The Constitution of the United States is a piece of paper. It doesn’t – and can’t – enforce itself. The ink can’t magically leap off the parchment and stop a president who’s decided that the document is nothing more than a nuisance to his goals. For most of American history, that didn’t matter because the people running the system agreed (more or less) to play by the same rules. That agreement was the republic. Not the document.

That agreement is dead.

The Republican Party has spent the past three decades learning that there’s no penalty for breaking it. They stole a Supreme Court seat and faced no consequences. They gerrymandered so much that nationwide House races are basically graded on a curve benefitting them the most. They incited an insurrection and attempted to subvert the will of the people with a fake elector scheme in the 2020 election and faced no consequences. They are, right now, defying court orders. They’re purging the civil service. They’re dismantling federal recognition of entire classes of Americans. And the cost until now? Basically nothing. The rational move, if you’re playing this game in pursuit of power and nobody hits back, is to just keep on pushing. And so they keep pushing.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have largely done what Democrats do: they’ve written strongly-worded letters, wagged their fingers, and appealed to norms that the Republican Party abandoned years ago. They tell themselves that if they just model good behavior hard enough, eventually the fever will break and we’ll be able to get back to normal. It hasn’t broken because it wasn’t a fever in the first place. It’s a cancer that’s metastasized.

The Democratic Party needs to adopt a doctrine of deterrence. No more empty rhetoric and constantly turning the other cheek. They need to make the concrete and credible promise that if Republicans keep trying to operate outside of the rules of the system, Democrats will not only match, but exceed that escalation. With court packing, abolishing the filibuster, hyper-partisan redistricting, and aggressive prosecution of corruption. Not because it’s a “good” thing to do, but because mutually assured destruction can only ever work when both sides actually believe the other will follow through.

Now, I really do think the system can be saved. I don’t consider myself a nihilist or “black-pilled.” But I also know that “returning to norms” is naïve, because the norms are long gone. My position demands emergency action to force the other side back into the system by making the cost of leaving it so high that their only other choice is Civil War.

I’m not being hyperbolic. The V-Dem Institute downgraded the United States from a liberal democracy to an electoral democracy. It was a 24% drop in a single year. We went from 20th globally to 51st. That number terrifies me because when an authoritarian state decides to test just how far it can push, it tests on people like me first. I’m a trans woman whose identity is being systematically erased from federal recognition. I’m an immigrant and citizen who grew up believing in the American dream, but who now has to worry about being denaturalized for speaking out against the administration. I’m a Marine Corps veteran who served honorably, but who is now considered a national security threat. I’m a mom in constant fear about what kind of country my son is going to grow up in and inherit.

The steps authoritarians take when trying to consolidate power are deliberately designed to make the stakes feel abstract to most people until it’s too late. It’s time to wake up to the reality of the moment.

The Asymmetry

In their essay titled “Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball“, Professors David Pozen and Joseph Fishkin argued that since around the mid-1990s, Republicans have engaged in more frequent and more intense norm-breaking to maximize power. Meanwhile Democrats have more often played by the spirit of the rules. Thirty years later, the result is about what you’d expect. One party treats democracy like a strict rulebook to abide by while the other treats it like a sandbox.

An immediate objection you could make is that politics is inherently messy, and political maneuvering will always necessitate trying to nibble around the edges of the rules to strategically defeat your opponents. Fair enough. But deterrence still works in environments like these. Institutions always respond to expected costs, and right now the expected cost for Republican escalation is effectively zero.

Norms only deter behavior when violating them actually hurts. But if you know the other side will never actually hit back, it’s a smart move to just keep swinging. Democrats have long confused unilateral disarmament with institutional stewardship for decades. The numbers are clear: 251 executive orders in about fourteen months. The Schedule Policy/Career rule is expected to strip away protections from around 50,000 federal workers. It’s going to convert the civil service into into nothing more than an apparatus for loyalty to the executive. The Supreme Court was reshaped through a stolen seat and rushed confirmation that produced a 6-3 supermajority that may very well outlast every senator that enabled it.

And when the courts actually do push back? The executive just shrugs. This administration has defied or manipulated court orders in 57 out of 165 adverse rulings. More than a third. They lose under one statute, jump to the next, and keep repeating it faster than any court can hope to keep up with them. Just like parking tickets when you’re wealthy, adverse rulings are treated like a cost-of-doing-business rather than consequences. As I wrote about in my Constitutional Arbitrage piece, we’re watching the emergence of a decorative judiciary.

V-Dem says freedom of expression is at its lowest point since the end of World War II. So the truth is that we’re way past normal democratic friction. To borrow from Ezra Klein, “the emergency is here“.

Proof of Concept

California already ran the experiment on deterrence.

When Trump publicly pushed (read: ordered) Texas to deliver him five more Republican House seats through a mid-decade gerrymander, Gavin Newsom didn’t wring his hands. He pushed through the Election Rigging Response Act, which replaced California’s independent redistricting maps with partisan ones designed to offset the Texas power grab. Then he put it up to the voters. Prop 50 passed with about 64% of the vote.

The move was deliberate. It was reactive, proportional, and transparent. California’s maps will revert to an independent commission the moment Congress does its job and passes federal redistricting standards. It wasn’t imposed by executive fiat the way Donald Trump rules. It was a democratic response to antidemocratic escalation.

And it worked. Before Prop 50, a nationwide redistricting war was brewing. But after Democrats actually fought back, Republicans de-escalated. Indiana’s redistricting efforts were blocked by Republicans themselves because the party doesn’t want to fight this war.

That’s what deterrence looks like. You punch the bully back and the bully thinks twice before punching you again. When the bully believes escalation leads to mutual destruction, the bully hesitates even further.

How You Punch Back

Courts. The Garland blockade and Barrett acceleration gave one party unilateral control over the judiciary for a generation. The response must be to expand the Supreme Court from nine to thirteen. We should push for staggered term limits; maybe around eighteen years long. The off-ramp is structural reform that includes term limits, fixed appointment calendars, and supermajority confirmation thresholds that make future expansion unnecessary. You build the case and sell it to the American people by showing the breach it answers.

The filibuster. Republicans spent years chipping away at procedural norms to pack courts and ram tax cuts through reconciliation. The minority veto over basic voting rights legislation can’t survive that precedent any longer. Kill the filibuster for legislation aimed at democracy-protection. Pass a federal democracy package that includes voting rights, independent redistricting standards, and anti-corruption laws. Things that should have been passed decades ago.

Representation. Senate malapportionment has been weaponized for decades. Allow D.C. and Puerto Rico to vote on statehood. Pursue retaliatory redistricting in blue states following the California model. Tether both to an off-ramp just like California: nationwide redistricting standards and automatic voter registration. Prop 50 proved that this works, especially if your messaging brings the American people along for the ride and explains the why, not just the what.

Enforcement. This is the one that matters most, because without it nothing else really means anything. Trump’s border czar took a $50,000 bribe in an undercover FBI operation. The President grew his net worth by billions through crypto schemes and patronage. Pretty much every American already believes the political establishment is corrupt. So prove them right and then prove you’ll do something about it.

The next Democratic administration’s Justice Department should launch aggressive corruption task forces without any Biden-esque hand-wringing about “perceived partisanship.” Investigate and prosecute crimes committed in office. Hold members of Congress accountable. If the outcome disproportionately affects Republicans, that says something about the Republican Party, not about the investigation.

The media landscape too. Media outlets that march in lockstep with the state have spent years laundering propaganda. Algorithmic feeds have fragmented our realities into mutually exclusive universes. Reform in this domain is paramount. How can you sustain a democracy when the information environment is designed to destroy any semblance of shared truth?

Now the sequencing here is important. You can’t just open with court expansion. You have to open with the democracy-protection legislation that’s being made impossible by the filibuster. And you build the political case for each step by pointing to the specific breach it answers. Let the opposition’s own behavior make the argument for you, because the Republican party will publicly oppose efforts to legislatively strengthen democracy.

“You’re No Different From Them”

Here’s the problem: if we don’t take extreme measures – like chemotherapy targeting cancerous cells – we’re taking an even bigger risk. Donald Trump is a symptom of the malignant authoritarian cancer that has been infecting the Republican Party for the better part of the last three decades. And if you just hope for the best and do nothing, the authoritarian will come back. And next time it won’t be headed by a narcissistic buffoon. It’ll be a charismatic bureaucrat with an actual ideology, using the same holes Trump created – except he’ll use them efficiently.

There’s a massive moral chasm between democratic self-defense and authoritarian capture. Every escalation I’ve described so far comes with an explicit off-ramp. California’s maps revert when federal standards pass. Court expansion becomes unnecessary once the judiciary is reformed. Emergency executive measures expire just as soon as statutes are passed to replace them. The goal isn’t to lock in a permanent partisan advantage for the Democratic Party. It’s to restore mutual constraints and force a truce with a faction that has stepped outside of constitutional bounds uncontested for the last thirty years.

Sometimes emergency actions are the only things that can restore normalcy. It’s how you save a system that’s being destroyed by people who have wagered everything that their opponents would never fight back.

The Choice

So we’re back where we started. Rights on paper and democratic hollowing aren’t mutually exclusive. You can have a constitution and still live in a managed autocracy. Russia’s constitution is lovely on paper, but no one would ever mistake Putin’s Russia for a free country.

The Democratic Party has two options. Send a credible shot across the bow — a promise of mutually assured destruction if this illiberal trajectory continues — or accept the slow decline we’ve watched unfold in Hungary, Turkey, and Russia.

Unilateral restraint has failed. Demonstrably, repeatedly, and spectacularly across every domain where it’s been tried. Our institutions can recover. But only if breaking them actually costs something again.

Vote for Democrats in the 2026 midterms. Demand that Democratic politicians and would-be presidential candidates commit to this doctrine of deterrence. Hold them to it. Because without real deterrence against authoritarians, democracy cannot survive.

The moral hazard posed by a government no longer constrained by our Constitution is a grave threat.

Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, 2026

212-219.

Seven votes. That’s the margin by which the House declined to assert its constitutional war powers. In a mostly party-line vote, almost every Republican voted to allow Donald Trump to continue waging an illegal war. Conversely, almost every Democrat voted against it. And on the House floor, a Republican congressman, West Point graduate, and Army veteran named Warren Davidson said to his colleagues, “The moral hazard posed by a government no longer constrained by our Constitution is a grave threat.”

But the 219 Republicans still opted – just the latest in a series of similar inaction – to further abdicate their Constitutionally-granted powers to a rogue executive.

Davidson didn’t even argue that the strikes were wrong. He explicitly called out Iran as an enemy of the United States of America. His argument, like mine, is that the mechanism matters regardless of whether or not you agree with the action. If you continually allow a government to wage war without permission, it won’t be long before it wages war without reason.

Only one of Davidson’s fellow Republicans agreed with him (or at least had the courage to agree with him publicly). That Republican was Thomas Massie. The other 99% of their colleagues voted to look the other way.

To understand what Davidson was defending, you have to see what was supposed to exist.

What Was Supposed to Exist

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and George Mason – three of America’s founding fathers – agreed on almost nothing. What they did agree on, however, is that the power to initiate war belongs to Congress and Congress alone. Their reasoning was that in the hands of a unitary executive, said executive will always have or find the motive to start one.

Madison plainly said, “The Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.” Even Hamilton, who was arguably among the most pro-executive founders, wrote that “the legislature alone” can “place the nation in a state of war.”

At the Constitutional Convention, the change from “make war” to “declare war” passed with only one state dissenting. The president could repel sudden attacks. All else required Congress. Not a single prominent founding figure of the United States took the other side of this issue. And for roughly 150 years, the system worked as designed. Through the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and both World Wars.

Then it stopped.

Click by Click

Korea, 1950. Truman deployed troops while Congress headed for its July 4th recess and called it a “police action under the United Nations.” He said, “I just had to act as commander-in-chief, and I did.” Senator Robert Taft protested the move, calling it a “usurpation,” but ultimately said he’d vote for the force anyway. The Senate Democratic leader actually discouraged a vote because he feared “a lengthy debate.” So instead, Congress chose a vacation, and more than 36,000 Americans died in a war that was never voted on. Thus, the first click locked.

The Vietnam War was supposed to produce a fix. In the most aggressive assertion of congressional war authority since the founding, Congress actually overrode a presidential veto to pass the War Powers Resolution in 1973. And then...zero enforcements. Nearly every president since Nixon has rejected the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution. It has also never once forced a president to withdraw troops. It’s the equivalent of a speed limit sign on a highway the police never patrol (Fifty-two years and counting, by the way. Perfect record). That failure locked, too.

The 2001 AUMF, coming in at sixty words, passed 420-1 in the House a week after 9/11. Those sixty words have since been used to justify military operations in 22 countries against organizations that didn’t even exist when the vote was taken. That includes ISIS, a group that was literally at war with al-Qaeda. A blank check that never expires, yet another click locked. To be clear, I’m not making an argument for or against these military operations. My contention is, again, with the mechanism used to wage these wars.

Libya, 2011. President Barack Obama argued that launching cruise missiles at a sovereign nation didn’t constitute “hostilities” under War Powers Resolution. His Office of Legal Counsel disagreed, but he did it anyway. Locked.

Syria, 2017. Trump launched strikes and Congress barely noticed. Locked.

Iran, 2026. We’re teetering on the edge of full-scale war. No authorization, a party-line vote to continue it, and an executive that simultaneously calls it a war and claims it doesn’t need permission. Vice President JD Vance said, “We are not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.“ Speaker Mike Johnson said, “We’re not at war right now.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said, “The regime sure did change.” And President Trump himself said, “Why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???”

“Police action.” “Not hostilities.” “Not a war.” Each euphemism shrinks while the wars get bigger. Each new phrase insulates the next expansion from the constraints bounding the last one.

This mechanism is a ratchet. Each click locks the previous expansion in place. Reversal requires the dismantling of the device itself. And no one with power has any incentive to dismantle it.

Working as Intended

The ratchet isn’t solely the result of executive overreach. It’s just as much a product of congressional complicity.

Congress chooses not to exercise its war powers because strategic avoidance is politically rational for individual members. When a vote on war can end your political career, not voting in the first place is the obvious choice for politicians who treat their roles as aristocrats rather than public servants. The Harvard Journal on Legislation calls this the “power not to decide,” or a deliberate silence that lets legislators claim they neither authorized nor opposed whatever happens next. Their hands are clean, right?

So the president gets to benefit from the precedent, and Congress gets to benefit from their avoidance. Courts won’t intervene either, as they’ve consistently called war powers a “political question,” and their silence naturally gets interpreted as legal consent. Everyone inside the system has a reason to keep the ratchet turning, and that’s what makes the whole thing so durable.

Columbia’s Matthew Waxman argues that Congress exercises a sort of informal influence through appropriations, hearings, and political signaling. Historically, he’s right. His examples include Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia. These are all cases where congressional pressure actually did constrain a president. But every one of those examples comes from an era when members of Congress were still willing to cross party lines on war. But when 99% of a caucus votes to continue an unauthorized war started by the president who represents their party, Waxman’s so-called informal checks simply evaporate.

The administration claimed that Iran’s progress toward nuclear enrichment were real, and that millions of lives were at stake. Even if that were true, that would be more of a reason to involve Congress, not less. An AUMF would have made the strikes more legitimate and harder to challenge. That’s not even a peacenik argument. It’s purely strategic. Even JINSA – known for being hawkish, pro-Israel, and supportive of the strikes in general – argued that Congress should pass an AUMF for Iran because that formal authorization would strengthen the mission.

So now the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day clock is ticking. It’ll expire in late April. When it does, however, it’s not like there’s any enforcement mechanism. Because no court will dare enforce it. Congress already voted against asserting its authority. They couldn’t even muster a majority for what was, in the end, a non-binding resolution. 62% of Americans want congressional approval for further military action. But instead, Congress voted not to require it.

The last nominal constraint on executive war-making is just weeks from expiring, but nobody is actually counting down.

A West Point graduate stood on the House floor, cited the Constitution, and lost to his own party by seven votes. Thus, the war continued. And the 60-day clock ticks toward a deadline no one will enforce.

The next time any president launches a strike on any country and for any reason, the constitutional mechanism designed to prevent it will perform exactly as it did on March 5th. A vote, a party line, and a shrug.

Just another click.

Last Friday morning, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s IEEPA tariffs 6-3. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that two words buried in a 1977 statute, “regulate” and “importation,” “cannot bear such weight.” Gorsuch and Barrett joined the majority. Cable news celebrated the victory against tariffs that obviously went against the spirit of the law.

But by Friday afternoon, Trump had signed a new order reimposing tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. He proceeded to call the justices “a disgrace” for performing their constitutional duties rather than showing him personal fealty.

Then Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the administration will “leverage Section 232 and Section 301 tariff authorities that have been validated through thousands of legal challenged.”

So the court said no, and it mattered for...about four hours.

The game the administration is playing is “constitutional arbitrage.”

Arbitrage, in finance, is fairly simple. Exploit the gap between what something costs in one market and what it’s worth in another. Constitutional arbitrage is the executive-power version. When one law says no, just hop to another that says yes, and move faster than the courts can possibly hope to keep up.

The US Code offers a very long menu. Multiple statutory provisions hand the President tariff authority. IEEPA Sections 122, 201, 232, and 301 are a few examples. A court can say “’not under this law.” But there is always another law to “creatively” interpret.

Even Justice Kavanaugh, writing in dissent, conceded the ruling was “not likely to greatly restrict Presidential tariff authority going forward” because “numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs.” So the dissent essentially endorsed the arbitrage thesis. The menu is so deep that losing one item barely narrows it.

Tariffs are the latest (and maybe cleanest?) example, but we’ve seen this strategy play out in other ways as well.

1. Semantic compliance: Rescind the specific document a court blocked, then claim the identical policy continues under different authority.

2. Retaliatory escalation: Lose a case, then go after the person who won it.

3. Procedural undermining: Rewrite the rules of litigation itself so courts lose their sharpest tools.

Under an administration operating in good faith (i.e. not this one), you could probably justify some constitutional arbitrage under the belief that the administration’s actions are taken in an attempt to affect some kind of positive change.

Regardless of intent, though, they all do the same thing. They make judicial review structurally irrelevant without ever technically crossing the bright red line of outright defiance.

And as with many of the Trump administrations actions, the scary part is that the tariff case, taken alone – particularly without the additional context that the administration has been waging a constant war against the constitution – actually looks like the system working, in a sense.

So let’s look at immigration. The administration invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a wartime statute never used outside a declared war, to fast-track deportations of Venezuelans. The Fifth Circuit blocked it, but the administration just pivoted. The Supreme Court allowed Trump to terminate Temporary Protected Status for nearly 350,000 Venezuelans, stripping their legal status and making them deportable through ordinary proceedings. So at the end of the day, we got the same deportations, just by a different legal pathway. The American Immigration Council called it “de-dedocumentation.”

Federal spending was another clear example. A court blocked the OMB’s funding-freeze memo. The administration rescinded the memo, then declared the freeze continued under different executive orders. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the memo.”

So the court explicitly ordered the administration not to reinstate the freeze “under a different name,” but they did it anyway, and in essentially the same breath as the rescission. It was an early example of the second Trump administration playing constitutional “chicken” with the Supreme Court.

And then the courts, for whatever reason, decided to kneecap themselves. In Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court effectively barred nationwide injunctions. Before CASA, one federal judge could freeze a policy for the whole country. Now you need class actions, which are slower, more expensive, and by the time they manage to grind their way through the system, the policy in question has already been running for months.

The judiciary’s best real-time weapon against executive overreach...gutted by the judiciary itself.

Authority-switching on tariffs is aggressive, but you can reasonably argue that it’s how delegated power was designed to work. Claiming a freeze continues while rescinding the document that authorized it, however, is lawyerly bad faith. And the Washington Post’s finding that the administration defied, delayed, or manipulated rulings in a full third of all adverse decisions, or the Cato Institute’s documentation that immigration accounted for 57% of all cases where judges found the administration misled the court, that’s something else entirely. You don’t need to lie to judges if your authority-switching is legitimate. A DOJ official says he was fired for refusing to do exactly that.

Defiance is easy to see. When Andrew Jackson (apocryphally) said “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it,“ his words couldn’t be interpreted as anything but a crisis because that kind of outright defiance immediately triggers the “code red” constitutional alarm bells.

Arbitrage, on the other hand, is almost invisible. In some ways it’s more dangerous than outright defiance because it avoids altogether the direct confrontation that would force a response. This is where the “presidents have always clashed with courts” argument kind of falls apart.

Lincoln defied the judiciary on habeas corpus during an actual civil war. FDR tried to pack the court after adverse rulings within one policy domain during the Great Depression. But neither of them turned court-dodging into an all-purpose governance tool deployed across every major policy area at once. And neither of them did it in peacetime.

