Erasure is the first step. What comes next is worse.
Last week, on Wednesday May 20, 2026, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 2616, the âStopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act,â by a vote of 217 to 198. Eight Democrats joined every Republican who voted.
The bill does two things. It forces every federally-funded elementary and middle school to out transgender students to their parents before the school can change the studentâs name, pronouns, or bathroom access - with no exception for cases where the teacher or administrator knows the disclosure will put the child in danger of abuse. And it amends Section 8526 of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act to ban âconcepts related to gender ideologyâ in any school that takes federal money, with âgender ideologyâ defined by direct reference to Trumpâs January 20, 2025 executive order - which in practice means acknowledging that trans people exist becomes legally equivalent to content schools are federally prohibited from teaching.
The bill now heads to the Senate. The White House Office of Management and Budget has already announced that the Presidentâs advisors would recommend he sign it.
A bill that would forcibly out trans children to potentially abusive parents, and that would legally categorize the existence of trans people as content schools cannot teach, has now passed one chamber of the United States Congress.
If you want to understand what this is - what is actually being built, and by whom, and toward what - I have to take you back to 1933.
What burned
On May 6, 1933, students from the Deutsche Studentenschaft - the Nazi-aligned German Student Union - marched on a villa in Berlinâs Tiergarten with a brass band. Inside that villa was the Institut fĂźr Sexualwissenschaft, the worldâs leading center for the study and care of trans people, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919. The students took the books, the photographs, the case files, the patient records, the charts on intersexuality prepared for an international medical congress, and a bronze bust of Hirschfeld himself.
Four days later, on the night of May 10, they burned everything on the Opernplatz in Berlin. Joseph Goebbels gave a speech declaring âthe end of the age of extreme Jewish intellectualism.â Hirschfeld, on a world lecture tour, watched newsreel footage of his lifeâs work going up in flames from a cinema in Paris.
Thatâs the part of the story most people know - when they know any of it. Itâs the iconic image of the Nazi book burnings, although most people donât realize that the library at the center of the most-circulated photographs was the worldâs trans research library. Itâs a satisfying story in the way that horror stories are satisfying: clear villains, clear crime, clear loss.
But the fire was the easy part. The fire didnât do the erasure. The erasure was done by everything that came after.
What was lost
The Institute had been operating since July 1919 as a research center, clinic, library, museum, and residence. It performed the first documented modern gender-affirming surgeries - Dora Richter received an orchiectomy in 1922, a penectomy in early 1931, and a vaginoplasty in June 1931, making her the first documented vaginoplasty patient in modern medical history. She lived in the building, employed there as one of several trans staff, because employment elsewhere was nearly impossible. Lili Elbe transitioned in 1930-31 within Hirschfeldâs network. Karl Baer had received masculinizing surgery and legal recognition as a man back in 1906. Hirschfeld coined the term âtransvestiteâ in 1910, in a 562-page book that distinguished gender identity from sexual orientation - a conceptual move modern researchers still consider foundational.
The Institute issued expert opinions that supported Transvestitenscheine - official passes issued by the Berlin police that protected trans people from arrest under public-decency laws. The first one was granted around 1908. By 1930, there was a magazine called Das 3. Geschlecht - âThe Third Sexâ - published specifically for trans readers. Berlin had over fifty lesbian bars and more than 170 LGBTQ+ venues by the mid-1920s. The Eldorado on MotzstraĂe advertised itself with the slogan Hier istâs Richtig - âhere itâs alright.â
This wasnât a fringe phenomenon. It was an ecosystem: medical care, legal protections, a public press, named patients, identifiable researchers, a research literature in active conversation with the rest of European sexology. It existed for fourteen years as a visible institution before the Nazis came for it, and its roots ran back to the 1890s.
When people say trans existence is new, this is the history they are denying. It isnât new. It was erased.
The actual erasure
But again - the fire was the easy part. The actual erasure required something more than a pyre.
It required laws. Paragraph 175, the existing German anti-sodomy statute, was dramatically expanded in 1935. Roughly 100,000 men were eventually arrested under it during the Nazi period, with around 10,000 ending up in concentration camps wearing the pink triangle.
