I've been ranting about this ongoing coup for years and was astounded that even after the DOGE data theft I was being called hysterical for calling it a coup. I think it began in earnest with the Supreme Court presidential immunity decision, which effectively eviscerated our constitutional balance and separation of powers. Thank you, Carole, for all your work in spotlighting the reality too many people refuse to acknowledge.
when i pointed out to people last year -- regular people, apolitical people -- that elon musk's private security force was surrounding the president at all times, they all immediately saw problem with this. i discussed it with an nypd officer while i was waiting for a train, and he said, "if that's true...well, that ain't good."
i think that most people who have been following politics online for the last ten or twenty years -- and that includes almost everyone "in media" -- have completely melted their brains. they are in a permanent state of anemic fury, too exhausted to collect themselves and actually do anything serious about these very serious things. they just keep going to their jobs, paying taxes, and posting about how awful it all is. well, posting is no longer enough!
i am not paying a cent in taxes to this criminal administration. if you do, person reading this, fuck you. if you file them properly, but withhold the check, the maximum penalty is 25% of the total after four years. consider it a tip to the next president.
TAX STRIKE! -- file, don't pay -- NO MONEY FOR TRUMP!
if you pay taxes, you support trump.
if you pay taxes, you support ice.
if you pay taxes, you support stephen miller.
SEND NO CHECKS TO THIS IRS! NOT ONE PENNY!
Nonpayment is NOT a crime. It's a debt like any other.
The US has a pay-as-you-go system. People who have jobs pay payroll taxes all through the year - Fed. as well as State (some exceptions). When they file, the result is usually a refund thanks to the deduction(s), child credit, earned income credit, etc.
"...if you do, person reading this, fuck you." I assume you are a US Citizen?
zero out any zeroable withholdings at your job. social security and medicare taxes will still be taken out, but those are earmarked for those purposes.
if you really need me to clarify -- if you pay a single cent to trump's irs that you could have held back by any means at your disposal, fuck you.
i said to file them properly -- so if that results in you getting a refund, go right ahead, obviously.
Changing your W-2 for this purpose will earmark you at your job. How many people with a mortgage, a car-lease, a child going to college, bills, etc. will go for it?
what you're asking is really, how many people will stand up for freedom when push comes to shove? forget fucking money -- you might have to risk life and limb. and if you won't risk money, i doubt you'll risk things money can't buy.
so -- how could i know how many will go for it? one can only hope that the answer is, "enough."
I think for your proposal to be effective it needs to be organized and up front about all the possible consequences.
I did withhold my taxes during the Vietnam War, but my act of resistance was part of an organized student protest against the war and I had a low paying waitress job. When the war ended, the IRS sent me a bill for taxes owed, which I paid.
Now, however, we have Thiel's Palantir analytical and surveillance software hoovering up all the stolen data Musk's DODGE downloaded, and a full-on lawless, authoritarian regime in place, so the consequences could be far more severe, i.e., being arrested and deported to another country. These Nazis have already designated anyone who criticizes them, their absurd version of "Christianity," or supports abortion as domestic terrorists. In addition, people are already struggling to make ends meet and a 25% penalty on top of a big tax bill could put them in even more dire circumstances. At minimum, an organized tax boycott should provide assistance from competent tax lawyers, and an legitimate escrow fund to hold all money owed, where it can earn interest.
@Oaktown. Your idea how to do it organized with an escrow account, makes a lot of sense. US citizens, unless they are not US born but naturalized, cannot be deported. The naturalized ones first need to to lose their citizenship and there are rules for that procedure. But Legal Non-Immigrants and Legal Permanent Residents will quickly get in trouble, can have their immigration procedure cancelled or their visa/work permit revoked. So a "fuck you" is undeserved IMHO. (We already "self-deported", many years ago. I do not need to repeat that exercise.)
What you say about US born citizens being protected used to be true, but this is a lawless and sadistic regime that feels no allegiance to our constitution or democracy, and has already threatened to deport "home grown" citizens to Cecot prison and unconstitutionally designated all citizens who oppose their regime as domestic terrorists. Even US born citizens are in the crosshairs now and should not be feeling safe either.
