Robert's Guide to The Next Six Months of Danger and Resistance

that year's Democratic Invention in Philadelphia. If you've never had the pleasure of seeing Vermin at a protest, he's essentially a rodeo clown for riot cops, and his example taught me a lot about how to communicate to a group of angry, scared people in tense situations. Those lessons came in handy for me back in twenty twenty. But the George Floyd Uprising is now almost five years in the past.

Trump is once again in power, very little to stand between him and the exercise of a kind of arbitrary, dictatorial violence that this nation has seldom seen within its own borders, but as often sponsored elsewhere, including El Salvador, where Trump has sent hundreds of American residents and plans to send thousands, perhaps tens of thousands more. The purpose of this essay is to provide my predictions for the

next six months to a year. What I'm writing here is speculative, but it is based on the best data I have available in numerous conversations I've had with activists, current federal employees, former soldiers, and retired law enforcement. There are a million places where I could start, but I feel like the most responsible place to begin is by answering this question, is now the time to panic? Last year, after Biden's disastrous debate performance, I put out a podcast

essay titled Don't Panic. It was my most shared episode of this podcast that year, and I felt pretty good about the response until Trump again, and I found it briefly impossible to take my own advice. Since January of twenty twenty five, the fascist takeover has only accelerated, and I have lost count of the number of people who've asked me, is it time to panic? The answer to that is still no, but not because there's no reason to panic. In fact, panic is a natural reaction to

our present moment. If your fight or flight reflexes haven't been triggered, well, they might be broken. Even so, don't panic, because in combat and disasters, in any dangerous situation, you might find yourself panic is what will kill you as surely as anything else. There's a concept in military theory I bring up often, something introduced to soldiers undergoing training today.

It's called the ODA loop. It describes the process people go through while acting and reacting under fire, and particularly while deciding how to act and react under fire. It stands for observe, orient, decide and act. If you can interrupt any part of that loop, you can stop your enemy from fighting back effectively. The basic principle of the ODA loop functions on the grand strategy scale as well

as it does in a gunfight. This is the point behind the flood the zone strategy, orchestrated by Stephen Miller and the other intellectual luminaries behind Trump iiO. The fire hose of outrage is to distract you from observing everything that's happening, to keep you off balance so you can't orient yourself, to stop you from deciding and acting. Elon

Musk's purchase of Twitter helped to supercharge the bullshit. Cannon AI accelerated the spread of lies on social media beyond all of our worst nightmares, and this has helped blind and divide the people who should have linked arms to stop this shit before it got to the point that it's at today. I want you to think of how many prominent leftists have fallen repeatedly for right wing propaganda like that Russia would never invade Ukraine, or that Trump

might actually be somehow better for Gaza. These and a million other things have blinded and hobbled potential resistance. I might also bring up the whole Maga communist movement, but the less set about those people, the better. Meanwhile, columnists at liberal legacy publications like The Times have fallen for every hyped up story about transgender athletes or woke kids on college campuses and the danger the liberal left poses

to free speech. They've denied genocide and demonized those who protest against it, and too many elected Democrats have taken their lead as the path of least resistance. Many have pulled right for reasons far more sinister. The fact that Gavin Newsom, governor of California, is hosting fascists on his new podcast while mailing burner phones to tech CEOs points

towards something dark, immediate, deadly. We live now in the culmination of a successful decades long plot two, in the words of Curtis Jarvin, repeal the twentieth century and turned this nation into a dictatorship where our lives and our collective national arsenal are the personal property of some dudes who inherited oil money or invested in Facebook back in like two thousand and five. The early stages of the plan, of course, date back well before Peter Teele or Elon

Musk or Donald Trump. They began when a coalition of would be oligarchs tried to overthrow FDR in what has become known as the Business Plot, and were thwarted by a Marine general named Smedley Butler. These men wanted revenge for the New Deal, but they found seizing power at the top harder than they'd hoped, and so they embarked on a slower, bottom up approach. Hence the John Birch Society, the creation of countless think tanks, and the generation's long

effort to stack the Supreme Court. The war on abortion was a concerted step towards this plan. An artificial creation alongside the birth of the religious right as a political coalition. There was initially a small group of men at the center of the web, guys like William Brignery Won and William Brignery Do or Paul Wayrich. But the engine of cultural and political change forged from the late forties to the nineteen seventies was so successful that at some point

