White Magic at the National Archives? Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle No. 1
A back-pages story may become lots more important than you suppose.
A few days ago, on February 6, Jonathan V. Last, the erstwhile editor of The Bulwark, wrote an essay entitled “The Story of Us” about what looked to be the early stages of the Trump Administration trying to seize political control of the National Archives and Records Administration. Amid the torrent of attempted coup-related news these past few weeks you might have missed this short-of-front-page news item.
Last admitted that the evidence for the Archives putsch was mixed, since the White House announcement that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would be put in charge of the Archives as Acting Director clashed with the fact that the current Archivist, Dr. Colleen J. Shogan, was still in the saddle on the morning of February 4, and no one over there on Adelphi Road in College Park had heard anything about the coming of Rubio. Things have since become clearer: Dr. Shogan was dismissed on February 7
“The Story of Us” is excellent background on this still-a-moving-target subject, bringing into sharp focus a skein of critical data points in the story going back to 2022, including several from the 2024 campaign, and bringing the tale up to date as far as was then possible based on publicly available sources. From digesting those data points two things become clear, the second a good bit more bone-chilling than the first.
First, Trump’s vendetta against his perceived enemies is behind his plot to politically suborn the National Archives, for he thinks that the Mar-a-Lago purloined secret documents indictment owes much to “snitches” at the Archives informing the FBI of his misdeeds.
Second and more important, either Trump himself or, more likely, some of his more granularly devious associates, want to politicize the Archives—which has a squeaky clean reputation for being non-political going back well before any of us was born—because they know, as Last cites Orwell to emphasize, that whosoever controls the past controls the future. One of the pithier remarks in Last’s essay follows a description of a January 6 National Review article by Dominic Pino praising and supporting Ms. Shogun, to wit:
The National Review article concluded that Shogan was “exactly the right kind of person to lead the National Archives” because the job is supposed to be nonpartisan. But of course, that misunderstands Trump’s desires. He doesn’t want the National Archives to be “nonpartisan.” He wants them to be his.
Absolutely right: This is an attempted hostile takeover, which bothers Trump and de facto co-President Musk not at all, since that is not illegal in corporate warfare and corporate brains are the only ones they have. But alas, for some reason Mr. Last failed to follow his own perfectly apt Orwellian reference point to its most logical target: the official documentary records of the November 2020 presidential election.
At this point I need to shift momentarily into personal mode to make my point. On January 21 Bill Kristol and Benjamin Parker had written in The Bulwark an essay entitled “An All-Out Assault on the Rule of Law.” No mention of the Archives appeared in this essay since the putsch aimed at it had not yet broken into public notice, but the Archives appeared anyway in my mind’s eye for a reason I will soon reveal. So I emailed Bill—whom I have known since mid-1995 (and whose father for several years signed my paychecks[1])—as follows:
Yes, and for that reason the official documentary archival records of the 2020 election need immediately to be kept safe, possibly with official copies sent to Britain or Canada, lest MAGA facticity termites seek to destroy them in an effort to “flood the zone of history with shit.”
So when I saw Jonathan Last’s February 6 article on the National Archives I immediately wrote again to Bill, more or less as follows:
The National Archives!!—You see, I think they really are going for the November 2020 presidential election archive. I think they are indeed seeking to flood the history zone with shit. They are trying to assure themselves that twenty years from now when some kid opens a history book to learn about the November 2020 election the standard version will be that the Democrats and the deep state stole it from Donald Trump.
Of course they can’t do this really, because there is so much footage and newspaper archive outside the government—not to mention Jack Smith’s January 6 report as public record—to validate what actually happened to anybody who seriously wishes to know. Can they?
That is not quite all I wrote to Bill, who, just by the way, is not someone I’ve always seen eye-to-eye with in the past—he being a Reaganite Republican and me being “Never Either,” to coin a phrase. But because I want to elaborate on what else I wrote I am eschewing block quotation style.
In that second recent email I referenced a novel—not a surprise to readers of The Raspberry Patch who by now know my predilection for finding resonance between reality and the literary side of life—Neal Stephenson’s The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., co-written with Nicole Galland, published in 2017.