Agree with you on everything you say about the perils of even naturalized citizens. It's a nightmare of shifting sand and lawless chaos and I would never tell anyone how to best resist these Nazis because each person's situation is different, as are the risks.
US Citizens have a lot of resources at their disposal if what you descibe would happen. Think ACLU etc. The current government would show its real colors by such actions. That would wake up many. I do not think deporting citizens is going to happen. There is so much low-hanging fruit in this regard. Most immigration petitions etc. for work-bound migrants are far from perfect. The immigrant has no say in the procedure, what, when, how, it is filed. But they are responsible and can be punished for mistakes, omissions, etc. Just have an AI program go over those files.
EDIT: Currently the US is deporting people to "third countries" because their original home country poses too many dangers to them. But is that not a reason to give them asylum? And how are people supposed to live in a foreign country, without money, having no (family) connections, not speaking the language, etc.? Young women fleeing from Afghanistan - we all know why - have been deported to Panama! Where is the outrage?
I think it's a mistake to underestimate the cost of being imprisoned and having to defend yourself from criminal or civil charges when you're up against the unlimited resources of the Fed. govt. That alone could bankrupt a huge percentage of Americans. ALL Americans need to accept this as entirely possible, and no one can be sure they could never be caught up in the Nazi surveillance net—even under false pretenses.
Of course immigrants are the most vulnerable, but I see too many US born citizens who are not moved to resist because they think they are immune from consequences. No one is if this coup is not thwarted.
any official organization would run FAR more legal risks than a ton of individuals doing this themselves. an organized escrow fund would be ONE thing to seize -- ONE court order.
fifty million individuals is fifty million court orders. and i can say from personal experience -- all the data that they have does not make courts run any faster.
trump cut the irs budget drastically -- and already, compared to the 70s, it is a shadow of its former self.
you want to know something funny? i owe various federal taxes here and there for a business i own, from having missed filings in some early quarters or having not had the funds to make a quarterly payment at various times. the irs has sent me various notices about my owings -- and prior to this second trump administration, i did intend to work it out and pay what i owe, because it could turn into a problem eventually. however i wasn't sure exactly *what* i owed -- i'm not the most organized and i had lost some of the notices, plus the interest on them would naturally have gone up in the interval.
so i wanted to find out exactly what i owed in total. i sent the irs a letter asking them for a summary of what i owed and from which quarters, so that i would know how much money i had to get together, and so that i could be certain i had paid off everything that was outstanding.
i asked them for that about three years ago. you wanna know how long it took to hear back regarding what i owe?
i cant tell you, because i still havent heard back. so as far as the state of the irs today, and its ability or willingness to pursue you for owing -- i couldn't even get them to tell me what i owe. and that was BEFORE trump slashed their budget. so frankly, i aint worried a bit.
I have a friend who went for years without paying past due taxes, but the IRS eventually caught up with him. Keep in mind you're talking about the IRS before DOGE and Palantir were embedded in govt. databases, including the IRS. Palantir can analyze and organize huge sets of data far better than our govt has been able to do before. Plus, after Biden passed increased funding for the IRS—specifically to enable them to go after rich tax cheats with armies of tax lawyers—the repugs clawed it back. Now if they go after anybody, it will be the little people who can't afford expensive lawyers.
Once again, I question whether you can get 50 million people to withhold their taxes in light of what corporate media, white shoe law firms, and elite universities have already demonstrated they will do: roll over and comply despite the fact they have the money, power, and lawyers to resist.
nevertheless, i'll persist. withholding your taxes for less than three years is not a big ask. they CANNOT just yoink the money from people en masse with a computer program. liens must be approved individually by a court, and increasingly, anything that requires a court takes for fucking ever.
if you're about to say "they won't wait for a court order" - they WILL, because if they don't, we are immediately called to a far greater risk & duty, which is to say, WAR.
