The Panican Ledger

100 Days of Ruin
Part VI: The Fall of Governance

Governments may fall to invaders.
They may rot from complacency.
They may be swept aside by the tides of revolution.

But rarely do they fall as America did — sabotaged from within by its own stewards, with an admixture of incompetence, corruption, willful ignorance, and cruelty so potent, it seemed less a political project than an act of ritualized national suicide.

The machinery of state once moved with sluggish dignity — bureaucratic, imperfect, but bound by rules, procedures, and at least a whiff of accountability.

Now, under the sacred banner of “efficiency,” it was disassembled with memes & chainsaws.

When Trump resumed power, the plan was already inked:
Project 2025 — a madman's blueprint for wrecking governance itself.

At its center sat DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), not a reform agency, but a demolition crew, led by Russell Vought, Elon Musk & his merry band of incel acolytes -- and every MAGA halfwit with a grievance and a Twitter following.

They did not seek to govern.
They sought to rule over the ruins.

And they began by cutting the wires, shattering the levers, and salting the gears of state.

“They came not to fix the machine, but to break it, strip it for copper, and auction the gears to the highest crypto donor.”

Schedule F was revived, allowing the White House to fire career civil servants en masse and replace them with loyal influencers, reality TV contestants, and interns with headshots.

Regulatory agencies were gutted. Legal memos were crowdsourced. A Department of Energy memo went viral after being formatted as an X post.

The ordinary business of governance — disaster response, infrastructure, food inspection — became not dysfunctional, but mythological. You heard tales of it. You never saw it.

What incompetence left standing, corruption looted.

In their madness, they declared that knowledge itself was the enemy.

Scientists were sacked for suggesting the climate was changing.
Economists were exiled for whispering about deficits.
Public health experts were gagged, banned from even uttering the word "pandemic."

Weather forecasts were rewritten to "emphasize optimism."
Economic reports banned words like "recession."
School textbooks were purged of historical realities that might provoke critical thought.

It was not simply stupidity.
It was a holy war against reality itself.

The symptoms of the great dismantling were no longer deniable:

Hurricanes leveled towns, with no federal response beyond patriotic hashtags.
Food safety collapsed, with contaminants flooding unregulated markets.
National parks turned into garbage heaps and infernos.
Courtrooms clogged with ideological lawsuits, with no one left to interpret or enforce the law.

The gears of governance, once noisy but enduring, froze and shattered.

Public trust cratered.
Public services evaporated.
And yet the banners still flew: