If you think things couldn’t possibly get worse, you may be in for a surprise. Then again, they may already be worse than you thought.

The chaos created by the current administration is unprecedented outside of a war zone. Then again, if you believe a few websites in particular, we are already at war. The war, in that case, is the fascist takeover of our government against the people, a kind of coup d’etat against our constitution and the system as we know it.

If that sounds like a bit much it’s understandable. But it’s still worth keeping an eye on just in case the paranoids are correct.

Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944).

Loyal readers know that Barataria’s position has always been that the Trump administration will be nothing but a big distraction. It’s all part of the process of gaslighting, or convincing the rest of the nation that crazy is somehow perfectly normal.

While that was described very coldly in pre-emptive terms lacking any specifics, the events of the last ten days have given this a lot more heat and light. And writers are picking up on it.

The website medium.com is an open platform with many writers on this topic for some reason. It seems to have attracted conspiracy theorists and others who are wary of what’s going on. In normal times they might seem like lunatics, but today they may be the only sane ones out there.

Should we believe that the Constitution of the US is under attack? The short answer is that no one should ever really “believe” anything, but there are a lot of interesting things worth remembering and filing away for later use. Two articles in particular stand out from the rest of the crowd at medium.com for their fairly precise descriptions of what’s up, or may be up, which we’ll know as soon as something else happens.

Following all this yet?

Same thing we do every night, Stevie.

The long and short of it is that all the noise created over the fairly blatant disregard for law, treaty, and tradition on immigration bans has some people suspicious. It’s fairly standard practice among those working to seize power to first set up a distraction, buying them time to implement their plans. The events of the last week seem to fit that purpose perfectly.

But, you may say, didn’t this get everyone out in the streets marching? As good as that may have felt, and as useful as it was to organize, it’s rather meaningless in the near term. There’s nothing here to latch onto yet.

If there was a nefarious purpose behind it all, what might that be? The short answer is that if we were distracted we don’t know yet. Yes, that’s a spurious answer not worthy of comment. The longer answer is that the appointment of Steve Bannon to the Principals Committee of the National Security Council looks like the real power move. Displacing actual generals and intelligence gatherers with an ideological operative is completely new and cannot lead to anything good.

The US Senate. Imagine if they had something they had to do.

It may, however, require Senate confirmation – exposing the whole shebang to public scrutiny. So there’s still a good chance that our system may have been protected against this all along and that Bannon isn’t as smart as he thinks.

What do I really think? I think that all of this is worth keeping an eye on and no one should get too excited about any one thing. What I can tell you is that America is still bigger than any of these clowns realize and we will take them down in the end no matter what. What this is a matter of is how much damage they do in the meantime – so there is a purpose to marching and making noise and, more importantly, helping out where you can.

And it’s worth keeping an open mind to any definition of mayhem that might come along. Anything is possible. Strange to think that was once a comforting thought.