Radical Ideologies Beg for Radical Solutions

The Union Is Terminal. Was Marjorie Taylor Greene right after all?

The crews are breaking down the stage in D.C. It was built to host Trump and his cadre of misfits, as they staged the first military parade since 1991. The publicly expressed intent was to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, coincidentally also the birthday of Trump. He’s now 79, which is about 80 years too many.

Dropping anywhere between $25 to $45 million on the spectacle, 6000 troops marched - the majority bored to tears - and there were tanks, helicopters, horses, and some of the soldiers wore historically “accurate” clothing. The latter, as a throwback, could be considered within keeping of the celebration of the Army, whereas, realistically, it’s drop in a bucket that was already overflowing with self aggrandizing Trump-administrative bullshit.

The White House claimed that the parade was attended by 250,000 patriots - coincidence, no? 250 years and 250,000 attendees? Strangely, every other outlet (other than right-wing toilet rags) reported that the attendance was 200,000 at best, but likely far fewer than that. Adding insult to injury, the crowd was about as energetic as Trump, who mostly tried to stay awake during the shindig, with many leaving before Trump and Vance felated the microphone.

Meanwhile, 11 million Americans united across the USA, ensuring that the trajectory we’ve upheld since 1776 was further codified: NO KINGS!

Yet, the banner still waves. Perhaps a bit droopier than usual. The anthem still plays, maybe a bit out of tune.

The problem is not the parade. That was merely to stroke the ego of a “president” whose skin is as thick as rice paper. The “show of force” looked like the Disney cast strolling down Constitution Avenue, and nothing like the parades other dictators have had. The gut punch for Trump is emphasized by 11 million Americans coming together for “NO KINGS!”

However, neither will change the trajectory of the United States succumbing to fascism.

While we’re committed to “no kings”, they’re committed to “not stopping”.

From my Substack notes:

The parade attendance was small enough, it could have been a community meeting on a basketball court (or fit in a Sears parking lot).

However, if we think, for even a moment, that the people who are working on fascism in the USA are disturbed by this, please…think again.

The parade was theatrics with a mute button.

“No Kings” brought 11 million people to the streets.

Neither will have any influence to stop them. They’ve come too far, are too committed, and ideological bankrupt to consider any other form of government than a christofascist state.

Thus, the question: how can we turn 11 million “No Kings” protestors, get the remaining 60 million who didn’t vote for the felon, to come together and take control of this country?

Control: withhold labor, financial noncompliance, deep community resource management, etc.

Don’t get me wrong. 11 million on the streets is great! It would be greater if the showing of numbers were to convert into massive action.

I wrote about “massive action”, in a bloodless variation, here:

Radical Ideologies require Radical Solutions

What about the Union, the nation, the United States of America? When we look closely, we recognize that the Union is barely on life support. The machines that keep us alive are running on debt, delusion, solidified inertia, lobbyism, and widespread corruption that’s also strangleholding SCOTUS, which you’d have thought is above it all. Alas, 70% of Americans believe that SCOTUS operates based on ideology, rather than being fair and impartial (PBS).

The US reminds me somewhat of a Wild West studio set. Step outside your echo chamber, waltz down Main Street, and look at the local saloon. The facade looks great, but peek around the corner, and you’ll see that the shack is barely held together by fraying twine.

The illusion of national unity is rotting in the catacombs of our own skeletons, held up by scaffolding made of bullshit, cemented by cosplay press conferences, quarterly earning calls, questionable elections, and the deranged optimism of the stock market, which remains over valued. If you listen closely, beneath the noise of the news cycle, you can hear the ligaments tearing and bones breaking, and when the bubble finally bursts, you won’t have a seat to hold on to. It will blow away in the hurricane of destruction.

Thus, the question: with all that is unfolding, does it make sense for the United States to continue to exist in such a state of disrepair, corruption, etc., just to uphold the illusion of a “United” States of America? Realistically, we’re anything but united, but have ideologically drifted far enough apart that the Grand Canyon looks merely like a papercut.

The message has long been clear, too: Texas doesn’t want California’s governance. Vermont doesn’t want Florida’s ideology. Arkansas liberates children to be pushed into the workforce, while Minnesota is working hard to establish paid FMLA. If Tennessee had its way, it would segregate again, and Oklahoma, Idaho, etc al., would love nothing more than to put their trans community on the pillory. Meanwhile, numerous blue states are opening their doors as sanctuaries for the LGBTQIA+ communities. And do we need to talk about women’s rights, bodily autonomy, the rights of the disabled, etc.? I think not. You know the differences between the states.

