ARTIST DIARY |. NOVEMBER 2024 | JOURNALING

Welcome to the Divided states of Dystopia.

It’s a little like the Wonderful land of Oz, but only if Oz was Hell. It’s the Oz where the curtain has been lifted and the mask has unveiled and all that's left is a shriveled-up man, only in this case, the curtain has been lifted and the mask has been unveiled and all that's left is a bunch of tech billionaires, ready to throw humanity into the garbage in its quest to evolve into artificial intelligence.

Joking*. Everything is a joke now, see? Hahaha. Funny. I am funny. I swear.

(*It was not a joke.)

We Are, Apparently, Going Back - Without Even a Court Fight, Despite All the evidence

It’s been a wildly disastrous and difficult week. I’ve personally gone through denial, rage, sadness and mania all in the span of a few days.

The Democrapic Party is funny. Hilarious. These people made the working class spend a billion dollars on an election, only to just give up before the first battle was even over. This wasn't supposed to be over on Election Day, not if you KNOW that one side has no plan to accept a loss. That means you should also have no plan to just accept a loss. The plan should have been to go to the courts, no matter what. That’s one of the reasons Pamala Parris talked about being a prosecutor, or so I thought.

“WE WILL NOT GO BACK,” they promised, over and over again to full arenas of people cheering and chanting.

The fight for our democracy shouldn't have been over until someone's hand was placed on a Bible on Jan. 20. All the evidence it needed to demand an investigation into this election has already been reported on. It doesn't matter that a foreign adversary pushed disinformation by the masses into our electorate. It doesn't matter that the only reason Republics won swing states is because of Edmond Lusk's fraudulent lottery. It doesn't matter that people, including me!, cannot really discern fact from fiction or truth from lies anymore. I will go about questioning every intention, I will not believe anything you say, I will bluff you right back all day.

What's happening? Where am I? Why am I here?

All that matters is what people can get you to believe. And I believe the Democrap Party had all the tools at its disposal needed to save the American people from this doom. President Hiden could have used his newly-issued immunity to arrest corrupt members of SCOTUS or investigate insurrectionists in Congress, or done something, but he didn’t do it because it’s somehow ‘unAmerican’ to hold elected officials accountable to the truth, to a code of ethics, even though Dumbotron has promised every day for four years to seek retribution against his political opponents.

Now, every day until power has actually transferred hands, I'm just going to throw the idea out there that it doesn't actually have to happen. I don't care that Pamala Parris conceded (I mean, I HATE IT), our military generals have not. We spend trillions on the promise that we will be protected from all enemies, both foreign and domestic. The future is not written in stone.

There's something in quantum mechanics that says something like every moment of time contains all possible pasts and all possible futures within it. In the timeline from the multiverse I'm writing from, our constitution has been destroyed through a traitorous relationship between our elites and a foreign enemy government and a completely corrupt Supreme Court. We can choose to write a new one, even split the union up if we have to? Can cities live in one america and rural aress live in another? I don't know, but there are wild options to throw out there for consideration.

In brainstorming, all ideas are good, at least until the drill is over. The cabinet and our military can agree to just not go forward with this. Put us all on timeout. President Hiden has immunity. The Cabinet has the 25th amendment. There is literally election interference and fraud all over the place. Foreign governments have a lot on the line, maybe James Bond will come and save the day, or some poor cook at MaryLayGo winds up accidentally serving tainted meat at the next dinner party or any other number of dystopian-rebellion premises that are being whispered through young adult literature and magical spells in thoughts and prayers. Everything seems bleak and uncertain and crazy and mad and upsidedown and backwards, but it can all still change in the blink of an eye, or in a last gasp of dying breath, or in a coup, or by a miracle, or in a shooting, or a sudden storm, a lightning strike, a stroke. No matter what any of us want or fear, tomorrow isn't guaranteed. It manifests itself with every passing moment. The likelihood of both the worst possible outcome and best possible outcome happening is still .00000000000000001.

