No Kings, No Gods, No Guard: Dispatches from a Nation Under Siege

Trump sends in troops. RFK Jr. purges science. Protesters face rubber bullets. And through it all, the air thickens with smoke, with fear, and with fascism.

Good morning! In a democracy, the military defends the people. In Donald Trump’s America, the military is used against them, especially if they live in a blue state, speak Spanish, or own a copy of the Constitution.

What started as peaceful protests in Los Angeles, residents opposing Trump’s aggressive ICE raids, has spiraled into a full-blown constitutional crisis. Not because protesters looted stores or set cars on fire, but because the president wanted them to. It’s not a reaction to chaos. It’s a production of it.

Over the weekend, Trump ordered 2,000 National Guard troops into Los Angeles, uninvited, unwelcome, and unneeded. California officials said they had the situation under control. But Trump didn’t want control, he wanted chaos. When the protests refused to turn into the riot porn he hoped for, he doubled down: 700 Marines were mobilized next, bringing the weight of America’s combat military into a domestic political theater. This wasn’t law enforcement. It was an audition for martial law.

But here’s the kicker: of the initial 2,000 Guardsmen Trump sent, only about 300 are even operational. The rest were dumped onto city pavement, literally, left to sleep on concrete floors without food, water, or proper accommodations. It’s a portrait of contempt, not just for California, but for the very servicemembers Trump pretends to champion. These aren’t props in a campaign ad. They’re human beings. But in Trump’s staging of America, they’re expendable extras in a war he’s desperate to ignite.

Gavin Newsom, one of the Democratic governors still trying to play constitutional defense, sued the administration within hours. His legal team argues this is a blatant violation of the 10th Amendment, because it is. And they’re backing it up with a $2.5 billion legal war chest set aside to “Trump-proof” California’s sovereignty. It’s an existential standoff: on one side, a president who treats the Constitution like an expired coupon; on the other, a governor trying to keep his state from becoming a live-fire backdrop to Trump’s authoritarian fantasy.

Former federal prosecutor Melanie Sloan warns the Insurrection Act does not apply. There’s no “rebellion” in LA, unless you count the White House’s rebellion against the Constitution. And under the Posse Comitatus Act, those 700 Marines can’t legally arrest anyone. So what, exactly, are they there to do? Help with traffic?

Veterans like Ken Harbaugh and Rep. Mikie Sherrill aren’t mincing words. This is a manufactured crisis engineered to justify martial law. Trump is deploying combat-trained soldiers, not riot police, not the National Guard with lawful authority, but actual warfighters, into American streets. Unlike law enforcement, Marines are trained to shoot to kill. A proud Marine mom, I asked my favorite USMC grunt and Iraq War combat veteran what he thought.

“Bad idea,” he said. “Marines have itchy trigger fingers.”

Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, who seems to run the Pentagon like a frat house with a cosplay fetish, announced the Marines’ arrival with all the legal decorum of a Facebook comment. Sherrill called him “the most incompetent Secretary of Defense we’ve ever had.” Which may be true, but it gives too little credit to how intentional that incompetence is. It’s engineered. Designed. Just like the ICE raids, just like the timing of the protests, just like the camera-ready tear gas in front of federal buildings.

Create the fire, blame the people you set ablaze, and send in the troops to save them from the flames. Even Nixon had more subtlety.

Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA acolytes, some already fantasizing about arresting Newsom, are cheering from the bleachers. A GOP candidate for New Jersey governor publicly declared he’d welcome troops into his state too, like a colonial vassal waiting for his Redcoat overlords. These people don’t want governors. They want governors kneeling.

All this chaos is performance art for fascists, and the show’s just getting started.

In a move so brazen it could’ve been ghostwritten by Joe Rogan, RFK Jr., America’s most famous vaccine conspiracy theorist turned Trump’s Health Secretary, just purged all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The entire expert panel? Gone. Fired. Disbanded. Apparently, science is too risky to leave to scientists.

