They Want it to Happen

Lately, I've been thinking about all the beating some of us got a few years ago when we predicted what's happening now: A climate crisis in full swing, diseases spreading out of control, a looming pandemic, fascists resurgent, the military in our cities, civil unrest spilling over into acts of extraordinary violence, social media in the hands of our worst enemies, economic war with China, prolonged government shutdowns, and world leaders fairly open that we're witnessing genocide, even paying for it, but they're doing practically nothing about it.

To make matters worse, just as bird flu begins showing up once again, the government conducts a surprise mass firing at the CDC, with more than a thousand employees suddenly seeing their badges "immediately deactivated." It's one of several direct attacks on the agency, but it's also the worst one, targeting senior leadership, including the director of the nation's measles response. Meanwhile, the Trump regime is using the government shutdown as an opportunity to fire thousands more scientists across the government, not just disease specialists, but climate science researchers too.

It's exactly the kind of thing you do if you want to suppress information and kill future generations of public servants.

That's why many of us started prepping in the first place, not just stacking up food but figuring out how to protect ourselves from diseases. (We've also started using HOCl in humidifiers, and it seems to work.) I've written tons of articles on preparing for specific disasters, but I also still watch channels like City Prepping to learn more.

As for the peace deal in Gaza, at the risk of sounding ultra doomer, Israel is already violating its own deal. Why? Because the hostages were never the point. Turning Gaza into a blockchain paradise, the next Dubai...

That's the point.

Sometimes, you have to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. You have to see how the ICE raids are connected to our economic problems, how our economic problems are connected to our public health problems, how it's all reinforced by larger collective psychological biases, and in turn how all that's driving a climate crisis that threatens humans with extinction, within decades. In turn, the climate crisis is driving increasingly inhuman behavior, more wars, and more greed.

It's a lot.

This week, it's been especially revealing to watch the Trump administration reopen their trade war with China, a crisis of their own making, one that was supposed to be wrapped up in September. Look at the stock market, just now recovered and moving forward from April's tariff tantrums. You look at the situation, and you see the only possible motivation to engage in such flagrant stupidity.

You look at Argentina, and the $20 billion bailout that we're paying for after their president's failed economic policies plunge the nation into recession. You watch Argentina's president rubbing elbows with the world's top tech CEOs. You understand. Trump is bailing out his rich friends, who back autocrats like Milei because he pushes the policies they want. Milei guts agencies and then buys corporate, privatized solutions. He makes Silicon Valley rich at the expense of his citizens.

It's exactly what's happening here.

The chaos is the point.

It's a simple plan. Strip away social safety nets. Shut down government agencies. Replace public services with private ones. Crash the economy. Create a rationale for bailouts. Increase wealth inequality. Repeat.

About a year ago, I floated an analysis of points by Thomas Malthus in his "Essay on The Principle of Population," where he promotes the idea of engineering mass death as a check on population growth. It's worth a refresher.

In short, Malthus pointed out the planet's finite resources and argued we wouldn't be able to sustain exponential population growth.

He was half right.

No, the planet can't sustain endless exponential growth of any population, much less one that consumes as much as humans. But Malthus didn't love the planet. He simply hated the poor. On the one hand, he opposed birth control. On the other, he endorsed mass death. He opposed medicine and public health. He opposed aid.

At one point, Malthus even urges leaders to encourage bad public health policies that foster the spread of disease. He explicitly criticizes doctors for trying to save lives. In his view, the super rich should simply let the poor die, and they should do everything they can to make sure they live in the filthiest conditions.

Does this sound familiar?

Many of you saw this coming, and you tried to explain it, only to get laughed off or called paranoid. Now look who's in charge of public health. Anti-vaxxers. People who don't just ignore clean air and vaccines. They actively fight them. They actively encourage everyone to go out and catch measles, flu, Covid...

They blame neurodivergence on Tylenol.

Malthus couldn't have picked a better team.

There's no real logical consistency in someone like Malthus. He wanted everyone who wasn't rich to breed new workers and consumers, and he wanted them to generate wealth for his own class before dropping dead from any number of threats that he personally felt were pointless to try and stop.

