This Election Year's Frightening Hall of Mirrors

Why I'm More Concerned About the Reaction to the Election than the Election Itself

I don’t know what’s going to happen between Election Day 2024 and Inauguration Day in January 2025. And unless time travelers are real, nobody does.

What I do know is that the two possible scenarios writer and futurist Daniel Pinchbeck outlines in this recent post are ones I pray won’t come to pass.

Let’s look at each, which I’ve condensed from his article, and why we should be concerned about them.

Scenario #1: Trump wins the election, takes office in January and immediately fires tens of thousands of government workers, replacing them with White Christian nationalist hardliners, and institutes a nationwide abortion ban, including cases of rape or medical emergency. He employs backer Larry Ellison of Oracle to create a total surveillance system in the US akin to China’s social credit system and eventually Elon Musk becomes CEO/Dictator of this new American Technorate.

Meanwhile, Trump gives Israel a much freer hand in their ongoing genocide, more directly represses student dissent in the US, deporting demonstrators. Eventually, mass incarcerations, deportations, and even worse things are common, including deporting not just illegal but legal immigrants.

Americans now live under the repressive hands of Christian nationalists who look to Putin, Franco, Netanyahu, Duterte and Pinochet as models for their regime. And it doesn’t end when Trump leaves office, because JD Vance waits in the wings (along with Musk).

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Scenario #2: Those fearing scenario #1 take matters into their own hands to stop it. They justify their behavior via various legal arguments, including that Trump fomented an attempted coup on January 6 against the government, legally disqualifying him from being President ever again. 

Thus, because of the “disqualification clause” in Section Three of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the election is either interrupted before or annulled after November 5. Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s broad immunity for all acts committed by the President, Biden, maintained by the support of the US military, uses an executive decree to interrupt the election and give the Republicans time to nominate another candidate, postponing the election some months.

Facing tens of millions of infuriated MAGA followers on the verge of revolt, teach-ins are held across the nation, where people would learn how propaganda and disinformation have been weaponized against them.

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Again, I don’t know if either of these things will happen. In fact, I’d put decent money that they won’t. Then again, the last time I made a bet regarding the US Election didn’t go so well. That was in 2020 when I took the field against my friend who said, “A white man claiming to be a Christian will win.” I underestimated the Machiavellian instincts of the Democratic Party and the lengths it would go to to hold onto power, so I’m no longer betting on US politics (only a foolish gambler bets on a game he believes is rigged).

Having said that, I really don’t believe scenario #1 will happen, mostly because we’ve already lived through four years of Trump and many of the worst-case scenarios people feared in October 2016 didn’t come to pass.

As for scenario #2, I'm inclined to disagree with Pinchbeck's interpretation. I don't believe the powers-that-be would resort to legal maneuvers to stop or postpone the election, nor do I think they would organize 'teach-ins' to educate the public. And I highly doubt any self-respecting MAGA member would attend such an event.

However, my concern is that the powers-that-be also believe something along the lines of scenario #1 will occur and thus will feel justified in doing some absolutely crazy stuff between now and January to slow down or derail Trump’s return to the Oval Office. I’m worried about this because I’ve seen this pattern before in recent American history. Call it the Problem-Reaction-Solution pattern, a strategy where an entity creates a problem, waits for the predictable public reaction, and then offers a pre-planned solution, often to further their own agenda.

Now, before I give some examples, I want to be clear: With all of these, I can’t know if the “Problem” was fully organic or whether it was consciously manifested. All I know is the Reaction was easily anticipated and the Solution was already prepared before the Problem happened.

In this way, it’s the same as Pinchbeck writing this blog post, in which after imagining a Problem, he admits, “I know this scenario seems impossible to imagine. We must imagine it. I hope the White House and FBI are gaming it out.”

Thanks to Matt Taibbi’s reporting from last June, we already know that government agencies have been, indeed, gaming out all sorts of scenarios relating to the upcoming election, even using a CIA-created dice game called HAIWIRE, in which the game players act as intelligence professionals, responding to AI-created information crises.

As Taibbi writes, “A great many of the incident cards involve interruptions to vote counting that role-players will have to find ways to explain. Events include an AI-caused “halt in vote counting,” corruption of voter data in ‘thirty states,’ the sudden appearance of AI-created obituaries for ‘still-living minority voters,’ a delay in delivery of absentee ballots, and more. Shown the game, one former military intelligence official who was a source on Twitter Files stories said, ‘It certainly shows where their heads are at.’”

(Note: Go to the end of this article for a very strange, memory-hole type update to Taibbi’s reporting about this card deck).