I wish you the best of luck in all your endeavors, but I encourage you to assess the situation not based solely on the past, but rather on a rapidly changing present and future. I also recommend subscribing to Gary Marcus right here on Substack to better understand what we are up against with the Silicon Valley billionaires.
i am one more voice -- but believe it or not, i baited musk & thiel into an interview on my show a month or so ago. listen if you like. i currently have eleven subscribers.
anyway, here's the chant i think fits the moment --
TAX STRIKE! -- file, don't pay -- NO MONEY FOR TRUMP!
if you pay taxes, you support trump.
if you pay taxes, you support ice.
if you pay taxes, you support stephen miller.
SEND NO CHECKS TO THIS IRS! NOT ONE PENNY!
Nonpayment is NOT a crime. It's a debt like any other.
While I agree that our mainstream media, & in fact Congress, is slinking away from Truth & Justice with their tail between their legs, you fail to highlight the non-traditional media, & CITIZENS, who are speaking out & loudly. While I appreciate your early & continued warnings, please balance it with progress we here in America are making in waking up. It is not happening fast enough for me! But IT IS happening!! Please cheer us on!!
Kathy, you're right; we're working hard out here and we're making progress. And we're scaring T*** and MAGA, and Minneapolis chased him away. The tide is turning against him. We can do this. We will do this.
He needs to be gone now. How Americans could allow someone of such awful character to become president not once, but twice beggars belief. In Australia, a person would be disqualified from running for parliament (we don't vote for a Prime Minister) with the felony charges that Trump has accumulated, let alone the actual vomit that is on record coming from his mouth about "grabbing women's pussy" .He brings shame on all Americans but I applaud all those who are standing up to this monster.
Absolutely delusional to expect free and fair elections this year or in 2028. There are so many unresolved issues with elections in the US and so many people thinking it's just going to be business as usual. Americans need to wake up now and fight like hell to get their country back. It can't start in November hoping that elections will help turn things around. A criminal regime will do anything to stay in power and avoid justice. It's naive to assume that their power will be surrendered peacefully with the way they've been conducting themselves.
When speaking about the "US media," I think it would be helpful if you differentiated between mainstream/corporate media and the rest. Considering that the former is increasingly under the control of the oligarchy, it's kinda silly to expect them to bite the hand that feeds them when it's their own hand.
In June of '24 I finally gave up on my 40-yr subscription to the NY Times. I dropped WaPo maybe a decade earlier when it unceremoniously dumped two of my favorite op-ed columnists. I gave up on TV news ages ago in the '60s when ABC put Roone Arledge (Wide World of Sports) in charge of the newsroom.
ABC, of course, now fronts for corporate behemoth Disney. CBS, the home of Ed Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, and Dan Rather was just turned over to found object Bari Weiss. NBC fronts for Comcast, another anaconda in the corporate galaxy. Facebook, X, TikTok, Fox Spews, Wall Street Journal, and the NY Post are all in the hands of oligarchs. News filtered such entities isn't news at all ... it's propaganda.
My Google news feed loads up on all of the above. There are plenty of other Indies doing a reasonable job of keeping us informed. AP, Reuters, El Paid, Le Monde, AFP, Der Spiegel, and Al-Jezeera are long-standing sources that are useful in fact checking 'murikan 'news' and whatever would we do without Substack and Blue Sky?
Like the saying goes: democracies get the governments they deserve.
The truth is, this isn't any kind of aberration, some perversion of an otherwise good people and their government. This is the mask coming off, the quiet part said out loud, the true ruling class that's always held the real power in America finally sick and tired of maintaining the pretense that it's anything else than what it is. This is the evil rotten heart of America, confident of its final and inevitable victory over the yoke of decency it has borne all this time, ready at last to cast it off and proclaim itself the sole rightful claimant to the throne.
I've spent years trying to figure out where the turning point might have been. Was it Sandra Day O'Connor voting to hand the Presidency to Bush on patently false pretenses, so that her successor would be nominated by a Republican? Was it Gingrich's sneering promise to America to thwart Clinton at every turn? Was it Reagan committing treason through the October Surprise? Was it the white backlash against the 60s, delivering Nixon the biggest landslide in history? Hoover ramming through every measure he could to hamstring FDR's incoming government? Was it the Civil War? In the end, I had to admit that I really couldn't find a point when the country turned rotten. That rottenness has always been there, since before the country's founding. The 1619 Project tried to warn us, but White Supremacy and colonialism, America's original sins, are so deeply embedded in the country's psyche I can only really be surprised that the pretense held up for as long as it did.