It required records. The Nazis didnât just burn the Institute. They took its address files first. Some scholars suspect those files contributed to later persecution.
It required platforms. The Nazi-aligned press defined the terms, Der StĂźrmer caricatured Hirschfeld as âthe most dangerous Jew in Germany,â and the queer press - which had been a thriving sector with titles like Die Freundin, Die Freundschaft, Frauenliebe, and Das 3. Geschlecht - was systematically shut down.
And critically, it required continuation. The fire was 1933. The expanded Paragraph 175 was 1935. Hirschfeld died in exile that same year. But the West German legislature kept the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 on the books until 1969. The West German courts ruled that the 1934 seizure of the Instituteâs property had been legal, blocking any restitution. Full repeal of Paragraph 175 didnât happen until 1994. Convictions werenât pardoned until 2002. The systematic recognition of trans victims of Nazi persecution is, in 2026, still ongoing.
This is the part most people miss. The fire is dramatic. The decades afterward, where every functioning institution of a democratic state declined to undo the erasure, are not.
Erasure is not an event. Erasure is a system. The Nazis built the system; everyone who came after chose to maintain it.
The part where the tech companies were involved
The Nazis wanted to identify Jews, homosexuals, Roma, âasocials,â the disabled - every category of person they intended to exclude or kill. This was a massive data problem. Tens of millions of people, multiple categories, cross-referenced against family trees, addresses, occupations, ration cards. In 1933, there were no computers.
There were, however, IBM Hollerith punch-card machines. IBMâs German subsidiary, Dehomag, contracted with the Nazi government to run the 1933 census. The journalist Edwin Black, in IBM and the Holocaust (2001), documented in detail how the companyâs punch-card technology was used throughout the Reich for census tabulation, identification, train logistics, and concentration camp management. Hole 3 designated homosexual. Hole 8 designated Jew. IBM CEO Thomas Watson personally accepted a medal from Hitler in 1937, and received a percentage of every Reich transaction. By 1942, there was an IBM customer-site Hollerith installation in nearly every concentration camp.
The infrastructure of identification was built by a private American company that knew exactly what it was building, and got paid for it.
Does this sound familiar?
I bring this up because I keep seeing the current moment described as if the worst-case version of it would require some unprecedented event - some Reichstag fire, some moment where the masks come off. It doesnât. The infrastructure gets built incrementally, by people who think theyâre just running a business, by engineers who think theyâre just shipping a product, by executives who think theyâre just optimizing for shareholder return. And then one day the infrastructure is there, and somebody decides what to do with it.
The 2025 version
I am wary of one-to-one historical analogies. The United States in 2026 is not Germany in 1933. The actors are different, the institutions are different, the political situation is different. People who flatten these comparisons into âliterally Nazi Germanyâ do a disservice to the specificity of both moments.
But.
I am also wary of the opposite move - pretending nothing is being built. Because something is being built, and it looks a lot like the 1933 infrastructure, recombined for the present.
On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled âDefending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.â It declared that the United States recognizes only two sexes, âmale and female,â defined at conception and unchangeable. It prohibits federal funding of âgender ideology.â It mandates the removal of the gender-neutral âXâ option from federal documents. It directs the Bureau of Prisons to house trans women with men and ends federal funding for gender-affirming care in federal prisons.
On January 29, 2025, the Office of Personnel Management directed federal agencies to remove webpages that âpromote gender ideology.â Starting late on Friday, January 31, the CDC, HHS, the Census Bureau, and other agencies began pulling data and pages. The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System - one of the largest nationally representative surveys of adolescent health, which had asked about sexual orientation and gender identity - was removed. The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System was removed. The Census Bureauâs Household Pulse Survey was deleted. CDC pages on HIV testing, contraceptives, and reproductive care were taken down. A federal judge ordered some restored in February 2025. In September 2025, HHS directed the CDC to remove at least twenty-two more pages on LGBTQ+ health, asexuality, and health equity. The CDC complied.
The state is, as a matter of explicit policy, removing the records of trans peopleâs existence from the federal data infrastructure. That is not subtext. The HHS spokesperson said it directly: âAll changes to the HHS website and HHS division websites are in accordance with President Trumpâs January 20 Executive Orders.â
That is the legal layer. Here is the platform layer.
