This post from Mike Brock’s Notes from the Circus blog went viral yesterday, and I’m glad. Well, glad and just a bit frustrated. The truth is, I’ve been in living in the mental space of that blog post for at least a month and trying to distill it into my own writing. But it has proved illusive.

Before I take a look at the piece for you, I also want to add that I believe there was actually a pretty deep psychological reason for my blockage. The truth is, once you distill this all down to the essence, I’m not sure what’s left to say. It’s like, if you can capture it, maybe everything else you can possibly write is just a pale reiteration of the point. No writer really wants to sign his own death warrant.

So, I think, I was kind of frightened of finding the solution.

Brock starts out with the basics:

We’re past the fall but not yet at the bottom. We’re in active collapse—that grinding, daily erosion where yesterday’s unthinkable becomes tomorrow’s precedent. Exhaustion is now the enemy’s greatest weapon. The sheer volume of destruction breeds numbness, and people start accepting the unacceptable because resistance feels futile.

This is precisely when remembering what’s real matters most. When the simple insistence that two plus two equals four becomes revolutionary. When refusing to pretend the emperor has clothes becomes an act of courage. When maintaining the capacity for moral recognition—this is evil, this is fascism, this is sedition—keeps alive the possibility of rebuilding.

The last piece I wrote, The Right is Trying to Make the Left Give Up, took a look at this exhaustion from the gerrymandering perspective, but that was far more limited than what I really wanted to convey. What I sensed was a collapse on every front, along with the destruction of all roads back to repair. And to be honest with you, my preoccupation with this hasn’t been solely about writing but also about my own personal financial investments. What I’ve been sensing is that we’re approaching the point when the markets stop seeing new areas to make money and sense that the whole system has been sabotaged and can’t be repaired. So, in a sense, I’ve been trying to time it so I don’t lose a big percentage of my paltry savings.

These two ideas have been swirling around in my head, and Brock describes the situation perfectly:

Soon comes the crushing arrival of consequences. The ground doesn’t approach; it strikes. Everything that seemed solid in the weightless phase—the delusions of control, the fantasies of optimization, the belief that reality could be indefinitely defied—shatters on contact.

Impact has its own physics: sudden revelations of truths long denied. Fascists discover skilled workers won’t come to countries that disappear immigrants. Oligarchs learn that dismantling regulation also dismantles the predictability their wealth needs. The Supreme Court finds that erasing constitutional limits erases the legitimacy that makes their rulings enforceable.

That’s why everything is failing at once—markets, courts, governance—each crisis colliding with the others. Immigration terror collides with labor shortages. The DOJ becomes a revenge machine just as markets crave legal stability. Media surrender to power just as public trust becomes essential.

These contradictions were suspended in freefall. Impact resolves them violently. The tech barons wanted unregulated capitalism and stable property rights. The fascists wanted to terrorize immigrants and keep the economy humming. The Court wanted unchecked executive power and judicial supremacy. Now their impossible wants meet immovable reality.

This really hones in on the sense I’ve had that the country, very much including the markets, has been defying gravity. And it agrees with my conviction that a shattering impact is coming, and the only real uncertainty is the timing of the splatter.

And the thing about splatter is that you know it when you see it.

Impact fragments attention as thoroughly as it shatters institutions. But it also clarifies: gravity is undeniable when you hit the ground. The evaporating fortunes, the failed plans, the collapsed institutions—these are not theories but physical facts, piercing even the most sophisticated denial.

What follows impact is the rubble phase—sorting through wreckage, preserving memory, documenting truth. The wire hasn’t just trembled—sections have been cut. Some strands still hold. The question is whether enough of us will grab them to weave something new, or let the last connections snap while debating whether the wire ever existed.

If you’ve even been a car collision, you know there’s a moment when you realize that the impact can no longer be avoided. The body tenses, time slows down. That’s where I’ve been living for weeks and weeks. I’m just waiting for that last fragment of time before impact when resignation sets in and perhaps the body relaxes. Being tense for so long makes you almost welcome that last fragment of time and the “crushing arrival of consequences.”

Part of it is just a “let’s get on with it” attitude. I think Brooks feels this when he writes, “The time for warnings is over.” If anything could have prevented the impact, that time has passed.

Here is how he concludes the piece:

The time for warnings is over. Now comes resistance, documentation, preservation—keeping alive the clarity about what is, the memory of what was, and the possibility of what might yet be rebuilt from the ruins.

Impact doesn’t last long. But in its violence is a rare moment of truth. The collision is also the moment of clarity.

And yes—this is going to hurt.

Remember what’s real.

Of course, the most important thing is quite literally whether or not Brock has diagnosed things correctly. If we somehow continue to defy gravity, then that’s a whole different ball of wax. Perhaps the country muddles through, fortunes are made instead of lost, etc. But assuming Brock is correct that the reckoning is coming, it really makes clear what the dilemma is for political analysts while we wait. How many different ways can we warn about it? Every day we have a dozen new examples to choose from, but at this point none of them matter since we’ve already passed the point of no return. We’re just frozen in stalled time, waiting to hear the crumpling of the fenders.

And, so, there’s this desire to just take the focus off all these endless new examples and start prepping for the cleanup: “Now comes resistance, documentation, preservation—keeping alive the clarity about what is, the memory of what was, and the possibility of what might yet be rebuilt from the ruins.”

I think you can see how this is a bit paralyzing for the political writer who is supposed to create daily content on breaking stories. It’s not great for investors either.