What we’re watching now is the emergence of a sort of decorative judiciary. The courts keep issuing rulings. The news keeps calling them “major blows.” And the next morning the policy is back under a different statute. The republic still has courts, but their rulings are increasingly cosmetic. Kind of like a constitutional Potemkin village. It has all the forms of judicial review, but without any of the substance. 663 lawsuits filed. 215 plaintiff wins. And an agenda that continues largely unimpeded. Instead of the losses actually being defeats, they’re just the cost of doing business in a system where another statute is always available and reimposition is always faster than adjudication.

Let’s return to where we started. Friday morning, February 20th, 2026. The Supreme Court says no, and by the same afternoon, the president just shrugs.

81% of Americans believe the administration must follow court orders (crazy idea, I know). So the problem isn’t public will. The problem is that our constitutional system assumed good-faith compliance with the spirit of rulings instead of just the letter. The framers assumed that a president who tried to treat the law this way would be checked by the both the courts and Congress. But they didn’t predict a Congress so morally bankrupt that it completely abdicated its power to stop such a would-be tyrant.

I’ve about stretched myself to the absolute limits of my knowledge of the law (which is abysmally slim to begin with), but I think the diagnosis here is “an administration that exploits gaps between overlapping statutory authorities faster than the judiciary can respond.”

And in my opinion, the treatment needs to be a combination of statutory consolidation, mandatory compliance windows after adverse rulings, and (most importantly) Congressional reclamation of delegated powers that were never meant to be stacked as a judicial workaround.

Constitutional arbitrage has a name now. It admittedly can feel like small potatoes when compared to the rest of the destruction the second Trump administration has left in its wake. But assuming our liberal democracy holds, it’s something Americans need to fix in order to further limit the tools a future would-be tyrant has at their disposal.

"I was a racketeer for capitalism."

This quote was a confession from one of the most decorated Marines in American history, describing thirty-three years and four months of service. He helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests. He purified Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers. He brought “light” to the Dominican Republic for American sugar barons. One time he said, “I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.”

He also gave us a definition. “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group know what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”

Now read the Washington Post’s investigation of DOGE. The man who led “government efficiency” received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits. He spent $277 million to help elect the president who appointed him. A sitting Supreme Court justice asked from the bench whether this constitutes quid pro quo.

Sound similar?

Butler’s framework is nearly a century old now. And it’s never been more precise.

How the Racket Works

The racket is the mechanism. Private extraction is disguised as “public service.” Butler saw it in imperial wars sold as “spreading democracy.” The 1930s financiers of the Business Plot dressed it as “saving the country from communism.” DOGE dressed it as “government efficiency.” The costume changes over the decades, but the structure itself always stays the same. It’s just public rhetoric masking private enrichment.

The racket’s sustainability relies on the sheer impunity of its conspirators. Without impunity, all you have is a scandal or crime that gets prosecuted. With it, the racket is a business model that scales across American generations.

The test case for the racket arrived in 1934. Wall Street financiers — backers from DuPont, J.P. Morgan, and General Motors among them — plotted to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt using a 500,000-man veterans’ army modeled on Mussolini’s March on Rome. They claimed $300 million in available backing (about $7 billion or so today). They recruited Butler to lead it. By that point, Butler has spent decades overthrowing governments on behalf of some of the same bankers.

General Smedley Butler blew the whistle.

Congress investigated. The McCormack-Dickstein Committee confirmed it: “There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution.” They collected 4,300 pages of testimony across six cities. The New York Times called it “a gigantic hoax” two days into testimony. This was while committee staff were still digging up bank records that verified Butler’s account.

Yeah…the renowned New York Times declared the whole thing fake before the investigation was even finished.

And then: zero prosecutions. The names of the powerful conspirators were removed from the public report. Butler responded, “Like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape. The big shots weren’t even called to testify.”

The lesson was learned and the message was heard loud and clear.

The Impunity Stations

Iran-Contra: 1985-1987; pardons 1992

Senior officials of the Ronald Reagan administration ran a secret, illegal war. They funneled money through Swiss accounts for illegal arms sales to Iran and funding Nicaraguan rebels. In direct violation of congressional law. Fourteen were charged, but only one served prison time. The rest were pardoned by George H.W. Bush.

The same George H.W. Bush whose own father, Prescott Bush, had his assets seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act for banking relationships with Nazi-era industrialists. The same George H.W. Bush who later received a $1.5 million windfall when those assets were returned, and later went on to become a United States senator.

Note: to be clear, Prescott Bush’s specific role in the Business Plot is historically contested. His “Trading with the Enemy Act” violations, however, are well documented.

The Iran-Contra personnel didn’t just escape the consequences of their actions, though. They came back to the seats of power. Elliott Abrams, Bill Barr, and John Bolton all served in the Trump administration. As TIME reported, “The rule-breaking and impunity during Iran-Contra may have set the stage for Trump.”

2008 Financial Crisis

The largest financial fraud in American history produced zero criminal prosecutions of Wall Street executives. Eric Holder said it plainly: banks had become “Too Big to Jail”. The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s (a much smaller catastrophe by comparison) produced over 1,000 convictions. 2008 sent the same signal as the Business Plot: the consequences aren’t coming.

Obama on CIA Torture

“Look forward, not backward.” The impunity system is bipartisan. It has to be. Power protects power regardless of party. The Republican Party has become openly fascist particularly during the second Trump term, but historically the powers that be were united by just that: power.

Sacrificial Lambs

Now, accountability does arrive sometimes. Enron produced twenty-two convictions. Madoff got 150 years. Sam Bankman-Fried is doing twenty-five. But notice who gets held accountable: the ones who have become politically expendable. Executives who were already toxic, Ponzi schemers who robbed the rich, and crypto bros who lacked political patrons. The racket isn’t that no one ever gets punished, it’s that punishment is selective. And the selection criteria revolves around political protection rather than guilt.

Mask Off

Every previous version of this played out with at least the fiction of accountability still intact. Pardons acknowledged that something worth pardoning had occurred. Non-prosecutions got framed as difficult legal judgments. Someone, somewhere, at least pretended to care.

So what happens when the racket drops the fiction entirely?

Take another look at Butler’s definition: “…something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.” Now look at the facts.

Elon Musk’s businesses received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits — “often at critical moments, helping seed the growth that has made him the world’s richest person.” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor at Yale School of Management, noted: “not every entrepreneur at this scale has been this dependent on federal money — certainly not Nvidia, not Microsoft, nor Amazon, nor Meta".” He spent $277 million to elect the president who then appointed him to lead “efficiency reform” of the very agencies that regulate his own businesses.

DOGE cut staff or budgets at all seven agencies where Musk’s companies have ongoing contracts.

A federal judge found that Musk “made the decisions to shutdown USAID’s headquarters and website even though he lacked the authority.” Another ordered him to sit for deposition, calling the circumstances “extraordinary.” Only 6 of 82 publicly identified DOGE employees filed required financial disclosures. Musk departed without ever disclosing his own holdings. Court orders regarding data access were violated while the injunction was active.

Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor added: “You mean to suggest that the fact that one major donor to the current president — the most major donor to the current president — got a very lucrative job immediately upon election from the new administration does not give the appearance of quid pro quo?”

When a sitting Supreme Court Justice is plainly calling out the corruption from the bench, what we’re seeing is not partisan commentary. We’re not watching judicial activism. We’re seeing the language of law used to diagnose a serious problem plaguing our political system.

A Democratic minority staff Senate report found that DOGE generated $21.7 billion in new waste and may have cost taxpayers $135 billion. Federal Spending in the first eleven months of 2025 was approximately $248 billion higher. And to add on to that, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is projected to add upwards of $3 trillion to the national deficit. Even the Cato Institute couldn’t find a structural break in spending that coincided with DOGE’s start date.

The “efficiency reformer” generated more waste than it cut. The racket is quantifiable.

Do You See It?

I’m not suggesting that Elon Musk read about the Business Plot before buying his deep access to the machinery of the United States. The causal chain doesn’t need to be that neat. What the pattern shows is simpler and more damning: if you’re a rational person observing American political history, you’d conclude that elite accountability is the exception. The incentive structure never changes. And pretty much everyone, regardless of their political leanings, would agree.

Impunity is the highest-yielding investment in American political life. And a system that converts bad acts into generational power will produce more bad actors in every generation.

The Racket Can Be Refused

Ninety-one years ago today, on February 17th, 1935, Smedley Butler took to WCAU radio in Philadelphia and told the American public what Congress wouldn’t.

While Smedley Butler is a legend among Marines, he spent decades as a self-described “racketeer” that enforced the very system he eventually exposed. He wasn’t innocent, but he saw the machine pointed inward and decided he no longer wanted any part in it.

Today, Task Force Butler, a group of veterans who literally named their organization after the man who said no, are doing the same work: observing, documenting, and refusing to look away.

Everyone knows the racket is there. They see it in the way that the wealthy and powerful among us seem to always avoid consequences for their actions. They see it in the way that political dynasties always seem to maintain hegemony over the country’s power structures.

Can the racket be beaten? I really don’t know. But Smedley Butler showed us that sometimes all it takes is one brave voice to dismantle a plot to destroy liberal democracy.

Afterword

If you’re interested in the topic, I would recommend picking up a copy of Smedley Butler’s “War is a Racket.” It’s a short read. The description below is provided by Goodreads:

Originally printed in 1935, War Is a Racket is General Smedley Butler's frank speech describing his role as a soldier as nothing more than serving as a puppet for big-business interests. The introduction discusses why General Butler went against the corporate war machine and how he exposed a fascist coup d'etat plot against President Franklin Roosevelt. Widely appreciated and referenced by left- and right-wingers alike, this is an extraordinary argument against war—more relevant now than ever.

War is a Racket

A democratic socialist who wants city-owned grocery stores in every borough. A moderate who just posted the largest raw vote margin in Virginia gubernatorial history. A Navy helicopter pilot who froze utility rates as her first official act in office.

Three candidates. Three wildly different ideological starting points. One identical result: landslide victories built on the same four words. What does this cost?

Zohran Mamdani won New York City with 50.78% in a three-way race — the most votes cast in a NYC mayoral race since 1969. Abigail Spanberger won Virginia by more than 15 points, the largest percentage margin since 2009. Mikie Sherrill won New Jersey by 14.4 points, becoming the first Democrat to carry Morris County since 1973.

So naturally, the Democratic Party responded by launching a furious internal debate about whether it should be more progressive or more moderate.

The 2024 election gutted me. But when I saw the results of these three races, I felt something I hadn’t felt since before Trump was elected a second time: actual hope. Then I watched the party spend three months trying to explain it away — each faction contorting the evidence into proof of whatever they already believed. That part felt pretty familiar. It felt like the stuffy mission statement meeting that has become so synonymous with the Democratic Party brand.

The Mission Statement Trap

If you’ve ever worked at a company that was in the midst of crashing and burning, you’re probably familiar with this. Sales are cratering. Customers are leaving. The product is clearly getting worse. And leadership responds by scheduling a cushy executive offsite to workshop the mission statement. Except the problem was never the mission statement in the first place. The problem is that nobody’s talking about (or listening to) what the customers actually want.

This is what the Democratic Party is doing right now. It’s an exhausting performance of identity theater. Just a compulsive need to resolve an internal ideological question before acting, even when the evidence shows that acting is the resolution. And if you’re politically engaged, you’ve definitely seen the cycle. Party loses, factions point fingers, the media frames recovery as a contest between different wings, primary candidates pick their lane, donors pick sides. The formula that actually won gets buried underneath all the drama.

The San Francisco Chronicle captured the meta-debate perfectly: “Affordability? Abundance? Aspiration? As 2026 looms, which message will Democrats run with?” Meanwhile the New Democrat Coalition just released a 16-page affordability blueprint explicitly positioned against progressive populism — whose actual content is almost entirely about the same kitchen-table costs that progressives are running on. Everyone agrees on the diagnosis. But the party is still fighting about who gets to be the doctor.

Derek Thompson nailed it: He asserts that affordability isn’t one specific policy. It’s just a prompt; a shared orientation toward material reality that lets different candidates answer the same question in whatever way fits their district. The party doesn’t need to resolve its identity crisis. Instead, it needs to stop having one altogether.

The Prompt in Action

Here’s what the factional debate is designed to obscure.

Spanberger won economy-focused voters by more than 20 points. Sherrill didn’t issue a statement about party values -- she froze utility rates. Mamdani ran on a $30 minimum wage, free childcare, and city-owned grocery stores. The DNC’s own internal analysis found that pocketbook concerns “overwhelmingly propelled the party’s recovery among minority voters.” The voter language is telling: “It’s not your mortgage, it’s your rent. It’s not groceries; it’s food. It’s not utilities; it’s heat.”

Now the paradox that proves the thesis. The Democratic Party’s brand is at historic lows. 34% favorable in Gallup (worst since 1992), 27% in NBC (worst since 1990), 18% congressional approval in Quinnipiac. And yet Democrats lead the generic ballot by 5 to 14 points depending on the poll, and hold a 33-point advantage among independents. Only 48% of Democrats approve of their own party’s congressional leaders.

Voters are motivated despite the party rather than because of it. The lesson we’re learning is that the brand itself is irrelevant. The material stakes are everything.

G. Elliott Morris’s analysis found that if the 2026 electorate resembles voters who prioritize affordability, it would produce a blue wave 50% larger than 2018. The party just has to talk about the thing voters already care about. That’s literally it.

Give Me Surgery, Not Aspirin

Time for a little push-back.

James Carville, hardly a progressive, has called for “the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression.” The Nation argues that “affordability” without structural ambition is empty branding; just a way for moderate Democrats to offer technocratic tax credits while claiming the same mantle as candidates proposing universal childcare. A Demand Progress/YouGov poll found that 72.5% of Democrats prefer sharp populist messaging over softer “abundance”-style framing.

The word affordability can certainly be hollow. If it becomes just another slogan concealing pilot programs and means-tested credits instead of real structural reform, voters will see through it. The New Democrat Coalition’s child care “pilot programs” and Mamdani’s universal child care are not the same policy, even if they share the same prompt.

But that’s not the argument. No one is saying that all affordability policies are interchangeable. Leading with material concern is what wins elections. The debate over how to address that concern is a productive policy fight that the party should definitely have. The useful version of the progressive-moderate debate is “which affordability policies work best?” The useless version is yet another round of “who are we?”

The cultural filter is non-trivial here too. Ruy Teixeira and the Liberal Patriot school argue that cultural perceptions function as a filter — voters who think you’re culturally alien won’t hear your economic pitch no matter how good it is. Research cited by The Liberal Patriot suggests roughly two-thirds of working-class voters think Democrats have moved too far left culturally. The general sentiment from pragmatic Democratic operatives like Pat Dennis of American Bridge is clear: economic populism helps, but it isn’t enough on its own to overcome cultural headwinds.

On the cultural point, I personally disagree completely. I don’t think the Democrats have really moved all that far to the left culturally. Instead I think Republicans and their dominant media powerhouse have very successfully painted the average Democrat as a caricature of the most absurd characters on the far-left fringes. Democrats have finally begun to fight on the new media battleground they had previously ceded to the right, but it’s an uphill battle to reverse these perspectives.

What I keep coming back to, however, is that leading with economics is still the best available strategy for managing the Democratic party’s cultural vulnerabilities. Not because it makes the perception vanish, but because it redirects voter attention to terrain where Democrats are strong and Republicans have lost. Spanberger didn’t win by taking the bait and engaging in ridiculous debates about “wokeness.” She instead won by making the conversation about grocery prices, which functionally communicated seriousness without requiring a single culture-war concession.

The 2018 Cheat Code

Democrats didn’t resolve their identity crisis in 2018 either. They didn’t hold a unifying convention or publish a manifesto. They let diverse candidates run on local conditions with healthcare as the shared prompt. Moderates won red districts. Progressives won blue ones. No one agreed on Medicare for All versus a public option, but pretty much everyone agreed that healthcare costs too much.

The result was the largest midterm wave in a generation.

Affordability in 2026 can work identically. The party apparatus itself doesn’t need to be unified. What it needs, as Derek Thompson wrote, is a shared prompt.

And the 2018 model worked despite Republican attacks, same as now. Republicans know that affordability is their Achilles heel, particularly as they’ve ceded their congressional duties during Trump’s second term. The NRCC’s October 2025 memo outlines a strategy to “weaponize Mamdani” — nationalizing his democratic socialism as the face of the party and running digital ads in nearly 50 competitive House districts. But Spanberger and Sherrill won their landslides while those attacks were being deployed. The affordability prompt is finally an offense against Republicans instead of a defense. It forces Republicans to argue against candidates who are talking about grocery prices while they’re still repeating the same anti-transgender talking points every single day.

Nine Months

The Democratic Party’s greatest risk in 2026 is spending so much energy on its internal identity fight that it never actually gets around to running on the thing that’s already working.

The identity debate is a scarcity-mindset trap. It’s fighting a pointless battle over who gets to define the party instead of building coalitions around what voters actually want. And the answer is boringly simple, in the same way abundance politics is boringly simple: build more, cost less, talk about what matters to people’s lives (I know…revolutionary stuff).

Three candidates proved the formula works. The party’s own data confirms it. Morris’s numbers say the wave is sitting there, waiting.

The only question is whether the party will spend the next nine months having the fight that feels satisfying, or doing the work that actually wins.

You read that correctly. The states’ rights party’s second-in-command just told the states to sit down and shut up.

Meanwhile, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat from the party that spent most of the last century championing federal power, filed a lawsuit invoking the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment. Sacred text of conservative constitutionalism for half a century. In 2026 everyone is speaking the other side’s lines, and nobody seems to notice (or care).

What you’re witnessing is technically hypocrisy, but it’s very old with deep roots in American history.

Nobody Believes in a Parking Spot

Federalism is not a deeply-held constitutional philosophy for either political party. Instead, think of it like a parking spot.

You occupy it when you need it. You vacate it when you don’t. Nobody defends a parking spot on principle. You defend it because your car is there. Drive away, and you couldn’t care less who takes it next.

That’s the Tenth Amendment. It’s the constitutional argument of whoever doesn’t control Washington, and the constitutional inconvenience of whoever does. Whoever holds federal power discovers the necessity of federal supremacy. Whoever lacks it suddenly discovers the beauty of state sovereignty. Every time. Without fail. For 230 years.

It’s not a new phenomenon. Legal scholar Jessica Bulman-Pozen documented the pattern in the Harvard Law Review back in 2014, calling it “partisan federalism.” That’s the idea that states primarily check federal power through partisan opposition that’s couched in constitutional principles. Americans are “particularly likely to identify with states when they are controlled by the party out of power in Washington.” So for most people, federalism is a pretty philosophy, maybe. But mostly it’s a faction.

The polling is brutal. On requiring local governments to cooperate with ICE: 85% of Republicans favor it. 83% of Democrats oppose it. Near-perfect partisan symmetry, perfectly inverted. Almost zero overlap. That’s a Fox News poll, by the way. With positions that mirror each other that cleanly, what you’re seeing is more akin to tribalism than deeply held constitutional convictions.

Carnegie Endowment’s Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, a former California Supreme Court justice, put it plainly: “The script has flipped 180 degrees.”

But this isn’t some new invention. The parking spot has been there for 230 years.

The 230-Year Hustle

Jefferson and Madison invented states’ rights as the weapon of the opposition party. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 were literally written to resist a federal government controlled by the other team. That’s it. That’s the origin story. Not high constitutional theory. Just political warfare.

Then the antebellum South demanded states’ rights for themselves while simultaneously demanding that Northern states enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Yes, the same faction wanted state sovereignty when it served slavery and federal supremacy when state sovereignty threatened it. Sound familiar?

Northern states responded by passing “personal liberty laws” forbidding state officials from cooperating with federal slave catchers. These laws were the direct structural ancestor of modern sanctuary policies. I want to be clear here: protecting people from enslavement is not the same as any modern immigration “policy”. But the constitutional mechanism — state non-cooperation with federal enforcement — is identical. The parking spot only cares about power.

Fast forward. Eisenhower, a Republican, sent the 101st Airborne to override Southern state resistance at Little Rock. Federal supremacy asserted by the “small government” party. Under Obama, Republican attorneys general shoved state sovereignty down every American’s throat. Texas AG Greg Abbott’s office filed over 30 lawsuits against the federal government on everything from the ACA to environmental regulations to gun rules. The Tenth Amendment had never been so popular.

Now? Same party, absolute federal supremacy on immigration. Did the amendment change? Nope…just the power dynamics.

