A Letter from January 20, 2029
A Warning from a Future We Can Still Avoid
Author’s Note: This isn’t my usual work. I cover the news—what happened, what it means, what we should do about it. This is different. This is a letter from a future that hasn’t happened yet—and doesn’t have to. It’s not a prediction. It’s a warning. Where we might be headed if we keep doing what we’ve been doing.
January 20, 2029
Federal Detention Facility, [REDACTED]
The guards came by this morning. They told us no more paper would be coming. They said it almost gently, the way you’d tell someone their loved one had died.
And then one of them laughed and said: “Who would you write to anyway?”
So this is the last thing I’ll write. I don’t know if anyone will read it. I don’t know if there’s anyone left to read it.
But I was a journalist. Documenting is what I do. What I did. So here it is: what happened to us. What we let happen. What we did and didn’t do while we still had the chance.
Maybe someone will find this. Maybe it’ll matter. Maybe it won’t.
I’m writing it anyway.
The Signs
The signs were there from the very beginning even before the inauguration.
The rhetoric. The appointments. The testing of limits. People who knew history saw it coming—the professors, the activists, those who’d studied how democracies die. They tried to warn us.
And we couldn’t even agree on what to call it.
Authoritarian tendencies. Democratic backsliding. Concerning developments.
We were so afraid of sounding extreme that we let them define what extreme meant. They called us hysterical for saying “fascism” while they planned concentration camps. They called us divisive for saying “white supremacy” while they promised mass deportations. We policed our own language while they did whatever they wanted.
And by not using words that named the depravity of their actions, we exonerated them. By not calling them fascists, we told the world they weren’t. By not calling them liars, we implied they might be telling the truth.
Our civility was their shield.
The Pattern
First it was DOGE—claiming to come after “waste, fraud, and abuse,” firing hundreds of thousands of government employees, shutting down agencies like USAID and the CFPB. Programs that helped people. Programs that held corporations accountable. Gone.
So we took to the streets. We protested outside government buildings. We filed lawsuits. The media called it a policy dispute. The pundits said the courts would fix it. The guardrails would hold.
Then it was Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia—and the others sent to CECOT to be tortured on the mere assertion that they were gang members. No trial, no due process, just a plane to El Salvador and a cage. Others were shipped to “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida. American soil turned into a gulag.
So we took to the streets. We protested outside ICE facilities. We filed lawsuits. The media framed it as a legal dispute. The experts said the courts would sort it out. The guardrails would hold.
When the government shut down because the regime was stripping healthcare from millions of Americans to fund tax cuts for billionaires?
We took to the streets. Signs that said “No Kings.” We filed lawsuits. The media treated it like politics as usual. The commentators said the courts would step in. The guardrails would hold.
USAID is gone. The CFPB is gone. The Department of Education is gone. The men who were sent to CECOT? Sent back to the country they once fled from, even if they were innocent. Those who were disappeared into Alligator Alcatraz? Nobody knows what happened to them once it was shut down. The government shutdown seemed like an inflection point, but the Democrats capitulated when the regime held SNAP hostage, threatening sixteen million children with hunger.
Kilmar eventually went free—because our pressure pushed Senator Van Hollen to fly to El Salvador himself while Kilmar was still in CECOT. An elected official taking direct action. That’s what worked.
None of the rest of it mattered.
Not because we didn’t care. We cared. Millions of people cared. The streets were full of them.
But we were protesting the wrong people. We confronted the enforcers who didn’t care, who had guns, who wanted the confrontation. We gave them the images they needed. We exhausted ourselves against walls that were never going to move.
Mayors could have ordered law enforcement to protect their residents against excessive force and other violations of the law by federal agents. State’s attorneys and DAs could have criminally charged bad actors. Governors could have called in their National Guards if necessary. The blue electeds who ran blue cities in blue states had actual power—power they never used.
Maybe they feared bloodshed. But by refusing to act, they guaranteed an endless one anyway—just on the regime’s terms. Slow. Gradual. Normalized. No single moment shocking enough to mobilize mass resistance.
Maybe they feared the Supremacy Clause. But federalism and the Tenth Amendment still exist. And if the regime could ignore the courts to violate people’s rights and destroy their lives, how was it moral not to do the same to defend them?
We never made them use that power. We never pressured them. We never demanded they fight back with the tools they had.
So they didn’t.
And the pattern repeated. Over and over. All through 2025.
Venezuela
The world changed in January 2026.
Venezuela fell first. They called it “liberation.” Then the oil started flowing to American companies at American prices. An insurgency eventually grew. it wasn’t long until American soldiers started dying. But we had bigger worries at home.
In Minneapolis, a woman named Renee Good smiled at an ICE agent seconds before he shot her. She was a citizen. She had committed no crime. A trained firearms instructor who knew exactly what he was doing put a bullet in her head. Then they called her a bitch. Then they called her a terrorist. Then they occupied her city.
We all saw it on video, from many angles. But when the president said she ran the agent over, the media didn’t call him a liar. When the DHS secretary called her a domestic terrorist hours after the shooting without any investigation, the media didn’t call her a liar. When the vice president gaslit the country, the media didn’t call him a liar.
