February 15, 2026: I have to credit Mike Figuerdo of The Humanist Report for the phrase, “Cold Civil War,” though for months now I’ve been posting here and there that we’re effectively in a civil war in the US.
Here’s his blog about Renee Good and the 1984-style thought stopping that is being attempted to be forced on us:
I have to email my students and thank Trump for making my job easy; I’ll be teaching 1984 as part of a seminar on “Love and Indoctrination,” and now that we have Trump & Co telling us in real time that what we see with our own eyes is not what we are perceiving, the students (and I) can no longer accede to liberal denial, telling ourselves that it’s only a book and It Can’t Happen Here, which is the title, as you may know, of a book by Sinclair Lewis, written in the 1920s. His point is made obvious by the title; the book is about a fascist takeover of the US.
So about this living now inside of a book, or several of them:
The first thing about it is that once in the land of fiction, all bets are off. We can set aside our quaint notions of reality, which I’m intentionally italicizing. I mean the reality we used to presume, that had propositions or assumptions in it, like:
–People are not really evil; they are just mistaken or indoctrinated.
–The citizens of the US will finally stand up to tyranny.
–Our leaders will abide by the laws.
–Our leaders have our best interest at heart
–There’s a god who cares.
Now it’s just us in the world where we are characters in a drama way bigger than our individual lives. It’s well past the time to stand off to the side and frown that this thing needs to be thought about, or there are two sides to every argument, and so on.
Nope; it’s a book called Civil War and we’re now living in it. The only choice we have is to realize this or not, and to proceed accordingly.