As of this writing in 2025, we Americans find ourselves thrust into a collective crisis that feels like a rupture in reality: Donald Trump's second term as president of the United States.

We aren't alone in our disbelief. Millions of people, both in America and across the globe, experience this moment as a visceral shock. How could this have happened?

And yet, we have to admit that it didn’t come out of nowhere. The rise of Trump II was not some inexplicable anomaly. It was the fruition of a long, deliberate campaign engineered by forces that never stopped scheming after their first taste of total control.

Chief among these architects were the minds behind Project 2025, a sprawling 900+-page blueprint for rightwing domination. Years in the making, funded by billionaire networks and extremist think tanks, this manifesto laid out, in chilling, bureaucratic detail, the systematic dismantling of civil rights, environmental protections, and democratic norms.

What seemed to many like a sudden rupture was in fact the result of slow erosion, strategic capture, and unrelenting ideological war.

As 2025 unfolded, our lives in both The Overt Real World and The Other Real World were engulfed by what felt like an unrelenting assault of malevolence. We began calling it the Trumpocalypse, a word that somehow contained both the specificity of the moment and the apocalyptic scale of its implications.

Evil has always existed in the world. That’s not news. But this particular eruption felt different: more concentrated, more deliberate, more poisonous in its reach and intent.

As I struggled to make sense of this new reality, I found myself reaching back to another moment when reality had shattered.

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On a late May night many years ago, I was crossing Duke University's East Campus, headed for the Greyhound station in downtown Durham. My bus was scheduled to leave for Philadelphia at 2:30 a.m. The weather was mild. I was toting a backpack.

The campus was quiet and deserted. As I passed behind Brown Dormitory, two angry-looking strangers glided out from behind a tree and strode up to within six feet of me. They were both brandishing shotguns. My body responded before my mind could: immediate, uncontrollable trembling.

Part of me—the innocent part that believes in fundamental human goodness—tried desperately to convince myself this wasn't happening. Not really. Not to me. But the realistic part of me recognized mortal danger when it stood close by, armed and hostile.

Shock is a curious state. It shuts down the realistic part, the part capable of action. In retrospect, I've often wondered what I might have done had fear not paralyzed me. Would I have attempted to disarm them? To run? But even as I consider these possibilities, I know the truth: with shotguns already trained on me at close range, any movement might have hastened the inevitable.

Instead, immobilized by fear, I stood motionless.
Then came the impact: 47 hot lead pellets tore into my flesh. They remain there to this day, embedded in my right buttocks. The trajectory of my life was violently altered in that moment. It was a deviation that took years to recover from.

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I share this memory because it provides reflection for all who have suffered and are suffering the paralyzing ravages of the Trumpocalypse. The danger is real. Its enormity threatens to freeze us in place.

As Enlightenment for Rebels go to publication, we Americans find ourselves in a red-alert emergency. This crisis extends beyond our borders, affecting countless others who are inextricably linked to American policy and power.

Historians aren't downplaying the menace. Many call this the most perilous moment since the Civil War. Some argue it's worse—more insidious because it masquerades as legitimate governance while undermining the foundations of democracy.

What we face is not simply political disagreement or policy differences. We are witnessing power wielded by brutes and thugs who lack empathy, wisdom, restraint, and respect for human life. Their reign of terror is a relentless spectacle of cruelty masquerading as strength, ignorance presented as insight, psychopathy disguised as strategy, and malevolence justified as necessary. Each day brings new outrages, each one normalizing the next.

The coalition now in control—a network of extreme wealth and extreme ideology—threatens the well-being and futures of millions. They are already responsible for a ruthless, relentless rampage of destruction whose consequences will echo far beyond their time in power.

We'll spare you an exhaustive catalog of specific harms. If you wish to see our running documentation of the damage being inflicted, visit: https://tinyurl.com/TrumpDecimatesAmerica

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Some people are alarmed by our alarm at this red-alert emergency, this full-on vicious assault by fascist misogynist militaristic psychopathic oligarchic theocratic bigots.

