Today, Hungary holds parliamentary elections. Orbán may lose. After 16 years of consolidated power, his Fidesz party trails the opposition Tisza party by double digits in independent polls. The irony is thick: the playbook that American conservatives imported may be collapsing in the country that wrote it. But the question for Americans is how much of his playbook has already been installed here, and whether Americans recognize the pattern before the installation is complete. It’s not really about whether Orbán survives Saturday.

Capture the Courts, Intimidate the Lawyers

Orbán’s first move after winning a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority in 2010 was constitutional. He drafted a new Fundamental Law in 2011 that restructured the judiciary, packed courts with loyalists, forced early retirements of non-aligned judges, and created administrative courts under direct government influence. The judiciary was repurposed.

The Trump administration has taken a different route to the same destination. Rather than rewriting the constitution (a structural impossibility in the American system), the administration has gone after the legal profession itself. In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order explicitly targeting Perkins Coie, one of the nation’s largest law firms, suspending security clearances, terminating federal contracts, and barring employees from entering federal buildings. The order’s rationale was the firm’s prior work on the Russia investigation. The practical effect was to punish a law firm for representing clients adverse to the president.

Four more firms followed: WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and Paul Weiss. All had represented clients or employed attorneys who had investigated or litigated against Trump or his allies. The common thread was political opposition, not some kind of malpractice. Federal courts unanimously ruled the orders unconstitutional, finding they violated the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of association. The Justice Department eventually dropped its appeals in March 2026. But the message landed. The chilling effect on legal representation of government opponents is precisely the point, and it mirrors Orbán’s approach to civil society organizations in Hungary, where NGOs critical of the government faced punitive tax audits and regulatory harassment until many simply closed.

Own the Airwaves

When Fidesz regained power in 2010, the first legislation Orbán introduced was a media law redesigning the entire regulatory system. His allies then spent the next decade acquiring the country’s major media companies. By 2019, roughly 80 percent of public affairs programming was directly or indirectly financed by sources connected to the ruling party. Outlets that resisted were starved of advertising revenue or shut down entirely. Hungary didn’t ban a free press. It made an independent press economically unviable.

The American version operates through threat and acquisition, with the financial incentives aligning. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, has warned broadcasters that those running “hoaxes and news distortions” risk losing their licenses. The FCC reopened an investigation into whether “60 Minutes” illegally distorted news in a Kamala Harris interview, an inquiry that had been dismissed days earlier under Carr’s predecessor. Media organizations have paid $32 million to settle lawsuits filed by Trump: $16 million from ABC, $16 million from Paramount.

The American version operates through threat and acquisition, with the financial incentives aligning fast. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, has warned broadcasters that those running "hoaxes and news distortions" risk losing their licenses. The FCC reopened an investigation into whether "60 Minutes" illegally distorted news in a Kamala Harris interview, an inquiry that had been dismissed days earlier under Carr's predecessor. Paramount settled Trump's lawsuit for $16 million (ABC paid $16 million separately), and the settlement smoothed the FCC's approval of Paramount's $8 billion sale to Skydance Media, bankrolled by Oracle founder Larry Ellison, a Trump ally. The Ellisons are now working on a cash bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, a deal that would put two of America's most iconic TV newsrooms under a single Trump-aligned family. Meanwhile, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos killed the paper's endorsement of Kamala Harris before the election and announced in February that the opinion page would shift its mission to promote "personal liberties and free markets," prompting a wave of resignations from top editors and columnists.

In 2025 alone, there were 170 reported assaults on journalists in the United States, 160 of them by law enforcement. The administration threatened news outlets over critical coverage of the Iran war. On his first day in office, Trump suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid earmarked for press freedom overseas. The mechanism is different from Orbán’s. The result is converging in a similar manner. Broadcasters are being forced to choose between editorial independence and their business interests. Self-censorship doesn’t require government ownership when the regulatory threat is credible enough. Orbán understood this early. His government didn’t need to own every outlet. It needed to own enough of them, and make the rest afraid. The FCC’s license renewal power serves the same function as Fidesz’s advertising boycotts: a financial lever that makes compliance the rational business decision.

Redraw the Map

Orbán’s 2011 constitution didn’t just restructure the courts. It redrew Hungary’s electoral map. Opposition voters were packed into large urban districts while Fidesz supporters were spread across smaller rural ones. A “winner’s compensation” mechanism amplified the effect. The math became nearly impossible: in 2022, Fidesz won 135 of 199 parliamentary seats with 54 percent of the vote. An opposition party would need roughly 55 percent just to win a simple majority. Fidesz could win a supermajority with as little as 45 percent.

In 2025, Trump personally pushed Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms, triggering a redistricting scramble not seen since the 1960s. Texas led the way, gerrymandering five new Republican-leaning congressional districts at the president’s urging. The map was signed into law in August 2025. A federal court in El Paso ruled the maps an illegal racial gerrymander in November. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked that ruling. Missouri and North Carolina followed with their own redrawn maps. As of February 2026, six states have new congressional maps.

The structural advantages compound. In the House, Republicans control more state legislatures and many Democratic-controlled states have legal barriers to partisan gerrymandering or require independent commissions. California countered with its own redrawn map that could help Democrats win five additional seats, but the asymmetry is baked in. In the Senate, the math is even more lopsided. Every state gets two senators regardless of population, which means a voter in Wyoming has roughly 68 times more influence in the Senate than a voter in California. Because the 25 least-populous states are disproportionately rural, white, and Republican-leaning, the GOP enjoys a formidable structural advantage in the chamber that confirms judges, approves treaties, and conducts impeachment trials. Republicans have held a Senate majority in seven of the last 12 Congresses despite the Democrats holding the Presidency far more frequently. Orbán achieved minority rule through constitutional revision. The American version didn't need to rewrite the Constitution. The constitution's original design, amplified by the geographic sorting of Federalism and accelerated by a president who personally directed the gerrymandering effort, is producing the same result: elections that are technically free but structurally tilted.

Governance Through Culture War

Orbán built his political identity on three cultural pillars: anti-immigration, opposition to LGBTQ rights, and the defense of “Christian civilization.” He made these issues the organizing framework for his entire governance model, the emotional fuel that kept voters loyal while Fidesz dismantled institutional checks. The 2018 expulsion of Central European University from Budapest (the EU’s top court later ruled it violated EU law) served as both a policy action and a cultural signal: intellectual independence was a threat to national identity.

The parallels in the United States are remarkable. Over 50 universities are under investigation as part of the administration’s anti-DEI crackdown. The Transportation Department terminated $54 million in university grants for advancing “a radical DEI and green agenda” - in transportation? More than 8,000 student visas were revoked in 2025, many targeting students active in pro-Palestinian protests, accused of anti-Semitism if they so much as spoke out against Israeli aggression in Gaza. At least 20 university-affiliated hospitals have ended or suspended transgender care for minors under government pressure.

Orbán targeted George Soros. Trump targets “woke.” The vocabulary differs. The function is identical: identify an enemy, make that enemy the explanation for every grievance, then use government power to punish institutions associated with that enemy. In Hungary, the Soros narrative justified the NGO crackdowns, the university expulsion, and the anti-immigration constitutional amendments. In the United States, “woke” justifies the DEI investigations, the visa revocations, the defunding of university programs, and the regulatory pressure on medical institutions. Both leaders discovered the same thing: a culture war doesn’t need to be won. It only needs to be sustained. The grievance is the product and policy is the vehicle.

Follow the Money

The most underreported parallel may be the economic one. Orbán used selective credit, tax inspections, and health and safety regulations to squeeze out independent businesses and push them to sell assets to Fidesz-connected buyers. Public procurement became the primary vehicle for rewarding allies. The personal wealth of Orbán’s childhood friend, Lőrinc Mészáros, grew astronomically through state contracts. Transparency International has ranked Hungary as the most corrupt country in the EU for 13 consecutive years.

The American version is less tidy but demonstrably similar. During Elon Musk’s tenure leading the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE terminated contracts for countless vendors but none for Musk’s own companies. Musk’s businesses have received at least $38 billion in state and federal contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits since 2003. The relationship eventually soured (Trump publicly threatened to cut Musk’s contracts in June 2025), but the precedent was set: a private citizen with enormous financial interests was given authority to restructure government spending, with predictable results.

The Trump family crypto wealth is striking: $11.6 billion in holdings, $800 million in crypto income in six months, an Abu Dhabi royal buying a 49% stake for $500 million four days before inauguration, followed by AI chip approvals for the UAE. Then the $2 billion Binance stablecoin deal and billions flowing in from China, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar through the meme coin. At the same time, suspicious marketplace activities preceding major military and policy moves suggest that insiders are enriching themselves and the expense of small shareholders.

The pattern in Hungary is well-documented. Single-bid tenders, the preferred mechanism for directing contracts to allies, remained stubbornly above EU targets despite reform commitments. The government used regulatory pressure to force independent businesses to sell to Fidesz-connected buyers. The result is a captured economy where political loyalty determines market access.

Orbán built an oligarch class from scratch, rewarding college friends and party allies with state resources until they became wealthy enough to fund the party’s continued dominance. The American version doesn’t need to build an oligarch class. It already has one. Our versions innovation gives oligarchs direct control over government functions, then we are “surprised” when they optimize for their own interests. In Hungary, the corruption took a decade to become systemic. In the United States, the conflicts of interest are instantly obvious and treated as a feature of the governing philosophy rather than a bug.

The Playbook Isn’t Secret

What makes the Hungarian parallel distinctive is that none of it is hidden. The Heritage Foundation published Project 2025. CPAC has held conferences in Budapest for four consecutive years. Trump endorsed Orbán’s reelection in a video message at CPAC Hungary 2026, praising him for defending “your borders, your heritage, your sovereignty, and your values.” Vice President Vance traveled to Budapest days before the April 12 election to campaign for Orbán.

The admiration is mutual and institutionalized. Leaked training videos showed Orbán’s influence on Project 2025’s policy framework. Heritage researchers have traveled to Budapest to study Hungarian governance methods. The consulting fees are modest (one contract paid $8,400 for a paper on “Hungarian migration policy and lessons learned for the state of Texas”), but the intellectual architecture is consequential.

Trump has done in 15 months what took Orbán 10 years. The speed is partly explained by the American head start. Orbán had to build the infrastructure of illiberal governance from scratch in a country of 10 million people with a parliamentary system. The American version benefits from an existing ecosystem of partisan media, a Supreme Court that has expanded executive authority, a billionaire class eager to participate, and a federalist structure that allows gerrymandering to be outsourced to state legislatures. The raw materials were already here. The Hungarian import was the blueprint for assembly. The question for Americans is “Will we tolerate this, or vote the F*$%-ers out”?

Stoic Moments

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” — Marcus Aurelius

Orbán governed for 16 years with consistent majority support. The machinery he built, the gerrymandered maps, the captured media, the crony economy, kept him in power long after his policies stopped delivering. Hungary’s economy has stagnated. Its corruption rankings are the worst in the EU. And now, with an election three days away, the machinery may finally be insufficient. The model worked for Fidesz. It did not work for Hungarians. That distinction is worth remembering on this side of the Atlantic.

Need to Do Something?

Read the Freedom House country report on Hungary. Then read the one on the United States. Track the scores over time. Hungary’s democracy score dropped from 5.61 to 3.96 over 16 years. The trajectory didn’t require a single dramatic collapse. It required a series of incremental steps, each one defensible in isolation, each one compounding the damage.

Support the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks redistricting, judicial independence, and democratic erosion across all 50 states. Support Reporters Without Borders, which monitors press freedom globally and has documented the decline in the United States.

Ask your representative one question: “How many congressional districts in your state were redrawn in 2025, and who drew them?”

Check on a neighbor. Plant something. The institutions matter, but so does the daily work of being a citizen in a community that functions because people choose to make it function. Those daily acts of civic life remain the foundation of a functioning democracy, especially when the playbook says otherwise.

Countdown

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress: 205 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 940 Days

References

Heritage Foundation & Danube Institute. (2023). Heritage Foundation and Danube Institute Sign Landmark Cooperation Agreement. Hungarian Conservative.

Freedom House. (2025). Hungary: Freedom in the World 2025 Country Report. Freedom House.

Global Extremism Project. (2025). Trump’s Political Playbook Follows Hungary’s Authoritarian Path. Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

NPR. (2025, April 20). How to Dismantle Democracy: Lessons Aspiring Autocrats May Take from Hungary’s Orban. NPR.

Protect Democracy. (2025). The Trump Administration’s Conflict with the Courts, Explained. Protect Democracy.

First Amendment Encyclopedia. (2025). Trump’s Executive Orders Against Law Firms. Middle Tennessee State University.

Center for American Progress. (2025). The Trump Administration and the FCC Are Weakening Freedom of the Press. Center for American Progress.

Poynter Institute. (2025). The Numbers That Defined the Trump Administration’s Attacks Against the Press in 2025. Poynter.

NPR. (2025, December 8). After Texas Ruling, Trump and Republicans Head to 2026 with a Redistricting Edge. NPR.

Center for American Progress. (2025). Trump Ordered Texas to Gerrymander 5 New Republican-Leaning Congressional Districts. Center for American Progress.

France 24. (2026, April 8). How Orbán Benefits from Hungary’s Tailor-Made Election System. France 24.

Inside Higher Ed. (2018, December 4). Central European University Is Forced Out of Hungary. Inside Higher Ed.

NPR. (2025, March 14). Over 50 Universities Are Under Investigation as Part of Trump’s Anti-DEI Crackdown. NPR.

Campaign Legal Center. (2025). Elon Musk Has Grown Even Wealthier Through Serving in Trump’s Administration. Campaign Legal Center.

Cato Institute. (2026). How Viktor Orbán’s Hungary Eroded the Rule of Law and Free Markets. Cato Institute.

Brussels Watch. (2026). Hungary: EU’s Most Corrupt State Under Orbán. Brussels Watch.

Washington Monthly. (2026, April 7). Trump Copied Orban’s Playbook. Now Both Wannabe Strongmen Are in Trouble. Washington Monthly.

PBS. (2026, April 7). Vance Speaks in Hungary on Trip to Help Boost Orbán’s Reelection Bid. PBS NewsHour.

Axios. (2025, September 18). Trump-Friendly Billionaires Remake America's Media Landscape. Axios.

NPR. (2025, May 7). How Trump Family Business Ventures Stand to Directly Benefit the President. NPR.

CNN. (2026, February 1). UAE-Linked Firm Bought Major Stake in Trump Family Crypto Company. CNN Politics.

Washington Post. (2026, February 1). Trump Family Crypto Deal with UAE Investors Renews Conflict Questions. Washington Post.

That deal, signed on April 30, 2025, after the United States froze military aid and cut off intelligence sharing to pressure Ukraine into terms, was called “neocolonialism” and “pure extortion” by many observers. One year later, its first tangible product is an investment in Ukrainian-made technology that is saving Ukrainian lives. That contradiction is at the center of a $588 billion question: Who is actually going to rebuild Ukraine, under what terms, and who walks away with the profit?

Arrangements for the Deal

Start with the structure. The minerals agreement establishes a joint investment fund (URIF) seeded with $150 million, split equally between the U.S. (through the Development Finance Corporation, or DFC, the government’s development bank for private-sector investment in developing countries) and Ukraine. The fund is governed by a six-member board, three American, three Ukrainian. It targets investments in critical minerals, energy, transport and logistics, information technology, and emerging technology.

Ukraine contributes 50 percent of all revenues from newly issued licenses for critical minerals, oil, and gas exploration. Existing revenue streams: Naftogaz (Ukraine’s state oil and gas company) and Ukrnafta (its largest publicly traded oil producer), are excluded. The deal covers 55 named minerals plus oil and natural gas, with provisions to add more by mutual agreement. For the first ten years, all profits stay in Ukraine. After that, profits may be distributed between the partners. Ukraine retains full ownership of its resources and determines what gets extracted and where. On paper, the structure looks reasonable. A 50/50 split and a decade of reinvestment all honor Ukrainian sovereignty over extraction decisions. But that’s not the full story.

The terms arrived through coercion. In February 2025, newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent presented President Zelenskyy with a demand: 50 percent ownership of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, framed as repayment for previously provided military assistance. When Zelenskyy balked, the United States halted military aid and stopped sharing intelligence, in the middle of an active war.

U.S. Special Envoy Keith Kellogg later suggested these measures were intended to bring Ukraine to the table. The diplomatic term for this is “leverage.” A less diplomatic term exists. Ukraine’s parliament ratified the agreement unanimously on May 8, 2025. Unanimity in a wartime parliament facing an aid cutoff is not enthusiasm.

The Just Security legal analysis posed a direct question: “Is the U.S. procuring a minerals treaty with Ukraine by use of force?” Whether the answer is technically yes or technically no, the optics are not ambiguous. The country providing weapons to keep another country alive used those weapons as bargaining chips to secure long-term access to that country’s natural resources.

What Does $588 Billion Buy

The World Bank’s most recent assessment, released February 23, 2026, puts Ukraine’s total reconstruction and recovery cost at $588 billion over the next decade, nearly three times Ukraine’s estimated 2025 GDP. Direct damage has reached $195 billion. Fourteen percent of all housing has been damaged or destroyed, affecting more than three million households. The 2026 reconstruction priority list totals more than $15 billion, covering destroyed housing, demining, and economic support programs.

Against that $588 billion need, the URIF’s $150 million seed capital is a rounding error, 0.025 percent of the total. The fund plans three investments in 2026. It first went to a company that makes drone navigation software. The scale mismatch is enormous. So where does the real money come from?

Corporate Contract Lineup

The answer is American financial and industrial capital, positioned at every level of the reconstruction apparatus.

BlackRock was hired by Ukraine in November 2022 to attract reconstruction capital. JPMorgan joined in February 2023 for its debt markets expertise. Both are working pro bono; for now. Their Ukraine Development Fund has gathered $500 million in committed capital and targets $15 billion total. In March 2026, Ukraine’s Energy Minister signed new agreements with Baker Hughes, Solar Turbines, and Aspect Holdings in Washington, with the DFC exploring $1.4 billion in credit support for energy equipment. These companies bring real capabilities Ukraine needs, not simply predatory goals. But the pattern is familiar: American capital arrives first, secures the contracts, and sets the terms while the client country has limited bargaining power.

Iraqi Analogy

Americans have seen this pattern before. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Halliburton’s subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root received $11.4 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure, through a $7 billion no-bid contract. Bechtel received $2.9 billion for utilities, roads, and schools. More than 70 American companies won up to $8 billion in postwar contracts over two years. The contracts operated on a cost-plus basis, the more a company spent, the more it earned. Military auditors caught Halliburton overcharging the Pentagon for fuel deliveries.

The Ukraine arrangement is different. The funding comes from private capital and resource revenues, not taxpayer appropriation. The contracts are investment partnerships, not cost-plus billing. The oversight includes equal Ukrainian board representation. But the underlying dynamic resonates. There is a country in crisis. American firms are well-positioned. Then terms are negotiated when one side has far more power than the other. While the details differ, the inexorable pull is the same.

Marshall Plan?

Comparison to the Marshall Plan comes up in nearly every discussion of Ukraine reconstruction. The comparison flatters the current effort more than it should. The Marshall Plan was 90 percent grants, frontloaded at roughly 2 percent of U.S. GDP in its first year. It was funded by American taxpayers, implemented after the fighting stopped, and designed to build self-sufficient economies.

The Ukraine model is the inverse. Investment-based, not grant-based, returns flow to investors. It operates during an active war. It is funded by private capital seeking profit. And Ukraine’s own resource revenues flow into a joint fund where the United States holds equal governance authority for at least a decade. The Peterson Institute noted that “any future Marshall Plan for Ukraine will probably be European.” The current U.S. approach is a business arrangement. Calling it a Marshall Plan obscures the truth of the matter.

It Could Have Been Green

Here is where the deal’s long-term implications get uncomfortable, and where observers in the sustainability space will recognize the dynamics. Global Witness estimated that the U.S. could capture up to $353 billion in Ukrainian oil and gas revenues under the deal’s terms. The hydrocarbon production-sharing agreements signed in March 2026 reinforce the fossil fuel pathway. Ukraine is being rebuilt around oil, gas, and mineral extraction.

An excellent alternative exists. Renewables could power almost 80 percent of Ukraine’s economy by 2050. Wind potential: 180 gigawatts onshore, 251 gigawatts offshore. Solar: 39 gigawatts. Another study calculated that 1 percent of Ukraine’s land area, used for solar and wind, could meet 91 percent of its energy needs. And on the money side prioritizing decarbonization in reconstruction would require only 5 percent more capital investment than the fossil fuel pathway.

Five percent is the cost difference between extraction dependence and a modern energy system. And the returns tell the same story. 2024 data showed that 91 percent of new renewable projects commissioned that year were cheaper than any new fossil fuel alternative. Solar was 41 percent cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil option; onshore wind was 53 percent cheaper. Globally, renewables avoided $467 billion in fossil fuel costs in 2024 alone. Thorough analysis of publicly traded energy companies found that renewable power portfolios generated higher total returns than fossil fuel portfolios across both developed and developing economies. The financial case for green reconstruction is settled, not aspirational any more.