The contrast between red and blue states is pronounced to a degree that it can be measured in lives affected and innocent people murdered, just so the ideologies of inhumane bastards are kept alive. Quasi as the cherry on the shit sandwich, the republican federal government operates like a terminal patient kept on life support, pumped full of monetary fentanyl by a Federal Reserve too terrified to pull the plug, a GOP too “MAGA”, about to pass the “Big and Beautiful” budget bill (with trillions in deficits baked in), and a Heritage Foundation too powerful and ideologically commited to be stopped. They’re salivating to push us over the cliff and into fascism.

A 2024 YouGov poll. A 2025 poll would likely look different.

Concerning all factors, were we really destined to last this long? The seams have split because the center, common ground, civility, and humanity are treated with Chauvin’s knee on their necks. And as the radicalized political factions sharpen their knives, the secession noise isn’t dying down. In the face of how the federal government is rapidly destroying what was painstakingly built, and with GOP-operated states succumbing to inhumanity at an even faster pace, almost as if they want to outdo each other in cruelties, perhaps it is time to consider the options:

• What if the solution isn’t a repair, that will continue to hemorrhage?

• What if the way out of the potential for civil war is to not participate?

• What if it's a divorce?

• What if *gasp* Marjorie Taylor Greene was, for the first and only time in her life, right?

According to an analysis of FEMA data, some twenty million Americans are actively preparing for cataclysm—roughly twice as many as in 2017. Political violence, including the spectre of civil war, is one of the reasons. A recent study conducted by researchers at U.C. Davis concluded that one in three adults in the U.S., including up to half of Republicans, feel that violence is “usually or always justified” to advance certain political objectives (say, returning Trump to the White House). In May, Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, told the Financial Times that he believed there was about a thirty-five-per-cent chance of civil war breaking out in America. “We are now on the brink,” Dalio said, noting that a modern civil war—though it might not involve muskets—would see the fracturing of states and widespread defiance of federal law. In June, Dalio upped his estimate to “uncomfortably more than 50 percent,” predicting “an existential battle of the hard right against the hard left in which you will have to pick a side and fight for it, or keep your head down, or flee.” (The New Yorker).

Let’s Explore: The Anatomy of Secession

We begin with a simple fact, some (many?) Americans would like to change: there is no constitutional right to secede. None. The Civil War burned that idea out of existence. Supreme Court rulings like Texas v. White (1869) codified that the United States is "an indestructible Union composed of indestructible States."

But the constitution is a living scaffolding, not written in stone scripture. The constitution exists by the consent of the governed. And that consent is dissolving, emphasized by an unpredictable SCOTUS.

Natural law is the radioactive core here. As James Madison acknowledged, people possess an inherent right to revolt when government becomes "intolerably oppressive." In American political thought, the Declaration of Independence is a prime example of an appeal to natural law, asserting the right of the people to "alter or to abolish" a destructive government. So, while "radioactive core" is, of course, metaphorical, the underlying idea of natural law as a foundational justification for extreme measures like revolution or secession is accurate in the context of American political philosophy. (Side note; I loathe the term “natural law”. It’s been bastardized by too many “sovereign citizens” - but that’s a topic for another day.)

Andrew “Genocide” Jackson (referring to the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears) even admitted that while secession isn’t constitutionally protected, it may still be morally justified under revolutionary conditions. In his Proclamation Regarding Nullification (1832), Andrew Jackson directly addresses the idea of secession. While vehemently denying any constitutional right to secede, he makes a very distinct and often-cited qualification:

"Secession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right is confounding the meaning of terms; and can only be done through gross error, or to deceive those who are willing to assert a right, but would pause before they made a revolution, or incur the penalties consequent upon a failure."

The American Revolution itself was the template: a violent rejection of distant, unresponsive power. It is both the origin story and the suppressed fear of every American administration that followed. We love to celebrate 1776, just as long as nobody else tries it again.

And yet, fracture is baked into our country’s DNA. The Articles of Confederation collapsed under the weight of irreconcilable regional interests. Kentucky peeled off from Virginia. Maine broke from Massachusetts. West Virginia seceded from Virginia in the bloodbath of the Civil War. Each rupture followed the same brutal calculus: when a population perceives that continued union endangers their survival or identity, the cost-benefit equation shifts.

The pain of leaving becomes less than the agony of staying.

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The Crisis That Makes Divorce (potentially) Inevitable

You don’t need a PhD in economics to see what’s happening. The so-called "United" States has become a hostage economy, deliberately engineered by elites and organizations who profit from controlled demolition.

• BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Blackstone, etc., are consolidating assets and housing like post-collapse warlords. They gobble them up for cents on the dollar.

• Hedge funds like Citadel are profiting from high-frequency chaos while middle-class pensions are vaporizing.

