PP #41: Preparing for Dystopia: Bye Bye Miss American Pie
Project: Pioneer #41, July 2, 2024 Tuesday 3pm
Giavana and I started this prepper pioneer journey a year ago, selling our home and all our crap to move into an RV in the woods. We did it because we saw red flags—big red flags. We’re not conspiracy people, we’re careful people. I think we both secretly hoped we were wrong, and this would just be a fun adventure. We were wrong about that, and unfortunately, correct in our original premise. On this 4th of July Independence Day weekend, it’s clear our 248-year beautiful experiment will end soon. I’ll explain why I’m very confident of that. This is not sensationalism. This is reality. My points are below. Change my mind, please. Otherwise, prepare.
Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Most posts are free, more personal posts are to reward our loyal paid subscribers. You can listen to and subscribe to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others).
The cool woodland breeze wraps around our small RV home, breaching the windows, whirling gently around us as we work, nature’s pleasant and calming fan. It rustles the trees that encircle us, whispering and rushing sounds like the excitement in a distant sports stadium as the home team edges toward triumph. We see mother does and their fawns through the trees, grazing, along with wild turkeys and their chicks, and there are numerous black bear and cubs on the move. The deer stop and stare, eerily like in the recent Netflix apocalyptic dystopian movie Leave the World Behind.
The panoramic windows of our beautiful White House RV home make it seem as if we’re on a train car passing through paradise sometimes. Maybe enroute to that Willoughby I spoke about in my last post. But, we’re not. We have to accept that.
I won’t lie, it’s beautiful and peaceful here. But, it doesn’t alleviate the stark heaviness of what’s happening in the outside world. It would be good to just tune out and enjoy this, but perhaps fatal at some point in the not too distant future. We have elderly mothers, children, grandchildren.
In Project: Pioneer #1, I said one reason we’re doing this is “To be minimal and mobile if the stuff hits the fan or democracy and this rock we live on begin their collapse.” We had no idea how fast both would happen.
I also said in that first post:
When we look around, especially these tumultuous last years, we see harbingers that concern us. The pandemic was a shocking eye-opener and rough for everyone. There’s war in Europe, incredibly. The climate, planet, and democracy seem to be crumbling around us. Half our freedom-loving democracy has joined a cult—fanatics for a guy who openly lusts after fascist, authoritarian leaders and yearns to be one.
I hate sounding like Debbie Downer. You can believe what you like, put your head in the sand. You do you. We all react differently to major stress. I remember knowing in my subconscious at some point at the dawn of COVID that our lives were going to be very bad for a very long time, but somehow my consciousness was trying to push that thought away. When the reality hit home, it was a heavy, heavy feeling. Just like the day after election day 2016, just like on 9/11. This can’t be happening.
If more than one justice on the Supreme Court (the good ones) are saying they’re in deep fear for our democracy, as they just did, it’s a real thing.
We see more clearly when step back from the fires we’re fighting and take an overhead view. Forest for the trees. It’s easier to see what’s happening, why it’s happening, and often when it started. Let’s do that.
This all started in the late 1970s, when the Moral Majority was founded in order to inject huge sums of money into our political system in order to turn our country into a straight, white, male-dominated evangelical Christian theocracy. A government run by divine guidance, by officials who are regarded as divinely guided. As in, Old Testament type angry vindictive Punisher God type theocracy. You will submit, you will obey. Especially women-folk.
I wrote about Project 2025 in my last post, and today I saw the Superintendent of the Oklahoma School System being interviewed. The flat-out religious fanatic has required that all public schools must include the Bible in their classroom teachings. In public schools! The separation of church and state is gone. They are coming for your children, to jam their religious doctrine down your kids’ throats, to brainwash them in obedience. Soon to be President Mike Johnson has already equivocated our law with Biblical law. I guess that means cheating wives will be stoned to death (but not the dudes).
The Moral Majority faded as scandals rocked key religious figures like Jim Baaker (wait, they’re like, divinely guided sinners?) But the effort never went away. Others picked up the mantle—Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, etc. Now we see the new work product to achieve that theocracy dream, which is the dystopian and disastrous Project 2025 (which I summarized in my last post). This has been in the works for a long time, tons of planning and tons money. This is their moment of execution, it’s do or die with everything at stake.
Which is why it’s hard for me to believe they did all that planning, all that work, spent all that money, to leave it all to chance with elections results. That doesn’t make sense to me. No way. I don’t think they’d be out there like this, proud and bold as all get out, waving that 900+ page evil document around, gloating, if they weren’t sure it’s going to happen.
