Guilly's Guide Day 16: The "Business as Usual Coup"

Or the why should log the fuck off social media for a day report.

Greetings Beloved: Welcome to day 16 of Guilly’s guide to the first 100 days. I took a few days off again. I just didn’t want to add the deluge of people completely loosing their fucking minds over the last few days. No really. 

We start with the only serious political response to egg prices: Egg Heist Has PA State Police Scrambling to Crack Case

To those of you rightfully outraged, afraid, and wondering what is next : I just want to say that there is a difference between being activated into the work, and being activated by the forces that stand to gain the most from our fear, division, and hatred. I don't have an endless amount of subscribers, nor is my social media platform that impactful, but it is mine. 

It is my responsibility. 

This is my platform I built from literally nothing. By writing. That's what I do. 

I write. 

So I intentionally limit the ways I earn wages via social media, internet, and platforms. It’s one of the ways I practice working class solidarity. It’s why there is no paywall on my substack ever. If you feel you want to subscribe and keep this going you either will or won’t. 

Nor is me repeating hysterical articles, headlines, links, or even arguing in comments helping anyone, anywhere.

I just try not to do that shit, outrage sells: but I don’t care.

Why? I am the literal baby of Gen X, and I spent my adolescence on the wild untamed internet. Message boards, AIM, serial killers building profiles, Geosites about the occult and the strange, hunting the Mantis when it was cool, when you could hitchhike across the country with nothing but a screen name and a meet up spot.

I don't enjoy the commodification of every agonizing aspect of human experience.

Nor do I care to be bored by how basic we all are by falling for the same lie or product placement laden trad wife account faux rage event. 

Nor do I wish to be a conscious participant in the corporate psyop we call media, news, or information. It is hard to take seriously an entire media industry that has decided to play the game of political Janus with us in such obvious display.

All of the Biden administration Fox, OAN, and a ton of other sources sounded the alarm, and sounded the alarm, and then decided to sound the alarm. Liberals laughed.

Now the “sane” or “thinking” media that this president seems to have been “fooled” or confounded again, after almost a decade of the same shit, and we are supposed to believe them.

That the sane or mainstream media, which is neoliberal for “us” wasn’t salivating at the unprecedented amounts of advertising dollars news orgs, 24 hour news rants, and constant op eds have earned them?

Because now they are sounding the alarm!

I'm actually amazed at the scale of the scam at this point: they still sit every broadcast just flabbergasted at their anchor desks, staring you in the eye, emoting the same terror your feeling. 

I mean I honestly think that's half of Democracy Now’s pull to average progressive, but even your beloved Amy is part of this cycle. Yes fam, even Juan. 

They make you feel less crazy, they are outraged too, but they are just as powerless as you …..which they aren’t. But they will make unprecedented profits, do investigative deep dives, share stories, tell you we finally “got him” and all of it will amount to nothing like last time. 

Also guy’s be cool: it’s just powerful mega rich influencers having their way with the American system of Democracy. I thought y’all loved this shit?

That’s why I am calling it the business as usual coupTM we are experiencing. 

I’m sorry unprecedented, unexpected, and historical moments don't come with ready made graphics and an MSNBC companion podcast. Whether you are rural, urban, suburban, white, black, queer, trans, cis, leftist, maga, or a democratic socialist your outrage has now become an industry.  We feed Joe Scarborough our serotonin for breakfast, our vital and radical thoughts are churned like butter into an endless scream into the largest identification platform ever devised. The revolution is now news feeds, timelines, and sky’s that seem anything but blue.

The disintegration of America is now a reality show and guess what: you are the star. 

Maybe I haven’t been plain: Empires are falling. Unfortunately for us they fall slowly, softly, at first. Think of a tower tipping over, wobbling left, then right, then left, then right again until it finally topples over. Those first few seconds or moments probably feel like forever. 

Only forward momentum brings the consequences to bear quickly with the crushing gravity of the inevitable.

It is clear to me that this is outright gangsterism, with political violence as a lil social lubricant to keep it going. On inauguration day,  the President of the United States informed me I am no longer a human being as per official government policy. That was my signal: the America I believed in, the wide tent of possibility we were all trying to find shelter under, the America where I relished being on the margins and the edges of so I could have the sacred duty of stretching the tent wider, is gone. 

You will have to find your personal signal or redline. 

Mostly white, but certainly mega wealthy, cis, supremacy is the order of the day. It’s easy to see why the Democrats have rallied behind any resistance, which of course is Black woman led. 