it became self perpetuating. And when a gaggle of tech bros found themselves with more wealth than any humans that ever held, the machine was there to mold them and to be used by them. It's all worked so damn well that many people I know have lost hope entirely. We're fucked, goes the script. They're going to send us to the camps, and they can't be stopped, at least

not without apocalyptic bloodshed. Well that's not necessarily so. Now people have already died as a result of this administration, a lot of them, and that will continue to happen. But a collapse into total carnage is not inevitable, nor is a future that offers us nothing but a boot upon our necks. Despite the money that went into building that this is a new house made with cheap materials,

and there are already cracks in the foundation. So my first prediction for the coming months is this, the cracks will widen, and we'll talk about that, but first, as we're obligated to do, here's some ads. Trump and the men who swim in his wake signal only strength. Honesty is neither in their interest nor a strong suit. But Curtis Yarvin, chief profit of the neo Reactionaries and Peter

Teel's pet philosopher, is in a different position. He knows people in power listen to some of what he has to say, and over the last few months his profile has risen enormously. I can take credit for an at least tiny amount of that. Many normal liberals and elected Democrats now know who he is. This exposes him to a danger that was not present for him during Trump's

first term. If the current fascist salient should be pushed back and this movement fails, there could be and should be prosecutions, and he rightly fears that if this happens, he might follow in the footsteps of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi high theoretician who was executed at Nuremberg. That's why on March sixth he published a messi sprawling, seven thousand word essay titled Barbarians and Mandarins in his trademark nine unreadable style. It comes with the subheading as soon as

it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes. If you want to spare yourself the headache of reading through one tenth of a novel of Yarvins at best turgid prose, there's a good article by the nerd Reich that breaks all of this down. We'll link it in the show notes. But the gist is that Jarvin thinks Musk and Trump have been too slow, have embraced too many half measures, and the whole authoritarian project is careening towards disaster. Quote.

Unless the spectacular earthquakes of January and February are dwarfed in March in April by new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale, the Trump regime will start to win and eventually dissipate. It cannot stay at its current level of power, which is too high to sustain but too low to succeed. It has to keep doing things that have never been done before. As soon as it stops accelerating,

it stalls and explodes. Now, the weeks since have seen massive and rising public awareness of Seacott the terrorism detention facility in El Salvador being used as a concentration camp by the Trump regime. This might rightly be called a new and unprecedented abuse. But there's a couple of issues here,

at least as far as Yarvin sees them. For one thing, the people targeted there have been migrants, people who are in the US, either illegally or in the US on visas that have been revoked, people who have been accused of being part of Trindagua, but not the people that Jarvin wants to see liquidated, because, as he writes in this column, the thing that he thinks the Trump administration should be doing right now is quite literally gassing media

personalities and politicians who don't align with his viewpoint, basically literally killing the opposition. And since he's shown to be unwilling to do that, the fact that he's shipping people to concentration camps on its own isn't terrifying enough.

temporary halt of such deportations. I'm referring to something else that's happened due to the sheer panic caused by the knowledge that our president has a concentration camp and has been talking about shipping US citizen dissidents there. I'm talking about stuff like the fact that formerly conservative columnist Bill Crystal is now calling for the outright abolition of ice and the arch neoliberal mealymouth David Brooks calling for a general strike in the pages of the New York Times

while quoting from the Communist Manifesto. This is more than just a vibe shift. It's an open realization and acceptance by prominent people who are neither radical nor revolutionaries that any action, even the formerly unimaginable, might be necessary and

justified in this regime. Now, make no mistake. First off, this is because a lot of these people are worried about their own privileges going away under a dictatorial regime, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a crack in the very foundation of the authoritarian power structure. Jarvin is scared then, because we weren't supposed to be here now. Harvard was supposed to have folded like Columbia

and then have been slowly and quietly liquidated. The tame press was supposed to turn wholly for the regime or be disappeared, not to quote Karl Marx, and urge people into the streets to do a general strike. So I don't find all this cheery because I think David Brooks is going to become shithead Shay Govara. I am embraced, however, by the failure that this represents for them and above

us who seek unchecked dominance. Cracks are also visible in the recent history of Elon Musk, who has watched the value of the stock that underpins his whole empire collapse. He fought desperately to convince Trump not to go through with the tariffs that would punish it further. The result we see Trump assuring his inner circle that Elon is on the way out, while Musk himself prepares to step back from doge In the hope that it will somehow