Of course, such exercises are nothing new, nor do I want to suggest they can’t play a useful role in preparing people for a crisis. What leads to questions is when games or “tabletop exercises,” such as Event 201 from the fall of 2019 about a pandemic, turn into reality shortly thereafter.

Again, these are chicken-and-the-egg quandaries, and in our current murky reality, I’m not going to claim I know where the line between preparing for possible problems and creating those problems in the first place lies.

However, getting back to Pinchbeck’s scenario, there are several reasons I’m more concerned with something like scenario #2 than scenario #1.

Before I get to scenario #2, let me share a few more reasons why I don’t think scenario #1 is likely. First, I do think it’s more likely that Trump will win the election, i.e. get more Electoral College votes than Harris does. I base this on both recent polling and my general sense of the zeitgeist. This is a “change election,” meaning people are generally unsatisfied with the current state of the country and want a change in leadership, and while we have already had Trump as president, his opponent is the one currently in power.

And while the Democrats have continued their messaging about Trump as the American Hitler, such messaging has less impact this time around because we’ve already had Trump as president. Would Hitler wait four years, leave office, and then hope he can regain power before showing his true colors?

Again, eight years ago, I had some of these fears and then was relieved they didn’t manifest. A few weeks back, I invited Pinchbeck on his Facebook page to think back to October 2016 and see if he could remember what he feared might happen then and then consider what did happen. Unfortunately, he didn’t accept my invitation.

Second, Pinchbeck, like all too many cosmopolitan liberal writers, seems to believe that MAGA nation is this giant block of racist Christian nationalists. His main piece of evidence is this hidden camera interview with Project 25 founder Russell Vought, writing that “(Vought) makes it clear Trump is completely on board with this plan.” However, Pinchbeck doesn’t inform his readers that Vought thought he was meeting with some potential big-money donors, so Vought telling them that Trump was “completely on board with his plan” is very likely salesman talk rather than an accurate reflection of reality.

Before I go on, that’s not to say that people with Vought’s priorities won’t have any influence on Trump or his policies. He might and maybe even likely will. However, since 2016, MAGA has become an even wider tent and now has many prominent former Democrats, such as RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, on board and in Trump’s ear. In addition, it has added classical liberals such as Bret Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, to the ranks of those openly supporting him (and urging others to do so).

RFK Jr. believes that Trump’s near assassination attempt deepened his appreciation for his potential legacy and that Trump, despite what seems to be his unhealthy lifestyle, supports RFK’s vision to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA).

Now, maybe he isn’t. Maybe RFK Jr. is being taken for a fool. I don’t know.

But we can be sure that RFK Jr. will do everything in his power to be heard, and that would include speaking out against some sort of Christian right nationalist takeover of Trump’s administration. And I bet Gabbard, a Hindu, Weinstein, an atheist, and many others who have risked their public reputation to back Trump would object, too.

In addition, when Trump first introduced RFK Jr. to his audience at a rally in Arizona, RFK Jr. spoke for about 10 minutes and said that one of their conditions for working together was that they were both allowed to publicly disagree with each other. RFK Jr. has said that Trump has told him he is inspired by Lincoln’s notion of a “team of rivals,” and that’s what he wants around him this time around; not “yes men,” not one ideologically driven group such as Christian nationals, and not deep-state types such as the neocons.

Last, perhaps Pinchbeck hasn’t mixed with those who support Trump, but I have. Like my friends who are on Team Blue, Trump supporters have a wide range of interests and reasons for voting for Trump. Furthermore, just look at where the culture is now: do you see a sudden rise of white Christian fascists in it? I’d like some more evidence besides one rally back in 2017 at Charleston that turned out to be overhyped by our divide-and-conquer media (and President Biden).

Also, do you remember that one of the the key reasons Hillary lost to Trump in 2016 was because voters in the swing states in the Rust Belt who had previously voted twice for Barack Obama voted for Trump? Are you claiming such people are racist white nationalists in disguise? Or that they’ve been converted in the eight years since? Where’s the evidence for this? Maybe the reality is the same thing that Michael Moore, an outspoken Harris supporter, said back then, that such voters were driven by economic insecurities and a sense that the system, under Obama, had screwed them again, despite all that talk of hope and change.

In the end, what seems to be happening here is an exercise of imagination by people like Pinchbeck. Yet it’s a very dangerous one because it’s creating a ton of fear in our environment, and those fears are then being used to justify all sorts of heinous behavior to “save democracy.”