But Immigration Really Is Different…Until It Isn’t

I’ve been able to find one genuinely strong objection to the parking spot thesis.

Immigration is constitutionally different from most policy areas. The plenary power doctrine recognizes that Congress has “plenary and unqualified power” over immigration. This doctrine has nearly 140 years of continuous Supreme Court precedent, going back to the Chinese Exclusion Case of 1889. It touches national sovereignty, foreign relations, and border security all at once. A Republican who championed states’ rights on health care and now champions federal supremacy on immigration might be drawing a constitutionally defensible line: health care regulation isn’t an exclusive federal power; immigration arguably is.

But this argument quickly breaks down in practice.

Plenary power supports federal authority over immigration policy: who can enter, who can stay, the terms of legal status. It absolutely does not create “absolute immunity” for federal agents who kill American citizens on American soil. Legal scholar Michael Mannheimer, writing on the Volokh Conspiracy (a libertarian legal blog, not a progressive one) called Vance’s claim “absolutely ridiculous.” The legal consensus against him crosses every ideological line there is. Plenary power also doesn’t override the anti-commandeering doctrine that protects states from being conscripted into federal enforcement. And it doesn’t authorize punishing resistant states by withholding unrelated federal funding.

But what really kills the “immigration is special defense” is that if the argument actually explained the current posture, Republicans would be confining their federal supremacy claims to immigration.

They are not.

The SAVE Act, passed by the House on a party-line vote, would require states to submit their voter rolls to DHS for vetting. Federal mandates on state election administration. Again, from the party of “states run their own elections.” When Trump pushed Indiana to gerrymander its congressional maps, 21 Republicans in the state Senate defied him, voting 31-19 against the plan. State Senator Spencer Deery, a Republican, vowed to resist federal pressure on his state for as long as he had breath.

The immigration defense is strongest when confined to immigration. If you widen the lens it collapses because the same politicians making the constitutional distinction aren’t confining themselves to it. They’re asserting federal supremacy across the board. Which is exactly what the parking spot thesis predicts.

I’m going to editorialize for a moment: I know the parking spot metaphor is deliberately reductive. Constitutional federalism is genuinely complex. Scholars spend their careers exploring federalism. There are different clauses, different allocations, different domains. But that complexity is precisely the camouflage. Politicians love to hide their inconsistencies in the weeds. The parking spot metaphor is just meant to strip the weeds away and make it a little easier to understand.

The Only Question That Matters

The value of naming this pattern isn’t “look at these hypocrites.” Democrats did the same exact thing when they held federal power and fought state resistance to the ACA tooth and nail. The parking spot isn’t a partisan indictment.

But I want to flag something the structural analysis alone can miss.

While the mechanism itself is bipartisan, the current application involves federal agents killing American citizens and a Vice President claiming absolute immunity from state prosecution.

So while the pattern itself may be symmetrical and bipartisan, the stakes — especially right now —are not.

The next time any politician invokes “states’ rights” or “federal supremacy,” the question is no longer “is this constitutionally correct?” The question is: Would this person hold the same position if the other party controlled Washington? For most political actors, across 230 years of American history, the answer to this question has been no. So if the answer is no, you’re watching someone park.

If federalism has always been used a weapon, can it be made into something more? Or is the honest answer that the Constitution’s most celebrated structural feature has just been a convenient fiction from the very start?

I think the honest answer is uncomfortable but not hopeless. Principled federalists do exist. Spencer Deery fought his own president on it. Ilya Somin at George Mason has criticized federal overreach under both parties for decades. Randy Barnett popularized the term “fair-weather federalism” to shame his own side. These people are real. They exist. And the problem is that they’re consistently outvoted, overruled, and abandoned by their own parties the moment federal power is at stake.

Naming the parking spot dynamic honestly won’t make it disappear. But it is the precondition for changing it, because you can’t hold politicians accountable for inconsistency they’ve convinced you doesn’t exist.

The next time someone tells you they believe in states’ rights or federal supremacy, you’ll know exactly which questions to ask.

"The Hangman" is a poem by Maurice Ogden. It's a favorite of mine and I felt it was apt for our current moment.

American democracy is in a weak state. The post-9/11 era saw slow but constant erosion of freedoms in the name of safety and security. Then in 2016, a new force entered our political landscape. A force unmoored from principles, norms, and the rule of law itself.

As Donald Trump finishes the first year of his new term in office, this video is a look at where we came from and where we're at. And maybe it provides some insights into where we might be heading.

The most revealing thing Donald Trump has said in the opening days in 2026 wasn’t about oil, tariffs, or even the particular thrill he seems to get from treating geopolitics like a game. It was a doctrine.

In a New York Times interview, Trump was asked what limits his power. His answer wasn’t Congress, courts, treaties, alliances, or the laws the United States helped write after World War II. It was...himself. His “own morality.” And then he said: “I don’t need international law.“

After a decade of deep public glimpses into the man’s psyche, it’s not a particularly shocking statement coming from him. We know he’s a narcissist. We know he’s insecure. And we know he has a seemingly pathological need for constant praise and dominance of every news cycle.

What it does reveal, however, is an administration that is increasingly getting comfortable with saying the quiet part out loud: the rules are optional, and the only real check on power is the person holding it.

Which is exactly what the post-World War II rules-based international order was built to prevent.

Strength vs. “Strength”

There’s a line you’ve probably seen a hundred times online:

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.”

The quote sounds like it's a piece of ancient wisdom, but it actually comes from a post-apocalyptic novel by G. Michael Hopf. A little on-the-nose for this moment.

But there’s a reason it’s memorable. It expresses a truth people can feel. Something is decaying and people do feel it. They can sense that the “normal” they were promised was either a lie or just brittle. They’re watching stalwart institutions crumble. Trust in the system is almost non-existent. The “strong man” may be a bloviating buffoon; but at least the lies he tells us promise a return to prosperity, right? Meanwhile a feckless establishment seems wholly unprepared for this moment; stuck in the old political strategies that favor competent governance over feel-good spectacle optimized for the attention economy.

But the quote blurs two very different kinds of strength.

A strong man is someone capable of restraint. Someone who can accept limits without interpreting them as humiliation. Someone who can keep promises, tell the truth when it costs them, doesn’t resort to cruelty, and has the intestinal fortitude to do the right thing when no one is watching (or clapping).

A strongman is the opposite; a vapid performer of dominance. He speaks in the language of strength – swagger, threats, and spectacle – because he’s terrified of looking weak. He wages war against reality because under the facade, he’s deeply afraid of humiliation, loss, and feeling ordinary. Strongmen don’t want constraints because constraints imply they’re not the main character in their story. So they rely on spectacle to mask their weakness.

A society that can’t tell the difference between the two ends up relearning the lesson the hard way. The lesson is that restraint is not weakness. It’s the whole point.

The Test Case

On January 3rd, 2026, U.S. forces raided Caracas, Venezuela and captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, removing them to the United States to face charges. Trump then announced that the U.S. would “run the country” until some future “transition” took place.

Maduro was a dictator. He wasn’t a good person. You can believe that he needed to be ousted. You can believe the world is better off without him.

But...if the question is whether this is a return to “strength,” you have to ask the hard questions:

By what legal authority does a country seize another country’s head of state? Who decides what “transition” actually means? If the U.S. is now engaging in this kind of behavior, what happens when other powers copy the precedent? What happens to global stability when the most powerful country on Earth returns to a mindset of conquest and governing other countries directly, as a matter of executive will?

And it doesn’t stop at Venezuela. Axios mapped an expanding list of countries the “no new wars” president and his surrogates have threatened with military action or territorial claims. At last count, there were eleven countries on the list. There are various pretexts for the threats, from anti-cartel rhetoric to simple hemispheric entitlement. But the common denominator for all of them is that the United States’ new diplomatic policy is intimidation and force.

Greenland is the clearest example of why this moment is not normal. It should snap people awake to the reality of the situation.

Greenland is a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. They’ve explicitly rejected a U.S. takeover and emphasized that its defense should be handled through NATO. To be clear: attempting to conquer a NATO ally would be the end of NATO.

Let that sink in. An American president’s territorial appetites are being discussed not as some absurd hypothetical, but as a real scenario serious enough to end the most important alliance on the planet. It would teach every other country that the law is irrelevant and power is the only thing that matters.

So at some point the question becomes...unavoidable. Why are we pretending we’re still living inside the old rulebook?

The Invisible Luxury of the Rules-Based Order

Most Americans alive today have lived in a pretty weird bubble, historically speaking.

It hasn’t been perfect or morally pure. It’s been laden with instances of hypocrisy where the U.S. violated its own professed ideals.

But broadly speaking, the post-World War II alliances, treaties, predictable norms, and shared international law helped keep the world relatively peaceful. Of course we still had wars, but this order greatly reduced the incentive for world powers to solve disputes with each other using direct force. It made the world more predictable, less suicidal, and – most importantly – it lowered the temperature in the nuclear age.

That stability has become a sort of invisible luxury that just works and most people don’t really need to worry about.

The problem with invisible luxuries, though, is that the people who inherit them start to treat them as laws of nature. They tend to assume that the cost of maintaining them is zero and the cost of breaking them is imaginary. They never had to personally watch a car go off the geopolitical cliff, so they don’t really remember why the guardrails exist there in the first place.

The World War II generation did. They lived through depression, total war, and deep national trauma. They were shaped by hard times and subsequently built a system designed for moments when countries are angry, scared, humiliated, and tempted. They understood that rules aren’t there for when everyone is calm. Rules are there for the exact moment when everyone isn’t.

But...the longer you go without catastrophe, the more catastrophe starts to feel like propaganda. Constraints start to look like unnecessary obstacles, international law starts to look like smug academia, and alliances start to look like charity.

So then a strongman shows up and says “I can get rid of those obstacles. I can make the world simple again. I can give you revenge. Just give me the wheel.”

And a public that’s been primed to distrust every political establishment hears that as strength, instead of what it actually is: the offer of autocracy wrapped in emotional satisfaction.

Weakness

When people hear "weak men," they imagine spoiled trust-fund kids, nepo-babies, out-of-touch elites, and people who have never known struggle. Sometimes that's part of it.

But the more dangerous weakness is both moral and psychological instead of economic.

Weakness looks like treating politics like sports because you don’t think its impacts will ever actually show up at your own door.

Weakness looks like trading your courage for cruelty because it’s easier to attack others than it is to withstand attacks against yourself.

Weakness looks like cheering lawlessness because it feels like revenge against a system you think is broken beyond repair.

Strongmen sell this as some kind of liberation. They defy the law because they're "outsiders," they rail against expertise and call it "conspiracy" from academic elites, and they claim accountable governance is little more than "weakness."

And because he's little more than a performer, he escalates, creates outrage, and causes crisis after crisis; then touts those same crises he inflames as proof that only he can fix them.

The Insidious Creep of Nihilism

If you’re a Millennial or older, you grew up in a time where politics were largely boring. So we look at Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and see an aberration.

But Gen Z?

They grew up with permanent crisis. Financial instability, pandemic, outrage economy, institutional distrust, and the chaos of Donald Trump have always been there for them.

Many of them don’t experience the “rules-based order” as safety. Instead they experience it as a set of rules that have protected somebody else’s wealth. Meanwhile they watch housing grow increasingly out of reach and are deeply concerned (certainly not without good reason) that AI will further destroy their hopes of achieving any sort of American Dream.

Nihilism isn’t just feeling like things are bad. It’s believing that nothing is real, nothing will improve, and nothing deserves protection. Once that mindset takes hold, the idea of protecting the system in place just sounds like protecting the people who own the system.

That’s why saying “the rules kept you safe” doesn’t really resonate. They don’t feel safe.

So when a strongman says “f**k the rules,” he sounds like someone finally angry on their behalf. Even when he’s only using that anger to concentrate power, enrich himself and his allies, and make the world more violent and less predictable.

Where Are We?

It’s hard to overstate how precarious this moment is. Anyone who pretends to know exactly how it ends is either lying to themselves or to you. There are just too many variables. Domestic institutions, global rivals, economic shocks, tech disruption, the sheer chaos of decision-making built around one man’s impulses.

But I think the overall shape of the problem is clear.

We’re watching a deliberate and concerted effort to replace liberal democracy with conservative autocracy; international law bucked in favor of “my morality;” alliances based on leverage rather than multilateralism.

We’re watching a morally weak strongman, spoiled by the prosperity given to us by the greatest generation, attempt to lead us into hard times. And we’re watching a public that is exhausted, disaffected, and algorithmically primed to mistake domination and cruelty for competence.

Despite all that, though – I can’t help but feel a genuine sliver of hope.

A hope that this illiberal shift is so sudden, so extreme, and so incompetent (as bloviating strongmen tend to be) that it shocks the general public awake.

A hope that these hard times mobilize the American people to find their strength.

And a hope that through this newfound strength, we are able to bring about a new age of goodness and prosperity. Economically, culturally, and – most importantly – with a renewed faith in the national identity that made America the “shining city on the hill.” The national identity that inscribed these words on the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

- Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty

Let’s assume we finally achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence); that is, artificial intelligence that is at least on par with human cognitive capability. AI researchers Daniel Kokotajlo, Eli Lifland, Thomas Larsen, and Romeo Dean wrote a speculative but detailed scenario about the rapid advances they expect from artificial intelligence in the coming years. Neither of their potential outcomes are particularly rosy; in fact, one predicts the (thankfully quick and maybe painless) death of all humanity. For the sake of this article, however, let’s be optimistic and assume that the AI doesn’t kill us all.

If AI indeed doesn’t kill us, you might be inclined to assume that superhuman intelligence will finally bring about the utopian society that humanity has always dreamed of: infinite abundance; no one has to work; you spend your days lounging beachside while robots do your dishes, fold your laundry, and cook you Michelin-star meals every evening.

Death/abundance via AI are the binary feel-good/feel-bad movie endings.

My bet? We don’t get either.

If (or when) AI really does get good enough to replace most human labor, my opinion is that the most likely future looks a lot more boring and a lot more familiar. I predict a return to feudalism where a global aristocracy lives inside something that’s pretty close to true utopia, while everyone else exists in some form of reality that’s not quite hell but certainly not heaven.

The medium place.

What the “Medium Place” Actually Is

If you’ve watched The Good Place (and if you haven’t, you really need to. It’s an amazing show), you know the bit: The Good Place and Bad place couldn’t decide if Mindy St. Claire deserved utopia or literal hell, so they compromised on a new realm called the “Medium Place.” It’s not terrible, but it’s not good. There’s no outright sadness, but there’s certainly no happiness. It’s comfy enough to function, but just irritating enough to make sure you’re never at ease.

Now apply that to AI.

In my medium-place future, AI and robotics really do replace most human labor. Factories, logistics, customer service, legal research, software, design, blue collar jobs, and maybe even politics get automated into something that looks magical. Rather than economic productivity going up by a modest 20% it goes up by many orders of magnitude.

But with humans being humans, we know that new wealth won’t fall from the sky evenly. Instead it will flow through pipes we’ve already built. Giant platforms, concentrated capital, captured states. Whoever owns the models, data centers, supply chains, and distribution networks own the future. I’ve mentioned neofeudalism before; AGI in the hands of a small few brings us to that future instead of just a nicer version of capitalism.

In this scenario, you don’t really need a broad middle class to buy things anymore. You don’t even necessarily need the economy to grow for everyone. The new “nobles” can point their AI factories at themselves: AI produces luxury goods and services for the elite, AI optimizes their portfolios, AI designs their cities and drugs and private security bubbles. And the rest of society gets just enough to stay pacified and out of the way.

That’s basically the core of the Medium Place scenario: post-labor capitalism without post-scarcity politics. AI may wipe out the need for most human work, but the people who own the AI keep almost all of the upside.

Life at the Top, Life at the Bottom

Let’s explore a day in this world!

At the very top, you have the AI aristocracy. Some are founders. Some are investors. Some are heirs who were born lucky enough to own and inherit the good life.

Their lives are absurd.

Medicine is personalized and predictive. Their kids get tutors, whether human or machine, that put today’s best schools to shame. Their homes are smart in the way “smart home” marketing never lived up to. The building learns their preferences, adjusts, notices early signs of illness, summons drones and staff before they even ask.

Human staff, by the way.

Because here’s the fun twist. Hiring people actually becomes a status symbol in a post-AGI aristocracy. When your personal AI can handle cooking, cleaning, scheduling, security, and childcare, paying actual humans to do it anyway is the new flex. As in the feudal courts of old, owning someone’s time is part of what proves that you’re an individual of high status.

So the aristocracy keeps small armies of bartenders, nannies, drivers, chefs, stylists, tutors, groundskeepers. Not because they need them. Because they can.

For everyone outside that bubble, life is...fine. Kind of.

You get some version of Universal Basic Income (UBI). Your stipend covers modest housing, food, basic necessities and decent options for staying entertained. You get access to AI tools that help with schoolwork, therapy, entertainment, maybe even personalized career coaching – although “career” starts to mean gig work that involves serving a member of the new aristocracy so that they can look wealthy and powerful to their friends.

If you want to bump up your income a bit, you can pick up some of the aforementioned gig work. You might tend bar, work events, help maintain the systems that keep the aristocracy’s abundant playgrounds humming. But those jobs are precarious by design, and they rarely, if ever, seem to let you stack enough money or influence to actually join the owner class yourself.

Your days are full of screens and simulations. VR worlds cheaper and more vivid than any vacation your grandparents ever dreamed of. Games that adapt to your psyche in real time and feeds tuned to your emotions better than you can tune them yourself. With some restrictions, of course. The aristocracy needs to make sure your emotions don’t lead you to deciding that you someday want real freedom like theirs.

So you’re not starving. You’re not in a camp. You have enough to get by and you’re even allowed to complain, to an extent.

You’re just...contained.

The New ^(Feudal) Deal

So what, exactly, keeps this arrangement stable? Quite simply, it’s the same thing that kept things the same way for much of human history.

Old-school feudalism rested on a pretty simple bargain: the lord protects you from chaos and starvation. And in return, you accept your place and send tribute upward.

The Medium Place runs on a similar deal, just modernized for the post-AGI era:

Protection

No mass unemployment riots. No food lines. No one "stealing our jobs", and no discriminatory pay gaps with stipends. Your UBI always hits on time and the lights stay on. Law enforcement is managed by predictive policing, mass surveillance, and swarms of drone "beat cops" that can quickly detect and interdict crimes. Disasters are handled by drone fleets where possible. The "basic ground" of your life is incredibly stable.

Distraction

In addition to religion (religion in the post-AGI world deserves its own book; I think a massive grassroots resurgence of organized religion is incredibly likely in this world; I won't dive into it here, but if you're interested in a deep-dive about that, send me an email and I'm happy to prioritize it!) and your social circle, you get personalized feeds, virtual worlds, and endless parasocial relationships. The system can read your mood from biometrics and micro-gestures, then push you toward whatever will keep you both online and calm. And, of course, everything you interact with will be advertising to you as well. Marketing can never die.

Hope Tokens

Lotteries, talent shows, creator-economy success stories, and various other contests allow a tiny fraction of people to escape into the aristocracy (or at least be adjacent to it). Their stories are featured everywhere. They're the proof the system uses to argue that "anyone" can make it, even though it's hardly true. It sounds kind of like The Hunger Games, right? Except here you don't have to die when you win the lottery. Yay!

Surveillance and "Safety"

The mass surveillance I mentioned earlier uses sophisticated filters that ingest a firehose of data: every transaction you make, every message you send, and every digital (or even physical) step you take. These filters scan for risk. It's all framed as security like fraud detection, harm reduction, counter-terrorism, community health, and so on. Your social credit score isn't necessarily branded as such, but you know you can lose access to platforms – and thus to money from gig work, food from your favorite restaurants, and your social life – if you accidentally trip the wrong wires.

No one needs to preemptively march you into a re-education camp. You learn the boundaries instinctively. You internalize what’s “safe” to say or search or share, because the penalties for stepping outside the lines show up as tiny, stacking frictions. Slower responses, closed accounts, fewer housing options, mysteriously denied travel permits; basically getting shadow-banned from real life. And, of course, you’ve heard stories about what happens to the people who stepped too far out of line – the ones who mysteriously took an international trip and maybe disappeared from your social (or parasocial, if maybe they were an influencer you liked) circle and are rarely heard from, save for the occasional “hey, I’m still around!” post.

Powerful elites + algorithmic surveillance + UBI + infinite distraction are the basis for the ultimate form of social control.

Why It Feels "Medium" Instead of Horrific

If you’re like me, imagining everything up until this point sounds terrible. You might be inclined to think “there’s no way I’d ever accept that life.” But I’ve unfortunately got a bit of bad news for you, because some pieces of this are already here.

