I’m not trying to burn anything down. I'm not calling for revolt or secession or even policy. I'm just watching. I sit at the edge of a republic that doesn’t know it’s collapsing, and I observe.
There was a time when being a card-carrying member of the ACLU meant something. It meant you were willing to defend someone you despised—a Nazi, a pornographer, a dissenter—because the principle of speech mattered more than your personal revulsion. I joined because I believed that. Al Gore said he was a member, so I became one too. I wasn’t virtue signaling. I wasn’t building an identity. I was pledging allegiance to the Constitution—not the performative one, but the dusty one in the glass case.
Now? The ACLU defends rights selectively. The Human Rights Campaign operates like a PR arm of a political faction. Free speech is violence. Silence is violence. But apparently, actual violence is just passion.
I don’t say this as some kind of red-hatted reactionary. I say it as someone who remembers when even progressives believed in the Bill of Rights. I say it as someone who grew up in Hawai'i surrounded by people who didn’t look like me, sound like me, or vote like me—but who were still mine. I say it as someone who had friends in the DIA. Who was close with Colonel Frank Burns—the man who coined "Be All You Can Be"—and his son Scott. Who shared long talks with Hope O’Keeffe, a brilliant constitutional lawyer who I once loved, and who now helps steer the same institutions I can’t recognize anymore.
Someone once joked that I was trying to get myself on the SPLC watchlist. That stung a little—not because it was false, but because it probably wasn’t. I’ve been adjacent to too many counternarratives for too long. From the early days at New Media Strategies to launching memes.org, to MemeSpace, to going spelunking down internet rabbit holes that the polite world doesn’t like to admit exist. I’m not sure I’ve been flagged for active surveillance so much as algorithmically sidelined—bozo filtered, soft-shadowbanned, passively quarantined from the center of discourse.
I’ve watched the meaning of words collapse. I’ve watched "racist" go from describing people with burning crosses to describing...me. A 55-year-old, 6'3", 340-pound, Jesus-believing gun owner with a lifetime NRA membership and an ACLU card in my drawer. I’ve watched the term "fascist" get applied to parents at school board meetings. I’ve watched the spell lose its power.
Because it was a spell.
These labels used to be nuclear. Now they’re bumper stickers. When everything is fascism, nothing is. When everyone is a bigot, no one listens. The public square is broken. The conversation is poisoned. I haven’t changed. But the rules have.
The activist left was invited to the table. We said, "Order anything you want." The polite response would’ve been to choose modestly, to appreciate the gesture. But they ordered everything on the menu—three lobsters, four steaks, twelve meals to go. And when the check came, they demanded someone else pay.
Meanwhile, the right didn’t scream. They didn’t march on cities. They just unplugged. Defunded. Withdrew. They didn’t try to storm the Capitol. They stopped sending their kids to your schools. They started homeschooling, building co-ops, decentralizing. You won the cultural war; they let you have it. And then they built something else.
The left staged a hard revolution—loud, moral, institutional, uncompromising. It arrived through the front door in broad daylight, armed with slogans and tenured allies, DEI statements and HR policy changes, intersectional theory and protest theater. It demanded dismantling, reeducation, reparations—not just for systems, but for language itself. It pushed with confidence, because it had won the culture war. The signals were clear: We run the campuses. We run the platforms. We run the stories. And because power had flowed its way, it didn’t need to ask—it told.
But the right didn’t respond in kind. There was no counter-revolution. No mobilization of equal energy or symmetrical confrontation. Especially not from the Christian-populist-nationalist segment that gets flattened into “MAGA” but includes a deeper, quieter, more local spirit. They didn’t storm anything. They didn’t campaign to take your institutions back. Instead, they absorbed the blows. They let themselves be called names—racist, fascist, bigot, hick. They lost friends, lost jobs, were told their values were antique and their faith dangerous. And still, they didn’t fight the way the left expected. They didn’t regress. They remembered.
What the left saw as resistance was, from the right’s perspective, maintenance. Not a regression to a dark past, but a refusal to update the firmware. They didn’t launch a new ideology—they defaulted to what had always been there. The church potluck. The homeschool co-op. The second freezer in the garage. The .30-06 above the mantle. The pick-up truck with the cross sticker on the rear glass. The local sheriff. The farmstand. The Bible on the bedside table. The high school football game where the entire town still shows up. It wasn’t a political platform. It was a culture—and it hadn’t died, just gone quiet.
It wasn’t backlash. It was something more disarming: exit. Not revolt, but retreat. Not destruction, but disconnection. It was, in effect, a national-scale version of that ancient move from judo: let the overextension defeat the attacker. Let the screamers scream, the breakers break, the revolutionaries spin into abstraction. Meanwhile, stock the pantry. Dig in. Wait. Because after the fever burns itself out, someone still needs to know how to change a tire, clean a deer, fix a roof, raise a child, pray over the dead, and endure.
They weren’t planning to storm your city. They were planning to outlive it.
That's the real civil war—quiet, economic, systemic. Red America doesn't want to invade blue America. It wants to starve it. Turn off the supply chains. Cut the water. Defund the grants. Let NPR say they only get "2% from the government." Anyone who’s been inside knows that's a joke. I’ve seen how the money flows—through CPB, NEH, NEA, USAID. It’s a shadow subsidy.
You want to stop public media? Don’t censor it. Just stop funding the oxygen tanks.
Same goes for universities. You can't shut them down directly—it would look like fascism. But if you redefine their excesses as antisemitism (which many of them are now guilty of), you can cut off federal grants under Title VI. You don’t need tanks. You need accountants. And lawyers. And parents who won’t write another tuition check.
The left made everything sacred: gender identity, racial identity, pronouns, dietary choices, even tone of voice. The right made nothing sacred—except autonomy. The right doesn’t want control. It wants distance. And if you push hard enough, if you stretch the rubber band too far, it doesn’t snap back. It breaks.
That’s the difference. Some corporations have too many chiefs and not enough Indians. The MAGA-populist-nationalist critique? Too many vanguards, not enough proletarians.
I’m not a racist. I’m not a sexist. I’m not a fascist. I don’t think I’m literally Hitler. But I am something else: I’m done pretending I don’t see what’s happening.
Call it what you want. I’m just the watcher. I see the restaurant going dark. I see the check unpaid. I see the waiter leaving. I see the lights flicker. And I see the activists yelling at the mirror, still arguing over the pronouns on the dessert menu.
I love my country. I love my friends. But I also know when a party is over.
I’m not here to fight. I’m just here to witness. To remember what it used to mean. And to wonder quietly—after the last credit card is declined, after the last fund is frozen—if they’ll ever realize who was paying the bill the whole time.
tl;dr
The article "The Watcher at the Edge of the Republic" by Chris Abraham expresses disillusionment with the current state of American society and its institutions, particularly concerning shifts in the understanding and application of fundamental rights and terminology. Abraham, a self-described former "true believer" and card-carrying ACLU member, observes what he perceives as a collapse of shared language and principles, where terms like "racist" and "fascist" have lost their original power through overuse. He argues that the "quiet civil war" unfolding is economic and systemic, with the political right disengaging from and strategically defunding institutions the left has culturally "won." Abraham concludes by stating his role is simply to witness this transformation, rather than to actively fight against it, while noting the financial implications of this societal split.
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