The Land of Nowhere

Okay, let’s see if I can get this together, shall we? Tried on Tuesday night, but I was too tired from work and the Tesla Takedown Tuesday protest.

Here’s a pic of one section, taken from across the street, call it “proof of fuck you, Elon”:

It may not seem immediately related, but naturally, it all is.

Now. Where. Were. We? Ah yes, the 2026 elections that Trump knows the Republicans are going to lose, and lose badly. It’d take a lot to lose the Senate, but it’s possible, and he – and his MAGA movement – do not give up power voluntarily.

In part one, I provided a couple of action items, of things you can be doing; in this one, I can be more specific about what needs to happen and when.

Before we can get into the meat of that, though, we have to talk about something else: timelines.

This writeup is something like the timeline I think we can expect if there are no other major events that allow him to reach his and his administration’s MAGA goal of declaring insurrection and imposing martial law, either de facto or de jure, through other means, like those he’s trying right now in Minnesota.

In reality, all these potential timelines are intertwined, affecting each other directly and indirectly. But if I’m going to unwind them from each other enough to make them clear to other people, I have to leave those connections out. It’s not really valid to leave them out; it’s just necessary for illustrative purposes.

It also assumes that projections as we have now continue, that the polls don’t swing the other way, that the 86% of people who oppose his plan to attack Greenland suddenly decide it’s actually a good idea, that everybody decides Federal violence against Americans is good actually, that just enough people of colour decide white nationalism is basically okay because they’ll be the exception (spoiler: they won’t be the exception), and so on. Americans are stupid motherfuckers with a shorter memory span than mayflies, so I don’t rule it out. But let’s say that he remains widely hated.

With that framing set, let’s get into the election itself. Most of this will seem awfully familiar to you if you paid attention in 2020; it’s not a new plan. It has some new details, but the broad strokes are identical.

First, Trump will spend as much time as he can afford in 2026 working to discredit the elections in advance. He’s already been doing this, attacking blue states as corrupt, as fraudulent, and attacking mail-in and machine-counted votes. He says he wants to lead a campaign to eliminate both, but particularly vote by mail.

(The interesting part of his attacks on machine counting is that every state uses machine counting, because it’s better! It is straight up better and more accurate. What’s important is to keep paper originals for hand-counting in the event of any necessary recounts, and most states have provisions for that, both machine and, if close enough, by multiply-checked hand counting, which is where you do get more accurate than machine counts, at the cost of high expense, both in money and in time.

This may be a matter of expanding his – and his administration’s – attacks on voting to all states, even red states, as a general attack on democracy and voting. As demonstrated previously, this is now a white nationalist movement, and white nationalism is by its nature fascist. There is a ruling minority fit to rule over society, and all the rest of society must fall into line or else, and that never ends up a democratic state. It’s just fascism.)

Secondly, he will do everything he can to disrupt the election mechanically, via new pronouncements, new executive orders, new court cases, whatever he and his evil crew can manage. He’s already promised he’ll do this, and for once you can take him on his word. It’ll continue. He’s just lost in court again – against us in particular – with the courts shutting down his attempts to break our electoral system, but he’ll just file something new. He’d shut them down entirely if he could – he’s out there saying so – but I don’t think he’ll be able to manage that.

Finally, as votes come in, he will attack slow-counting states (like the Cascadian states, but not just) demanding that their voting and/or counting stop as soon as he and his ruling clique see the best sub-count of results they think they’re likely to see. Given voting patterns, that will mean stops so early that not even votes even cast on the day of the election would be counted.

States will, naturally, ignore this and continue counting.

At that point, his administration will condemn the results as fraudulent. Will there be legal cases? One assumes there will be legal cases. The bigger question is whether there will be ballot seizures by Federal agencies, and given what’s happening with the murder of Renee Good, it seems likely. Besides, they tried some of that in 2020; they will try it again.