• We already trade privacy for convenience every time we accept yet another Terms of Service agreement that lets trillion-dollar companies build and sell our digital profiles to parties who see us as nothing more than potential revenue.

• We let engagement algorithms decide what exactly counts as “speech that matters” because all the social media companies are doing it anyway and that’s where the people are.

• We accept workplace monitoring software because the rent is due and the job market sucks.

• We become desensitized to suffering as we scroll past wars and tragedies in feeds that are engineered to make a skincare ad feels like respite from an ever-worsening world.

By the time we realize we’re firmly in the aforementioned reality, we’ve already taken a thousand small steps toward it. Each step a compromise. Every inch forward a little worse than the last; but it doesn’t feel terrible compared to the last one, right? We’re all just trying to make it through life, and fighting a system that’s not built with you as the intended beneficiary anyway makes you ask “why even bother fighting it?” And so the Medium Place, rather than being a hard break into a new reality, is merely a continuation: our existing reality just pushed to its logical extreme once AI can do most of the productive work that was once the sole domain of human beings.

Because it arrives so gradually, it doesn’t quite feel like dystopia for most people most of the time. Whatever enforcement apparatus exists doesn’t make you fear for your life with every action you take, but you quietly learn not to search certain topics. You decide not to join that group chat. Not to go to that protest because, hey, you don’t want to invite trouble into your good-enough life.

Materially speaking, your life might even feel a lot better than your parents’ or grandparents’ in some ways. In fairness there’s less grinding work, fantastic healthcare, cheap entertainment, and few, if any, existential money crises. The sky is still blue and soccer practice still happens.

And that’s what makes the Medium Place so dangerous. It’s dystopia that’s not-so-subtly telling you that things always be a lot worse; and that if you don’t like it, we’ll show you just how much worse they can really be. Because if the boot is never fully on your neck, rather just hovering nearby, it takes a different kind of courage to say, “This isn’t good enough.”

Freedom as UX vs. Freedom as Power

The heart of the Medium Place problem is a mismatch between two senses of “freedom.”

On the surface, it seems like you’re more free than at any point in human history. After all, you can sit around and binge all the content you could ever want, you can escape into immersive virtual worlds, and you don’t even have to work a day in your life if you really don’t want to. Like any good tech product, you get a beautiful interface. The UX (”user experience”) of your daily life is super smooth. But underneath the pretty veneer your actual power is increasingly diminished.

You have exactly zero ownership over the platforms that you’re forced to rely on. You don’t get any actual say in the way that the AI models running your life get trained or deployed.

You’re free the way a user is free inside of an app on a phone. The sandbox has plenty of options inside of it. But you get absolutely no control over the sandbox itself.

We already feel that tension in our online existence today. Imagine if it were scaled up to the level of your entire existence.

The AI-Powered Aristocracy

You might ask, “why does AGI have to lead to neofeudalism and aristocracy? It’s because it collapses the gap between labor and capital.

In the classical version of capitalism, workers were its lifeblood. You could organize, strike, vote, and bargain because owners needed the time and bodies of laborers to actually make things.

But in the post-AGI Medium Place, however, capital is the worker. Once a handful of AI models can perform most economically useful tasks, whoever controls them has leverage over literally everything else. Because how does one strike against a datacenter? How can you unionize against an AI model?

Researchers have already begun to sound the alarm about this exact pattern. The more “general” AI becomes, the more bargaining chips will begin to shift to the handful of people who actually own and govern the infrastructure that AI lives on.

Human labor won’t necessarily just vanish in this potential future. High-skill niches will still exist, as well as low-status service labor. But the balance of power will shift so far upward that most people will end up in a position of dependence. They’ll wait for their regularly scheduled allocations of money from a governing body they have no real say in and access to systems they neither understand or control.

That’s what makes this scenario of technofeudalism feel so depressingly apt. It’s simply a return to a period in human history where lords rule over the peasants, except now the peasants aren’t actually needed anymore.

Why UBI Alone Won't Save Us

Whenever discussions about the post-AGI future come up, most peoples’ first reflexive instinct is to say, “That’s why we need Universal Basic income!”

They’re not wrong. There’s just more to it. Some guaranteed baseline of human dignity will be an absolute necessity in a world where essentially all human productivity has been destroyed by AI. The problem is treating UBI like it’s a cure rather than a band-aid for a much deeper kind of dysfunction in human society. Because in the Medium Place, UBI just acts as a tranquilizer instead of a bridge. Instead of abundance for all of us, it will instead be used as a way to keep the masses pacified while the fortunate few enjoy the closest thing to utopia we’ve ever seen. It’s an unholy amalgamation of the worst parts of both socialism and capitalism.

Safety nets and your stipend help to keep you out of destitution, but they don’t give you any leverage over the people who actually own the machines. They don’t let you buy any tangible amount of shares in the platforms that govern your life, and they certainly don’t give you a vote in how surveillance is run or how AI systems are deployed. They’re meant to lock in dependence. You live off a payment managed by the same corporate state that set up the new technofeudal order in the first place. You’re “taken care of,” in the way that farm animals are taken care of. Fed, stabled, tagged, and watched.

When, not if, the terms of that arrangement shift, your ability to resist the system will be increasingly limited by design. “Safety” requirements will expand. “Misinformation” will be defined ever more broadly. Weaknesses in the system will be treated like software bugs and patched to make the guardrails ever stronger.

Is the Medium Place Inevitable?

Is this just doomposting? Am I selling the same kind of (cope/hope)-ium that the AI evangelists and doomers are hocking? The truth is that I really don’t know.

My take here is based on what I’ve observed as a student of human history. We’ve made incredible gains in material abundance for the common person in the modern world, but the one thing that has remained the same is the zero-sum game played by power brokers and influence peddlers. Greed is a natural instinct for humans, and I hate the game rather than the player here. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have managed scarcity. It’s not farfetched that we’d play the same game in a post-AGI world of true material abundance. That those with the most power and influence would fight to cement their own power for fear of losing it to someone else rather than for some callous cartoon-villain goal of ruling over everyone else.

I don’t think that the Medium Place is our only option. But I also don’t think that we can just let things play out as they may and hope for the best. We need to place our thumbs on the scale, because if we don’t, there is no good outcome for the masses when AGI is plugged in to our current sociopolitical economy.

If we don’t want this dystopia, we have work ahead of us that’s harder and less glamorous than talking to chatbots. We need to fight over who owns and who governs the system.

That involves boring work like building legal frameworks that treat AI models like utilities instead of toys to be deployed at the whims of private enterprise. It means aggressively regulating firms that aim to own the entirety of everyday human life. Humanity at large needs to have a genuine say over how AI is deployed across our world. We have to insist that the abundance generated by AI comes in the form of more homes, more energy, and more infrastructure for all of society instead of our historical dichotomies. There will likely always be an upper-class and lower-class, but in a post-AGI world there’s no reason that gap can’t be narrowed significantly.

It also means pushing ourselves to imagine scenarios deeper than the simplistic binary of “killer robot apocalypse” vs. “perfect utopia,” because if those are the only futures we let ourselves entertain, the Medium Place will remain an invisible force that slowly metastasizes itself into reality.

Whether you like AI or not (and to be honest, I really don’t. I’m the mouse angrily yelling, “who moved my cheese?!”), the reality is that AI can and will do incredible things. The fight needs to be over whether most of us will live as full participants in that future or if we’ll just be well-entertained NPCs in someone else’s utopia.

The Medium Place is what we get if we let the current top of the pyramid plug a godlike tool into the status quo and call it a day.

We don’t have to accept that. But refusing it requires something uncomfortable. It requires looking at lives that are “not that bad” and saying, out loud, “This isn’t freedom. This isn’t enough.”

Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoy my work and want to support me further, one-time tips are always appreciated but never expected.

Buy me a coffee

Grab your phone and try to reach anything that isn’t an ad.

You unlock the screen. What’s the first notification? Probably a promoted post? Go to a retailer’s website. Before you even get a chance to browse, you’re accosted by popups begging for your email address in exchange for a 10% coupon. Even this blog, sadly, engages in that same behavior.

Try to go read a news story. Maybe there’s an associated video with the article. It autoplays, but not because it’s useful. It plays because that’s the best way to guarantee you see yet another ad whether you were planning to actually watch the video or not.

Maybe you like to scroll TikTok; every third clip is either someone hocking goods on TikTok shop or a straight up ad. And even among videos that aren’t explicitly advertisements, you can rest assured that a significant number of those creators are pretending to “give advice” while they’re really just funneling you into their affiliate link tree.

Open any new AAA video game. Battlefield 6 comes to mind. You’ll probably find battle passes, loot boxes, skins sponsored by energy drink brands, or even actual in-game billboards.

Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” has never been more apt. Enshittification is the process where platforms start out good, then gradually transform into useless piles of garbage in order to wring out more profit. And what started as a description for companies like Facebook, AirBnB, Uber, TikTok, and the tech space in general, is now a pretty solid description of America in the 2020s. The internet enshittified first; but work, politics, culture quickly followed. Now even friendship and “personality” run on ad logic.

It’s a theocracy of sorts; the culmination of an attention economy, where everything must serve the ad gods.

The Internet: Wild West to Commercial Break

We’ll start with the most obvious culprit here: the modern web.

Using search engines like Google used to feel like a public library with a fantastic catalog system. You could type a question and get back pages made by real people who actually cared about the topic. Now the first page is made up of sponsored junk, SEO sludge, and AI slop strategically manufactured to game the search ranking system. Anyone who grew up with or experienced the earlier internet can plainly confirm that search results in 2025 are worse than useless. Even the “site:reddit.com” trick is losing its usefulness given the rise of AI slop infecting everything we consume.

Social platforms followed the same arc. The old Facebook was posts from people you know. Generally useful content overall, and if you didn’t want to hear from the town crazies you could just unfriend them or block them. Facebook now? Agitprop, rage bait, and “suggested for you” content that paid to be there, juiced by an algorithm that literally decided that making you angry was five times more valuable than making you happy. TikTok, too, was pure dopamine at first; then the shop tab metastasized to the point where the app now feels like QVC but for shitty Temu items. Twitter turned into an influencer casino where paying for a blue check gets your replies shoved in everyone’s face.

Doctorow’s enshittification life cycle is pretty simply:

1. Be good to your users in order to grow.

2. Be good to your business customers to lock them in.

3. Once you’ve trapped them, squeeze them both so that you can deliver more and more value to the shareholders.

That’s enshittification in a nutshell: everything that made a product or service decent is later treated as a detriment to revenue.

Add the marketing obsession to the equation, too. Every pixel on a website now has to “perform.” When a user takes an action it’s simply a signal in a giant auction that determines how much a brand values a person’s next click, tap or lingering eyes. The internet used to be an information superhighway, but it’s devolved into a market that simply there to rent space in your head.

And because these strategies performed so well financially, that logic metastasized into the rest of daily life as well.

In Marketing We Trust!

This creep is literally everywhere once you start seeing it.

Video game developers used to sell you just that: video games. Now they sell you the game, a battle pass, catalogs of often branded skins, plus in-world billboards plus a branded crossover with a soda company. And don’t forget the pop-ups. You can’t open the game and just get into a match without the game throwing a pop-up ad in your face to beg you to buy new skins or that battle pass. Your $70 is the entrance fee to enter the digital mall, but the loading screen is an ad, the menu is an ad, and your character is walking ad real estate for whatever brands bought crossovers that season.

TikTok is no longer “short video,” it’s just a home shopping channel. Every other clip is someone selling you something. Instagram feeds are half people and half “creators” pretending their life stories just naturally lead into discount codes for the newest protein powder.

Even the physical world has been strip-mined at this point. Go to a gas pump with a screen. Is it showing you anything useful? Nope. It’s just playing you ads. Uber inserts ads mid-ride. Your smart TV plays commercials inside the device you already paid for. Cars have even begun to ship with subscription features. If there’s a quiet surface anywhere in the world, it’s ripe for ruin as a “monetization opportunity.”

This is the beginning of technofeudalism. A small cartel controls chokepoints like app stores, search, payment processors (those Venmo transactions where you pay someone and add the pizza emoji? Don’t worry, the pizza ads will find you soon!); and then charges rent on every single human interaction that passes through. It’s been said for a long time, but you’re rarely the customer anymore. You’re just the product being sold to advertisers.

Work is Love, Work is Life

Our workplaces aren’t immune to the cancer of enshittification.

“Bossware” is installed on your machine to track your keystrokes, your webcam, and the human-ness of your mouse movements. It’s sold to companies with much the same pitch used for ad tech. There’s more data, more optimization, and more efficiency. Your tangible, unquantifiable performance comes second to the myriad of metrics that get reported to determine your “productivity.”

That’s just corporate work. But gig workers don’t even get the dignity of having a boss with a face. The platform is their boss. It decides rates, routes, deactivations, and “promotions.” Over time customers will pay more while the gig workers earn less. Drivers and couriers are treated as disposable in this revolving door; all in the pursuit of delivering value to the shareholder, of course.

And let us not forget the personal-branding sickness. LinkedIn’s transformation from useful networking platform to influencer-drive social media slop taught a generation to consider themselves corporate mascots for their own existence. You’re not just a designer; no, you’re a “thought leader” posting mini TED talks so that the algorithm will remember your face and so you appear professionally relevant when seeking employment. Every single bullet point on a resume becomes an ad for you, written in the most deranged buzzword dialect ever invented.

Life as a Subscription Bundle™

Housing is supposed to be shelter. But because our political systems, over decades, abandoned abundance in favor of managing scarcity, is now just an investment.

During the pandemic, institutional investors gobbled up single-family homes in bulk and turned them into rentals. If you’re trying to buy a starter home, you’re probably not bidding against a young couple who’s just trying to buy a place to live. You’re instead bidding against a faceless fund running simulations on revenue yield. If they win, the house turns into yet another subscription you pay for until you die.

Everything else got the same treatment. Airlines, hotels, ticketing sites are littered with junk fees and upsells. Shrinkflation quietly charges more for less. Streaming lured us all with their promises of saving money by cutting the cord; then they gradually raised prices, added ads, and split their catalogs to the point where you’re probably spending nearly the same amount on streaming services as you used to spend on cable. But don’t forget — if you want to watch live sports, you still more than likely have to pay for cable as well. They really figured out how to have their cake and eat it too.

Everyday life is beginning to look like a subscription bundle. You subscribe to housing, healthcare coverage, phone plans, “productivity” tools, streaming services, cloud storage, kids’ apps, and even your car’s heated seats. Miss a payment? Part of your world just switches off. Rather than just selling products, the enshittification game has optimized for “lock them in, then twist the price knob forever.”

Enshittification is monopoly power bundled with recurring billing.

Making America Polarized Again!

If you thought enshittification stopped at commerce, think again! It infected politics too.

Political campaigns just define you as demographic segments. They’ll throw A/B-tested slogans at your feed to make you fearful or angry. Rather than persuading you that a candidate has a plan for governance, the goal is really just to keep you in the outrage funnel (and, of course, buy the president’s cryptocurrency — which definitely isn’t a scam).

Cable news and partisan creators discovered that measured, objective, and boring governance doesn’t move numbers, doesn’t sell super chats, and doesn’t drive Patreon subscriptions. But telling people that some “enemy” wants to erase them? That’ll make you rich. So that’s what we get. Every televised congressional hearing becomes content and every tragedy becomes copy for a fundraising campaign before the bodies are cold.

Legislation is almost secondary. Why bother doing the hard work involved with fixing healthcare when last quarter’s metrics went through the roof by simply screaming about “illegals?” The incentives favor viral cruelty over boring competence, so virtue signaling about the latest culture war takes precedence over crafting serious AI policy at a time where it actually may pose an existential threat to modern society.

Politics have become just another branch in the sprawling ad industry, and from that lens, the collective nihilism of the younger generations makes a lot of sense.

Culture, Friendship, and Influencer Brain Rot

Culture had no chance of escaping this fate either.

Consider Hollywood. Every other movie is a remake. Is that because the remakes are better than original content? Nope. Hollywood went all-in on franchises, reboots, and remakes because they’re easier to market globally than original stories. Streaming platforms buy and sell rights to popular shows, and if Netflix has a rough quarter? It’s okay, they can just cancel Santa Clarita Diet even though it was great, but not as popular as Stranger Things. No more paying Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant if we’re not looking at infinite growth.

Whether it’s music, books, or games, recommendation engines decide what’s “hot,” and they are incredibly opinionated. Ever notice how songs used to be at least 3-4 minutes long, but now they’re barely breaking the 2 minute mark? Yeah, that’s enshittification at work there too. Creative processes like making music are tuned to the almighty algorithm. Catchy hook that can be a viral sound on TikTok; verses and depth be damned.

Your social life, too, gets sucked into this same filter. Friendships turn into engagement metrics. Who liked your posts? Who shared your clips? Who engages with you? People start treating their face and personality as “their brand.” Rather than hanging out, you collaborate. Rooftop drinks are photo shoots and hobbies are potential content.

Meanwhile, we’re lonelier than we’ve ever been. The Surgeon General had to literally issue a warning that half the country is experiencing serious loneliness, with physical health effects on par with smoking. And what was the solution? It certainly wasn’t investment into public spaces and mental health. Instead we got AI companion apps marketed as “connection.”

Is This Inevitable?

None of this is necessarily some natural evolution of technology; rather it’s a very specific set of decisions about how power and money are allowed to work.

We could have built an internet funded like a utility, but we chose surveillance ads instead. Instead of cutting drudge work and shortening workweeks, we’re using AI to fire people and crank out endless slop to glue your eyes to more ads. We could govern like adults and invest in housing, transit, healthcare, and the climate. Instead, we’ve collectively decided to let oligarchs and theocrats squabble over whose brand of control gets to dictate our lives.

And this is the real obscenity about all of this. Not that everything has become an ad. It’s the fact that “ad logic” has replaced any serious sense of what a decent society should actually work to deliver. If it can’t be auctioned it’s treated as fluff. You can’t have a park without a sponsor’s logo, a public train that isn’t plastered in brand wraps, or news outlets that don’t farm rage for revenue because the march toward infinite growth demands these things.

The answer can’t just be “digital detoxing” on an individual level or being angry at people for liking — and working for — nice things. The answer is simply power. Laws that work for the people by breaking up monopolies (and modernizing laws to actually redefine what monopolies look like in our era), block harmful data harvesting, and make some spaces legally off-limits to the ad machine.

If we keep letting everything be consumed by enshittification — our social media feeds, our jobs, our friendships, and our elections — we shouldn’t pretend to be surprised when the country feels hollowed out, like a private equity firm buying a company and stripping it for parts and profit.

Electoral power in the hands of ordinary people like you and me is the only thing that can stop the cancer of enshittification. We need to build abundance; to replace a gerontocratic government; and to elect Americans who care about Americans to rebalance the scales of our society.

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or if you just want to chat. You can find me on the following platforms:

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnalignedPolitics

• Twitter: https://x.com/just_becs

• Email: rebecca@unaligned.sh

After nearly a year of the second Trump administration’s flurry of (often illegal) executive actions and Steve Bannon’s early cries of “muzzle velocity” as a governing philosophy, the would-be authoritarian regime now finds itself mired in a bog of internal knife fights, lawsuits, broken promises, and a growing chorus of allies who’ve decided self-preservation matters a lot more than loyalty to the man in the high tower.

How did we get here?

You might chalk it up to dumb luck for the “good guys” — and sure, there’s some of that — but the real story is, as usual, a lot dumber and more human. The new Trump coalition happily dragged almost anyone into the tent: Q-pilled zealots, the bored and apolitical, people obsessed with “releasing the Epstein files,” and people who just remembered that life felt less chaotic from 2017 until the pandemic. Some were motivated by ultranationalism, some by nihilism, some by xenophobia; but the new coalition was propelled to victory by those whose votes were informed by growing rents and grocery bills.

But it’s almost impossible to open your tent that wide and still give everyone what they thought they were promised. It’s even harder when the only person you actually care about is yourself, and your real project isn’t restoring America to “greatness”, rather it’s just personal enrichment and power at the expense of anyone and everyone else.

Muzzle Velocity to Mud

The opening months of Trump’s second term felt like a speedrun of every authoritarian fever dream. Trump comes back into office insisting he has a sweeping mandate. He purges civil servants who are there for America instead of Trump, he gives Project 2025’s founders free reign to implement it, and he surrounds himself with tech-bro asset J.D. Vance and a bench full of Heritage lawyers and tech-world oligarchs (the so-called Christofascists vs. Technofascists from my previous article).