On January 7, 2025 - thirteen days before the inauguration - Mark Zuckerberg announced major changes to Metaâs content policies. The new Hateful Conduct policy carved out an explicit exception for anti-LGBTQ speech. The relevant new language, still in the policy as of this writing: âWe do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like âweird.ââ Meta also removed the rule prohibiting users from claiming there is âno such thingâ as a trans or gay person, removed prohibitions against calling protected groups âfreaksâ or âabnormal,â and removed the rule against referring to trans or nonbinary people as âit.â The same week, Meta ended third-party fact-checking in the United States. YouTube had already removed gender identity from the list of protected characteristics in its hate speech policy. X had completed its analogous transformation under Musk over the prior two years.
Meta has roughly three billion users. X has hundreds of millions. Whatever your position in the abstract âfree speechâ debate, the platforms making these specific changes at this specific moment with this specific carve-out for this specific group are not making content-neutral decisions. They are deciding that trans people can be publicly described, on the largest communications infrastructure in human history, as mentally ill, abnormal, and not really existing.
And here is the data layer.
Palantir, the company I wrote about a month ago, has been embedded across the federal government over the course of 2025. Per the Journal of High Technology Law at Suffolk University, Palantir engineers have been working at the IRS to build whatâs been described as a âmega APIâ unifying IRS data into a single searchable hub. The company holds a $30 million ICE contract for âImmigrationOS,â providing real-time visibility into immigrants by integrating passports, Social Security numbers, IRS data, license plates, cell phones, and facial recognition. Palantir is in talks or active engagements with the Social Security Administration, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Pentagon. Thirteen former Palantir employees published an open letter in May 2025 condemning the companyâs Trump administration work.
The thing Palantir is being paid to do is the thing Dehomag was paid to do in 1933: build the infrastructure that connects everything to everything else, that lets the state identify any individual by any combination of attributes, that turns the data exhaust of modern life into a searchable index of who is who and where they are.
I do not know - and nobody outside the relevant rooms knows - whether trans-specific data sits inside the Foundry queries being constructed at HHS or SSA. I do know that the data already exists in those systems (Medicare and Medicaid records, Social Security gender markers, IRS dependent records, Selective Service registration), and that the explicit federal policy as of January 20, 2025 is to ârestore biological truthâ - meaning, to re-identify trans people by their sex assigned at birth across federal records. The combination of an explicit policy goal and an integrated data infrastructure is not nothing. Structurally, it is the same combination that was being built in Germany in 1933, by an American company, for a regime that had already publicly announced what it intended to do.
The CEOs in the front row
Here is the part I find hardest to write without sounding hysterical, because the image is so on the nose.
At Trumpâs January 20, 2025 inauguration, the front row of the Capitol Rotunda - closer to the president than most of his cabinet picks - held Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Shou Zi Chew, and Dara Khosrowshahi. Musk had donated nearly $300 million to Trumpâs reelection. Google donated a million dollars to the inaugural fund, and Tim Cook personally donated another million. Most of the others donated as well. Zuckerberg co-hosted a black-tie reception that evening. Two weeks earlier, he had announced the Hateful Conduct changes after meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
These are not people who happened to be invited to a public event. These are the heads of the companies that own the platforms that decide what speech is permitted, the companies building the AI systems being trained on the next generation of human knowledge, the company being paid to integrate the data infrastructure of the executive branch, the company that hosts most of the worldâs commerce. They paid for seats, they got them, and they got the photographs.
If you wanted a visual representation of the alignment between the political project and the technical infrastructure that will execute it, you could not stage it better than what was actually photographed on January 20.
I am not saying these companies are Nazis. I am saying that the historical pattern for state-driven erasure of a marginalized group includes a private-sector partner that builds the identification and tracking infrastructure, and we know the names of the people who currently hold those roles, and they were sitting in the front row.
Where this could go
I donât know which future weâre in. Neither does anyone else. But the historical record gives us a list of branches.
