Authored by Chuck Devore via DailyCaller.com,
Shutdown, Day 100
I’m walking through the haze of what still lays claim to be the capital city of the United States of America. The monuments still stand, though graffiti covers a few now. Weeds are starting to poke up in lawns that were once well-tended. Trees and bushes look a bit rangy.
Leviathan bureaucracy has simply… stopped. Or has it? No more IRS audits? No EPA enforcers? Really? Certainly, the endless streams of grants propping up about a third of state spending (along with 1,000 strings—those are gone) but the programs remain, at least in name.
Shutdown, Day 200
Anarcho-capitalists speak of a coming paradise, but in the flickering neon of my neural implant—courtesy of a black-market hack—I saw the edges blurring.
Was this freedom? Or was the simulation unraveling?
The military, those stoic guardians of the Republic, unpaid for months, started to splinter. Enterprising commands offered themselves as mercenaries for hire. In Virginia, a battalion rented themselves to a tech mogul, guarding server farms against looters who mistook data farms for food depots. “Protection services,” they called it, bartering ammo for crypto.
The Lone Star State, seeing opportunity, decreed that active-duty troops on Texan soil would draw from state coffers—filled by oil revenues swelling without federal siphons.
Churches in red states swelled with tithes, now untaxed fortunes, funneled into soup kitchens and orphanages. In Alabama, Pastor Clarke preached, “The Lord provides where Caesar fails,” as congregations pooled resources, feeding the poor with communal farms that bloomed in the absence of regulations.
But in New York, the dream swiftly soured. Comrade-Governor Mamdani, the firebrand socialist, swept into statewide power months earlier on waves of elite discontent, promising a workers’ paradise. “Seize the means!” his rallies thundered, as crowds stormed Wall Street’s empty towers. Yet the production had fled—factories shuttered, supply chains evaporated without federal bailouts. Bread lines snaked through Manhattan, citizens trading heirlooms for scraps. Mamdani’s decrees echoed hollowly: universal income from thin air, but the air made a thin gruel.
Shutdown, Day 500
Out West, Reason Foundation libertarians made their move. Selecting the best beachfront, they declared the Santa Monica pier their sovereign zone. “Voluntary exchange,” they proclaimed, as free market chemists in lab coats brewed designer highs, partnering with shadowy Chinese syndicates via encrypted drones. Profits soared, with drugs flooding the coast—euphorics that made the shutdown feel like bliss. Their privateer fleet, retrofitted yachts with missile launchers, patrolled the Pacific, “neutralizing competition” from Mexican cartels. On the sidewalks, illuminated by a gaudy cacophony of LED light, legions of voluntary sex slaves, many missing a kidney, called out their price and specialty. Was this to be capitalism’s final form? Its highest triumph?
The dream had morphed into a nightmare loop, reality folding like a Dickian origami. My implant glitched nightly, replaying shutdown announcements in a loop.
Federal buildings were squats now, haunted by gaunt bureaucrats peddling secrets for sustenance.
States clawed back independence; locals thrived or withered on their own merits. No transfer payments meant blue cities begged for alms, while red heartlands prospered, untaxed incomes fueling private charities. Churches became mini-welfare states, bishops as CEOs, harvesting souls and auditing spreadsheets. “Faith-based efficiency,” it was called, outpacing any government program.
The military’s atomization accelerated. Unpaid sailors auctioned submarines on dark web markets; pilots flew freelance for agribusiness, dusting crops with precision strikes. The exception was in Texas where, flush with petrodollars, the rebirthed Republic of Texas nationalized its garrisons, renaming the force the “Lone Star Legion.” The world’s third most-powerful military was on Austin’s payroll with inevitable whispers of border ambitions and score-settling against the increasingly restive criminal cartels to the south.
New York’s paradise imploded. Mamdani’s regime mandated collectives, but the “means” were ghosts—corporations relocated to tax havens, leaving rusting husks. Starvation riots gripped the boroughs, with workers seizing empty warehouses only to find dust—even the rats decamped to New Jersey.
The Santa Monica cartel, allied with Beijing’s ghost ships, dominated the West Coast dope trade. Euphorics, laced with neural enhancers, turned users into loyal consumers—love was mandatory, the shutdown as engineered bliss. Their privateers raided cartel convoys, sinking rivals in international waters. “Market correction,” the Reason scholars penned in manifestos, profits funding seasteads off Malibu.
But in my dreams, I could see ragged outlines of code: anarchy or programming? I no longer cared.
Shutdown Day 1,000
My implant shorted out 24 days ago, leaving me in a searing funhouse reality—or was it?
Federal remnants passed into myth, D.C. a feral zone where survivalists bartered artifacts.
The best of states were fiefdoms: locals patched roads, red America nurtured the needy through a multitude of churches providing poorhouses, farms, and shelter. Untaxed wealth birthed benevolence: poverty waned in Bible Belt bastions, and volunteers outnumbered the destitute.
The military devolved into a patchwork of warlords. Many rented to corporations, securing trade routes. Texas, however, had ascended. Its Legion, battle-hardened and state-funded, crossed the Rio Grande at dawn on Day 1,000, tanks rolling into cartel strongholds, drones whirring overhead. Old revanchist dreams revived—annexing borderlands, eradicating narco empires. Mexico City protested, but without U.S. aid, its forces crumbled. Texan privateers, now allied with Santa Monica’s fleet in a marriage of convenience, bombarded cartel coastal hideouts, “liberating” resources in the name of free enterprise and Texas.
Mamdani’s paradise was a shell, a starving farce. Seizures yielded nothing; producers had vanished to freer climes. Famine struck the vanguard last, with the masses fleeing to red sanctuaries where churches offered bread and salvation.
Santa Monica gleamed a libertarían Valhalla. Its cartel, in cahoots with China, monopolized highs from British Columbia to Baja. Profits sustained armadas—their privateer navy obliterating Mexican remnants. They toasted to an “Ancap ascendancy.”
Was the shutdown a dream, or had we all awakened in someone else’s simulation?
* * *
Chuck DeVore is Chief National Initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He served in the California State Assembly and is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. He’s the author of “Crisis of the House Never United.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation or ZeroHedge.
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