For a while, it works. The right’s culture-war superfans are ecstatic. Tech oligarchs get their AI wish list. Christian nationalists get their hands on the machinery of the state. The average apolitical voter isn’t paying close attention yet; they just see a guy who said he’d bulldoze the things that are making their lives shitty and, to his credit, it looks like he actually is bulldozing something. And who knows if it’s good; at least they can finally see some kind of change from the government.

But no matter the muzzle velocity, no bullet escapes gravity’s pull.

Trump’s tariff tantrums and chaotic budget cuts start hitting regular people where it hurts: rent, groceries, car payments. His “I’ll end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours” promise turns into a groveling plea for Ukraine to accept what amounts to a surrender plan that was written in Moscow. Gaza is a hellscape: first we talk about U.S. occupation, then we write a blank check to Netanyahu, then constant lurching between “let them finish the job” and “wow this looks pretty bad on TV, tone it down.”

The authoritarian machine isn’t falling apart for lack of power. They came in with what felt like unlimited power. But the muzzle velocity drops as the machinery jams. Without any real guiding principles from the king, the factions that happily marched in lockstep when the target was “woke elites” suddenly remember they hate each other — all while a growing contingent of actual neo-Nazis begins to infect the mainstream of the Republican party.

I won’t pretend to have been above panic or that I always had the “correct” opinion about how Trump’s second term would play out (although — shameless plug — I did predict the right-wing overextension on the culture war front). The truth is that I’ve been, and still am, deeply concerned for the future of the republic. I genuinely believe that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the constitutional order and that there is still a real possibility that he, with support from his Christian nationalist and Tech oligarch allies, will be able to assert dictatorial control over the United States of America. But Trump’s own selfishness; his lack of discipline; his willingness to sell the country off to the highest bidders appears to be directly working against the actors who have long planned to discard liberal democracy in favor of their own brands of autocracy.

The Bill Comes Due

Some big problems are grinding Trump’s second term into stalemate.

Epstein Files

“Release the list” was a rallying cry on the right-wing for years. In the run-up to the election, Trump’s surrogates turned appointees (meet conspiracy theorists & podcasters turned FBI chiefs Kash Patel and Dan Bongino) were gung-ho about releasing the so-called list and exposing all the crooks involved.

But when the chance finally arrives and the power is all his? Trump does what Trump always does when his own interests are at risk: he tries his hardest to bury it. That goes badly. Republicans in Congress, some sincerely disgusted and some just smelling blood in the water, join their Democratic colleagues to force a release of the files. Trump loses the fight in his own party and then, as usual, pretends it was his idea all along.

To a lot of his voters, this really doesn’t look quite right. The guy who promised to finally expose the “elite pedo ring” suddenly looks like he’s actually…protecting it? You don’t need to believe every insane conspiracy theory to feel gross about that. In the past I never actually thought Trump was implicated in the Epstein affair, but his actions have even made me question just why he would fight so hard to keep them hidden.

Cost of Living

Trump and his people can spin in the media and tweet all the charts they want about “Bidenflation.” But the reality is that none of it actually matters when a family walks into the grocery store and watches the total climb. Tariffs sold to the American people as righting some wrong by foreign countries ripping us off actually work as a tax on food, clothes, and the basics that everyone needs. Eventually the White House has to partially back off and ease some of the tariffs on consumer goods. That reversal pisses off the nationalists and confirms what all the critics were shouting from the start: this was an entirely self-inflicted wound. Now the Supreme Court even seems poised to strike down Trump’s unilateral ability to impose tariffs.

Foreign Policy

The 24-hour Ukraine “miracle” that Trump promised turns into months of pressure on Zelenskyy to accept a “peace plan” that’s functionally a surrender: permanent loss of territory, forced neutrality, and their military on a leash. The Kremlin loves it — and why wouldn’t they? They did write it, after all. But Kyiv doesn’t. Europe doesn’t. Even some old-school Republican hawks don’t. The administration ends up looking weak and oddly eager to carry Putin’s water just so Trump can get a “win” on paper and get that Nobel Peace Prize he’s been yearning for.

This same pattern plays out in the Middle East. Trump’s early “do whatever you want” approach to Netanyahu delights Christian Zionists, but the footage from Gaza horrifies almost everyone else — even people who otherwise supported Israel’s war against Hamas. (And no one forgot about the “Trump Gaza” hotel idea either).

Under pressure from markets, allies, a younger generation that’s not keen on endless war, and a surprisingly loud contingent of groypers who just don’t want us helping “the Jews,” the White House nudges toward a ceasefire. That enrages the hardliners who thought they finally had their biblical final showdown, while doing nothing to erase the months of carnage.

Mass Deportation

Lots of people who voted for Trump were thinking, “Sure, deport violent offenders, fix the asylum system, stop the chaos.” That’s honestly a very reasonable take. They weren’t thinking, “Let’s watch ICE raid churches, terrorize daycares, and teargas children.” They weren’t prepared for a teenager who gets wrongfully deported, or the videos of parents ripped away from their terrified and heartbroken kids in parking lots.

The hardcore nativists and propagandists may cheer; but business owners, neighbors, pastors, friends, and a lot of quiet-Republican suburbanites do not. It feels a lot less like “law and order” and more like a government that enjoys cruelty for its own sake.

Pile those together. Epstein, groceries, Ukraine, Gaza, deportation raids — and you get a simple picture: Trump’s version of “strength” keeps boomeranging back and hitting him in the face. Not necessarily in a way that magically saves liberal democracy on its own, but seemingly enough to weaken the spell.

Kleptocracy vs. True Believers

What happens in an authoritarian project when the dictator doesn’t actually care about the ideology?

I’ve written about this before; the so-called altar and algorithm. There’s the Christian nationalists on one side: Heritage, the Federalist Society, Mike Johnson, Kevin Roberts, and the preachers who say secular society is heretical. On the other side you have the tech oligarchs: Thiel, Musk, and the rest of the Curtis Yarvin acolytes who want a CEO-run state.

And they can certainly work together, for a time. But only as long as the enemy is something abstract like “wokeness.” But their goals are just fundamentally incompatible. One wants a theocracy that locks in a biblical idea of family, gender, and faith. Meanwhile the other wants a society in the end-stage of capitalism, where markets and oligarchs rule over everything.

But while Trump is happy to accept patronage from these two factions, the reality is that he’s loyal to neither of them. His only loyalty is, and always has been, to himself.

That means every single serious project inside his administration must get pegged to the most important questions: what does this do for me right now? Does it help me and my family get richer? Does it help me avoid my legal troubles? Do I get publicly praised for it?

So you get scenes like:

• Project 2025 staffers working for years to draft policy blueprints for a new theocratic state, only to be kneecapped by Trump’s flip-flopping on policy.

• Tech billionaires plotting to build their surveillance/AI state, then get humiliated on social media because Trump felt disrespected or slighted in some way.

• Hard-right influencers whipping up their audiences for “revolution,” then privately realizing that the guy they’re shilling for keeps fawning over whoever flatters or charms him the best.

To be clear, none of this makes Trump less dangerous. It just means that the danger is undisciplined. It’s a shambling, corrupt machine prone to tripping over its own feet while it swings at enemies.

The Kids at the Edge of the Stage

There’s another growing faction in this fight that’s easy to miss: the zoomer far-right.

Nick Fuentes and his army of “Groypers” don’t care about constitutional theory and they don’t give a damn about liberal democracy. Their generation came of age with only ever knowing Trump’s vitriolic brand of politics. COVID and its lockdowns shaped their youths. Fuentes’ so-called “Groypers” see their prospects as hopeless. From dating, career prospects, or home ownership. So to take revenge on a system they feel failed them, they’ve decided they just want to burn it all down with open fascism. They want anti-miscegenation laws to right the “wrongs” that have led to their failed dating lives. They want a white ethno-state so “those people” stop taking their job opportunities.

Trump himself has always played a really weird game with these groups. He likes to toss them rhetorical scraps just to keep them happy and make them believe he’s on their side (remember “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by”), and then pretends like he has no idea who they are whenever he gets bad PR because of it. Meanwhile, they chant his name and talk openly about what comes after Trump. They want a leader who is even more ruthless; who is even less bound by the old norms; and most importantly, less interested in Trumpian-style grift and more in ideological purity.

These people have always been kept to the fringes of the right-wing, but they’re beginning to creep their way into the mainstream of the Republican party and that is serving to further weaken the party’s grip on power.

From the outside it might look like a monolith, but from the inside it’s a huge mess of clashing fantasies about what restoring our nation to “greatness” actually means.

So What Happens Next?

You might be wondering, “so…what does this all mean? What happens next?” It’s tempting to think that these cracks and schisms mean that the Trump administration is destined to come crashing down. I’d love to believe that. But I don’t.

I reiterate that I believe Donald Trump is a unique danger to the constitutional order. The guardrails have been demolished. The courts are packed with loyalists. The administrative state has been bent and kneecapped in ways that will take years to undo, even under great leadership.

What has changed is that Trump’s “aura” of invincibility appears to be fading, if not altogether gone. Republicans watched him lose the Epstein fight in a chamber they control. They watched off-year elections in 2025 become mini-referendums on Trumpism specifically, with Democrats wildly overperforming and moderate Republicans bleeding support in areas that were previously safe. They’re starting to imagine life after him. Quietly for now, but their whispers will only keep growing.

On the movement side, you can practically feel the tension between the techno-authoritarians, the religious nationalists, and the zoomer fascists. Each thinks they’re the future of the right. Each thinks they could do a dictatorship “properly” if this asshole at the top would just get behind them instead of only being in it for himself. None of them are willing to compromise enough to build a truly stable regime together.

For a coalition that wants to beat back MAGA, Trumpism, and the broader right-wing extremist project, this moment is a weird mix of danger and opportunity. The danger is obvious: desperate authoritarians do desperate things and a cornered regime is capable of atrocities it wouldn’t have dared try when it felt untouchable.

Regular people who voted for Trump because they were hurting are now watching groceries spike, allies die overseas, neighbors dragged off in raids, and their president twist himself into a pretzel to hide the truth about rich pedophiles. No one expects them to suddenly become liberals. But some of them are open, for the first time in a very long time, to the idea that Trump’s “art of the deal” has just been a con all along.

And that’s where a real opposition has to live. We can’t waste time lecturing people and chastising them for voting the way they did. We need to give them an off-ramp. A politics that says: yes, the system is broken; no, the answer is not a king; here’s a way to actually make your life less miserable without putting absolute power in the hands of a guy who wouldn’t think twice about screwing you over to make a buck.

The authoritarian MAGA project is bloated and paranoid; it’s full of backstabbers and looters. And its weakened state might just be a chance for a true pro-democracy coalition to destroy this illiberal ideology once and for all.

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or if you just want to chat. You can find me on the following platforms:

• LinkTree

• Substack: https://unaligned.sh

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnalignedPolitics

• Twitter: https://x.com/just_becs

• Email: rebecca@unaligned.sh

I want to paint an ugly, brutal picture for you. Mohammed Hashim: a two-year-old boy. Dead. His limp body being held by his weeping father, mother, and siblings. The sweet, innocent boy’s face is ashen and his stomach is empty. His family had to watch as he took his last breath on this earth. Not too long before he died he was a typical toddler — playful, goofy, silly, learning about the world around him. A lot like my own son, who is also two. But one day, the food rations that kept him alive just…stopped.1

0.2%. That’s the percentage of the annual U.S. budget that was allocated to USAID (United States Agency for International Development)2. To put it in perspective: the median U.S. taxpayer pays around $14,000 in federal taxes annually. $28 of that $14,000 went to USAID. That’s about 7¢ per day3. Donald Trump and Elon Musk illegally gutted the agency, whose budget was allocated by Congress4. As a result, it’s projected that 14 million people will die by 2030 (including 4.5 million children under five) — people who otherwise were expected to have survived5. Make no mistake — you’re not getting that $28 back. Thanks to Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” that’s just going toward increased deficit spending to fund tax cuts for people in my tax bracket and above6. If you voted for this, thanks for your patronage. My net worth thanks you as you get poorer. If you voted against it, I’m truly sorry.

Even if you personally don’t give a shit about some dead toddler on the other side of the world, what you should care about is the soft power that the United States is willingly leaving for grabs on the world stage. What we’ll spend in blood and credibility is incalculable. A Lancet analysis found USAID programs helped prevent 91 million deaths worldwide from 2001-20217. People in developing countries used to think of America as a land of “opportunity”; of “freedom”; a country that gave a goddamn about the greater good in the world compared to the pathetic despots that ruled over them. Those people yearned to one day become Americans. They dreamed of making it to America and not only participating in our culture, but assimilating to it. They dreamed of their children growing up in the Greatest Country in the World™ and becoming everything they wished they had had a chance to accomplish. But that’s now a thing of the past. The pre-Donald Trump United States that we grew up in is — in all but name — gone on the world stage. $28 per year is an absolute steal for the soft power that USAID bought us globally. It not only kept us relevant, it kept us safe. It kept us popular. It helped maintain our “America #1” image8.

Two weeks after Mohammed Hashim died, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and lied: “No one has died.” This is the same Marco Rubio who, in 2016, said of Donald Trump, “He is a con artist. He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy — his entire career.” Marco Rubio is a coward. He may be playing a savvy political game; denying causality and trying to keep Donald Trump from his worst impulses, but make no mistake: he is a coward of the highest order. He and the rest of this administration’s enablers will have to live the rest of their lives carrying the weight of knowing that they condemned not only baby Mohammed Hashim, but millions of others, to death for the vanity of a small, pathetic narcissist9.

Donald Trump signed an executive order to freeze foreign aid for 90 days. It was marketed as a “review.” Contractors were told to stand down, disbursements were halted, and programs hit a hard pause. It didn’t matter if you were mid-treatment, mid-pregnancy, or mid-meal. Elon Musk’s new vanity project “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE for short; a shitty internet meme in case you weren’t aware) swaggered through agencies while senior USAID staff were being placed on leave or locked out of their own headquarters. Before long, Rubio announced that the “purge” had been completed. 83% of USAID programs were eliminated10.

This “freeze” became a common occurrence. Courts pushed back, but the White House just reached for pocket rescissions to cancel nearly $5 billion in Congressionally approved foreign aid and peacekeeping funds by running out the clock with an audacious end-run around the power of the purse that Congress is supposed to have — before cowards like Mike Johnson and John Thune abdicated their constitutional powers to a would-be authoritarian11.

Myanmar/Thailand

Food rations were severed for about 1 million people. Starving families who used to have reliable meals now survive on one meager meal per day or forage for roots to try and make it through the day. Mohammed Hashim is one of many children who has died for a billionaire’s vanity project12.

Congo/Ethiopia/Somalia

Malnutrition programs were halted. Tens of thousands of children were labeled “in mortal danger.” Health ministries were forced to lay off thousands of dedicated workers who spent their lives fighting HIV, malaria, and TB. Dozens of clinics had to close when salaries could no longer be paid.

Yemen/Syria/Afghanistan

Maternal care was cut for hundreds of thousands. Northern Syria saw clinics shuttered en masse. Hundreds of mobile health teams operating in Afghanistan were suddenly suspended. After two decades of destabilizing the Middle East, our one token of goodwill vanished13.

USAID’s mission has never been particularly “sexy.” The agency has always worked quietly in the background to prevent outbreaks, famines, and failed states. It championed an unglamorous American leadership that the downtrodden across the world could count on and look up to.

Our rage matters. It tells a most uncomfortable truth about harm. It’s easy to think of these things as abstractions, but we’re arguing over the worth of 0.2%; of $28/year; of 7¢/day. Was it worth Mohammed Hashim’s life? Was it worth the 4.5 million children under five that will die in the next five years? If you care about American hegemony on the world stage, you should feel ashamed of our country. If you consider yourself a Christian you should feel ashamed of our discarded humanity.

What’s left to say at this point? The truth is small like Mohammed Hashim’s body; unbearable like the grief his family will carry with them every day for the rest of their lives to satisfy the vanity of the weak and pathetic men who sentenced their baby to death. It’s also fixable, if we decide that the richest country in the world can afford both a conscience and 0.2%14.

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or if you just want to chat. You can find me on the following platforms:

• LinkTree

• Substack: https://unaligned.sh

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnalignedPolitics

• Twitter: https://x.com/just_becs

• Email: rebecca@unaligned.sh

On a gray morning in Washington, D.C., two doors stand open, facing each other across a long hallway. Behind one is a makeshift chapel in a federal conference room. It’s adorned with folding chairs arranged neatly in rows, a lectern draped in a cross painted red, white, and blue, and influential preachers who are practicing just the right words to replace secular law with codified Biblical authority. Behind the other lies a high tech war room. It’s full of monitors, dashboards, and machines siphoning data from, and building surveillance infrastructure for, the American people. AI roadmaps are pinned to the walls. Former tech platform builders are now busy shaping a new kind of state.

Between these rooms, a family strolls by, shopping bags in hand. They don’t glance through either open door; they’re not interested. They’re only here to collect.

That’s the second Trump presidency in a nutshell: two authoritarian factions living under the same roof, neither loyal to the other, and each convinced they are destined for ascendance. On the sidelines sits the Trump family, more than happy to auction off access to the highest (or most flattering) bidder while the house burns down, a kleptocracy that thrives on factional bidding wars and pay-to-play governance. “Supporting” players include legislative and judicial branches that have all but abdicated their own constitutional authorities in the hopes that they can just ride out the turbulence and land back in a world of sanity when all is said and done.

The Gospel of the Machine

The brain trust behind Silicon Valley’s pivot toward authoritarianism is formed by Peter Thiel’s network. They’ve installed Vice President J.D. Vance as their highest-ranking operative, and he’s surrounded by proteges like David Sacks who are embedded across the federal government. They’ve begun their efforts of reshaping America in the image of venture capital. Their ideology is transparent. Thiel himself declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Their endgame isn’t particularly subtle, either. Influenced by their philosophical godfather Curtis Yarvin’s “CEO-dictator” model, their vision of government is one that is just another platform to be optimized and monetized. Democracy is an outdated concept. Labor rights are just obstacles to innovation. Social safety nets are market distortions. Instead, they imagine a world in which billionaires set public priorities and “efficiency” replaces equality as the measure of justice. It’s like if Amazon ran every aspect of your life. Elections would just become shareholder meetings and citizens would become “users.” It’s the enshittification of the internet brought to everyday governance. Yay.

To technofascists like Musk, Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, salvation comes through capital couched in the optimism of the early internet age — when technology disrupted entrenched players and “made the world a better place™”.

Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” promises grandiose outcomes like infinite growth and prices falling to zero, but it conveniently omits the fate of the other 99% of society who would inevitable become economically irrelevant once machines are able to surpass human labor. Under their vision for America (and the world), capital owners return to their rightful places as rulers while they leverage automation and AI to further consolidate wealth and power — with human beings becoming largely obsolete. Musk’s platform X (formerly known as Twitter) already functions as a quasi-official propaganda ministry, amplifying regime narratives while drowning large-scale dissent. And on top of that is Palantir with that their lucrative federal data contracts that aim to expand surveillance to unprecedented extremes.

This is technofeudalism: a cult of the same old power-hungry sociopaths we’ve seen throughout history, except this time wrapped in the veneer of innovation for humanity. They have the money (Musk, Thiel, Andreessen), the infrastructure (literally every platform you use), and increasingly, the levers of government. At this point we’ve taken a step past mere dystopian theory. This future is frighteningly achievable. If they succeed, America will not only look undemocratic; it’ll look medieval, a (somewhat familiar) new world where a small handful of tech lords rule over a population that’s been made economically irrelevant by their own creations. In a word: technofeudalism.

The Gospel of the Cross

The second faction, in the meantime, believes salvation will come through scripture. Architected by the Heritage Foundation, their blueprint is Project 2025: a thousand-page document that openly outlines the plan for a Christian nationalist American state. Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, famously called it “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Like the technofascists, operatives from Heritage and their ilk are deeply embedded across the federal government, occupying key positions. House Speaker Mike Johnson calls the separation of church and state a “misnomer.” Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director turned inquisitor, diverts federal funds from social programs to “faith-based initiatives” and uses bureaucracy as a “moral” weapon.

Democracy is heresy to the Christofascists. It’s a rebellion against their divine hierarchy. The president is not a public servant but a chosen instrument of God, ruling by revelation rather than consent (though make no mistake, Christofascists and Technofascists alike hate Donald Trump, a godless and unprincipled egomaniac who is simply an easy-to-buy vessel for their ambitions). Their stated goal is theocracy, where law is derived from their interpretations of holy texts rather than the Constitution, where the Bible replaces the Bill of Rights, and where dissent is sin.