A Pathetic, Heartbreaking,
Absolutely Enraging Concession
Without a Glimmer of a Plan

We are living in a timeline where there is no right or wrong, no agreed upon morality. There is just tit for tat, and Democraps were too afraid of backlash to fight against the Christian Nationalist extremism that has overtaken our politics. But The Prosecutor didn’t even go tit for tat with court cases or investigations, and the party completely failed to properly use all the tools it had at its disposal. It didn’t try to call out Russia for its election interference or the Republic Party for using an enemy of the state to overthrow our democratic government. No, the Democrappy Party just conceded everything. With Joy(!), might I add. After that concession speech, I never want to hear the word “joy” again. “My heart is filled with joy! You are in grave danger! There are dark, painful days ahead! Live your life with joy!” is very …. disturbed… messaging.

Democraps should have been preparing a plan for an election "defeat" / worst case scenario the entire time, instead of running with this optimistic hubris of assuming that what they were doing would be enough. Thinking they would win by doing nothing now and promising to do it all in the next term is lame, and pretending that all the disinformation surrounding this campaign wasn’t an attack on our democracy is … treasonous.

We cannot have a democracy without an informed populace. It is impossible. That’s why a free, independent press is so important, but ours has been on its deathbed for two decades now, ever since social media companies started eating into what miniscule profits newspapers are able to gleam off of subscriptions and advertisements, causing newspapers to fail and be bought out by tech billionaires who wanted their own propaganda platforms. Our country was doomed the second Edmond Lusk bought Y and turned it into a psychological techno-cyber weapon committed to the mass spread of disinformation and our government did nothing about it. It destroyed all the trust people had managed to keep for our free press, it doomed our ability to figure out what was happening within our government, and it ultimately made it so that a fair election was impossible.

And still, Democraps did nothing except promise us this was a fair election and tell us to prepare as our freedoms and what little economic stability we had gets ripped out from under us.. Bizarre. Ridiculous. Is someone holding their families hostage?

It was easy to see that the Democraps might lose this fight. They lost all the battles. Citizens watched as President Moe Hiden refused to be challenged in the primaries despite his advancing age. We watched as the entire democrapic circle kept Hiden in power even after his dementia was thrust upon us all in that first awful debate. We watched him refuse to use his SCOTUS-granted immunity in favor of being some kind of shining beacon of democracy, even though democracy was at stake and we had already voted Dumbotramp out of office. The 2020 election was supposed to be the referendum on that topic. We watched as disinformation flooded us on social media, creating more and more divisions among friends and neighbors as we each consumed divergent information. We watched as insurrectionist leaders in Congress unconstitutionally returned to their positions of power, while misled everyday Americans (not patriots, but working class people) were arrested. We watched as Hiden refused to support students and activists protesting genocide. We watched as he touted infrastructure improvements as women lost our reproductive freedom and refused to say the word "abortion" for nearly four whole years. We watched as corrupt SCOTUS justices kept passing awful opinion after opinion after opinion, and Biden did nothing. He had immunity, an open-ended tool that he could have tried to get creative with. We watched as Edmond Lusk committed fraud to buy swing state votes, and the Democrapic Party did nothing. We watched as the Prosecutor President refused to take the case for our freedoms to court and claimed to be joyous about the "fair" loss without any kind of time for review or investigation or conversation into even the meaning of "fair".

The Democrapic Party needed to do more about all of it, instead of pushing their duty to protect the American people from threats onto the voters for a third time. A serious threat to our nation is supposed to be arrested for terrorism or for national security, not running for president. It's a fine line between threatening retribution against political opponents and finding justice against a treasonous sack of golden poop, but democraps did basically nothing or took too long to do it, were too easily stymied, to find that line, and that nothingness empowered him even more. It made him look innocent to a certain segment of the population (like people who dream of being white collar criminals and people who think our justice system is the greatest in the world or that our Constitution is infallible).

Despite all that, I still believe the swing state lottery was enough to rig/steal this election, though I also believe that when you're funded by billionaires with endless amounts of money to pour in because they have endless amounts of money on the line to make, it's all a sham to begin with.

Placing Blame at the Bottom Instead of At the Top

The Democrapic Party could have won, should have won, would have won, except that was never going to be in the script. The majority of the Democrapic Party has not been working for the people for a very long time, just like the Republic Party. Democrap Party, Republic Party, the whole two-party system is one long con on the People. It's really just all one party that exists to keep us worker bees fighting each other. Almost all our elected officials work for the tech billionaires, just like most of the rest of us do, just like the news media does, just like our bosses do.

