>Phone rings a little after midnight, strange but recognizable number. Man pauses a film before answering.

“Good evening President Nixon, been a long time since you called. I knew you couldn’t let an election go without talking.”

“You son of a bitch, you keep changing numbers. What are you doing?”

“Watching The Thing. It’s Halloween, horror movie season.”

“The ‘50s one or the new one?”

“The newer one with Kurt Russell.”

“You know it’s all from a 1930s short story?”

“I thought they were just ripping off Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness.”

“How many ways can you do a monster story? Kids trick or treating or your state shut you down?”

“Going out. You can’t stop a private tradition, Mr. Nixon. It’s un-American to deny kids their treats.”

“They can’t stop you on any of these petty ordinances unless you give in.”

“Ever thought you’d see so many people give in?”

“Jesus Christ no. Take your kids out. Keep the masks off them, damnit live a little.”

“My boys are ready to go.”

“Sons. What I’d give for one! Nation might’ve been spared the dumb Bush boy.”

“Jeb?”

“No, the other dumb one, Dubya.”

“Gotta have two, an heir and a spare.”

“Didn’t work out for Trump.”

“How so?”

“Win or lose, he or that wormtongue must be lining things up in ’24 for Ivanka?”

“Did you see that New Yorker article talking about GOP paths with remnant, restoration and reversal? I don’t quite see how anyone captures everything.”

“Yes, but it was a very convenient framing of the situation. They set it up as if there are three paths. This gives the restoration crowd hope of viability in the party, but capture is possible. The remnant and reversalists are really the same crowd, just a difference of attitude and behavior. The reversalists are my type, add a dash of Trumpian rhetoric and confrontation and call it Marxism-Nixonism.”

“Couldn’t we try Castizo Futurism?”

“What the hell is that?”

“Like Peronism, you support el caudillo, law and order with a dollop of socialism. The Republican who can come up with a slightly socialized health care solution will do it.”

“Jesus Christ. Stop using slang.”

“At this point I think matching up señoritas with incels will bring about the castizo futurism ethnogenesis.”

“That’s a hard sell kid unless you have a stable of Raquel Welches.”

“Yeah well, you haven’t seen white women’s BMIs and yo voy a votar por donal trump has been stuck in my head for two weeks now.”

“Latins love the optimism. I see Bebe Rebozo dancing to it.”

“In your mind’s eye?”

“No, down here. He’s had it on a loop and smiles dancing among the flames. He’s doing that step in place with the t-rex arms thing Cubans can get away with.”

“So how does Ivanka fit into this?”

“There is no heir to Trump in the party. Rubio is DOA. Hawley is a nerd, and a bit of an opportunist. Cruz. That man’s destiny should have been becoming the new Scalia on the Supreme Court. Cotton? No charisma. DeSantis, I like his spirit. I’d watch out for him. The restorationists will try to get Haley in there, but that bloc of Trump voters in the primary was already there waiting for a champion. We saw it in ’12. They bounced between outsiders. Trump just herded them into his camp. He’s going to be able to say, ‘Vote for Ivanka to finish what I began’. Win or lose. Jared will be there. They’ll refine the message so it’s same policies with softer tones and coming from a middle aged woman.”

“I can see that President Nixon. Wouldn’t be shocked if she goes quiet for a bit and gets some new work done. It’s the era of HDTV. It matters. If it’s true Kushner launches some media ecosystem, it’s going to be to put her into the White House. Don Jr. and Eric do not have it. After four years though, are Kushner + Co. going to deliver for that swingable Midwest bloc?”

“Likelier if they lose. A win makes it less likely, and will inflate their sense that it is style not the substance of policies.”

“It’s a little of both. I have zero faith they’ll learn. They had a goddamn Reichstag Fire drop into their lap, twice, and failed to capitalize. How much of a lay-up is a global disease that affirms all your stated policies?”

“Kid, have you thought it through. Do you get how hard it is to turn that Titanic? He can barely play up his historic achievement of no new wars. He’s facing the same problem I did fifty years ago. It’s the same party set up to lose.”

“I think it’s beyond that. They don’t consider ten steps down the road. They always think there is a deal to cut. I’m pretty sure hand over your money and die whitey has a logical end.”

“Old wine in new bottles. They said the same message back then but with different words. Think about Manson’s Helter Skelter. Spark a race war, and assume the black organized groups will win but be too dumb to run a society, needing Manson’s family to lead them.”

“What would white liberals do if they didn’t have minorities to tend to?”

“Have children.”

“You haven’t caught onto the new left. They’d drown themselves in wine after a long session filming for OnlyFans.”

“What’s OnlyFans?”

“It’s a marketplace where the producers are women selling videos or photos of themselves naked directly to subscribers.”

“Didn’t DARPA invent the Internet so you could get naked pictures for free?”

“Some men want to talk to the women as a simulacrum of a relationship.”

“Who wants to talk to whores?”

“Jesus Christ. That’s not even the worst, and it gets worse. Our culture is shit. You hear of WAP down there.”

“Kid, who do you think came up with the video? The greatest trick the devil pulled was getting women to objectify and whore themselves out and call it empowerment.”

“How the hell do you overcome that? We’re stuck having the same talks, Nixon.”

“Delegitimize and create. Look at how delegitimized the legacy media is–.”

“Hold off for one goddamn moment. Are there protests in the streets of Europe for beheaded French grandmothers? No. Not one. You know what did get people in the streets of Europe? Dead George Floyd. I know it was an op, but enough people marched into the streets, wailed, cried and shouted as well as burned down their own cities, over a dead career criminal because the screens told them so. Media still has amazing power. Look at them fall into line on Biden corruption. Every single item.”

“You’re going to have to create institutions to rival them.”