The minerals deal pushes toward extraction anyway, not because it is economically optimal, but because the companies positioned to profit are extraction companies. The supreme irony is that the critical minerals in this deal, lithium, titanium, graphite, rare earths, are the building blocks of renewable energy technology. The deal extracts them to sell to others that are retooling their energy systems, not to benefit Ukraine’s (or the US’s) long term energy needs. In some senses, this is the imperial model retooled for modern times, with a dash of obtuse lack of imagination.

The Sine Engineering Complication

And yet, the first investment did go to Sine Engineering. Sine Engineering is the Lviv-based startup founded in 2022. It develops and produces satellite-independent navigation software that allows drones to fly without GPS, a critical capability given Russia’s electronic warfare battlefield counter measures. Its components are used by over 150 Ukrainian drone manufacturers. Sine is a Ukrainian company, founded during the war, building defense technology, selected competitively from 200+ applicants, funded by a joint board with equal Ukrainian representation. It’s not Halliburton.

An April 2026 assessment acknowledged that while academic opinion remains skeptical of the deal’s origins and structure, “its structure and goals are seeds of the same strategic logic, one that serves the interests of both the United States and Ukraine.” The fund got off to what might best be termed as “an energetic start.”

Does one good investment redeem a deal born from coercion? No. But it complicates the narrative that the entire arrangement is extractive. The question is whether Sine Engineering represents the rule or the exception; whether the fund will continue investing in Ukrainian innovation or will shift toward the extraction projects that generate revenue for the 50/50 split. Two more investments are planned for 2026. What they fund will tell us more than any policy paper.

What the Evidence Says

This deal was made badly and may yet work usefully. The United States froze military aid to a country fighting for survival and extracted resource concessions as the price of turning it back on. The structure channels half of new mineral and energy revenues into a fund where Washington holds equal governance power. The corporate lineup, BlackRock, JPMorgan, AECOM, Baker Hughes, is American. The energy agreements signed in March 2026 favor fossil fuels despite renewables being cheaper by 40 to 50 percent. A $150 million seed fund is a rounding error against $588 billion in reconstruction needs, but it establishes the governance template for everything that follows. The origins of this arrangement are coercive, and the structure favors American capital.

And within that structure, the first investment went to Sine Engineering, a Ukrainian company, founded during the war, making technology that saves Ukrainian lives, selected competitively from 200 applicants by a board with equal Ukrainian representation. Ukraine retains ownership of its resources. The ten-year reinvestment lock prevents early profit-taking. The deal excludes existing revenue streams. The alternative to this imperfect arrangement was not a better deal, it was no American investment at all, leaving Ukraine more dependent on European institutions and a shattered domestic economy.

This is not a novel approach. Beijing has spent a decade running a version of it through the Belt and Road Initiative, lending billions to developing nations for ports, railways, and power plants, then securing long-term access to critical minerals as repayment. China now controls the majority of global refining and processing capacity for rare earths, lithium, cobalt, and graphite. An economic review of over 1,000 Chinese loans found the “debt trap” label was overstated; most borrowing nations were not deliberately ensnared. But the structural outcome is consistent: countries that traded resource access for infrastructure investment found themselves locked into commodity-export dependence, vulnerable to price swings, and reliant on Chinese processing capacity they never built domestically. The U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal follows the same pattern. Whether Washington learned anything from watching Beijing run it first, or simply wanted a turn, depends on what the fund does next.

Stoic Moments

“No man is free who is not master of himself.” — Epictetus

Epictetus was born a slave and lived a life under the control of others. He knew something about agreements made under duress. His insight is practical: mastery is about what you do within the constraints you face.

Ukraine signed this deal with limited options. The question now is whether Ukrainian institutions, the board members, the regulators, and the parliament, exercise mastery within the structure they accepted. The fund’s first investment suggests someone is trying. Whether that holds through the next $588 billion is the test. Two more investments are planned for 2026. They will tell us whether this fund builds Ukraine’s economy or strips it. Watch them.

Need to Do Something?

Support organizations tracking reconstruction accountability: the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), which documented Iraq reconstruction fraud; the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which covers the money trail in conflict reconstruction; and Global Witness, which tracks natural resources, conflict, and corruption.

And closer to home: strengthen communities through mutual aid. Donate food, volunteer, contribute funds. Clean up the garden, plan for spring, check on neighbors, and care for those close. Those daily acts of civic life remain the foundation of a functioning democracy, especially when the government has other priorities.

Countdown

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress: 214 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 949 Days

PBS News. (2025, April 30). What’s in the minerals deal Ukraine signed with the United States? PBS NewsHour.

CSIS. (2025). Breaking Down the U.S.-Ukraine Minerals Deal Center for Strategic and International Studies.

CSIS. (2026, February 9). Six Months Since the U.S.-Ukraine Minerals Deal Was Signed — What Now?Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Ellis, J.C. (2026, April). From Theory to Reality: Evaluating the U.S.-Ukrainian Minerals Deal War on the Rocks.

TIME. (2026). The U.S.-Ukraine Minerals Pact Is Still a Bad Deal TIME.

Global Witness. (2025). Trump’s minerals deal: Bad for Ukraine, bad for climate Global Witness.

Global Witness. (2025). US could seize $353bn of Ukraine oil and gas money in deal Global Witness.

Just Security. (2025). Is U.S. Procuring a Minerals Treaty with Ukraine by Use of Force? Just Security.

World Bank. (2026, February 23). Updated Ukraine Recovery and Reconstruction Needs Assessment Released World Bank Group.

Kyiv Independent. (2026, March 25). Exclusive: Ukrainian defense tech firm lands first US-Ukraine minerals fund deal Kyiv Independent.

Kyiv Post. (2026). Ukraine-US Reconstruction Fund Approves First Investment in Drone-Tech Firm Kyiv Post.

U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2026). URIF Announces First Investment, Strengthening Ukraine’s Security and Unlocking New Emerging Technology for the United States and Allies U.S. Treasury.

DFC. (2026). DFC Announces U.S.-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund Fully Operational U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.

Ukrainska Pravda. (2026, March 25). Ukraine’s energy minister outlines US hydrocarbons and energy equipment agreements Ukrainska Pravda.

BlackRock/JPMorgan. (2024). BlackRock and JPMorgan are backing a $15 billion investor fund to rebuild Ukraine Quartz.

ICIJ. (2003). U.S. contractors reap the windfalls of post-war reconstruction International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

PIIE. (2023). Lessons from the past for Ukrainian recovery: A Marshall Plan for Ukraine Peterson Institute for International Economics.

UNECE. (2024). Renewables could power almost 80% of Ukraine’s economy by 2050 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.

ETH Zurich. (2024). How Ukraine can rebuild its energy system ETH Zurich.

IRENA. (2025, July). 91% of New Renewable Projects Now Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels AlternativesInternational Renewable Energy Agency.

Imperial College London. (2024). Clean Energy Investing: Global Comparison of Investment ReturnsImperial Business School.

Chatham House. (2026, March). America needs partners to challenge China’s critical mineral chokeholdChatham House.

Timeline

The shutdown began with two bullets and then became a budget dispute. On January 7, 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renée Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old American woman, during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis. Good was not an immigration target. Eighteen days later, on January 25, a Border Patrol agent killed Alex Pretti, also 37, a nurse at the city’s Veterans Affairs hospital. Both shootings occurred during Operation Metro Surge, which DHS had announced on December 4, 2025, and expanded on January 6 into what the agency called the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, deploying 2,000 agents to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area. DHS’s own investigators found that immigration agents appeared to have lied about the circumstances of the Minnesota shooting, according to NPR’s reporting.

Two American citizens dead. Federal agents who apparently lied about what happened. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer announced that Democrats would not provide the votes to fund DHS until Congress enacted reforms to immigration enforcement operations. On February 14, DHS funding lapsed. Congress left town for a week-long recess. Six weeks later, nobody has budged.

What Each Side Wants

The impasse is not vague. Both parties have published their demands. The specifics matter because they reveal what each side considers worth shutting down the government over.

Democrats, led by Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House, delivered a formal list of proposed reforms. The core demands include:

• Body cameras on all ICE and Border Patrol agents conducting enforcement operations.

• Visible identification, including agency name, unique ID number, and last name displayed on the uniform.

• A verbal identification requirement when asked.

• A prohibition on face coverings during enforcement actions.

• Judicial warrants, signed by a judge, before entering private property. A

• ban on enforcement near sensitive locations: schools, hospitals, churches, child-care facilities, courthouses, and polling places.

• A prohibition on racial profiling, including stops based on a person’s presence at certain locations, their spoken language or accent, their job, or their race and ethnicity.

• Verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before placing them in immigration detention.

These are, by any reasonable standard, basic accountability provisions. Body cameras are standard equipment for most municipal police departments. Judicial warrants are a Fourth Amendment requirement for most law enforcement searches. Visible identification is a baseline expectation in any professional context. The Democrats are asking the federal government to meet the same standards that most local police departments already follow. The White House signaled openness to some reforms, including body cameras and training standards. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune called the full list of demands “not even close to being real” and said judicial warrants and the mask prohibition were “never on the table.”

Republicans, for their part, want full funding restored for ICE and Border Patrol with no constraints on enforcement operations. House Speaker Mike Johnson added the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship and photo identification to vote in federal elections. Trump has said he will not sign new legislation until that measure passes. The House Freedom Caucus, led by Chairman Andy Harris, demanded that the House reattach ICE funding and the voter ID provision before sending any bill back to the Senate.

The Senate, after an overnight session, passed a measure by unanimous consent at 2 a.m. on March 27 that funds all of DHS except ICE and Border Patrol. Speaker Johnson declared it dead on arrival. He is preparing a 60-day continuing resolution that fully funds DHS, includes ICE and Border Patrol, and attaches the voter ID requirement. Senate Democrats have already said they will block it.

The result is a closed loop. Democrats will not fund enforcement without accountability. Republicans will not accept accountability provisions. The Senate passed a compromise that funds everything except the contested agencies. The House rejected it. And 50,000 TSA officers continue working for free.

Human Cost

The starting salary for a TSA officer is $34,454. The average falls between $46,000 and $55,000. These are not senior federal executives. These are the people who stand between a bomb and an airplane, and they make roughly what a mid-level retail manager earns. Six weeks without pay has produced exactly what anyone would predict.

Fortune reported that TSA officers are facing eviction notices, car repossessions, empty refrigerators, and overdrawn bank accounts. Some officers have sought relief at food banks. Others have tapped retirement accounts to cover rent. Yet more cannot afford the gas or child care required to get to work. And many have delayed medical appointments because they cannot pay the copay. As a result more than 450 officers have quit since February 14, according to DHS. Nearly half of those who left had more than three years of experience. A third had more than five years. The agency is not losing new hires. It is losing its most experienced screeners.

The operational consequences are severe. Callout rates at the most affected airports are running between 40 and 50 percent. The national callout rate hit 11.76 percent on one recent Sunday, the highest in TSA history. On Wednesday, March 26, more than 3,120 officers did not show up. For comparison: during the 2018-2019 government shutdown, the longest in U.S. history at 35 days, TSA callout rates peaked at roughly 10 percent. That shutdown ended after air traffic controllers warned of a “growing safety concern” and LaGuardia Airport briefly halted arrivals due to staffing shortages. The current shutdown is seven days longer and counting. The callout rates are worse. The wait times are worse. And there is no resolution in sight.

Collateral Damage

TSA gets the headlines because every traveler feels the pain. But the shutdown extends across the entire Department of Homeland Security, and the damage is compounding. FEMA cannot process payments for non-disaster grants because its grants management system is not operational during a shutdown. Billions of dollars are frozen. Firefighters, police departments, and emergency managers who depend on federal reimbursements are not getting them. Nearly 85 percent of FEMA employees continue working without pay.

The Coast Guard is operating with more than $200 million in unpaid bills to industry partners. The service has been unable to pay more than 5,000 utility accounts, putting critical infrastructure in what Stars and Stripes described as “imminent danger” of widespread utility shutoffs and refusals of fuel deliveries. The Coast Guard has also stalled the processing of more than 16,000 merchant marine credentials, with the backlog growing by 300 per day. Civilian employees are not receiving paychecks. Military personnel are being paid through alternative funding, but the service acknowledges “grim uncertainty” about whether each payroll can be met.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, is operating with roughly one-third of its workforce. CISA leaders told House appropriators that the reduced staffing significantly impairs cyber incident response, security assessments, stakeholder engagements, training exercises, and the deployment of new cyber services to federal networks. A landmark cyber incident reporting rule has been delayed. The sharing of threat guidance with critical infrastructure partners has degraded.

And the economic damage extends far beyond government employees. Last fall’s funding lapse produced an estimated $6 billion in economic impact and disrupted travel for more than six million people. The current shutdown is longer, and the travel industry represents $3 trillion in annual economic activity. Airlines, hotels, and the small businesses that depend on air travel are absorbing losses that will not be recovered.

Executive Order: Playing Hero in a Fire You Set

On March 26, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum titled “Paying Our Great Transportation Security Administration Officers and Employees.” The memo directs the Secretary of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget, to use funds with a “reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations” to pay TSA employees their owed compensation and benefits. The funding source, according to administration officials, is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed in July 2025. That law included tens of billions in additional DHS funding, much of it earmarked for immigration enforcement. The administration plans to redirect some of that money toward TSA payroll.

The constitutional problem with utilizing this approach is marked. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution states that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” Congress holds the power of the purse. A president cannot unilaterally redirect appropriated funds from one purpose to another without congressional authorization. The memo itself acknowledges this constraint, stating that any payments should follow the federal law requiring appropriations to be “applied only to the objects for which the appropriations were made except as otherwise provided by law.”

Senator Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, suggested there may be funding that can be used “perfectly legally” to pay TSA without declaring a national emergency. But legal scholars and members of both parties expressed skepticism. Senator Chris Murphy said he was “very skeptical” that declaring an emergency situation gave the president authority to override the appropriations process, noting that “this is a president that has walked right past the line or over the line many, many times.”

The political choreography is hard to miss. The administration allowed the shutdown to persist for six weeks. TSA officers went unpaid. Airports descended into chaos. Then the president signed a memo, declared it an emergency, and positioned himself as the person solving a crisis that his own party’s intransigence helped create. The fact that ICE agents, who earn between $95,000 and $145,000 per year and are eligible for $50,000 signing bonuses, never missed a paycheck is instructive. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act included $75 billion for ICE over four years. TSA received no comparable protection. The priorities were visible from the start.

A Brief Note on Priorities

Although this post is about the shutdown, not the war, there is one number worth highlighting. The United States is spending roughly one billion dollars per day on Operation Epic Fury, the military campaign against Iran that began on February 28. In the same period, it could not find the money to pay 50,000 airport security officers. The juxtaposition here requires no further elaboration.

Indictment: Nobody Is Governing

The instinct is to assign blame to one side. The reality is worse. Nobody is governing. The White House set the stage by backing an immigration enforcement posture so aggressive that federal agents killed two American citizens in a single metropolitan area in 18 days. When Democrats demanded basic accountability reforms, the administration offered partial concessions on cameras and training while rejecting the two provisions, judicial warrants and unmasking agents, that would have the most operational teeth. The president allowed the shutdown to run for six weeks before intervening with a legally questionable memo, having already ensured that ICE agents, the workforce at the center of the controversy, never missed a check.

House Republicans rejected a bipartisan Senate deal to reopen most of DHS. Speaker Johnson attached the SAVE Act, a voter ID bill unrelated to the funding dispute, ensuring the House bill would be unacceptable to Senate Democrats. The Freedom Caucus demanded full ICE funding with zero constraints. The House position is clearly a refusal to negotiate.

Senate Democrats held firm on reforms that most Americans would consider reasonable. Body cameras, visible IDs, and judicial warrants are not radical proposals. But Democrats also knew, from the moment they drew the line, that these provisions would not survive the House. The question is whether the political point was worth 42 days of unpaid labor by 50,000 federal workers and the degradation of the nation’s airport security system. Reasonable people can disagree. The TSA officers visiting food banks probably have an opinion. The Senate eventually passed a compromise at 2 a.m. that funds everything except the disputed agencies. It passed by unanimous consent, meaning no senator objected. The House killed it hours later. The Senate then left town for a two-week recess.

Forty-two days. $1 billion in unpaid wages. Over 450 experienced officers gone. Four-hour security lines. FEMA grants frozen. Coast Guard utilities at risk of shutoff. CISA operating at one-third capacity. And Congress went on vacation!

Stoic Moments

“Never shirk the proper dispatch of your duty, no matter how cold or hot the weather is, how sleepy you are, how critical the crowds, and how unworthy of praise the task.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The Roman emperor governed an empire at war, dealt with plague, and spent years on military campaigns far from home. His standard was simple: do the work. Do it regardless of comfort, recognition, or political advantage. The duty exists independent of the reward.

The members of Congress who left town for recess while 50,000 federal employees worked for free are not cold or tired. They are not facing plague or foreign invasion. They are choosing not to do the basic work of governance: funding the agencies they created. Aurelius would have found the spectacle familiar. The Roman Senate in its declining years was equally capable of factional paralysis while the empire frayed at the edges.

Need to Do Something?

Call your representative and your senators. Ask one question: “The DHS shutdown has lasted 42 days and left 50,000 TSA officers unpaid. What specific vote are you willing to take this week to end it?” A specific question demands a specific answer. Write the number down. Follow up.

Support the American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing TSA officers, which has been organizing food banks, financial counseling, and emergency assistance for members. AFGE Local 1 and its affiliates have been on the front lines of helping workers who cannot afford groceries.

Check on the people around you. The shutdown affects real neighbors. If someone you know works for the federal government, ask how they are doing. Bring a meal. Offer to help with a bill. The political system has failed these workers. Communities do not have to.

Strengthen your corner of the world. Plant something. Fix something. Talk to a neighbor you have not spoken to in a while. Our institutions are struggling. The daily acts of civic care, the small, local, unglamorous work of holding a community together, are not.

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress: 221 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 956 Days

CBS News. (2019, January 16). TSA absences double during shutdown, 300 officers quit, as some airports see longer security lines. CBS News.

CBS News. (2026, March 27). DHS funding live updates as Johnson says House will vote on its own stopgap plan. CBS News.

CNBC. (2026, March 25). Republicans balk at Senate Democrats’ DHS shutdown counteroffer. CNBC.

CNBC. (2026, March 26). Trump says he will sign an executive order to ‘immediately pay’ TSA agents. CNBC.

CNBC. (2026, March 27). TSA funding update: House GOP spikes DHS funding proposal, extending shutdown. CNBC.

CNN. (2026, February 12). A partial government shutdown has hit the Department of Homeland Security. CNN.

CNN. (2026, March 14). TSA workers grapple with loss of first paycheck. CNN.

CNN. (2026, March 23). Top Senate Republicans push plan to end DHS shutdown. CNN.

CNN. (2026, March 27). Trump has ordered TSA workers be paid, regardless of what Congress does. CNN.

CNN. (2026, March 27). House GOP erupts over Senate’s overnight move to fund pieces of DHS. CNN.

DHS. (2026, February 17). Another Democrat Government Shutdown Dramatically Hurts America’s National Security. Department of Homeland Security.

Federal News Network. (2026, February). How a DHS shutdown affects different components and employees. Federal News Network.

Federal News Network. (2026, March). Federal employee unions, organizations call for an end to DHS shutdown. Federal News Network.

Fortune. (2026, March 21). TSA officers are quitting rather than working without pay during shutdown. Fortune.

Fortune. (2026, March 24). ICE agents can make twice the salary of TSA employees. Fortune.

Jeffries, H. (2026, February 4). Leaders Jeffries and Schumer Deliver Urgent ICE Reform Demands to Republican Leadership. Office of Congressman Hakeem Jeffries.

NBC News. (2026, March 25). More than 400 TSA officers have quit since shutdown began. NBC News.

NBC News. (2026, March 27). Senate agrees to fund DHS, except ICE and CBP, in bid to end extreme airport delays. NBC News.

NPR. (2026, February 13). DHS says immigration agents appear to have lied about shooting in Minnesota. NPR.

NPR. (2026, February 14). 5 things to know about the shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security. NPR.

NPR. (2026, March 25). Travelers are facing the longest TSA wait times in history. NPR.

NPR. (2026, March 27). House Republicans reject Senate DHS bill, Trump signs TSA directive. NPR.

PBS News. (2026, February 5). Democrats demand ‘dramatic changes’ for ICE on masks, cameras and judicial warrants. PBS News.

PBS News. (2026). Why do ICE agents get paid during the partial government shutdown, but not TSA?. PBS News.

Stars and Stripes. (2026, March 25). Coast Guard operates with unpaid bills and ‘grim uncertainty’ in ongoing government shutdown. Stars and Stripes.

The Hill. (2026, February). Second fatal Minneapolis shooting puts Congress on verge of shutdown. The Hill.

The Hill. (2026, March). 5 takeaways from House hearing on DHS shutdown’s impact. The Hill.

The White House. (2026, March 26). Memorandum: Paying Our Great Transportation Security Administration Officers and Employees. The White House.

