vitalwholeness

Today I had two separate conversations with people directly affected by the current administration’s sacking of the federal government. The first was a man who worked for the Consumer Protection Agency, up until a week ago that is. He was summarily dismissed along with dozens of his fellow staff members. Their job? To protect citizens from the kind of untoward practices that led to the economic meltdown of 2008. But it doesn’t matter if they protect citizens. Something else is at work.

The second was a retired federal law enforcement employee who provided the blow by blow of the Doge invasion of personal records, the kind of privacy and security invasion that would have justified an investigation just a few years ago.

It is clear that we have entered new territory. By now we are becoming aware of the many agencies affected, including USAID, NIH, FFA, IRS, Social Security, and more. Here is the thing: Elon Musk and his storm troopers operate under the mask of efficiency, rooting out waste, and eliminating fraud. But it’s a smoke screen to cover what they are really up to. I want to talk about that.

It has been the plan to gut the federal government as a part of a second Trump term. It was outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – its roadmap. People like billionaire Peter Thiel who bought J.D. Vance’s Senate seat and placed him in the Vice Presidency, and Oligarch Elon Musk, the South African who bought Donald Trump’s Presidency in return for favors, join with other authoritarian-leaning oligarchs in an ambitious attempt to undo democracy and replace it with a single party, autocratic, theocratic fascist state. To get there you have to destroy things. You have to savage the separation of powers, sack the judiciary, gag the press, and pillage every institution of government, removing expertise and smarts. They want to privatize health care and the support of veterans and make millions off them. They want to gut anything that benefits all the people and make those who are already economically fat even more obese. They want to eliminate those who can investigate them and fire career law enforcement people. They want to politicize the military and transform them into the President’s new storm troopers. Replace competent people with compliant unqualified people. Silence and disappear the scientists and experts. Soil international relationships. And while they are at it, dismiss the board of the Kennedy Center and move in Trump as the chair.

Why all this? To consolidate absolute power. To move beyond governing a state and instead forming an international cabal of strongmen and oligarchs to determine everyone’s future and profit off it. They will decide what happens to Ukraine. They will decide what happens to Gaza. Trump wants this. So do his wealthy enablers. And his populist working class minions don’t even know that they are being played with a sheaf of culture war issues du jour.

That is exactly why a bunch of inexperienced tech kids under the supervision of the rogue shadow President, Elon Musk, are tearing through government with a digital chain saw. It is not their mission to reform; they want to destroy. And unless someone stops them, they will do just that.

This is also why American politicians like Vance and Hegseth show up at a security conference in Munich with supposed allies and trashes them. And spouts Russian talking points instead. Putin was surely tossing back a double vodka on that one. What useful idiots I have in America, he must think. Yes, the enemies of America are within. And they are mine.

One response is for Americans to throw up our hands and say, “Oh, well, there’s nothing to do.” Another is denial, “It’s not that bad, things swing back and forth.” Another is to be petrified and stuck in place with feet in concrete. None of these are adequate for these times.

As opposed to the fake Christian Nationalists who use religion to accomplish their ideological ends, I want to suggest another way forward. I think that the menace that stalks at noonday is already in the land. The whore of Babylon is here. I think that only spiritual power and moral resolve can stand against this tyranny. This requires resistance to injustice, domination, and destruction. This requires denouncing the ways the worst among us are thrilled at marginalizing anyone who doesn’t look like them and worship their small little tribal god.

For everything there is a season. It’s time to be prophets, not consolers. Not time to comfort, but rather to confront.

We do not choose the times given, only how we will respond. Generations from now they will look back at us and ask, “Did they stand against the plague?”

Well, did we?