you nerds out there simply cannot grasp why – using facts and logic and appeals to common decency and progress – you can accomplish nothing against this devil’s alliance.

== Notes from Civil War Phase 8 ==

Miscellaneous addendum to the first part of this missive... another of my wager challenges. This one demanding MAGA support their incessant jeremiads against universities.  And wow, on social media that campaign is at full throttle!

Sean T. Smith's novel Tears of Abraham is a terrific and scary novel about a US civil war, far better than the recent movie Civil War, by Alex Garland. I touted it before and will again. 

In the wake of Donald Trump's ear-clipping, if anyone, anyone, tries to accuse Dems of “inflammatory language” – read to them aloud from this volcanically horrific call by Alex Jones for this own leader’s violent demise. Then demand a wager with your MAGA, whether his side only spews violent yowlings ten times as much, as opposed to (actually) 100x, than democrats or even ANTIFA. 

And bet over compared death rates wrought by their cult vs those few (any?) actually caused by US leftists.

Or by vaccines.

== Want even deeper fundamentals? ==

 My general political essay in four parts is about - among many things -- the insipid/lobotomizing left-right “axis”- how history betrayed competitive creativity...

...and what libertarianism might look like, if it ever grew up.

Political Totemism and the Danger of Metaphors: 

Part 1 followed by....

Part 2.  and Part 3.  and Part 4.

== A script for a killer advert ==

Hey Lincoln Project!  Want a script for a potentially powerful ad vs. Mafia Don?

 

   2014 – He promised proof – “Next week!” - that Obama was born in Kenya. Week after week, for years. Then stopped. Did any of you ever ask… “Well?” 

   2016 – He promised “great financials!” and tax returns “as soon as the audit is done!” There was no audit. And it’s been 8 years. 

   2017 – He vowed to end terrible Obamacare and replace it with “wonderful, perfect healthcare!” A plan that he promised to reveal “in a couple of weeks.” He repeated that promise every month for years… then went silent when Obamacare proved popular and worked! Have YOU ever seen Trump’s Great New Healthcare Plan? Has anyone? Maybe ask for it now?

   2017 - He promised to “Build the Wall!” Republicans controlled Congress, the Supreme Court, the Executive Branch… every lever of power! They could have built the wall. They didn’t. Did you ever ask why?

   2018 – He ‘fell in love!’ with murder commie tyrant Kim Jong Un. (We want those love letters; they’re public documents!) All the remaining communist despots on Earth support him, along with all the “ex” commissars and “ex” KGB agents in today’s Kremlin, who grew up reciting Lenin and working for America’s downfall… who then changed a few lapel pins and took over the Republican Party.

   2020 – He pooh-poohed Covid 19, predicting it would not come to America… and later that it would ‘pass naturally in a little bit’ … then bragged when scientists and civil servants delivered vaccines! … then swerved to anti-vax and back and forth amid calls for swallowing bleach and lasers… while the economy tanked and a million Americans died.

2021 – “I wuz robbed!!” Oh, the whining about losing by 8 million votes! Especially in six Red States that had Republican governors and officials running the election.  Always promising ‘evidence’ of a ‘steal’ but never ever delivering any. No real evidence at all!  Not to a single judge, jury or grand jury across the nation… while refusing to cooperate with independent investigation panels. 

The biggest single tantrum in the history of our Republic… until 2024, that is.

2016-to-now – A firehose, a tsunami, a supernova of lies! Over 100,000 of them, according to one ongoing list. Naturally, he won’t revisit or explain even one of them.  And his followers are fine with that, fleeing or distracting, when you bring up any of the lies. 

(Let’s pick a dozen from that list and bet $$$ on them! Got guts?)

And now… - almost without exception, Republicans wage all-out war vs all fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror. 

Now who (*cough-Vladimir*) would want Americans to do that?

We could go on with more examples, you know we could. 

Only here’s the deal. If any one of these are true, then many of our neighbors are in a mad cult. 

And gently - with malice toward none - we need to wrest power from what Heinlein called the worst, dark streak in American nature.

Enemies so desperately want a US Civil War

I'll slip in some interesting misc. items below that you won't see elsewhere... but first there's the most obvious potential failure mode for our entire civilization, that's being pushed hard by vile men...

You've heard and seen me raise this topic for years. Lately, others have issued both warnings and science fiction exploring that most-chilling topic - worse than zombies or alien invasion. That of a new, hot phase of the recurring, 240 year American Civil War. 

I've touted two SF novels - Tears of Abraham and Our War - that tried for a multi-spectral view of this potential tragedy, if our current simmering Phase 8 boils over (as some seek) into a volcanic Phase 9. And this year we had a theatrical film, Civil War (from Alex Garland). Even the trailer is scarier n' shit. And do you doubt the very same social forces that ignited those earlier phases will start, sometime in 2024, perhaps with a flood of would-be McVeighs? 

Pay attention when Kremlin-lackey traitors like Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon rave about violence being the next step, if they don't win it all. 

The closer we come to ending this madness at the ballot box, the more desperate will be those who see this as their only way out.

== Better late than never? ==

Gen. John Kelly, former chief of staff for Donald Trump, offered his harshest criticism yet of the former president with on-the-record confirmation of a number of damning stories about statements Trump made behind closed doors, attacking U.S. service members and veterans. 

“A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

Kelly continues: “A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

“There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.”

It isn't just Trump dismissing those heroes buried at a D-Day/Normandy cemetrery as "suckers and losers of course. In fact, the entire modern Republican Party now wages all-out war vs ALL fact-using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.  

Still, thanks, Gen. Kelly. Better late than never, I guess. But is it all that helpful? 