Time. (2026, March 27). ‘A Joke’: House Republicans Reject Senate’s DHS Funding Deal. Time.

Vera Institute. (2026). Democrats’ Demands for ICE Accountability Could Be Effective, If They Can Be Enforced. Vera Institute.

Washington Post. (2026, March 26). Senate passes bill to reopen much of DHS after Trump moves to pay TSA officers. Washington Post.

Washington Post. (2026, March 27). House GOP plans vote on DHS funding bill after rejecting Senate measure. Washington Post.

So what happens when the world’s most critical oil chokepoint goes dark? What are American consumers already paying? And finally, why does Beijing’s vulnerability to the Hormuz crisis matter more than most Americans realize?

The Strait: Twenty-One Miles of Global Dependency

The numbers are staggering in their concentration. 20 percent of all petroleum liquids consumed on Earth flow through this geographic choke point. Five countries depend on that passage for virtually all of their oil exports.

Ninety percent of those exports go to Asia. China and India alone receive 44 percent. The United States imports relatively little oil from the Persian Gulf; Canada happens to supply 62 percent of American oil imports. But oil is priced on a global market, so the shortage impacts everyone. When 20 percent of global supply disappears, every barrel on Earth gets more expensive.

The alternatives are limited. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline (the Petroline) connects the eastern oil fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, bypassing Hormuz entirely. Aramco pushed the pipeline to its capacity limit of 7 million barrels per day by March 11, after converting natural gas liquids lines to carry crude. The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah pipeline adds another 1.8 million barrels per day of capacity, but Iranian-allied drone strikes hit the Fujairah port and storage facilities in early March, forcing the suspension of its operations. Combined, the two bypass pipelines can handle roughly 5.5 million barrels per day under best-case conditions. That replaces slightly more than one quarter of the typical daily flow of oil through Hormuz. The remaining 14.5 million barrels per day have no alternative route. With typical transfer inefficiencies, the actual gap is likely closer to 16 million barrels per day, an unprecedented shortfall in the modern oil market.

What America Pays at the Pump, the Store, and the Factory

The price signals arrived fast. Brent crude crossed $100 per barrel on March 8 for the first time in four years, peaked near $126 per barrel, and traded at $107.40 as of March 20. Simultaneously, the price of regular gasoline in the United States rose from $2.98 before the conflict to $3.84, with California topping $5 per gallon. The crude-to-gasoline math is straightforward. Crude oil accounts for roughly 47 percent of the retail price of gasoline, with taxes contributing 17 percent and refining, distribution, and retail making up the remaining 36 percent. When crude rises, gas follows.

The average American household spent $2,716 on gasoline in 2022, the last time oil prices spiked during the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The current trajectory puts 2026 household gas spending on a similar or higher path, erasing projected savings and pulling as much as an additional $1,000 directly from family budgets.

Gas is the visible cost. The less visible costs hit harder. Consider these critical items:

Food. Oil touches every stage of the American food supply. Trucks move 70.5 percent of all food consumed in the United States. Transportation accounts for 9 percent of the retail price of food. Fuel and electricity make up 15 percent of U.S. farm operating costs. And the connection goes deeper than diesel: 70 percent of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured from natural gas, and up to 30 percent of global fertilizer trade passes through the Persian Gulf.

Since February 28, fertilizer prices have risen 35 percent. Oil is up 45 percent. Gasoline is up 55 percent. History says what comes next. During the 2007-2008 oil spike, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index more than doubled, driving 44 million people globally into poverty. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, wheat prices rose 36 percent in less than two weeks. The link between energy costs and food costs is very clear.

Plastics and petrochemicals. Fourteen percent of global oil production goes to petrochemical manufacturing: the feedstock for plastics, synthetic fabrics, pharmaceutical packaging, agricultural chemicals, and construction materials. Petrochemicals account for more than a third of oil demand growth through 2030 and half through 2050. The global chemical industry generates $4.9 trillion in annual revenue.

The products are everywhere. Polyester, which is petroleum-derived, now accounts for 60 percent of global fiber production. Medical tubing, sterile packaging, and disposable gloves all depend on petroleum-based intermediates. Every plastic bottle, food container, and garbage bag traces its raw materials back to a barrel of oil.

When crude moves from $70 to $120, input costs propagate through the entire manufacturing chain beyond food and plastics to impact prices for packaging, clothing, building materials, auto parts, and medical supplies, usually with a 60-to-90-day lag as inventories cycle through.

The macroeconomic picture is equally grim. The Dallas Federal Reserve estimates that a full Hormuz closure, removing 20 percent of global oil supply, lowers global real GDP growth by 2.9 percentage points in the affected quarter. Every sustained $10 increase in crude prices shaves 0.1 percentage points off U.S. GDP growth. Federal Reserve Chair Powell has described the situation as “an energy shock of some size and duration.”

Lest it appear that simple solutions are available, it’s worth noting that the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve release of 172 million barrels began flowing on March 20 and will have a fairly minor impact on available oil supply. At normal Hormuz flow rates, that release can replace only 8.6 days of the strait’s throughput. Using the strategic reserves in this manner is like using a Band-Aid on an arterial wound.

China’s Hormuz Problem

If the United States is paying at the pump, China is paying with its economic model. China consumes 16.37 million barrels of oil per day, second only to the United States. It produces 4.3 million barrels domestically. The remaining 11.1 million barrels arrive by tanker, pipeline, and rail, making China 70 percent dependent on imported oil. That ratio is projected to hold through at least 2030.

Between 45 and 50 percent of those imports transit the Strait of Hormuz. China receives 37.7 percent of all oil that passes through the strait, the largest share of any country on Earth. Saudi Arabia alone sends China 1.6 million barrels per day. Iraq, Iran, the UAE, Kuwait, and Oman add millions more. GCC countries, Iraq, and Iran collectively supply over half of China’s crude imports.

The Iran connection deserves special attention. Iran sends roughly 90 percent of its crude exports to China, approximately 1 million barrels per day. China buys that oil at steep discounts, often $11 to $12 per barrel below comparable benchmarks, using a shadow supply chain of transshipment and yuan-denominated payments that bypass U.S. dollar settlement. The two countries signed a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement in 2021 worth a headline figure of $400 billion, including $280 billion for oil, gas, and petrochemical development. Little of that investment has materialized. Chinese companies remain wary of triggering U.S. sanctions. But the trade in discounted crude continues.

The vulnerability is real but not total. China holds roughly 1.2 billion barrels of onshore crude stockpiles, providing approximately 96 days of import coverage. Russia delivers 2.2 million barrels per day, making it China’s top single supplier, and those barrels arrive by pipeline, not through Hormuz. The Power of Siberia gas pipeline delivered 38.7 billion cubic meters in 2025, with an expansion to 44 billion agreed upon and a second pipeline (Power of Siberia 2) signed for 50 billion cubic meters annually over 30 years.

China has also been investing in energy transition faster than any other major economy. Renewables provide roughly 80 percent of new electric power demand. Electric vehicle adoption has cut gasoline consumption by an estimated 28 million tons in 2024 alone. The IEA concluded in late 2025 that Chinese oil demand for transportation fuels has reached a plateau. Oil and natural gas account for just 4 percent of China’s power mix, compared to 40-50 percent in many Asian economies.

None of this insulates China from a sustained Hormuz closure. Economic growth is projected to fall below 3 percent year-on-year if the conflict continues for several months. Manufacturing, particularly in southern coastal provinces dependent on seaborne crude deliveries, faces production constraints. Petrochemical feedstock demand, which grew 5 percent in 2024 as new plants came online, requires barrels that pipelines from Russia and Central Asia cannot fully replace.

Beijing’s diplomatic response reflects the bind. China has deployed naval units to the strait, including the missile destroyer Tangshan, frigate Daqing, and supply ship Taihu, dispatched from China’s base in Djibouti. Chinese diplomats are engaged in direct negotiations with Iran to allow crude oil and Qatari LNG carriers safe passage. At the same time, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has called on all parties to “immediately stop military operations” and warned that the conflict threatens “global economic growth.”

When President Trump urged countries to send warships to help secure the strait, China declined. So did Australia and Japan. Beijing has positioned itself as a “sincere friend and strategic partner” rather than a military ally of either side, a stance that preserves diplomatic flexibility while protecting energy supply lines. The question is whether diplomacy can keep tankers moving when missiles are flying. So far, diplomacy has been unsuccessful.

A Pattern of Previous Decades

The pattern is consistent. Every major disruption produces a price spike that outpaces the actual supply loss. In 1979, Iranian production dropped 4.8 million barrels per day, 7 percent of the world's supply, but panic buying and speculation doubled prices within twelve months. In 2019, the Abqaiq drone attack took 5.7 million barrels offline, the single largest supply disruption in history, yet prices rose only 15 percent because Saudi Arabia restored production within two weeks.

Duration matters more than magnitude. The 1973 embargo lasted five months and reshaped global energy policy. The Tanker War of 1984-1988 resulted in over 400 commercial vessels being attacked over five years, prompting the United States to launch Operation Earnest Will, the largest naval convoy operation since World War II, to protect Kuwaiti tankers reflagged under the American flag. That effort took 14 months.

The current crisis has already lasted three weeks. Combined output from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, UAE, and Kuwait dropped 6.7 million barrels per day by March 10 and then dropped again to 10 million barrels per day by March 12. Twenty-one confirmed Iranian attacks on merchant vessels have been documented as of March 12. Over 150 vessels are anchored outside the strait, waiting. Major marine insurers, including Gard, Skuld, NorthStandard, and London P&I Club, have canceled war-risk coverage for Gulf-transiting vessels. War-risk premiums for those still willing to insure have risen from 0.125 percent of ship value to 5 percent, turning a $125,000 premium into a $5 million charge for a single voyage. The insurance marketplace is a telling prediction of events to come.

The 2022 Russia-Ukraine crisis demonstrated what happens when a major energy supplier becomes a combatant. Brent crude hit $139.13 per barrel. European gas prices quadrupled. Seventy million people who had recently gained access to electricity lost the ability to afford it. That crisis involved supply constraints, not a physical blockade. Hormuz is a physical blockade and is thus poised to have an even bigger impact.

And Now for the Really Bad News

The consequences are compounding in real time across three economies. American households face projected gasoline costs of $2,900 or more this year, up from a pre-conflict baseline of $2,038. Fertilizer prices are up 35 percent, and the 60-to-90-day lag between crude oil spikes and grocery shelf prices means the worst of the food inflation has not yet arrived. The Dallas Federal Reserve projects a 2.9 percentage point hit to global GDP growth for every quarter the Strait stays closed. The United States entered this war with inflation receding and consumer confidence rising. Both trends are now reversing.

China faces a steeper fall. With 45 to 50 percent of its oil imports cut off, economic growth is projected to fall below 3 percent, a rate Beijing treats as a crisis threshold. Southern manufacturing provinces dependent on seaborne crude are reporting production slowdowns. China's 1.2 billion barrels of strategic reserves buy roughly 96 days of breathing room, not 96 days of normalcy. Beijing's simultaneous deployment of warships and diplomatic envoys to the strait signals a government that sees its economic survival at stake.

The global picture is worse than the sum of its parts. Twenty percent of the world's oil supply is offline, and the IEA estimates that only 4.2 million of the 20 million barrels per day that normally transit Hormuz can be rerouted. War-risk insurance premiums have risen 40-fold. Over 150 vessels sit anchored outside the strait, carrying cargo that cannot move. The interconnection of oil markets means that this is not a regional energy crisis, it is worldwide. When Hormuz closes, prices rise in Houston, Shenzhen, Hamburg, and Mumbai simultaneously. Every week the strait remains shut adds another layer of cost to every barrel, every bushel, every container, and every household budget on the planet.

Stoic Moments

“Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.” — Marcus Aurelius

The Strait of Hormuz crisis is, at the most basic, a question of what a nation values. The arithmetic of this war forces a choice: a billion dollars a day in military operations, or functioning supply chains that deliver affordable fuel, food, and materials to 330 million Americans. The numbers do not allow for both. A government that cuts Medicaid by a trillion dollars while spending a billion dollars a day on airstrikes has made its values clear. The question for citizens is whether those values match their own, and whether they are willing to say so.

Need to Do Something?

Share the data. The EIA’s Strait of Hormuz analysis page (eia.gov/todayinenergy) provides real-time data on oil flows, prices, and supply disruptions. Share it. Facts travel farther than outrage.

Call your representatives. Ask one question, with a number attached: “The war has raised gas prices 86 cents per gallon in three weeks and is projected to cost American households an additional $1,000 or more this year. What is your plan to protect consumers from the economic fallout of this conflict?”

Support energy policy organizations. The Center for American Progress tracks the consumer impact of energy price shocks and advocates for strategic reserve policy and renewable energy acceleration. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publishes rigorous analysis on Hormuz security and Middle East geopolitics. Both accept donations and amplify informed voices.

Track the prices. GasBuddy (gasbuddy.com) and AAA (gasprices.aaa.com) provide daily fuel price tracking. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Consumer Price Index monthly. Knowing the numbers makes the political arguments concrete.

Act locally. Carpool. Combine errands. Check on neighbors who drive older, less fuel-efficient vehicles and who feel the price squeeze first. Strengthen communities through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, contribute funds. Clean up the garden, plan for spring, check on neighbors, and care for those close. Those daily acts of civic life remain the foundation of a functioning democracy, especially when the government has other priorities.

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress: 227 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 962 Days

U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2024, November). Amid regional conflict, the Strait of Hormuz remains a critical oil chokepoint. EIA Today in Energy.

U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2025, June). About one-fifth of global LNG trade flows through the Strait of Hormuz. EIA Today in Energy.

Visual Capitalist. (2026). Charted: Oil Trade Through the Strait of Hormuz, by Country. Visual Capitalist.

S&P Global. (2026, March 10). Aramco’s East-West pipeline to hit full capacity in next couple of days: CEO. S&P Global Commodity Insights.

CNBC. (2026a, March 12). Two oil pipelines are helping Saudi Arabia and UAE bypass the Strait of Hormuz. CNBC.

International Energy Agency. (2026). Strait of Hormuz: Oil Security and Emergency Response. IEA.

Fortune. (2026, March 20). Oil prices today, March 20, 2026. Fortune.

AAA. (2026, March). Gas Price Tracker. AAA.

American Petroleum Institute. (2026, March 16). How gasoline prices are determined. API.

Center for American Progress. (2026). How fossil fuels and global extreme weather increase Americans’ food prices. Center for American Progress.

International Fertilizer Association. (2025). Fertilizer production and natural gas dependency data. [URL needs verification]

Civil Eats. (2026, March 17). The Persian Gulf oil crisis is a food crisis. Civil Eats.

Al Jazeera. (2026, March 10). How will soaring oil prices caused by the Iran war impact food prices?. Al Jazeera.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2011). The global food crises. Report on the World Social Situation 2011.

Federal Reserve Board. (2022, May 27). The effect of the war in Ukraine on global activity and inflation. FEDS Notes.

International Energy Agency. (2018). The Future of Petrochemicals. IEA.

Dallas Federal Reserve. (2026, March 20). What the closure of the Strait of Hormuz means for the global economy. Dallas Fed Research.

Scotiabank. (2026, March 2). Impact of higher oil prices on Canada and U.S.. Scotiabank Economics.

Kansas City Federal Reserve. (2026). The economic outlook and monetary policy. Kansas City Fed Speeches.

Bloomberg. (2026, March 20). First U.S. oil barrels from emergency release to hit market. Bloomberg.

Worldometer. (2024). China oil consumption. Worldometer.

Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy. (2025). China’s oil demand, imports, and supply security. Columbia CGEP.

CNBC. (2025, June 27). China skirts U.S. sanctions to remain top Iranian oil buyer. CNBC.

Brandeis University Crown Center. (2023). The Iranian-Chinese Strategic Partnership. Crown Conversations.

OilPrice.com. (2025). Russia’s pipeline gas exports to China set for 25% surge in 2025. OilPrice.com.

Congressional Research Service. (2025). Power of Siberia 2: Another Russia-China pipeline. CRS Reports.

International Energy Agency. (2025b). Oil demand for fuels in China has reached a plateau. IEA Commentary.

Inside Climate News. (2026, March 13). China’s clean energy push has made it less vulnerable to energy shocks. Inside Climate News.

Kpler. (2025). Chinese oil demand weakness masked by petrochemical feedstock growth. Kpler Blog.

CNBC. (2026b, March 9). China can withstand oil’s surge past $100 more easily than other countries. CNBC.

Modern Diplomacy. (2026, March 8). China bolsters naval presence in Strait of Hormuz amid U.S. pressure on Iran. Modern Diplomacy.

Bloomberg. (2026b, March 3). China calls on all sides to protect ships transiting Hormuz. Bloomberg.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China. (2026, March 2). Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning’s Regular Press Conference. MFA China.

CSIS. (2026). No one, not even Beijing, is getting through the Strait of Hormuz. Center for Strategic and International Studies.

United Against Nuclear Iran. (2026, March 16). Iran war shipping update. UANI.

Kennedy’s Law. (2026). Iran war triggers a reshaped marine insurance risk landscape. Kennedy’s Law.

Bloomberg. (2026c, March 16). Shipping insurance costs to cross Hormuz soar after ship attacks. Bloomberg.

U.S. Naval Institute. (1988, May). The Tanker War. Proceedings.

Federal Reserve History. (2013). Oil shock of 1978-79. Federal Reserve History.

U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2019, September). Saudi Arabia crude oil production outage affects global crude oil and gasoline prices. EIA Today in Energy.

International Energy Agency. (2022). Russia’s war on Ukraine: Topics. IEA.

World Economic Forum. (2022, November). 6 ways the Ukraine war led energy crisis reshaped the world. WEF.

The National News. (2026, March 12). U.S. to release 172 million barrels from Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The National News.

That sentence deserves a second look. The country with the largest military budget in human history, engaged in a war against an adversary that spends roughly 2.5 percent as much on defense, turned to a nation it has been arming since 2022 for the technology it needed to defend its own bases. The technology in question costs a thousand dollars. The arithmetic of modern warfare has changed. The trillion-dollar question is whether anyone in Washington will notice before the missiles run out.

The Cost Equation

Iran’s Shahed-136 drone costs between $20,000 and $50,000 to manufacture, depending on the variant. A U.S. Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptor missile costs $5.17 million. The math is not complicated: for every dollar Iran spends launching a drone, the United States spends between $100 and $250 shooting it down.

In the first three days of Operation Epic Fury, Iran launched over 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones at U.S. bases and Israeli cities across twelve countries. The U.S. and allied forces burned through more than 800 Patriot interceptors. That is more interceptors than Lockheed Martin produced in all of 2025, when the company set a production record of 600 PAC-3 MSE missiles. At current manufacturing rates, replacing the expended stockpile will take 15.5 months. The first week of air defense alone cost approximately $4 billion.

It was Iran’s outlay for the drones that drove those costs. Roughly $40 million to $100 million. That expense ratio is a strategic weapon that the Iranians are exploiting effectively.

For every dollar Iran spent manufacturing a Shahed, the UAE and other Gulf states spent $20 to $28 to intercept it. Cameron Chell, CEO of drone manufacturer Draganfly, described the dynamic: Iran can drive exponential costs on the U.S. side by targeting small, hard-to-detect drone units. The Carnegie Endowment called the interceptor stockpile problem exactly what it is: the United States and its partners have had stockpile challenges in this area for years, and the methods being used to counter drones are resource-intensive and expensive. The problem is not new. The warnings were not subtle, but the Pentagon chose to spend the money elsewhere.

Calling Kyiv

Seven months before the first bombs fell on Iran, Ukrainian officials tried to sell the United States their battle-proven counter-drone technology. They walked through a PowerPoint presentation showing how their interceptor drones could protect American forces and allied bases in a Middle East war. The Trump administration dismissed them.

Then Iran launched 2,000 drones in three days, so the administration had to reverse course within a week. U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll confirmed that 10,000 interceptor drones developed in Ukraine were shipped to the Middle East to defend American and allied bases. President Zelenskyy confirmed that Ukrainian counter-drone teams were dispatched to Jordan, where the U.S. operates assets at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base. Several of Ukraine’s best-known drone military commanders were invited back to Washington to brief policymakers and defense leaders on the details of modern drone warfare.

The technology that changed the equation is simple. Ukrainian interceptor drones are small enough to fit in a duffel bag. They cost between $1,000 and $2,500 apiece. They fly between 195 and 280 miles per hour. They combine thermal imaging, radar tracking, and AI-assisted guidance, with a human operator taking manual control for the final seconds before impact. They kill incoming drones by ramming them or detonating alongside them at altitude.

Ukraine built these systems out of necessity. They learned as Russia’s nightly Shahed waves were burning through Western-provided missiles faster than allies could resupply them. So Ukrainian engineers did what the Pentagon’s procurement system could not: they built a cheap, effective answer to a cheap, effective weapon. Last month, Ukrainian interceptors destroyed more than 70 percent of incoming Shaheds over Kyiv, freeing Patriot missiles for the ballistic threats they were designed to counter.