protect the remainder of his ambitions. These are all good signs, and the damage will continue to spread. However, and this brings me to my next prediction. The Empire's gonna strike back. We are in for a hot summer, my friends, and there's no way around that. I mean this in the literal sense that it will probably be the hottest summer on record, although that fact will be true of every subsequent summer in our lives. But I also mean this in the sense that things are going to cook off

in the streets very soon. This is something the administration has quite openly been waiting to see. Trump has made no secret of his desire to use the Insurrection Act not only at the border, but to send US troops and US cities to crush riots and punish leftist demonstrators. This was a desire hatched in reaction to the George Floyd uprising, and it always seems to be envisioned by

the right as targeted against black clad antifa types. The reality is that anti fascists have not been a consistent presence on the ground around the country for some time, at least not organizing in the way that they were back when antifa was a buzzword. There are numerous reasons for this, but the biggest is that the fascist movement has moved beyond waving flags in the street and getting into fistfights to try and scare people. A lot of

them are running federal law enforcement agencies in the military. Now, Proud boys just tain't a priority, not for those on the left who want to stop this, or frankly, for the administration. I expect protests around the country in the coming months for several reasons, but the likeliest event to provoke severe civil disruption is a right and food prices in the rise of everything else in price, as well

as a collapsing economy courtesy of the president's tariffs. There are already numerous signs of this, both in terms of the volume of shipping coming into the United States and early signs of collapsing crop yields in the United States. And this is where a study of history helps one out, because nothing but nothing breaks down regimes like rising bread prices, and any attempt to crack down will be stymy by the fact that a decent chunk of the elites who

backed Trump before will be suffering too. Obviously, the people closest to him are making bank off the economic upswings and downswings over the whole tariff issue. But there's a lot of other people, people who supported him, people who thought he had their back, who aren't quite close enough to power, and they're watching Trump shoot their own fortunes in the kneecap because they built their money on free trade.

I won't pretend to know where things are going to pop off or will be the hottest, but the evidence shows the regime at least SPEC's Washington d C to play a central role in what comes next. Republican Congress members recently reintroduced a bill to repeal DC's self rule, and Trump appointed Ed Martin to be the city attorney, a man who, in the words of USA Today columnist

Chris Brennan quote, lacks experience but loves revenge. Now, the fact that Elon Musk and his Doze cronies left so many in the city and the surrounding area unemployed after their purge of the administrative state means that there's an even higher number of motivated, angry people with free time and experiencing organizing large, complex systems who have nothing to do right now. A similar set of circumstances brought us

to the twenty twenty uprisings. This was not just a product of the months of isolation, or of the brutality of George Floyd's murder, but of the sheer number of people who were out of work and who were finally given a chance to take out their anxiety at an authoritarian president tightening his grip. And today that grip is even tighter, the danger more real. We have a president openly discussing his desire to put American citizens in a

foreign concentration camp. Trump and his inner circle are hoping for protests that stay isolated to DC and perhaps a few major Blue cities, Portland and the like. This would provide an opportunity to send in the troops, to utilize the Insurrection Act, to shoot people in the street, and to send some ringleaders off to l Salvador. This would

be the riskiest option for Trump in some ways. Pete Hegseth has not been a competent or popular Secretary of Defense, and asking US troops to fire on protesters opens up the risk that some junior officer might bulk at that order, which could create a cascading chain of disobedience. Such things

have sparked rapid collapse in other dictatorships throughout history. There's also the chance that spectacular and comprehensive violence by the military might succeed and thus strangle any protest movement in the cradle. So we might call this the high risk, high reward option. And I should note that Don Trump has more than a few times in the past chosen the high risk, high reward option, so I don't consider

this unlikely. But it won't be lost on Trump or his cronies that the violence which met the first protest in twenty twenty provoked the largest domestic uprising and living memory. People have not forgotten this, and some blue state Democrats have even made let's say, confusing noises to that effect. Case in point, Governor Bob Ferguson of Washington just signed to bill barring other state National Guard units from entering