If you are familiar with this book, lucky you and you have likely already anticipated my point. If you do not know it, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is about time travel, by and with the assistance of witches, from the present day back in time on strands to any number of centuries in order to change things just enough so that they will reverberate positively into the present—sort of like the butterfly-wing effect of subtle cumulative causality in nature, only in this case applied to human history. This is, of course, a top-secret U.S. Government project—D.O.D.O. stands for Department of Diachronic Operations—….that ultimately backfires. It was because D.O.D.O. was on my mind, or somewhere inside it, that the Kristol-Parker essay of January 21 led me to hone in on the official records of the November 2020 election, the very seed germ of the now electorally successful Big Lie.
In any event, all changes to the historical antecedents of current reality must be done subtly lest the soul of reality erupt in a violent diachronic shear, destroying everything in its vicinity. One of the D.O.D.O. story’s heroes loses his favorite beer in present-day Boston because a diachronic op gone awry touches off a diachronic shear that destroys the brewery that invented and brewed it four and a half centuries earlier in London. In another case a diachronic op that goes well results in the name of the headquarters of U.S. Department of Defense suddenly shifting from being the Trapazoid to being the Pentagon. Millions of documents suddenly start to blur in a haze of magical light refraction and in a trice everywhere is printed the new name. Pretty soon all but a very few lose consciousness that there ever was an old name, or remember what it was. That’s how magic works in novels. But only in novels?
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is a wonderful book, but it’s fiction. The idea that MAGAts—as my regular readers know, that’s what I call them because they are basically shit-based and shit-dependent—could seize control of the National Archives so to falsify the record of the November 2020 election so thoroughly and skillfully that history itself will have been changed is crazy magical thinking. Yes, but that just establishes it as being consonant with the MAGAt essence, as illustrated just below. It does not necessarily mean that just because it is crazy magical thinking it cannot succeed…..if enough Americans now and in years to come credit crazy magical thinking as real. Phenomenology applies to postmodernism in ways that postmodernism cannot apply to phenomenology, to wit: If enough people to matter in an electoral democracy lose track of the Lebenswelt, then magic can become unselfaware conventional reality—and if it does then so much, most likely, for that electoral democracy.
Remember: So-called low-information voters—so-called by conventional American political scientists, most of whom who have yet to get a significant domestic politics prediction right in over a decade—are not properly defined only by what knowledge of actual public affairs is not in their heads, but also by what simpleminded fantasy and conspiracy-theory “knowledge” is in their heads. When those of us who have not misplaced the Lebenswelt manage somehow to speak to or write for those who have—rare as that has become given the nearly hermetically sealed infospheric echo-chambers most Americans now inhabit—we are not addressing tabulae rasae. We are for the most part addressing those with often well-rooted perceptions of spectacle-implanted malarkey. MAGAt entrepreneurs know this, since they have helped plant and shape a fair bit of that malarkey over the past decade; brain-closeted Democrats, some guilty of peddling their own brand of culture-war malarkey, on the other hand, tend to act as though this fact of American political life is the farthest thing from their minds. That is something they are very ill-advised to do in these days since this past November 5.
Remember too, if you will, that an elected member of the Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene—once referred to by former Republican Senator Ben Sasse as “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs”—proposed in June 2023, along with Elise Stefanik, “expunging” Donald Trump’s two impeachment trials from the record. No such concept exists in law, constitutional or otherwise, or common sense. It was akin to proposing that we abolish, oh, say, 2020 because it was so unhealthy and unpleasant (and Trump actually did, you know, psst psst lose the election). This proposal was an almost pure example of the magical law of metamorphosis, repeated over and over through the MAGAt default stratagem of projecting onto enemies, without the existence of or any need for evidence, the evils they themselves have plotted and often enough have tried to carry out.
Greene has persisted. On October 3 of last year she asserted that Hurricane Helene, and a bit later Hurricane Milton, had been created by the Biden Administration to harm political “red” zones to suppress early voting there. This was pure projection, yet again, since Republicans these days specialize in voter suppression, not Democrats. But it was more than that: It was a display of insistence on magical efficacy.
