Ice Skating Through Hell

Local politics and policy is spicy right now, but Washington makes talking about it like discussing the weather while the sky is on fire.

"We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." — Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation

Georgia’s legislative silly season has begun in earnest, the perennial moment where good, bad and weird ideas blossom in abundance. It’s like spring, but it smells different.

But before we get into the legislative weeds, or the Atlanta city council’s increasing conflict with its inspector general’s office, or the symbolism of a horse-drawn funeral procession to city hall for a homeless man killed in service to affluent tourists attending King memorial day services … I think a word is due about the unfolding catastrophe around us.

I don’t want to pretend things are normal, and that I can write about local politics like nothing else is going on. That’s a lie that history will notice, even if we don’t.

Atlanta and America are under a barrage of Project 2025 cannon fire. The CDC in north Decatur is locked down while the bird flu is one gene mutation away from a second pandemic. Hell, we may already be in a second pandemic, but the people who understand that are forbidden from saying so, never mind doing anything about it.

ICE agents have started snapping up people around town, from Plaza Fiesta to local churches. One property-bro “heritage American” took to Twitter last week to try to call down ICE agents on Brannon Hill.

I note in passing that Brannon Hill, a condo complex just outside of Clarkston that’s been prone to fires and violence, has many problems, but illegal immigration ain’t one. Most of the immigrants there are perfectly legal refugees who obtained American citizenship years ago.

Elon Musk, who is not a government employee, has appropriated the personal and financial information of every government employee, every contractor, every person who receives a Medicaid or Medicare reimbursement or Social Security check, or ever has for as far back as records go at the Treasury Department. He has applicant data for anyone who ever applied for a federal job. He now has the means to extra-judicially target anyone presenting an obstacle to misrule.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has likely violated the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Internal Revenue Code with respect to taxpayer information, by giving Musk and his adolescent team of DOGE staffers access to the Bureau’s records. A lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO’s retirement fund argues that, at the very least, 5 U.S.C. § 552a(e)(4). obligated the department to publish notice when a system of record keeping changes, and that the IRS code famously restricts tax records from being shared to private citizens except as allowed by statute.

If that seems like a tepid, technical response to a technofascist coup … well, that’s how the law works. But it beats the hell out of what our elected leaders are doing, which is mostly nothing.

The failure of Democratic leaders to stand in the gap right now is what Atlanta is talking about with their second breath, after they have exhausted themselves shouting expletives with the first.

After listening to four years of “stop the steal!” noise on the right, the natural instinct to grudgingly accept the results of a clear election loss contends today with the natural instinct to fight the clearly, gravely illegal and unconstitutional acts by the incoming president. Atlantans are asking themselves what should be tolerated in the name of democracy, and what should be rejected as a threat to democracy.

About 115,100 more Georgians voted for Donald Trump than Kamala Harris, a 2.2 percent margin. Many reasons have been given for the shift; the cost of living seems to be highest on the list. There’s a sense on the left that Democrats will recover a majority once things get so bad that the mistake will be obvious in retrospect … so why exhaust yourself fighting when time is on your side?

Of such things is the logic of “demography is destiny” born.

There is a broad feeling of despair on the left here, a sense that the exhausting political work of the last six years has been wasted. People are tuning out of news. They are cocooning until some viable plan of resistance emerges.

Protests are planned by someone tomorrow. A group calling themselves the "50501 Movement" are organizing a rally at Centennial Olympic Park tomorrow at 2 p.m. as a protest against Donald Trump and Project 2025.

Never mind the permits or lack thereof: we know how to do an unpermitted protest in Atlanta. Here’s the problem. I do not know who the f—k these people are.

More to the point, neither do the serious street activists in Atlanta. There’s widespread skepticism about who is behind the protest and its potential to be an operation by the regime/administration as a means of identifying targets.

I, of course, will be there to see what happens, because I am a journalistic masochist.

This may be a perfectly ordinary protest. Or it may be something organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party <sigh> who know everyone hates them and are co-opting the zeitgeist. Or the organizers may simply believe operations security demands a layer of anonymity to avoid reprisals. But that’s a recipe for random people to go smash stuff without accountability.

More than one person has told me over the last two weeks that they are concerned about Luigi Mangione-type violence in response to a president who is ignoring the law and cannot be held accountable — not out of moral concern about violence, but from the assumption that Trump is hoping for a violent reaction, a Reichstag Fire moment that will justify violent repression of his critics.

Elected leaders: this is what regular people are discussing. It’s not just the political bubble. It’s not hard-core activists. This is the tenor of barbershop conversation now.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Democratic elected officials from Georgia — from Sens. Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock all the way down to the average state representative and city councilperson — people I generally like and respect, are temperamentally incapable of meeting this challenge with anything more than a sternly worded public statement, when we need to see wooden shoes being thrown into the machine.

Tell them so.

U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff

T: 202-224-3521 | Contact: https://www.ossoff.senate.gov/contact-us/

U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock

T: 202-224-3643 | Contact: https://www.warnock.senate.gov/contact/contact-form/

U,S, Representative Hank Johnson

T: 202-225-1605 | Contact: https://hankjohnson.house.gov/contact

U.S. Represenatative Lucy McBath

T: 202-225-4501 | Contact: https://mcbath.house.gov/email-me

U.S. Representative David Scott

T: 202-225-2939| Contact: https://davidscott.house.gov/contact/

U.S. Representative Nikema Williams

T: 202-225-3801 | Contact: https://nikemawilliams.house.gov/contact

DO SOMETHING. NOW.