Somewhere between a late Coltrane solo and the fourth tequila at a dive bar in Mexico City, I realized the truth: if a president wanted to destroy his own country, he wouldn’t need bombs, armies, or foreign agents. Just a mirror. And a microphone.
Because the easiest way to kill a superpower is to make it hate itself.
You start by muddying the waters. Call truth a hoax. Science a scam. Journalists enemies. Make every citizen a suspect and every neighbor a threat. Divide the people like a butcher at a cutting board—left, right, woke, MAGA, us, them, always them.
Then you light the Constitution on fire—but slowly, ceremonially, as if it were incense. Let the people breathe it in while you appoint loyalists, crush dissent, cancel oversight, and sell off the last of the public trust to your donors like expired meat.
Education? Overrated. Better to fill the minds with slogans and the airwaves with noise. Replace critical thinking with tribal rage. Keep the people scrolling, shouting, sedated. A nation of dopamine junkies who mistake cynicism for wisdom and conspiracy for courage.
And while they’re looking the other way—strip the copper from the walls. Deregulate. Defund. Privatize. Funnel public money to private friends. Turn every institution into a vending machine rigged to accept only your coins.
It’s a masterstroke, really. You don’t kill a country with a bullet—you kill it with indifference. You let it rot from within while claiming you’re saving it. You blame the immigrants, the poor, the librarians, the drag queens, the masks, the vaccines, the teachers—anyone but the men behind the curtain, raking it in and laughing all the way to offshore banks.
And here we are.
The empire creaks. The dollar trembles. The sky’s gone mad with mood swings. Hope is tired. And history? History just keeps playing the same scratched record on loop. One empire falls, another rises. Cue the brass section.
But here’s the thing no tyrant understands: people still care. They still vote. They still speak. They still write songs and protest signs and blog posts at 3AM, not because they think it’ll fix everything, but because they remember.
They remember what it felt like to believe in something bigger than a brand or a hashtag. They remember the sound of decency. They remember when the flag stood for more than fear.
So no, this isn’t a eulogy.
It’s a jazz funeral. Loud. Defiant. Full of syncopated grief and stubborn joy.
Because if they’re going to burn it all down, the least we can do is dance through the smoke and tell the truth while we still can.
You’re right, but it’s been happening since long before Trump. When they killed Kennedy it was the first official salvo in the war against the people, and freedom itself. Eisenhower was right about everything to come, and here we are.
This is why I protest when I see people doing the Red Team, Blue Team thing, and hating on their neighbors. That’s exactly what the elites want. If we ever found a way to reject those instincts and come together around shared values (and there are many), THAT would be a threat to them. Hoping that these cartoon buffoon, criminals in either party are the answer, is an empty pursuit. In the end, the system always gives us the same shit.
As much as I like dancing, I think at a time like this marching and demonstrating in public protest will be my reaction to the decadence of the current scene. Pricked by your insightful critiques, I seek more information, as with *Lever Reports*. Today's shows that the argument of Ezra Klein's new book, *Abundance*--that Democratic insistence on following regulations for safety and against pollution is impeding real progress that could help the underserved--is disinformation funded by oligarchic interest groups, such as fossil fuels and irresponsible greedy corporations.