“Yes, they control the weather,” Greene said in a tweet. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” She then concluded: “Climate change is the new Covid,” an astonishingly compressed clot of utter conspiratorial nonsense asserting that climate change is deliberate, caused by deep state plots and not untoilet-trained human consumption habits, and that COVID too was a U.S. government deep state invention. Greene later shared a list of patents supposedly filed for weather-control purposes and an old CBS clip of journalists speculating about using lasers—yes, of course, Jewish space lasers—controlling the weather. Greene perhaps saw and took as fact rather than fiction the 2024 sequel to the seriously poor 1996 movie “Twister,” brilliantly called “Twisters,” in which a young woman invents and heroically deploys a technique to tame deadly tornados. Normal people, by which I mean people who read, laughed at Greene. Most of her constituents and many others besides, however, took her seriously—and most of them, in turn, voted on November 5.
Greene has been grooving to the current trending magical meme in the culture that, ironically enough, is based on the postmodern premise that there is no truth except for what hegemonic narratives manage to establish as truth. “’Tis a fool who would expend himself against the determined forces of magic,” says a fictively reinvented William Shakespeare to witch-aided time-traveling U.S. Army Major Tristan Lyons in Nicole Galland’s 2021 sequel to The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., titled Master of the Revels. “Every power in the world waxes and wanes. It may be the technological wonders you hint of reach their natural zenith in the years to come, but then after that ‘tis time for magic to reassert itself. . . . [A] lifetime from now you may find your technology at neap tide.”[2] It’s just a novel; again, still….
Still some are reluctant to face the raw facts: The entire political reality we are living in and with right now is based on a mammoth fraudulent narrative inducted into hegemony by the results of the November 5 election. The entire Trump campaign, indeed the MAGAt meme for four years after January 6, 2021, was based primarily on the “Stop the Steal” Big Lie. In victory the Big Lie has now become the substance of a loyalty oath necessary to get a job on the National Security Council staff and on the Policy Planning staff at the State Department (where I once worked). During those four years the MAGAt juggernaut strove to transform what was a failed coup attempt directed by Trump himself into a patriotic pro-democratic uprising against the so-called deep state allied with the Democratic Party. It was, in short, a conspiracy theory known to be false by its purveyors and, we thought, by a solid majority of the citizenry and the electorate—and it nevertheless has won the day politically.
Nothing like this has ever before happened in the 250-year period of American independence: that a massive and protracted fraud could give rise to the non-fraudulent election of the fraud-master. Presidential candidates have often sculpted the truth here and there at the margins; but no one who was elected or even came close to being elected did so on the basis of a lie as expansive and thinly credible as Trump’s Big Lie.
This is not the place to examine what has changed in American culture to enable such an enormity to occur. That, of course, is the main burden of The Age of Spectacle project—which loyal readers of The Raspberry Patch know well by now—in which I try to monitor changing brain-magic levels—roughly comparable, if metaphorically so, to blood-sugar levels in diabetic sufferers—in a patient collectively known as We the People. (Hint: the patient is not doing well.) But cut to the chase: Occur it did, and the fact that no precedent exists for what has happened means that the usual, so the roughly predictable, patterns of American politics no longer hold. We don’t know what will happen now to the American Experiment in ordered liberty, and anyone who claims otherwise is someone from whom a certain distance should be put.
The main point, it will by now I hope be clear, is that if a wild-eyed lie like “Stop the Steal” can win the political day, then why can’t a MAGAt seizure of the Archives reverse, in effect, the result of the November 2020 election? Why is it not possible that twenty years hence a typical random kid will read about the November 2020 election and the January 6 2021 coup attempt in the way that MAGAt witches and warlocks beavering away at the National Archives mean for them to? That will be an exciting read, to be sure. Remember what Hannah Arendt pointed out now so long ago: Lying is far more attention-arresting and exhilarating than truth-telling, even after aging for twenty, or fifty, or a hundred, years. If future American politics are as spectacalized as they already are now, if not even more so, then what, pray tell, will prevent that? A diachronic shear that vaporizes the White House and the Old Executive Office Building?
