Dispatches from a nation dismantled by greed, delusion, and unchecked power.
America is no longer functioning as a country.
It operates like a cartel with a national anthem. A criminal enterprise draped in red, white, and blue. The stars and stripes don’t symbolize a republic anymore—they’re the branding of a privatized empire that barters loyalty for access, and survival for silence.
A government’s duty is simple. Protect. Provide. Preserve. That is the social contract. You pay your taxes, abide by the law, participate in democracy, and in return, the government works for you. It builds roads. Pays teachers. Keeps water drinkable. Protects your vote. Makes medicine accessible. Ensures that, when your child breaks a bone or your grandmother needs a meal, someone shows up. That’s not socialism. That’s basic governance.
But this regime—this machine of greed and delusion wrapped in the language of patriotism—has abandoned that contract. And replaced it with one designed to serve the ultra-wealthy while exploiting everyone else.
What MAGA has done is weaponize nostalgia. They’ve wrapped corporate theft in the flag. They’ve sold hate as heritage and delusion as democracy. Their slogans sound like salvation, but they function like scams.
We’re told America is back. But back from where?
Because from where I’m standing—here in Texas, where books are being banned but guns roam free—this isn’t a comeback story. It’s a controlled demolition. One that benefits the few while blaming the many.
Let’s be clear: authoritarianism rarely announces itself with jackboots. It arrives as bureaucracy. As ballots rigged by gerrymandering. As bills passed in the dead of night that promise relief but deliver ruin. It shows up in executive orders that silence federal agencies. In tariffs sold as punishment to foreign powers but functionally act as invisible taxes on working Americans.
H.R.1—the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—is one of the greatest bait-and-switch scams in modern legislative history. It cuts programs for the poor. Slashes environmental protections. Rescinds funds for food assistance, health research, and education. Then, in the same breath, it gifts massive tax breaks to the wealthiest people and corporations alive.
This isn’t fiscal responsibility. This is economic sabotage.
We’re being told to tighten our belts while billionaires build rocket ships, stadium-sized yachts, and moon-based nuclear reactors. Meanwhile, a single mom in Waco can’t afford her child’s asthma inhaler. Meanwhile, teachers in El Paso are buying snacks for hungry students out of their own underpaid pockets. Meanwhile, rural hospitals across Texas are closing because Medicare funding has dried up. But there’s always money for war. There’s always money for border walls and corporate bailouts.
It feels familiar, doesn’t it?
This isn’t the first time a ruling class insulated itself with wealth while punishing dissent.
In 18th-century France, the aristocracy lived in such obscene luxury that Queen Marie Antoinette reportedly responded to news of bread shortages by saying, “Let them eat cake.” They danced under chandeliers while the streets filled with starving families. Lavish court life became a grotesque performance of wealth hoarded through taxation and cruelty. But when the people could no longer eat, they no longer obeyed. The guillotine became not just a tool of execution, but a symbol of revolution. The inevitable response to decades of elitist decay.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's wealth fell into the hands of a select few—oligarchs who bought up the nation’s industries at cut-rate prices, with full blessing from those in power. They reshaped the economy in their image: extractive, exploitative, and utterly detached from the public good. In a matter of months, public resources were liquidated into private fortunes, leaving ordinary citizens with ration books while a handful of elites became overnight kings. The people were promised democracy and delivered monopoly.
And here in America, the Confederacy built an entire economy atop the brutal lie that human beings could be owned, abused, and discarded in service of white wealth. Southern elites convinced poor whites that their enemy was the enslaved, not the planter class who kept them poor. It was a system built on false kinship and violent deception. The Civil War wasn’t just a battle for territory—it was a desperate attempt to preserve an illusion of prosperity that depended on suffering.
Any of this sounding familiar yet?
The through line is always the same: those in power consolidate resources, rewrite laws to legalize theft, and vilify the people who dare to name the con.
And the people? They’re blamed for their own suffering.
We’re told we’re lazy, entitled, too woke, too poor, too brown, too queer, too female, too sensitive, too expensive. We are the problem, they say. Not the billion-dollar oil subsidies. Not the billion-dollar tax breaks. Not the war profiteers. Not the banks foreclosing on veterans. Not the pharmaceutical companies marking up insulin by 1000%. Not the members of Congress who insider-trade our futures while calling us thieves for needing help.
The cruelty is not a glitch. It’s engineered. It’s profitable. There’s money in denying food stamps, in shuttering hospitals, in pricing people out of insulin and education. Misery has a market—and they’re cashing in.
Our systems don’t fail by accident. They fail because someone profits when they do. The rent hikes. The grocery prices. The shuttered schools. The canceled bus lines. The vanishing doctors. None of it is an accident. It’s a business model.
And Trump? He is not the disease. He is the symptom of a body politic infected with decades of deregulation, white grievance, Christian nationalism, and Wall Street exceptionalism. He just said the quiet part loud. He stripped the veil off the old myths: that the market will save us, that merit determines wealth, that America is fair, that democracy is sacred.
The truth is: the system is functioning exactly as designed. And if we don’t admit that, we can’t change it.
I’m writing this as someone who still believes in the people. In the idea that a nation can rise again if it remembers what it was meant to be. But belief is not blind. I see the truth now. This country didn’t lose its way. It sold its soul.
We were never meant to be shareholders in a moral economy. We were meant to be expendable. Disposable. Useful so long as we remained quiet and functional. But the cost of silence is our humanity. And the price of complicity is everything human.
So let this be the first dispatch. Let this be the opening line in a long accounting of what was stolen, and what we must reclaim. Because this republic? It was always for sale. But the people? We are not.
And we will build again. From the rubble. From the grief. From the well they tried to poison but could never drain.
Because the water remembers. And so do we.