Unfolding Very Rapidly
October 6, 2025
It’s spelled out in Project 2025. Dems warned about it during last year’s presidential campaign. The warnings have been getting louder and louder.
The ball is rollling.
From Robert Reich:
Friends,
The direction we’re going is either martial law or civil war.
Americans from so-called “red” states, with the backing of their Republican governors and legislatures, are on the brink of using lethal force against Americans in so-called “blue” states, whose Democratic governors and legislatures strongly oppose the moves.
I pray we don’t come close to this but Trump has now ordered the deployment of 400 members of the Texas National Guard to several states, including Oregon and Illinois — ostensibly to protect ICE agents and facilities from protesters. The first group of Texas Guard troops is expected to arrive in Chicago tomorrow.
The troops are under the control of the Pentagon, with Trump as commander-in-chief. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “the orders will be effective immediately for an initial period of 60 days.”
Less than an hour after Trump’s order, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, responded that he “fully authorize[s]” such a move by Trump. “You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let Texas Guard do it,” Abbott said in a post on X.
The Democratic governors of Oregon and Illinois have sought emergency injunctions against these and similar deployments.
Late Sunday night, a federal judge in Oregon (appointed by Trump) temporarily blocked the mobilization of any state national guards to that state. Today, a federal judge in Illinois declined to block the deployment of National Guard units there.
What is Trump’s plan? What is the troika behind him (Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Russell Vought) seeking to accomplish, and how?
Sad to say, I believe Trump and his enablers have worked this out in advance. At the Pentagon on September 30, 2025, Trump pitched the plan to use American soldiers for the purpose of punishing his political enemies.
He told hundreds of United States military leaders that they must prioritize “defending the homeland” against the “invasion from within” in American cities run by “radical-left Democrats.” He stated his intention is to use certain cities “as training grounds for our military.”
The first step has been for the Department of Homeland Security to deploy ICE agents to use aggressive tactics in targeted cities.
ICE has sent masked and armed federal agents into cities with Democratic mayors — arresting and detaining people outside immigration courtrooms, firing tear gas and chemical munitions on city streets without warning, raiding homes and apartments in the middle of the night and arresting their occupants willy-nilly — including Americans and people legally in the country, and children, using racial profiling to stop anyone looking Latino and demand proof of citizenship without warrants, and detaining people they believe are here illegally, and doing so without due process.
The second step is for such aggressive tactics to provoke demonstrations, and for Trump to exaggerate the scale and severity of them.
Trump has described Portland as a “war-ravaged” city “burning to the ground,” with “insurrectionists all over the place.” In fact, demonstrations there had been muted and rarely expanded beyond a one-block radius of the immigration detention facility in the city.
On September 6, 2025, Trump posted on social media an image of the Chicago skyline in flames, stating “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” including a depiction of himself in the image of the fictitious warmonger character Lt. Col. Kilgore from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, titling the post “Chipocalypse Now.”
Yesterday, he described Chicago as a crime-ridden “war zone.”
The third step is for Trump and Hegseth to deploy federalized National Guard troops to control the demonstrators, an act that’s already enflaming the public and provoking some actual violence.
Until Trump’s announcement that he was sending troops into Portland, protests rarely numbered more than two dozen people. Since his announcement, clashes have become more violent.
The fourth step will be for Trump and Hegseth to invoke the Insurrection Act.
All of this is preamble for Trump’s real goal: to invoke the Insurrection Act, which empowers a president to deploy the U.S. military and to federalize the National Guard units of the individual states to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or armed rebellion against the federal government of the United States.
It is a statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the president’s power to deploy the U.S. military within the United States.
The Insurrection Act requires that after invoking it, but before exercising its powers, a president must formally order the dispersion of people committing civil unrest or armed rebellion.
The major clause of the Insurrection Act reads:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory, where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ, for the same purposes, such part of the land or naval force of the United States, as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the pre-requisites of the law in that respect.
***
As I said, I hope we don’t come near to this. I hope the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, stops Trump’s plan. But I believe it is Trump’s plan (the details of which have been worked out by the troika of Vance, Miller, and Vought), and they are implementing it as quickly as they can.
I don’t want to unduly alarm you, but you need to be aware of this imminent danger. It’s unfolding very rapidly.
Please share.
