Above: The entrance to a bunker at the factory of Atlas Survival Shelters in Sulphur Springs, Texas.
If we wait for the hyperrich to finally realize that their fates are tied to ours—for their children to contract measles, or for them to get cabin fever in their apocalypse bunkers—it will be too late for many of the rest of us. A better, quicker path out of this situation? Proving to the plutocrats that they actually are in the same game and bound by the same rules as common people by enacting harsh civil, criminal, and social penalties on those who have orchestrated our present political moment. This can be done within the confines of the rule of law—but only if legal consequences are swift, painful, and delivered on a timescale they cannot ignore. Minnesota prosecutors’ recent charging of ICE officials for crimes is one step forward in the process of presenting the administration with consequences it cannot fantasize away. But it will take scores more of these thrusts, aimed at officials far higher up the political food chain, to pierce the veil of invulnerability currently launching warships toward the Strait of Hormuz. We are going to have to make war their problem.