Why? Because, according to Kennedy’s op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, the real crisis isn’t disease, it’s “public trust.” And naturally, the solution to restoring trust in vaccines is to replace immunologists and pediatricians with ideological allies who think mRNA is a Deep State plot.

The committee in question is no bureaucratic rubber stamp. Its members are unpaid experts from diverse disciplines who evaluate vaccine safety and make recommendations that influence everything from insurance coverage to school entry requirements. But Kennedy, who swore during his confirmation that he would not interfere with the process, has now gutted it completely. Sen. Bill Cassidy, who voted to confirm him based on that promise, is suddenly doing his best impression of a man realizing his handshake deal was with a snake.

Trump’s administration doesn’t just want to defund the public health state, they want to defang, discredit, and dominate it. First DOGE gutted the agencies. Now Kennedy gets to rebuild them in the image of his podcast fanbase.

And don’t expect this to slow down. As one analyst noted: the Trump doctrine is simple, “Move fast, lie loudly, and count on the press to be distracted by the next fire.” Or drone strike, or deportation raid, or marine deployment.

The American people aren’t just being left unprotected from disease. They’re being force-fed doubt as policy. And the new public health standard is no longer “Does this protect the population?” It’s “Does this poll well with Tucker Carlson viewers?”

The next pandemic won’t care how much RFK Jr. trusts his gut.

In the early hours of Monday, Russia launched one of its largest air assaults yet against Ukraine: 322 drones and missiles in a single wave. Among the targets? The capital, Kyiv. The cities of Dnipro, Chernihiv, and Odesa. A maternity hospital.

Ukrainian air defenses shot down most of the incoming swarm, 284 out of 322, but not all. Eleven sites were hit, casualties reported, and lives lost.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s response wasn’t just about the bombs. It was about the silence that followed.

“Russian missile and Shahed strikes are louder than the attempts by the United States and others to force Russia to peace.”

The message wasn’t subtle. Diplomacy without consequences is just a slower kind of surrender. Trump’s undermining of U.S. alliances abroad and promotion of lawlessness at home increasingly leave Ukraine fighting a two-front war: one against Moscow, the other against Western apathy.

It’s not that the weapons haven’t come, eventually. It’s that they’re always late, always partial, always conditional. Trump-era arms deals favor Gulf monarchs over European allies. Anti-drone systems meant for Ukraine were rerouted to serve Trump’s “Middle East peace optics.” Zelenskyy is begging for air defense systems while Trump is posing with a UFC belt and trying to outlaw history class.

And let’s not pretend this is just about Ukraine. When authoritarian leaders bomb hospitals and the self-declared defenders of democracy respond with hesitation and handwringing, it tells the world: if you’re strong enough to ignore the rules, the rules no longer matter.

If Trump’s muscle-flexing in LA is a dry run for crushing domestic resistance, Zelenskyy’s desperation is a warning: unchecked power doesn’t stay in one country. It metastasizes.

You can hear the drones over Kyiv. You can hear the boots in Los Angeles. But from Washington, all too often, we hear nothing at all.

While soldiers patrol American streets and Russian drones fall on Ukrainian hospitals, a quieter kind of collapse is underway, one not caused by bombs or bullets, but by burnout.

According to a sobering new report from the United Nations Population Fund, the global fertility rate is in “unprecedented decline.” And not because people are choosing to stay child-free. It’s because they can’t afford not to.

In a survey spanning 14 countries, including the U.S., India, Germany, Nigeria, and Brazil, one in five respondents said they have fewer children than they want. In South Korea, 58% blamed the cost of raising a child. In India, long commutes and impossible work hours are forcing families to scale back dreams. In Sweden, yes, Sweden, land of state-supported childcare, financial strain is still the leading factor behind shrinking families.

The real kicker? Only 12% cited infertility. The overwhelming majority pointed to money, time, and the absence of a stable partner. In short: the system is broken, and it’s not safe to build a family on top of it.

Maybe this is nature’s way of fighting back. A species that strip-mines the planet, sells insulin for profit, and calls childrearing a “lifestyle choice” may finally be too tired to reproduce itself. Not out of apathy, but out of economic trauma.

