PROJECTION MUCH? Stacey Abrams' latest fantasy.

So, start with winning an election, usually the last one you're gonna get to have for real. Number two, you have an expansion of executive power. The president decides he wants more than he's supposed to have. Number three, you start to make the Congress complicit. So you weaken them and you neutralize or neuter the judiciary. Like, oh, I don't know, the Supreme Court giving you unfettered power and saying, "We don't have the ability to stop things." Uh, then you move on to firing all the people who know how to make government work.

So you gut the civil service. And you do that because you wanna break democracy so people forget the stuff that used to get done, so you can't get your Social Security check, so the CDC doesn't know what diseases are anymore.

Then you put in place these loyalists, people who are only responsive to you. You put them in charge of the FBI so they go after your enemies. You put them in charge of, uh, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, so they can signal to their friends and tell them all about the evil plans that you have. Then you make certain that you break how we communicate. So you criticize the media, and you create your own echo chamber of propaganda. You call it truth even though you know you're lying. Then you go to the next step, and I call that step seven. 'Cause at step seven, you have to blame someone. You have to blame people for the broken government, for the broken promises. So you go after DEI.

You go after the vulnerable, the dispossessed. You go after any community that doesn't look like what you think power should be. While you're doing that, you make certain that you, in step eight, you eliminate anybody who could help them. So you sue law firms that do pro bono cases.

You go after philanthropies and accuse them of giving money to the wrong people. You go after colleges and universities that can teach people possibly what else they should know. You get to step nine, and you start to private — you start to encourage and incentivize private violence. You send the U.S. Marines into spaces they should not be. You send the National Guard in. You kidnap people off of the streets and pretend that's normal, because that's how you quiet dissent.

Because you make everyone afraid that if they don't do what you want, they might be next. And once you've done those nine steps, step 10 is easy. That's when you decide there won't be new elections, because everyone's either afraid, poor, broken, or complicit.

She's been way too much time looking in the mirror at herself.