When they speak of “restoring order,” that really is just a demand that half the country kneel. They speak of repealing the 19th amendment and reducing women to homemakers and breeding stock. Queer Americans are to be erased by decree. Education is stripped of science and history in favor of “classical academies” that teach submission as virtue. Public life is re-engineered around prayer, punishment, and absolute obedience to those ordained by God to rule over the masses. It’s the Handmaid’s Tale, but with bluer skies, more paperwork, and Patriotic™.

This movement’s strength lies in its organization. The courts are fortified by the Federalist Society and the intellectual scaffolding is built by Heritage. They’ve spent half a century constructing a machine for theocratic rule, and they believe that this is their moment to strike.

Yet amid the seemingly impenetrable strengths outlined above, their greatest weakness is cultural gravity. Theocracy demands total control over hearts and minds, but culture has simply moved on. With broad public support for reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, and secular governance, ruling by scripture means ruling against the majority. And like all rigid hierarchies, it can only sustain itself through force.

The Kleptocratic Core

And presiding over both temples is Donald Trump: the false messiah of both creeds.

Trump is neither technocrat nor theocrat. He is, instead, a broker of chaos, a malignant narcissist who cares little about ideological visions of the fate of the Republic. What Trump is really selling isn’t ideology; it’s access. Every policy becomes a product; every appointment, a transaction. Crypto tycoons secure pardons through Trump-branded tokens. Sovereign wealth funds trade investments for policy favors. The Trump family converts government power into personal wealth, openly and shamelessly.

To the technocrats and theocrats alike, Trump is simply a useful tool — someone who will deregulate on command if the price is right, or an imperfect instrument of God serving a higher purpose. To Trump himself, though? He’s just a tollbooth operator on the highway to power. He’s indifferent to the ideological direction as long as the money, power, patronage, and public praise keep flowing.

The result is a regime that feels simultaneously futuristic and medieval: a digital oligarchy cloaked in religious pageantry, driven by a single overriding principle — graft. The state no longer governs; it simply grifts. And this transactional nature breeds a unique incoherence. What happens when Saudi and Qatari interests both buy influence? When tech companies crave immigrant labor, but Trump’s base demands closed borders? Simply (and dangerously): policy just goes to the highest bidder, and chaos reigns supreme.

Where Faiths Collide

For now, the hydra’s two heads are only able to coexist because they share the same enemies: secular democracy, free media, and the idea of equality itself. But their visions simply cannot occupy the same country forever, and cracks are beginning to show.

Tech oligarchs need foreign engineers; Christian nationalists want “walls.”Musk sells electric cars and futuristic dreams; Heritage preaches that climate change is God’s business, not man’s. The tech elite dreams of transhumanism; the religious right dreams of banning evolution. Silicon Valley wants unregulated platforms; the evangelicals demand censorship of blasphemy and porn.

Trump is facing a careful balancing act. He has to bless AI one day and prayer rallies the next. But it cannot possibly hold long-term, because when one faction gains ground, the other inevitably feels betrayed. The result is a sort of policy whiplash; a government that speaks two languages simultaneously — godless late-stage capitalism on one end and weaponized scripture on the other. And it’s unified only in its contempt for power in the hands of the many.

History itself offers grim precedents. Dual regimes tend to end with purges rather than partnerships. Stalin devoured his technocrats; Iran’s clerics subjugated their generals; China’s Xi Jinping dismantled the balance between party factions in favor of total control. It follows that the same logic will assert itself here. One empire will consume the other — or both will collapse under their contradictions.

Possible Futures

If the technofascists win, America becomes a sort of polished cage — a blue-skied dystopia. The surveillance machine will be absolute and the markets will boom. Any dissent will vanish behind interfaces optimized by enshittification and artificial intelligence. Religion will wither into private nostalgia. You’ll probably still get to vote, but your feed will tell you who to vote for, and your employer will know if you didn’t (Also, your feed and your employer will likely be owned by the same people).

On the other hand, if the Christofascists triumph, the nation will become the Y’all-Qaeda version of the classic conservative “sharia law” boogeyman, but as a superpower with nuclear weapons. The Constitution will survive in name, but rewritten to sanctify the “majority” faith of Supply Side Jesus. The economy will stagnate as dogma replaces research, women are subjugated, and queer people retreat into the safety of the shadows. The flag will fly over a new country that is the antithesis of everything the founding fathers envisioned.

Authoritarians hate sharing power — so if the factions destroy (or at least weaken) each other, the wreckage could offer democracy its last opening to eke out victory against tyranny. Authoritarian alliances tend to die of greed and incompetence before they die of principle. The machine wants infinite growth while the cross demands infinite purity. Between them lies an impossible equation. As the regime consumes itself through corruption, factional warfare, or the sheer incompetence that always follows tyranny — there may just be space for American patriots to mount a counteroffensive that rebuilds our broken system into something stronger than it ever has been.

But that window will not stay open for long. Every week the guardrails weaken; every month another institution bends. Tuesday’s elections offered a much-needed boost in morale to the growing coalitions that stand against American fascism. The question now is whether we can rediscover solidarity faster than the warring factions in the White House can finish the job.

Between the Algorithm and the Altar

The struggle defining this moment is not liberal vs. conservative. Traditional politics aren’t even really a factor anymore. It’s now a contest between two new American gods: the algorithm that promises order through data, and the altar that promises order through devotion. Both want to end the “chaos” afforded to the masses by freedom. Both offer a form of certainty in exchange for surrender of everything that makes us American.

But republics die not when they lose faith. They die when they give it to idols.

If America is to survive, it won’t be by choosing between the two heads of an authoritarian hydra — the machine or the cross. It will be by remembering that the concept of democracy was always meant to be a secular act of faith. Not in technology, not in theology, but in each other.

The Party of Reagan spent 40 years preaching the gospel of small government and states’ rights. And in a most stunning ideological reversal, they completely abandoned those principles in under a decade in favor of unprecedented federal expansion and authoritarian tendencies. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party — who brought the New Deal to life — is discovering a newfound appreciation for states’ rights, federalism, and limits on executive power. It’s a funny thing, and something worth exploring. If the republic survives Trump, it appears that the magnetic poles of our political system will have yet again reversed, and whatever comes next will be fascinating.

I grew up in the era when Republicans could recite the principles they held dear like they were scripture: small government, free markets, states’ rights, fiscal responsibility, and foreign policy that emphasized strength through deterrence. Their philosophy was that the federal needed to be constrained instead of celebrated; and that power belonged closest to the people themselves, in their own states and communities.

Whether or not you agree with those principles, they at least formed a coherent and fairly consistent world view: freedom flourishes when governments step back. Markets allocate resources better than any bureaucrat can. Communities know their needs so much better than Washington does. For decades, this was what the Republican Party claimed as its North Star.

Then came Trump, and with him, a complete ideological reversal. In less than a decade, the party that championed free trade now celebrates using tariffs as weapons. The party of fiscal restraint added trillions to the deficit and called it “beautiful.” The party that sounded the alarm bells about executive overreach over the Jade Helm training exercise under President Barack Obama now cheers as Donald Trump sends masked paramilitary forces onto American streets to snatch people and violates the Posse Comitatus Act by sending the U.S. military to perform law enforcement in our cities.

Meanwhile, Democrats are having their own “come-to-federalism” moment. Blue state governors are forming interstate compacts, asserting state sovereignty, and mounting legal challenges to federal overreach. Governor Gavin Newsom’s talk of “California values” is reminiscent of the same states’ rights fervor that once animated the Republican party. Whether by stockpiling abortion medications, creating state-level climate agreements, or building parallel institutions to protect their residents against federal intrusion, Democrats are beginning to understand why the concept of federalism was deemed so important in the first place.

The irony is delicious. The party of the New Deal and Great Society is now the one shouting “Tenth Amendment!” at Washington. They’re living what conservatives used to fear would come from an unrestrained executive: when the federal apparatus is controlled by authoritarians, federalism looks very appealing.

As it turns out, political principles are sometimes more situational than we’d like to admit. When you hold power, centralization is efficient. It gets things moving and it lets you deliver on your promises to the people, if you’re a politican who cares about that kind of thing. When you’re out of power, however, decentralization acts as protection. But this ideological reversal goes much deeper than mere opportunism.

For Republicans — and parasitic organizations like the Heritage Foundation whose long-term goals in America are actual dictatorship — Trump revealed that Americans who are hurting can be weaponized. He found power in appealing to peoples’ grievances and cultural anxieties. The constellations of think tanks and intellectuals who once provided ideological coherence for the Republican party have been largely purged. All that remains is populist nationalism wearing a Republican costume.

For Democrats, the shock of Trump has forced them into their own internal reckoning with their assumptions about federal power. They’re learning what claimed to know: a powerful federal government is only your friend when your friends run it. The administrative state can easily be turned against you. Executive powers you expand can — and will — be wielded by your opponents.

This ideological scramble has created a most fascinating incoherence in both parties. Republicans simultaneously rail against the supposed “deep state” while Trump and his handlers go full-steam ahead with unitary executive theory and attempt to assert federal control over private speech and states’ rights. Meanwhile Democrats defend institutional norms at the same time as they build state-level workarounds to limit federal authority. It’s been brewing for some time, but — especially after the 2024 election — it’s now become clear that neither party really has a consistent theory of governance anymore. With Donald Trump’s cannibalization of the Republican party, our duopoly can now seemingly only assume tactical positions based on who holds which levers of power.

This incoherence isn’t sustainable in a healthy democracy. Without real organizing principles beyond “whatever helps us win,” it becomes an inevitability for charlatans like Donald Trump to seize power. The constant flip-flopping in our politics erodes the public’s trust and makes it impossible to actually govern. How can you ever expect to build any lasting policy when the fundamental question of federal versus state power depends solely on who happened to win the last election?

So what comes next? It’s possible we’ll see a Republican party that openly embraces national conservatism and drops the “small government” pretense entirely in favor of using state power to enforce “traditional values.” Maybe Democrats will become genuine federalists who build a philosophy of progressive localism that achieves its liberal goals through state and local action.

Or perhaps our exhausted majority will demand something different entirely. A politics that isn’t about maximizing power when you have it and minimizing it when you don’t; a recognition that in a diverse democracy, different places need different solutions; a return to principled governance over partisan victory.

The Party of Reagan is dead — but so, too, is the Party of FDR. What rises from their ashes will determine whether our republic strenghtens or fractures beyond repair. The magnetic poles of our politics have reversed before and will almost certainly reverse again. The real question is whether we’ll actually learn anything from the flip, or if we’ll just keep playing the same old zero-sum power games until one entity amasses enough power to assert absolute control.

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or if you just want to chat. You can find me on the following platforms:

• LinkTree

• Substack: https://unaligned.sh

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnalignedPolitics

• Twitter: https://x.com/just_becs

• Email: rebecca@unaligned.sh

Close your eyes and picture a dystopian society. What do you see? You’re probably envisioning gray skies — the skies are always gray in dystopia, aren’t they? There’s that heavy, all-encompassing dread that permeates the fabric of society. People are afraid to speak, lest an all-seeing iron fist — ready to crush all dissent — sets its sights on you.

As you look out the window; drive to work; go to shows; spend time with your family — you probably won’t see or feel any of those things. Indeed, unless you’ve indicated to the all-seeing data brokers and social media algorithms that you’re interested in the current goings-on in the world, things probably seem downright normal. Our heuristic for a “society in distress” is colored by novels, films, and other works of art that take a heavy-handed approach to describing dystopia.

And yet…if you allow yourself a moment to break free from the distraction machine, ask yourself: do things actually feel normal? When you go to work each day, do you have that little inkling that makes you wonder “what the hell am I even doing this all for?”

What I Mean by “Blue-Skied Dystopia”

I’m talking about a society that, at first glance, looks just fine. There are blue skies, the kids have soccer practice, you’re doing Costco runs, and otherwise living life just the same as you always have. But at the same time there’s an uneasy turbulence bubbling beneath the surface that feels like the very foundations of society are beginning to crumble.

AI is everywhere now. Politically, rights become more and more conditional. Concentration of power accelerates. Cruelty becomes performative. The very fabric of our social realm feels as though it’s being pulled apart as our information environments are increasingly fragmented into mutually exclusive realities.

If you’re disengaged or insulated, it probably feels normal on the surface. But I’d wager that you probably feel, at some level, the machine I’m describing here — because, after all, the sun still rises. Your coffee still brews. Kids still laugh on playgrounds. Our dystopia arrives through dehumanization; through push notifications and targeted ads; through algorithms that know you’re depressed even before you do; through the gentle nudge of a system that’s learned to manufacture your consent one micro-interaction at a time.

Comfortable Cage

The part of the story that Orwell got wrong was that “Big Brother” doesn’t need to force you to love him. All he has to do is make himself indispensable to you. Your phone knows where you are, who you talk to, what makes you angry, what turns you on, how long you linger on that photo of your ex. It knows you’re pregnant before you’ve even told your partner1. It knows you’re probably going to quit your job three weeks before you’ve even consciously made the decision. And we’ve all collectively handed over this power willingly — eagerly even — for the convenience of one-day shipping and little hits of dopamine in the form of TikTok videos.

The surveillance state we feared would be imposed by force was instead crowdsourced through Terms of Service agreements that none of us ever bother to read2. We didn’t need secret police when we had social media — although now we’ve got our own version of secret police3 too. We carry our own tracking devices, update our own files, report our own thoughts. Those gray dystopian skies never came because we painted them blue ourselves, one blissful distraction at a time.

The genius of our particular dystopia is that it doesn’t feel dystopian to most people most of the time. When 800 million people use ChatGPT weekly4 and 51% of web traffic is bots5, reality hasn’t quite collapsed — it’s just been…seamlessly replaced with something that looks almost identical but operates on fundamentally different principles. Objective truth, rather than being dramatically assassinated, was simply diluted — drop by drop — until even the concept of truth became negotiable.

Productivity Trap

At work, we’ve become willing participants in our own optimization. Those workplace surveillance systems tracking every keystroke, every bathroom break, every Slack message?6 We tolerate them because the alternative — unemployment in a society where the cost of basic goods and services outpaces cost-of-living every year — feels worse. When the alternative is sleeping outside, the cage starts to seem comfortable enough.

I think about the Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, who voted against unionizing after the company deployed algorithmic intimidation, showing workers their own efficiency scores during meetings, reminding them they’re always watched7. That’s our dystopia: not the boot stamping on a human face forever, but the algorithm “gently” suggesting you pick up the pace if you want to keep your health insurance.

The writer’s strike of 2023 wasn’t about money. It was about whether human creativity would survive the age of machines. Eleven thousand writers fought for 148 days to ensure AI couldn’t be credited as a “writer.”8 They won that battle, but the war continues. Studios didn’t want to replace writers because they hate creativity; they just wanted to reduce the inconvenience of dealing with humans who need things like fair wages and working conditions. That cold and impersonal feature of our system is part of what makes it so frustrating.

Paradox of Connection

We’re simultaneously more connected than ever and lonelier than we’ve ever been. Forty percent of young people have ongoing conversations with AI chatbots9. Kids develop parasocial relationships with algorithms that remember everything and demand nothing. Youth suicide prevention hotlines are eliminated by out-of-touch billionaires who claim to care about “saving the government money”10 while AI companions proliferate — with instances of AI-influenced suicide already occurring11 — as if machines could replace the human need to be seen and understood by another consciousness that has suffered and survived.

The dystopian genius here is…sublime. We haven’t eliminated human connection; we’ve just made it feel optional. After all, why risk the messiness of real relationships when an AI partner won’t judge your insecurities? Why struggle through the difficulty of making friends when parasocial relationships with podcasters and streamers fill the silence? It’s not that we’re forced into isolation; we’re just selecting it from a menu of options optimized to feel like connection without all the stressful parts.

Still Building

You know what’s most unsettling about our blue-skied dystopia? Just how reasonable each step toward it has seemed. Of course we need security after 9/11 — the PATRIOT Act12 may not be great, but we said never again and we meant it, right? Of course companies should use AI to be more efficient — after all, if I don’t replace my workers with AI, my competitors will and I’ll go out of business. Of course social media should show us content we’ll engage with — the incentive is profit, and engagement is profit13. Each individual decision point seemed…logical, even beneficial in some ways. Nobody voted to create a surveillance state. Nobody chose oligarchy. We just made a thousand small compromises that, at the time, seemed pragmatic enough.

But here’s where I part ways with both doomers and deniers: recognizing our dystopian moment doesn’t mean surrendering to it. The same research documenting democratic backsliding also shows millions of Americans marching in resistance and rebelling against the machine we unwittingly built14. For every algorithm designed to manipulate, there are people working to preserve the authentic connections that make us human. For every billionaire capturing government, there are organizers building coalitions to fight back.

The exhausted majority — that ~65% of Americans who aren’t extremists, who just want to raise their kids and pay their bills and maybe have something left over for joy15 — we’re still here. Sure, we may be tired. And yes, we’re often distracted by the very systems designed to exhaust us. But we haven’t disappeared.

The challenge isn’t awakening to the dystopia. Most of us feel it in our bones even if we can’t quite name it. The challenge is believing we can build something different while trapped inside the machine. It’s maintaining human connection when algorithms optimize for isolation. It’s preserving truth even when lies are cheap and travel a whole lot faster16. It’s creating abundance when scarcity drives engagement.

Weather Inside

That uncomfortable feeling you have? That sense that something fundamental has shifted even though the surface looks normal? It’s not paranoia: it’s clarity piercing the dystopian veil. You’re seeing the blue-skied dystopia for what it is; not because you’re delusional, but because you’re paying attention.

The cognitive dissonance of living through democratic collapse while your friends and neighbors discuss anything but isn’t a “bug.” It’s a feature of a system that depends on that disconnect, that feeds on keeping us just comfortable enough that revolution seems more disruptive than endurance, and just distracted enough that organizing against it feels impossible.

But movements don’t begin with millions; they begin with individuals who refuse to accept that this is the best we can do. They begin when people talk about the uncomfortable topics. When your friend asks you how you’re doing and you speak the truth instead of practicing comfortable avoidance of this moment.

We don’t need gray skies to recognize dystopia. We just need clear eyes and a little bit of courage. And once you see it — really see it — you can’t unsee it. The question then becomes: what do you do with this clarity?

The answer isn’t in my words or anyone else’s. It’s in the conversation between you and the person next to you who’s also been feeling that something’s wrong. It’s in the small acts of resistance that refuse to let apathy override humanity. It’s in the insistence that despite everything — despite the surveillance, despite the inequality, despite the algorithms — we’re still human, still capable of choosing connection over isolation, truth over comfort, courage over capitulation.

Because if there’s one thing our blue-skied dystopia has taught us, it’s this: the future rarely announces itself dramatically. It arrives in small increments, each one seeming reasonable at the time. And if that’s true for dystopia, then maybe it can be true for its opposite too.

We build the better world one conversation, one connection, one moment of clarity at a time. Under the same blue sky that watches us, we watch back. And we refuse to forget what freedom actually feels like.

Call to Action

Consider joining a No Kings Protest near you on Saturday, October 18th. Make your voice heard with others who see our dystopia for what it is.

https://www.nokings.org

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or if you just want to chat. You can find me on the following platforms:

• LinkTree

• Substack: https://unaligned.sh

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnalignedPolitics

• Twitter: https://x.com/just_becs

• Email: rebecca@unaligned.sh

Content Warning: Suicidal ideation

As a child, my father used to tell me, “You owe your mom and me nothing but to give your child a better life a better life than we gave you.” We were first-generation immigrants. They fled Romania after the 1989 revolution that ended with the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife. We were poor. To make ends meet, my father worked in a factory by day and drove a cab at night. My mother stayed home and raised me until I was old enough to go to school, then she went to work too. Through the foggy haze that remains of my childhood memories, that platitude stuck with me. One day I’ll tell my son the same thing. Our children don’t ask to be born. We owe them everything; they owe us nothing. And that’s how it should be.

I remembered my father’s wish the day I received my Eagle, Globe, and Anchor. After finishing the Crucible I stood exhausted in formation. My drill instructor placed the emblem in my hand and called me what I’d been waiting to hear: Marine. It felt like a weight settling onto my shoulders in the shape of relief. As a teenager I’d been rudderless — flirting with gangs, drugs, and risk, as if danger might answer a question I was too afraid to ask. The uniform gave me an answer: I could serve something bigger than myself, and the chaos would quieten. And for a while, it did.

Wearing the did quiet the chaos for a time, but not the question underneath it. I built a life and learned to fight through the static. After many years, as the static resolved into a single, undeniable frequency, I had to face that question directly. It was like being chased down a long hallway with no doors, knowing that you’ll eventually reach the wall and have to turn toward your tormentor.