Washington without his approval unless they were mobilized by the President. Now, as that last part might key you when on, this bill doesn't have a lot of legal force or any really at all, but it's a sign that even fairly milk toast elected Democrats are starting to consider the real possibility of a federal invasion of their states. The President has discussed sending out of state troops into blue cities before, largely in the context of cracking down on immigration and

sanctuary cities. This is all dangerous language, but going first other than just language carries risk for the regime too. I would not be shocked if we were to see the Texas National Guard or whoever, whichever state occupying let's say Chicago, after federal law enforcement makes good on the threats that have been made by members of the Trump administration to arrest governors who aid in a bet undocumented

migrants like JB. Pritzker, and an act like that would surely spark mass protests in Chicago and very likely elsewhere. The fact that a move like that would have such a risk of sparking mass resistance as well as further legal challenges, might keep the Trump administration focused on smaller fish and less dangerous outrages, at least for the time being. And if that's the route they choose, I think something different might be likely. And I call this potential path

forward the pressure cooker, and we'll talk about that. But first, here's more ads. When public unrest exploded in twenty twenty. It did so after four solid years of build up. If you'll remember, the earliest fascist anti fascist street clashes of that period, started before the twenty sixteen elections, were largely focused around speeches and campuses by right wing provocateurs

and dueling demonstrations in a handful of cities. The first wave of such activity crested in Charlottesville twenty seventeen with tragic results, but the vibe it set and the people it trained continued to take part in street actions, and many of them formed the infrastructural core of the movement

that exploded onto the scene after George Floyd's murder. The last year of serious protests have focused more on the genocide and Gaza than anything, and it's not coincidental that the first wave of deportations have heavily targeted legal residents who took part in those demonstrations. Since Trump took office and DOZE started doing its thing, there have been more

large scale demos that focused directly on the regime. Now, these have been quite manageable from the regime's point of view, and they have not yet attracted the same kind of crackdown but that won't remain the case as people grow more desperate. Any fool can see that the apparatus of repression constructed to punish genocide protesters will be turned on democrats, former federal employees, and people who are just hungry and

pissed about rising food prices. However, this represents another tightrope scenario for the regime. These demonstrations are large, and unlike student protests against Israel, the media has proved less eager to marginalize the participants as extremists. As time goes on and things get worse, folks who last year scoffed at college students occupying campus buildings may themselves consider if perhaps

it might be time to fox some shit up. This will be an uneven process with sudden leaps forward and pulls back, and it will provoke an equally uneven state response. There will be attempts to send so called instigators and organizers overseas to will solve or unless the public reaction to this, which is building as I type, continues to escalate to the extent that it becomes unfeasible. If so, there are ample domestic locations to detain or even disappear

those the regime considers dangerous. First on the chopping block will be the people whose heads are currently closest to the blade, organizers and demonstrators against genocide, whose citizenship is not at all in question. I expect if large disruptive demonstrations do threaten the administration's hold, they will also start to our target Antifa again, which will start with the targeting of longtime activists, many of whom would have been

people arrested or at least heavily surveilled in twenty twenty. However, it won't end there, and it will quickly expand to elected Democrats, new people organizing protests, folks who have never had anything to do with any of the kind of anti fascist actions that so captivated Fox News back in

twenty twenty. I will be shocked if we make it more than another year without a serious attempt to brand Antifa demastic terror organization, and if that succeeds in a way that has legal force, then the fact that there is no such organization won't matter. Trump's Feds will do

what we've watched Ice do with Trendagua. They'll break down the door of whoever they wish argue tattoos or possessions of certain literature or whatever is proof of membership, and then those who survive the raids will find themselves in the most restrictive detention the regime feels secure placing them in. If things follow what I suspect is the likeliest path. We will watch this process ebb and flow over the

next several months each spring and summer. Protests will grow and peak in the hottest months, with new cities and tactics being attempted regularly by groups constantly reeling from raids that are devastating and terrifying, but due to the incompetence of an FBI whose investigative capacity has been neutered, fail to really disrupt things. As the weather cools off, exhausted

activists will lick their wounds and make new plans. Scattered acts of disruption carried out by small groups or individual cells occur year round, but I expect large scale demonstrations and clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement to follow a pattern not so different from what Afghanistan veterans knew was fighting season, hot summers of mass activity, winters of raids, and experimentation to scout holes for the next year's offensive, and as time goes on, the energy will build, the

tension will build, and of course we might find ourselves reaching towards something that explodes in the not too distant future, perhaps a year or two down the line. Now, of course, none of this will occur in a vacuum or independent of the news churn that we've been drowning in for years. And this brings me to my next prediction, which is

the coming of politics as unusual. I apologize for coming back to the David Brooks of it all, but seeing a man who in twenty seventeen wrote the Trump had changed and we really needed to stop stressing out over him, and then wrote a column attacking millennials for their tribalism. Call for a general strike is a sign, and it's not a sign that Brooks has gotten smarter. It's a sign that we've entered radical times, and that radicalization spares

not even the centrist. If the worst case scenario occurs in a few weeks from now, US soldiers are gunning down demonstrators while ice officers krt elected Democrats off the Seacott feel free to disregard this passage. But if the somewhat slower path prevails, I expect to see more politicians and news editors chase viewers as they sprint left or

at least away from the dissolving center. We've watched this process occur on the right during the Biden years, and to a degree it is still occurring out of a fear of reprisals under the Trump regime. I'm finalizing the script on the Day sixty Minutes producer Bill Owens step down over interference from paramount executives into his coverage of Donald Trump. But the polls have started moving against the right.

