This is speculative nonfiction— a working theory of the many data points at play in this horrific global moment. I’m no Hercule Poirot. He had a fancier mustache and was solving riddles during a different world war. I’m just a community college teacher and organizer, who reads a whole lot. All the same, I speculate there are two coups and one very big con at play here. Picture this: A global syndicate of techno-fascists pair up with white Christian nationalists and do so using Donald Trump as a puppet. Trump is the outer layer of a matryoshka doll— a literal Russian doll, hiding the others. (How fitting, really.) Anyhow, what he gets out of this mess is good healthcare and staying out of prison for human rights violations while he’s dying. Trump’s not running s**t, but they’re using his chaos to sow confusion. Steven Miller and Russ Vought are working hand in glove. Steven’s job is to scare the public into submission by targeting vulnerable groups for death. Vought, a Christian Dominionist, is stealing the power of the purse from Congress to defund democracy and kill the institutions propping them up. Together, they overpay white Christian nationalists to be the muscle. These grunts think their “take” in all this is re-establishing white male supremacy. What the grunts may actually be doing is helping billionaires wage wars for the resources they need to build spaceships to escape a dying planet. I suspect those data centers aren’t for us; they’re for a “future” you and I won’t see. Why do I speculate this is the case? Elon and Besoz are testing rockets for a reason, and you don’t just try to go to space for fun on a dying planet. If Elon et al. were sane people, they’d just f**k off to a bunker and let people die. That is the sane rich people thing to do: accept reality and let the poor die first. But the vulture class believes they are immortal. Listen to them: they speak of this. They’re escalating tech and ecological collapse for a reason. They’re destroying this ecosystem irreparably for a reason. They think life on the planet is unviable, that we are headed for a mass extinction event (which we are) and that he’d rather die trying to go to space than have to die with common people on the planet. The vulture class is trying to escape a death sentence, and they’re blowing through the Earth’s last resources so that he can use them to get to space. The fake-AI you’ve been playing with is, essentially, spyware, now conveniently installed on your computers and your smartphones. But! For techno-fascists to pull this all off, they need people to keep working in service of capitalism (in service of them)— not because capitalism is a better model but because it keeps you in trauma, too tired to fight back. Again, just speculative nonfiction. The answer here isn’t elections alone. By all means, please, do vote. But I suspect they know they won’t win, just as much as you know they’ll cheat. I suggest you partake in voting anyhow as a thought exercise. But when the balance of power doesn’t really change, as least you’ll have the last Lucy and the football moment. I suspect, if they cannot cheat, they intend to start a World War, knowing it’ll result in counter attacks on American soil, allowing the United States to attempt to declare martial law. America First means: billionaires first, and everyone else last. Again, I’m no journalist. I’m just a person with eyes and ears, developing a working theory of what may be going on, behind the two coups in a trench coat. If I were in the writer’s room of the worst version of How to Get Away with Global Mass Murder, this’d be it: lie to its people, turn them against each other, keep them in trauma, rig political systems to gain access to levers of power by making unusual alliances, kill democracy, systematically abandon its people, leaving them to die, start genocidal wars for resources, whilst the world’s richest s**t-bags create starships for the world’s most depraved people to hang out in bunkers, draining our water, while the tap dries for us, then yeet from this planet when they have the appropriate tech. That is, I speculate, an estimate of how all this bat-s**t antisocial behavior fits together: global techno-fascist parasites are playing “The Scorpion and the Frog” with the white Christian nationalists: using them as the muscle to achieve their own ends. I don’t think many of them realize they’re disposable— and that climate collapse is real. If you’re not in the ketamine billionaire class, or among the cast of entertainers and concubines, you’re not gonna be invited onto the space yachts. We’re not even human to them; they see us as resources, a useful idiots— “non-player characters.” That’s my terrible, no-good, speculative nonfiction. But I also read Octavia Butler. She’s smarter. I think the most rational thing to do in order to stop these people is to stop working for them. Stop working for a US government that is trying to kill you and for a job that has demonstrated it will dispose of you, right up until the world burns. Trust that the oligarch class has a ticket on the Ketamine Kid’s rocket. I suspect they’re acting out their own version of Don’t Look Up. Here’s what I do know, though: Regardless of the layers of nonsense going on, we need to build parallel systems of support, not just to hold a General Strike but to stop working for them altogether and start working for each other. Capitalism is not the only form of trade. These people are killing us for power and profit, and several parasitic maniac men appear to be further draining the world’s resources to leave the planet entirely. It is, to my mind, the only way to make sense of this: to believe them for who they’re showing themselves to be and to listen to the words coming out of their mouths. I recommend we stop working for them and learn to collaborate with each other— not just to starve them of the participation they need to pull this off but to be able to work together, on a hyper-local, to engage in a swift global slow-down. Because capitalism has shown us, on loop, it will work people til they die, and, speculatively, this appears to be racialized capitalism’s last act: the parasitic rich screwing us over one last time. But it doesn’t mean we have to cooperate. Are we headed toward poly-crises? Yes. But the people who learn to collaborate better are the ones who prevail. As I leave you with this theory of techno-fascist, white Christian nationalist power, I think it’s worth mentioning one of the finest quotes from the film Smoke Signals: “I keep thinkin’— I wish we was this organized when Columbus landed.” Neighbor, I believe we are here again. Columbus, the villain, vandal, rapist, and thief has landed once more. Only this time, the are trying to colonize this planet, in order to strip it of its resources and leave. Here’s what’s not speculative: it is up to us to organize and build parallel systems of support for what comes next. There’s a reason the techno-fascists hid the climate data and fired the climate scientists. If they didn’t, you’d eventually hear the alarm bells and ask: “Why are we still working for them when they want to kill us?” Eventually, you’d use all your time, talents, and resources to help each other survive. I’ve been working on a loose map for how to proliferate the helpers we need, at scale. It’s a rough theory of how we can learn to move together to face whatever absolute batshit genocidal nonsense these people are playing at. The answer, as ever, is to stop cooperating with them and start cooperating with each other. I would delight in being alarmist, but I actually listen to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. They are crazy people, unchecked by the peer review of other people. They and their techno-fascist shitheads would absolutely kill us all to try and get out of dodge. And I don’t personally think the Epstein files will bring them down. I think stopping working for them and abandoning the economic and political system designed to keep them in power— and, instead, collaborating on a new system, which can respond to the moment we face, cooperatively— is the way out. Trust me when I tell you that I didn’t want to write this. The s**t I speculate these people are doing is unspeakably nuts. “Trump derangement syndrome” is an accusation in a mirror. They are, indeed this homicidally crazy that they would blow through the world’s resources to “save themselves.” Who wants to suggest an unspeakable and catastrophic plan might be in play? Who wants to suggest the world as we knew it is about to end, like it or not, because racist rich white guys thieve until last, and have pushed us into climate collapse? Who wants to suggest that one way of working with each other to stop them from killing an already dying planet and its people? Surely not me. But here I am writing it down, knowing full well that this speculative nonfiction may be the equivalent of telling the first sailors to keep sailing into the horizon when the map-makers were convinced they’d fall off the edge of the world. My larger point here is this: If we’re heading into climate collapse, why in the fresh hell are we then listening to the very leaders whose intention is to kill us and hasten the end times (for us and the planet)? What if, instead, we didn’t deny what we are facing, unglued ourselves from our screens, and worked together to try and survive “the end of the world” as we previously knew it? The truth is: my speculative nonfiction is immaterial. We know enough of the score to know we must move in a radically different way, starting now. Luckily, when it comes to developing plans for what comes next, I’m nowhere near the the first person to suggest these collaboration. For example, adrienne maree bro
