This Week in the Apocalypse

or: it hasn't been a boring week

This week I drove through a power outage, through a mile of dead streetlights. About half the cars seemed to observe the rule that a dead traffic light counts as a four-way stop. The other cars just drove full speed through intersections. I don’t know if this serves as some grander metaphor, but it feels like it does.

Several hours later, I drove back the way I came, and nothing had changed, as the temperature dipped closer to freezing on the wet roads.

This week we talked about that book Parable of the Sower, about slow collapse versus fast collapse, about the hill we felt like we might go tumbling down.

This week a friend told me her partner, a US citizen, was abducted out of his car by ICE in Minneapolis. They scanned his face and let him out hours later, after intervention from a lawyer and from a massive protest outside where he was detained.

This week my other friends in Minneapolis are reporting the most heartbreaking and heartwarming stories, of repression and resistance.

This week I made plans with friends and loved ones about what we’re going to do if cell networks go down. Whose house will we rally at? Who knows the roads best without GPS? Who has all-wheel drive?

A few hours earlier, I heard from a friend who couldn’t afford his phone bill and relied on the internet that the internet had gone out at his house. He’d driven 20 minutes to Walmart to get on the wifi to tell people he was currently cut off. It seems as though the wind ripped the fiber connection right off the power pole.

Most nights this week I stayed up late doomscrolling, watching videos of ICE raids and ICE sieges.

It hasn’t been a good news week. Things appear to be spiraling faster and faster.

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I’m going to start this with the dark, but then talk about the light. The thing is, I genuinely believe we’re going to win. But it’s going to be hard, and scary. As always, the only way out is through.

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I imagine that you, reading this, are aware that Renee Nicole Good was murdered by ICE in Minneapolis. I’m certain you’re aware that she wasn’t the first person ICE have killed, that she won’t be the last. (I’ve been writing and rewriting this piece for days, and the news keeps shifting under my feet. ICE has shot at least three more people since Renee Good.)

Maybe you’ve seen the videos of ICE agent after ICE agent threatening to kill people in the days since, saying “haven’t you learned anything from what we did last week?” to threaten anyone who challenges their power.

More and more accounts are coming out about ICE profiling and kidnapping people, and if they can’t be deported, beating the shit out of them and leaving them bleeding, miles away.

ICE has detained numerous indigenous people, including several members of the Oglala Sioux. ICE won’t even give the tribe the names of the people it’s detained, and is refusing to do so unless the tribe recognizes ICE formally and enters into an immigration agreement with them. The tribe, understandably, has refused.

The thing it seems like everyone, including politicians, is dancing around is “well, can the world survive Trump in power until the elections, or does something need to be done sooner?” Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, has mobilized the National Guard to put down any potential rebellion in the state, and consistently tries to stop people from rising up against fascism. But he is also seemingly aware that there’s a sort of moral imperative to use the national guard to stop ICE, and is trying to explain why he still won’t do it. He said to the press: “We’ve never been at war with our federal government.”

Everyone is aware that using police or the national guard against federal agents could trigger a civil war. Politicians are dancing around that, trying not to set off the powder keg. Which means allowing the atrocities to continue.

Even diehard moderates like Walz are starting to crack.

The last time the country was in this kind of stalemate—with half of the country aware of a moral imperative to stop a great atrocity, but afraid of the level of violence stopping it would involve—was the 1850s. That stalemate was broken by a bold raid on Harper’s Ferry by Black and white abolitionists, which sparked a civil war that stopped, with enormous bloodshed, one of the most evil institutions the world has ever seen. 2% of Americans died in that war.

If we had another civil war and two percent of us died, that’s almost 7 million people.

Of course, there’s no reason to believe a second civil war would look anything like the first one, in terms of casualties but also in terms of outcome. There’s no reason to assume so many, or so few, people would die. There no reason to assume the better side would win, or that there would be clear winners at all.

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Maybe you’ve caught that Trump is actively considering invading Greenland. Greenland should be controlled by its indigenous inhabitants, but it is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Which is part of NATO. Which the US is part of. The invasion of Greenland would, at the very least, cut off the US from its own extensive bases in other NATO countries. It could lead to sanctions and presumably hyperinflation. It could also lead to a war against NATO, who is already landing troops on the world’s largest island.

And speaking of hyperinflation, Trump is trying to force the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. The Federal Reserve sets the interest rates that banks use to lend money to one another (which they do every day because they’re obliged to keep a certain amount of cash on hand, but prefer to invest all the money they can, so they’re all playing a delicate game all the time). These interest rates trickle down to the entire economy. When interest rates are low, people are more willing to take out loans, so the economy grows and there are more jobs created, but it causes inflation. When the interest rates are high, people borrow less, and inflation is controlled but the economy cools off. It’s all a bit arcane, but here’s a decent explainer.

Trump wants the interest rates cut even lower, because he wants short-term gains for the economy. The Federal Reserve is independent-ish for exactly that reason—it’s in the best longterm interest of the US economy to not be beholden to political maneuvering.

