The Bracket Remains
Trump flags are coming down. The brackets remain.
A man in Northern Arizona took down his Trump flag yesterday. He’d had it up since 2016. The American flag stayed. The bracket where the Trump flag hung is still there. It would take five minutes with a screwdriver to remove it.
He hasn’t touched it.
Some of them say they were never really political. Not partisan. They just think this has gone too far. Others were Trump supporters—flags, hats, donations, years of posts. They’re deleting everything now.
A woman whose husband works for the federal government voted for Trump because she thought it would lower her taxes. It did not lower her taxes. Her husband missed a paycheck on Day 27 of the shutdown. She is not speaking to her mother-in-law, who also voted for Trump.
A woman is divorcing her husband. Court tomorrow. A man’s friend changed his mind because of Greenland. Greenland.
An artist who spent ten years building a Trump persona online deleted everything. Made a new account. Planning a new stage name. Some say it was after Renée Good. Some say it was after Alex Pretti.
Renée Good was thirty-seven years old, a poet, a mother of three. Alex Pretti was thirty-seven years old, an ICU nurse at a VA hospital. Both killed by federal agents in the same city in the same month. The memorial at 26th and Nicollet keeps growing—flowers stiffening in the cold, candles guttering and replaced, handwritten signs in plastic sleeves against the snow.
The Secretary of Defense posted two words on social media after Pretti’s death: ICE > MN.
The chorus on one platform: I don’t care what side you’re on, this has gone too far.
The chorus on another: Girl, we’ve been trying to tell you this for ten years.
The Interregnum
In 1928, a fascist prosecutor looked at Antonio Gramsci—a hunchbacked Sardinian, a communist, the founder of a socialist newspaper called The New Order, a member of the Italian parliament who Mussolini had dragged from his seat—and told the court: “We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.”
They sentenced him to twenty years, four months, and five days. They put him in a crowded cell in Turi, in southern Italy. He had tuberculosis. A uremic disorder that left him unable to walk. His teeth fell out. His health collapsed so completely that by the end he weighed less than a hundred pounds.
He filled thirty-three notebooks anyway. Three thousand pages in tiny handwriting, smuggled out by his sister-in-law. He wrote about power: how it works, how it breaks, what happens in the gaps. He died at forty-six, six days after they finally released him. They stopped his brain from functioning, but not before he named what we’re living through now.
He called it an interregnum: the gap between an old order dying and a new order not yet born. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Power does not rest on force alone. It rests on ordinary participation: the newscaster who frames the story, the judge who signs the order, the neighbor who stays quiet, the algorithm that pushes the content. None of them need to believe. They only need to go along. And when enough of them stop going along, the whole arrangement reveals itself as what it always was: a scaffold that stands only while people keep gripping it.
The quiet part starts getting said. People who disagreed but never said so. People who suspected but stayed quiet. People who knew but couldn’t afford to know. And then a trigger—a video, a body, a lie so blatant it insults their intelligence—and the hidden numbers start to surface. Each defection makes the next one easier.
The flags are coming down. The brackets remain.
The confessions are flowing. The votes haven’t changed.
Is this collapse or repositioning? Nothing is settled yet.
The Architect
This week, a video surfaces from Minneapolis. A man is marching with the clergy outside the federal building where protesters have gathered since Alex Pretti was killed. He is sixty-six years old, wearing an orange parka and a fur hat. His breath fogs in the January air.
His name is Rob Schenck. For decades he was one of the most powerful Christian nationalists in America. He flew on private jets. He ate at the finest restaurants. He trained wealthy couples as “stealth missionaries” to cultivate Supreme Court justices—not to persuade them, but to embolden them, to make them feel protected while they moved to strip rights. He knew Alito. He knew Thomas. He blockaded abortion clinics. Three doctors who performed abortions were murdered in those years. Schenck later admitted his rhetoric may have helped create the climate that killed them.
He remembered the women outside the clinics—”some of them quite young, very distraught, very frightened.” He said: “Over time, I became very callous to that.”
He helped build the machinery that overturned Roe.
“I helped build this.”
Now he is marching with people he spent his life working against—and with people now being killed by a different arm of the same machine.
A reporter asks why he’s here. Schenck says he was wrong. Says the protesters are showing him more grace than he ever extended to anyone. Says this is what repair looks like.
Does redemption require only confession? Or does it require dismantling what was built, brick by brick, with the same patience that constructed it?
The Chorus
Across social media, two conversations are happening at once.
The first is white Americans calling this fascism out loud. Using the word. Some for the first time. The Atlantic published a piece this week: “Yes, It’s Fascism.” The comments filled with readers who had been saying it for years: Where have you been? Took you long enough.
The second is black Americans responding to something else: the plea that there’s never been a time like this, that everyone needs to get off the sidelines, that this is the moment.
The response: A time like what? To who?
A time like the slave trade. A time like Jim Crow. A time like Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. A time like every time. For generations, black parents have sent their children out knowing they could be killed for existing. When they said their lives mattered, the response was that all lives matter, from people who are suspiciously silent now.
And it’s not just black and white. It never was. The Chinese Exclusion Act. Japanese internment. The Muslim ban. Children in cages at the border. Hispanic families raided in their homes right now. This country has always had a list, and the names on it change but the list never goes away.
