The first and most treacherous step involves admitting that we are fucked. That’s the hardest part. We live in a land with no democracy, no human rights and the sort of hope that meanders back and forth from full on surrender to visions of alien starships dangling diamond encrusted escape ropes above our heads. The first Trump (remember 2016?) stumbled across a normal world. You could feel his confusion and tens of millions grew giddy anticipating his buffoonery. Now he can shit himself, slobber about illegal alien hotel rooms in NYC and “lavish fish monitoring” in a single sentence, and we look at him in awe. He is unkillable – literally and metaphorically. We bypass his vacant eyes, his fake hair, his brick tinged complexion, his tiresome word salad, and go straight to his immortality. We imagine nuclear bombs turning the world into a flat, smoldering, Hiroshima horizon, and there he is, as orange as ever, standing triumphant in the debris. Trump has inherited the earth. The fans of meek were dead wrong.

Maybe a fragment from a meteorite will cleave Trump’s skull in two, like a machete on a watermelon. But is Trump even real? And if he has a place in the material world, do we know what he does, where he fits in, and why? Maybe we have blamed all the crimes of industrial agriculture on the scarecrow in the cornfield. The US has always bombed, murdered, overthrown, extracted, stolen, imprisoned and impoverished people far away, but now it has become personal, intimate, proximate and still unfocused, like a 1950’s radio station on a cross country drive. Are we really listening to “Love Me Tender” and “Jail-House Rock” at the same time? Is Trump a right turn or a straight highway? Nobody knows – Trump’s Tourette’s slogan.

You can smell the fear on your own breath. The mugging that you read about in last year’s paper now involves your ribs, your plea for mercy, your teeth spilling out on the bloody pavement. Fascism does that – you ask if the fists are on your side, but it’s crickets. Maybe? Maybe not?

That’s life in occupied territory. You have to show your papers, your birth certificate, your passport while security runs a scan of your profile. And you have no one to petition – your elected officials have already requested that you stop calling and emailing. What the fuck can we do? they say. You might have watched your favorite representative listening politely to stories about dead people scamming social security and other tales about the military budget being wasted on transgender mice. You saw Al Green waving a cane at the Gestapo, and others shyly clutching ping pong paddles in shaky hands. I saw the whole thing on Inside Edition. They redacted the footage of Representative Green being beaten by truncheons. We did, however, see the video of Democrats standing about and watching Congressman Green’s beatdown, shivering like cattle in the slaughterhouse feedlot.

We have all seen videos of a lone crocodile snatching a wildebeest and death-rolling it while two hundred other wildebeests watch from the safety of the shore. That, for the metaphor challenged, illustrates the Democratic/Wildebeest party, the helpless bystander party, the “don’t- make-a-big-deal-over-one-unlucky-wildebeest-party” when over ninety nine percent got away.

Last night an I.C.E. van pulled into my neighbor’s driveway, and a family of four were taken away in cuffs. Five houses on my street were seized for eminent domain and plowed away by bulldozers. Occupation works that way. The poor have way too much and the rich have way too little. There are soldiers here to fix that and other things, private security forces have discovered stolen bitcoin belonging to Elon Musk and Peter Theil. Give your Bitcoin back, people. Rich people have human rights too. Fascism weaves a fantasy out of fear and hope. Did you see a mushroom cloud on the horizon? Did you bounce into the future and back again with a sigh of relief? I just checked my street – all the houses still stand. My Bitcoin sparkles in a plastic bottle set on the kitchen counter.

Most of us don’t get Bitcoin, just like we never got paper money and coins with George Washington’s face. If we find a dollar in the curb, most of us have no idea why it is worth a dollar, or, more accurately, worth a nickel. But a dollar feels good in your pocket, even if it only buys a half a slice of sawdust extended bread. Not so with Bitcoin – it may be in your pocket, but unlike a paper bill, Bitcoin can fall out of your pocket even if there is no hole. Bitcoin are like neutrinos – ghost particles that pass through the earth in a nanosecond. All money is designed to escape from ordinary pockets and accumulate in bank vaults. If you have nothing, the bank charges you for a late fee. Bitcoin will have the advantage of doing away with petty regulations. North Korean hackers hoovered up billions in ghostly cryptocurrency. If Trump wants you to fill your pockets with invisible cash, you can bet that his fat, tiny fingers will be in there scraping out the residue. People write about a scam of tariffs, Bitcoin and Musk. Bitcoin is the water in Zuckerberg’s swimming pool. Bitcoin is the canvas walls in your new home. Tent city America ran out of Bitcoin.

These are not the best of times, these are not the worst of times, these are not The New York Times – we live in alternative times, the times of unfettered nonsense, the times of dark matter and invisible dimensions, the times when the cable connecting thought and action has been severed. The danger is that we think of our moment as if we owned familiar and comfortable templates – like the Democrats playing ping-pong with no ball and no table.

It is high time that we set up a government in exile. No, not the Democratic Party in exile. The Democrats are the Vichy Regime of cooperation, capitulation and selling out. Think of Hakeem Jeffries as our Marshall Petain – or is it Marshall Schumer? How would I know? Maybe you know about The Czech Government in Exile headed by Edvard Benes. Benes helped plan Operation Anthropoid that conceived and carried out the assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich in German occupied Czechoslovakia. Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik were the heroes who carried out the deed.

A government in exile has the power of legitimacy, the ability to hide and strike in random fashion, but crucially, a government in exile frames narrative clarity. A government in exile provides a road map. You see color, texture and depth. Our reality has representation – a government in exile. You don’t listen to a deranged cretin bloviate about transgender mice in the midst of multiple genocides, you acknowledge the dire situation with complete opposition – a government in exile, the Anti-fascist States of America.

In exile? Where? Antarctica? The Galapagos? Atlantis? Havana? It’s a big world.

Phil Wilson writes the blog, Nobody’s Voice.