Two years ago, it struck some corners of the internet as laughably absurd to suggest the super rich of today are following the playbook of someone like Malthus. After all, they go on and on about wanting to colonize space with hundreds of billions of humans. They themselves are trying to birth as many children as possible. People like us got called "idiots" for suggesting that what they actually want is to kill most of us, expedite the collapse, and rule over the ashes.

Not so absurd now, is it?

Today, I'm getting a refreshing dose of honesty. And honesty always feels better than the relentless deluge of delusional optimism and distraction that floods our screens. For starters, Douglas Rushkoff has published a smart new piece that offers a lot of the same views I've been exploring here. For some reason, the vast majority of the public still doesn't seem to understand a basic set of truths about what's happening. As Rushkoff and many others have pointed out, the world's mega-millionaires and billionaires know exactly what's going on with the climate crisis.

They only differ in how they're planning for it.

Some of them believe they can build bunkers strong enough to insulate them from the collapse. Others are simply hoovering up as much wealth as possible, while building private armies to fend off the sick and starving masses as they start fighting for food, clothing, and shelter. As Rushkoff points out, and as I've said on here before, this doesn't stop with ICE. The point is to build a military force with zero empathy, who subscribes completely to social Darwinism, who doesn't believe in things like public health or living wages, who only wants to kill-kill-kill.

The immigration raids are training for urban warfare. The genocide in Gaza is a big test and a laboratory for the design of new weapons and new combat strategies, for deployment on American, European, and Canadian soil against their own populations when the medicine runs out, when the food runs out, when the water runs out. They're going to designate anyone who stands up to them a terrorist.

In the U.S., they're going to create their own Hamas.

They've already called it Antifa.

Richard Crim has said it. Douglas Rushkoff has said it. Sarah Kendzior has said it. Naomi Klein has said it. As Kendzior has pointed out several times, Trump isn't a conventional fascist. He's an international mafia boss who employs fascist ideology in order to enrich himself and his friends. He's not an idiot. He's not a genius. He's a cunning grifter who can manipulate perception. He plays MAGA, but what many liberals don't want to admit is that he also plays them. Every time he gets up and runs his mouth, every time he instigates a scandal, he knows what he's doing.

Maybe he doesn't have a master plan.

He doesn't need one, but he's happy to execute someone else's master plan, like Project 2025, as long as he gets paid enough to do it.

We're not watching a conventional fascist takeover. We're not watching 1930s Germany again. That's simply the closet analogy we've got. We're watching something new, something that draws inspiration from fascists but also goes far beyond them in terms of their worldviews and the depths of their depravity.

We've got to imagine Nazis with drones and robots, with mass surveillance systems, who are deeply terrified of the apocalypse they've created, who are willing to destroy not millions but tens of millions of lives while presiding over and actively managing a mass extinction event. That's some grim stuff.

Just over the last 2-3 years, we've watched the world's biggest tech and financial companies give up on their climate pledges. They're going full steam ahead with coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. They're going with renewable energy, too, when it doesn't threaten them. They're pursuing the most suicidal agendas, like AI, because they no longer believe they can stop what they've set into motion. They only believe in amassing wealth, at the expense of accelerating the collapse.

The choice between Democrats and Republicans has become a choice between a slow collapse and a fast one. That's the difference.

As Richard Crim has recently noted, world leaders might very well try to geoengineer the atmosphere in a last ditch effort to buy themselves some time. They'll most likely go with the cheapest option, injecting massive amounts of sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere. Some experts call this "solar engineering," and they point to evidence in the form of volcanic eruptions that have, in fact, significantly cooled the planet in the past. Climate scientists have also pointed out that, somewhat ironically, our diesel ships emitted enough sulfur aerosols to keep a significant amount of global warming at bay. New regulations are actually hurting us on that front.

What can we expect?

We're going to see echoes of history everywhere. It's going to be a remix of great depressions, great famines, world wars, genocides, and so on. It's all going to be unfolding in different ways in different pockets of the world, punctuated with super floods and super storms like we've seen over the last year.

At this point, just staying grounded in reality counts for a lot.

Some of us are going to deal with this by prepping, by building what communities we can, or by throwing on a frog costume.

Do what works for you.

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