Back in the 1970s, a French philosopher named Michel Foucault revealed a dark secret at the heart of the modern state, one that had been hiding in plain sight for well over a century. He coined the the ghastly term “biopower” to describe a set of tools by which states control their populations through the regulation of bodies. Beyond the absolute power of the state to decide whether we live or die, biopower is more subtle, shaping how we live and die toward certain ends: for example, conducting public health campaigns to ensure a healthy workforce is available to run the nation’s factories, restricting contraception and abortion to encourage or discourage population growth, controlling borders to decide which bodies may ender and leave, and surveilling public health through data collection, analysis and monitoring. For Foucault, biopower could include literal technologies (like the development of vaccines) but it could also include more nebulous tools like ideas (such eugenicist philosophies which underpin prohibition on “interracial” marriage, sex and reproduction). In complex multicultural nations like the United States, biopower has historically been exercised by the state unevenly, targeting certain bodies at certain times.

Today, Americans are undergoing a new experiment in biopower: governance by trauma. Trauma is an effective weapon of biopower because it lives in the body. While our species has evolved to be able to cope with trauma - physical, psychological, emotional - we have not (yet) evolved to cope with it as a constant state of existence. The human body is built to handle temporary trauma through acute, survival-driven sympathetic nervous system activation, releasing adrenaline and cortisol to ensure safety. When this system remains constantly engaged, it results in chronic stress, shifting the body into a state of permanent, harmful arousal. Psychologists have furthermore found trauma to be an inherently social experience: the individual experience of trauma is acutely influenced by the way in which those around us handle it, with strong social networks acting as a buffer against the harm trauma does, and affecting our ability to weather it successfully, and bounce back.

While rule by fear is nothing particularly new in the history of states, in the last decades of the twentieth century, abetted by an explosion of growth in the infrastructure of both mass communication and weapons of mass destruction, the United States began to witness not the introduction of trauma, but the nationalization of trauma historically targeted toward particular groups. Black American bodies have been ruled by trauma from the colonial period, beginning with slavery and extending through Jim Crow, police brutality and entrenched structural racism. Immigrant groups, ethnic and religious minorities, women, disabled, queer, indigenous, neurodiverse and poor Americans and the intersection of these groups have long been the historical subjects of targeted violence, neglect, regulation and terrorism. While the rights hard-won by social justice movements in the latter third of the twentieth century both named and resisted these traumas, the last decade has witnessed not only their reversal but their universalization.

The groundwork for this nationalization was laid by nothing so much as the phenomenon of mass (and especially school) shootings, which have proliferated rapidly since the atrocity at Columbine in 1999. While mass violence was of course not unknown in the United States before this period, the development of a national ritual of periodic, random child slaughter - broadcast to the public so rapidly that sometimes it is still underway when the news breaks - provided the foundation for an entire nation primed for the incessant moral injury of terror-induced traumatic stress. The unwillingness of the political class to protect American children, and indeed the public writ large, from such acts of random violence, has normalized mass trauma, acclimating Americans to the “constant state of emergency” that is modernity. We all know it is coming again. We just don’t know when. And so it has, from mass shootings to repeated wars

Through the same historical period, this normalization of trauma was accompanied by an erosion of the social and public infrastructures that help us to weather the storms of periodic trauma. This erosion was not accidental. Rather it was part and parcel of neoliberalism, or the form of governance championed in the west by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher which promoted the deregulation of the market, the retrenchment of public funding, the privatization of space, services and support, and the offloading of responsbility for social wellbeing from the state and other collective entities to the individual, the family and the household. Just as mass trauma was becoming a regular occurence, mass support was being effectively dismantled, and the public was increasingly expected to shoulder the burden of its long-term consequences.

The year 2020 marked a watershed in the history of mass trauma. The Covid 19 pandemic which killed over a million Americans was of course an uneven one, targeting certain age cohorts by its very nature, but landing too upon an uneven social landscape characterized by a differential ability to survive it based especially on race, geography and income. The pandemic collided catastrophically with the rise of a neofascist movement already afoot in America, which found its champion in an aspiring king who demonstrated a remarkable emotional intellgience in his faculty for manipulating mass fear to his advantage. And thus did rule-by-trauma become a concerted method of governance, deployed not randomly, occasionally or haphazardly, but regularly and relentlessly. Flooding the zone with shit, as it was described by a key deputy, became a strategy ensconced in law, with an incessant stream of crises first manufactured, then employed as the basis for the emergency executive orders which have now all but replaced congressional legislation.

The succession of neoliberalism followed by neofascism - with the pandemic as both rupture and bridge - has been very useful for the mad king and his ilk. A majority of Americans sit isolated in our silos, fractured from the friends and family who are in thrall to his movement, sympathetic nervous systems so worn down from the relentless onslaught of crisis that any trifling social friction can become flint - primed and ready for an overdetermining state backed by immense firepower and a cadre of misogynistic sociopaths recruited to the cause to beat us into submission at will. When even just living is an effort, the enormity of surviving an enemy which sees “triggering” as an amusing blood sport, seems formidable.

But history tells us that it can and must be done, for survival itself is resistance. Americans are not the only nation to be subjected to traumatic forms of governance. And while history never repeats itself exactly the same way twice, we can nonetheless learn from those who have weathered such times, both in our own nation and abroad. This page is a field manual for surviving trauma as biopower, a sort of Anarchist’s Cookbook for those of us - especially rural American women living in the treacherous viper’s nest that is MAGA country - who feel like we are weathering this storm alone. This guide is not about blowing things up, but about putting things back together by naming and acknowledging the tactics being used against us, and refusing to cooperate with them by giving the enemy what it wants: our cooperation with our own oppression.

Back during the pandemic I broke my immune system with the stress of worrying that idiot MAGA were going to kill my medically fragile baby during Covid. I might actually use this story as the introduction because believe me, I know whereof I speak.

It was just a case of wrong place, wrong time, in some ways, otherwise I might have weathered that pandemic very differently. But my one year old daughter just happened to have been through a series of serious respiratory infections in late 2019 early 2020 that entailed three midnight ER runs, one ambulance ride and two admissions to a children's hospital. We learned eventually that she was developing asthma, which is not always obvious in the very young because lungs that are not fully formed do not respond well to Albuterol, which is the marker that really tells you what's going on. Her dad has it so probably not surprising, but we went through several bouts of pneumonia and bronchiolitis to get to that knowledge.

So you might imagine how a respiratory pandemic looked, hurtling at us across Europe and bound to reach our shores. Even then, I think I could have weathered it if Americans had just done the right thing. We didn't. Instead, under the tutelage of Trump, who would through this in sociopathic fashion learn the lesson that governing by crisis is an effective way to control people, many conservatives panicked in terror, embraced Qanon and other conspiracy theorists, sank into denial, or otherwise collapsed at a moment when we really needed to pull together in the face of trauma. Although I am an anthropologist I live in my field site, which is in MAGA country in the Adirondacks, and the stress of thinking my community would kill my baby landed me with Graves' Disease. She is a healthy 7 year old today, but we quarantined for 2.5 years while waiting for the vaccine to reach her age level.

So I have a particular reason for knowing that if you are exposed to the incessant, recurrent triggering of your fight-or-flight response, there is every chance that your body might incur real, irreversible damage. We have not evolved to handle that degree of stress without relief.

• This is for women who feel alone in this fight because neofascism has severed them from their sisters, their best friends, their parents their social networks.

• This is for women who must go through their day biting their tongue in the face of abuse, abandonment and atrocity lest they lose their very means of survival - and that of their kids.

This is also an exit ramp for MAGA women who want out.