Now, the Party is blaming voters for being disengaged and running with this narrative that we all hate each other, instead of having Hiden take accountability for his lack of planning and strategy and political gaming. The party is dead. I don’t think it will win elections again, especially considering all the disinformation people are consuming surrounding their major complaints (i mean, seriously, imagine thinking that immigration is the cause of inflation instead of wealth inequality and the climate crisis being the cause of inflation and immigration, but that is one of the consequences of disinformation).

The Democrapic Party and the main stream media keep pushing this narrative that they want us to believe that women voted against our own rights, that Latinos voted for mass deportations, that men weren't smart enough to spot a conman scamming them out of their own money, that senior citizens don't want Social Security. LIKE LOL that is really want you're telling us to believe??!?! I mean, I know our educational system is completely broken, I guess the billionaires like it better if we are dumb and disengaged, and it is, like, far more enjoyable, to be honest. But, no, it just doesn't make sense to me.

Does the official narrative that we all just hate each other fit the evidence? I mean, maybe. They want us to think that, for sure. There's a loooooot of money dedicated to the Manosphere and christian nationalism, a lot of money dedicated to tearing us apart by gender. There's a looooooot of sexism still permeating the culture - but it's nothing new (until, of course, this week, when boys and men started flooding the Internet and schools with “your body, my choice, forever” messaging, which is terrifying and shows exactly how extreme and awful the party of “God” has become). Still, all that misogyny has been there all along. It's what we all grew up with. Taking away bodily autonomy, degrading women down to a lesser form of life than an internal clump of her own cells? That’s because women have proven ourselves to be a threat. We're obviously quite scary adversaries. They seem to be terrified of facing us in a debate or the board room. They call us stupid, but it's only because we totally lost them. It’s gaslighting.

This is still not an excuse for the people who voted for Dumbotron because they cared more about what the founding fathers thought than the health and well-being of their wives and daughters, or because they believed Pamala was a "bimbo", or because immigrants are "tainting the nation's blood", or because they were attracted to the hate. That's all still a huge, separate, unforgivable problem. This is just about why voter turnout was low and why the party's messaging wasn't more effective, in my unpaid-for, independent, completely average, totally-nobody, opinion.

Yes, people are being brainwashed this patriarchal christofascist Make America Awful Again cult by the masses. But it’s not everyone, and the official narrative of us all just hating each other isn’t real. It can’t be real. It’s not what happened. We're all out here fighting for our lives, because these tech billionaires are watching the news like Julius Caesar would watch gladiators die at his knees in the arena.

What happened is people grew tired of the weakness of the Democrapic Party, of all the failed promises, of all the promises never made, of how we kept falling back further and further even though we kept working harder and harder. Many people realized the Democrapic Party wasn’t working for the people when it started working for the billionaires. Some of those disengaged entirely, but others fell right into the arms of the Republic Party because what else is there? They see Dumbotron escaping prison, getting away with all kinds of crimes, and they think, “he's gonna tear it all down,” which is what needs to happen anyway, if the government isn’t working for the people.

But they don't realize who Dumbotron is really aligned with. I mean, who knows if he is truly aligned with anyone? He serves his own interests, nobody else's, really. Most ordinary people are so busy and so removed from the news of the world that they don't realize the timing of all this, how the billionaires are about to put us all into checkmate with this election, how much danger we are all really in because of this perfect storm of modern technology and global famine and wealth inequality. They can't really envision the scale of everything that's coming.

And what happened was what was always going to happen: Republics were always going to find ways to cheat and Democraps were always going to find ways to lose and billionaires were always going to take over our elections and tech was always going to takeover humanity and this outcome reveals nothing but who is really in "charge": Big Tech. These disruptors, agents of change and chaos and this force pushing people into the great unknown.