I write because the country that raised me — an immigrant kid who really believed in the American idea — has become something smaller and crueler than it was meant to be. We’ve built a politics where outrage is profitable, cruelty is a meme, and humanity is only as valuable as the current news cycle allows. Launching Unaligned is my refusal to play that game. I’m making a bet that sanity can scale, that abundance can be a coalition, and that the most radical act we can take right now is to remember each other’s humanity.

This piece explains how I got here. In all honesty, I’d rather not make myself visible while the federal government is actively hostile to people like me. I’d rather write fiction, lean into photography, and launch new startups. But when speaking out invites turbulence and authenticity is increasingly scarce, silence feels like neglect. My voice, as small as it may be, is all I have.

If you’ve been looking for a place that takes truth seriously, invites good-faith debate, and holds the idea of what America could be in the absolute highest regard, follow along with Unaligned.

Mask, Choice, and Cost

For years I performed a version of myself that could blend in with the world. I’d wake up, feel my pain for a brief moment, then put on my armor — jokes, habits, a voice tuned to the room — and hope the day wouldn’t ask me any questions that I couldn’t answer. The pain wouldn’t shout; it hummed, steadily. It lived in the pauses between conversations, in the quiet of a long drive, and in the way I would throw myself at risk because danger was the only way I could feel alive. I told myself I was fine. I told myself a lot of things.

The night the lie ran out wasn’t dramatic from the outside. A house asleep. Doors closed. The kind of silence that makes you hear your own heartbeat. In the depths of near functional alcoholism and excessive marijuana use to numb an ever-present pain, I finally uttered a sentence that, as a means of self-preservation, my psyche had desperately fought to subdue since I was four years old. It was the reluctant acceptance that, for one reason or another, I was born with a body and a soul that just didn’t match. It was a shattering of reticence that, for decades, sought to keep me safe from the cruel world around us. Denial swarmed my mind — it can’t be true; I’m not the caricature on TV; what about my family? The ceiling didn’t part; the room didn’t change. But something in me finally unclenched — like a fist, finally released. The choice in front of me became painfully clear: live honestly or stop living at all. From puberty until that night in my early 30s, I had thought fondly of death almost daily — craving its release, but too afraid to hurt the people I love. But when the choice finally presented itself, I chose life. I chose to stop fighting against a current that I could never hope to overpower. I chose to stay for my wife and for the son we were bringing into the world. I cried tears that I had held back for decades.

Telling my wife was the next act of courage. There’s no script for that conversation, no guaranteed outcome, only the hope that love is big enough to hold a truth that neither of you ever planned for. She listened to me. She loved me. “We’ll take it one day at a time together,” she said. That grace — which meant more to me than I could ever possibly express, let alone repay — became a bridge I could walk across without looking down. The months that followed were small, human-scale acts: trying on a name until it fit, telling a few people we trusted, and letting the mirror finally be a place to meet myself instead of dodge myself. We were preparing to welcome our son into the world, and the calculus of my life became so clear. He deserved a parent who was present and honest, not a ghost wearing a mask.

The weather inside me began to shift. The background sadness that had colored everything since adolescence finally began to lift. I was softer with the people I love; steadier in the mornings; less at war with myself. The old parts of me — curiosity, happiness, love, the instinct to meet people where they are — began to come back online. I reveled in that newfound joy of actually experiencing life for a change. And after a while, my work started to take shape. If I had been given a chance to live, what would I use it for? I wanted a sort of responsibility. Speak when you can. Humanize where you must. Help build the world your kids will inherit.

To be clear, none of this was free. The first bill came due in a friendship I had always thought was durable — a friend I had hoped would be a buoy for me in these rough waters. But one day that text thread just…thinned. Fewer check-ins, slower replies, less engagement. No blowup or principled disagreement to dissect — just distance that wouldn’t actually say its name. I tried to explain what was happening inside me, and the replies just got shorter. It’s amazing how loud a quiet phone can be. Losing that friendship hurt more than open hostility would have. Anger at least gives you something to push against. Silence only gives you yourself.

Social transition, too, is hard in ways most people don’t see. You can be outgoing and happy-go-lucky, but still feel your shoulders go tight in every room. How am I supposed to act now? Do these people actually accept me or are they just tolerating me? And so the second bill was social gravity. People I’ve known for years — people I’ve counted among my closest friends — didn’t ask questions. Not even simple ones. No “How are you really?” No “What do you need?” No “Can you tell me about your experience? I want to get to know the real you.” I don’t think most of it was cruelty; I like to assume good faith in everyone. Perhaps it was simply discomfort in search of an exit. But the effect is the same: alienation.

Meanwhile, the top of the government has continually found new ways to say people like me are a problem to be “dealt with.” Ordinary people are tired of politics — and who can blame them? — but there’s a certain privilege in being able to treat politics as optional. When you’re unaffected, disengaging makes sense. When you’re a target, the smallest acknowledgments matter. When someone in your life asks sincere questions and wants to hear your answer? It means the world.

Even safety became a choreography. When we go out as a family, I clock rooms instinctively — where the exits are, whose gaze lasts a second too long, whether it’s safe to use the restroom, where to sit so my son doesn’t have to learn adult fear before he needs to. That mental calculus runs constantly in the background: be visible enough to be human, blend enough to be ignored. I’ve debated concealed carry more times than I can count — not because I want to play hero, but because I refuse to be a passive character in my own life if someone decides I’m a symbol. I hate that calculation. But I also can’t pretend it isn’t real.

And yet, the inside of my life got better. The fog that settled over everything since adolescence finally lifted. I’m more present with my wife; I’m gentler with my parents; I’m a steadier parent to my son. Joy returned in ordinary ways — making breakfast, reading at bedtime, catching myself laughing and feeling real joy. Becoming myself didn’t erase my loss; it put it in scale. Some days I still grieve what fell away. But most days, I’m just grateful for what stayed and what became possible.

If there’s a name for the price I’ve paid, it’s tuition. This is what it cost to learn how to live honestly and to understand what courage looks like when other people depend on you. It taught me what I can’t outsource anymore: my safety, my voice, and my responsibility to humanize a group that has been reduced to propagandized headlines. The costs clarified the stakes. They’re why I’m building something instead of just enduring.

Why I’m Writing This

I typically write about the political zeitgeist — electoral strategy, video essays, conversations and debates. This piece is different: it’s part memoir, part coming-out, part attempt at properly introducing myself to my readers — and yes, a (hopefully immersive) window into one person’s transgender experience. More importantly, it’s me reaching out across the digital void to try and establish trust in a voice I promise will stay authentic.

In a period of time where information is weaponized and digital authenticity is dying, sincere truths are a public service. When speaking out invites turbulence you could avoid by simply staying quiet, words become courage. Under national leadership so morally weak it thinks the greatest power lies in the sword, the pen must stand as a bulwark — to help prevent bloodshed, and to remind the brutes that those who first seek the pen are often more effective than the tyrants who worship the sword.

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or if you just want to chat. You can find me on the following platforms:

• LinkTree

• Substack: https://unaligned.sh

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnalignedPolitics

• Twitter: https://x.com/just_becs

• Email: rebecca@unaligned.sh

Author’s Note:

This essay is more personal than my usual work. If you’re here for strategy and analysis, that continues. I’m sharing this now because trust is the soil that better politics grows in; I want you to know the human who’s asking for yours.

While political leaders fixate on culture wars and other manufactured issues meant to rile us up for elections, many Americans are left wondering: What about the real problems actually shaping our lives?

If you’re in high school or college, you’re getting ready to enter a job market that’s being upended by AI. The tech industry is racing forward with a clear intent to replace human labor, and new graduates can’t even find entry-level roles — all while government isn’t even pretending to acknowledge the obvious disruption.

If you’ve just entered the workforce in the past few years, you’re probably hoping to buy a home now or in the near future. You want the promise we all heard growing up: a partner, kids, dogs, a yard. You open Zillow and the results are bleak. Within commuting range, homes in your budget are few and far between. Bidding wars take homes off the market mere days after being listed. Investors and private-equity buyers snatch up inventory just to rent it back to you. You’d move farther away, but a two-hour commute each way is hardly living — and “high-speed-rail” is nonexistent in the richest country in the world.

This isn’t a new problem. The squeeze has steadily tightened for decades, ironically punctuated by several “once-in-a-lifetime” economic crises. Before you ever get a chance to recover from one crisis, the next one happens. And when we’re not fighting culture wars, we fight within a narrow policy box. Either we divide a shrinking pie so nobody’s happy, or we let the strongest — or luckiest — few take most of the pie while everyone else fights over the crumbs. Nobody ends up happy there either.

We’ve been so conditioned to pick one end of the spectrum that we stop asking the basic question: Why not bake more pie? That’s the heart of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson — a reinvigorating call to return to a politics of plenty that built post-WWII America and expanded wealth, opportunity, and the American dream.

The Ship is Sinking

If you ask Americans whether they still believe in the American dream, you’ll hear a resounding no. About 70% of American, in fact. They don’t think the ship is just taking on water anymore; they’re sending proverbial distress signals while the vessel once named “Opportunity” begins to sink.

The chaos isn’t the same for everyone. Some passengers — the Elon Musks and his peers — have their own yachts following the ship. They were never really passengers on our ship anyway; they occasionally popped in to enjoy our amenities but by the time the alarm bells are sounding, they’re already gone. They’ll be fine. It’d be too risky to help our passengers escape, though.

Some are lucky enough to reach the lifeboats. They already have established careers and were lucky enough to buy homes. Maybe their kids can stay with them to save for a down payment. Maybe they’ll buy their kids a starter home. The trip to shore will be uncomfortable, but they’ll probably make it. Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough lifeboats to go around.

Some of the other passengers have life vests. They can float — for now — but the water is cold. Hypothermia and exhaustion begin to creep in while they either wait for help that may never come or they struggle to swim toward shore, hopeful that it’s not too far; that the cold doesn’t catch up; that their tired muscles don’t give out.

Most people don’t have a lifeboat or a vest. They desperately cling to pieces of furniture; to barely buoyant fixtures that fell off the ship and litter the water around it. A gig job here, a payday loan there — anything to keep them afloat until they find another piece of debris to grab on to. They’re fighting stay afloat and to swim, at the same time.

So why do we accept a scramble for too few lifeboats? Why not build more before the disaster ever happens? We’re certainly not lacking land. We’re the richest country in the world, so we definitely don’t lack resources. What we do lack is homes. Why?

Smooth is Fast

There’s an intersection where Market Street meets Public Avenue. If one side gets all the green lights, the other side ends up gridlocked. Effective stewardship of the system means balancing the signals, adding new lanes when they’re needed, and proactively retiming the lights as conditions begin to change.

When the market’s light stays green forever, capital gets through quickly, but everyone else piles up on the red light. When the government’s light stays green too long, private initiative begins to stall. A capitalism that functions properly and works for everyone requires efficiently managing the intersection. It means relieving pressure where it builds, keeping traffic moving, and constantly adjusting to a rapidly shifting reality.

Take housing, for example. Private equity firms aren’t buying homes because its executives are evil caricatures (even if I personally find the practice gross); they’re just responding to market incentives. When homes are scarce and prices begin to rise, buying and renting them back is rewarded by the system. If we really want more homeowners, the answer is to build more homes — and that means changing the rules that are keeping supply limited.

What’s in the way? Complex layers of well-intended regulations that no longer work with our modern world: restrictive zoning laws, procedural chokepoints, environmental review processes designed for a different era, and local veto points that lets a few individuals block what the many need. Neighbors show up to oppose apartments next to subdivisions. Rules originally meant to prevent harm become tools to prevent anything happening at all.

When the consumer side is stuck at a perpetual red light and the producer side cruises on through, the equilibrium is broken. Government can’t shrug and say, “Those are the rules.” The job of governance is to fix the lights — and if that requires revising rules that once made sense but no longer work, that’s not sacrilege. It’s good stewardship. When rules no longer serve us, we change them.

The Point of Abundance

Abundance politics starts with a simple observation: whether left, center, or right, people broadly experience the same material stressors. When you take inventory of your real-world anxieties, I’d bet culture-war items aren’t at the top — if they make the list at all. You’re probably thinking:

• “I’m graduating soon, AI is replacing entry-level jobs, and no one in power seems to have a plan or even care about the problem.”

• “I want to buy a house, but there’s nothing I can afford. Rates are high, listings are few and far between, and I’m losing bidding wars for fixer-uppers.”

• “I work full-time — more than full-time — and I still need a roommate to make rent.”

The common theme is a sad realization: the American dream no longer feels real. Into that void rush outrage, doomscrolling, and nihilism. Abundance is the counter: a governing posture that builds instead of barricades — more homes, more transit, more energy, more productive capacity — so ordinary people can actually live decent lives.

For a deeper dive, I highly recommend you read Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (I’m not sponsored and this is isn’t an affiliate link. I just really believe in their ideas). The core idea isn’t partisan, it’s practical. It focuses politics on things actually affecting people: lower costs, better services, faster building, and dignity in daily life. Common desires among all Americans. That’s the politics we need to revive — not because it gives us our regular dose of outrage dopamine, but because it delivers the very things that made the American dream possible in the first place.

Please feel free to reach out if you have questions or just want to chat! Links to my other platforms are available below:

• LinkTree

• Substack: https://www.unaligned.sh

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnalignedPolitics

• Twitter: https://x.com/just_becs

• Email: rebecca@unaligned.sh

Treat the political culture war like King of the Hill: whoever’s on top sets the agenda and, more importantly, becomes everyone’s target. The right claimed the crown in 2024. In 2025 they’re learning that defense is a different game than insurgency — and that overreach turns the crown into a crosshair.

Everyone Aims Up

Picture a playground mound. One kid on top; rivals who were bickering a minute ago suddenly coordinate to yank them down. That’s backlash physics. Attention platforms are the hill; the “king'“ is the narrative center of gravity; and holding the hill invites coalitions of convenience from below. It’s not morality, it’s mechanics.

The hill is built from attention + institutions: recommendation systems and news cycles; courts and school boards; donor networks and brand-safety rules. The crown certainly brings perks (like framing power, first-mover advantage), but it also has costs (constant scrutiny, coalition fatigue). And so the loop repeats:

Social media research helps explain why the loop runs so hot: moral-emotional language travels faster than cooler speech, and engagement-ranked feeds tend to amplify highly charged, out-group-hostile content—even when users say they don’t prefer it.

2008 - 2016: Obama Era Ascendancy - Cultural Dominance and Overreach

With Barack Obama’s election and re-election, the broad liberal-left appeared to have, for all intents and purposes, won the culture war. We had a black president; same-sex marriage was legalized; broad acceptance of queer people rose. From pop culture to corporate America, institutions leaned into embracing and normalizing the diversity of actual American life. Anyone now in their early 20s might barely remember a different zeitgeist.

I’m going to editorialize here. As someone who supported the cultural advances of the Obama era and then felt alienated by the left’s internal culture civil war, Obama’s election — culturally, this piece is not getting into policy — felt like we were moving past racial division. Sure, you had the crazies who really couldn’t handle a black president. But broadly? It felt like society might finally close a painful chapter (yes, simplified; I’m describing a vibe). Ben Shapiro, whom I typically disagree with, has voiced a similar feeling during an interview with Ezra Klein. The legalization of same-sex marriage and rising acceptance of diverse gender expression felt like a final nail in the coffin of an unenlightened era that obsessed over how people look, love, and express themselves — rather than, in Martin Luther King’s formulation, the content of our character.

The war felt like it was over. The “conquering heroes” laid down their proverbial weapons. But, as so often happens among victors, a smaller group lusted for more fighting; high on the alluring euphoria of victory. Whether or not those causes were virtuous (often, yes), the strategy was flawed.

Self-Sabotaging Cultural Victory: The Leeroy Jenkins Approach

If you grew up online, you know the Leeroy Jenkins clip: the team is planning a hard raid, and one guy decides to just sprint in yelling “LEEROOOOOY JENKIIIINS,” causing the entire party to get wiped out. I’m being a bit cheeky, but the left’s strategy as cultural king had a similar problem. Most reasonable people wanted steady progress via careful strategy; a smaller group charged uphill into too many unwinnable fronts at once, with rhetoric that pushed even allies away.

If you spare some charity about motive, you can understand why they charged. You might even agree with their causes. But messaging matters.

“Systemic racism” describes real dynamics, but to many people the gut reaction is defensive: “Are you calling me racist?” The term isn’t about that, but words trigger frames. Same with “toxic masculinity”: not “all men,” but the culturally disengaged only heard attack.

Across front after front, the left’s messaging, rhetoric, and branding often didn’t help. Instead of “I’m right and if you’re not all the way with me you’re my enemy,” a softer, persuasion-first touch would have worked better. Counter disinformation. Focus on moving minds. Avoid maximalism as default.

Of course, this phenomenon isn’t unique to the left. The right, ascendant now, is making parallel mistakes — only faster.

2016 - 2020: The Trump Era - Fight for the Cultural Crown

Trump’s 2016 victory was an immense blow in the cultural battle. It wounded the left’s grip on the hill. Liberals who assumed their values were firmly in the mainstream shifted to defense; conservatives launched a full-scale counteroffensive led by Trump and MAGA. The cultural conflict escalated.

Trump styled himself as the culture-warrior-in-chief: constant Twitter shitposting, attacks on kneeling NFL players; a ban on transgender Americans serving in the military; nonstop railing against “political correctness.” The left mobilized in response: the 2017 Women’s March, #MeToo, pop culture and corporations leaning even harder into diversity.

Yet the louder the left roared, the more the right doubled down. The right found a bulwark in Donald Trump. Strange bedfellows emerged in that fight. Far-right fringes were emboldened and stepped into daylight: Charlottesville in 2017 and the murder of Heather Heyer; QAnon and InfoWars moving into the mainstream; sophisticated disinformation networks laundering illiberal narratives.

Then 2020 hit. COVID scrambled everything. Protests after the murder of of George Floyd brought the largest demonstrations in decades alongside riot footage that galvanized the right and alienated many in the center. Even now, years later and after the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, we hear the right talk about how “we’re not burning down cities” in response to Kirk’s murder.

The 2020 election arrived and Donald Trump narrowly lost to Joe Biden. In the aftermath of the election, he lied about fraud and incited January 6th. The Senate declined to convict him for inciting the insurrection, clearly hoping to avoid another black eye on the party and losing the support of the MAGA base.

Victory was achieved. Culturally, however, it felt like a respite, not a clean win. The left struggled to regain cultural power. The Trump era battles left deep wounds in the cultural base, further splintering them into groups with maximalist focus on fringe issues rather than unifying. Too many mistook an electoral win for renewed cultural dominance.

Can you necessarily blame them? In hindsight, I suppose it did seem like we were finally able to put Donald Trump behind us as a country. That after 4 years of increasingly charged cultural battles, the right would also want to return to normalcy. To the left’s own chagrin, they underestimated just how deeply the culture war had become intertwined with electoral politics.

2024 Election: Final Shot in the Culture War

In November 2024, Donald Trump again won the U.S. presidential election. His tactics didn’t soften during his campaign; they intensified. He doubled and tripled down on the very things that Americans believed cost him the 2020 election. The left itself doubled down on fighting recklessly on difficult-to-win terrain in myriad cultural battles. Were they righteous fights to engage in? Sure. But they further weakened an already hobbled holder of the crown.

On November 6th, 2024, America woke up to a different cultural landscape. The reigning King of the Hill, the liberal left, was dead — replaced by the MAGA right. The war that had raged on for nearly a decade was finally over.

The battle may or may not have been won because of cultural issues — indeed, post-COVID elections were largely a rebuke of incumbents worldwide — but to say that cultural issues played no role would be naïve. Regardless, a politician who prioritizes cultural combat over governance was crowned. A new king stood on the hill.

Has the Right Learned From the Left’s Past Mistakes?

In short: not much. The right’s cultural agenda targets “enemies” that many in the broad public assumed were already defeated.

With control of the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, conservatives have moved swiftly to consolidate their cultural victory through policy. But the aggressive approach risks a backlash that could prematurely cost them their newly-won dominance.

Since taking power in January 2025, the right’s approach to defending its cultural crown has been a scorched-earth offensive against the progressive advances of the past decade. Rather than pivoting to a unifying or forward-looking message focused on gradually returning to a cultural equilibrium that keeps the majority unperturbed, Donald Trump and the MAGA right have largely kept focus on punishing the left’s key constituencies and symbols. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ongoing attacks on LGBTQ+ people — especially transgender Americans.

Over the past few years, anti-trans legislation has aggressively been pursued in Republican-led states, and it has only accelerated. By early 2025, 25 states had enacted blanked bans on gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth. These laws have abruptly cut off medical care for tens of thousands of trans adolescents, despite evidence that such care significantly reduces suicidality and improves mental health for this vulnerable group.