As one Chilean fisherman recently asked, staring out at fjords choked by salmon farms:
“How many billions is all this destruction worth?”

They were lovers. They were rivals. They were side-eyeing each other on Truth Social and X like jilted prom dates. But now, the Trump-Musk feud appears to be cooling, again. And the symbolism could not be more on the nose.

Trump has confirmed he’s keeping his bright red Tesla parked outside the White House. Not because he’s embracing EVs. Not because he’s driving it, heaven forbid. But because it’s a reminder of the fleeting PR romance between two of the world’s most performative men. He won’t sell it, he says. He “might move it around.” Musk, naturally, responded with a coy nod of approval, eager to reenter the inner circle he only just publicly fell out of.

Call it geopolitical limbo: one part restraining order, one part late-night text that says “u up?”

Last week, Musk was reportedly persona non grata after throwing a public fit over not being “respected” by the Trump administration. This week, the car stays. The insults taper. The door creaks open once again for collaboration, coordination, and if nothing else, mutual utility.

Trump doesn’t care if Musk is on drugs, as he mused during a recent presser. And Musk doesn’t care if Trump is inciting rebellion, so long as there’s a seat at the authoritarian oligarchs’ table.

This isn’t reconciliation so much as cold war détente between two men who understand the transactional value of each other’s audiences. Trump needs tech legitimacy. Musk needs government contracts and legal cover. Both are narcissists with fascist tendencies and WiFi access. The result is less ideology than improv, two billionaires pantomiming populism while their toys rust in the driveway.

And the Model S Plaid parked outside the West Wing? It’s not a car. It’s a monument to ego. A big, red, battery-powered metaphor for how ridiculous, and dangerous, this whole arrangement is.

Stay tuned for their next falling-out. Or wedding announcement. It could go either way.

Elon Musk has promised a lot of things over the years. Underground hyperloops that would revolutionize transportation (we got a glorified tunnel for Teslas). Fully autonomous vehicles by 2020 (still waiting). And now: 5,000 humanoid robots by the end of 2025.

Which makes it awkward that Tesla just lost the head of its robotics division.

Milan Kovac, the engineer leading the “Optimus” project, announced he’s walking away from the robot dream factory, insisting he’s just “spending more time with family.” And sure, maybe. Or maybe he just got tired of duct-taping servos to anxiety and pretending it could fold laundry.

Optimus, the awkward android Tesla unveiled in a stilted dance routine that looked like rejected E3 cosplay, was supposed to be a leap forward in AI and automation. Musk pitched it as a labor-saving savior, a humanoid helper that would “eliminate dangerous, repetitive tasks.” Instead, it’s mostly been eliminating investor confidence and video credibility.

Los Angeles isn’t just a local crackdown, it’s a test run for authoritarianism in plain sight. Former Canadian MP Charlie Angus put it starkly: “The burning of American democracy” is visible even from across the border. In the same breath he spoke of climate fires consuming Canada’s forests, he warned of the fascist flames being fanned by a U.S. president who once asked if he could legally shoot protesters. The only reason it didn’t happen last time, as chronicled in War by Bob Woodward, was because generals like Mark Milley and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said no.

Milley didn’t mince words: “No one has ever been as dangerous to the United States as Donald Trump. He is a fascist to the core.” Esper recalled how close they came to crossing “a red line” in 2020. The difference now? There’s no one left in Trump’s inner circle to stop him.

So here we are. Marines are being mobilized for a domestic deployment that California didn’t ask for, ICE is terrorizing immigrant communities, and peaceful demonstrators are being met with rubber bullets and tear gas, all while most National Guard troops languish without supplies, used as set dressing for a dictatorship-in-progress.

This isn’t 1931. But it might be what 1931 would’ve looked like with livestreams and meme warfare. As one Substack post put it: Whatever you think people should’ve done in 1931 to stop the rise of the Nazis, do it now, times ten.

California may be the front line, but the fire doesn’t stop at the state line. And unlike the smoke from the wildfires curling over the Pacific, this one won’t dissipate on its own.