Month: February 2022

What Is This Second Thriller About?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

For the month of February, I’ve decided to bounce around the huge five thriller universe I’ve come up with instead of focusing just on the first book. For the moment, I focusing on the second novel in the series.

I’m struggling, however, to figure out what the second novel is *about*. The first novel is about a mother’s love for her son. The second novel is about the love of one woman for the love of a late women’s infant. I know that much, but what I don’t know is the details of the plot of the novel.

But that’s what the next month is for. And it’s really helping that I can go backwards and forwards in time as needed to change things on a structural basis to fix issues as needed.

The issue is, I need to get going. I need to stop daydreaming and get something figured out on the page. But, I guess, in a sense, I have to daydream first before I can do just that.

My Hot Take On Crooked Media’s Ben Rhodes’ Hot Take On Trump’s Electoral ‘Trap’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m a fan of Ben Rhodes and the whole Crooked Media team, but I’m in the middle of listening to the latest Pod Save America and I have to take issue with something he just said.

He apparently wrote in The Atlantic that Trump has set something of a “trap” for center-Left people by making them aware of white identity politics, etc. This, in turn, makes us angry to the point that we alienate the people who would otherwise help us win elections.

I have two things to point out about this.

One is, we’re now an anocracy, to the point that we can no longer work with the assumption that elections will be free and fair in the first place. The 2020 elections could be, in fact, the last free-and-fair national elections that the United States ever has (unless, of course, we have a civil war and sort things out that way.) So, it’s difficult to win elections — no matter what your policies are — when the whole system is run by people on the local and state level who have heeded Steve K. Bannon’s call for an “administrative coup.”

Even if we get past that particular situation, the people that Rhodes is talking about that could be appealed to — people I call “Traditionalists” — no longer believe in democracy anymore. They’re all-in with the fascist MAGA New Right because they’re deathly afraid of white people being in the minority.

So, I just don’t see traditional politics being a viable option anymore for the center-Left. Either be prepared for a civil war or get out of the country. I don’t want a civil war and I think, in the end, many, many, MANY wealthy center-Left people — like Ben Rhodes — will ultimately leave the country.

That’s our future. Listening to Crooked Media through a VPN because fucking fat fuck President Mike Pompeo destroyed America. Good luck.