What a year … oops, I mean week.

Momentous events are pelting at us at maximum warp. I thought we’d reached a peak in 2024, but oh, no; in the past week, acceleration has gone parabolic. Off the charts. Absolutely fucking asymptotic.

As an ADHD queen, I’ve started a plethora of blog posts to spill my thoughts on each shocking development. Inevitably, I abandon the draft in a fit of overwhelm, called away by the gross overabundance of Very Important Things to doomscroll about. And then, of course, the cycle restarts. At some point, I’m going to have a spectacular backlog of posts to dump here. Unless, that is, they become wildly irrelevant — which I fear is happening at the blistering rate of “daily.”

So, what topic pierced my fog of indecision?

You know the scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden is driving in the rain and decides to make a point by taking his hands off the steering wheel? The scene that ends in the car careening down an embankment?

Right now, the United States is the car. And the tech billionaire ”broligarchs” are in the driver’s seat.

Player 1: Ready

A few days ago, I watched a video essay that you might (or might not) have encountered already. When I saw it, the counter showed (I think) about 250,000 views. Today it’s sitting at 1.5 million and counting. I’m referring to Blonde Politics’s video on YouTube about “Dark Gothic MAGA.” If you haven’t watched it yet, you should. Go on, I’ll wait.

… Okay, welcome back. It’s a doozy, right?

I want to take a closer look at the players in this game. Let’s start with Peter Thiel. He’s known for being a PayPal founder, so he goes way back with Elon Musk, and while the two men have reportedly had their differences, Thiel’s comments (and Musk’s response) regarding the announcement of DOGE would suggest they’re getting along nowadays. An early Facebook investor (Hi, Zuck!), he left the Meta board in 2022 to, as The New York Times put it, “focus on influencing November’s midterm elections.” And influence he did. That year, his protege, JD Vance won his senate race in Ohio.

Vance owes his start to Thiel. And while ostensibly, Thiel had no direct involvement in Project 2025, he was ostensibly involved in last September’s “Reboot 2024: The New Reality” consortium, which brought Project 2025 visionaries together with the tech bros and their pet thinker, Curtis Yarvin. 

So now that we know the players …

What’s The Game?

This is the point where the billionaire playbook gets into weird stuff that will make me sound like a tinfoil hatter. I honestly won’t rehash all of what they’re trying to do and how; you can get a much clearer view of that by reading the backlogs over at The Nerd Reich.

Suffice to say, their end goal seems to be to establish private cities (of “desirable” people, either rich, or white, or smart in a eugenics/IQ test sort of way) that function as independent, sovereign entities and are — of course — run by conservative tech billionaires. If this doesn’t sound like a new concept, well, it’s kind of not. Walt Disney originally wanted EPCOT to be something similar, and of course hippie communes and cults have been doing this for a long time (David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, anyone?). The difference is that these network states expect to be granted federal land, which will be easy for them to get … after the fall of the U.S. government as we know it. And, uh … I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that rapid dismantling is now in progress.

Truly, I wish it were all a load of bull. But unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be. In fact, I argue this sort of familiar, woo-woo cultishness is the reason the billionaires’ dystopian ideas were being dismissed as too far-fetched to be real. (And still are, despite the evidence of our eyes and ears.)

The Gameplay is Gonna Suck … Because We’re Not the Players

Think about the first time you played an open-world video game populated with a lot of NPCs. Grand Theft Auto, Assassin’s Creed, Skyrim  … you know the type. Maybe you’re not like me, but if you are, you might have approached the world and the characters in it carefully. In these games, actions have consequences. Accidentally kill a chicken as a low-level n00b, for instance, and you’re in for a world of hurt. Even if the villagers don’t strike you down, the city guard will extort you for money or haul you off to jail (and confiscate your items). 

Early on, the consequences are fairly powerful deterrents, but if you’ve played any of these games long enough, you may have noticed a tipping point. Once you’re leveled enough and have money stashed in a chest somewhere, these game mechanics stop meaning much. At that point, you can steal indiscriminately. No chicken is safe from your hand of doom. And, well, if an NPC gets stuck in a doorway, your sword is an easy solution.

Billionaires are like that overleveled player character, flush with cash and power. And the danger of that is in their belief in their superiority and total disregard for the lives of “the poors.” Society isn’t a video game; treating everyone else as if they aren’t real is, in fact, antisocial, and has a great capacity for harm when there’s power involved. Not only have the rich shown their contempt for us by opposing working improvements, Yarvin actively advocated for sequestering the poor in a virtual reality prison (after claiming another comment about turning them into biodiesel was “a joke”). Heck, Musk apparently already thinks we could be living in a simulation. None of these point to a ruling class that will give a solitary shit about the common person.

I like science fiction and fantasy as much as the next person; It’s what I wrote back when I wanted to be a novelist for a living. But the amount of stock these assholes seem to put in societal blueprints pulled directly from dystopian sci-fi is downright terrifying. That genre is generally understood to be a warning, and often a study on the hubris of humanity.

Oh, what irony.

What Can We Do?

On one hand, I hope my fears are an overreaction, and that everything will turn out alright. Of course, that’s what they told us about Roe v. Wade, and we all know what happened there. At the moment, we’re being assured that everything DOGE is doing will be argued in court, and the checks and balances will prevail. But remember: defying the courts is a clearly outlined step in Yarvin’s playbook. We’re only now cresting into that phase as the rulings roll in. If the Department of Justice is complicit and Congress refuses to act, what recourse is there, anyway?

Like many other people, I’m overwhelmed right now, so I’m sticking to a few things to do my part without going nuts:

1. Call your elected officials. 5 Calls makes it easy to call your congress members. If you’d rather be a writer, Resist Bot has you covered as well, although word on the street is that letters and emails are pretty much immediately disregarded. If you’re like me, and represented only by MAGA Republicans (thanks, gerrymandering), you should still call. At the least, we can clue them in that their normalization campaign is not working. We’re aware of this shit, and we’re not okay with it.
2. Stay informed. NPR, PBS, the BBC, Reuters, and the AP are pretty reliable, mainstream news sources. Outside the mainstream, I respect the Alt National Parks Service, Robert Reich and Heather Cox Richardson. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a great voice of reason and insight into what’s being done in Congress. (Her video from the other day honestly talked me off a ledge.) I’m also using Reddit a lot to keep on the pulse of things, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that if you’re trying to stay calm.
3. Limit social media use. I dumped most of my social media after the inauguration (for reasons I’ll get into in another post), but I understand it’s difficult to give up on platforms we’ve used for so long. However, social media is owned by the very broligarchs running this circus, and they’re not optimizing for good mental health. Bluesky seems okay, if you really must have somewhere to scroll.
4. Build your community. Check in with any friends and coworkers who are likely to be aware of what’s happening (and thus in a similar state of worry). Validate each other, plan for mutual aid, and otherwise create a support network. I wouldn’t bother fighting with the ones who are celebrating—in fact, I’d carefully avoid them—but if you think someone might not be totally brainwashed, perhaps you could gently alert them to the very real consequences Musk’s rampage will have for everyday life. I think we’ll all feel the effects eventually, but maybe some people can be woken up before everything has gone too far.

Keep your chin up, y’all. We’ll get through this.

Title image by Lionello DelPiccolo on Unsplash.