Over 20 Ukrainian companies now produce interceptor drones. Some models are even 3D-printed. The industrial base is distributed, resilient, and fast. The Pentagon, by contrast, named 25 vendors in February 2026 to compete in the first phase of its Drone Dominance Program, with $150 million in prototype delivery orders expected over five months. But, Iran is launching their drones now and doesn’t seem to be waiting for the five months.

Zelensky had a price for the help he received so quickly. He wants air defense missiles. Ukraine lacks sufficient anti-missile defenses to defend itself against Russian ballistic missiles. By deploying drone teams to the Gulf, Ukraine positions itself to receive the Patriot systems it has been requesting for years. Strategically, that means Ukraine trades expertise in low cost warefare it built under fire for expensive hardware it cannot build at home.

There is plenty of irony in these events. The United States armed Ukraine to fight Russia. Ukraine used the war to develop drone technology that the United States did not have. Iran, armed with the same Shahed drones Russia has been launching at Kyiv, forced the Pentagon to import that technology back from Ukraine to defend American bases.

The Shahed Comes Home

The ironies continue to compound. The LUCAS FLM-136, the first long-range kamikaze drone the U.S. military used in combat during Operation Epic Fury, is a reverse-engineered copy of the Iranian Shahed-136. Built by defense contractor SpektreWorks, the LUCAS costs $35,000 per unit, flies for up to six hours with a range of 444 nautical miles, and was first deployed to the Middle East in December 2025. Its first confirmed combat use came on February 28, 2026, the opening day of strikes against Iran. The Pentagon developed it by studying captured Shahed airframes.

The United States spent $900 billion on defense in fiscal year 2025. The drone needed for combat was reverse-engineered from a $20,000 Iranian weapon. The drone needed for defense was imported from Ukraine at $1,000 apiece. The most expensive military in history entered its latest war dependent on the innovations of a country it outspends 39-to-1.

The Drone Dominance Program, announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in July 2025, aims to produce 300,000 low-cost drones and equip every squad with expendable unmanned systems by the end of 2027. Congress earmarked $1.7 billion for small unmanned aerial systems, a significant increase from the $398 million spent in 2022. But the program’s timeline assumed peace. Every squad by the end of 2027 means nothing to the service members under drone attack in March 2026.

At the same time, Ukraine produces 200,000 first-person-view drones per month at a few hundred dollars each. The Pentagon’s tactical drone budget supports roughly 4,000 systems annually. The US production gap is an order-of-magnitude differential.

The Other Battlefield

The war with Iran is not confined to missiles and drones. It extends into cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the information domain. Iran’s response to Operation Epic Fury has been layered, simultaneous, and more sophisticated than many analysts expected.

Within hours of the February 28 strikes, pro-Iranian hacktivists escalated cyberattacks by 700 percent, targeting Israeli critical infrastructure, including energy grids and medical facilities. Iran activated its “Great Epic” initiative, mobilizing proxy hackers for distributed denial-of-service assaults and data exfiltrations against U.S. and Israeli targets. More than 100 hacking groups claimed involvement.

On March 11, a group called Handala Hack executed a destructive wiper attack against Stryker Corporation, a Fortune 500 medical device manufacturer with a market capitalization exceeding $100 billion. The group claims to have wiped more than 200,000 systems, servers, and mobile devices, and exfiltrated 50 terabytes of data. Stryker confirmed a global network disruption.

Pro-Russian hackers teamed with Iranian groups on March 2 to target Israeli defense and municipal organizations, including defense contractor Elbit Systems. The partnership between Russian and Iranian cyber operators represents a convergence that U.S. intelligence has warned about but failed to prevent.

In the electromagnetic domain, Iran’s electronic warfare capabilities have disrupted navigation for more than 1,650 commercial vessels in the Gulf as of March 7, a 55 percent increase over the previous week. GPS jamming and spoofing caused ship navigation systems to report false positions, placing vessels at airports, inside nuclear facilities, or miles inland. By March 7, maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz had fallen to near-zero, with only three vessel crossings recorded in a single day.

The economic consequences are direct. Major war-risk insurers withdrew coverage for Gulf and Iranian waters. The International Energy Agency announced its largest-ever release of oil reserves, 400 million barrels, to control spiking energy prices. The price of Brent crude surged 10 to 13 percent following the initial strikes.

Iran also deployed AI-augmented capabilities, including unmanned ground vehicles for surveillance and combat, and generative AI to produce deepfake propaganda. The information warfare component is designed to shape domestic and international narratives, projecting defiance and inflating operational successes.

The combined effect is a strategy called “layered asymmetric warfare.” Iran cannot match the United States in any single conventional domain. Instead of trying to match symmetrically, it imposes costs across every domain simultaneously: drones drain interceptor stockpiles, cyber operations disrupt commercial and military networks, electronic warfare closes the Strait of Hormuz without firing a shot, and information operations erode public support for a war that already lacks it.

$900 Billion Buys What - Really?

The United States military budget for fiscal year 2026 is $895 billion. That figure exceeds the combined military spending of the next ten nations. It is designed to guarantee American dominance across every domain of warfare. Two weeks into a conflict with a nation that spends 2.5 percent as much on defense, the United States ran short of interceptor missiles, called Ukraine for drone technology, deployed a reverse-engineered copy of an Iranian weapon as its primary attack drone, and watched Iran’s electronic warfare capabilities shut down the most important shipping lane on earth.

A $400 first-person-view drone that destroys a $5 million tank changes the cost calculus of conflict. As recently as December 2025, internal experts warned of this, noting that no U.S. military installation could reliably repel a complex drone attack like those Ukraine routinely conducts against Russian targets. These same experts predict a drone attack on U.S. soil by 2026. The Pentagon’s own Drone Dominance memo acknowledged that U.S. units are not outfitted with the lethal small drones the modern battlefield requires.

The United States defense budget is not a measure of capability. It is a measure of spending. And the spending has been directed, for decades, toward platforms that cost billions and take years to build: aircraft carriers, F-35 fighters, destroyer-class warships. Those platforms have their uses and their political “pork-related” benefits. But they cannot solve the problem of a $20,000 drone that a high school engineering class could assemble from commercial components. The U.S. defense industrial base is optimized for complexity, not speed. Expense overwhelms effectiveness and builds lucrative contracts, not necessarily successful outcomes.

Iran’s defense strategy exploits the mismatch. A slow, protracted war of attrition is likely Iran’s intended outcome. Their leaders calculate that their country is more willing to absorb casualties and sustain pain than either the United States or the Gulf states. If Iran retains the capability to inflict economic damage and keep energy prices elevated, it, not the United States, will determine the end of the conflict. The strategy is asymmetric by design, absolutely rational and so far seems quite successful.

The Historical Pattern

Asymmetric warfare is as old as warfare itself. David and Goliath is an asymmetric warfare parable. The American Revolution was won by an army that could not meet the British in open battle and chose not to try. The Viet Cong tied down the most powerful military on earth for a decade with tunnels, booby traps, and the political will to absorb losses that the American public would not tolerate.

The pattern repeats because the logic remains relevant. Conventional military superiority creates vulnerability: the need to protect expensive platforms and the political cost of losing them. The asymmetric adversary attacks the vulnerability, not the strength. Iran does not try to sink aircraft carriers. It launches $20,000 drones that force the carrier group to expend $5 million on interceptors until the magazine runs dry.

The post-9/11 wars demonstrated the pattern at scale. The United States spent $8 trillion over twenty years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria. Insurgents armed with improvised explosive devices that cost a few hundred dollars tied down forces equipped with mine-resistant vehicles that cost $1 million each. The IED did not defeat the United States militarily. It imposed costs that made the wars unsustainable.

The drone is the IED of the 2020s, with one critical difference: it can be deployed at strategic range. An IED required proximity. A Shahed-136 can fly 444 nautical miles. Iran’s drone capability extends the cost-imposition strategy from the tactical to the strategic, from the roadside to the base perimeter to the shipping lane. The battlefield is everywhere, and the weapon costs less than a used car.

Stoic Moments

“Some things are within our power, while others are not.” — Epictetus, Discourses, Book I, Chapter 1

A nation that spends $900 billion on defense and cannot defend its own bases from $20,000 drones is not master of its own security. It is master of its own procurement process, which is a different thing entirely. The distinction between spending and capability, between budget size and battlefield effectiveness, is the distinction between the appearance of strength and strength itself.

Need to Do Something?

Read the data. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute have all published open-source analyses of the cost asymmetry in the Iran conflict. The numbers are public. Share them with anyone who equates defense spending with defense capability.

Ask elected representatives one question: “If Iran’s $20,000 drones depleted our $5 million interceptor stockpile in three days, what specific reforms to defense procurement will you support to prevent this from happening again?” Demand an answer that includes timelines and dollar figures, not talking points about supporting the troops.

Support organizations working on defense reform: the Project on Government Oversight, the Stimson Center, and the Center for a New American Security have all produced actionable analysis on procurement reform, industrial base modernization, and the shift to distributed, low-cost defense systems.

Pay attention to the Ukraine relationship. The country that developed the technology now protecting American bases in the Middle East is still fighting a war of its own. The drone teams dispatched to Jordan are not surplus. They are being lent by a country that needs them at home. The least the United States can do is ensure the exchange is reciprocal.

Strengthen communities through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, contribute funds. The war is far away, but its economic effects are not. Energy prices are rising. Grocery costs follow. Check on neighbors who live on fixed incomes, and care for those close. Those daily acts of civic life remain the foundation of a functioning democracy, especially when the government is busy spending $5 million to shoot down a $20,000 drone.

Countdown to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress: 234 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 969 Days

References

Al Jazeera. (2026, March 10). What are the Ukrainian drone interceptors sent to counter Iranian attacks? Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera. (2026, March 12). Can Iran’s asymmetric warfare hold US-Israeli military power at bay? Al Jazeera.

Army Times. (2026, March 11). Ukraine’s top drone units to bring frontline lessons to Washington this month. Army Times.

Axios. (2026, March 10). Exclusive: U.S. dismissed Ukraine deal for anti-Iran drone tech last year. Axios.

Axios. (2026, March 11). Iranian cyber attacks: What to know about U.S., Israel’s cyberwarfare. Axios.

Bloomberg. (2026, March 13). US sends intercept drones used in Ukraine to blunt Iran strikes. Bloomberg.

Brown University. (2021, September 1). Costs of the 20-year war on terror: $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths. Brown University Costs of War Project.

CBS News. (2026, March). U.S. turns to Ukraine for drone defense expertise in Iran war. CBS News.

CNN. (2026, March 6). Ships and planes are vulnerable to GPS jamming. The Iran war is revealing just how bad the problem is. CNN.

CNBC. (2026, March 5). Iran’s Shahed-136 drone: How ‘the poor man’s cruise missile’ is shaping Tehran’s retaliation. CNBC.

CSIS. (2026). How will cyber warfare shape the U.S.-Israel conflict with Iran? Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Defence Express. (2026). How many missiles Iran launched, how much it cost to stop them, and how long before Patriot interceptor stocks recover. Defence Express.

DefenseScoop. (2025, July 10). Hegseth directive on ‘unleashing U.S. military drone dominance’ includes deadlines for major overhauls. DefenseScoop.

DefenseScoop. (2026, February 3). Pentagon names 25 vendors to compete for $150M in delivery orders during first phase of its Drone Dominance Program. DefenseScoop.

DroneXL. (2025, December 28). Blue UAS architects predict 2026 drone attack, highlight Pentagon’s mass production gap. DroneXL.

Euronews. (2026, March 10). LUCAS FLM 136: America’s cheap Iran-designed Shahed drone clone. Euronews.

FDD. (2026, March 12). Russia helps Iran attack U.S. and its allies. Ukraine helps defend them. Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Flashpoint. (2026, March). Escalation in the Middle East: Tracking “Operation Epic Fury” across military and cyber domains. Flashpoint.

Flight Global. (2026). The Pentagon’s LUCAS drone: Shahed-derived one-way attack system deployed against Iran. Flight Global.

Fox News. (2026). Iran’s drone swarm attacks unleash ‘exponential costs’ on US, prolonging war. Fox News.

Japan Times. (2026, March 3). Iran’s missile math: $20,000 drones take on $4 million Patriots. The Japan Times.

Military Times. (2026, March 11). These are Ukraine’s $1,000 interceptor drones the Pentagon wants to buy. Military Times.

Military Times. (2026, February 28). US confirms first combat use of LUCAS one-way attack drone in Iran strikes. Military Times.

NBC News. (2026). Cheap, effective and battle-tested by Russia: Iran leans on Shahed drones to penetrate U.S. defenses. NBC News.

NPR. (2026, March 9). Why Ukraine is offering to help U.S. in drone warfare with Iran. NPR.

OCCRP. (2026). More than 1,100 ships hit by widespread GPS disruption after Iran strikes. OCCRP.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. (2026, March). Threat brief: March 2026 escalation of cyber risk related to Iran. Unit 42.

SOCRadar. (2026). Iran vs. Israel & US cyber war 2026: Operation Epic Fury threat intelligence. SOCRadar.

Washington Post. (2026, March 6). Unprepared for Iranian drones, U.S. and partners seek help from Ukraine. The Washington Post.

Washington Post. (2026, March 11). Cargo ships hit in Persian Gulf shipping lane crucial to oil market. The Washington Post.

Windward. (2026, March 8). Iran war maritime intelligence daily. Windward AI.

The Price Tag

Start with the raw numbers. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates that the first 100 hours of Operation Epic Fury cost $3.7 billion, or $891.4 million per day. The Pentagon’s own preliminary estimate runs higher: closer to a billion dollars per day. The Center for American Progress places conservative total costs above $5 billion as of March 2, barely four days into active operations.

Those figures do not account for the pre-strike military buildup. Repositioning naval vessels, deploying aircraft, and mobilizing regional assets cost an estimated $630 million before the first missile launched. Three F-15E Strike Eagle fighters were lost to friendly fire on March 2, adding roughly $351 million in hardware losses alone.

This war follows an earlier strike. In June 2025, Operation Midnight Hammer targeted Iranian nuclear facilities over a two-and-a-half-hour campaign. That operation cost between $2.04 and $2.26 billion. The two operations combined have already consumed more than $35 billion in taxpayer funds, with no announced end date.

A two-month conflict is likely to cost between $40 billion and $95 billion in direct costs, and up to $210 billion when broader economic impacts are included. The Pentagon is reportedly preparing a request for $50 billion in emergency supplemental spending to replenish munitions and replace equipment. For context, the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria cost approximately $8 trillion over twenty years. The trajectory of Iran spending suggests a pace that rivals the early years of those conflicts.

What Got Cut

Six months before the first bombs fell on Iran, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) became law on July 4, 2025. The reconciliation package delivered the largest reductions to the American social safety net in modern history. The stated purpose: offsetting the cost of extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts.

Medicaid. The law reduces federal Medicaid expenditures by $1.035 trillion over ten years, approximately 15 percent of program funding. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that 11.8 million people will lose Medicaid coverage directly. An additional 3.1 million will lose coverage under marketplace plans. When enhanced premium tax credits expire later this year, another 4.2 million marketplace enrollees face becoming uninsured. The total: approximately 19.1 million Americans at risk of losing health coverage.

SNAP. The reconciliation bill cut nearly $300 billion from SNAP over ten years, the deepest reduction in program history. CBO estimates the Nutrition subtitle reduces federal spending by $187 billion over the 2025-2034 window. The law shifts benefit costs to states for the first time, halves federal administrative funding, and tightens work requirements for Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents (ABAWDs), reducing participation by 2.4 million people in an average month. The benefit reductions are immediate and tangible. Approximately 65 percent of SNAP households face a $10 monthly decrease due to the internet expenses provision. Three percent of households lose approximately $100 per month through the energy assistance changes. SNAP-Ed nutrition education funding vanishes entirely beginning October 2025. As a result of the funding reductions, farmers stand to lose $24 billion over the decade as household food purchases decline.

Housing. The Trump administration’s FY2026 budget proposed cutting approximately $33.6 billion from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, including a $26.7 billion reduction in federal rental aid, approximately 44 percent of the total. The proposal would effectively end Section 8 and other housing voucher programs as they currently exist, replacing them with a state block grant program featuring a two-year limit on assistance for non-elderly, non-disabled recipients. The Senate Appropriations Committee rejected the most extreme cuts, approving $37.4 billion for tenant-based rental assistance. Final appropriations remain unresolved. Meanwhile, Trump administration tariffs are projected to result in 450,000 fewer new homes built through 2030, according to the Center for American Progress. The national housing deficit already exceeds 2 million units.

The Tradeoff Table

On the other side of the ledger, a single Tomahawk cruise missile costs approximately $2.2 million. That same amount could cover 775 children on Medicaid for a year or provide 3,600 children with meals through the National School Lunch Program. Scaling those numbers up, the $50 billion the Pentagon seeks in emergency supplemental spending for Iran operations could extend enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies for a year, restore federal nutrition assistance to millions set to lose it under the OBBBA, and expand Medicaid to nearly 2 million people.

The arithmetic is relentless. Every dollar directed toward Iran is a dollar unavailable for healthcare, food assistance, or housing. The federal budget is not an abstraction, it is a set of choices. Through that lens, the current choices make the priorities of this administration and the current direction of America clear: $1 billion per day for bombs, and $1.035 trillion in cuts to healthcare over the next decade.

Who Gets Rich

The war enriches a very specific class of people - stockholders. Within hours of the first strikes on February 28, defense stocks surged. On March 2, the first trading day after Epic Fury began, RTX (Raytheon) gained 4.7 percent. Northrop Grumman rose between 4 and 6 percent, depending on the source. Lockheed Martin climbed approximately 3 percent and hit an all-time high of $676.70. Boeing gained about 1 percent. Honeywell, with a smaller but growing defense segment, saw its defense and space business surge 13 percent year over year.

The longer trajectory tells an even clearer story. Between the June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and early March 2026, Lockheed Martin shares climbed roughly 40 percent. Northrop Grumman gained approximately 46 percent. Boeing rebounded 70 percent from its 2025 lows, buoyed by $12.8 billion in new defense contracts. Honeywell rose 21 percent over six months as its defense segment outpaced its industrial divisions. The gains are direct reflections of government procurement spending.

At the same time that the missles are flying and bombs are dropping Boeing, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon all agreed to quadruple production of advanced weaponry. Quadrupling production means quadrupling contracts. Those contracts are funded by the same taxpayers who lost Medicaid coverage, SNAP benefits, and housing assistance in July 2025.

The stockmarket pattern is structural and leads to further income and wealth inequality. The reconciliation bill that cut $1.035 trillion from Medicaid also extended tax cuts that deliver over one trillion dollars to the top one percent of households over the next decade. Almost three-quarters of the tax reductions flow to the highest-income 20 percent. While the safety net shrinks, war expands and wealth concentrates. This isn’t even a conspiracy theory, it’s a budget document.

The Historical Pattern

The pattern is older than the Republic. War spending has always concentrated wealth upward while distributing costs downward. The mechanism is straightforward: governments borrow to fund wars, direct contracts to private manufacturers, and repay the debt through broad taxation or reduced domestic spending. The beneficiaries are producers of war materiel and their stockholders. The costs fall on everyone else.

The post-9/11 wars illustrate the pattern at scale. $8 trillion in cumulative spending across Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria have been documented. That spending enriched defense contractors, private military companies, and reconstruction firms. It did not produce broadly shared prosperity. Median household income grew more slowly during the war years than in the decades preceding them. The current conflict compresses the same dynamics into a shorter timeframe. The Iraq War cost approximately $3 trillion over twenty years. Operation Epic Fury is on pace to spend $95 billion in its first two months. The speed of expenditure has increased, but the distribution of benefits has not changed.

Meanwhile, the domestic programs being cut serve the populations least likely to benefit from defense spending. Medicaid covers 85 million Americans, predominantly children, pregnant women, the elderly, and people with disabilities. SNAP serves 42 million people. Section 8 housing vouchers assist 2.3 million households. These budget line items are the infrastructure of survival for the bottom third of the income distribution. The reconciliation bill transferred resources from that population to the wealthiest. The Iran war transfers additional resources to defense contractors. The two policies have the same impact on all of us.

What a Billion Dollars a Day Looks Like

Abstraction is the enemy of accountability. One billion dollars per day is $41.67 million per hour. It is $694,444 per minute. It is $11,574 per second. In the time it takes to read this sentence, approximately $70,000 in taxpayer funds went to military operations in Iran. One billion dollars per day for 60 days is $60 billion. That figure approaches the entire annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security ($66 billion in FY2025). It is more than five times the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency ($11 billion). It exceeds twice the annual discretionary budget of the Department of Agriculture ($26.6 billion). Two months of war spending rivals what the federal government spends on housing, environmental protection, and agricultural support combined.

The average cost of building one unit of affordable housing in the United States runs approximately $125,000. One day of war spending at the current rate could build 8,000 units. Two months of war spending could build 480,000 units, nearly a quarter of the national housing deficit.

The average annual SNAP benefit per person is approximately $2,100. One day of war spending could fund SNAP benefits for 476,190 people for an entire year. The 2.4 million people losing SNAP eligibility under the reconciliation bill could be fully funded for a year with just five days of war spending.

