The Wall Being Built

Reintroducing......Heather Honey

Maps. Machinery. Fear. That’s the architecture—brick by brick, lever by lever, it’s rising in full view. You don’t need the blueprints to see the outline. The newest brick was laid on August 26, 2025: Heather Honey.

She now sits on the Department of Homeland Security leadership chart as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity—a title invented for her. Not a promotion, a signal. And like “Truth Social,” “Election Integrity” in the Trump administration means its opposite.

Honey’s fingerprints are all over the 2020 election. She misrepresented Pennsylvania data, claiming “more votes than voters.” She helped script the Arizona audit—a farce in real time—and led efforts to dismantle ERIC, the interstate system that keeps voter rolls accurate. She ran mass registration challenges designed to erase names before they could cast a ballot. In a democracy, that’s a scandal. Here, it’s a résumé.

Maps. Texas rammed through a mid-decade redistricting plan designed to hand Republicans five extra seats. Civil rights groups sued before the ink dried. The claim: racial discrimination. The reality: baked-in advantage. Once Gavin Newsom pushed back, Trump dispatched Vance to Indiana to lean on lawmakers. Florida and Ohio are being lined up. What used to be covert is now choreography.

This is the move: flip a 51–49 state into a 60–40 delegation by shifting a few lines. You don’t need to change votes—just neighborhoods. If your agenda can’t win with fair maps, fair maps become the problem.

Machinery. The election-security framework built after 2016 is being gutted. CISA, the cybersecurity agency that helped local officials defend their systems, faces a one-third cut. At DOJ, Attorney General Pam Bondi has shuttered the foreign-influence unit and turned inward—toward voters, not saboteurs.

The new obsession is data and control. States are being told to hand over full registration lists—names, addresses, voting history. Security grants now come with strings attached: comply with new voting rules or lose funding. And aides say a legislative push is coming to eliminate mail ballots and voting machines outright—hitting seniors, service members, and rural voters hardest.

None of it needs to survive in court. The aim is suspicion, not law. Change the story from “How do we protect voters?” to “Which voters can we afford to lose?”

That’s where Honey fits in. Her new post isn’t about defending elections—it’s about defining who belongs in them.

Atmosphere. ICE detention is expanding to more than 107,000 “beds.” Bureaucracy turns people into furniture. In cities like D.C., federal checkpoints pop up without warning. In Houston, church food drives and soccer games empty out—not from apathy, but fear.

You don’t need agents at the polls. You just need people nervous to get there.

This is how you shift an election without touching ballots: redraw the districts, repurpose the offices, rattle the people. No gunfire, no coups—just a rising wall of policy, intimidation, and data.

Do it early enough, and courts won’t intervene. The midterms won’t be a contest. They’ll be a performance. The curtain rises, ballots drop, the outcome feels foregone.

You don’t have to make voting illegal. You only have to make fair voting implausible.

The construction is visible from the street. Texas draws five new seats. Indiana eyes a special session. DHS buries conditions in its grants. Authority shifts sideways, data stops flowing, trust dissolves.

Time is the weapon. Change the rules now, and they harden by 2026.

If we mean to have a democratic midterm election, the fight isn’t about turnout on the day. It’s about the terms of the contest now—maps that reflect voters, institutions that defend facts, and a civic climate where participation isn’t treated as a risk.

Because once the wall is high enough, it won’t matter how loud you yell on the other side.

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Coda

The Weapon - Rush (1982)

Rush’s “The Weapon” doesn’t detonate like most rock songs. There’s no explosion of riffs or arena-sized choruses. Instead, it coils. It tightens. It builds a rhythmic machine that feels more like surveillance than liberation. Neil Peart’s drums don’t release—they regulate, ticking like a stopwatch, a reminder that time is running out. Geddy Lee’s bass loops with clinical precision, stripped of its usual flamboyance, becoming a mantra of inevitability. Alex Lifeson paints in shadows and angles—less anthem, more architecture—while the synths hum like fluorescent lights in a government hallway. The song doesn’t shout. It watches.

Rush—Canada’s cerebral power trio known for fusing progressive rock with philosophical lyricism—have always aimed higher than the hook. “The Weapon” is no exception. Music has always held power not just in sound, but in function. Chant once structured the sacred; the fugue demonstrated logic and the mind of God. In that lineage, The Weapon stands as a parable about modern power: fear itself as the organizing principle.

“With an iron fist in a velvet glove, we are sheltered under the gun,

In the glory game on the power train, Thy kingdom’s will be done.

And the things that we fear are a weapon to be held against us”

The track insists that violence isn’t necessary if you can instill dread. The real weapon is never the strike—it’s the anticipation. It’s the glance over the shoulder, the hesitation that makes action wither before it’s even tried. In political terms, that’s how elections can be suffocated without a single law that says “don’t vote.” The machine hums, and people decide for themselves it’s safer to stay home.

That’s where the track transcends its decade. What sounded in 1982 like Cold War paranoia and technological unease now plays like prophecy. Rush were prog realists—they knew power wasn’t always boots on the ground or bombs in the sky. Sometimes it’s the quiet, steady beat of intimidation. The same four bars cycling until you believe they’ve always been there.

The Weapon isn’t a song of triumph or despair. It’s a song of tension—of the systems that manage us without ever raising their voices. It’s the soundtrack of fear turned into infrastructure, and it lands today with the clarity of history: the most efficient tool of control isn’t force. It’s the silence that comes after fear has already done the work. Just like its looping bass and metronomic drums, the track doesn’t need to strike. It’s already won—quietly, efficiently, inevitably.

Dies irae, from Verdi’s Requiem (1874).

When Verdi unleashes the Dies irae, it’s with thunder: timpani hammering, brass blaring, the chorus shrieking in terror. The refrain keeps returning, each time louder, each time more insistent. Not a circle, but an escalation. Today, it’s “redraw the map, rewrite the rules, rattle the people.” Each repetition tilts the field further, each brick laid where the wall is meant to rise. Verdi’s audience was jolted back into fear again and again; we’re jolted back into the same inevitability, one policy move at a time—new districts, hollowed institutions, voter surveillance.

Between these shocks, Verdi writes in the solos: the bass trembling at Mors stupebit (death in astonishment), a trio whispering Quid sum miser (what can I say, a wretch?), the tenor pleading in Ingemisco. Human voices flare up against the orchestral machinery, frail but undeniable. These moments remind us that beneath the structures of state, there are individuals—hesitant, whispering, pleading for reprieve.

The movement doesn’t close in triumph but in exhaustion: the Lacrymosa and Pie Jesu sinking into fading chords, marked morendo—dying away. Not victory but grief. Verdi shows that overwhelming force can end not with explosion but with drained will. That’s the modern tactic too. An election doesn’t need to be stolen by violence if people are made anxious, doubtful, too worn down to resist. Fear and repetition do the work, until inevitability feels like fate.