The Nazi escalation against trans and gay people, in dates, ran like this. 1919-1932: rhetoric, harassment, the 1920 assassination attempt on Hirschfeld in Munich. January 1933: Hitler chancellor. February 1933: gay clubs purged, the Eldorado converted to SA headquarters. May 1933: the Institute raided, the library burned. June 1934: the Night of the Long Knives, with Ernst RĂśhmâs homosexuality used as public justification for the purge. 1935: Paragraph 175 dramatically expanded; the Gestapoâs Sonderdezernat II S for homosexuals established. 1936: the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion founded under Himmler. 1937-1939: mass arrests, with the SS empowered to send those acquitted by courts to concentration camps via âpreventive detentionâ - Schutzhaft. 1940-1945: systematic pink-triangle internment in the camps.
The timeline from âthe library is burningâ to âexpanded criminal statuteâ was two years. To âmass arrests under preventive-detention authority,â four to six years. To âsystematic camp internment,â seven. The escalation wasnât legible in advance. Each step looked, in the moment, like a slightly more aggressive version of the previous one - administrative tightening, then criminal expansion, then expansive criminal interpretation, then âpreventiveâ detention outside the criminal system, then the camps. The German legal system was nominally functional throughout. There were courts. There was a press. There was opposition. None of that prevented the trajectory; it shaped its pace.
And the German precedent isnât the only one I should be drawing on, because the United States has its own indigenous version of this pattern.
Japanese-American internment, 1942: the federal census, originally collected with confidentiality protections, was used to identify and locate Japanese-Americans for forced relocation. The Second War Powers Act of 1942 temporarily repealed the confidentiality protections specifically to enable this. The Census Bureau formally apologized in 2000 - fifty-eight years after the fact. The mechanism was identification, registration, restriction, exclusion, mass detention. The United States identified an entire ethnic category of its own citizens using existing data infrastructure and detained them in camps for years, within the lifetime of people who are still voting.
The Lavender Scare, from roughly 1947 through the 1960s: the federal government systematically identified and removed gay employees from federal service. Eisenhowerâs Executive Order 10450 in 1953 made âsexual perversionâ formal grounds for federal dismissal. Thousands lost careers. The FBI maintained lists. State surveillance infrastructure was cross-referenced against existing employment and security-clearance records. The categories of âhomosexualâ and what we would now call trans were not separated in the bureaucratic record - anyone gender-nonconforming was a target. EO 10450 was not fully repealed until 2017, on Obamaâs last day in office. Sixty-four years.
The U.S. has done identification, removal, and detention before. Multiple times.
With its own data infrastructure.
Within living memory.
So when I think about where the current moment goes, I think about it as branches rather than a single line.
One branch is incremental administrative erasure. Continued removal from federal data. Loss of federal recognition on passports and IDs. Denial of federal benefits to people whose records donât match the EOâs âbiological truth.â Federal employees blocked from transitioning. Military service eligibility revoked, which has already happened. Trans people continue to exist, but become administratively invisible to the state, which functionally means locked out of large categories of public and private life that route through state recognition. This is the path weâre already on. It does not require any new event to continue.
Another branch is state-level criminalization, accelerating. Twenty-seven states had passed gender-affirming care bans for minors as of July 2025, affecting roughly 40% of trans youth aged 13-17. In June 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Skrmetti that Tennesseeâs ban on gender-affirming care for minors did not violate the Fourteenth Amendmentâs Equal Protection clause, effectively greenlighting the model for the remaining states. Several states have moved toward criminalizing it for adults. The federal layer is already synchronizing: H.R. 2616, the bill I opened this post with, codifies EO 14168âs definitions into federal statute for the first time, making the categorical exclusion of trans existence from federally-funded education a matter of law rather than executive policy. The endpoint of this branch is that gender-affirming care is illegal across much of the country, providing it is a federal crime, and federal statute treats the acknowledgment of trans existence as prohibited content - meaning the medical practice, the social recognition, and the educational framework are destroyed structurally rather than just locally.
Another branch is identification and tracking. This is the Palantir layer. If the data infrastructure being built across HHS, SSA, IRS, and DHS gets cross-referenced against the âbiological truthâ mandate, the state will know, comprehensively and at the level of named individuals, who has had Medicare- or Medicaid-funded HRT prescriptions, who has updated their Social Security gender marker, who has filed taxes claiming dependents whose markers were updated, who has been seen at a federally funded clinic for gender-affirming care. That index does not exist today as a single queryable object, as far as anyone outside Palantir and the agencies knows. The infrastructure to build it exists. The political will to build it has been publicly stated.