Frankly, if you’re reading this, you lived through the last coup attempt and you already know how all this works. The point of the lies isn’t to convince anyone; the point is to keep the lies swirling and the pot stirring so everyone involved or willing to go along keeps pretending the lies about the elections are genuine concerns, or at least worth considering.

Then: remember false electors?

Remember all those fake “alternate slate” electors? Remember those?

Remember how some of them tried to show up in DC to get counted in place of the real ones? Some of them got arrested. Some of them got charged, some of them got convicted, for fraud.

Let’s talk about disputed representation, shall we?

They won’t actually be under dispute. Not in reality. The results will have been announced weeks before, along with the results of many recounts. Court cases will likely have been cleared away, hopefully with some amount of compliance to the law involved.

But all that was true in 2020, and that didn’t stop Trump from trying anyway. He and Vance and Miller and the whole rotten crew will say they’re disputed, and may even try to pretend they mean it.

Since the Senate – not the House – officially opens the new Congress, let’s look there first.

The Senate opens the new Congress because it is the continuing body, with two thirds of its membership returning. It doesn’t have to adopt rules; it can move into action very quickly.

One of the first acts will be for Republican Secretary of the Senate Jackie Barber to receive election certificates from any and all new Senators, which will then be announced by…

…President of the Senate and Vice President of the United States J.D. Vance.

I can’t speak to the Honourable Jackie Barber, but I can most definitely say that unlike Mike Pence, J.D. Vance is fully onboard with these projects. He will not hesitate to perpetrate the treasonous fraud should they decide to go with it.

Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, there are no returning officers, and the VP plays no role. Instead, the duty of receiving the certificates of election, announcing the new Representatives, and calling the House to order lies with the previous Clerk of the House. Or, if they’re not available, the previous House’s Sergent-at-Arms.

Meet the Honourable Kevin McCumber, Republican, and Clerk of the House. Meet the Honourable William McFarland, Sergent-at-Arms, wielder of the Mace of the Republic, appointed by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Republican) at the start of this current Congress.

McFarland has seen some shit. I have some doubt as to whether he’d go along. I don’t know enough about McCumber to have any guesses. But I do know that either way, recognition of new Representatives is all in Republican hands.

So. It’s a simple game for four players. I stress again: none of this is legal. It is barely pretending to be legal, it’s a hypothetical plan for an illegal coup with just enough pretence at legality to let people who want to believe in it go ahead and say they believe in it. It’s not about a plausible legality at any point; it’s just about permission to pretend that it’s legal.

Trump et al declare the elections disputed or just fraudulent, and either presses still-open court cases or files new ones in the days before January 3rd.

Citing open cases and/or “clear election fraud,” J.D. Vance either recognises “alternate slate” Senators or simply refuses to recognise any new Senators from “disputed” states, as Mike Pence was supposed to either recognise the fraudulent electors or declare an impasse, and not allow “either slate” from “disputed” states to be counted. And so, the Senate is in session, with a quorum and a Republican supermajority – along with, possibly, several empty seats.

Kevin McCumber – or a replacement we haven’t met yet, still to be appointed – does the same dance in the House. If Kevin gets swapped out late in the year, I would just go ahead and assume that’s for election rejection purposes and that the coup is on.

Regardless, if the House does not have quorum, it cannot do business, so that would be one play. Another play would be to seat false Representatives with a Republican supermajority, seating those few Democrats elected from heavily-jerrymandered Republican states as “fairly elected,” along with the false Republican representatives from Democratic states.

It is quite possible that – citing the arrests of some “alternate slate” electors in 2021 – Trump orders the arrest of the actually-elected Senators and Representatives.

Protests erupt en masse; Trump declares an insurrection, invokes the Insurrection Act, enacts martial law, and we get to see whether the US Army will refuse illegal orders to occupy several American states and oppress the citizenry in the face of a coup, and the last remnants of the old Republic will have been swept away.

…

Christ, this all sounds so stupid, doesn’t it? It sounds like such conspiracy theory bullshit. But I remind myself and you both that this was the 2020-2021 plan, and they almost pulled it off. With someone like J.D. “Couchfucker” Vance in place of Mike Pence, you know the elector count would’ve stalled out. It’s not even a question.