I posited above that the seizure and rape of the National Archives by the Trump 2.0 Administration cannot possibly succeed in altering the historical record of what actually happened in early November 2020, or on January 6, 2021, with so many other objective external sources for the truth out there in the world. But I frankly invoked the language of near-certainty largely to convince myself, even then knowing at some level that I would not wholly succeed. To put it mildly, some prophylactic caution is in order.
It is not as though the challenge is a new one. It is, after all, a common assertion that the victors get to write history—whether we like any particular group of victors or not—and no shortage of examples can be brought to prove the point. The historical record of most civilizations is indeed specked at the least with invidious self-exculpatory inventions and delusions. They stick, insofar as they do, usually because the audience for these inventions and delusions conspires with the victorious authors to make them stick. And it is no use labelling this sort of thing “fascist,” although it is not necessarily not fascist. Radical leftists have air-brushed history with the best (or worst) of them. Nothing is so ridiculous as listening to a Marxoid postmodernist wokester complain about MAGA distortions of American history. As far as tactics go, leaving aside ultimate purposes and ideological biases, the Trump 2.0 Administration resembles the onset of Mao’s Cultural Revolution as much or more than it does anything that has happened on Right.
Gut-wrenching pre-woke case in point: The American historical imagination still venerates Kit Carson, for example. The original prooftext for Carson’s supposedly heroic exploits is the once widely read John Wesley Powell book The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons (1895). But if you read what Carson did to subdue the Navajo, which Powell relates in relishing detail, it reveals what today we would today call state terrorism and certainly would qualify as a war crime. Yet as recently as 1994 the USPS put Carson’s face on a postage stamp. Invention? Delusion? Just ignorance? You choose.
If Kit Carson can still be a hero, if aggressing against Canada, Denmark, and Panama can be popular, if word-magical votive acts like the re-naming of mountains and gulfs of water can actually seem like something significantly real to many people, then—again—why can’t falsifying the official record of the November 2020 election succeed?
So you see, then, what is really at stake in the world of Trump 2.0. It’s not just a range of critical policy decisions with life-and-death implications for people here and abroad. It’s not just the status and future of the Constitution and the rule of law. It’s not mainly about the physical security of Donald Trump’s real and imagined enemies. It’s not the now hazy future of the constructive role of the United States in the world. It’s the status of reality itself: past reality, and therefore present and future reality. For “Never Trumpers,” whether former Republicans or, like me, former Democrats and independents, what is at stake is not just about the national interest, it’s about national sanity.
Well is that all, you say? Not quite and, let me suggest by way of denouement that what follows requires that you be seated.
Darren Beattie is now Acting Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, and if confirmed by the spineless, brain-dead U.S. Senate that seems somehow—magic?—to be channelling the final Senate of the Roman Republic in 27 BCE, he will be ensconced in that position possibly for most of four years. (And to think I used to grumble quietly about some of things Richard Boucher said and did……) Beattie, whose nomination was forwarded by Vice-President Vance and has been defended by him, is the most out-of-the-box white supremacist to hold such any such high Executive Branch office since the Wilson Administration. He has openly asserted on social media that the only good African-Americans are those who know “know their place” in a white man’s world.[3] He has been forced on Secretary of State Rubio by the White House, have no doubt, just as similarly minded moral arsonists may soon be foisted on Rubio at the National Archives.
Rubio is the perfect foil for such insertions, since he is downright meek, polite, and even clingingly likable compared to nearly all of his MAGAt colleagues in Washington. Trump probably sees him as the rough functional equivalent of “Golden Boy” Arnold Skaaland, the greatest WWF fall-guy of the 1950s, who got destroyed by the evil Graham Brothers more times than anyone could count. In Trump’s delayed-maturation TV brain everything is reality-TV filtered, and he is a Jerry Springer maestro who is producing and managing what to him is a constant show: Public opinion translates to show ratings; Spanish-speaking immigrants are the always-losing Indians in the old Westerns and the only good Indians are like Tonto, those who “know their place”; Canadian real estate is the old Western frontier there for the taking; defying Federal Court orders, the Vice-President at your side, summons the ghost of Andrew Jackson who once reportedly said, “John Marshall has made the decision, now let him enforce it”—probably one of the few or perhaps even the only thing Trump knows about Jackson that someone told him, not anything he learned from a book—…..and you can work out the rest on your own.