Thank you for reposting this dire story. I'm not sure if it's complacency or ADHD but I fear we have lost sight of this, and as you point out, mainstream media does us no favors. Grateful for Journalists like you who are the sounding the alarm.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’ll upgrade my subscription to PAID. Keep publishing here please. I saw your TED talk a long time ago and completely got off social media as a result. So glad to find you here. And thank you.🙏
2016's rigged election has been called out in the Epstein files. Epstein, Thiel, Kushner all displayed while climbing into bed with Russia. Zev Shalev wrote two pieces on this in the past few days complete with a graphic that shows the many fingers involved. There is no reason to think Thiel wasn't the architect behind Trump yet again as Vance went on the ticket. Add to it Project 2025 and we have a perfect trifecta proving your point a year later. Who wrote the chapter on elections? None other than Hans Von Spakovsky who was an integral part of Fulton County GA elections and has been crying 'WOLF' in every state Trump lost.
What did anyone expect after the Heritage Foundation published their programme for all to see, other than a fast-paced slew of Executive Orders crudely shaping a new political context and determining the desired direction of travel?
Are you working with Meidas? The Wolf Pack Lev Parnas & Zev Shalev Ellie Leonard etc the Epstein connection to Peter Theil is becoming clearer - and those fears for the UK with Defence & the NHS data being handed to Palantir are so very worrying. Not least because of links with Russia. WTAF is happening to democracy? If only more had paid attention sooner.
I've been ranting about this ongoing coup for years and was astounded that even after the DOGE data theft I was being called hysterical for calling it a coup. I think it began in earnest with the Supreme Court presidential immunity decision, which effectively eviscerated our constitutional balance and separation of powers. Thank you, Carole, for all your work in spotlighting the reality too many people refuse to acknowledge.
when i pointed out to people last year -- regular people, apolitical people -- that elon musk's private security force was surrounding the president at all times, they all immediately saw problem with this. i discussed it with an nypd officer while i was waiting for a train, and he said, "if that's true...well, that ain't good."
i think that most people who have been following politics online for the last ten or twenty years -- and that includes almost everyone "in media" -- have completely melted their brains. they are in a permanent state of anemic fury, too exhausted to collect themselves and actually do anything serious about these very serious things. they just keep going to their jobs, paying taxes, and posting about how awful it all is. well, posting is no longer enough!
i am not paying a cent in taxes to this criminal administration. if you do, person reading this, fuck you. if you file them properly, but withhold the check, the maximum penalty is 25% of the total after four years. consider it a tip to the next president.
TAX STRIKE! -- file, don't pay -- NO MONEY FOR TRUMP!
if you pay taxes, you support trump.
if you pay taxes, you support ice.
if you pay taxes, you support stephen miller.
SEND NO CHECKS TO THIS IRS! NOT ONE PENNY!
Nonpayment is NOT a crime. It's a debt like any other.
TAX STRIKE!
The US has a pay-as-you-go system. People who have jobs pay payroll taxes all through the year - Fed. as well as State (some exceptions). When they file, the result is usually a refund thanks to the deduction(s), child credit, earned income credit, etc.
"...if you do, person reading this, fuck you." I assume you are a US Citizen?
zero out any zeroable withholdings at your job. social security and medicare taxes will still be taken out, but those are earmarked for those purposes.
if you really need me to clarify -- if you pay a single cent to trump's irs that you could have held back by any means at your disposal, fuck you.
i said to file them properly -- so if that results in you getting a refund, go right ahead, obviously.
Changing your W-2 for this purpose will earmark you at your job. How many people with a mortgage, a car-lease, a child going to college, bills, etc. will go for it?
what you're asking is really, how many people will stand up for freedom when push comes to shove? forget fucking money -- you might have to risk life and limb. and if you won't risk money, i doubt you'll risk things money can't buy.
so -- how could i know how many will go for it? one can only hope that the answer is, "enough."