They argue that we should simply beam unconditional love at those who have such violent and destructive intentions; or that we should be gentle souls biding our time.

I recognize in these suggestions the same innocent disbelief I felt when confronted with shotguns. "This can't be happening," that part of us insists. "Not really. Not to us."

Would these advocates of unconditional love have advised me to beam positive energy at the assailants on Duke's campus? Would they suggest passive acceptance as the appropriate response to imminent violence?

This is not the approach River and I have chosen. Nor is it the path embraced by our extended family. We believe that standing against cruelty, ignorance, and destruction is not merely justified. It’s noble, necessary, and sacred. This is our work now and always.

To be clear: We harbor no hatred toward those enacting this chaos. Hatred would distract from the essential work at hand. But we do carry a righteous anger, a holy outrage, about the harm being inflicted. This anger fuels our commitment to justice and restoration.

We categorically reject literal violence as a response. We condemn anyone who advocates for such actions. But we wholly support all nonviolent efforts to challenge, obstruct, and ultimately remove from power those who abuse their positions to harm others. We are committed to doing everything possible to neutralize their capacity for destruction.





OUR BEAUTIFUL LIVES ARE SACRED SPELLS

If our previous essay, “Too Real,” is our invocation of sacramental alarm, the next piece is our ecstatic counterspell.

Because even in the face of soul-numbing cruelty and weaponized governance, we refuse to let despair be our default mode. Even in the smog of empire’s necromantic curses, we remember the breath-magic that still lives in our lungs.

This second offering is not a protest so much as a consecration. Not only a rebuke—but a re-enchantment. A reminder that our bodies, our lives, and our communities are already insurgent spells. That joy is an act of resistance. That beauty is a form of protection. That mutual care is revolutionary technology.

We call this next installment “Our Beautiful Lives Are Sacred Spells.”

On July 4, 2025, the 249th anniversary of the day 13 American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, the idiotically and childishly named Big Beautiful Bill slammed down like a guillotine on American democracy.

It guaranteed sweeping harm on working- and middle-class Americans while benefiting the ultra-wealthy.

Seventeen million Americans lost their health insurance. Rural hospitals and community health centers closed. Nursing homes became less safe and closed. Prescription drug prices rose. Cuts to food assistance programs endangered millions of families.

Precipitous reductions in support for education threatened learning, intelligence, and critical thinking. Environmental protections were drastically curtailed. Economic inequality surged. The thug-infested Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency became an authoritarian national police force with a massive budget.

Last but not least: The bill delivered massive tax breaks, nearly $1 trillion, to billionaires and large corporations. It promised to add over $4 trillion to the national debt.

This Draconian Grotesque Malediction was a culmination of previous catastrophic damage. By the time it arrived, The Trump II regime had already criminalized all abortion procedures, gutted the Department of Education, slashed voting rights, defunded the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health, reversed LGBTQ+ rights, purged federal workers, abandoned treaties and climate accords, and viciously drained the USAID programs that provided vital global health and humanitarian aid.

This blast of horror didn’t descend on us out of nowhere. It was not an aberration, but a denouement—a flagship decree in a broader war on empathy, justice, and life itself.

It crystallized the ethos of the Trumpocalypse we described in “Too Real:” a relentless campaign of cruelty that weaponized governance, sanctified violence, and dressed up white supremacy in bureaucratic drag.

The Bill was only one particularly grotesque jewel in the crown of a regime bent on the demise of American democracy. Behind it loomed and looms a thousand lesser decrees, deregulations, and dehumanizations—each a hex cast by oligarchs and theocrats, each a brick in the golden gulag they aim to build. It is into this landscape of engineered despair that we now speak our spell.

Below is our counterspell to the violence.

