I’ve slowed down the frequency of my writing lately. Some of my regular trolls shout that I’ve run out of things to say. It’s actually the opposite. There’s just too much happening, even on a daily basis. It’s like being caught in a house of a thousand bells all ringing wildly. The noise of today’s chaos is deafening. I’m overwhelmed. Well, that’s the plan, right?
I struggle to make sense of the madness, particularly how many, due to their own exceptionalism, fail to recognize it, or worse, actively support it. The degradation of America is here, folks, happening under the cover of daily chaos. The news cycle is complicit. Journalists are scared. Politicians are scared. They all see the danger and fear being the first to be sacrificed. Yet, they know intrinsically that they will be sacrificed anyway.
This America before us is in a quiet, calculated, decisive destruction. It’s boiling its population like frogs, slowly. It’s been doing this for hundreds of years, but has recently ramped up its resolve in 2025. Project 2025. Covert. Legal? Not moral. Sanitized through mind-numbing non-sensical bureaucracy and euphemisms like “make America great again”, “national security,” and “economic growth.”
Every day, new pieces of legislation slip through while the public is busy watching a protest blown up by the media and the sending of excessive military forces, far more in number than the protestors, just to give the illusion of riotousness to excuse the implementation of the eventual military state.
Endless court trials, only to be told later that in a lawful country, the head of state is immune from all laws and all courts. We watch celebrities’ meltdowns as they speak out against the chaos, but continue to move their favorite art to their homes overseas. Yet, even then, they know America likes to exert extrajudicial authority on citizens abroad as well as citizens of other countries.
The use of outrageous government actions, flagrant disregard for law and order, morality, or even common decency, while claiming they are attacking those who lack the same qualities. We have a giant flashlight blinding us to reality, stealing our reality, stealing our willpower, stealing our resolve for a better future. It will take decades to undo the damage done since January 2025, and they are not done yet. Most of us imagine that by the end of the four years of this Republican government, not that anyone sensible expects them to leave in four years, the country will be unrecognizable to anyone who was around before. Take pictures now.
Behind the distractions, they’re building surveillance infrastructure with AI to reduce the need for human personnel, especially since people may turn against their own government. AI won’t! Do you remember the AI they said would help with customer service? The one who would help you with your letters, your school project, your studies, and help you create cool videos and images? That same technology will be used to surveil you and control you and create an excuse to throw us in the Gulag, or the American version of it. Is that what the Alligator Alcatraz is, that detention center in the Everglades in Florida?
AI digitally tracks your spending, uses fingerprint and facial recognition, monitors your voice, flags your words, and analyzes the tone of your writing to build a profile of who you are and who they think you might become. Freedom and the rule by pre-crime are incompatible. We are humans and not that predictable.
I’m a policy economist. I read bills. I follow legislative movements, international trade deals, court rulings, private sector incentives, national security orders, and patents. I listen and watch what people say and do. I observe their actions and their counterplay. Many consider this boring stuff. It’s why I follow it, to be unique, and in my earlier days, to provide work via that uniqueness. And what I see right now should terrify everyone with a pulse.
We’re being ruled by distraction and governed by fear. This was true for a long time, but it’s amped up now like never before. The systems of daily life—food, transport, medical care, digital communication, even emotional regulation—are becoming hostile terrain. Human rights are disappearing. Not all at once. Slowly, like the slow-cooking frog. So quietly, many don’t see. They hope you won’t even notice until it’s too late to reclaim them.
Learn to Weedle
Brush up on how to sew. Plant something, even if you live in an apartment. Save the seeds. You will need them later. Learn to fix a torn jacket. Learn to sharpen a blade. Make friends with people who have even a spot of land. Help them cultivate and garden, so you can share in the harvest. Plus, it creates community, vital for these times. Screaming about an apocalypse in the TV sense is not helpful now. We are entering an era where dependence will be your undoing.