The Approval Question

A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only one in four Americans support the strikes on Iran. The war lacks public mandate. It also lacks congressional authorization. The costs are being absorbed within the existing $839 billion Pentagon budget for FY2026, supplemented by emergency requests that bypass normal appropriations.

The same Congress that passed $1.035 trillion in Medicaid cuts and $300 billion in SNAP cuts on the grounds of fiscal responsibility now faces a $50 billion emergency spending request for a war that 75 percent of the public opposes. Fiscal discipline applies, it appears, only to the poor.

The parallel is instructive. When the question was whether to fund healthcare for 19 million Americans, the answer was: the country cannot afford it. When the question is whether to fund a war that benefits defense contractors and costs a billion dollars per day, the answer is: the money will be found.

The Broader Economic Damage

The war’s costs extend beyond the Pentagon budget. Brent crude oil prices surged 10 to 13 percent following the first strikes, reaching $80 to $82 per barrel by March 2. The Dow Jones fell over 400 points. The S&P 500 dropped 0.7 percent. European and Asian markets declined 1 to 2 percent.

Higher oil prices function as a regressive tax. Low- and middle-income households spend a larger share of their income on gasoline, heating, and transportation. The same families losing Medicaid and SNAP benefits now face higher energy costs driven by a war they did not support.

The conflict threatens to upend the administration’s own economic narrative, with rising gas prices, grocery costs, and mortgage rates hitting precisely the constituencies that were promised relief. The irony is both rich and cruel. The administration cut safety net programs to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. It then launched a war that raises costs for the non-wealthy. The policy architecture transfers wealth upward through three simultaneous mechanisms: tax cuts that favor the top, program cuts that harm the bottom, and war spending that enriches contractors while inflating costs for everyone else.

Precedents

Every major American war of the past century followed a similar fiscal pattern. World War II, justified by existential threat, at least distributed its costs through progressive taxation and war bonds that offered broad participation. Korea and Vietnam relied increasingly on deficit spending, distributing costs to future taxpayers. The post-9/11 wars combined deficit spending with simultaneous tax cuts, a historically unprecedented choice that shifted the entire burden forward and downward.

The Iran conflict represents the next iteration. War spending funded through a combination of existing defense budgets, emergency supplementals, and borrowing, all while domestic programs for the most vulnerable are being dismantled. The fiscal architecture ensures that the costs of war fall on those least equipped to bear them, while the benefits flow to those least in need of them. The pattern of spending and cost allocation has been documented across two decades of post-9/11 conflict. The current trajectory compresses the same dynamics. But, the Iraq War’s costs accumulated over years, while the Iran conflict is burning through billions in days.

Stoic Moments

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” — Marcus Aurelius

A government that spends one billion dollars per day on a war that three-quarters of the public opposes, while cutting healthcare for 19 million people and food assistance for millions more, has departed from rational governance.

Need to Do Something?

Share the data. The National Priorities Project’s fact sheet on Iran war costs, the CBPP’s analysis of SNAP and Medicaid cuts, and the CSIS cost estimate for Operation Epic Fury are all public documents. Send them to anyone who frames the war as fiscally manageable while defending safety net cuts as necessary.

Contact elected representatives. Ask one question: “How does the administration justify one billion dollars per day for a war that lacks public support while cutting healthcare and food assistance for millions of Americans?” Demand an answer with numbers. Oppose the $50 billion emergency supplemental. Contact senators and representatives. The appropriations process is the one remaining check on unconstrained war spending.

Support the organizations tracking these costs: the National Priorities Project, Brown University’s Costs of War project, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Food Research & Action Center. Their work provides the evidence base that accountability requires. Strengthen communities through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, contribute funds. Clean up the garden, plan for spring, check on neighbors, and care for those close. Those daily acts of civic life remain the foundation of a functioning democracy, especially when the government has other priorities.

Countdown to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress: 240 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when the public can express its opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 975 Days

Get Out and VOTE!

Air & Space Forces Magazine. (2026, March 3). Iran war boosts defense stocks, at least for now.

Al Jazeera. (2026a, March 3). How much could the Iran war cost the US? Here’s what we know.

Al Jazeera. (2026b, March 6). Cost to US for war on Iran is $3.7bn in first 100 hours, says think tank.

Brown University. (2021, September 1). Costs of the 20-year war on terror: $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths.

Center for American Progress. (2025b). Trump administration tariffs could result in 450,000 fewer new homes through 2030.

Center for American Progress. (2026, March 3). The Trump administration’s reckless war in Iran has already cost more than $5 billion.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (2025). House reconciliation bill proposes deepest SNAP cut in history, would take food assistance away from millions of low-income families.

CNBC. (2026, March 2). Defense stocks jump as U.S., Iran exchange attacks.

CNN. (2026, March 6). Here’s how much the war with Iran is expected to cost every day.

Food Research & Action Center. (2025). House Republicans advance deep cuts to SNAP, shifting costs to states while hunger and economic pressures mount.

Georgetown Center for Children and Families. (2025, May 27). Medicaid and CHIP cuts in the house-passed reconciliation bill explained.

Harrison, T. (2026). $3.7 billion: Estimated cost of Epic Fury’s first 100 hours. Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Institute for Policy Studies. (2026). FACT SHEET: How much is the war in Iran costing American taxpayers?

KFF. (2025). Tracking the Medicaid provisions in the 2025 reconciliation bill.

Multifamily Dive. (2025). Trump proposes cutting $33B in HUD funding, including Section 8.

National Priorities Project. (2026). FACT SHEET: How much is the war in Iran costing taxpayers?

NBC News. (2026). Home loans, gas, groceries: How the Iran war could upend Trump’s touted economic gains.

NPR. (2025, May 2). Trump budget would slash federal rental aid by 40%.

Oxford Economics. (2026). The 2026 Iran war, an initial take and implications.

Penn Wharton Budget Model. (2025, May 19). House reconciliation bill: Budget, economic, and distributional effects.

Responsible Statecraft. (2026). The cost of Trump’s Iran war: $5 billion and counting.

Yahoo Finance. (2026). Trump’s strikes on Iran could cost American economy as much as $210 billion, top budget expert says.

Every two years, a name appears on the ballot. Most voters recognize it, but few can say what the person behind the ballot has done. In this case, Congressman John Moolenaar has represented mid-Michigan in the U.S. House since 2015, first in the old 4th District, now in the redrawn 2nd. After a decade in office, he has won six elections and now has a record worth examining.

The examination reveals contradictions. In one regard, Moolenaar has built a genuinely substantive, bipartisan body of work on U.S.-China policy that has earned bi-partisan support and respect. On another, his voting record on healthcare, civil rights, and the environment reads like a party-loyalty checklist with little connection to the needs of his constituents. And on a third, the most troubling front of all, the man who began his career as a chemist at Dow Chemical has consistently voted against regulating the toxic chemicals contaminating his own district.

The China Hawk

Credit where credit is due. John Moolenaar chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and the work there has been serious. The BIOSECURE Act, which Moolenaar co-introduced with Democratic Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi, prohibits federal agencies from contracting with Chinese biotechnology firms that collect American genomic data. The bill targets specific companies: BGI Genomics, WuXi AppTec, and Wuxi Biologics. Beijing’s national security laws require all Chinese firms to share data with the CCP on request. BGI has collected DNA from millions of people worldwide and used that data without consent on projects conducted by the Chinese military. The bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and was included in the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act. That alone represents more consequential legislation than most backbenchers produce in a career. Moolenaar did not stop there.

In September 2024, the House passed 25 bills during “China Week,” a legislative push that Moolenaar championed. Twelve of those bills came directly from or aligned with policy recommendations in the Select Committee’s December 2023 Economic Report. The Countering CCP Drones Act addressed the national security risks posed by DJI, a Chinese drone manufacturer with deep ties to the Chinese military. The Decoupling from Foreign Adversarial Battery Dependence Act prohibited the Department of Homeland Security from procuring batteries from six Chinese companies, including CATL and BYD. The Restoring Trade Fairness Act became the first bipartisan bill to revoke China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations status. Moolenaar also introduced the Uyghur Genocide and Accountability Sanctions Act, targeting officials complicit in the oppression of the Uyghur people.

Collectively, this legislative body of work is substantive. The BIOSECURE Act has real teeth. The battery and drone provisions address documented security vulnerabilities. The trade legislation challenges a three-decade consensus that engagement with China serves American interests. Moolenaar built coalitions across party lines to get it done. The question that follows is simple: why does that energy evaporate when the issue is closer to home?

The Party Man

GovTrack, the nonpartisan congressional tracker, publishes annual report cards for every member of Congress. Moolenaar’s cards tell a consistent story. In 2015, he introduced the fewest bills of any member of the Michigan delegation. In 2017, the fewest of any House sophomore. In 2020, again, the fewest in the Michigan delegation. Over a decade in Congress, Moolenaar has been the primary sponsor of exactly two bills that became law. One renamed a VA clinic in Cadillac, Michigan. The other designated a post office in Beaverton, Michigan. That is the legislative output of a man who chairs a select committee. On China, Moolenaar leads. On everything else, he follows.

The following has a pattern. In January 2026, the House voted to restore enhanced Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies that had expired at the end of 2025. The expiration hit Michigan hard. More than 530,000 Michiganders access private health insurance through the ACA marketplace. Without the subsidies, average premiums more than doubled, rising from $888 to $1,904 annually. The Detroit News reported that a Michigan family of four earning $130,000 faced a premium increase of $9,092 per year, while a 60-year-old couple earning $80,000 faced an increase of $19,500, bringing their annual premiums to roughly $26,750. The Congressional Budget Office projected that 3.9 million Americans would lose marketplace coverage without renewal. Hospitals and physicians faced $32.1 billion in lost revenue nationally.

Moolenaar voted no. His stated reason: “Extending a COVID-era subsidy for those making more than 400 percent of the poverty level is wrong and will only increase health care costs”. Half of Republican voters and 60 percent of all voters supported extending the credits. Every Democrat and 17 Republicans voted yes. Moolenaar and six other Michigan Republicans voted no.

This was not a one-time calculation. In 2017, Moolenaar voted for the American Health Care Act, a bill that the CBO estimated would have increased the number of uninsured Americans by 23 million. The bill failed in the Senate. The pattern is consistent: when the party asks for a vote against healthcare access, Moolenaar delivers.

In 2022, Moolenaar voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified federal recognition of same-sex and interracial marriages. Forty-seven Republicans voted in favor. Moolenaar was not among them. In December 2020, Moolenaar signed an amicus brief supporting Texas v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit seeking the Supreme Court's dismissal of the presidential votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Court rejected the case. Then, on January 6, 2021, Moolenaar voted to certify the electoral results, citing his oath to the Constitution. The sequence is worth noting: he joined the effort to overturn the election, then voted to certify it when the effort failed. Later that year, he voted against creating a commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

The Heritage Action scorecard gives Moolenaar a 74 percent lifetime rating. Not a firebrand. Not a moderate. A reliable vote that lands where the leadership needs it, every time, on every issue except China.

The Chemist and the Forever Chemicals

John Moolenaar was born in Midland, Michigan. Midland is a company town. The company is Dow Chemical. Moolenaar graduated from Herbert Henry Dow High School in 1979. He earned a chemistry degree from Hope College in 1983 and went to work at Dow as a chemist. The tenure was brief, eight months, before he left for Harvard to pursue a Master of Public Administration. He returned to Midland, sat on the city council, served in the state legislature, and won a seat in Congress. The arc from Dow’s lab bench to the U.S. House runs through Midland the entire way.

The campaign finance record runs through Midland, too. According to OpenSecrets, Dow Inc. contributed $61,825 to Moolenaar’s campaign committee during the 2021-2022 election cycle, making it one of his top organizational contributors. The chemicals industry ranked as his second-highest contributing sector overall. Now consider what Dow left behind in Midland.

The Dow Chemical Company began operations at its Midland plant in 1897. Over the next century, the facility produced more than 1,000 different organic and inorganic chemicals, including mustard gas, Agent Orange, chlorpyrifos, and Styrofoam. The byproducts of that production included dioxins and furans, among the most toxic substances known to science. Dow discharged liquid waste containing those byproducts directly into the Tittabawassee River for decades. The contamination extends more than 50 miles downstream through the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers into Saginaw Bay. A University of Michigan study found dioxin levels in soil around homes in the Tittabawassee floodplain were three times higher than control sites, and within the city of Midland itself, 16 times higher.

The entire downstream waterway is on the federal Superfund list. The EPA reached a $5.4 million settlement with Dow for contamination at the Tittabawassee River site. A separate settlement in 2020 required Dow to pay an estimated $77 million to restore fish, wildlife, and habitats damaged by the releases. In May 2020, catastrophic flooding in Midland sent floodwaters into containment ponds at the Dow complex, raising fears that years of environmental cleanup could be undone in a single day. That is the legacy in Midland. The story in the rest of the district is no better.

Moolenaar’s current 2nd District includes Kent County, home to the Wolverine Worldwide PFAS disaster. Wolverine operated a tannery in Rockford for over a century, using 3M’s Scotchgard to waterproof its shoes. Scotchgard contains high concentrations of PFAS. Wolverine dumped contaminated waste into disposal sites that leached into the groundwater, reaching residential wells in Plainfield and Algoma Townships. Groundwater testing detected total PFAS concentrations of up to 532,399 parts per trillion. Wolverine and 3M paid $54 million to affected homeowners and up to $69.5 million to connect homes to municipal water. As of late 2023, approximately 900 homes had been connected. Litigation continues as neighborhood landowners seek redress for their losses.

All told, Michigan has more than 11,000 potential PFAS contamination sites statewide. An estimated 1.5 million Michiganders drink water from contaminated sources. Up to 3.2 million, roughly one in three state residents, get their water from aquifers containing detectable PFAS levels. Those are the constituents John Moolenaar represents.

Here is how he has represented them on the issue. In July 2021, the House voted on the PFAS Action Act, a bill requiring the EPA to designate PFAS as hazardous substances and begin cleanup. All 217 Democrats present voted yes. Twenty-three Republicans crossed the aisle to vote yes. Moolenaar voted no.

The League of Conservation Voters tracks congressional votes on environmental legislation. The LCV tracked Moolenaar on at least four PFAS-specific votes between 2020 and 2021, including “Protecting People from PFAS,” “Taking Action on PFAS Contamination,” “Closing the PFAS Clean Water Loophole,” and “Protecting People from PFAS Pollution.” His lifetime LCV score is 7 percent. His 2025 score is 0 percent.

Moolenaar is not a member of the bipartisan Congressional PFAS Task Force. That group, co-chaired by Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell and Republican Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, has worked since 2019 to advance comprehensive PFAS legislation. Michigan has four Democratic members engaged in the PFAS fight at the federal level. Moolenaar, the congressman from Dow’s hometown, representing the district with the Wolverine PFAS disaster, the man who started his career as a chemist, is not among them.

A congressman with a chemistry degree, from a company town built by the chemical industry, funded by that industry, representing constituents whose water has been poisoned by that industry, votes against regulating the poisons. There is evident contraction in both the lack of action and the loyalty to the interest of the Dow Corporation that is presumably part of the equation.

Contradictions

Moolenaar builds bipartisan coalitions to confront the Chinese Communist Party. That work is real and it matters. But the same man cannot find his way to a yes vote on cleaning up the chemicals in his constituents’ drinking water. The same man votes against healthcare subsidies that half a million Michiganders depend on. The same man introduces fewer bills than almost any member of the delegation, year after year, and counts a renamed VA clinic among his primary legislative achievements.

The China work earns headlines. It positions Moolenaar as a serious legislator on the national stage with thoughtful concerns that represent the concerns of both his constituents and the balance of the American people. But, sadly, it appears that this interest is convenient because it does not require him to cross Dow Chemical, the chemicals industry, or the Republican leadership. The PFAS fight does. The healthcare fight does. The marriage equality vote did. On every issue where the party line conflicts with the interests of the people he represents, Moolenaar chooses the party not the interests of his constituents.

Moolenaar is not alone in this pattern. The Center for Effective Lawmaking, a joint project of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, tracks every member of Congress on how far their sponsored bills advance through the legislative process. The Center explicitly distinguishes between substantive legislation and commemorative bills like post office renamings, which do not count toward a member’s effectiveness score. By that standard, Moolenaar’s two enacted laws disappear entirely. He joins a familiar roster. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio served 17 years in Congress without a single sponsored bill becoming law, passing the House, or even clearing committee, yet earned a national profile through hearings and cable news. Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland spent 12 years in office with one enacted bill: naming a post office in Salisbury. Rep. Daniel Webster of Florida scored 0.043 on the Center’s scale in the 118th Congress, ranking 225th out of 228 House Republicans, having sponsored five bills with none reaching committee. Nearly 20 percent of all laws enacted between the 108th and 112th Congresses were post office namings. The bar for “getting something done” in Congress has sunk low enough to trip over. Moolenaar clears it by the width of a renamed clinic and a designated post office, then points to Beijing.

Those “accomplishments” do not represent balance. They evidence a calculation. And the people drinking contaminated water in Kent County and Midland are not part of the equation.

Stoic Moments

“No man is free who is not master of himself.” — Epictetus

A representative who cannot act independently on behalf of the people in the district is not a representative. The title remains. The function does not.

Need to Do Something?

Look up the voting record of your elected representatives. GovTrack, OpenSecrets, and the League of Conservation Voters all publish free, searchable databases. The information is not hidden. Attend a town hall (Moolenaar and other congresspeople hold them). Ask questions: “What have you done to address PFAS contamination in this district?” Demand an answer with a bill number. Check your water quality. The Michigan PFAS Action Response Team (MPART) maintains a searchable map of contamination sites and areas of investigation at michigan.gov/pfasresponse. If you are in the 2nd District, the odds that PFAS affects your community are not small.

Support the organizations tracking the issue: the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, Clean Water Action, and the Environmental Working Group all publish scorecards and policy analysis specific to Michigan. Register. Vote. The primary is August 4, 2026. The general election is November 3, 2026. Congressional seats are decided by the people who show up at the polls.

Countdown to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress: 248 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 983 Days

Ballotpedia. (n.d.). John Moolenaar.

Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. (2025, March 25). Legislative effectiveness scores for 118th Congress highlight the keys to successful lawmaking. University of Virginia.

Bridge Michigan. (2020, May 20). As floodwaters bear down on Dow Chemical, worries about water toxins.

Congressional Research Service. (2024, May 8). Postal primer: Post office naming (IF12656). Library of Congress.

Dingell, D. (2025). Dingell, Fitzpatrick relaunch bipartisan PFAS Task Force. U.S. House of Representatives.

Environmental Protection Agency. (2020). EPA reaches proposed $5.4 million settlement with Dow for Tittabawassee River, Saginaw River & Bay Superfund site.

Environmental Protection Agency. (n.d.). Wolverine World Wide tannery.

Fitzpatrick, B. (2025). Fitzpatrick relaunches bipartisan PFAS Task Force. U.S. House of Representatives.

GovTrack. (n.d.). Rep. John Moolenaar.

Great Lakes Now. (2024, October). Up to 3.2M in Michigan may be getting water from PFAS-tainted aquifers.

House Select Committee on the CCP. (2024a). Moolenaar, Krishnamoorthi, Wenstrup introduce bipartisan BIOSECURE Act.

House Select Committee on the CCP. (2024b). China Week recap: Congress passes 25 bills to combat Chinese Communist Party threats.

House Select Committee on the CCP. (2025). Moolenaar statement on the inclusion of key Select Committee legislation in the NDAA.

League of Conservation Voters. (n.d.). John Moolenaar.

Notus. (2025). ‘Postal-naming destruction’: The least controversial thing Congress does is becoming controversial.

Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. (n.d.). Tittabawassee River clean-up and dioxin information.

Michigan Independent. (2024). Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin introduces bipartisan bills to address forever chemicals.

Michigan Independent. (2026). US House votes to restore health insurance subsidies over objections of GOP leaders.

Michigan PFAS Action Response Team. (n.d.). PFAS sites and areas of interest.

Michigan Public Radio. (2022, September 21). Wolverine Worldwide and 3M agree to $54 million settlement over Kent County PFAS contamination.

Moolenaar, J. (n.d.). Full biography. U.S. House of Representatives.

OpenSecrets. (2022). Rep. John Moolenaar: Campaign finance summary, 2021-2022.

The Morning Sun. (2026, January 10). Congressman Moolenaar votes against Affordable Care Act extension.

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. (n.d.). Tittabawassee River natural resource damage assessment and restoration.

Urban Institute. (2025, September). The effects of expiring ACA marketplace premium tax credits.

Most administrations in American history have had their scandals. Some of the most fabulous included: Teapot Dome, Watergate, the HUD scandal, and the savings and loan collapse. Americans have grown accustomed to a background hum of self-dealing at the top, a hum that occasionally rises to a full-throated roar. Recently, the current administration has broken the scale.

This presidency is corrupt in a way that redefines the category. The numbers come from government filings, watchdog reports, and the administration’s own disclosures. They tell a story that no amount of podium theatrics can obscure: public office has become a private equity vehicle, and the American taxpayer is the limited partner who never sees a return.