I remember thinking: this is it. This is the moment people will wake up. An American citizen. A mom. Murdered on camera. The words “fucking bitch” in the background. And then the lies that followed—and the media that refused to call them lies.
Surely now people would see it. Surely they would protest the media for their complicity. Pressure the governors and mayors who had the power to protect us. Demand that the celebrities—the actors, the musicians, the athletes with millions of followers—use their platforms to speak against the violence. Target the people who could actually change things.
I was wrong.
People protested. God, did people protest. The streets filled with bodies and signs and righteous fury. But all that energy went into confronting ICE. Precisely as the regime had hoped. They surged cities with more and more agents.
And then there was Greenland.
The president said he wanted it. Refused to rule out military force. When the Danes—our allies, NATO members since the beginning—objected, he dismissed them. Something about how having a boat land somewhere five hundred years ago didn’t mean you owned it.
European leaders warned us. The French called it the line between rival and enemy. The Danes said it would end NATO. They were right. Article 5—the promise that an attack on one was an attack on all—was the foundation of everything we’d built since the war. We wrote that treaty. Now we were threatening to shatter it.
The Greenlanders had their own answer. They didn’t want to be Americans. They didn’t want to be Danes. They wanted to be Greenlanders.
Nobody who mattered listened.
The USSR spent forty years trying to break the West. They failed. We decided to destroy it in one.
But it was going to be okay. The midterms were less than a year away.
The End of Checks and Balances
In the meantime, we filed lawsuits. So many lawsuits. Surely the courts would stop this.
The judges kept granting extensions, assuming good faith from a DOJ that was making a mockery of them. Every case that wound through the system gave the appearance of rule of law while the regime ignored rulings it didn’t like.
I remember covering a hearing in May. The government’s lawyer actually laughed when the judge asked about compliance with a previous order. Not nervously. Not awkwardly. He laughed. And nothing happened. What could happen? The courts had no enforcement power. They never did. They only worked when the executive branch agreed to play along.
There were judges who tried. Good judges who could see through the smoke and the games. They issued injunctions. They held officials in contempt. They wrote opinions that will be studied someday, if anyone is left to study them.
It didn’t matter. In every case that could have made a difference, the Supreme Court was ready to back the government.
Meanwhile, in Congress, every attempt to slow the regime faltered. There were never enough Republicans willing to break ranks. Any time one showed resistance, the regime targeted them for primarying—promising to end their career if they didn’t fall in line. So they stayed silent. They complied.
The three branches had effectively become one.
The Midterms
The 2026 midterms should have been a turning point. But they kept the House.
The voter purges started six months early. Laws had been passed enabling anyone to challenge voter registrations—and they did. Groups around the country challenged thousands upon thousands of registrations based on how names sounded. The kicker? It was up to the challenged person to find out they’d been challenged, and then to contest the challenge. Most people never realized their registration had been removed until they showed up to vote and were turned away. Then there were the hundreds of thousands purged for “name similarities”—same deal, same trap. Over a million people total—mostly in cities, mostly Black and Latino—showed up on Election Day to find they’d been erased.
ICE was at the polling places on election day. Not inside—technically—but outside. Agents in tactical gear, checking IDs in the parking lots. Not just in Latino neighborhoods. In Black neighborhoods too. Anywhere the regime thought the wrong people might vote. It slowed everything down, and people had to go to work. Some just didn’t want to take a risk. Over two dozen people had died in ICE’s hands by then.
The mail-in ballots were a masterpiece of bureaucratic sabotage. They’d quietly changed the postal regulations so letters didn’t have to be postmarked the day they were received by the Post Office. Half the mail-in ballots got thrown out—postmarked after election day, even though voters had sent them a week early.
And in one state the state legislature simply reversed the results. “Irregularities,” they said. “Fraud concerns.” They installed their candidates anyway.
Democrats screamed. Lawsuits were filed. Even though the Supreme Court decided it was illegal for ICE to be there, the results stood.
Protests happened. Millions out on the streets, night after night.
None of it mattered.
And everyone said: wait for 2028.
Meanwhile, the professional resistance class monetized the outrage. They sent dozens of emails a day about democracy being on the line while doing nothing with the power they had. They built an infrastructure for losing. They trained people to think clicking “donate” was resistance.
The Empire Expands
While we were watching the midterm disaster, the machine kept moving.
Cuba fell by December—another “liberation.” Denmark handed over Greenland. They called it an “enhanced security partnership,” but everyone knew what it meant. The Greenlanders, who had wanted to be Greenlanders, became Americans whether they liked it or not—a U.S. territory like Puerto Rico, with no representation in Congress and no right to vote for president.
NATO collapsed. We did that. Article 5—the promise that kept the peace for seventy-five years—became a dead letter when we threatened our own allies with military force. Russia pushed further into Ukraine. Europe scrambled to rearm, years too late.
And they were already talking about Mexico.
There was always a next target. There always would be.