So I’m not sure the election will matter, sadly. How? They own the courts now, that’s clear. All the way up to a Supreme Court rife with the blatant stink of corruption. They’re not even hiding that, because it was part of the plan. The Dobbs decision was a big step toward putting women back in their place (they’re not done, more to come!), and the Chevron decision essentially gave them all the power they need to pull this off. The immunity decision this week was more icing on the cake—it creates an executive autocrat at the top with absolute power to do anything without legal repercussion. Remember Bush v Gore in 2000? When the Supreme Court threw an election? That was the pregame, nothing compared to what’s to come.
On the extreme side of things, keep in mind we’re just two heartbeats away from a President Mike Johnson by the close of business today. I fully believe these folks are capable of that. It’s called a coup, and it happens all the time. We’ve engineered plenty of them in our 248 years. Don’t fool yourself into thinking Trump is going to be their leader. He’s too dumb, too sinful, and they hate him—take that to the bank. I believe Johnson, a devout evangelical who keeps his wife in her place, will be their man. I explained that Honey Trap in detail in my last post.
Biden’s debate performance only made things worse. This feels like 2015 through 2016, when every single domino fell in place for Trump, seemingly in defiance of the odds. I wrote in a post recently about whether there is true evil. I’m not even sure I provided a conclusion. It feels like Satan is out there, directing all this, which could mean we’re heading fast toward The Last Battle and Rapture. Boy, won’t these sleazy, greedy, hateful “evangelicals” be surprised if Jesus comes back and asks them what part of the Beatitudes they were following when they did all this horrible, hateful stuff!
I don’t believe in Satan. I think the “evil” is just inherent in our own human flaws. Perhaps placed there as a test, going back to the Garden of Eden. Things like temptation, greed, lust. If you can be truly good, follow the Commandments and Beatitudes, perhaps then you’ve evolved sufficiently to earn paradise for eternity. If not, back to start, try again.
Back to the debate. Biden’s team is complaining about the bed wetters asking him to step down. But, he shit the bed. In a big way. I love Biden. True American hero. Saved us. Good man. Trump lied through the whole debate. He's a monster with a cult following.
BUT
Biden's approval rating has been in the tank, the race dead even. Millions of critical undecideds, swing state voters, and Haley voters tuned in and saw that debacle. Fifty million voters. They've now made up their minds and will tune out and go back to their lives.
Putting him out there in staged gigs with a teleprompter and speeches someone else wrote won't fix it. They’ll say he’s back on his meds, jacked up. Look at the swing-state polls now, since the debate. Swinging wildly away from Biden and for Trump. 60-70% of registered voters said, after the debate, he is not mentally competent to serve.
I'm sorry, but this is the reality. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had an incredible legacy. But, she enjoyed her celebrity and stayed too long, and because of that all the good she did was (or will be) undone, because she couldn't leave the limelight well into old age. It was selfish, and a big factor in all this horror.
How do you possibly fix this, tell me? How do you get those voters back? You can’t. No way. Gretchen Whitmer said that Biden has lost Michigan. That’s game over. If the election will really count, which I’ve already say I doubt, a move needs to be made now. We can’t risk Biden having a stroke or other medical event just before the election and throwing everything to chaos in the final hour. Yes, making a move now involves some chaos. But it would be for the Republicans too, who would have to spend millions in a new campaign strategy and ads, since they were all centered around Biden.
If people vote for a Republican president, they’ll also vote down the line for House and Senate races. They won’t want a new president handicapped without a majority. And that will mean the authoritarian powers newly awarded by the Supreme Court along with the immediate implementation of Project 2025 and the end of our democracy. They’ve promised it, on day one.
I was at another music festival this past weekend, out in the country and country-rock themed as opposed to the urban one I was at and wrote about last week. Lots of drunken Bubbas, traitorous confederate flags, the whole rednecky thing. A beautiful song came on, moving some to actual tears around me.
Forget your lust for the rich man’s gold
All that you need is in your soul
And you can do this, oh baby, if you try
All that I want for you, my son, is to be satisfied
And be a simple kind of man —Simple Man, Lynyrd Skynyrd
Buck-shooting bros and country hoes singing that song, and yet pledging allegiance to a rich trust-fund baby with a gold toilet, ready to turn our beloved country over to a man that’s only ever destroyed everything and everyone he’s touched. And another line says, “And don't forget son, there is someone up above.“ They all pointed skyward at that one. Amazing. But, here we are. It feels like a foregone conclusion. We will fight on through November, but we are preparing.
What will we do? Fight through November. Our dual citizenship and exit to another country is a backup plan. It would be hard to leave our mothers, kids, grandkids behind, even though we feel it would give them a place to go. Perhaps, like in Handmaid’s Tale, Canada will have some kind of asylum project. I bet they’re already working out what they’ll do. They’re fighting right-wing fascism there too, as is France and Italy. France—a country that was obliterated and conquered by fascist Nazis! Incredible. Yet, here we are.