The Numbers

Start with the simplest measure. Donald Trump’s net worth jumped from $3.9 billion in 2024 to $7.3 billion by September 2025, a $3.4 billion increase in less than eleven months in office. Some of that is paper gains from stock valuations and crypto holdings. But the scale is unprecedented for a sitting president, and the mechanisms of enrichment are not subtle.

The Trump family’s crypto ventures alone generated over $100 million in trading fees within two weeks of launch. World Liberty Financial, co-founded by Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Barron Trump, and the sons of Trump foreign policy adviser Steve Witkoff, reached a stablecoin market capitalization of $2.7 billion. Seventy-five percent of its revenue flows directly to the Trump family. The $TRUMP meme coin hit a peak market capitalization of $27 billion before collapsing 93%, enriching the 58 earliest crypto wallets by millions, while the late-coming 764,000 wallets lost money. The pattern is familiar: insiders profit while the common people absorb the loss.

Then there is the real estate. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) projects that Trump’s overseas property developments, ten currently open, at least twenty-two in the pipeline, and five announced since the inauguration alone, will generate over $400 million annually during the second term, a dramatic escalation from the $8 to $14 million in documented foreign government payments during his first term. In October 2025, Trump was recorded on a hot mic discussing Trump Organization business with Indonesia’s president, thus erasing whatever remained of the line between state business and family business.

Amazon paid $40 million for the licensing rights to a documentary about the First Lady. Melania Trump receives 70 percent of that amount. The Trump family collectively earned nearly $80 million since the 2024 election through documentary deals and media settlements alone.

Government travel to Trump properties has cost taxpayers $71 million in golf-related expenses since January 2025, with forecasts projecting over $300 million by the end of the second term. Palm Beach County’s Sheriff spends $240,000 per day when the president is in town. Air Force One runs $1.1 million per four-hour round trip. The Secret Service has historically been charged over $800 per night at Mar-a-Lago. The taxpayer subsidizes the president’s lifestyle. The president profits from the subsidy. The entire arrangement functions as a business model, not a conflict of interest.

Who Benefits

The enrichment extends well beyond the family. The cabinet is the wealthiest in modern history, with at least a dozen billionaires among its members. At least eight nominees had recent lobbying ties that previous administrations would have disqualified or restricted from appointment to conflicted positions. But now none seem to have the slightest intention of following the quaint process of placing assets in blind trusts to ensure fair dealing.

The specifics are instructive. Chris Wright, the Energy Secretary, netted over $50 million from his fracking company. He now oversees the Department of Energy, which directs contracts to companies in the industry he just left. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services Secretary, continues to receive referral fees from a law firm suing a vaccine manufacturer, collecting $856,559 from Wisner Baum while overseeing the agencies that regulate those same vaccines. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, handed control of Cantor Fitzgerald to his 27-year-old son. His firm created financial products enabling clients to bet on the outcomes of Trump’s own tariff litigation.

Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary, refused to commit to divesting his wife’s stock in major defense contractors. He also refused to pledge that he would not join a defense contractor for ten years after leaving office. The revolving door stands propped wide open. Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund six months after he left the White House in 2021. The fund’s own advisers concluded the deal was “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman overruled them.

Perhaps the most egregious example involves Elon Musk, who holds $15.4 billion in government contracts through SpaceX alone, predominantly $11.8 billion with NASA. He simultaneously led DOGE, an office with influence over the agencies that regulate and fund his companies, while negotiating contracts benefiting his business holdings. At least five inspectors general investigating Musk’s companies have been fired by the administration, including those at the Department of Labor and Department of Transportation. Musk was allowed to decide for himself when his government work conflicted with his private interests. The arrangement eliminated oversight entirely.

The Pay-to-Play Machine

Corporate donors are paying and receiving. A $400 million White House ballroom project, funded through corporate donations from Apple, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Google, Coinbase, Comcast, and Meta, bypasses congressional appropriations entirely. Companies with pending antitrust business before the administration write the checks. The Campaign Legal Center documents the pattern: multimillion-dollar donations earn cabinet appointments, seven-figure corporate contributions secure policy support, and hefty inaugural fund donations make federal investigations disappear.

The administration paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the 1977 law that prohibits bribing foreign government officials, arguing that the statute “hurts” American businesses. The message is unmistakable: corruption is no longer a risk to be managed. It is a feature to be marketed.

A History of Corruption, in Proportion

Interestingly, the United States has always struggled with corruption. But, the real question is one of scale. How does the current moment compare, not in rhetorical intensity, but in measurable financial terms relative to the size of government?

**The Gilded Age** set the original standard. The Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872 defrauded the federal government of approximately $44 million through inflated railroad construction contracts, roughly $1.1 billion in today’s dollars. Federal spending in FY 1872 was approximately $273 million. Ultimately, that single scandal consumed roughly 16 percent of the annual federal budget. Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall operation stole an estimated $25 to $200 million from New York City, with the most conservative estimate reaching $5 billion adjusted for inflation. The Whiskey Ring, exposed in 1875 under the Grant administration, involved a conspiracy of distillers and Treasury officials who skimmed federal liquor tax revenue, defrauding the Treasury of $3 to $6 million annually, or roughly 1 to 2 percent of the federal budget at the time, and producing 238 indictments including Grant's own personal secretary. A Harvard Law School study by Stephenson and Cuéllar concluded that early American government "suffered from levels of political corruption commonly associated today with impoverished nations in the developing world."

**Teapot Dome**, the scandal that defined the Harding era, involved bribes to Interior Secretary Albert Fall totaling approximately $400,000, about $6.5 million in today’s dollars. Against a federal budget of roughly $3.5 billion in FY 1923, Fall’s personal take amounted to about 0.01 percent of annual spending. Teapot Dome was significant not for its dollar value but for its brazenness: a cabinet secretary secretly leased naval oil reserves to private companies in exchange for cash. Fall became the first cabinet member imprisoned for crimes committed in office.

Watergate involved an estimated $22 million in total scandal-related costs, roughly $170 million adjusted for inflation. Against a federal budget of $268.7 billion in FY 1974, that figure represented less than 0.01 percent. The damage from Nixon’s corruption was institutional, not primarily financial: the weaponization of federal agencies, illegal surveillance, obstruction of justice, and the systematic subversion of democratic norms.

The Reagan era produced three distinct corruption fronts. The HUD scandal diverted at least $100 million through political favoritism in housing subsidies, yielding sixteen criminal convictions. Iran-Contra diverted $3.8 million from illegal arms sales to fund Nicaraguan rebels. And the Savings and Loan crisis, driven by deregulation and lax oversight, cost taxpayers $124 billion, roughly 10 to 11 percent of the federal budget at the time of the bailout. The S&L crisis remains the single most expensive corruption-adjacent failure in American history when measured as a proportion of government spending.

The Current Scale

Now consider the present. Trump’s personal net worth increased by $3.4 billion in less than a year in office. The Trump family’s crypto ventures have generated hundreds of millions. Foreign property income is projected at $400 million annually. Taxpayer-funded travel to Trump properties runs $71 million and counting. A $400 million ballroom project funded by corporate donors with business before the administration proceeds without congressional approval. Cabinet members hold financial interests in the industries they regulate. The administration’s own ethics enforcement apparatus has been gutted.

Against FY 2026 discretionary spending of $1.653 trillion, Trump’s documented $3.4 billion net worth increase alone represents approximately 0.2 percent of the annual federal budget. That figure understates the total. It excludes Kushner’s $2 billion Saudi investment, Musk’s $15.4 billion in government contracts, the corporate pay-to-play donations, the foregone enforcement of anti-corruption statutes, and the unmeasured cost of regulatory capture across every cabinet department.

The Brennan Center puts it plainly: not even the most notorious public corruption scandals in American history match the total dollar amount of the current administration’s profiteering.

Here is the comparative picture:

The Gilded Age and the S&L crisis remain the benchmarks for proportional corruption. But neither involved the president personally enriching himself at this scale while in office. Crédit Mobilier enriched congressmen and railroad executives. The S&L collapse enriched thrift operators and real estate speculators. In both cases, the president’s personal financial stake was minimal or nonexistent. The current situation is structurally different: the president is the primary beneficiary.

What Makes This Different

Previous corruption scandals shared a common feature: they were treated as aberrations. Crédit Mobilier led to congressional investigations and public disgrace. Teapot Dome produced the first criminal prosecution of a sitting cabinet member. Watergate generated a constitutional crisis, a presidential resignation, and sweeping legislative reform. The S&L collapse produced the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act and hundreds of prosecutions.

The current administration and its Republican legislative branch treat corruption not as an aberration but as a governing philosophy. Ethics enforcement has been paused. Inspectors general have been fired. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act sits unenforced. Cabinet nominees with disqualifying conflicts are confirmed anyway. The president’s businesses operate openly alongside official state functions. Corporate donors receive contracts and regulatory relief in a visible, documented exchange for payments.

The Gilded Age lacked regulatory infrastructure entirely. Today, the infrastructure exists and is being dismantled. Nixon tried to hide his crimes. The current administration conducts them in the open, defends them as prerogative, and rationalizes them as smart business. The system has been repurposed.

The Brennan Center describes the current moment as a “new era of crony capitalism.” That framing is accurate but may be too generous. Crony capitalism implies that the corruption serves a broader class of political allies. The current model is narrower: it serves the president, his family, and a circle of donors and appointees whose financial interests have been woven directly into the machinery of government. The public trust now functions as a private asset, thereby stealing from all of the rest of us.

Stoic Moments

“He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.” — Epicurus

The appetite for public enrichment has no natural limit. A president who enters office with $3.9 billion and adds $3.4 billion in eleven months is not building wealth. He is demonstrating that the office itself is the product. Every historical precedent, from the Emoluments Clauses to the blind trust tradition to the Office of Government Ethics, was designed to prevent exactly this. Every one of those guardrails has been breached. Is this the America we believed in as we grew up? If it isn’t, let’s do something to change it.

Need to Do Something?

Share the data. The CREW database, the Campaign Legal Center’s conflict-of-interest tracker, and the Brennan Center’s analysis are public. Send them to anyone who claims this is just “business as usual.” The data says otherwise. The scale and brazenness are historically unprecedented.

Contact elected representatives. Ask one question: “What is the total estimated financial benefit the president and his family have received from government action since January 2025?” Demand an answer with a number.

Support the watchdog organizations doing the work: CREW, Brennan Center, Campaign Legal Center, and the Sunlight Foundation. They are the only institutions currently tracking the full scope of the problem.

Seek out and support candidates at every level who commit to ethics reform: mandatory divestiture, independent inspectors general, enforced conflict-of-interest rules, and restoration of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The architecture of accountability still exists. It needs to be rebuilt and reinforced.

Strengthen communities through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, contribute funds. Clean up the garden, plan for spring, check on neighbors, and care for those close. Those daily acts of civic life remain the foundation of a functioning democracy, even when the roof leaks.

Countdown to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress: 254 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 989 Days

References

Berr, J. (2025, September 12). Trump net worth jumps $3 billion while in office, raising ethical questions. TIME.

Brennan Center for Justice. (2022, June 17). 50 years after Watergate, unregulated money continues to corrode our politics.

Brennan Center for Justice. (2025). A new era of crony capitalism.

Campaign Legal Center. (2025). Exposing President Trump’s pay-to-play administration.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. (2025). Trump foreign property income is set to explode in his second term.

CNN Politics. (2025, April 24). Donald Trump’s cabinet: Policy and ethics concerns. CNN.

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. (2026). Appropriations watch: FY 2026.

Federal Judicial Center. (n.d.). Teapot Dome trials.

Federal Reserve History. (n.d.). The savings and loan crisis.

Fortune. (2025, February 6). Elon Musk’s conflicts of interest: DOGE, Tesla, and SpaceX.

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. (n.d.). Graft and oil: How Teapot Dome became the greatest political scandal of its time.

Golf Inspired. (2025). Trump golf expenses 2025. https://golfinspired.com/trump-golf-expenses-2025/

Heritage Foundation. (n.d.). The HUD scandal. https://www.heritage.org/housing/report/how-not-clean-hud

House Judiciary Committee Democrats. (2025). New report exposes the Trump family’s multi-billion dollar crypto empire. U.S. House of Representatives.

House Oversight Committee Democrats. (2022, June 2). Chairwoman Maloney launches probe of Saudi government’s $2 billion investment in Kushner fund. U.S. House of Representatives.

NPR. (2019, February 5). Government watchdog: Trump’s trips to Florida costing taxpayers millions.

NPR. (2025a, January 22). RFK Jr. and the HPV vaccine.

NPR. (2025b, September 3). Trump crypto family: World Liberty Financial.

OpenSecrets. (2025, September). Trump administration profile: Chris Wright.

PBS NewsHour. (2022, April 11). Massive Saudi investment raises questions about Jared Kushner business dealings.

Rada, R. (2025, May 6). Trump meme coin data shows 764,000 wallets lost money. CNBC.

Rolling Stone. (2025, March 14). Elon Musk conflict of interest: DOGE.

Siddiqui, S. (2025, December 17). Trump accounts and private donations. The Washington Post.

Stephenson, M., & Cuéllar, M.-F. (2023). Taming systemic corruption: The American experience. Harvard Law School Working Paper.

The American Prospect. (2025, October 28). Here’s what Trump’s ballroom project wants.

U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives. (n.d.). The Crédit Mobilier scandal.

U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Minority Staff. (2025, April 27). Memorandum: Elon Musk conflicts of interest.

U.S. Senate Finance Committee. (2025). Wyden, Warren probe Lutnick firm’s potential conflicts of interest related to massive tariff bets.

Warren, E. (2025a). At hearing, Warren slams RFK Jr. for dangerous conflicts of interest [Press release]. Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Warren, E. (2025b). Letter to Secretary Hegseth on ethics commitments [Letter]. Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren.

WBUR. (2025, February 25). Trump family profits. WBUR News.

The Numbers They Hope You Never Read

It turns out that ICE publishes custody data. It is not hidden. It is not classified. It is a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets do not lie, spin, or hold press conferences. Here is what ICE’s own book-in records show for FY2026, updated through November 15, 2025. Of 61,801 people booked into ICE custody, 44,857, nearly 73%, had no criminal charge whatsoever. They did not have a pending charge, nor had they prior convictions. Instead, they were classified as “Other Immigration Violators,” government-speak for people whose only offense is being in this country without proper paperwork. The administration says they are hunting monsters. But DHS’s own spreadsheet shows that it is primarily workers who are being rounded up and detained.

Among those who did have a criminal charge on their record, the single most common category was traffic offenses, 4,004 people. The next largest? Immigration violations themselves, 3,166. That means more than 7,000 of the “criminals” in ICE custody were there for driving infractions and paperwork violations. The removal of these people from the counter is not making the streets safer.

What about the truly dangerous? Homicide charges accounted for 183 out of 61,801. That is 0.3%. Sexual assault: 506. Kidnapping: 76. If you add up every violent crime category, homicide, sexual assault, assault, robbery, and kidnapping, you reach roughly 3,200 people, or about 5% of the total. The other 95% are traffic tickets, immigration paperwork, and, overwhelmingly, no criminal record.

So when the administration stands at a podium and tells the American public that these enforcement operations target “the worst of the worst,” the question is simple: why are they lying when their own report says differently?

So Who Are the 73%?

If nearly three-quarters of the people ICE is detaining are not criminals, then who are they? The answer is uncomfortable for everyone. They are the people on whom everyone depends every day and whose presence is often ignored or taken for granted. They are in the restaurant's kitchen, where birthdays are celebrated. They are on the roof of the house, going up in the nearby subdivision. They are holding the hand of an 83-year-old mother in the memory care unit at 2:00 AM because no one born in this country will take that shift for $17.36 an hour. The damage is most acute in these three sectors.

The People Who Feed Us

Immigrants make up 73% of the total U.S. farming workforce, a higher concentration than in any other sector of the American economy. According to the USDA’s National Agricultural Workers Survey, approximately 42% of hired crop farmworkers have no work authorization. This is not a new phenomenon. For the past three decades, undocumented workers have constituted at least 40% of the crop labor force.

The consequences of enforcement are already measurable. Agricultural employment dropped by 155,000 workers between March and July 2025, a period when the prior year saw a 2.2% increase. Dairy operations, meatpacking plants, poultry processors, and nurseries, industries that cannot simply pause production while the labor market “adjusts”, are scrambling. The existing H-2B visa program caps temporary worker visas at 33,000 per half-year, and demand already exceeds that cap for the first half of FY2026. Even Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ office has acknowledged the need to “streamline” visa processing, an admission from inside the administration that the fields are going unworked. Crops do not wait for policy debates, instead they rot.

The People Who Build Our Houses

There are an estimated two million undocumented workers in the U.S. construction industry. Immigrants represent roughly 34% of the national construction workforce, rising to over 40% in states like California and Texas. Before ICE enforcement accelerated, the industry already faced a shortage of 439,000 workers in 2025 alone, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors. The Associated General Contractors of America reported in August 2025 that workforce shortages were the leading cause of project delays, and that immigration enforcement had directly impacted nearly one-third of construction firms.

But here is the detail that labor economists find most significant: it is not just the raids. It is the fear. NPR reported in November 2025 that construction crews across the country are not showing up to job sites, not because agents appeared, but because workers are afraid agents might appear. The chilling effect is doing more damage than the enforcement actions themselves. 92% of contractors report difficulty filling open positions.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that four years of mass deportation at the current pace would eliminate 2.3 million construction jobs, 1.4 million held by immigrants and 861,000 held by U.S.-born Americans whose work depends on that immigrant labor. Those are not theoretical jobs. Those are framing crews, electricians’ apprentices, concrete teams, and the supervisors and suppliers who depend on them. When the crew doesn’t show up, the foreman doesn’t work either.

Housing costs, already a crisis, will get worse. And the people cheering the deportations from their suburban living rooms will eventually wonder why their kitchen renovation is eight months behind schedule and $40,000 over budget.

The People Who Care for Our Parents (and will care for us)

This is the one that should keep every American over 50 awake at night. More than 10,000 Americans turn 65 every single day. This will continue for the next five years. By 2030, adults 65 and older will make up more than 20% of the population, and an estimated 75% of them will need some form of long-term care. The demand for direct care workers, nursing assistants, personal care aides, home health aides, is projected to grow by 35% to 41% between 2022 and 2037.

Who is doing this work right now? Immigrants make up 28% of the entire direct care workforce, up from 21% in 2011, a share that was growing precisely because demand was exploding and native-born workers were not filling the gap. More specifically, immigrants constitute 33% of home care workers, 24% of residential care aides, and 21% of nursing assistants. In New York, immigrants are two-thirds of the direct care workforce.

The median wage for these workers is $17.36 an hour. Thirty-six percent of them live in or near poverty. Annual turnover in home care runs as high as 75%. These are brutal, essential, poorly compensated jobs, and the immigrant workforce has been the only thing standing between millions of elderly Americans and a complete collapse of the care system.

In January 2025, the administration rescinded a Biden-era policy that had protected healthcare facilities from ICE raids. The result was immediate and predictable: widespread fear, not only among undocumented workers but among green card holders and naturalized citizens who live in mixed-status households. Many of these workers have not been deported. They have simply stopped showing up, or moved to off-the-books care work where neither they nor their patients have any legal protections. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that deportation at the current pace would eliminate 394,000 direct care jobsover four years. In New York alone, the direct care workforce could shrink by 45%. Who exactly benefits when your mother sits in her own waste because the night-shift aide was too afraid to drive to work?

What This Is Not

This is not an argument for open borders. It is not an argument against immigration law. It is not even an argument against enforcement. Every sovereign nation enforces its immigration laws.

This is an argument that enforcement should be honest about what it is doing and who it is targeting. If the policy is about removing working, non-criminal immigrants from the labor force, then say so. Make that case on its merits. Defend it in the open. Do not hide behind the fiction that 73% of ICE detainees are violent predators when self-reported data says otherwise. This is also an argument about self-inflicted economic harm on a scale that should alarm every fiscal conservative, every chamber-of-commerce Republican, and every American who eats food, lives in a house, or expects to grow old.

And it remains, as always, an argument about the Constitution. Administrative warrants are not judicial warrants. Due process is not a courtesy extended only to citizens. The Fourth Amendment does not contain an asterisk that says “unless politically expedient.” This was true in the context of Alex Pretti’s and Renee Goode’s killing, and it applies with equal force to the 44,857 people sitting in ICE custody right now with no criminal charges on their records.

The Self-Inflicted Wound

Here is the arithmetic that should terrify anyone paying attention. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that four years of mass deportation at the administration’s stated pace will eliminate nearly 6 million jobs, 3.3 million held by immigrants and 2.6 million held by U.S.-born Americans whose work is economically linked to immigrant labor. The Congressional Budget Office had projected that civilian employment would grow by 4.2 million between 2025 and 2029. Under the current deportation policy, employment will not just grow more slowly, it will shrink in absolute terms. Such a dramatic loss of jobs is unprecedented outside of the worst recessions in American history.

By September 2025, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that over 400,000 people had been formally deported, and estimated that 1.6 million had “self-deported”. Independent researchers have raised significant questions about the self-deportation methodology, but even the disputed numbers point to a labor market shock that is already being felt. The construction industry is short-handed. Agricultural output is declining. Care facilities are understaffed.