So as thick, as just fucking dumb as all this is…

…we have to be ready for it. At very least, we have to be watching very carefully for the same progress steps as were clearly visible last time. Building up to the January 6th coup attempt was largely visible. I was warning neighbours, who were not really believing me until it happened. I doubt it will be much different this time.

We have to be ready for a national, comprehensive protest if this goes down. A walkout of everyone, on every level. Absolutely nothing can be allowed to be done; no work, no school, no optional spending, no nothing. Pay your rent if you must, but don’t buy anything.

A lot of leftists and posers keep going “general strike when?” THIS IS WHEN, and the time to prep to pull it off is now.

Demanding “general strike now!” as in right now, as I write this, with no prep and no coordination which is so obviously a recipe for failure that at this point I presume they’re opposition ops, roleplayers, or useful idiots. This won’t be some kind of holiday. You will have a new, unpaid job: marching in the streets demanding removal of the dictator. It will not be safe, but it’ll be your new temporary career – as well as mine – despite that. You need to have food stocked up in advance, so you don’t have to worry about bank cards not working. You may need to have water stocked up, but hopefully not. You need to be ready to help people who haven’t prepped for fucking anything because it’s not real until it happens to them. And you need to have communications and networks set up, preferably ones that don’t rely on the internet.

FRS radios, which do not require a license, would be good purchases right about now. Just for one example. Get a HAM license, if you can; the technician license is not particularly difficult. And don’t just buy shit and stick it in a drawer, either. Know how they work. Get used to using them in advance.

But it can’t be just up to individuals self-organising; that’s not enough. States have to be ready for this possibility. States will have to protect their citizens; despite Trumpist protestations, they are not “extensions” of the Federal government. Legally, in theory, it’s the states which are ultimately sovereign; states can dissolve the Federal government without its permission. It’s right there in the Constitution.

That dissolution won’t happen here, not de jure (by law), but it could happen de facto (in reality) for a little while, or maybe a lotta while, depending upon how badly everything goes in this event. States must be ready to act both on their own and in alliance to protect themselves, and protect us, while we all work to protect each other.

Cascadia, in short, may be a necessary reality forced upon us. The New England Confederation may rise from the ashes of history. California may, in fact, über alles for a while – in reality, if not, of course, in name.

If Trump and Vance and Miller et al do this, it’s not just that it will get ugly, it’s that it has to get ugly in order to reverse it.

In some small ways, we’re already there. We’re getting tastes of it now. They’re small samples, limited, but still scaling to the tongue. Minnesota, in particular, is right now having to protect its citizens from the Federal government, which is threatening retaliation and the Insurgency Act in return.

Support Minnesota, help them, participate in walkouts, participate in protests, do whatever is needed, because if we get there, the full-bore version – the version Trump and Miller and Vance and Musk and the TESCREAL crowd so desperately want – will be much, much worse.

All this could’ve been prevented. But we ran out of “easy” ways to defeat it a year and a half ago, having pulled a semi-easy way back out of the fire via the seemingly impossible feat of getting Joe Biden elected President, and defeating Trump’s first coup attempt. We ran out of options to stop it from ever happening almost 20 years ago, in 2007, when the Democrats gave Bush II a pass on his illegal torture regime. We ran out of easy ways to stop this crisis from even starting in 1998-1999, when Christian Fundamentalist political culture took over GOP political culture at the ground level and the money people could not be convinced this was a really, really bad idea despite how many low-level roles the fundies chose to fill.

We no longer have “easy” ways, and we no longer have “good” outcomes. Too much damage has been too long done. What we have instead of “easy” and “good” is hard work, salvage, and, if we’re lucky, opportunities to rebuild.

But we do still have those. By some miracle – and by a lot of hard work by some of us – we still have that much.

If Trump, Vance, Miller, and the rest of the traitors try this, though, and we aren’t ready – we won’t even have that.

So get to work. Be ready.

And be good.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.