No, I was asking how many people can afford to go for it.
I think for your proposal to be effective it needs to be organized and up front about all the possible consequences.
I did withhold my taxes during the Vietnam War, but my act of resistance was part of an organized student protest against the war and I had a low paying waitress job. When the war ended, the IRS sent me a bill for taxes owed, which I paid.
Now, however, we have Thiel's Palantir analytical and surveillance software hoovering up all the stolen data Musk's DODGE downloaded, and a full-on lawless, authoritarian regime in place, so the consequences could be far more severe, i.e., being arrested and deported to another country. These Nazis have already designated anyone who criticizes them, their absurd version of "Christianity," or supports abortion as domestic terrorists. In addition, people are already struggling to make ends meet and a 25% penalty on top of a big tax bill could put them in even more dire circumstances. At minimum, an organized tax boycott should provide assistance from competent tax lawyers, and an legitimate escrow fund to hold all money owed, where it can earn interest.
@Oaktown. Your idea how to do it organized with an escrow account, makes a lot of sense. US citizens, unless they are not US born but naturalized, cannot be deported. The naturalized ones first need to to lose their citizenship and there are rules for that procedure. But Legal Non-Immigrants and Legal Permanent Residents will quickly get in trouble, can have their immigration procedure cancelled or their visa/work permit revoked. So a "fuck you" is undeserved IMHO. (We already "self-deported", many years ago. I do not need to repeat that exercise.)
What you say about US born citizens being protected used to be true, but this is a lawless and sadistic regime that feels no allegiance to our constitution or democracy, and has already threatened to deport "home grown" citizens to Cecot prison and unconstitutionally designated all citizens who oppose their regime as domestic terrorists. Even US born citizens are in the crosshairs now and should not be feeling safe either.
Agree with you on everything you say about the perils of even naturalized citizens. It's a nightmare of shifting sand and lawless chaos and I would never tell anyone how to best resist these Nazis because each person's situation is different, as are the risks.
US Citizens have a lot of resources at their disposal if what you descibe would happen. Think ACLU etc. The current government would show its real colors by such actions. That would wake up many. I do not think deporting citizens is going to happen. There is so much low-hanging fruit in this regard. Most immigration petitions etc. for work-bound migrants are far from perfect. The immigrant has no say in the procedure, what, when, how, it is filed. But they are responsible and can be punished for mistakes, omissions, etc. Just have an AI program go over those files.
EDIT: Currently the US is deporting people to "third countries" because their original home country poses too many dangers to them. But is that not a reason to give them asylum? And how are people supposed to live in a foreign country, without money, having no (family) connections, not speaking the language, etc.? Young women fleeing from Afghanistan - we all know why - have been deported to Panama! Where is the outrage?
I think it's a mistake to underestimate the cost of being imprisoned and having to defend yourself from criminal or civil charges when you're up against the unlimited resources of the Fed. govt. That alone could bankrupt a huge percentage of Americans. ALL Americans need to accept this as entirely possible, and no one can be sure they could never be caught up in the Nazi surveillance net—even under false pretenses.
Of course immigrants are the most vulnerable, but I see too many US born citizens who are not moved to resist because they think they are immune from consequences. No one is if this coup is not thwarted.
any official organization would run FAR more legal risks than a ton of individuals doing this themselves. an organized escrow fund would be ONE thing to seize -- ONE court order.
fifty million individuals is fifty million court orders. and i can say from personal experience -- all the data that they have does not make courts run any faster.
trump cut the irs budget drastically -- and already, compared to the 70s, it is a shadow of its former self.
you want to know something funny? i owe various federal taxes here and there for a business i own, from having missed filings in some early quarters or having not had the funds to make a quarterly payment at various times. the irs has sent me various notices about my owings -- and prior to this second trump administration, i did intend to work it out and pay what i owe, because it could turn into a problem eventually. however i wasn't sure exactly *what* i owed -- i'm not the most organized and i had lost some of the notices, plus the interest on them would naturally have gone up in the interval.
so i wanted to find out exactly what i owed in total. i sent the irs a letter asking them for a summary of what i owed and from which quarters, so that i would know how much money i had to get together, and so that i could be certain i had paid off everything that was outstanding.
i asked them for that about three years ago. you wanna know how long it took to hear back regarding what i owe?
i cant tell you, because i still havent heard back. so as far as the state of the irs today, and its ability or willingness to pursue you for owing -- i couldn't even get them to tell me what i owe. and that was BEFORE trump slashed their budget. so frankly, i aint worried a bit.
