I thought about one of my first stories. I had interviewed an Indian shaman who was making a nice living predicting the future at parties. “Parlor games,” he called them. Everyone goes home optimistic about their future. But he told me a story I’ve never forgotten. He was lying in bed with his wife; the lights were on, but his eyes were closed. In that brightness behind his eyes he saw blackbirds flying around her. But when he opened his eyes, the birds were gone. He knew then that she was an evil woman. And as he later discovered, after she’d emptied their joint accounts, she was. That’s when he understood he could see reality with his mind far more clearly than with his eyes.

However, he complained, he had once traveled too deeply into his mind, all the way to the end of his subconscious, to the dressing rooms in which his dreams were putting on their makeup and costumes. In his opinion, that journey was too dangerous for the unenlightened to make.

He also had given me a gift, a mantra. I’m not going to tell you what it was, but to my surprise it often proved valuable. When my mind was churning with unsettling thoughts, the demons still lived there, I used it to calm down. It often helped me relax into sleep. Not this night, though. There was nothing calming about what I saw that night. I was confronted with the true objective of the Wrightman government. The future in my mind was far more ominous. I was seeing a repressive government that clamped down on individual rights—with the tacit approval of the distracted majority. It wasn’t the historic fascism that we had fought and defeated. It was the irrational buffoonery of the Trumpsters. In this form of fascism, people weren’t being lined up against walls and shot; rather, they were being restricted in what they could say or write or post. Or by extension, think. Anyone who broke those rules was silenced, shunned, or in the extreme, “separated.”

And here was the most chilling part: Few people objected to it. Instead, they appeared to embrace it. They continued to proudly profess a strong belief in democracy, but a democracy in which the rights of the individual had to be sacrificed for the good of the many. This wasn’t a nightmare. It didn’t spark my fears. I didn’t start sweating. I’d left most of those fears behind years earlier. This just seemed so patently obvious that I was astonished my eyes hadn’t seen it.

Whoever had broken into my apartment did not return that night or the nights that followed. I eventually put my gun back in its place. The overwhelming police—and militia—presence eventually defused the protests. Several governors declared state emergencies and temporarily suspended habeas corpus, arresting and holding hundreds of people without charging them or granting them their right to representation. In defending this action, those state’s attorneys cited Article One, section 9, clause 2 of the Constitution: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The attorneys claimed that out-of-control antigovernment demonstrations qualified as acts of rebellion and constituted a direct threat to the public safety.