And the aggressive fight has not only been on this front. From political pressure against companies practicing DEI to Florida attacking Disney with hostile legislation, the right has behaved like a conquering army, determined to crush any pockets of the left’s cultural influence. They’re attempting to send a message that no one, not even powerful companies, should cross the ascendant right’s cultural agenda.

The concept of “overextension” in warfare — when a force stretches itself too thin or pushes too far beyond what support can sustain — applies in the culture war context as well. Similarly to how the more radical messengers of the left weakened their hold on culture, so too it seems that broad public opinion is not on board with the extreme measures we see from the MAGA right in their new role as cultural victors.

In other words, the MAGA right — the current King of the Cultural Hill — seems to be speedrunning the last king’s mistakes (obviously through cruel and sinister means when compared to the left), seemingly with the hope that their gains can be codified in law. Whether this strategy will actually succeed in the end is anyone’s guess. But if you’re a glass-half-full kind of person, you could argue that cultural overreach is self-limiting: the hill punishes the heavy-handed.

Bottom line: the right holds the crown, but their aggressive agenda is focused on foes the median voter thinks are already beaten. The crown confers power — and paints a large target.

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Please feel free to reach out if you have questions or just want to chat! Links to my other platforms are available below:

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America is approaching a stark choice — and it isn’t left versus right. It’s violence or reform. We can keep sliding toward a bloody national divorce, where extremists dictate the terms of politics and rip the country apart. Or we can disrupt the establishment itself, forging a coalition that exists within both major parties but answers to something larger than either. Donald Trump exposed just how fragile our system really is — how a president can bend norms, sidestep laws, and smash through guardrails. He used that power to break democracy.

What if those same lessons could be used to save it? This is a two-front fight: first, a middle-out media offensive to deprogram and de-escalate; then an institutional alliance to usher in a saner political order.

The Choice: Violence or Reform

I’ll be blunt and a little hyperbolic. The American Republic is rapidly accelerating toward a fork in the road. Violence, bloodshed, and effective collapse of our system await us on one side. The details are hazy, but the big picture is bleak. The other side is hidden in a dense fog. It’s uncharted territory, and all we have are semi-educated, hopeful guesses about what might await us beyond that pale.

Take off your partisan hat for a moment. If you’re a Democrat, forget for now the many sins of Donald Trump: the weaponization of government, the destruction of norms, the rules and laws that once kept our political order stable. If you’re a Republican, temporarily set aside the rudderless, soft-on-crime, milquetoast catering to the “ultra-woke” causes you see in the post-Obama Democratic Party.

Now ask yourself: what do you see in your everyday life? You interact constantly with people who voted both for and against Donald Trump. Most of those interactions are cordial, often even pleasant. You’re not running into the seemingly psychopathic personalities we imagine represent the “average” on the other side. Why?

The answer is simple: because most of us are not radicals. Yet we are represented to each other by the most radical voices on our own side. If you’re a Republican, understand this: the social media feeds of most left-of-center people portray the average Republican as a brain-dead MAGA cultist who dreams of theocratic dictatorship. If you’re a Democrat, ask your right-of-center friends: they’ll tell you the average Democrat is a literal communist who wants open borders, undocumented immigrants voting, and gun confiscation along with rampant crime. And of course, also authoritarianism.

This is the reality of the attention economy. Social media algorithms don’t reward nuance; they reward outrage. And as much as we may want to believe otherwise, that isn’t an ideological choice. Like most things in our dumbest timeline, the reality is worse: it’s just profitable. Companies like Meta pay psychologists millions of dollars per year to optimize how long they can keep you scrolling. And what’s the discovery? Outrage sells. Anger makes you engage. Engagement shows you more ads. I wish I could say there was some sinister conspiracy here, but there isn’t. It’s unfortunately much simpler: publicly traded companies need infinite growth, quarter after quarter, year after year, and whether that growth comes at the cost of democracy is irrelevant.

The blame doesn’t rest solely on tech CEOs. They’re just following the incentives of our current iteration of capitalism. The real danger is the political grifters who exploit this attention economy to pit us against one another. They are sociopaths who don’t care about tearing the country apart while raking in hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions — every month. They profit by making you, a Republican, hate me, a Democrat and a transgender American. And the most infuriating part? They’re rarely motivated by principle or ideology. Almost always, it’s just the almighty dollar.

And the greatest trick of these grifters, these provocateurs, these sociopaths who have no care for our constitutional republic? It’s convincing you and your neighbors that the culture wars dividing us — guns, DEI, religion, ~10 transgender women in collegiate sports — are somehow bigger than the things that unite us: rent is too high, housing is unaffordable, wages are stagnant, health insurance companies bleed us dry while denying claims, young men’s mental health is largely left behind and young women are increasingly subjected to impossible-to-achieve standards. I could list dozens more.

As someone viciously attacked day after day by the current administration, I know how hard it is to lay down my proverbial weapons against the MAGA crowd. When I watch the President of the United States of America repeat the words “men in women’s sports, transgender for everyone” in every single public speech like it’s a slogan; when conservative media desperately tries to find any possible link to a transgender person regarding the Charlie Kirk shooter; when a sitting Congresswoman openly and repeatedly refers to transgender human beings as “trannies”; when the Department of Justice reportedly considers banning transgender Americans from firearm ownership — I want to hate everyone who enables it. The visceral part of me wants war. But I know in my heart that the average American wants something simpler: a life of abundance, free from the constant churn of the culture war. And I know they’ve been lied to, manipulated by grifters and opportunists who crave power more than they care about their fellow human.

Hear me: we, as Americans, need to come together — more now than at any other time in our history. The Republic is under attack. Your algorithmically curated media feed may not show it, but the danger is real. In the age of technology, the attention economy, artificial intelligence, and democratic backsliding, we face a choice: keep marching toward violence, despair, and destruction, or take the foggy, uncertain path of reform that at least offers a chance to save the Republic.

Choosing reform means stepping off the collapsing highway and into the fog. The road we’ve been driving on is destroyed — its guardrails smashed, its pavement cracked, its traffic signs treated like decorations by leaders who wanted power more than a republic. Trump didn’t just break the rules; he proved how flimsy they really were. And the establishment’s answer? Pretend the wreckage can be repainted and called “normal” again.

That’s a lie. We can’t duct-tape democracy back together. The guardrails won’t reattach themselves. If we want a system that survives the next storm, we can’t be afraid to tear down and rebuild. That means breaking rules not to destroy them, but to create new rules that actually protect us this time. It means refusing nostalgia, rejecting passivity, and doing the uncomfortable thing our politics has avoided for decades: rewriting the operating system before it crashes completely.

The choice is clear. The coward’s path is clinging to what’s broken. The harder, braver path is breaking what must be broken — so that freedom, fairness, and the republic itself can be saved.

Phase One: The Middle-Out Media Offensive

Like it or not, the battlefield is media — not cable news, but the algorithmic feed where most people now live. If we want to pull the country back from the brink, we have to fight and win there. That means wresting narrative control from the organized mis- and disinformation networks aligned with the current administration and its media allies.

You’ve seen the pattern. A damaging story lands. For a day or two there’s visible dissent on the right. Then, almost in unison, the conversation snaps into place: identical phrases, mirrored talking points, synchronized clips. The narrative runs down a pipeline — first-tier commentators and journalists seed the story; partisan podcasters and streamers amplify it; meme accounts distill it into bite-size slants for every attention band. The result isn’t only insulation for authoritarian behavior. It’s an engine that polarizes ordinary people and normalizes contempt for democratic constraints. That’s the sophisticated machine we’re up against.

Our counter-strategy must be a public alliance of center-left and center-right creators — journalists, podcasters, debaters, streamers, thinkers, and influencers — running a coordinated middle-out campaign. We start with the lightly political and the apolitical on the right: people whose view of Trump and governance is whatever leaks through the outrage machine. The goal isn’t to turn them into liberals. It’s to give them an off-ramp: a credible, face-to-face invitation to reject authoritarianism and demand normal, competent, rights-respecting government. In parallel, we confront the propagandists directly — debate them, challenge claims in their own spaces, and, when they inevitably begin to retreat from open debate, take the case to their audiences on platforms built for casual political conversation, like TikTok. Step by step, we deprogram from the middle out.

This isn’t about purity tests or viral clips. It’s about de-escalation and reintroduction to reality: correcting core falsehoods, modeling good-faith disagreement, and centering shared material wins — cheaper life, safer communities, more opportunity. It’s also about cadence and craft: coordinated content, recurring joint streams, rotating guest chairs across the aisle, mirrored talking points where they make sense, and visible moments of “we disagree on X, unite on Y.”

I’m not a professional organizer, and I’m certainly not wealthy enough to fund a network. But I want to do my part in the fight for deprogramming Americans who have been lied to by these sophisticated disinformation networks — and I’m asking creators and communities on both sides of center to do theirs. If we can move the middle, we can change the incentives. If we change the incentives, the temperature drops. That’s Phase One.

Once there’s daylight between the public and the outrage machine, we need institutions that won’t snap back to dysfunction. That’s where an inside-the-parties governing bloc comes in.

Phase Two: The American Alliance (Institutional)

The “American Alliance” (not an official name by any means) is a cross-party coalition that behaves as a third party, but operates inside both parties. It’s Phase Two — the institutional follow-through once the middle-out media work has opened space for sanity. Candidates keep the “D” or “R,” but publicly pledge shared principles and agree to govern together as a bloc. No spoilers. No third-party trap. Just a (peaceful) hostile takeover of politics-as-usual. In Silicon Valley, startups “disrupt” aging industries that are slow, ineffective, and allergic to change. That mindset can be applied to American politics.

The Tea Party movement hypothesized that political takeover within a party was possible. Donald Trump proved that it could be done — the “Party of Reagan” is effectively dead, and MAGA killed it. So what if a new coalition could use similar tactics to upend the two-party system — not only beating back the authoritarians corroding our government, but replacing the very political establishments that enabled the takeover in the first place? What if this coalition could bring about a new political order that elevates agile, builder-minded leaders who actually treat democracy, liberty, and justice as non-negotiable?

Why now? Because the exhausted majority is politically homeless. We align ourselves with the left or the right, but on average, Americans feel their political leaders are failing to actually deliver on meaningful policies that make their lives better. They want competence instead of chaos, freedom without intrusion, and problem-solvers instead of culture war performers chasing viral clips because they’re too weak or corrupt to actually govern. This alliance is their home.

How it works: organize in both primaries, recruit pragmatic candidates, and bind them to a simple covenant — protect rights, lower costs, build abundance, tell the truth, and vote together on the big stuff. Use the parties’ own machinery to force negotiation, moderation, and results.

What does our alliance look like?

• On the right: Republicans who see Trumpism as anti-American at its core; voters who don’t care about the culture war du jour and want a government that does what it does best and leaves the rest to the market.

• On the left: Democrats ready to shed the far-left’s baggage — a loud but deeply unreliable voting bloc that drags the party into cultural firefights on unwinnable ground instead of focusing on steady progress; voters who believe capitalism can work if we try to fix what’s broken, rather than chasing utopian ideas that human nature itself just won’t allow for.

• Sane, reasonable individuals who are willing to actually meet at the negotiating table and work together toward building a society of abundance again and restoring the American dream. They recognize the eerie echoes of 1930s Germany and desperately want an off-ramp — and they’re willing to, in good faith, set aside the deep political division and hatred that has been building in our society, in order to save it.

Most importantly, the alliance looks like voters and leaders who want to improve everyday life. We will disagree on implementation. We will debate and disagree. But instead of blind party-line votes driven by fear of the president or primary threats from special interests, we’ll hammer out real consensus on issues that actually affect people. Humanity and democracy are not on the table — we’ve seen what happens when those become negotiable. It’s what brought us here in the first place.

This is a pivotal moment. The old norms are shattered. Democratic institutions need to be disrupted by a new political order that is agile, attuned to modern realities, and responsive to Americans’ needs.

The American Alliance is how we do it.

Breaking the Rules to Save Them

Every system has breaking points. America’s laws, norms, and institutions were never sacred — they were scaffolding, built by people, for people. And like all scaffolding, they can rot, buckle, or collapse under pressure. Trump showed us just how brittle they really were. He bulldozed guardrails, bent rules until they snapped, and proved that power in the wrong hands can make the Constitution look like little more than paper on a podium.

So here’s the hard truth: we can’t save democracy by worshiping the very rules that failed to defend it. We have to do the opposite. We must be willing to defy the old playbook — challenge institutions that calcify instead of protect, rewrite rules that reward corruption, and break traditions that were never designed for all of us in the first place.

To be clear, this isn’t destruction for its own sake. On the contrary — it’s renovation. Any republic worth living in demands bold remodeling, not timid repairs. That means ripping out the rotten beams, replacing warped foundations, and refusing to treat the political order as untouchable. If we keep mistaking reverence for strength, the house will collapse on top of us.

The establishment will call this reckless. They will say it’s dangerous to touch the old structure. And honestly? I can’t say I disagree. But the danger is already here. The foundation is being hit with a sledgehammer while we hope and pray that it won’t buckle. The choice at our feet now isn’t between safety and risk. It’s between letting rot consume us, letting the sledgehammer bring us down, or daring to rebuild before it’s too late.

Is it already too late? I honestly don’t know — but I still think we need to fight like hell to try and save the spirit of what America was meant to be. What it still could be.

We can use the very lessons Trump and his cronies have taught us about the brittleness of our rules as weapons against the very forces that seek to destroy the republic for their own personal gain. That requires something bigger than one party. It requires an inter-party coalition. A third party without the wasted-vote trap. A political force that cannibalizes the establishment itself and reshapes it toward nobler ends: liberty, justice, and the forced disarmament of authoritarian movements before they ever have a chance to consolidate power.

Is a coalition like this possible? I think it is. I believe, in some sense, that it already exists, and it’s hiding in plain sight — its members unable to see one another due to the polarizing veil of the social media algorithm; blind to each other’s similarities because of the intricate and sinister pipelines of political influence that aim to keep them apart.

If you believe in the principles of liberty and justice for all; if you yearn for a society where we build abundance rather than managing scarcity; if you love the promise of what America is supposed to be, then I think you might consider yourself a part of this group.

The Call: Pick the Road That Leads Forward

We don’t have forever. Either we unite across parties against fascism now, or we risk losing the Republic itself. The choice isn’t left versus right anymore; it’s repair or ruin.

I’m not a professional organizer, nor am I a political leader. I’m one person with a keyboard and a deep love for my country. That means that people with real experience — campaign pros, policy hands, community leaders, fundraisers, alternative media creators, volunteers — are needed in every lane of this coalition if it is to ever have a chance at success.

Why am I doing this? It’s certainly not for money. I work in technology and am admittedly comfortable enough to not have to carry many of the day-to-day financial burdens that most Americans do. But I grew up poor. I’ve been working class. I’ve felt the pain that both conservatives and progressives talk about. If I wanted to get rich off of politics, I’d try to join the margins and stoke outrage for clicks — cash in while the system collapses. I’m not doing that. I’m doing this because I love this country and the people in it. I believe in the ideal of America — the promise of the American Dream. I’m no longer in the military (and, thanks to Donald Trump, I can’t legally serve again), but I’ll be damned if I let the Republic die without at least trying to do my part — as small as it may be — to help right the ship in some way.

This might fail. Maybe the whole idea falls flat and I just end up as another liberal commentator shouting at the void. But at least I, and we, will have tried something. That’s more than we can say for the cynical opportunists who just want to further divide and break us.

This project isn’t about me. It’s about us. If any of this hits home, join the Unaligned community and help build a better country.

If you create content — even part-time — on the center-left or center-right, and you’re willing to collaborate across that line, reach out. If you’re not a creator, you can still help: share cross-partisan collaborations, invite a friend from the “other side” into a stream, to listen to a podcast, to read an article; and starve the outrage machine of your clicks.

• Substack: https://unalignedpolitics.substack.com

• Blog: https://unaligned.sh

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• Email: rebecca@unaligned.sh

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On September 10th, 2025, conservative influencer and founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk was assassinated during a campus event in Utah. It's left the nation shocked, but unfortunately unsurprised. We're living through a flash point in American history, where fury and polarization are rapidly beginning to spill into bloodshed. The question now isn't abstract or academic. It's what this climate is producing in real time.

Political violence in America has been escalating; Kirk's murder is one more rung up that ladder. He was a close ally of Donald Trump and, admittedly, a polarizing figure. None of that makes a bullet an acceptable rebuttal. A sniper's shot cut him down mid-debate, and the crowd fled in panic. I unfortunately watched the videos of the shooting. It was horrific. Almost immediately some celebrated online while others stoked the flames with talk of vengeance. Whether you agreed with Kirk or not, tossing fuel on a fire that's close to jumping containment lines is more than reckless.

We Needed Leadership in this Moment

What we needed in the aftermath was leadership that lowered the temperature. We didn't get it. The President of the United States could have used the largest platform in the world to not only condemn the violence full stop, but to model restraint – including his own (significant) contributions to divisive rhetoric. Instead, predictably, he could not bring himself to be the bigger person even in this moment. He blamed "the radical left," before investigators had even identified a suspect or motive. The contrast with his response to the June assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark, and their dog is hard to ignore; the rhetoric then was subdued at best, and there was certainly no national half-staff order.

The loudest online right-wing reactions went further. Chaya Raichik, the founder of the anti-LGBTQ group "LibsOfTikTok" posted, "THIS IS WAR." Elon Musk called the left "the party of murder." Laura Loomer, a conservative influencer who is considered an unofficial advisor to the President, said that the administration should "shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization." Andrew Tate, another high-profile conservative voice, called for civil war. Even Stephen Miller, the President's Deputy Chief of Staff, chimed in. These aren't anonymous troll accounts; these are people with real megaphones and power. What they're exhibiting isn't leadership in this moment – it's pouring gasoline on the fire.

High-profile figures on the left have almost universally denounced the murder, in direct contrast to the picture being painted by these influential provocateurs. To be clear, I don't think that any of the extreme reactions we see online (from either side) are indicative of how the average American feels about any of this. No one should be celebrating a politically motivated murder. No one should be fanning the flames and attempting to prime an otherwise reasonable public to believe that the "other side" wants to kill them.

The "exhausted majority?" We hate that this happened, whether they agreed with Charlie or despised him for the things he did and said. Not because his life was more or less valuable than anyone else's, but because we keep watching as political violence continues to escalate, our babies are slaughtered in schools, inflammatory rhetoric gets ratcheted up, and our leaders refuse to suck it up, take responsibility for their rhetoric, and set a new tone in pursuit of political unity. And why would they? That would be politically disadvantageous.

Normalized Cruelty

Here's the conflict in me that I won't pretend isn't there. Kirk relentlessly pushed rhetoric that directly endangered people like me – transgender people. As a parent, my heart aches for his family. I gain nothing from his death. I take no joy in it. I'm angry it came to this at all. We should be arguing in public, not burying our dead. Whatever our disagreements, he was a human being, a fellow American, and a builder of a formidable political machine. He didn't deserve to be gunned down, his kids don't deserve to grow up without their dad, and his family doesn't deserve to have to live with the fact that they lost a husband, a parent, and a child.

But crises like this don't appear out of thin air. They're the predictable outcome of treating politics as warfare and each other as subhuman. Cruelty has been normalized – sometimes turned into spectacle. The White House even posted a video of shackled immigrants boarding a deportation flight tagged as "ASMR."

In Florida, a migrant detention camp built in alligator-infested swampland – nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz" – has become a political brand, complete with merch and photo-ops.

When you train people to laugh at suffering and see not only opponents, but other human beings, as monsters, violence starts to feel permissible to a small – but incredibly dangerous – few. Conspiracy mills, political grifters, and algorithmic echo chambers continually pour fuel on that fire. And it's priming people not just to strike first, but to strike back. That's how tit-for-tat hatred accelerates.

If we don't interrupt this cycle, it points somewhere we absolutely don't want to go: civil war. That's not melodrama. We're laying the groundwork brick by brick – an assassination here, a foiled plot there, each side citing the other's excesses to justify the next escalation. We're quickly approaching the edge of the cliff – and if we step off, we've passed the point of no return. What comes afterward will be a vicious spiral.

Pulling back from that edge isn't naïve. It's survival. We desperately need an off-ramp from lethal polarization: cooler heads, fewer dopamine hits from rage, and a politics that prizes persuasion over humiliation. That won't just mean changing who holds power – it will mean changing how we fight for our values.

It's beyond devastating that we are here. I want the country my generation was promised: freedom paired with basic decency; neighbors who disagree but still see each other as neighbors; a nation my son will never have to defend against his own.

We can step off this path. But we have to choose it on purpose.