I have a friend who went for years without paying past due taxes, but the IRS eventually caught up with him. Keep in mind you're talking about the IRS before DOGE and Palantir were embedded in govt. databases, including the IRS. Palantir can analyze and organize huge sets of data far better than our govt has been able to do before. Plus, after Biden passed increased funding for the IRS—specifically to enable them to go after rich tax cheats with armies of tax lawyers—the repugs clawed it back. Now if they go after anybody, it will be the little people who can't afford expensive lawyers.
Once again, I question whether you can get 50 million people to withhold their taxes in light of what corporate media, white shoe law firms, and elite universities have already demonstrated they will do: roll over and comply despite the fact they have the money, power, and lawyers to resist.
nevertheless, i'll persist. withholding your taxes for less than three years is not a big ask. they CANNOT just yoink the money from people en masse with a computer program. liens must be approved individually by a court, and increasingly, anything that requires a court takes for fucking ever.
if you're about to say "they won't wait for a court order" - they WILL, because if they don't, we are immediately called to a far greater risk & duty, which is to say, WAR.
I wish you the best of luck in all your endeavors, but I encourage you to assess the situation not based solely on the past, but rather on a rapidly changing present and future. I also recommend subscribing to Gary Marcus right here on Substack to better understand what we are up against with the Silicon Valley billionaires.
i am one more voice -- but believe it or not, i baited musk & thiel into an interview on my show a month or so ago. listen if you like. i currently have eleven subscribers.
anyway, here's the chant i think fits the moment --
TAX STRIKE! -- file, don't pay -- NO MONEY FOR TRUMP!
if you pay taxes, you support trump.
if you pay taxes, you support ice.
if you pay taxes, you support stephen miller.
SEND NO CHECKS TO THIS IRS! NOT ONE PENNY!
Nonpayment is NOT a crime. It's a debt like any other.
TAX STRIKE!
While I agree that our mainstream media, & in fact Congress, is slinking away from Truth & Justice with their tail between their legs, you fail to highlight the non-traditional media, & CITIZENS, who are speaking out & loudly. While I appreciate your early & continued warnings, please balance it with progress we here in America are making in waking up. It is not happening fast enough for me! But IT IS happening!! Please cheer us on!!
Kathy, you're right; we're working hard out here and we're making progress. And we're scaring T*** and MAGA, and Minneapolis chased him away. The tide is turning against him. We can do this. We will do this.
The Democrats are saying "He'll be gone in 3 years". Just think of the damage that he's done in one year!
He needs to be gone now. How Americans could allow someone of such awful character to become president not once, but twice beggars belief. In Australia, a person would be disqualified from running for parliament (we don't vote for a Prime Minister) with the felony charges that Trump has accumulated, let alone the actual vomit that is on record coming from his mouth about "grabbing women's pussy" .He brings shame on all Americans but I applaud all those who are standing up to this monster.
'Vote for me and you'll never have to vote again!' It's not like he didn't warn us what was coming - will there really be midterms or a 2028 election?
Absolutely delusional to expect free and fair elections this year or in 2028. There are so many unresolved issues with elections in the US and so many people thinking it's just going to be business as usual. Americans need to wake up now and fight like hell to get their country back. It can't start in November hoping that elections will help turn things around. A criminal regime will do anything to stay in power and avoid justice. It's naive to assume that their power will be surrendered peacefully with the way they've been conducting themselves.
When speaking about the "US media," I think it would be helpful if you differentiated between mainstream/corporate media and the rest. Considering that the former is increasingly under the control of the oligarchy, it's kinda silly to expect them to bite the hand that feeds them when it's their own hand.