But back to the thread: You remember, certainly, Elon Musk’s Hitlergruss—twice—on Inauguration Day evening, and you know that one of his young bureaucra-termites who staffed the digital coup at the Treasury Department, 25 year-old Marko Elez, claimed on social media that he was a “racist before it was cool,” strongly suggesting that among Musk’s coterie it is now cool to be a racist.[4] Further evidence: Musk persuaded Trump to grant refugee status to white South Africans even as he denied refugee status to actually deserving others on the rest of the planet. See any pattern here, perhaps?
So what do you think it means when the Trump White House declares its determination to “restore free speech” and, more recently, to more quietly ignore court orders? Do you think it refers only to lifting the thumb of over-the-top cancel culture? Plenty of non-MAGA types could get on board with that. Or do you see it, possibly, as a green light, a veritable beckoning for the return of overtly racist expression, and ultimately racist behavior, amid the American demos? Is defying the courts on illegal intrusions into the Federal bureaucracy a prelude to defying the courts on civil rights issues, to the de facto repeal of the 14th Amendment? At this point a person would have to be deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid not to at least suspect as much.
Eight years ago at the start of the first Trump Administration some observers claimed to see his victory as a whitelash against the two-term Obama presidency, with a prospect of regression whose limits were unclear but not necessarily shallow. I was not convinced of that at the time. Like most normal people I found the idea that America might regress to the turpitude of the pre-civil rights era too wild to credit. Americans are dyed-in-the-wool matter-of-fact believers in Whig history without knowing, most of us, what the term even refers to. We have been imperturbable optimists, unshakable believers in progress even in hard times, and over two and half centuries we gained evidence to support our assumptions and hopes. It has been very hard, until fairly recently, to persuade most Americans that progress, howsoever they might define it, is not inevitable.
It is, however, by way of indisputable historical fact, not inevitable. Eight years ago the magical spectacle mentality we see on the rise today had not yet gained such obvious forward momentum. White magic, let us call it, is now loosed in the land and could turn out to be far worse than any form of black magic our forebears imagined. On the other hand, maybe it’s all just holographic projection from magic-infused brains. In other words, instead of things being serious but not hopeless they may be hopeless but not serious.
We don’t really know for sure; it is still early. But it is only prudent to assume the former. Fortunately, regression is no more inevitable than progress. It’s up to us, all of us, to weigh in against it. Sirens of inevitability can be heard only by the morally deaf. As some then-young folksinger once put it, “. . . don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin.” You bet your ass it is.
Epilogue, February 16, 2025
I had not remembered when I drafted this essay last week that the iconic role of January 6, 2021 in MAGA mythology—where anything can become anything else if it willed to be regardless of evidence and, for many, inner private awareness of the truth—has a direct analog in the German National Socialist 1923 Munich beerhall putsch. After the failure of the putsch Hitler spent time in a German jail. Some others were killed in the abortive effort. Thereafter, the putsch became an iconic, heroic, seminal deed in the history of the Nazi Party. Every year on the anniversary of the November 8, 1923 event Hitler commemorated the crime and tried to turn it into an act of patriotism. He did this even after becoming Chancellor in January 1933. In his November 8, 1935 commemoration he said as follows (in translation of course): “Fate has meant well for us—It did not let an action succeed which, had it succeeded, must finally have foundered because of the sheer immaturity of the movement and its faulty organizational and spiritual foundations. We know this today. Then, we acted with courage and manhood. Providence, however, acted with wisdom.” (quoted in Franz Neumann, Behemoth, pp. 42-43.)
Hitler continued his annual November 8 commemorations even into the war years. He did the honors as late as 1943. Hitler skipped the 1944 event, handing over the microphone to Heinrich Himmler. At some point, too, Hitler ordered the re-interment of the martyred dead from 1923 in places of honor. (I thank David Blankenhorn for reminding me of this latter detail.)