• Billionaires like Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg are dumping stock before the music stops. The difference between them and us? They still have a chair when the music stops. We’re falling flat on our economic asses.

• Corporate boards are executing mass layoffs while reporting record profits.

The middle class is being systematically vaporized. What was affordable just a few years ago, has gone out of reach. The illusion isn’t the complete inaccessibility, but that most things are now subscription/monthly “low” fee-based. To boot, unless your family owns their home already and keeps it in the family, entire generations will be locked out of homeownership. Wage growth is a sickening joke, and corporate cost hikes have reduced most American paychecks to hamster wheels: run faster just to stay in place, while the wheel around is disintegrating.

The financial engineering is not accidental. It mirrors every late-stage empire collapse in history: the Rome playbook, the Weimar playbook, and even echoes of the British imperial unwind. Consolidate wealth. Transfer assets. Strip public institutions bare. Inflate financial bubbles as a distraction and profit centers while real productivity withers.

Each economic cycle transfers more power into fewer hands. The sovereign nation is reduced to a logo stamped on the oligarchs' asset portfolios. I saw a TikTok video some time ago, she said “America is a third world country with a designer label” - this stuck with me, and frankly, it also hit a nerve. The idea of shared national destiny collapses under the weight of divergent economic realities. Silicon Valley and Wall Street function as borderless empires unto themselves, while Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and vast chunks of the interior hemorrhage relevance and hope.

At a certain stage, there is no longer a national economy, but only a patchwork of regional economies with diverging interests, linked by little more than inertia and an overstretched currency privilege. The dollar floats, for now, but the scaffolding under it has termites. The float is provided by “cheap money”, credit cards, and student loans, both as deferred instruments of debt. You may temporarily buy yourself some runway, but the wall you’re going to hit is merciless, and the more you rack up, the harder you’ll hit the wall.

The ruling class is preparing for the break long before the general population has time to think about it. Hedge funds, private equity firms, and multinational conglomerates have already established their exit ramps: dumping stocks, diversification into different asset groups, offshore accounts, most hold foreign passports or can afford to buy them, decentralized assets, and/or holding billions in cash-on-hand. They are not planning for unity. They are planning for what is (seemingly) the inevitable fragmentation.

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Bullshit Saturation: The Last Phase Before Breakage

Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt (1929-2023), wasn’t being cute when he defined bullshit as discourse detached from any concern for truth. Today, America runs on industrial-grade bullshit. A media spectacle where both left and right vomit performative outrage while legislatures do little or nothing but serve corporate donors. The language of governance is now marketing, not leadership. It's "optics," "messaging," "narrative control", rather than substantive change in the interest of the people. Granted, there are a few outliers who still have America’s best interests in mind. But, do they measurably move the needle toward the collective good, or are they stonewalled? We know the answer.

According to Frankfurt, bullshit isn't a symptom. It is a survival mechanism for a regime that can no longer function by persuasion or merit. The public square is flooded with curated outrage designed to keep populations locked into tribal hysteria, incapable of uniting long enough to threaten elite control. Yes, we showed up. 11 million poured into the streets for No Kings, but does that make a measurable difference, other than masking lasting decay with temporary unity?

The result? Two entirely incompatible visions of reality occupy the same geographic space. Red America sees Blue America as tyrannical, godless cultural CRT authoritarians bent on erasing history and imposing degeneracy. Blue America views Red America as a reactionary theocracy waiting to impose Handmaid’s Tale governance and minority rule.

Of course, both sides are correct,… from their own vantage points. And both sides believe to be “more right” than the other. That’s what makes the fracture permanent.

There is no longer a shared epistemology. No common currency of facts. The media apparatus has become a tribal affirmation theater, not journalism. Social media algorithms radicalize at scale. They’re all the scandalous rag-slingers in the amphitheater of bread and games, promising a captivating show! Then we compound with AI-generated propaganda, which will amplify these divides exponentially in the coming election cycles.

Once two sides no longer inhabit the same factual universe, democratic compromise becomes impossible. When your opponent is not just wrong but evil, negotiation becomes treason. If you can’t tell what’s fact from fiction, you’ll fall victim to your confirmation bias, groupthink, and identification of the common enemy = the trenches of hate will be dug deeper, potentially filled with gallons of blood of those who perish in a domestic war.

But, what if we don’t fight that war, but leave the battlefield? A “new” strategy to end what may otherwise turn into billions of gallons of blood seeping into the ground?

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The Geopolitical Minefield of Fragmentation

Let’s be clear: A US Divorce isn’t a completely bloodless fantasy. There may be some bloodshed, but not at cataclysmic scale, while we’re trying to figure out:

• Who controls the nukes?

• Who inherits the Federal Reserve’s printing press?

• How are military assets divided?