And here is what the “they’re taking our jobs” crowd refuses to consider: the economic research consistently shows that immigrant workers and native-born workers are not interchangeable. They are complementary. Immigrants disproportionately fill roles that support and enable jobs held by American-born workers, supervisory positions, management, logistics, and equipment operation. When the crew disappears, the foreman’s job disappears too. When the home health aide doesn’t come, the daughter, who was counting on that care so she could go to her own job, doesn’t go either. Mass deportation does not create American jobs. It destroys them. That is not ideology. It is arithmetic.

Stoic Moments

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

There is something genuinely unhinged about a nation that simultaneously faces a historic labor shortage in agriculture, construction, and eldercare, and responds by systematically removing the people who do that work. This is a failure of reason so profound that no amount of political rhetoric can redeem it. When a society acts against its own material interests, against its own elderly, against the people who put food on its tables and roofs over its heads, in service of a narrative contradicted by its own data, that is not strength. It is madness dressed in a flag.

Need to Do Something?

Share the data. The ICE custody spreadsheet is public. Send it to anyone who tells you these operations target “the worst of the worst.” The numbers speak for themselves. Support legal aid organizations providing representation to detained workers, many of whom have been in this country for years, paying taxes, with U.S.-citizen children who are now functionally orphaned by their parents’ detention. Contact your representatives and ask one question: “If 73% of ICE detainees have no criminal charges, what is the policy justification for the economic and human cost of their detention?” Check on your neighbors. The fear extends far beyond the undocumented. Mixed-status families, green card holders, and naturalized citizens are all living under a cloud of anxiety that is reshaping entire communities. Mutual aid, food donations, volunteering, and simple human decency are not substitutes for policy, but they are what hold communities together while we fight for better policy. Finally, voting is still the most powerful tool we have.

Countdown to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress: 261 days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 996 days

References

American Immigration Council. (2025). Immigrants are key to filling US labor shortages.

American Immigration Council. (2025). Trump’s immigration actions are taking a toll on local economies — What the data says.

American Immigration Council. (2025). Amid a severe shortage of home health aides, immigrants help care for our seniors.

Associated Builders and Contractors. (2025, February). ABC: Construction industry faces workforce shortage of 439,000 in 2025.

Associated General Contractors of America. (2025, August 28). Construction workforce shortages are leading cause of project delays as immigration enforcement affects nearly 1/3 of firms.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (n.d.). Immigration policies threaten critical nursing home workforce. Center for Medicare Advocacy.

Goldstein, A. (2025, August 7). Mass deportations are worsening the caregiving crisis. The American Prospect.

Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. (2026, January). Potential impact of the federal pause on immigrant visas from 75 countries on the U.S. health care workforce. KFF.

NPR. (2025, November 6). Trump’s immigration crackdown is hurting the construction industry.

PHI. (2025). Direct care workers in the United States: Key facts 2025.

PHI. (2025). Immigration and the direct care workforce.

Stateline. (2025, December 3). More industries want Trump’s help hiring immigrant labor after farms get a break.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2025). Aging. HHS.gov.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2025, September 23). New milestone: Over 2 million illegal aliens out of the United States in less than 250 days.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. (2024). Farm labor. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (2025). ICE initial book-ins by criminality and MSC: FY2026 YTD [Data set, through November 15, 2025 - attached].

Zipperer, B. (2025, July). Trump’s deportation agenda will destroy millions of jobs: Both immigrants and U.S.-born workers would suffer job losses, particularly in construction and child care. Economic Policy Institute.

Zipperer, B. (2025). Trump’s deportation plans threaten 400,000 direct care jobs: Older adults and people with disabilities could lose vital in-home support. Economic Policy Institute.

The risk to democracy posed by the concentration of media ownership arises more from an asymmetry of financial dependence than from overt editorial interference. News organizations are increasingly governed by owners, platforms, or capital structures for whom journalism is economically trivial but politically, reputationally, or strategically meaningful. The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos, from revitalized public-interest institution to a newsroom undergoing mass layoffs, illustrates how benign patronage matures into conflicted proprietorship. That trajectory is not unique, and its implications extend well beyond any single paper.

Democratic Risk

An independent press, the “Fourth Estate”, is necessary to hold government power accountable. Yet ownership concentration now means journalism depends on owners who do not themselves depend on journalism for their financial success. News organizations require sustained investment, institutional memory, and editorial continuity to function as civic infrastructure. Many modern owners, however, can exit, downsize, or deprioritize news with little personal, professional, or financial consequence.

The mismatch produces both neglect and interference. Advertising has collapsed as a stabilizing base. Distribution systems are more volatile and opaque. Artificial intelligence has reduced production costs while increasing pressure to speed up and expand content volume. Although content remains plentiful, reporting capacity does not. The veneer of the media corporation looks intact as the structure weakens beneath it.

The harm is cumulative rather than spectacular. Thoughtful journalism requires time, specialization, and persistence. When institutions lose the ability to pursue an investigation or stay with a difficult story, power encounters less resistance, not because the press has been silenced, but because its capacity has quietly eroded.

The Washington Post

The recent trajectory of The Washington Post captures this risk with clarity. When Jeff Bezos purchased the paper in 2013, the effect was stabilizing. Investment followed. Digital infrastructure improved. National and international reporting recovered after years of decline. The Post regained its stature as a public institution.

The recovery depended on patience. The paper remained financially immaterial to its owner, which insulated the newsroom from immediate pressure. As long as tolerance for lower returns held, the institution benefited. When political pressure grew, growth slowed, and platform economics tightened, the calculus changed. As recently as last week, the Post announced sweeping, ongoing layoffs that reduced sports, books, metro, and international coverage, cuts that will reshape the paper’s identity, not just its budget. In short order, the equation was reversed.

Little ideological intervention was required. The shift followed the financial incentives. For the owner, it represents rational management of a non-core asset. For the newsroom, contraction undermines mission and coherence. The conflict is structural: it arises when professional stewardship is optional rather than essential.

Other Ownership Patterns

The Washington Post is not an exception. Across the industry, major news organizations now sit within portfolios dominated by unrelated commercial or financial interests. Billionaire ownership can begin with restoration, new capital can slow institutional decline, and prestige can return or at least be preserved. But over time, journalism competes internally with ventures that profit more, scale faster, and matter more to the owner’s primary interests.

Private equity ownership further compresses this timeline. The approaches differ from billionaire patronage, but the destinations converge: cost-cutting, newsroom contraction, and diminished local and international coverage. Technology reinforces the pattern. AI tools make it easier to claim efficiency while reducing staff. Editorial labor appears more substitutable than it is. Judgment, verification, and persistence remain expensive, even as they become easier to sideline. Output continues, but without the accountability that once gave it weight.

Against this backdrop, the growth of reader-funded and networked alternatives like Substack represents a counterweight. But before the world of journalism is declared saved, a thoughtful examination of the benefits and costs is warranted.

Substack Unbundled

Platforms like Substack respond to traditional media’s institutional failure by reconnecting writers directly with readers. Revenue aligns more closely with trust. Writers who depend on subscriptions face incentives to maintain credibility and depth rather than chase scale for its own sake. AI tools can lower operational barriers, allowing individuals or small teams to publish with reach once reserved for large organizations.

That promise faces constraints. The pool of readers willing to pay for journalism is finite and, in many cases, shrinking. Subscription fatigue is real. Attention is fragmented across platforms that reward immediacy and visual engagement over engaged reading. Even strong writers increasingly compete for a smaller share of discretionary attention, which limits the scalability of reader-funded models regardless of editorial quality.

Substack’s expansion into video reflects this pressure. Video offers reach, immediacy, and a different relationship to breaking news. It also introduces new uncertainties. Video production demands different skills, higher time costs, and often favors personality over reporting. Whether Substack can support video journalism that sustains depth, verification, and economic viability remains an open question. The platform may broaden distribution, or it may replicate the same attention dynamics that hollowed out legacy media in the first place.

Unbundled journalism provides a partial answer. It excels at analysis, interpretation, and niche expertise. It struggles with coordination, institutional memory, and audience breadth, features that investment and organizational structure have traditionally provided. Its success will depend less on technical capability than on whether enough readers are willing to fund work requiring attentive engagement in an environment increasingly optimized for distraction.

Rebuilding Journalism as a Network

The path forward likely lies between centralized institutions and fragmentation. Independent media networks can preserve editorial autonomy while sharing the functions that make accountability journalism possible. Models such as ProPublicademonstrate how pooled investigative funding can support long-term reporting while distributing publication across multiple independent outlets. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists shows how coordinated reporting across hundreds of newsrooms can sustain complex, cross-border investigations without centralized editorial control, while state-level nonprofits like the Texas Tribune illustrate how regional networks can replace lost local capacity through donor support and syndication. Even older cooperative models such as the Associated Press highlight how shared distribution and reporting infrastructure can strengthen independent outlets without concentrating ownership. Together, these approaches suggest that capacity can be retained by pooling what is expensive, investigation, legal defense, data, and distribution, while preserving plural, locally accountable editorial judgment.

Technology supports this model when paired with thoughtful governance. AI tools reduce costs for research, transcription, translation, and archiving, expanding what small teams can accomplish. With appropriate norms and guardrails, tools that reward speed over accuracy can be directed toward a democratic purpose. The challenge lies in institutional design, not technological capability.

Readers play an important role as well. Democratic resilience will depend on diversified sources, broader subscription opportunities, and more intentional patronage. Direct relationships between journalists and audiences can reduce platform mediation and financial fragility. These approaches will not replace legacy journalism, but they can extend its relevance by buying time and space for alternatives to mature.

Democratic journalism once relied on organizations whose survival depended on their public role. That alignment has broken. Preserving the Fourth Estate now requires rebuilding journalism’s economic foundations, through reader funding, networked cooperation, and ownership structures that make editorial independence a requirement rather than a courtesy. Without that work, the thinning of traditional media, unreplaced by durable alternatives, risks making independent accountability not just difficult but structurally impossible.

Stoic Moments

“What does not benefit the hive does not benefit the bee.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VI

Drop the mic!

Need to Do Something?

Examine your media consumption and see if it comes from objective sources. Recognize that value likely needs payment. Refuse to accept official narratives that contradict observable reality.

Contact elected officials. Congressional representatives possess authority to constrain executive overreach. They exercise that authority only when constituent pressure makes inaction costly. Calls, letters, and office visits register that pressure. Participate in civic action. Protests, strikes, and community organizing create political costs for overreach. Physical presence matters. Solidarity matters.

Strengthen local communities. Mutual aid networks, neighborhood watches, and know-your-rights trainings prepare communities to protect vulnerable members. Federal enforcement relies on atomized populations. Connected communities resist more effectively.

Countdowns to the Next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when citizens can express opinions about the performance of Congress: 268 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when citizens can express opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 1,003 Days

Associated Press. (2026, February 4). Washington Post cuts a third of its staff in a blow to a legendary news brand.

Reuters. (2026, February 4). Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post guts staff, shrinks news coverage.

Axios. (2026, February 6). What WaPo editor Matt Murray told Puck about Bezos, layoffs and the publisher.

The Guardian. (2026, February 6). Bob Woodward says he is “crushed” by Washington Post layoffs.

Columbia Journalism Review. (2022, September 27). The Washington Post has a Bezos problem.

Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. (2016, June 8). The Bezos effect: How Amazon’s founder is reinventing The Washington Post. Harvard Kennedy School.

Ewens, M., Gupta, A., & Howell, S. T. (2022). Local journalism under private equity ownership (NBER Working Paper No. 29743). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Peterson, E. (2023). The new news barons: Investment ownership reduces newsroom staffing. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 705(1), 112–129.

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (2026). Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026. University of Oxford.

Columbia Journalism Review, Tow Center for Digital Journalism. (2022). Digital platforms and journalistic careers: A case study of Substack newsletters.

Nieman Lab. (2020, December 7). Substack isn’t a new model for journalism—it’s a very old one.

Backlinko. (2025, December 29). Substack user and revenue statistics.

Digiday. (2024, August 14). Substack creators attribute subscriber growth to the platform’s community tools.

Investopedia. (2025, December 23). Billionaires who bought media publishers.

Operation Metro Surge

The federal government launched Operation Metro Surge on January 6, 2026. The Department of Homeland Security deployed approximately 3,000 armed agents to Minneapolis-St. Paul, exceeding the entire sworn officer count of the Minneapolis Police Department by a factor of four. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison described the operation as “a federal invasion” and stated that “these poorly trained, aggressive and armed agents of the federal state have terrorized Minnesota with widespread unlawful conduct”.

The scale of this operation distinguishes it from routine immigration enforcement. Targeted enforcement operates within constitutional boundaries. The killings of Renee Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on January 24, both captured on video and both contradicting official accounts within hours, demonstrate the consequences of the armed occupation. In response, workers responded with the first general strike in eighty years on January 23, 2026.

Constitutional Claims

A lawsuit in Minnesota advances three constitutional arguments against Operation Metro Surge.

• The First Amendment claim alleges retaliation. The surge began days after the new administration took office and now has concentrated 3,000 federal agents in a state that voted against the president. The timing and targeting suggest punishment rather than enforcement priority.

• The Fourth Amendment claim challenges administrative warrants. A judicial warrant requires a neutral judge and probable cause. An administrative warrant is self-authorized by the agency seeking entry. Under settled doctrine, administrative warrants do not authorize entry into private homes. A recently revealed ICE memo instructs agents otherwise. Whistleblowers told Congress the memo contradicts their training and the law. A federal court has already found ICE violated the Fourth Amendment by entering a Minneapolis home without a judicial warrant.

• The Tenth Amendment claim invokes the anti-commandeering doctrine established in Printz v. United States (1997). Federal agents cannot commandeer state resources for federal enforcement. Sanctuary policies rest on this constitutional foundation.

Overall, the accumulation of violations is staggering. ICE violated at least 96 court orders in Minnesota between January 1 and January 25, 2026. This is systematic disregard for judicial authority.

Judicial Response

In response to federal overreach, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez issued a targeted preliminary injunction on January 28, 2026. The order bars federal agents from making retaliatory arrests, using chemical agents against peaceful protesters, and conducting vehicle stops based solely on protest activity. The injunction draws a constitutional boundary around enforcement tactics with limitations, but not an outright halt of Operation Metro Surge. The pattern of rulings shows institutional friction between executive enforcement and judicial review. Federal courts have rejected presidential authority claims twice in recent weeks regarding National Guard deployments. Habeas corpus petitions in immigration detention cases increased from 200 in 2024 to over 9,000 by January 2026. In response, constitutional law professor Steve Vladeck describes the situation starkly: “I think we’re in the middle of an institutional crisis, and we have been for the better part of a year. And it’s a crisis caused largely by the fact that we have an ambitious executive, we have a, I think, fairly well-functioning judiciary, and we have a completely sort of indolent Congress”.

Republican Fracture

The most significant political development of the past week is the emergence of Republican opposition to federal enforcement tactics. Vermont Governor Phil Scott responded to the Pretti killing with unambiguous condemnation: “It’s not acceptable for American citizens to be killed by federal agents for exercising their God-given and constitutional rights to protest their government”. Similarly, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, chair of the National Governors Association, called for federal officials to “consider a reset” on immigration enforcement strategy. Stitt told CNN: “What we’re seeing on TV, it’s causing deep concerns over federal tactics and accountability. Americans don’t like what they’re seeing right now”.

The significance of Republican dissent is huge. When members of the governing party publicly question tactics, political vulnerability for the executive branch increases. Democratic officials opposing federal enforcement can be dismissed as partisan obstruction. Republican officials raising identical concerns cannot. The bipartisan nature of the criticism strengthens the constitutional argument that something fundamental is wrong.

Historical Parallels

The current confrontation is similar to earlier moments when states challenged federal authority over fundamental rights questions. Two episodes are especially instructive.

The Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833 pitted South Carolina against the federal government over tariff policy. South Carolina declared federal tariffs null and void within its borders. President Andrew Jackson prepared military force to compel compliance. The crisis was resolved through compromise, but Jackson understood the deeper stakes. He wrote that “the tariff was only a pretext, and disunion and Southern confederacy the real object.” It’s worth noting that surface disputes often mask fundamental conflicts over the nature of federal power.

Northern states’ resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 provides another parallel. The federal law required state cooperation in returning escaped enslaved people. Northern states responded with “personal liberty laws” that forbade state officials from assisting federal enforcement. They required jury trials before rendition. They imposed penalties on those who aided capture. The laws represented state-level resistance to federal policy deemed morally intolerable. The resistance ultimately contributed to the constitutional crisis that preceded the Civil War.

The parallel is imperfect but useful. Northern states invoked constitutional principles to resist federal enforcement of laws they considered unjust. Minnesota now invokes constitutional principles to resist federal enforcement it considers unlawful. The legal frameworks differ. But, the political dynamics share recognizable features. States asserting constitutional limits against federal overreach is not novel. It is a recurring pattern in American history.

The Administrative Warrant Problem

DHS's use of administrative warrants to authorize home entry represents a specific and significant constitutional violation. Understanding the distinction matters. A judicial warrant is issued by a neutral judge or magistrate after a showing of probable cause, following the presentation of the facts about the need for the warrant. The Fourth Amendment requires this process for searches and seizures. The requirement exists to prevent arbitrary government intrusion. Constitutionally, an independent authority must review the justification before the state enters private spaces.

On the other hand, an administrative warrant is issued by an executive agency official. No judge reviews the justification. No neutral authority evaluates probable cause. The warrant represents the agency’s own determination that entry is warranted. Self-authorization is not constitutional authorization. Under settled Fourth Amendment doctrine, administrative warrants do not authorize entry into private homes without consent. A recently revealed ICE memo instructs agents otherwise. The memo authorizes forcible home entry based solely on administrative warrants. Department whistleblowers who presented this memo to Congress stated that it also contradicts their training and the law.

The practical implications are severe. If administrative warrants authorize home entry, then executive agencies can enter any home by issuing their own paperwork. The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches becomes moot, and judicial oversight disappears. This is not a technical legal distinction. It is the difference between constitutional government and executive discretion that leads to overreach.

State Capacity for Resistance

The Minnesota confrontation tests whether states possess effective tools to resist federal overreach. Several mechanisms are now in active use.

• Litigation remains the primary tool. Minnesota’s lawsuit seeks declaratory and injunctive relief. Court orders can somewhat constrain federal conduct, as the recent preliminary injunction demonstrates. The limitation is enforcement. Federal agencies that disregard judicial orders face contempt findings, but contempt requires further judicial action. The cycle can continue indefinitely if the executive branch refuses to comply.

• Non-cooperation is a second tool. Sanctuary policies prohibit state and local officials from assisting federal immigration enforcement. The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of such policies under the anti-commandeering doctrine. States cannot be compelled to enforce federal law. Federal pressure to override these policies through funding threats or other mechanisms faces legal challenge.

• Public mobilization constitutes a third tool. Protests, strikes, and civic organization create political costs for overreach. Elected officials respond to constituent pressure. Federal officials respond to political calculations. Sustained mobilization shifts those calculations even when legal mechanisms prove insufficient.

• Information warfare operates as a fourth tool. Video documentation of federal conduct contradicts official narratives. Bystander footage from Minneapolis has repeatedly exposed discrepancies between government statements and observable events. Transparency imposes accountability costs that closed systems avoid. Citizens armed with cameras constitute a check on power that formal institutions sometimes fail to provide.

Congressional Abdication

Our constitutional framework anticipates that Congress will check executive overreach. That check has failed because of Congressional inaction, enabling the current crisis. Congress possesses abundant authority to constrain executive enforcement. It controls appropriations, aka the “purse strings”. It conducts oversight. It can subpoena witnesses and documents. It can impeach executive officials. It can pass legislation limiting enforcement authority or mandating procedural protections. None of these powers has yet been exercised in response to Operation Metro Surge.

The majority party declines to challenge an administration of the same party. The minority party lacks procedural power to compel action. The result is institutional paralysis. Executive authority expands into the vacuum, leaving the power of the presidency significantly for all parties. Professor Vladeck’s assessment is worth repeating: the crisis results from “an ambitious executive,” “a fairly well-functioning judiciary,” and “a completely sort of indolent Congress.” Two branches cannot compensate for a third’s failure. The constitutional design requires all three to function. When one abandons its role, the system loses equilibrium.

What the Resistance Reveals

The accumulating resistance to federal enforcement reveals something important about the current political moment. Constitutional boundaries still command loyalty. State officials, judges, workers, and citizens are asserting limits on federal power. The assertion matters regardless of immediate outcomes.

Authoritarian consolidation succeeds when resistance fails to materialize. The Minneapolis response breaks this pattern. Every lawsuit filed, every injunction issued, every strike organized, every video recorded creates friction. Friction slows consolidation and importantly it preserves space for correction.

The resistance also reveals fractures within the governing coalition. Republican governors calling for a reset mark a significant development. Their dissent from inside the political tent creates political vulnerability. Administrations that lose the support of their governing coalition face constraints that partisan opposition alone does not impose.