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OUR BEAUTIFUL LIVES ARE SACRED SPELLS AGAINST THE BIG UGLY BLASTS OF BRUTALITY

The 870-page Big Beautiful Bill signed into law on July 4, 2025, was a culmination of many Big Ugly Blasts of Brutality—and the promise of many, many more, as specified in the 920-page manifesto-malediction known as Project 2025.

The true name of these damnations was and is The Grotesque Necromantic Jinx.

An 870- and 920-page tangle of death curses written in the blood-ink of lobbyists. A trillion-dollar knife sharpened on the bones of children. A gulag blueprint bound in gold leaf and sealed with poisoned laughter.

The poor are punished. The rich get raptures. The oligarchs ascend to tax heaven while the masses are cast into medical purgatory.

ICE builds trauma temples—concrete scumholes where brown babies are baptized in cortisol, and families are sacrificed on the altar of white supremacy.

The sick are sentenced to ghoulish theology: ordered to get well by calling on the Faux Christians’ holy spirit, to pray their cancer away, to manifest their insulin from the ether, to bootstrap their way out of wheelchairs through the miracle of heroic willpower—as if healing were not a collective spell, as if wellness were not a web we weave together.

Seventeen million bodies evicted from care. Mothers who will die in labor, their last breath a prayer for universal healthcare. Elders who will stroke out alone in homeless shelters, their final words the names of grandchildren they'll never hold. Kids with asthma gasping at midnight, their lungs learning the syntax of suffering, their wheezes writing elegies for the right to breathe.

This is not policy. It's a curse. A diabolic summoning of Old World Tyrants and their hungry ghosts:

Mussolini purring in the cloakroom, his fascist playbook photocopied and distributed as talking points.

Pinochet tapping Morse code into the Senate floor—dot-dash-dot: "disappear the dissidents."

Hitler grinning through the telecoms, his thousand-year Reich rebranded as "Making America Great Again."

Stalin lighting JD Vance's cigars, the smoke spelling out five-year plans for the industrial harvest of human misery.

Jefferson Davis conducting lynching rehearsals in the Capitol rotunda.

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WE RISE.

We rise with counterspells, raw and radiant, molten and myth-born—

Incantations conjured from the dialects of soil and starlight,
from ancestor-code thriving in root-fiber and thunder-rattle,
from the prophecy of mycelia and the praise-moan of the wind.

We cast it in cavalcades of antidotes:
• In Diné prayers that remember the original agreements between land and sky.
• In Ojibwe, where verbs carry prayers and lakes name themselves.
• In Nahuatl, resurrected in barrio murals and midnight lullabies, spelling tlazohcamati, thank you, as a battle cry of gratitude.
• In Yoruba, where oríkì praise-poems summon the gods and resistance is braided into every call-and-response.
• In American English that refuses to genuflect to corrupt power.
• In Spanish that walks through walls and erases illegitimate borders.
• And in sign language fluttered by the hands of the deaf who know that silence can scream, who spell revolution in the air and make the invisible visible.


WE RISE.

With potlucks and plot twists—casseroles that feed both body and rebellion, stories that smuggle truth past empire’s censors.

With roots music that refuses to die—improvisation as insurrection, syncopated sabotage of the dominant narrative, blue notes that bend reality toward justice.

With muralists painting the streets like arteries—turning concrete into canvas, making barriers into windows, transforming cities into galleries of revolutionary beauty that oligarchs can’t commodify.

With teenagers chanting queer liturgies at the capitol steps—their rainbow flags healing heresies, their pronouns devotionals, their love letters engraved on the future.

With witches stirring cauldrons of mutual aid—brewing community care from herbs and solidarity, casting spells that turn neighbors into family, strangers into chosen ones.

WE RISE.

Ancestor wisdom spray-painted on courthouse doors.

Harriet’s footsteps echoing, Malcolm’s words sparking, Sylvia’s spellwork blooming in every trans kid who refuses erasure.

Street medics anointing wounds with lavender salve, turning protest injuries into sacred glyphs, making first aid a form of sacramental meditation.