But it’s hard to take seriously a party being defeated by an agency named after a meme. In case you don’t know DOGE is a fucking meme. That's how this unserious person named a government agency. He is literally doing it for the ‘gram all over government agencies. Doge the meme is about the intentional misspelling of the word dog to be cute. Elon named his agency DOGE after this because that’s basically the plan. He is going to shit all over whatever he gets his hands on, intentionally, because it’s cute. 

I described this in Dear Church as disaster capitalism. Designed disasters by the ultrawealthy corporate entities and individuals that widen the wealth gap. Dismantling of the safety nets, combined with recent  SCOTUS continued to slide towards an America where inalienable rights of individuals are more tied to ability to pay for it, and we are facing oligarchy. The racism is just for flavor.

Fact-it costs more to be poor. That's why you would crash, dismantle, and jeopardize the most powerful economy in the world if you were part of the richest percentage of the world. To create a ready market of consumers forced to consume ever more, and a permanent serf class. 

This all leads to very simple math for me. 

They are beating y’alls ass with the principles of capitalism. 

Elon didn't buy this power for 244 million, he bought access for that much. He spent 44 billion to weaponize the digital public square, then he bought the sitting POTUS for a steal. 244 million. 

It’s also why it’s a business as usual coup. Wealthy entity buys their way into unprecedented access, stages a hostile takeover and sends lifelong workers and employees packing with no notice, their email doesn't work, security escorts poor Bob from accounting out, Susan from HR finally loses it and starts screaming racial epithets. Some 20 year old punk who makes a third of what you used too just plugs his laptop into yours and drains a lifetime worth of work. They break every norm the workforce previously used. 

Where have we seen this movie before? 

 From wall street to main street. 

This is how corporations, ceo’s, and ultra wealthy treat everyone. Your favorite uncles Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is just another memestock to them. The DOD is just another NFT to be tattooed all over Pete Hegseth’s arms next to his white supremacist ink. We see you Pete. 

Don't intentionally mishear me: this is dangerous and a threat. 

As long as you and I rely on these systems they can always threaten us.

But it is exactly what we expected from a South African diamond heir turned CEO and international political player who has the decorum of P.T Barnum and the actual engineering skills of Alexander Graham Bell. This is what corporations do to those who have suffered and slaved away for them. 

Some of y’alls favorite non profits, and denominations too. 

We have always treated it like business as usual in America. We have always exalted, and near worshiped those with power, wealth, celebrity, follows, and that special lack of empathy it takes to have that “dog eat dog” and those who get to the top “grind harder” series of belief systems to be successful in America’s 21st century. 

Now those chickens have come home to roost. 

In the final analysis coups are hardly ever this bloodless. Unless the populace through terror, strong arm tactics, and political violence have been conditioned to accept this is just how things go. 

The Gaza Strip was just described as a possible “Rivera of the Middle East” by the same land speculator who ran Atlantic City to the ground, the 47th POTUS. Proving once and for all there may have been a slight difference between his policies and Harris’s. For starters her warhawk administration would have at least had the common sense to know nation building in the Middle East is the easiest way to start an all out war, and more importantly cut their weapon sales and oil profits in the Middle East. The entire Middle East is armed to the teeth, supplied by us. Except Iran and its allies. 

That's just bad business

It is hard not to reflect back on the George W Bush Era scenes of the march to Baghdad. I thought to myself then that no empire has ever crossed the rivers of Babylon in conquest and survived, almost as if the lesson from the Hebrew Bible still lives on those banks waiting to strike out any who come to remind them of the tower. 

It is a coup, but it is business as usual in the ol US of A folks. Unions, lawsuits, the judiciary, and your Congress still will have a chance to respond. They will. But the damage is done. They are gangsters, who are using populism and racism to steal in front of our eyes. While we are fighting for, or upset about the total lack of defense of the republic by those we sent as its guardians. What are we to make of an America that  has abandoned the average working class person? Codified the intent to erase another people group? All this while rounding up other groups based solely on race, or looking “unamerican?” 

Jesus died for his friends. In the Garden Of Gethsemane the whole world isn’t there. Just his loudmouth buddy about to get killed by the cops, and eleven friends. He turns himself in at that moment so the world as he knew it, through his friends, disciples, and followers could live on. Get away. Escape. Even the traitor who would have surely paid a price for loosing Jesus.

Friends. Build community. Concentric circles of mutual aid and interdependence. Learn the skills that you used to depend on state agencies for, but mostly take care of each other. 

Log off. Turn off your fucking TV. Tell your group chat to stop sending you links. Find the things you love, the things worth dying for, and build a world rooted in that for the days, weeks, months, and years ahead. 

Because it is unadulterated disaster capitalism, or just a modern coup, through the very sneaky means of: business as fucking usual. 

Written in love and liberation

rev/awo lenny duncan