Another branch is detention. ICEâs detention infrastructure currently holds tens of thousands of people. The legal architecture for indefinite immigration detention has been built over the past forty years and is sitting there. The administration has already attempted to move trans women in federal prisons into menâs facilities under the EO - currently blocked for named plaintiffs by Judge Lamberthâs injunctions, but the Marshall Project documented at least a dozen trans women slated for transfer before the courts intervened, and some have already been moved despite the rulings. It is not a long structural distance from âwe house trans women in menâs facilitiesâ to âwe house people whose gender does not match their birth-assigned sex separately, for their own protectionâ to something materially worse. The Nazi-era term for that framing was Schutzhaft - protective custody. The U.S. has used analogous framings before.
And another branch is the one that doesnât happen - the branch where courts hold, where elections shift composition, where internal corporate resistance hardens, where some combination of legal, political, and economic factors interrupts the trajectory. That branch is real too. The February 2025 restoration order is one piece of evidence that itâs still live. Judge Lamberthâs injunctions blocking BOP transfers are another. The thirteen Palantir employees who published the open letter are another. The people leaving Meta, the journalists doing the work, the trans communities organizing mutual aid networks that donât route through federal recognition - those are all part of the branch where this gets interrupted.
I am not predicting any of these. I am saying that historically, all of them have happened in democracies that, six months before the worst version, looked like the United States looks right now.
By the historical pattern, year three to five reaches mass arrests under expanded statutes. Year six to eight reaches systematic detention in some form. Whether the U.S. version follows that timeline, accelerates, decelerates, or breaks off the trajectory entirely is something nobody can say with confidence - including me, including the people building the infrastructure, including the executives in the front row. The library is burning right now. The choices that decide which year weâre on are being made now.
What this is and what it isnât
I want to be precise, because the comparison invites both overreach and dismissal.
I am not arguing that the United States in 2026 is Germany in 1933. The differences matter. There are still functioning courts - the February 2025 restoration order is real evidence of this. There is still a press that can publish this kind of analysis. There are still tens of millions of Americans actively organized against the project. None of that makes the trajectory I just described impossible; all of it shapes the pace.
What I am arguing is that erasure is a system rather than an event, and the components of that system in the historical case are observably being assembled in the current case. A state policy goal of removing a group from public recognition. Removal of that groupâs records from state data infrastructure. Platform changes that legitimate dehumanizing speech about the group. Private-sector data integration enabling identification. Active alignment between the political and tech-industry leadership. And a legal-historical analog that shows the erasure can persist for decades after the political moment that initiated it. The Federal Republic of Germany kept the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 on the books from 1949 to 1969 - not under a dictatorship, but in a democracy whose ordinary functioning preserved the Nazi-era erasure for two more decades.
What I donât know is whether the current trajectory will be interrupted by election outcomes, court rulings, internal corporate resistance, or some combination. I donât know what specifically is happening inside Palantirâs HHS and SSA engagements. I donât know how many of the people building this think of themselves as building it.
That last one is the part I keep getting stuck on. The Dehomag engineers in 1933 mostly werenât Nazis. They were data-processing professionals who had a contract. The IBM executives in New York mostly werenât Nazis. They were running a business. By 1937 their CEO accepted a medal from Hitler, and by 1942 there was a Hollerith installation in nearly every concentration camp.
There is no version of âwe are just building infrastructureâ that survives the question of who is paying for the infrastructure and what they have publicly announced they intend to do with it.
Why I keep writing about this
If youâre wondering why I keep writing about this - the Palantir post, the technofascism analysis, this one - itâs because I am genuinely fucking scared of what the next few years will bring.