Elders teaching Tarot on folding chairs in laundromats—reading the future in soap bubbles, divining the dissolution of technocratic oligarchy in the ordinary magic of clean clothes and community wisdom.

Librarians hiding banned books in safe places—underground railroads of literature, smuggling dangerous ideas like contraband hope.


WE RISE.

With midnight vigils where we sing out the names of the disappeared—each voice a soul refusing deletion, each name a beauty hex that burns through the darkness of forgetting, sound as the language of remembrance.

With storytellers weaving truth into our dreams—their voices carrying medicine across generations, their tales smuggling hope past the censors of despair, imagination as the technology of survival.

With coyotes howling in sync with midnight jail releases—the natural world joining our chorus, wild voices harmonizing with human freedom songs.

With drummers keeping vigil at the ICE gates till dawn—their rhythms rewiring reality, their beats becoming the heart-pulse of a world without cages.

With dancers who know each spin is a protection spell—their bodies writing incantations in air, their movement making portals to emancipated futures, their grace a form of warfare against the forces of gracelessness.


WE RISE.

With neighborhood councils defying federal mandates—democracy sprouting in kitchen table meetings, power growing from the grassroots like dandelions through sidewalk cracks.

With ballot initiatives passed in church basements and food co-ops—worship spaces becoming political laboratories, bread and ballots blessed together on the same communion table.

With backyard city halls—governance reimagined as conversation, policy written in the language of neighbors helping neighbors, power shared like communal banquets.

With local sheriffs who refuse to enforce unjust laws—badges transformed from symbols of oppression to talismans of protection, uniforms worn in service of conscience over compliance.

With elders running for school board to unseat fascist curricula—grandmothers becoming guerrilla fighters, their ripe acumen a weapon against the persecutors’ willful ignorance.

WE RISE.

With lovemaking that remembers the pleasure before conquest—bodies holding histories that authoritarian manifestos push to erase, acts of civil disobedience against the empire’s enforcement of loneliness, our flesh as archive of resistance.

With voices that braid sacred literature and sedition—reverent words rewoven into revolutionary inspirations, incantations becoming resistance spells, the divine and the defiant synergizing.

With water protectors dreaming policy into rivers—their visions flowing downstream into legal chambers, their benedictions becoming precedent, their dreams the source code of new law.

With poets whispering strategy to mayors—metaphors becoming municipal policy, verses transforming into ordinances that protect the vulnerable, lyrical language as a form of political power.

With brokenhearted organizers who still show up—their grief composted into determination, their tears watering seeds of the world they're fighting for, their sorrow transformed into blessed fuel.

With ecstatic vision tethered to tactical maps—mysticism married to activist work, dreams wedded to data, the prophetic partnered with practical magic grounded in the material realm.

With 80 million candles lighting the next constitution—their flames spelling out new amendments in the language of liberation.

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But wait! There are more spells. Vigorous, rigorous acts of strategic resistance:

• Economic disruption as spiritual discipline: General strikes that stop the machinery of exploitation. Coordinated consumer boycotts targeting corporations that fund authoritarianism—hitting them where revelation meets the bottom line.

Bank transfers from predatory institutions to credit unions and community banks, redirecting billions in collective capital. Shareholders wielding proxy votes as exorcism rites, casting out executives who profit from cruelty.

• Ridicule as sacred weapon: Jon Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel weaponizing humor to expose absurdity, their satire reaching millions who might never read manifestos. Gavin Newsom's targeted mockery stripping away the strongman facade.

Saturday Night Live sketches that make fascism look pathetic instead of powerful. TikTok creators turning authoritarian pronouncements into viral jokes, dissolving fear through laughter. Because tyrants can survive many things, but they cannot survive being made ridiculous.

• Legal warfare as liturgy: ACLU attorneys filing injunctions that block cruel policies before they metastasize. State attorneys general refusing to enforce unconstitutional federal mandates.