Giavana and I are always planning. We’ll take a scouting trip to Canada and maybe elsewhere. We’ve mapped out the trails and refuge areas on the mountain behind us. We’re taking inventory of our supplies, our readiness, adding to our ammo stockpiles, and hitting the shooting range. We’re tagging all our stuff with color coded labels as essential, important but not essential, non-essential so we can move quickly. We may stay in our current area until we can’t or don’t feel safe, and then hitch up the wagon (RV) and become mobile. We need to up our solar and water collection/purification game, and soon. And ham radio as well, if there’s time.
If the above scenarios don’t work out (taking out Biden/Harris so there’s an immediate President Johnson or taking the election through the courts) I’m sure there will be lots of violence. Perhaps civil war, as promised by the lunatic fringe and Trump/Project 2025 leadership. It’s already being encouraged, and now it won’t even be illegal. Texas is already creating its own stock exchange in preparation for secession, and they already have their own (crappy) energy grid. I can imagine Florida right behind.
We watched the new movie Civil War. It’s hard to watch stuff like this with it actually happening around us in slow motion, but it’s part of preparing. We got a lot of ideas. The most chilling line was a camo’d up crazy with an assault rifle confronting a group of reporters and asking them, “What kind of American are you?” before shooting several of them in cold blood because he didn’t like the answer. We are a mentally unwell (especially after too-recent COVID) nation that’s armed to the teeth with incredibly violent tendencies. Not a good recipe, with all this stress and planned divisiveness.
Perhaps it’s that subconscious at work and the mind attempting to prepare me for what’s to come and what we’re about to lose, but I wrote about illusions recently and I wonder if this beautiful experiment was all an illusion anyway.
Were we really a great country, a beautiful experiment when we:
Perpetrated mass genocide on native Americans and broke every single treaty
Enslaved other human beings
Subjugated women, who couldn’t even get a credit card without their husband’s approval until almost the 1980s
Interfered in countless other countries, assassinating their leaders, causing chaos
Had a President and leadership who laughed and did nothing while over a hundred thousands gays died from AIDS in the 80s
Conspired at the top to lie to the public in order to start a war in Iraq with no basis that killed over 5,000 US servicemembers and killed over 300,000 innocent women, children, and men.
Bombed two Japanese cities and killed over 200,000 innocent women, children, and men.
Support Israel’s genocide of innocent women, children, and men in Gaza.
I raised my right hand and pledged to die for my country during the Viet Nam era in the 1970s. I never had to go, but my son and son-in-law fought in combat for this country, and my father and grandfather served. Was it all for nothing, all to be lost to this fringe lunatic group about to take it over?
Let’s get to the point. Enough dystopia. What I would like to see happen is for President Biden to take the stage on our Independence Day, July 4th, in a national address, and announce he will step down at the end of this term. He should fully endorse his vice-president Kamala Harris, for a quick non-drama no fighting transition. She’s tough (former prosecutor), whip-smart, an incredible debater, and she’s Trump and Project 2025’s worst nightmare—a confident, accomplished, smart woman of color.
That’s our way out of this debate debacle. Biden rides out as a savior, his incredible legacy intact, a true American hero. I think it rallies the woman vote (even more, after Dobbs), the Black vote, rallies all the young folks who are currently sick of watching ancient white men as their only choices.
What’s Next?
Things are moving fast. We have a lot of work to do here, to prepare even more than we have over this past year. With, incredibly, a CAT5 hurricane that formed in June, not September or October, I’m dubious about the one thing I always looked forward to most—a week at the beach. It’s coming up, and I’m wondering if it will happen with the storm forecast from NOAA.
I doubt I’ll make that reservation again (if we’re not in Trumpistan by then), because it’s just too risky. These beach communities just can’t afford to continue to rebuild their washed out beaches after these severe storms.
The summer schedule is winding down, events checked off, thankfully complete. The long 4th weekend is ahead, it’s a nice break and I hope to get to the beach here at our paradise location, more time outside with those whispering trees to contemplate more, or maybe just try to be silent and meditate.
I’ll keep you in the loop as our solar and water collection/purification build-out transpires. Stay tuned for lots of prepping tips and techniques! And, please keep fighting for democracy. Join an organization like Swing Left or Indivisible, write letters or phone bank from home or get out there in the summer weather with some campaign canvassers. I know this post was a bummer, but don’t give up hope, I truly haven’t!
This pioneer journey continues… Don’t forget, commenting is now turned on for everyone on these free posts. Let’s interact!
“So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.” ~George Orwell
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