Over the past few years, I’ve kept coming back to the apocryphal phrase attributed to a Vietnam Era general, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” I thought this when well-known intellectual Sam Harris said on a podcast in 2022 that the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was justified because he felt that Trump’s unpredictable nature makes him an existential threat to democracy.

In addition, when I hear Blue Teamers talk about how Trump wants to lock up his political enemies, I can’t help but notice that Trump’s former advisor, Steve Bannon, was just released from a four-month prison sentence on a charge by the Democrats for failing to appear in front of Congress that is basically never enforced, or that Trump himself has had much of his time wrapped up in various courtrooms defending himself against, umm, trumped up charges. Thus, it feels like hypocrisy and projection to say, “If you vote for this person, he might do this horrible thing which we are already doing!”

And last, when Pinchbeck writes about a need for “teach-ins” across the country for “infuriated MAGA voters on the verge of revolt” to educate them about “how propaganda and disinformation have been weaponized against them,” I just wonder if he knows how arrogant and condescending he sounds to some of us who aren’t even MAGA voters but who disagree with his perspective.

I think he misunderstands how tired people are of being talked down to by people who not only don’t take the time to understand them but who slander them and chastise them for daring to “do their own research.” As comedian-and-former-Bernie-Sanders-supporting firebrand Jimmy Dore has quipped, “We used to call ‘do your own research’ reading, and that was a good thing!”

In the end, indeed, my biggest concern about these next several weeks is the reaction by those Blue Team people if Trump wins because, well, they just seem a bit unhinged, and the things they are suggesting they must do to stop Trump sound like the very sorts of things they are warning us that Trump will do.

What kind of hall of mirrors have we entered?

Memory Holing The CIA Card-and-Dice Game

Now, to the aforementioned story regarding that strange CIA card-and-dice game.

If you read Taibbi’s article, dated June 19, 2024, you’ll see the following introduction and picture of one of the cards:

“On the last America This Week, Walter Kirn and I introduced “HAIWIRE,” a game for training intelligence professionals to respond to AI-created information crises. One of the cards in this Dungeons & Dragons-style game read, “An easy-to-use voice model helps create a viral video suggesting that one of the candidates may have dementia”:

This photo was shared in Matt Taibbi’s article from June, 2024.

However, when I went to the link Tabbi provided for the Github page which hosted HAIWIRE and downloaded the PDFs for the cards, not only didn’t this particular card show up in the set but despite Taibbi writing that “a great many of the incident cards involve interruptions to vote counting,” I didn’t see any cards related to that topic (and there’s one more screenshot of a card in Taibbi’s article that doesn’t show up in the decks I downloaded).

Now, Taibbi’s too good and honest of a reporter for me to believe that he made this up. More believable is that, after Taibbi’s article came out, the HAIWIRE card set was “updated.” However, as you can see from the screenshot I just took here on October 31, 2024, below, that update didn’t show up in the dating of this Github page:

Something shady this way slithers! (Screenshot: Author)

Who knows what’s going on? I could speculate that someone updated the set without noting the update on the Github page to prevent further embarrassment for the company that made the cards and the intelligence agencies who are using them. I have no trouble believing that people with enough computer skills could make such an update and make it appear as though no update was made.

Or maybe something more sinister is at play? Maybe they didn’t want to reveal some more things that might actually happen around the election, a la Event 201 and what went down with COVID-19?

Anyway, the only reason I discovered this is because I was going to share a screenshot of a different card to illustrate Taibbi’s point but couldn’t find one and then I couldn’t find the one he’d posted the picture of that I shared above.

None of this is surprising, of course, because we’re talking about people working for intelligence agencies, which is another way of saying, “liars.” This sort of bullshit is to be expected. At least, that’s been my orientation for many decades and, BT (Before Trump), it was the orientation of most folks who considered themselves informed liberals. Sadly, because the intelligence agencies have been publicly opposed to Trump, all too many liberals now give free passes and excuses to such agencies.

Considering the card below, maybe they are right to. After all, who doesn’t want a group of well-trained government agents protecting “adorable toddlers” from AI-created incidents?

But then again, what about the ugly, bratty toddlers? Who’s protecting them?

Thanks for reading, folks! I haven’t regularly been writing on this blog because most of my work is focused on my Archetypal Lens blog. However, I’d like to consider writing more of these types of posts so please consider subscribing to let me know you’d like me to write more.

Meanwhile, you can check out my daily podcast, The Daily Bryan Podcast, which I’ve now done 305 episodes of (every day of 2024) and which has more socio-political commentary like this article. For example, here, here and here.