Blue state legislatures passing sanctuary laws with teeth. Lawyers working pro bono to flood ICE with habeas corpus petitions, gumming up the deportation machine with sheer legal volume. Public defenders treating every case as resistance, every client as sacred.

• Electoral insurgency as ritual practice: Voter registration drives in communities targeted for suppression. Precinct captains organizing like they're building underground railroads—because they are. State legislature campaigns that flip chambers and block the worst.

• Ballot initiatives that pass Medicaid expansion, raise minimum wages, protect abortion rights, and fund schools—even in red states, bypassing corrupted federal power. Running for school boards, city councils, water districts—the unglamorous offices where policy actually touches lives.

• Mutual aid as material magic: Not just potlucks but coordinated networks providing healthcare through volunteer clinics when insurance vanishes. Insulin-sharing rings when pharma companies gouge diabetics.

Community fridges in every neighborhood feeding people after SNAP cuts. Underground railroads for abortion access, trans healthcare, banned books. Collective housing solutions when rents become predatory. These aren't metaphors—they're infrastructure.

• State-level defiance: California and New York and Illinois building healthcare systems that catch those thrown off federal programs. States stockpiling medication ahead of tariff-driven shortages.

Governors forming regional compacts to preserve environmental standards, worker protections, consumer rights. Blue state tax structures that claw back what federal policy gives to oligarchs. State-level policies that function as lifeboats while the federal ship lists.

• International alliance: Connecting with global movements facing similar threats. Learning from organizers in Hungary, Poland, Brazil who've fought creeping authoritarianism. Building transnational networks that share tactics and resources.

Making it clear that American fascism threatens global stability, recruiting international pressure. Diplomatic embarrassment as leverage—making the regime's cruelty too costly to sustain on the world stage.

• The long game of cultural transformation: Not just resisting but building the future inside the shell of the dying empire. Cooperative businesses that prefigure a solidarity economy. Time banks and tool libraries demonstrating post-capitalist possibility.

Democratic schools teaching critical thinking and civic courage. Media literacy programs inoculating communities against propaganda. Youth organizing that trains the next generation in both mysticism and revolt.

• Strategic noncooperation: Federal employees slow-walking cruel orders, losing paperwork, "misunderstanding" directives—bureaucratic resistance from inside the machine. Teachers refusing to implement propaganda curricula.

Scientists preserving climate data before it can be purged. Doctors refusing to report patients seeking reproductive care. Tech workers declining to build surveillance tools. Each act of principled refusal a brick removed from the authoritarian edifice.

• Media insurgency: Independent journalists investigating corruption that mainstream outlets ignore. Whistleblowers leaking documents that expose grift. Fact-checkers methodically dismantling lies before they calcify into accepted narratives.

Podcasters building audiences larger than cable news, creating alternative information ecosystems outside corporate control. Local newspapers staying alive through subscriber drives, preserving the last line of defense against municipal corruption.

• Our brilliant, tactically creative pundits who nourish insurrectionary hope. There are too many great souls to name, but we'll start with these:

Heather Cox Richardson translating history into current strategy. Rebecca Solnit reminding us that hope is a discipline not a mood. Robert Reich breaking down economic injustice in terms anyone can understand.

Dahlia Lithwick defending the rule of law with fierce eloquence. Jay Kuo making resistance accessible and actionable. Thom Hartmann connecting authoritarian dots across decades. Jessica Craven turning outrage into organized action.

Mehdi Hasan interrogating power with prosecutorial precision. Timothy Snyder teaching us how democracies die so we can prevent it. Adam Serwer exposing cruelty as the point and naming fascism clearly. Anand Giridharadas dissecting oligarchy and the billionaire con.

Wajahat Ali combining humor and moral clarity on authoritarianism. Ruth Ben-Ghiat showing us the authoritarian playbook. Rick Wilson trolling authoritarians with strategic savagery. and Joy Reid centering racial justice while dissecting right-wing strategy.

