Welcome to the Upside Down

It's Gonna Be a Long, Strange Trip Into Autocracy

Folks, if you subscribe to the Cycle you know I like to give you reality straight, with no chaser. If you think your mental health isn’t up to that, please flee.

There will be little feel-good content coming from me. Instead, I plan on bringing you a weekly blow-by -blow documenting the decline of democracy loosely based on William Shirer’s work as a foreign correspondent reporting from Berlin in the early years of the Third Reich.

I’ll be calling this feature This is America, after Shirer’s (heavily censored) live radio show from the 1930s and I’ll be offering this service only to paid subscribers because I need to keep the lights on. In case you’re wondering how it’s going, I have no dental insurance so please consider converting your old newspaper subscription money into The Cycle and I will watch the decline of democracy so you don’t have to.

I will continue to offer other programming here too, particularly my pod cast, for free subscribers and have some excellent people on my radar for 2025.

Now, I need to make an important point.

This week has been “what went wrong” week and predictably I am seeing lot’s of bullshit explanations as to why we lost. Most predominately is the idea that Democrats needed more economic populism to win over working class voters.

I’m here to tell you that working class voters don’t vote on economics. They did at one time back in the days of the New Deal, but those days were done as soon as cultural issues emerged and segegeation was ended by the federal government.

Don’t forget, there was no cultural issues prior to the 1950s/1960s because White men ruled unopposed and whether they were Democrats or Republicans, they all agreed that women belonged in the kitchen and gays in the closet.

The Era of Individual Freedom created the culture wars, and now we’re about to see a lot of it get rolled back.

Like the industrial age, the digital age has led massive improvements for humans but like pollution, it came with a massive negative externality. In the case of the Industrial Era it was pollution. In the case of the Digital Age it is mass propaganda.

Propaganda cannot be beat by comms and the Right’s propaganda and its massive media and online distribution power has successfully branded Democrats as out of touch elitists that care more about sex changes for prisoners than you.

This is what Trump ran on

Spoiler alert: its not the economy.

In fact, Trump and down ballot Republicans centered their entire campaigns around wedging trans people and migrants, as I spent months in vain trying to tell Democrats they would.

The data don’t lie. Trump ran less on the economy than Harris did and before Harris even came along the Biden team dropped $100 million into the Blue Wall on the economy and didn’t move the needle an inch.

Again, few Americans consume news and the GOP’s propaganda system is based on this reality. They know Americans will have no idea they are being lied to.

That said, I don’t think the autopsy conversations really matters much in the long run because I think that ship has sailed.

If I was Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Cassidy Hutchinson, Anthony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, and the many other people on Trump’s personal enemies list, I would start making plans. As should parents of trans kids in Red States. GTFO