• What happens to the national debt?

• What happens to student loans owed by 40 million Americans?

• What about taxation, social programs, and social security?

• How will borders be controlled?

• How can the economy be untangled?

• How will red states manage their economic deficit without robbing the purse of the blue states?

• How would foreign powers exploit the vacuum?

The break-up of the U.S. would go beyond the redrawing of domestic maps; We would almost immediately vacate our global power position, leaving California with the largest GDP representation of the former USA, and the 4th largest economy globally. By divorcing, we would shatter the entire global power structure. The dollar’s reserve status would collapse. Trade alliances would unravel. Then there’s NATO and other global initiatives that would be irreparably harmed. Certainly, China and Russia would fill the void, seizing the opportunities. However, when do we have a duty to save ourselves, because if we perish domestically, China and Russia would still capitalize on the opening we leave behind.

Domestically, while it should be “as easy as”: Democratic governors getting together, forging an alliance, and declaring their intentions to separate into the “New United States”, the reality would likely be entirely new power blocks. An East Coast Union, a Texas Republic, and a Pacific Alliance could emerge, (no clue what we’d do in the Midwest - join Canada?) but only after passing through economic hellfire and restructuring of the kind that no one has seen before (nod to Trump for the shitty choice of words here).

Although the situations cannot be compared, it still throws me back to former Yugoslavia. Except, we have nukes.

Meanwhile, the federal government’s monopoly on violence remains the final glue holding this thing together. They have just proven this again, by illegally commanding CA National Guards, and releasing U.S. Marines onto U.S. Citizens, including the detainment of at least one U.S. Veteran who was on the way to a VA appointment. This is military warfare against the American people, on the behest of the autocrat, with dictatorial ambitions, in the White House.

But even that is only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it all, we must consider the increasing number of rogue sheriffs, state nullification and trigger laws, and active duty law enforcement officers publicly pledging loyalty to ideological causes rather than federal authority. Granted, for good measure, the sheriff confined his statements to “violent protestors”, but that’s merely buying time until they are emboldened enough to consider anyone who exercises their right to the 1st Amendment as the enemy. The scenario is not yet a dictatorship, but it certainly is regional authoritarianism.

Ultimately, as this continues, and we’re closer to the breaking point, blue states will become technocracies with a drive toward sanctuary status, and red states will harden into cultural puritan enclaves. Increasing the pain points, the Trump administration is already punishing “sanctuary states” by threatening to withhold funding. As this continues, the concept of a universal American identity will atomize into something far more dangerous: competing moral absolutisms with shrinking tolerance for dissent. Then, if you’re lucky to get out of the stronghold in which you no longer belong, you’ll have to choose your poison. Lockstep marches, with a bible in one hand, and a semi-automatic in the other, or a semblance of peace, liberty, and freedom.

Your personal disposition and psychological tolerance will determine where you want to be, or the risks you’ll take to get to where you need to be.

Why This Conversation is No Longer Fringe

Once-unthinkable ideas are always fringe. Until they’re not. Secession used to be the language of militia nutcases, X-Live Streams with “General” Mike Flynn, and Reddit forums. However, now it's creeping into think tanks, state legislatures, and mainstream discourse. Because underneath the noise, “We, The People” probably sense the truth: at the going rate, the USA cannot hold. We’ve lost center, and we certainly cannot find “true north”.

Map of States with Convention of States movements

Polling data already shows non-trivial support for peaceful separation among both Republican and Democratic voters. In Texas, secessionist rhetoric has gone from fringe to ballot measures. In California, the "CalExit" movement surges after every right-wing federal power grab. Even Vermont quietly discusses a return to its short-lived independence prior to statehood. In all, and as of 2024, over six states are said to have growing secessionist movements, including Alaska, California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, New Hampshire, and some counties in Oregon, which want to join ultra-conservative Idaho (they’re nuts).

The federal leviathan no longer serves most Americans. Washington functions as a wealth extraction terminal for K Street lobbyists, defense contractors, and transnational corporations, with a madman at the wheel, fueling up at the gas stations operated by the Heritage Foundation. The federal bureaucracy is simultaneously incompetent and impotent, joyfully capable of spending trillions on war but incapable of fixing bridges, education, or healthcare. Worse yet, the progress we’ve made under the Democratic administrations of the past was swiftly reversed by the Trump administration.

As this trust deficit metastasizes, local and state identities grow stronger. People begin looking inward to communities, municipalities, and regions that better reflect their values and protect their economic survival. The direct correlation of the gravitational pull of local sovereignty grows stronger as federal legitimacy decays.

In that context, this divorce isn’t treason.

It’s life-saving triage from our deadly Stockholm Syndrome.

The Antidote