In June of '24 I finally gave up on my 40-yr subscription to the NY Times. I dropped WaPo maybe a decade earlier when it unceremoniously dumped two of my favorite op-ed columnists. I gave up on TV news ages ago in the '60s when ABC put Roone Arledge (Wide World of Sports) in charge of the newsroom.
ABC, of course, now fronts for corporate behemoth Disney. CBS, the home of Ed Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, and Dan Rather was just turned over to found object Bari Weiss. NBC fronts for Comcast, another anaconda in the corporate galaxy. Facebook, X, TikTok, Fox Spews, Wall Street Journal, and the NY Post are all in the hands of oligarchs. News filtered such entities isn't news at all ... it's propaganda.
My Google news feed loads up on all of the above. There are plenty of other Indies doing a reasonable job of keeping us informed. AP, Reuters, El Paid, Le Monde, AFP, Der Spiegel, and Al-Jezeera are long-standing sources that are useful in fact checking 'murikan 'news' and whatever would we do without Substack and Blue Sky?
Like the saying goes: democracies get the governments they deserve.
The truth is, this isn't any kind of aberration, some perversion of an otherwise good people and their government. This is the mask coming off, the quiet part said out loud, the true ruling class that's always held the real power in America finally sick and tired of maintaining the pretense that it's anything else than what it is. This is the evil rotten heart of America, confident of its final and inevitable victory over the yoke of decency it has borne all this time, ready at last to cast it off and proclaim itself the sole rightful claimant to the throne.
I've spent years trying to figure out where the turning point might have been. Was it Sandra Day O'Connor voting to hand the Presidency to Bush on patently false pretenses, so that her successor would be nominated by a Republican? Was it Gingrich's sneering promise to America to thwart Clinton at every turn? Was it Reagan committing treason through the October Surprise? Was it the white backlash against the 60s, delivering Nixon the biggest landslide in history? Hoover ramming through every measure he could to hamstring FDR's incoming government? Was it the Civil War? In the end, I had to admit that I really couldn't find a point when the country turned rotten. That rottenness has always been there, since before the country's founding. The 1619 Project tried to warn us, but White Supremacy and colonialism, America's original sins, are so deeply embedded in the country's psyche I can only really be surprised that the pretense held up for as long as it did.
while I don't disagree at all, this is the most depressing thing I've ever read. I'm just so very sad about it all.
You were and are so right about this. I am horrified that the dreadful situation south of the border continues as it does…
That could mean a number of things
For Canadians the USofA is "south of the border".
Thank you for reposting this dire story. I'm not sure if it's complacency or ADHD but I fear we have lost sight of this, and as you point out, mainstream media does us no favors. Grateful for Journalists like you who are the sounding the alarm.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’ll upgrade my subscription to PAID. Keep publishing here please. I saw your TED talk a long time ago and completely got off social media as a result. So glad to find you here. And thank you.🙏
2016's rigged election has been called out in the Epstein files. Epstein, Thiel, Kushner all displayed while climbing into bed with Russia. Zev Shalev wrote two pieces on this in the past few days complete with a graphic that shows the many fingers involved. There is no reason to think Thiel wasn't the architect behind Trump yet again as Vance went on the ticket. Add to it Project 2025 and we have a perfect trifecta proving your point a year later. Who wrote the chapter on elections? None other than Hans Von Spakovsky who was an integral part of Fulton County GA elections and has been crying 'WOLF' in every state Trump lost.
The meekness of so much of USA media is what is most striking...they keep treating it as "normal" and something to be debated
What did anyone expect after the Heritage Foundation published their programme for all to see, other than a fast-paced slew of Executive Orders crudely shaping a new political context and determining the desired direction of travel?
Luigi has the answer
This is so sad for the people in the US. But sadly, it affects the whole world.
Are you working with Meidas? The Wolf Pack Lev Parnas & Zev Shalev Ellie Leonard etc the Epstein connection to Peter Theil is becoming clearer - and those fears for the UK with Defence & the NHS data being handed to Palantir are so very worrying. Not least because of links with Russia. WTAF is happening to democracy? If only more had paid attention sooner.
Are we witnessing the collapse of an empire?