The Contrarian
January 13, 2025
I just read the news that my favorite columnist, Jennifer Rubin, resigned from the Washington Post today. Oh happy day!! She was the final reason I was hanging on to my subscription and I immediately went over to the Post to cancel with a raised fist… a joyous act of defiance and resistance.
Heh, heh, I had already canceled my subscription.
I initially resisted canceling when the Post declined to endorse Kamala. My reasoning had to do with the importance of quality journalism, especially in the form of Jennifer Rubin. Authoritarians want the mainstream media to collapse and I didn’t want to be a part of that. However, I must have had second thoughts. By the time Bezos gave a million bucks to the inauguration, and certainly by the time he pulled a political cartoon that was critical of said contribution, I was already out.
I continue to receive Post articles in my email because subscriptions are not prorated and mine will continue until February 7. But, then, fini! Yay, one less thing to ceremoniously do. I done did it already.
Jennifer is starting a new publication called The Contrarian and I just subscribed on Substack.
Here’s her resignation notice:
I Have Resigned from The Washington Post, effective today
Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy—Donald Trump—at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.
I therefore have resigned from The Post, effective today. In doing so, I join a throng of veteran journalists so distressed over The Post’s management they felt compelled to resign.
The decay and compromised principles of corporate and billionaire-owned media underscore the urgent need for alternatives. Americans are eager for innovative and independent journalism that offers lively, unflinching coverage free from cant, conflicts of interest and moral equivocation.
Which is why I am so thrilled to simultaneously announce this new outlet, The Contrarian: Not Owned by Anybody. The Contrarian will offer daily columns, weekly features, podcasts and social media from me and fellow pro-democracy contrarians, many of whom have decamped from corporate media, others who were never a part of it. I am launching this endeavor with my cofounder, Norm Eisen. Founding contributors will include Joyce Vance, Andy Borowitz, Laurence Tribe, Katie Phang, George Conway, Olivia Julianna, Harry Litman (who recently resigned from the LA Times for reasons similar to mine for leaving the Post), and Asha Rangappa, among many other brilliant voices. We will provide fearless and distinctive reported opinion and cultural commentary without phony balance, euphemisms or gamified political punditry.
The need for upstart outlets has never been more acute. The contradiction between, on the one hand, the journalistic obligation to hold the powerful accountable and, on the other, the financial interests of billionaire moguls and corporate conglomerates could not be starker. The Post’s own headline last month warned: “Trump signals plans to use all levers of power against the media; Press freedom advocates say they fear that the second Trump administration will ramp up pressure on journalists, in keeping with the president-elect’s combative rhetoric.” And yet The Post’s owner quashed a presidential endorsement for Trump’s opponent, forked over $1M for Trump’s inauguration through Amazon, and publicly lauded Trump’s agenda.
None of us could imagine Katharine Graham sending LBJ or Nixon a $1M check. It would have been, as it is now, a fundamental betrayal of a great American newspaper. Defense of the First Amendment is incompatible with funding or cheerleading for the very person who seeks to “drastically undermine the institutions tasked with reporting on his coming administration.”
The Post’s downfall is hardly unique. ABC, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and corporate-owned cable TV networks (which have scrambled to enlist Trump-friendly voices) are catering to powerful interests, and have profound corporate conflicts. Instead of guarding their independence, they join financial leaders, politicians and other public figures currying favor with Trump and his orbit. Through classic anticipatory obedience—a dangerous but all too familiar pattern—they normalize the authoritarian menace. If Trump has taken “attacks on the press to an entirely new level, softening the ground for an erosion of robust press freedom,” as The Post reported, it is because he finds insufficient resistance. Instead, owners whose outlets he targets quite literally rewarded him.
In closing, I want to reiterate that I have been honored to work for over fourteen years alongside the finest writers and editors in journalism. Above all, I was blessed to work for The Post under the Graham Family ownership and Fred Hiatt’s leadership of the editorial section. My admiration for their collective integrity, dedication to craft, courage, patriotism, and decency is boundless. But when new leaders sully the reputation of institutions entrusted to them and the fate of democracy is in the balance, we all must reevaluate our careers and our obligations to the world’s most essential nation. History calls us all.
I treasure the readers who have stuck with me over the years. I invite them and all those interested in defeating authoritarianism as well as writers and content creators to join this exciting new venture in defense of democracy. Forward!
Filed in Uncategorized
Tags: authoritarianism, jennifer-rubin, journalism, politics, the-contrarian, washington-post
Life of Wry 