Trump's public approval on immigration policy is under water for the first time in years, and his approval on everything else is, while not always at record lows, diving with significant speed. The next several months of shipping data, as well as concerning early reporting on farm yields, suggests a near future in which a lot less will be available

for everyone. We saw what a rising price of eggs did to Biden, and we've also seen Senator Chris van Holland go almost overnight from a marginal figure in US politics to one of the most famous Democrats in the nation, all because he had the modest courage to fly to l Salvador and call the president's use of a foreign black site what it was. There will be more people like Van Holland who display courage previously unseen in a

moment of trial. But much more than that, there will be opportunists, those who see the wind blowing and chase the approval of crowds more willing to countenance radical action

in the streets than they were a year ago. Most politicians and most thought leaders in the old media are reactive, and I'm not saying that this will change, merely that what they react to will change because of who is in charge now, and because of the desperation of the times brought on by Republican policies, which is going to pay to target on the backs of conservative leaders as large as the targets they'd been painting on the backs of dissidence. And all of this means one thing, which

is we're approaching the age of weird terror. So much has happened in this shitty, stupid year that I think we've all forgotten. Twenty twenty five opened with a military veteran blowing himself up at a cyber truck in front of the Trump Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. His reasoning was based as much on the numerous head injuries he'd suffered in his service as it was on his exposure to right wing propaganda, which convinced him that the

Democrats needed to be dealt with. But he saw things clearly enough to know that yet another mass shooting or self emulation, or even a run of the mill bomb wouldn't have garnered him or his manifesto any attention. So instead he picked a cyber truck and a Trump building, symbols of the two most viral men of our very stupid era, and he blew one of those up in front of the other. And by gummet, we all did pay attention for a few days, at least late last year.

And Anna, miss gunman the government believes to be Luigi Mangione, was even more successful at holding our attention with an even stranger attack, a brazen and igh perfectly executed assassination carried out by a man with a dazzling smile and the wisdom to pick the most universally hated target that

exists today, a healthcare ceo. We have all watched so many mass shootings at schools, at grocery stores, nightclubs, everywhere imaginable that they've lost the ability to shock us, But targeted assassinations of people at the top of the food chain are so rare that they can't help but draw eyeballs, and sheer, rollicking strangeness like we saw in Vegas, has a captivating power all its own. We will see more of both kinds of attacks in the months to come.

The arson attempt on Governor Shapiro's home, bizarre at least for the extensive damage done, might be seen as another data point on this list, But as new figures rise to prominence within new protest movements, we will see attempts to kill them. Furious and deranged Trump supporters armed with cars and guns and Trump branded by rocket dives will do as they've been doing, and this part won't be new.

What I do expect will be new is the increased threat felt by the oligarchs at the top of the system, as intelligent and patient young people continue to plot ways to go after them and the places and times where they feel invulnerable. And I also expect that editors and journalists will continue to learn that these actions draw eyeballs

more than almost anything else. And while all that's going on, the truly unbalanced among us will find ways to hitchhike off the well publicized turmoil coming our way and make their own confounding statements. There will be public suicides and attacks utilizing weapons and tools we can't yet imagine, at least not openly on a podcast without receiving a visit from some friendly Alphabet boy or another. I don't know what exactly to expect beyond the unexpected and the very

very silly. And of course, as we talk about weird terrorism, I don't mean to discount the Nazi accelerationist types here. They'll keep trying if they want to raise above the chatter and an even more crowded media ecosystem. Even they're going to find ways to get weird with it after all, and attack No One Notices isn't likely to accelerate much of anything. And I guess that's what I've got right now. I've got ten pages or so on what I see coming.

I didn't come up with a smooth, sexy ending for this like a writer should, because I'm tired and thinking about this isn't fun. But I did a lot, and there you are. I suppose the thing you're asking now is what the fuck do I do about it? And you know, let's what we talk about a lot on this show. Organize with your friends, get involved, find ways to help people, take us, stop the bleed glass and the love of God, keep your eyes open.