I Would Prefer Not To
We Will Pay the Price
But We Will Not Count the Cost
“And if the love remains though everything is lost
We will pay the price, but we will not count the cost”
Bravado: Neil Peart & Rush
In Herman Melville’s short story: "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street," the character Bartleby responds to each and every request for him to perform labor with “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby eventually takes up residence in the office, refusing to do any work and after a series of somewhat comical occurrences, he winds up imprisoned in the Tombs where one of the landlords that tried to evict him bribes a cook to make sure that Bartleby has food to eat. Eventually, Bartleby is found dead of starvation as he refuses to eat and Melville ends the story with the narrator saying, "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"
We are witnessing the end of our country, the end of an empire. It will be facilitated by a strange mix of bedfellows. It is the combination of Christian Nationalists and far-right organizations run under the umbrella of the Council For National Policy, the “CNP,” along with the Nerd Reich, the Silicon Valley techbros known as the TESCREALists.
Together, this unholy alliance is out to completely dismantle the U.S. Government via the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. When you study the Project 2025 Tracker you will see that they have already completed almost one third of the plans for tearing apart the government and the Constitution.
The digital coup is being led by Elmo Musk and his INCEL band of Nerd Reich programmers who are stealing all the government data and implementing AI in the effort to have total control over the data…thus no one else can touch the data unless they have the keys.
“Along the way, DOGE also gained access to untold terabytes of data. Trump had given Musk and his operatives carte blanche to tap any unclassified system they pleased. One of their first stops: a database previously breached more than a decade ago by alleged Chinese cyberspies that contained investigative files on tens of millions of US government employees. Other storehouses thrown open to DOGE may have included federal workers’ tax records, biometric data, and private medical histories, such as treatment for drug and alcohol abuse; the cryptographic keys for restricted areas at federal facilities across the country; the personal testimonies of low-income-housing recipients; and granular detail on the locations of particularly vulnerable children.” --Wired
In Melville’s tale, we learn that Bartleby acquired his peculiar outlook on life as the steward of a ‘dead letter’ office…gathering unsent mail and preparing it for the fire. He simply gave up on life after lifetime of throwing away, “…pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities.”
Though Everything is Lost
Americans are “about to go through some things.” The dismantling of the government will be the least of the worries. Courts taken over by coup, the money shuffled off to the Seychelles or some other place where no democratic governance will ever be able to touch it, government systems locked down in AI prisons that only the elite few with the keys can access, citizens being rounded up for protesting, religion being forced on the population, privatization of needed public services. It’s coming…and the wheels are coming off. And the people know this.
This leads us to ask, what can I/We do? We are being told by the world’s biggest snake oil salesman that things eventually be ‘great.’ We are going to experience a “Golden Age.” But those of us with half a brain know better. As Rick Wilson told us years ago, 'Everything Trump Touches Dies.' EVERYTHING. #ETTD
The Crazy Kooky Cuckoo Kakistocracy is by design meant to fuck things up. They will burn it down to rule over the ashes. The New Apostolic Reformation and the Seven Mountains Mandate (Dominionists), and the Council For National Policy and the implementation of Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation of which Opus Dei has been the cash cow is EVIL.
The sole purpose of this enterprise is to put all the wealth in the hands of a very select few while the rest of us suck wind. The difference between the previous Gilded Age in the U.S. is the tech. We are about to discover if the Libertarian techbros are simply doofuses that have a back of the napkin plan and no means of implementing it, or they really will control it all and give the Talibangelicals free reign to start converting us all to their Theocratic vision.
In either case, it is going to be ugly AF.
We Are All Bartleby
Our response to this needs to be Bartleby. Shopping at ANY business that supports the coup; “I would prefer not to,” sit-ins, conscientious objection, peaceful protest…the response to the evil insanity is always, “I would prefer not to.”
Mass labor strikes, mass economic strikes, occupy D.C., our options are limited but they must be born of the collective. Hungarians have finally stood up to Viktor Orban (the darling of the GOP) as he continues to crackdown on the free press. Tens of thousands of Hungarians rallied this weekend in opposition to a 15-year rule by Orban’s dictatorship.
The sooner that Americans can assimilate in the single cause of opposing the T***p Regime’s autocracy, the better. If we take James Carville’s suggestion of going to sleep until the midterms, there likely will not be elections in this country. Hell, with “Big Balls” in control of all American’s data, we may have already passed the tipping point for any free and fair election ever again.
The thing is, if we wait one year, or three…the damage will be so catastrophic that we may never be able to recover. Collectively we must rise and fly as close to the fucking sun as we can, and right now. It is time for the country to burn its wings if that is what it takes. We win by protecting each other.
The solution comes from a statement by Warren Buffet, summed up in this video:
“Would they hide me?” We are going to be our brother’s and sister’s keepers. Just like the Hungarians right now, Americans are going to need to band together and revolt. We must protect everyone, and we need to welcome the MAGA as(if) they awaken from their cultish delusions.
The protests at town halls right now are not the die hard MAGAts, those people are still deeply entrenched in the cult. But the bulk of uninformed voters who took a flyer on the conman are waking up to the fact that they got bamboozled. We need them on our side.
You know that right now they are starting to use the AI to sweep all social media and gather data on anyone who dares to dissent. Author of “The Nerd Reich,” Gil Duran, has had his writings blocked on the META platform because he dares to speak out against Elmo Musk. All of us who count ourselves part of “The Resistance” are targets.
Note: I am not talking about Bartleby the relinquishing. This is Bartleby the person who says, “No.” No, we are not going to take your bullshit or listen to your nonstop P.T. Barnum mendacity. We will not surrender to Putin’s wet dream. We are not screaming no. We simply say, “I Would Prefer Not To.” As Elmo famously told his advertisers, “Go Fuck Yourself.”
The Professor asks us, “If the love remains.” A collective love with a Fuck You attitude toward the dictatorship of the CNP can and will win. We must show our Bravado.
“I will not back down. I will not bow or scrape. I will never obey.” —Marc Elias