The corporations that sell you food are now dictating government policies. The health department is defunded, and the skilled government workers who were there have been fired. The same is happening to the education department, the legal system, and public security. The banks that handle your money are deploying machine learning to flag “risky behaviors.” And “risky,” as always, will be defined by your skin color, your passport, and your opinion, or even the perception of your opinion. So, innocence doesn’t mean shit.
Green card holders are being deported. American citizens, too. Bureaucratic violence is increasing. Technical errors are the new excuse for systemic purging. Justice be damned. It’s about power. If you’re a citizen, you can be rendered stateless. If you’re a worker, you’re disposable. If you’re a writer, a dissident, a human with a memory of what this country pretended to be, you’re a problem. Remember when we frowned on refugees? We did not understand what they were running from. Now, as Americans with the means to flee to other countries, trying to fast-track an escape, do we understand now what they run from?
I’ve watched students disappear from university rolls for speaking against genocide. Professors were terminated for not toeing the ideological line. Columbia and Tufts are no longer safe spaces for critical inquiry—they are extensions of state surveillance. Their role is no longer education. In such a society, every institution fears operating as they are created to do and aims to survive. But even that will not last in a collapsed system. You think it’s just about Gaza? It never is. You think that is so far away, it doesn’t affect you! Palestine is the excuse. The real target is your ability to speak, to think, to organize. DEI programs are being dismantled not because they failed, and, yes, they did fail miserably. It’s an excuse to remove qualified brown people from every system.
People ask why I’ve been quiet. Why I’ve slowed down. The truth is I’m not quiet—I’m watching. Listening. Preparing. The chaos is designed to exhaust us. When nothing functions, when everything is noise, you can’t organize. You can’t think. You can’t resist. That’s the point. Flood the system, and you drown the people. You drown good ideas. You drown reason and sanity.
So, I’m taking the time to prepare myself and my family. I’m mapping out resilience. I’m building skills and networks. I’m refusing to become dependent on systems that are turning against us. That includes the food system, the digital system, the education system, and the economic system. All of it. When they decide your existence is inconvenient, they’ll cancel it with a keystroke. They will delete your ability to survive with a keystroke.
If you’re not alarmed, you’re asleep. And I don’t say that with condescension. Seriously! I say it with grief and sadness. Because waking up is painful. It changes you. It makes you angry. It makes you mourn for life and a sane world. It ruins small talk and makes grocery shopping feel dystopian. It makes you notice who gets followed around in stores. Who gets served last? Who gets excluded from “random” opportunities? It makes you look around and realize how many people still don’t get it—and maybe never will. As I wrote in my article on mass shootings in America, exceptionalism blinds many people until the point of death. They see the truth the moment they are dying.
I can’t leave you with gloom and doom. We have been around for thousands of years. Even the oldest civilization, the aboriginal people of Australia, have been around for over 65,000 years, have suffered and diminished, but many are still here despite genocide and colonization by their European invaders. We will survive. But to do so, we must get grounded. Get close to the people who matter. Build bonds with people you trust—real trust, not LinkedIn recommendations, and Facebook friends. I am talking about the kind of trust where you could disappear for a while, and someone will know where to find you and fight to get you back. We have to re-learn what community means. What does dignity mean? Because no one’s going to give it to us. Not the courts. Not the ballot box. Not the NGOs.
They want us to believe we are powerless. But we’re not. We’re just unorganized. Disconnected. Distracted. Really distracted!
That’s why I will keep writing, even if it’s slower. Even if it’s just one post a month, I’ll do it when I have the energy. I will write because writing is a memory against the bad machine. It’s an archive of resistance. It’s a refusal to forget. It’s a yearning for peace and harmony where humans genuinely care about one another and the planet we inhabit, prioritizing these values over profits and the desire for power.
I hope more of you write. I hope more of you document what you’re seeing, feeling, fearing. The system and its ideologues are trying to whitewash the truth as it happens. You are the record. You are the resistance. This is a swing in the pendulum of life, and to build momentum for the next upswing of peace and sanity, we must all add energy via resistance.
And if you don’t have the words right now, then learn to plant. Learn to build. Learn to mend. Learn to barter. Because one way or another, we all have work to do.