I am not saying that Trump is Hitler, or that American democratic institutions are like those of Weimar Germany, or, certainly, that history repeats itself. It doesn’t; it merely occasionally rhymes. But anyone who cannot see similarities in these two circumstances needs to explain why they may not usefully be compared.
Epilogue II, February 18, 2025
Apparently, I cannot leave off this basic topic. Two brief data points to add, if I may.
First, in the interesting Foreign Affairs essay posted on February 12 by Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way, entitled “Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War,” the authors argue that U.S. politics will not become dictatorial along the lines of a one-party state, but become rather more like Hungary and Turkey where democratic institutions remain formally but are systematically tilted in favor of incumbent autocrats and against challengers. In a recital of all the things the second Trump Administration cannot do, one item claims that it cannot expunge the widely documented record of what actually happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Aside from being wrong in their core thesis, they seriously underestimate the power of magical thinking in a culture characterized by a resurgent mythic consciousness.
Second, on February 18 Donald Trump somersaulted the history of the Ukraine War, telling reporters that Ukraine started the war. Nearly everyone first gasped and then laughed. They laughed too soon: Trump then began speaking as though President Zelensky was a dictator, not Putin, and that Russians were the war’s main victims, not Ukrainians. It’s typical MAGA projection surrealism, but it is not to be dismissed as so crazy that it is feckless. If Trump and his MAGA minions can convince a winning political plurality of Americans that he won the November 2020 election and that all the trouble on January 6, 2021 was caused by an FBI “inside job,” then convincing millions of Americans Ukraine started the February 2022 war will prove to be a piece of cake. At a certain point many of the people who political scientists like to call “low-information voters” turn into cultic zombies who will believe any and everything they are told by cult leaders. We are at, and for too many well beyond, that point.
Epilogue III, March 17, 2025
News sources reported on March 14 that the Oklahoma Board of Education recently approved a social studies agenda for Oklahoma public schools that would mandate teaching in history classes about supposed irregularities and discrepancies in the November 2020 Presidential election. Clearly, the MAGA effort to institutionalize the Big Lie is not limited to the National Archives.
Is this alarming? Yes. Is it also surprising? Not to me. What starts as urban legend ends up as myth—if not an outright falsehood—in the historical record of most nations. As with most individuals, national elites like to tell themselves and others the stories they want to hear. In the case of American history the process has usually been subtle for being rooted in comforting delusion, not in premeditated mendacity. It applies to some pretty big items, let’s call them: The Civil War, the Trail of Tears, even the Revolution itself in non-trivial ways. But not now…..not now……
Update, June 26, 2025: Two more examples of DODO-style witchery in changing history to reflect ideological interpretations of reality have come to light. First, see Caroline Orr Bueno, “Elon Musk Gives Antisemites a Chance to Rewrite History,” Weaponized (Substack), June 26, 2025. This is about Musk’s nefarious uses of his AI system Grok to create a generative Holocaust denial narrative. Second, I recently read David Grann’s 2023 book The Wager about a 1742 shipwreck and its aftermath. I did not enjoy the book but respect it. I mention it here because that the book’s brief epilogue—just pages 253-57—shows how the received “Anson” version of this 18th-century episode differs substantially from and distorts the reality Grann revealed through his copious archival research. For my purposes, then, pages 1-252 constituted a mere sequel to the real payoff, the lesson buried in the roughly five pages of the epilogue, an afterthought that I suspect many of Grann’s readers skipped.
[1] This is another story, with plenty of subplots, perhaps for another time.
[2] Galland, Master of the Revels: A Return to Neal Stephenson’s D.O.D.O. (William Morrow, 2021), pp. 85-86.
[3] For ample details see Cathy Young, “Trump Once Fired Him for Palling Around with White Nationalists. Now, Darren Beattie Is Back.” The Bulwark, February 5, 2025.
[4] See Beatrice Nolan, “25-year-old employed by Elon Musk’s DOGE who posted he was ‘racist before it was cool’ resigns after being linked to deleted social media account,” Fortune, February 7, 2025.