Nah. Our gone-brownshirt neighbors will shrug off any one... or two, or ten... such fellows as traitors.  As Defectors from righteousness who fooled their saintly former casino mafioso boss and betrayed him. 

So? Then make that the issue!  How easily he was fooled.

Show your MAGA the long, long list of appointees - each of whom Trump formerly called "a great, terrific guy!!"  - who later joined the long list of those denouncing him.  At least a hundred former 'great guys,' who DT now call "terrible!"  

It's a list far longer than ALL previous U.S. presidents... combined. He himself says so "No one was ever betrayed as much as me!"

Agree with that!. Then follow up with this killer:

"Completely aside from all policies and party loyalties, and all the rest... 

...doesn't that long list of those he appointed and later denounced prove one thing with absolute perfection?  

"That Donald Trump is a lousy judge of character?"

== Reid Hoffman dishes on Rich Fools ==

Some rich dopes recently raised millions of dollars in support of Donald Trump, helping a known monster under the theory that somehow it will work out for them personally.  Tech maven and brilliant investor/speaker Reid Hoffman wrote a by-invitation essay in The Economist explaining their error. 

 “American business should not empower a criminal, says Reid Hoffman: No rational CEO would want a capricious strongman in the White House, argues the entrepreneur.”

 

Reid’s denunciation of such rich fools is cogent, incisive and worth your time! It is also far more polite than I would be. 

In fact, I have observed that fanatics of the entire Mad Right (and the loopy farthest Left) are all effectively immunized against mere argument. They are immune because the trend in lobotomizing modern cultism is to dismiss ALL assertions as equivalent. All assertions are just battling incantations that bear no relationship to objective reality.

 

In other words: 

“You assert something and I assert something… and those incantation assertions cancel each other out!  I believe you are delusional… and you think that of me. 

"Hence we are left undisturbed – both of us – in our beloved smug assurance, while nothing at all can ever be disproved.”

Read that again. It is exactly the deal, the arrangement between left and right, screaming at each other, while leaving in place a tacit arrangement of reciprocal sanctimony addiction. 

Alas, we can’t afford this deal, anymore. Especially since allowing political polemic to be left in that condition gives the Putinist/fascist/commie/confederate cult an advantage that they should be denied. (And also the far smaller and less harmful, but still-noxious loopies of the very-far-left.)

 

There must be a way to FORCE comparison of the factual verifiability/falsifiability of assertions! 


== One method works... and no one will try it ==

Of course… you all know that I have pushed (in utter futility) just such a technique, one that worked well for our ancestors, for centuries.  Anchoring fact-checkability in actual CONSEQUENCES that blowhards fear most. And here I am referring specifically to the aristocratic fools addressed by Reid Hoffman.

What'd work, making them flee in shame, is to demand actual cash wagers over explicitly verifiable/falsifiable facts!  Truly explicit true-or-false assertions, like:

 

Which party has better economic outcomes across the last 40 years of administrations.  

Which party has a record of being far more fiscally responsible re debt. 

Which party supports US science. 

Which party has forty times the rate of high officials indicted and convicted for felonies, including child predation. 

Which party wages all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror. 

 

This list goes on and on... assertions that are absolutely fact-checkable with utter explicitness. (In 1st comment, below, I will append a further list of fact verifiable wager demands.)

 Moreover, the cash wager aspect is crucial! Because it focuses on actual consequences, instead of blowhard incantations. 

 

Of course there’s another thing Reid could demand of his delusionally GOP-supporting peers. Have them watch the last 5 minutes of the movie CABARET and then ask the following question (uttered by Michael York in the film) about today's aristocratic fools, supporting brownshirt MAGAS: 

 

"So, you still think you can control them?"

== What happens if the masters grow desperate? ==

And finally...  Vladimir Putin appears eager to rewrite the past. Recently, he... signed a decree rendering the sale of Alaska to the U.S. illegal! 

Like declaring void all treaties guaranteeing Ukrainian independence... or merging Soviet flags and emblems with the Czarist escutcheons that his younger self ritualistically spat on, back when he was an 'idealistic' Leninist KGB agent. Only now he and his fellow 5000 "ex" commissars wear different lapel pins and raise statues to Nicholas II, whom Lenin 'righteously' murdered. 

And you wonder where Orwell got his ideas for the Ministry of Truth?

It's all very chuckle-worthy. Till tou wonder... what happens when Vlad starts getting desperate?  Faced with astonishing and devastating losses at the battlefront and plummeting morale. he speaks often and with passion about the Soldier's Revolt of 1917 that toppled the Czar and brought Lenin to power. And he speaks of that event with a rising sense of dread, now frantic to evade the same fate.

He has one great hope.... the November US election. Hence, it must be with horror and dismay that he sees his favorite tool, Donald Trump, rapidly deteriorate, before the world's eyes.

No one is talking about what the secret masters of the gone-undead Republican Party might do about Donald Trump, if it looks like their asset is dragging down down their prospects in 2024. But we must consider what they might do, in order to salvage their situation... by eliminating the liability in such a way that advances their central goal. Their core goal of dissolving the United States into chaos and self-immolation.

One approach would be the "Howard Beale Option"... referring to the last 5 minutes of another great film... NETWORK.  In other words, martyrdom... get rid of your asset-turned-liability and blame the dems, inciting a volcano of McVeighs, burning and destroying across the land. A win-win for Putin and the casino mafiosi and others in that anti-enlightenment Cabal. 

Hence I recite this mantra, again and again: 

“God bless the United States Secret Service. Stay on your toes, guys.

"Keep him safe.”