I don’t think the Republic Party is going to last that much longer, either, though. It’s made up of a bunch of individualistic non-negotiators, instigators and stubborn-ass a-holes who don’t like playing nice. I think it’s going to splinter into two parties, a Christian Nationalist/Family First party lead by JV Kance and a Big Tech party filled with the centrist DINOS and RINOS, lead by whoever Lusk wants it to be lead by. The long-neglected left flank of the old Democrapic party is going to have to completely rebrand with an entirely different name to move past this. (People will be so unhappy with what happens during these next four years, the word "socialist" might make a comeback….)

Big Tech Turning Humanity Into Puppets
in the Hopes of Becoming Mars-Bound Cyborgs

Honestly, we were pretty screwed either way. With that concession, Democraps proved that they wouldn't have saved us from anything. I’m guessing either billionaire donors told Pamala Parris to step down, and she stepped down, or she is truly feeling threatened or blackmailed or …something is going on.

But it’s really feeling like Big Tech billionaires are the ones pulling all the strings in a fight against deregulation and keeping tech regulation at bay, and they gave us this, you know, very entertaining election story of Harris vs. Trump to see whether we wanted the joy of Pamala Parris or the dark comedy of Dumbotron leading us through this long and winding tale of the Artificial Intelligence/Automation takeover, but it was always, always going to be Dumbotron who won, no matter how much it cost them, because none of them want to have to take the wellness of the environment and humanity into account while they keep developing all their pioneering, terrifying, world-changing technology. That's all it is, that's all it has been since Citizens United gutted the people's power in 2010. That’s when the government actually broke.

Our entire government is just one party, designed to fight, designed to instigate, designed to instill fear, designed to obfuscate the eye from the ball, designed not to get anything done for the working class, because these tech billionaires really believe they neeeeeeeed morrrrrrrrre moneeeeyyyyyyyyy to turn us into organic machines and start their Mars colonies and fulfill all their wildest fantasies about their place in the cosmos. The best guess of science does theorize that this is all a simulation, so who knows?

Maybe they are tapping into something real. Maybe they've found a divine code and if you could just read it, you'd understand everything that's ever happened. Maybe Elon Musk created the Big Bang in 2034 and I'll see you all again in 14 billion years, same time, same place.

Billionaires pay Republics to say and do this, and they pay Democraps to say and do that, and they watch us all as we beg to keep our jobs and cry about the cost of food and divide ourselves into smaller and smaller groups and talk about how the world has turned against us, about how we all hate each other, so that we completely forget that we are still the masses.

We are just a game to them, gamers gotta game, but so many of us are in survival mode, haven't been told the rules, weren't handed a golden spoon, started off with the odds against us, and kept finding ways to fight anyway but never with a strategy, never with the benefits of time and money.

Now we’re all just pawns in a game, fighting for control over our own lives.

And who really knows what coming? Nobody really knows what Dumbotron will do. He could gain power, pardon himself, and retire. He could have a heart attack and die tomorrow. He could fill his cabinet with prostitutes just so he doesn't have to pay them cash. He could sign a national abortion ban. He could make every Friday a Dumbotron Worship Day where we all hold hands and sing him his own National Anthem.

The billionaires don't doubt that he can keep us entertained in the same way we are entertained by horror movies and dystopian tales. He's an entertainer, really, not a business man, and we are living in a fake, made-up world where truth is on the other side of a matrix we just don't have a key to get into. All the world is a stage. Democracy was always sort of an illusion.

It's hard not to suck down all the fears and not to feed on all the anger. I get that. I'm scared. And I'm pissed. And severely disappointed in this screen play thus far. I think it should have been more heroic. I wish the billionaires were helping us up instead of pushing us down. Maybe there's a turnaround coming. Maybe a villain will see God and discover Hell is real. I hope I've got the wrong ideas about Trump. I hope I've been misled. I hope it's not going to be as bad as all the things I've read. If I'm wrong about how severe the betrayal of the Democrapic Party has been with this four-year-long concession, and they wind up fighting with us and for us instead of just laying down, then I'll gladly breathe a sigh of relief and say, "oh, wow, I really did go crazy!"

But I'm just so rarely wrong. Is that the algorithm shaping my reality? Is that manifest destiny? Is that just the narcissism of us all being the heroes of our own stories? Am I a sadist choosing my own adventure here? I'm a story teller, crazy is in the pudding. Don't touch it.