So Trump has come up with some excuses to try to oust the head of the federal reserve, which has actually pissed off a huge part of his base—the finance bros. If Trump succeeds at controlling the federal reserve, it could easily lead to hyperinflation and economic collapse. Even his threats against the Federal Reserve sent stocks down and the price of gold up. And since huge portions of the world economy is held up by the US dollar, hyperinflation at home will have knock-on effects worldwide. This is about the mildest way I can put it.

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I don’t trust people who sell fear and anxiety on the internet, and you shouldn’t either. I love preparedness, but I hate 90% of prepper content, because the best way to get eyes onto a video—or substack post—is to tell people all the horrendous shit that is just around the corner.

I don’t want to do that. I try so hard not to do that.

One reason I try not to do it is because I don’t want to believe it myself. I don’t want collapse. I don’t want global or civil war. I want to play roleplaying games with my friends and write fantasy novels and organize community fundraisers.

Last year I told my friends: “look, I don’t think we’re going to have a civil war in the next year. I think it’s like a 5% chance. But the thing is, most years, it’s like .01%, so this is an issue worth taking seriously.” Anyone who has played Dungeons and Dragons knows that 5% chances happen all the time. It’s when you roll a 1 on a twenty-sided die.

Now, of course, I’d made that number up wholecloth. But “hey there’s a 5% chance of something really, really major happening” is more than enough reason to be prepared for it.

And frankly, I’d put the odds of global or civil war a lot higher now than I did a year ago.

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A final bit of precariousness: a physician’s assistant friend of mine told me that around half of clinicians are looking to change careers, then sent me this article from Forbes about why. There are a slew of reasons, but that list includes: patients use AI to misdiagnose themselves and doctors have to spend an increasing amount of their time debunking misinformation; insurance companies are making it impossible to give patients the treatment they need; the end of Roe v. Wade has made it illegal to perform basic reproductive healthcare.

A medical shortage is coming. 40% of clinicians are set to retire within the next decade, and the “big beautiful bill” capped loans for medical school at $50,000 a year or $200,000 total. So no one can afford to go into medicine.

And the EPA is no longer taking human health into consideration when it sets policy about pollution.

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2026 is off to a rough start.

But as I harp on about all the time, the thing we can learn from winter solstice is that as the sun begins to return, the cold sets in. There is a delay between the return of hope and of things getting better. Spring is coming.

I believe that.

In a strange way, I’m more hopeful for the future than I’ve ever been. For the first time in its history, more Americans support abolishing ICE altogether than oppose abolishing ICE (46% to 43%). ICE has always been a problem. It shouldn’t be reformed, and any politician calling for its reform is woefully out of touch. Authoritarianism and capitalism have always been problems. More people are aware of that, and more people are doing something about it.

I said I’ve been watching videos of ICE raids and of ICE sieges. The sieges, oddly, give me hope. More and more and more people are standing up, and with shaking knees and quivering voices, saying “fuck you, you can’t steal my neighbors.”

ICE was certain that videos of them murdering Renee Good would cause the public to cower. They thought that terrorism (that is, in this case, a policy of causing terror) would silence their opposition. They were wrong. It’s emboldened people.

Last night, protesters chased ICE out of North Minneapolis, forcing them to leave vehicles behind. Protesters found all sorts of documentation inside those vehicles.

Earlier this week, a whistleblower from inside the DHS leaked the personal information of 4500 ICE and Border Patrol agents.

They’re so desperate for new hires that they accidentally hired an antifascist journalist.

I think resistance is working.

The politicians aren’t acting to save people. They know they should, but they aren’t doing it. People are acting to protect each other and themselves, and it’s working.

But things are going to get worse before they get better.

I drove through that power outage this week, because public infrastructure in America—or at least Appalachia and the Rust Belt, where I spend my time—is crumbling. Infrastructure is aging and going un-updated. Climate change has increased rainfall in some areas, leaving trees more vulnerable to wind storms. Power companies in Ohio are requesting permission to do a worse job, to take longer to restore power.

The country isn’t being run by politicians right now, it’s being run by thieves stripping the copper out of the walls of our society. They’re bankrupting us and leaving us in the cold.

The only question (and this is genuinely a question, one you should ask yourself and your family and your community, rather than listen to answers written by anarchists on the internet with newsletters) is “what is it going to take to change this situation?”

On a local scale, I would guess that what it takes to change the situation is people coming together with megaphones and whistles and trembling voices and the courage we’ve inherited from the bravest of our ancestors to say “get the fuck out of our city” directly in the faces of the gestapo. We’ve seen that that can work. Courage works. (The exact tactics with which we express our courage are likely to shift over time, in all sorts of directions.)

Refusing to let them divide us, along class lines or religious lines or ethnic lines or even tactical lines, that works. Solidarity works.

None of us know the future. Because the future is something we, collectively, determine.

By acting with courage and conviction, we embolden ourselves and each other. Fascism is an ideology of fear, and courage is its antithesis.

Thanks for coming to my pep talk. I needed it to get out of bed.