I am not performing that fear for emphasis. I am stating it as a fact about my interior life in May 2026. The infrastructure I just described took me weeks to research, and the more I researched the worse it got, and the more historical parallels I read the more clearly the present clicked into the same shape. I donât think Iâm being hysterical. I have tried very hard, in this post and in the ones before it, to distinguish what is documented from what is speculation, what is historically attested from what is inference. I have tried to use the actual scholarly record, the actual EO text, the actual policy changes, the actual SEC filings, the actual photographs. And what that record shows, when you lay it out next to the historical pattern, is genuinely terrifying.
I think we will, eventually, reach a future where things are okay. I do believe that. I have to. The arc of history is not actually bent toward justice by anything other than the people who keep bending it, but enough people have kept bending it across enough generations that I trust the long-run trajectory more than I trust any specific yearâs politics. Berlin has trans pride again. Paragraph 175 was repealed. The Lavender Scare ended. The Japanese-American internment is taught in schools as the historical crime it was. Most of the worst things in history have, eventually, been recognized as the worst things in history. I believe this one will be too.
But âeventuallyâ is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The question I cannot stop turning over is: how much damage will be done before we get there, and how many people wonât live to see it? Hirschfeld didnât. He died in exile in Nice in 1935, on his sixty-seventh birthday, watching his lifeâs work being criminalized from across a border he couldnât cross back over. Felix Abraham, the Instituteâs surgeon who documented Dora Richterâs transition, died by suicide in exile in Florence in 1937 at thirty-six. Most of the named patients of the Institute disappear from the record after 1933. The Transvestitenscheine stopped being issued. The magazine Das 3. Geschlecht shut down. The bars closed. The doctors who could be reached were arrested or fled. The eventual repeal of Paragraph 175 in 1994 came sixty-one years too late for almost everyone who needed it.
Some did live. Dora Richter lived. For decades historians believed she had been killed in the May 1933 raid or shortly after. In 2023, the researcher Clara Hartmann traced her through a Czech parish archive to a baptismal record updated with her chosen name in January 1946, then through expulsion records to Allersberg, Bavaria, where she lived until her death on April 26, 1966, at the age of seventy-four. Neighbors remembered her as a cheerful old woman who kept a pet pigeon in her handbag. She had survived the raid, survived the war, survived the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, survived the postwar expulsion of Germans, and lived out another twenty years in quiet ordinary obscurity. Dora Richter lived. Sixty-one years past the burning of the library where she had been one of the first patients in modern medical history.
That is the part I keep getting stuck on. Not whether things eventually get better, but who is alive to see it.
The trans teenagers being told right now, by federal policy, that they donât exist - some of them will not survive this. That is not hyperbole. A peer-reviewed study published in Nature Human Behaviour in September 2024 by the Trevor Project established a causal link, using a difference-in-differences design on data from over 61,000 trans and nonbinary young people, between state-level anti-trans laws and increased past-year suicide attempts - increases ranging from 7% to 72% depending on age cohort and time period. Thatâs the documented effect of state laws. The federal layer is new. The data does not yet exist for what the federal layer does. The historical pattern suggests it will not be smaller.
The adults losing access to healthcare, the federal employees losing jobs, the people on Medicare who can no longer access HRT, the people in federal prisons being moved into menâs facilities, the people in red states watching their familiesâ legal status erode month by month - some of them will not make it to the future where this is recognized as the historical crime it is. They will be the names that show up in the eventual museum exhibits, the people whose existence is the reason the eventual apology gets issued.
I do not want to be writing the May 2026 version of a post that future historians use to establish that yes, people did know, yes, people did say so out loud, yes, the warning signs were legible in real time. But I think that may be what this is. I think a lot of what I am writing now will read, in twenty or fifty years, the way that the warnings from 1932 and 1933 read now - as obvious in retrospect, dismissed as alarmist at the time, vindicated by a record that came too late for most of the people the warnings were about.
So I keep writing because I donât know what else to do with the fear. I keep writing because the historical record shows that erasure works in significant part through silence - through everyone deciding the comparison is impolite, the warning is alarmist, the documentation is too much, the analysis is too political. I keep writing because some future person reading the archive should be able to find a record that says: we saw it, we named the companies, we named the executives, we knew what was being built, and we said so before it was finished being built.
The library is burning right now. The choices that decide which branch weâre on are being made now. And I am, in the most honest way I can say this, genuinely fucking scared.