Tiny Sparkles of Light Shimmering in the Darkness

What to do next? I am up and I am down and up and down. To keep fighting like the billionaires want us to? To turn against each other for the entertainment value? To debate morality until the end of time? To take bets on how many days humanity has left? To set sail across the ocean and claim a free life out to sea? To get eaten by a shark or get murdered by the Eyes? To become a handmaid or to become a renegade? To buy the nicer bread, or the cheaper coffee? No matter what happens, our lives are still ours to live, our stories to tell, our wills to push forward, our minutes to be had. There is still how you want to be remembered, what you want to be remembered for, the mark you want to put onto the world, the lessons you want to leave your kids with, a resiliency to be found, an emotion to be had, a ray of sunshine to feel, an enemy to defeat, someone to save, a hope to have, a disruption to cause, a problem to solve, a joke to tell, a song to sooth, a forest to walk through (****may be only CGI****).

This is not a concession. The Democrapic Party does not speak for me, it did not work for me, the Resistance to billionaire greed and these cultural wars they make us bleed will never die. No matter what, people deserve human rights, like the right to autonomy and to love and to create and to not die from treatable illness -- in the multiverse, in the Metaverse, on Mars, in the matrix, in prison. And I won't live in this world without fighting for that.

The good news is, Dumbotramp’s coalition of Christian Nationalists and Big Tech don’t actually mix. There is no way they get along for long. They are fundamentally opposing forces, one wanting to take us back into the distant past and the other wanting to move into the distant future. One side wants to start World War III to start the Rapture and the other side is trying to create eternal life by turning themselves into Cyborgs. The only reason they are a “coalition” at all is because they all think they can manipulate Dumbotramp’s with money and power, and they can, while he needed the help, but now that Dumbotramp doesn’t need the help, he doesn’t really need them, either. Most-likely scenario: these two factions are going to rip each other apart, absolutely nothing will get done except deregulation and more billionaire tax cuts, we accelerate the climate crisis even more, we accelerate wealth inequality even more. Best-case scenario: In four years, we are all going to be watching a cult from the 1860s go to war with a bunch of low-performing humanoid robots while the rest of us start a matriarchal, socialist society based on trade and bartering and kindness, and AOC is elected our first female president as she rises from the ashes of that battle.

In the meantime, we must never lose sight of the world we want to live in, the world we are trying to create day by day. As the Democrapic Party collapses, we must debate how we can best reconvene and rebuild and move forward, even under the oppressive eyes of fascism. What should the tenets of the next left-wing party be? I would propose these:

1. ALL PEOPLE DESERVE HUMAN RIGHTS.

That's reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy, the right to be financially independent, the right to an education, the right to a profession, the right to choose our own lives, the right to choose our religion or our own spiritual beliefs, the right to self-expression. Freedom and justice applies to all, not just the wealthy.

2. MAKE AMERICA DREAM AGAIN

In a world of automation and artificial intelligence, every person should have the opportunity to pursue their own business or non-profit or creative passion without having to worry about basic necessities. I propose a socialist network of small business/nonprofit/artist grants for all who apply. Each person who signs up would be given $5K/month to cover basic survival needs. In exchange, they work with a team of business and marketing experts to reach their stated goals, and 75 percent of all profits go back to the program to ensure it’s sustainable for everyone.

3. CREATE A WELLNESS SYSTEM

Access to affordable health care is a human right. We should create Free Wellness Clinics that offer free basic medical care and routine checkups to everyone who needs them through a Wellness Care for All program.

4. PROTECT OUR BEAUTIFUL PLANET

The financial and economic consequences of the Climate Crisis grow everyday. Sustainability is good economics. Creating a more stable world, protecting the future for our kids is something we must strive to do every single day so that the next generation isn’t the last generation.

5. HELP THOSE WHO NEED HELP

The government should prioritize the interests of people who most need help and are unable to help themselves, along with the interests of the most good being done. We must work to create a system that rewards love and kindness instead of greed and exploitation. We must work to put people and community before profits.

6. PEACEFUL ACTIVISM IS A CIVIC DUTY

Fight with your words and your ideas. Tolerate no violence.