“How? What use is creating a well-produced documentary if no one distributes it? That’s the power of ideological monopolization of the memeplex. Even if you did figure it out, they’d start shutting you down by going after your distributors and up the value chain.”

“Well with every institution in enemy hands, razing them to the ground is no loss. Take every tool you can use after the universities, after the press, after them all. Just destroy them. Take a look at Trump’s order on critical race theory. It was so good that the media had to not cover it exactly as written so they could spin it as sensitivity training. Every red state governor should do this. Every county in red hands should do this. Every single one because government contracts are covering their base expenses. The second part of this is that someone should build sensitivity training programs that come at it with a red angle because these programs are still needed to fend off lawsuits, so why not hire sensitivity experts who give it a right wing spin. Hey be careful around Dan because he lost a son to opioids. Feel his pain Larquanda. Starve them of money, and then siphon some of the remainder for your team.”

“The right does need to shed the mentality of muh freedom and muh small government. They have to embrace wielding power.”

“Marxism-Nixonsim kid, Marxism-Nixonism.”

“Did you see before corona, South Dakota, South f*cking Dakota, passed a bill to prevent irreversible treatments to transgender youth. The GOP senate then pulled back and said they didn’t want to interfere with the family. What absolute bullshit. We have state courts for divorce and child custody. We have CPS. We regulate or mandate countless things that are family matters. This no name chickenshit legislator squashed it.”

“The only time conservative principles matter are when they can be deployed to further progressive programs.”

“Amen. There’s something else at play. These conservatives don’t play the game the lefties do for issues. We all know some lunatic left wing legislators in all of our states. Far left and safe in their districts, so they say things that extend to Overton window for their side. What do we get? We get every dumb hick safe red district legislator thinking he can sit in The Big Chair. Every single one thinks he is material for The Big Chair. These fools are all auditioning for Governor or President when they aren’t leaving their state senate seat for twenty years. Delusional and cowardly.”

“Speaking of The Big Chair, what about the biggest of them all?”

“I knew why you were calling. What do you think?”

“I think Trump does it. It’ll be a close run thing. One of those races where a few coin flips either break it open or sneak him in, but I think he does it. Electoral vote over 280. The left is voting against him, not for anything. They have nothing to vote for. I’ve seen Biden’s rallies, trust me, they’re warming a seat up for him down here, and I could draw bigger crowds up there.”

“Corona is the great unknown. No corona and he cruises to a win but even now, who will show up? I put his odds at 40%. Better than a few months ago. You’re underselling something, and it’s powerful. They are voting for something. They’re voting for the TV to tell them they’re good people. This is the good thing. They are good, and only good if they do this one thing. We just said the culture is trash, and who loves our pop culture? These people. They watch the screens and the screens have told them for five years now that this is the bad man, and it’ll all go away, all the pain from everything will go away if they just get rid of this man.”

“It’s not going away.”

“Jesus Christ Nixon, I know that. Enough of them don’t. They actually don’t see the demonization. They think there’s always going to be some other white they can point to and say, ‘that’s the bad guy, not me I’m a good white, I voted for Obama’. They haven’t caught on that it is everywhere, in their media and schools, and it is original sin. There is no escape, no absolution, not even in the self-loathing votes they cast and self-deprecating jokes they make. Enough of them don’t see what is coming, because if you thought ’16 was wild, and ’20 is insane, look at any solution proposed by either side. The ’24 election is going to be smackdab in the sights of Medicare’s bankruptcy and the Social Security auto-reduction date. We’re going to have more years of progressive governance at the state level that’ll make the ‘10s look easy, more years of woke warriors, and likely some stupid war or conflict so the natsec adults in the room types can feel important.”

“And they’ll fail.”

“And there will be blood.”

“The crisis is upon you. I feel like I keep saying that to you.”

“Crisis is a process not an event. I feel it though, and so do my friends. You see your friends not make it.”

“Men and women aren’t dying in the streets from this corona.”

“No, it’s the other crisis. The crisis of decline. The crisis of a dying civilization. Like seeing a female friend hit 40 barren, but her dating profile still says someday for kids. Like a friend telling you he is a Disney person. Childless but with a child’s passions.”

“What’s a Disney person?”

“Ahhhh, they are adults who center their life around Disney products and going to Disney parks.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“When a family member explains it, it’s like coming out of the closet. Kinda hurts the soul.”

“Would you rather your brother be queer or mouseketeer?”

“At this point, I don’t know.”

“The path does look dark but enough people are voting aware of how bad things are. Even a left wing regime with total media control cannot install a tyranny over half of a nation for long. These things don’t last. The point is building up an intellectual structure, a cadre of bureaucrats, lawyers and donors and a story for the masses to justify the new system. The Soviets, the Chinese, it doesn’t last, and often end in wars and catastrophe that give new founding myths and stories for people. That is the point of the crisis. It gives new meaning and new shared stories. People want this and crave it but they are told day in and day out to deny it. It’s why you see these Disney people. They want to belong, and you have to give them something positive to belong to and engage in daily. You’re living in the twilight of the system set up by the double crisis I was in as a young man in. We had the Depression and the War. We all knew it. We all lived through it. These are the cycles of regimes, even the cycles of societies.”

“I didn’t think it was going to be so hard.”

“That’s marketing for you. Nothing worth having is ever easy. He’s going to win by one or two states.”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it does. Don’t listen to the defeatists. You’re going to have to make stands at different points. Better to have breathing room to exert power and build up non-state power as well as regional power centers as the central power declines. America is not an idea, it is not its media or academies, and it is not the federal government. It is a people. It is a history. That is what you fight for.”

“Win or lose he’s my favorite president.”

“I’m still on the phone.”

“Favorite president in my lifetime. Good night.”

“Good night to you, too. You’re right in focusing on process. No one moment settles anything. Remember that.”