Running Out of Enemies
By 2027, the economy was collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
We had deported millions of workers who picked the crops and built the houses. But the jobs didn’t go to Americans—they went to no one. Farms couldn’t find workers at any price. Construction slowed to a crawl. The prices that were supposed to go down went up.
And AI was hollowing out white-collar jobs the way globalization had hollowed out manufacturing—only faster. Productivity soared. Profits soared. All the gains went to capital. Everyone else got poorer.
The regime had promised that deporting the “illegals” would create jobs for Americans. Instead, Americans competed for the scraps that automation hadn’t already taken—while the billionaires who funded the regime got richer than ever.
They needed a new scapegoat.
It started on X—where everything started by then. The “gay agenda.” The “groomers.” They brought it back and there was no stopping it.
You see: when the platforms got ugly, when Musk bought Twitter and Facebook scaled back moderation and fact-checking, when the disinformation got exhausting—we walked away. “I’m taking a social media break,” we said. The break became permanent. We told ourselves we were protecting our mental health. We told ourselves we wouldn’t give them the engagement.
What we didn’t understand: they stayed. They kept posting. They kept repeating.
And repetition wins.
The information space doesn’t stay empty. When we left, they filled it. Every unanswered lie became the default truth. Every unchallenged narrative became the accepted history. By now, the whitehouse.gov page said January 6, 2021 was a peaceful protest and the “patriots” were political prisoners. And there was no one left to say otherwise.
We thought leaving was resistance. It was surrender. We thought silence was dignity. It was absence. We thought the truth would defend itself.
It didn’t.
The talking points spread to Fox, to Newsmax, to OAN. Congress repealed the Respect for Marriage Act half way through 2027. The Supreme Court reversed Obergefell almost immediately after. And the same apparatus that had hunted immigrants was repurposed.
Every marriage license became a target list.
The documents that had once symbolized love—the legal recognition that two people had chosen each other—now contained two names the state could use to find you. County clerks’ offices. State databases. They had all the records. They always had.
By then, most of us were numb. The violence, the cruelty, the spectacle—it had been going on for years. Every week brought a new horror. Every horror became normal within days.
The Quiet
By the time the 2028 election came, it was strangely quiet.
The violence hadn’t stopped. But it had become mundane. ICE was still taking people. The cruelty was still happening. But watching it had become like passing a car accident on the highway—you glanced, you looked away, you kept driving.
The regime had won not by crushing all opposition, but by making opposition feel pointless.
Trump was elected to his third term. The 22nd Amendment was still technically in the Constitution, but the Supreme Court had ruled that it only applied to “consecutive” terms and that Biden’s presidency was an “illegitimate interregnum.” The dissent called it constitutional arson. No one who mattered listened.
The Democratic candidate—does it even matter who it was?—conceded within hours.
Some people celebrated. Most people just absorbed it. Another piece of news. Another thing that happened.
I was arrested two days later. 4 AM. Six agents. They had a list of my articles. Screenshots of social media posts from years ago. The names of my sources—or at least, the names they thought were my sources.
The charge: seditious conspiracy.
The evidence: my journalism.
What I’m Writing With My Last Paper
If you’re reading this, maybe you still have choices we no longer have.
I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers.
But I’ll tell you what I wish we had done differently:
We should have called it what it was from the beginning. Fascism. Not “concerning” or “problematic” or “authoritarian tendencies.” Fascism. The word that names the thing.
We should have pressured the people who had power to use it—the governors, the mayors, the state attorneys general, the media that refused to call lies lies, the celebrities with millions of followers who stayed silent—not performed resistance for an audience that wasn’t watching.
We should have spoken the truth everywhere where there were eyes to read and ears to hear, not just where it felt pleasant. Even when it was exhausting, especially when it was. The information space doesn’t stay empty. Silence isn’t neutral.
We should have understood that waiting for elections and the courts was a trap.
We should have been smarter. We did right by staying peaceful, but we waited too long for someone else to save us.
I don’t know how to end this. There’s no resolution. No hope I can offer now that isn’t a lie.
I see names carved on the floor of my cell. Names of people who were here before me. Latino names, names of couples with hearts around them. I have carved my own. My hand is cramping. Outside—there are no windows here, but I remember what outside looked like—outside, America is waking up to its third Trump term and mostly not caring. The quiet will continue. The violence will continue. The taking will continue. I’m sure more names will follow my own.
I’m almost out of paper now, so I leave you with this: back in 2025, people were saying it can’t happen here.
It did.
The only question is whether you’ll do something different than we did.
I hope you will. I hope this letter matters. I hope someone remembers that it didn’t have to end this way.
You’re not powerless, not yet.
Don’t wait until you are.
— Lukium
[The letter ends here. The following note was found attached:]
We don’t know what happened to the author. We found this in the debris when the facility was abandoned during the [REDACTED] of 2031. We’re publishing it now because people should know. Because someone should remember. Because it might still matter.
Great article. I loved the writing approach from the future to our current self. Oh how I hope our actions today can change this future outcome.
Creepy in a "Blair Witch Project" way. Maybe some people will pay attention. Maybe it needs to be a movie.