Some are marching. Some are sitting out. Some are saying: we told you. Some are saying: this isn’t our fight to lead, not this time. Some are saying: we’ve been fighting this our whole lives and now you want us to save you too?
Do not dictate how they respond. Do not demand their sacrifice as if it were owed. Do not arrive late and tell the people who lived through generations of it how to feel.
The awakening is real. So is the exhaustion of those who were awake all along.
It has always been a time like this for some. Now others are discovering what that means.
The Question
The memorial at 26th and Nicollet: two people, both thirty-seven.
The man in Arizona still has the bracket on his house. The flag is gone but the hardware remains. Five minutes with a screwdriver would remove it.
The old is dying. The new cannot yet be born.
Is this collapse or repositioning?
One requires dismantling what was built. The other requires nothing at all.
The brackets remain.
A time like what?
Notes & Sources
Alex Jeffrey Pretti (37, ICU nurse, Minneapolis VA)
PBS News (family statements, ICU nurse at VA, background): https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/man-shot-and-killed-by-federal-officers-in-minnesota-was-an-icu-nurse-his-parents-say
CBS Minnesota (memorial at 26th and Nicollet, timeline): https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/live-updates/reported-shooting-south-minneapolis-federal-agents-protesters/
FOX 9 (Joule the dog, bicycle racer, father’s quotes): https://www.fox9.com/news/minneapolis-shooting-what-we-know-man-killed-border-patrol-agent-jan-24
“A Time Like What” refrain, conversation, and framing from: @sunnmcheaux (original video )
Renée Good (37, poet, mother of three)
CBS News (comprehensive profile, mother of 3, poet, moved to Minneapolis): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/renee-good-killed-ice-minneapolis-what-we-know/
CNN (Old Dominion poetry prize, family background): https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/us/renee-nicole-good-minneapolis-ice-shooting-hnk
Minnesota Reformer (wife’s statement): https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/01/09/renee-good-poet-and-mother-of-3-was-supporting-neighbors-when-ice-shot-her-wife-says/
Pete Hegseth “ICE > MN”
CBC News (exact quote, full context): https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/livestory/ice-minnesota-shooting-jan-24-updates-9.7059653
PBS News (additional context): https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/man-shot-and-killed-by-federal-officers-in-minnesota-was-an-icu-nurse-his-parents-say
Antonio Gramsci
Interregnum quote (“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”):
Prison Notebooks, Notebook 3 (Q3), §34 (1930)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/
Full text, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Hoare & Nowell Smith, trans.): https://archive.org/details/AntonioGramsciSelectionsFromThePrisonNotebooks
Prosecutor quote (“For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning”):
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/
New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2018/02/antonio-gramsci-marxist-thinker
Biographical details (tuberculosis, 33 notebooks, 3000 pages, died at 46, sentence of 20 years 4 months 5 days):
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/
Rob Schenck
“Callous” quote (“I remember women—some of them quite young—being very distraught, very frightened, some very angry. Over time, I became very callous to that.”):
NPR (2018 interview): https://www.npr.org/2018/07/11/628000131/once-militantly-anti-abortion-evangelical-minister-now-lives-with-regret
Operation Higher Court / stealth missionaries / cultivating justices:
Congressional testimony (December 8, 2022): https://www.congress.gov/event/117th-congress/house-event/115220/text
NPR: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/08/1141546218/supreme-court-leaks-reverend-rob-schenk-dobbs-hobby-lobby
Three doctors murdered (Dr. David Gunn 1993, Dr. Barnett Slepian 1998, Dr. George Tiller 2009):
NPR (2018 interview): https://www.npr.org/2018/07/11/628000131/once-militantly-anti-abortion-evangelical-minister-now-lives-with-regret
PBS Amanpour: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/rob-schenck-on-the-consequences-of-inflammatory-rhetoric/
Schenck marching with clergy in Minneapolis (January 2026):
Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/minneapolis-ice-shooting-clergy-march-rob-schenck-video/
Crooks and Liars: https://crooksandliars.com/2026/01/formerly-rich-and-famous-christian
Minneapolis Clergy Protests (January 23, 2026)
NPR (100 clergy arrested, “ICE Out” day of action, subzero temperatures): https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5686733/minnesotans-day-of-ice-protests
Washington Post:https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/01/23/minnesota-general-strike-ice-protest/
"These are the times of monsters." And yet, if we choose to listen to and follow those who have endured this madness for centuries there is every hope that this new world, aching to be born, will find a way through the rubble of the old order... what a fantastic, even lyrical, synopsis you have offered of what is and what is at stake.
Excellent synopsis of what I think is the current substructures of political beliefs in this country. MAGA is losing ground among those intelligent enough to finally see what Trump truly is. The wealthy are having serious doubts and conflicts about Trump’s on-going ability to deliver what he promised, especially as it relates to foreign trade and relations. Undoubtedly though, the biggest issue yet to be faced is the newly named wealthy upper middle-class. These are the people, who believe that Trump is going to eliminate all the lower class, immigrants, non-white people that are getting in the way of their attainment of more wealth. They are arrogant enough to believe that he will also ensure the continuation of economic growth and refuse to see otherwise.
While while the majority of Americans have reacted strongly against the horror of this past week and some have even supported it, this group have had no reaction at all. THEY DON'T CARE.