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This is our spell-work at scale. Not just singing what they try to erase, but building material alternatives to their death cult economics. Not just affirming that healthcare and housing are sacred rights, but creating systems that deliver them when government fails to.

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Our spells undo theirs.

Our spells sing what they try to erase:

that love is sovereign—the only authority worth obeying

that borders are fictions—illusory lines drawn by fraudulent empires, erased by empathy

that food is sacred—communion bread that belongs on every table, nourishment as birthright, hunger as sin against the abundance of creation

that healthcare is a human right, not a luxury—healing magic that must flow like water, like air, free to all who breathe

that housing is a human right, not a luxury—shelter as sacred as churches, homes as heavenly as temples: safety as sanctuary, walls as protection not prison

that education is alchemy—transforming minds into liberation tools, curiosity into revolution, knowledge as the technology of freedom

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To the architects of The Grotesque Necromantic Jinx, we say:

You have mistaken your power for permanence.

But empires crumble when they grow irreversibly corrupt and depraved—and yours has passed that threshold.

We are dreaming a new Constitution with every stolen breath we dare to take, with every heartbeat that refuses to be regulated by your erratic rhythm.

And we are building it not on the decaying sludge of your cruel stupidity, not on the toxic rubbish of your parasitic greed,

but on the compost of collective grief transfigured into strategy, on the bones of extinct species whose names we vow never to forget, on the erotic ingenuity of lovers whose tenderness is a sacred weapon against callous contempt, on the liberation anthems conjured in borderlands and storm zones, on the maps tattooed into our muscles by past uprisings, on the sacred impudence of dreamers who dare to remember the world without ceaseless conquest.

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HIGH MAGIC PRAYER FOR THE RESISTANCE
by our colleague, Witch of the Keys

May the rich and powerful bullies perpetrating cruel violence be plagued by the consequences of their own actions, as their attempts to undermine empathy and democracy backfire spectacularly.

May their lies and deceit be exposed under the relentless light of truth, leaving them with no refuge from their own brutal fabrications.

May their efforts to sow division and hatred result in their own isolation and disgrace.

May their corrupt machinations unravel, leading to legal repercussions that strip them of power and influence.

May their attempts to suppress dissent and free speech be thwarted, amplifying the voices of those they sought to silence.

May their alliances with extremist groups turn against them, causing internal chaos and betrayal within their ranks.

May their disregard for the environment lead to personal losses that make them acutely aware of the damage they’ve inflicted.

May their exploitation of the vulnerable bring about a groundswell of resistance that topples their oppressive structures.

May their attempts to rewrite history be met with an unyielding preservation of truth, rendering their propaganda ineffective.

May their pursuit of authoritarian control be met with relentless opposition, ensuring their failure and ignominy.

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BLESS our wild, defiant, radiant uprising.

May our uprising go viral in the underground, spreading through the networks of mutual aid and revolutionary love.

May our uprising pulse through the fourth dimension where linear time bends toward justice.

May our uprising flourish in nature's paradise: The earth realm where abundance is the only economics that matter.

May it multiply in the shadow-networks of mycelial minds—fungi teaching us that cooperation creates forests from single spores.


May it echo in the whisper-chambers of ancestor bones—our beloved dead voting for life, the past growing toward a more perfect future.

May it bloom in the outlaw dreamscape where banned ideas flower—thoughts dangerous for the sick, shrunken tyrant minds, growing wild in the gardens of liberated imaginations.

May our uprising broadcast from the rogue beacons pulsing beneath surveillance—pirate signals of hope transmitted through tear gas, love letters smuggled past the watchtowers of empire.


May it channel the secret gospel of roots and trickster spirits—the underground railroad of underground wisdom, the sacred mischief that topples thrones.

May our uprising please no algorithm but the one That's the testimony I wanted to give.

written in stardust and thunder—the cosmic code that programs planets toward peace, justice, and joy—the divine mathematics that adds up to justice, the holy equation where all variables equal love.

And so it is. And so it shall be. And so we make it so.