Dear Diary

Notes from Inside a Collapsing America

January 10, 2026

Dear Diary,

I have be honest, those are words I never expected to write, because I’m way too lazy and uninteresting to keep a diary But as most of you guys know, I’ve been reading and researching the Third Reich for about five years now.

I started off pretty wide, with big books about the developments and details of that eleven-year Reich that we mostly only pay attention to during the war years, even though it came into power in 1933. And it wasn’t long into that research before I started to really appreciate how important contemporaneous diary accounts were.

Back in the old days—before the internet —apparently most people kept diaries. That’s why we know so much about our history, our public officials, and what actually happened: because people intentionally wrote things down. All kinds of people:

Allied leaders

Nazi leaders

Resistance leaders

Jews in hiding

Jews in ghettos and camps

Journalists

Professors

Enslaved Workers

Housewives

From the mightiest to the most ordinary we can bring the 1930s and 40s alive through personal accounts- some made for privacy, some for public consumption.

Not a record written backward once the events were over, but contemporaneous records that captured the uncertainty of each moment while it was happening.

And the reason they did so was because people who understood the importance of that moment asked them to.

So last year I said I was going to keep a diary. And then I totally didn’t. Within like two months I was like, I can’t even remember all the shit that’s happened today! There are days where there are three news cycles. I’ll be going crazy for eight hours and then look up and Trump’s like, “I don’t care about international law,” and it’s six o’clock on the East Coast. Back to work!

It’s fast.

And I don’t know if you can feel it, but I can feel it. It’s speeding up.

We’ve all seen that footage JD Vance released that he argued exonerated ICE for shooting Renée Good in the face. It’s a horrible video. Her poor dog is in the back seat—this big, dopey black lab—just staring calmly out the window while these juiced-up, testosterone-junkie ICE rabid dogs are circling this woman, who was also calm.

And you’ll forgive her, because she would never in a million years think that lipping off a bit to the cops, or being like “hey, we’re watching what you’re doing,” is grounds for being assassinated. You know what I mean? And this whole idea that she was a threat—this thread—is just completely undermined by the video.

Then you’ve got JD Vance claiming they have absolute immunity. And then they do the same thing in Portland. We haven’t even seen the video from the Portland shooting yet, but we’re seeing footage of them doing crazy shit to people all over the place.

And it’s not a surprise to me that this woman was shot. And I don’t think it’s going to be the last thing. I think it’s going to get worse from here.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Hermann Goering, who was Hitler’s number two. Nobody knows who anybody in the Nazi regime was except for nerds like me who study this shit, so I’ll explain: Goering was known as Hitler’s paladin. He was the military star from World War I who helped the Nazis create enough credibility to win elections, and then he was rewarded by becoming Hitler’s number two.

Very important guy.

And I’ve been reading recently about how he collapsed the state—especially in terms of law enforcement. And I’m putting a quote into this diary. I didn’t make the quote, obviously, I made the meme, but it captures perfectly this judicial philosophy of giving people a permission structure to be aggressive. In fact, if you’re not aggressive, then you’re the problem. And “I have your back.” “I am the wall.”

What he really means is: the Nazis are the law. Hitler is the law.

He doesn’t say “it’s better to shoot innocent people” exactly like that—you can read the quote —but he means is it’s better to go out there, shoot and arrest the wrong people, to cast a wide net, than to be soft. Being soft is weakness and weakness is unacceptable.

And it’s crazy watching this, because I’ve been arguing for at least six months—really since DOGE and the first purges out of DOJ and the FBI—that we are living in a post-federal-law-enforcement era. We just didn’t know it yet.

But here we are.

They sent the local cops away. They took full jurisdiction of the investigation in Minnesota. Now they’ve done the same thing in Portland. They came out and made statements that are provably false—framing this woman as a domestic terrorist, framing ICE agents as being hurt, claiming one had broken ankles and was hospitalized. Bullshit. The video shows him walking around after the shooting and then driving off.

We are in a post-federal-law environment. For all intents and purposes, there is no federal law enforcement system for us anymore.

And I think we’re going to see in the Minnesota fallout people starting to realize that. I just saw something from Keith Ellison saying Minnesota is going to try to do its own investigation.

And that’s the other thing I’m bitching about: media. Just because the government makes a statement now does not mean you can report it as fact. You have to ask whether it’s an out-and-out lie.

We need the media to catch up to this shit fast.

Or we’re all going to die.

Anyway—case in point—what I’m trying to tell people is that things feel fast and slippery. And you’re not crazy. They are slippery.

It sucks that we can’t get off this train. We’re strapped to a train being run by a madman, headed straight toward an abyss and a broken bridge, and there’s nothing any of us can do to stop it. That’s what it feels like.

But I do feel heartened—actually heartened—by the response to this. From what I’ve been seeing, even across the political spectrum, people are genuinely horrified by that video.

And part of the reason is that this isn’t someone like George Floyd, who they could try to destroy after the fact by dredging up a shoplifting conviction or some other bullshit character assassination. This is America’s mom. She looks like she could be dropping off cupcakes for a kindergarten class.

And they’re trying to call her a domestic terrorist.

And because things feel fast and slippery, it really behooves us to keep a contemporaneous record.

I mean, I’ve got to tell you: James Comey didn’t do a lot to help America. But the one thing James Comey did do is introduce me to the word contemporaneous. And it’s a beautiful word. It really rolls off the lips in that very chef’s-kiss way.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that contemporaneous notes are how we understand, in extraordinary detail, exactly what happened in Germany as the Nazis began to seize power. That knowledge is power. Understanding that process—watching it unfold in real time, not reconstructed later—has always felt crucial to me.

And one of the things we’re going to have to tool up for in 2026 is getting over fear.

The courage that Renée Good had to stop and say, hey, this isn’t right—that matters. I’m sure she didn’t think it would cost her her life. But it did.

It’s going to be a high check to pay.

But we have to pay it.

We have to be there.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

And I’ve got to tell you, it feels a little awkward. I don’t tend to talk to myself in a diary. I do my self-reflection in my truck, listening to great tunes and singing along with my very poor singing voice.

But I think this is important.

And I think if you’re hearing this, or reading this, you should consider doing the same thing. Because what we’re going to live through—one way or the other—is living history. Every single one of us is inside it right now.

So anyway, I’m going to start this new series.

It’s called Dear Diary.

I’m going to tell you what I’m thinking.

And I’m going to encourage you to keep your own contemporaneous diary of the moment we’re living through.

Given that the White House is hosting fake history of January 6th on taxpayer funded websites it will be on us more than ever to record the truth.

As Orwell once said: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

That means, to quote Jean-Paul Sartre: "To tell the truth is revolutionary."