Finally, the resistance also establishes public capacity for mobilization. Overall, the state of Minnesota has proven to be a fertile ground for resistance. social support for residents concerned about being grabbed off the street, contributions to funds that support everything from towing cars of those arrested in public to legal support mark a state and a nation ready to help the resistance. These steps and the willingness to participate in a general strike demonstrated that citizens retain the willingness to bear costs for constitutional principles. Mobilization is difficult, disruptive, risky, and in this case, very, very cold. But it happened anyway. The choice made in Minneapolis suggests that democratic energy remains available for the work ahead.

Conclusion

History teaches that federal overreach eventually generates correction. The Gilded Age produced antitrust law. Jim Crow resulted in civil rights legislation. Watergate created the appetite for reforms and resignations. Correction arrived in each case because resistance accumulated until change became unavoidable. The accumulation takes time and requires persistence.

Minnesota now stands at the center of this accumulation of challenges. The state’s officials, courts, workers, and citizens are testing whether constitutional democracy can still constrain executive power when that power operates through armed occupation and civilian death. The test is emerging in a grass-roots, sometimes messy way on the streets of Minneapolis. As the viral and emotionally raw video of one Minnesotan explains, “…I’m not f-ing paid to be here….. I got work in the goddam morning, just like everybody else….” Accomplishing a successful correction depends on whether resistance persists and expands, or whether exhaustion and normalization allow the executive overreach to harden into precedent. The American experiment has survived concentrated power before. Survival required active defense, not passive hope.

Stoic Moments

“Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Book III)

Aurelius understood that external advantage means nothing if it corrupts internal character. A person who gains safety by abandoning principle has not preserved anything worth keeping. The resistance in Minnesota reflects this logic. Constitutional limits are defended not because defense is advantageous, but because abandoning them is intolerable.

Need to Do Something?

Bear witness to the constitutional collision. The videos from Minneapolis document what happened. Watch them. Share them. Refuse to accept official narratives that contradict observable reality. Support the legal resistance. Organizations filing lawsuits and representing affected individuals require resources. The ACLU of Minnesota, the American Immigration Council, and local legal aid organizations are engaged in this work.

Contact elected officials. Congressional representatives possess authority to constrain executive overreach. They exercise that authority only when constituent pressure makes inaction costly. Calls, letters, and office visits register that pressure. Participate in civic action. Protests, strikes, and community organizing create political costs for overreach. Physical presence matters. Solidarity matters.

Strengthen local communities. Mutual aid networks, neighborhood watches, and know-your-rights trainings prepare communities to protect vulnerable members. Federal enforcement relies on atomized populations. Connected communities resist more effectively.

Countdowns to the Next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when citizens can express opinions about the performance of Congress: 275 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when citizens can express opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 1,010 Days

Associated Press. (2026, January 24). The man killed by a U.S. Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis was an ICU nurse, family says. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/minneapolis-ice-shooting-alex-pretti-nurse

CBS News. (2026, January 28). Minneapolis becomes ground zero in Trump’s immigration crackdown. CBS News.

Digital History. (n.d.). The Nullification Crisis. University of Houston.

Lawfare. (2026, January). Can the U.S. government compel states to enforce immigration law? Lawfare.

MSNBC. (2026, January 25). “Enough”: Some GOP governors urge Trump to change course on immigration operations. The Rachel Maddow Show Blog.

NPR. (2026a, January 26). Minnesota sues and residents protest Trump’s immigration surge. NPR.

NPR. (2026b, January 31). Judge says she won’t halt the immigration enforcement surge as a lawsuit proceeds. NPR.

PBS News. (2026, January). How Trump is challenging America’s judicial system during his second term. PBS NewsHour.

Richardson, H. C. (2026, January 13). January 13, 2026. Letters from an American.

Sellers, M. D. (2026, January). Judge issues preliminary injunction protecting protesters, limiting ICE tactics in Minnesota. Substack.

DEEPER LOOK with Michael Sellers

Judge Issues Preliminary Injunction Protecting Protesters, Limiting ICE Tactics in Minnesota

Today U..S. District Judge Katherine Menendez issued a targeted preliminary injunction restraining certain actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents participating in Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota. The order bars “retaliatory” arrests, detentions, use of chemical agents, and vehicle stops based solely on “followin…

Read more

3 months ago · 120 likes · 20 comments · Michael D. Sellers

State Court Report. (2026). Federalism and state constitutional rights in 2026. Brennan Center for Justice.

The Sanders Firm, P.C. (2026). Administrative power without judicial constraint: Why ICE’s interior enforcement model is colliding with constitutional policing in 2026.

Vera Institute. (2026). Weaponizing the system: One year of Trump’s attacks on due process. Vera Institute of Justice.

Unknown author. (n.d.) (2026). Facebook video,

What We Know About 26th and Nicollet

This morning at approximately 9:00 local time, federal immigration officers shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a Minneapolis resident and ICU nurse, at the intersection of Nicollet Avenue and 26th Street in Minneapolis amid an immigration enforcement action. Multiple bystander videos from the scene depict federal agents tackling and pepper-spraying individuals. They also show Pretti reaching toward a woman who had been pushed to the ground and pepper-sprayed by agents just before he is wrestled to the sidewalk, beaten with the barrel of an officer’s pistol, and finally shot numerous times. He was left lying there, unmoving, in the video footage I watched. In the widely circulated footage before his death, Pretti is seen holding what appears to be a phone, not a visible weapon, immediately before the confrontation. The shooting rapidly sparked protests and clashes with law enforcement in the area.

Introspection

I have a particular attachment to the Twin Cities of Minnesota. My remaining extended family lives in and around the area. I have friends and co-workers who live there. My great-grandfather owned land that is now the site of the Cathedral of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and survived his enlistment in the First Minnesota Regiment during the Civil War. My grandparents were both graduates of the University of Minnesota, a groundbreaking achievement for my grandmother in the early 1900’s. My father worked for 40 years at the 3M Company in Saint Paul, and I was part of the founding team of the largest recycler in the Twin Cities, Eureka Recycling. It is a place of great midwestern heart and goodness!

My instinct is to return to my first home and join the protesters tonight. For those of you who read this substack at all, you know that I am of a progressive mindset and anti-authoritarian. But the reasons for my anti-authoritarian stance might not be so clear. I was a Peace Corps volunteer, an interlude in life that I claim as “service to my country”. As part of that service and my three years overseas, I learned that the US belief in the rule of law and democracy is very special. I experienced what it was like to live in a dictatorship. I was friends with people who were tortured and imprisoned because of their political views and outspokenness. I saw the commitment that they brought with their views.

So, I take the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence very seriously because I believe their origins were, in many ways, almost divinely inspired. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”. Has it been perfect all these years? No, it hasn’t. Has it been better than every other form of government? Probably! Has it been self-healing after dreadful conflicts like the Civil War and the Civil Rights demonstrations? Yes, for the most part. Now we need to heal once again.

What This Is Not

This is not an argument against borders. It is not an argument against immigration law. It is not even an argument against the enforcement of laws. Every nation enforces its laws. The distinction that matters is how power is exercised and whether it remains restrained by a code of honor and constitution. A state that abandons warrants, proportional force, and accountability in the name of expediency asserts authority without limit.

This is also not an argument against all law enforcement activities or a claim that every officer acts this way. Institutions are composed of individuals, many of whom serve with integrity. But constitutional systems are not protected by good intentions. They are protected by rules, oversight, and a clear expectation that force is constrained, documented, and answerable to the law. When violations of these codes and even the highest law of the land are excused as operational necessity, the problem is no longer individual misconduct. In this case, especially with recent revelations of ICE policy directive enabling the unconstitutional use of “administrative warrants” to forcibly enter homes without “judicial warrants”,1 it is lawlessness and anarchy.

The outright denial of the facts (the man was shot in cold blood) presented us with clear video evidence of what happened. The blatant and aggressive lies told about the encounter by our governmental officials are saddening and sickening. They cannot stand in the face of the video we have all seen today.

Is There a Call to Action Here?

When I see poorly trained, violent men, and yes, with rare exceptions, these actions are carried out almost entirely by men, breaking into homes without judicial warrants; stopping people on the street and demanding papers based on skin color; and beating or killing citizens and non-citizens alike, I conclude that constitutional rights are under wholesale attack. These rights: freedom of speech, the lawful right to bear arms, the freedom to assemble in protest of anything, and the right to record and publish the actions of law enforcement, are not optional if we wish to have a functioning democracy. So, when I want to experience things on the ground AND stand up for what I think is right, that feels patriotic to me.

How can anyone watch the videos circulating online without asking, “This is Wrong?” I feel bad that I am not packing up my car here in mid-Michigan to drive to the Twin Cities for a few days to see the events for myself. It doesn’t feel sufficient to write about it on Substack when other people are witnessing and resisting the evil in person. I want to be absolutely sure that I am not being snookered by a social media algorithm that has figured out that I want to see only the depradations of ICE on protesters.

While in-person witnessing creates the opportunity to learn. It also puts me in danger, and that impacts my loved ones as well. I do not know whether the right response in this moment is to drive west or to keep writing. I do know that democracy will fail in this country if force is abused and if those who recognize the abuse convince themselves that protesting it in-person is someone else’s responsibility.

Stoic Moments

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Book V)

Authoritarian systems do more than suppress opposition. They deliberately make an effort to eliminate moral contrast. As a result, they attack institutions, journalists, and bystanders who insist on reporting reality. Virtue is threatening because it exposes corruption. [This is from last week and it still resonates - even more today!]

Need to Do Something?

Bear witness to the authoritarian acts. Standup against tyranny. That’s how the country was founded. Observe and amplify small and large acts of courage. Do not forget Renee Good or Alex Pretti. Do not let them die in vain. Seek, support, and elect candidates who bring moral clarity and truth to their campaigns and office. That means ICE needs to go! Represent your beliefs by showing up for your country and fellow citizens. Strengthen your community through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, and contribute funds. Clean up your garden, shovel your snow, hope for next Spring, check on your neighbors, and care for yourself and those you love.

Countdowns to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress: 290 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 1,020 Days

Associated Press. (2026, January 24). The man killed by a US Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis was an ICU nurse, family says. AP News.

Star Tribune. (2026, January 24). Alex Jeffrey Pretti identified as man fatally shot by federal officers in Minneapolis. Star Tribune.

Kilat Fitzgerald. (2026, January 24). Minneapolis shooting: What we know about Alex Pretti, the man killed by Border Patrol agent. FOX 9.

The Guardian. (2026, January 24). Man killed in Minneapolis by federal agents identified as VA nurse Alex Pretti: ‘He wanted to help people’. The Guardian.

CBS Minnesota. (2026, January 24). Federal agents fatally shoot another Minneapolis resident; BCA says feds deny access to shooting scene. CBS Minnesota (WCCO).

American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. (n.d.). Immigration enforcement: administrative vs. judicial warrants.

FindLaw. (2025). What you need to know about administrative and judicial warrants.

The Federal Judiciary

When executive power turns coercive, the judiciary remains the system’s first and quickest hard stop, reinforcing the limits on state violence. Friday’s injunction issued by Judge Menendez against the harassment, arrest, and detention of peaceful protesters in Minnesota illustrates the most immediate pushback. The order did not engage in abstract norm-setting or political commentary; it imposed concrete behavioral limits on federal law enforcement. That distinction matters. Authoritarian drift accelerates when courts hesitate to intervene early or retreat into procedural minimalism. Here, the court acted quickly, narrowly, and with constitutional clarity, grounding its reasoning in First Amendment protections and due process rather than discretionary balancing.

This action fits a broader judicial pattern. Federal courts have repeatedly resisted attempts to expand executive authority through emergency rationales, expansive interpretations of national security, or administrative shortcuts that bypass statutory limits. Injunctions blocking protest suppression, election interference, and agency overreach signal that the judiciary still understands its role as a co-equal branch. Importantly, these rulings also create precedents that limit future bad behavior and raise the political and institutional costs of repeated violations.

The durability of this guardrail lies in the judiciary’s capacity to convert civic conflict into enforceable law. Although courts cannot prevent authoritarian ambition, they can deny it legitimacy, momentum, and operational freedom, provided their orders are respected and enforced.

Red Lines on Expansionism and War Powers

Authoritarian systems often fail abroad first, and congressional resistance to territorial or military overreach reflects a consequential reassertion of constitutional authority.

The emerging bipartisan Senate opposition to any attempt to seize Greenland represents more than foreign policy disagreement. Senator Wicker’s explicit statement that such an action would constitute grounds for immediate impeachment reframes executive adventurism as a constitutional violation rather than a strategic debate. The destruction of the long-term NATO alliance is a bridge too far. That distinction is critical. Congress loses its constraining power when it treats executive overreach as merely unwise rather than unlawful.

This episode echoes earlier inflection points, Vietnam, Watergate-era covert actions, and post-9/11 authorization creep, when executive escalation forced Congress to reassert its authority. What distinguishes the current moment is the willingness of majority-party senators to articulate consequences publicly, not just express concern privately. The suggestion of bipartisan support for impeachment, funding denial, and authorization requirements signals a shift from a permissive ambiguity to institutional boundary-setting.

Territorial expansion, like unilateral military action, is a classic authoritarian power move because it concentrates power, mobilizes nationalist patriotism, and sidelines domestic accountability. Congressional resistance here serves as a guardrail, asserting that even popular or symbolic acts of force remain subject to constitutional process. Whether Congress follows through procedurally will determine whether this guardrail hardens or collapses, but the line has been drawn more clearly than might have been expected several months ago.

State Capacity and Federalism

Federalism is not merely a division of sovereignty; it is a distributed veto system that denies authoritarian power the capacity it requires to function.

States possess something the federal executive cannot easily replace: operational control. Law enforcement cooperation, election administration, licensing authority, and emergency response all depend on state and local participation. Increasingly, governors and attorneys general are treating federal overreach as a violation of this arrangement, not simply a policy disagreement. Coordinated refusals to cooperate, combined with targeted litigation, represent a durable form of resistance rooted in constitutional design.

Recent multi-state legal actions, often bipartisan in nature, challenge federal attempts to retroactively claw back previously allocated funding streams, override local election procedures, or deputize local officials for politically motivated enforcement. These efforts rely on capacity denial: withholding cooperation, blocking access, and forcing federal actors to operate without the infrastructure they assume.

This guardrail scales under pressure. As more states push back, the political and logistical costs of coercion rise for the executive branch. The federal government can override individual jurisdictions, but it struggles to override a coordinated bloc of action. Too much of this activity, and it can be more clearly identified as coercive rather than legitimate. That exposure, in turn, feeds back into judicial scrutiny and congressional resistance, reinforcing the system's overall strength.

Intra-Party Institutionalists

Democratic systems are most at risk when unified acquiescence becomes the underlying condition rather than an episodic response to pressure. Accordingly, currently emerging cracks within the governing coalition mark a decisive shift.

Authoritarian consolidation depends on party discipline that subordinates institutional loyalty to personal allegiance. When members of the governing party begin to articulate constitutional red lines, especially using the language of impeachment, illegality, or disqualification, the internal power structure changes. The remarks of Senator Wicker and Congressman Bacon are emblematic, but not isolated. Similar signals have emerged from other legislators who frame extreme executive actions as violations of constitutional order.

This form of resistance is often underestimated because it lacks spectacle. It conditions votes, committee actions, and internal negotiations, and although it does not march or litigate, it remains a formidable force. Historically, democratic breakdown accelerates only when governing parties abandon institutional self-preservation entirely. Consolidation grinds to a halt when they hesitate and begin to weigh the cost of compliance.

This guardrail is no doubt fragile. It depends on numbers, coordination, and momentum. But its emergence indicates that partisan loyalty is no longer absolute, and that institutional legitimacy retains value even within the president’s own coalition.

Necessary but Not Sufficient

What emerges is something historically familiar: a constitutional system entering its pressure phase. This is not a sudden moral awakening or a democratic conversion among actors long indifferent to the public good, but it is far preferable to the alternative. Courts are enforcing limits, states are denying operational capacity, Congress is rediscovering its red lines, and members of the governing party are beginning, however cautiously, to prioritize institutional survival over executive loyalty. These guardrails are not activated by virtue; they are activated by stress. The United States was designed for precisely this moment, not because it assumes good faith, but because it anticipated overreach in its conception. Today’s outcome is not predetermined. Guardrails can hold, even harden, or potentially fail. Their emergence signals underlying structural strength and a growing insistence that power remain answerable to law, not force, even under this administration.

Stoic Moments

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Book V)

Authoritarian systems do more than suppress opposition. They deliberately make an effort to eliminate moral contrast. As a result, they attack institutions, journalists, and bystanders who insist on reporting reality. Virtue is threatening because it exposes corruption.

Need to Do Something?

Bear witness to the authoritarian acts. Observe and amplify public outrage about the absurdity of behavior that suggests power for power’s sake is a good goal. Be clear about values and the nature of good and evil. Elect clear-eyed moral leaders who have the personal strength and judgment to distinguish right from wrong. Seek, support, and elect candidates who bring moral clarity and truth to their campaigns and office. Represent your beliefs by showing up for your country and fellow citizens. Strengthen your community through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, and contribute funds. Clean up your garden, shovel your snow, hope for next Spring, check on your neighbors, and care for yourself and those you love.

Countdowns to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress: 296 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 1,026 Days

Associated Press. (2026, January 17). Judge rules feds in Minneapolis immigration operation can’t detain or tear gas peaceful protesters.

Associated Press. (2026, January 17). Trump says he may punish countries with tariffs if they don’t back the U.S. controlling Greenland.

Bloomberg News. (2026, January 17). Minneapolis protesters win ruling curbing ICE use of force.

Reuters. (2026, January 17). U.S. judge orders curbs on immigration agents’ conduct toward Minnesota protesters.

The Washington Post. (2026, January 16). Minneapolis judge bars DHS agents from arresting peaceful protesters.

Votebeat. (2026, January 13). Trump’s election executive order again set back with latest court ruling.

The Guardian. (2026, January 16). Justice department loses bid to get sensitive information on California voters.

Mediaite. (2026, January 15). House Republican says he would “lean toward” impeaching Trump if he were to invade Greenland.

The Daily Beast. (2026, January 15). GOP Rep. Don Bacon predicts Trump invasion may “end” presidency.

Council on Foreign Relations. (2026, January 9). The Senate moves to limit Trump on Venezuela.

Al Jazeera. (2026, January 15). U.S. Senate defeats war powers resolution designed to rein in Trump.

Axios. (2026, January 15). Trump administration’s offshore wind stoppage hits more legal snags.

Fox News. (2026, January 13). Bipartisan lawmakers propose bill to block military action against NATO members amid Greenland threats.

This post was supposed to be a retrospective. A look back at a year of writing discipline, modest reach, and the satisfaction of showing up consistently. Last week argues differently. The week’s bookend events of the forcible removal of another country’s leader and the execution at 10 inches of an American citizen highlight the authoritarianism and moral depravity of our leadership. Authoritarian is no longer a risk. It is now the operating condition and something that needs immediate and countervailing action.

The Meaning of Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is making a dramatic announcement. It’s advancing through repeated violations of legal and institutional limits. The defining characteristic is not ideology, personality, or rhetoric. It is the systematic disregard for constraint. Legal limits are ignored. Moral limits are dismissed. Institutional limits are treated as obstacles to be overridden. In response to objections, restraint is recast as weakness. Due process is reframed as inefficiency. Law becomes something to bypass rather than obey. In truth, down is up and up is down in the governing space of this country.

Authoritarian governance shows itself when power acts first and justifies itself later. It is obvious when unlawful actions proceed without accountability, when consequences fail to follow violations, and when normalization replaces outrage. It consolidates when administration spokespeople and lapdog media figures translate coercion into necessity and state violence into realism. But the truth must be rejected.

The Normalization of Empire

The forced removal of Nicolás Maduro was framed as inevitable strategic leverage. The description was as far from reality as possible because it was a violation of national sovereignty carried out without lawful authority in an attempt to grab up fossil fuel resources at cents on the dollar.

This is not a defense of Maduro. He is an autocrat who hollowed out democratic institutions, repressed opposition, and presided over economic collapse. While these facts are well documented, they are also irrelevant to the core issue at hand. National sovereignty is not conditional on virtue. International law does not apply only to sympathetic regimes. When force replaces law, precedent is established for all actors, not just favored ones.

Consider the logic that justified the act. Regime change discussed as an operational challenge rather than a legal crime. Borders treated as inconveniences. Consent erased. The language of democracy is used to mask coercion. Resource access is hovering just beneath the surface as the unspoken incentive structure. Once empire stops apologizing, it stops moderating.

The Good Killing

Authoritarianism abroad is now paired with the same at home, perhaps deliberately. Although the methods differ, the logic does not. The killing of Renee Good was not a tragic accident. It was an execution carried out at close range. Proximity, method, and process all matter. There was no remorse amidst the comment “f-ing bitch.” in the immediate aftermath of the woman’s death. When the state kills without trial, without imminent necessity, and without accountability, it is not enforcing order. It is asserting dominance and violating the constitutional rights of everyone, citizen and non-citizen alike.

This was not a failure of training. It was not an isolated lapse. It was a demonstration of power unconstrained by consequence or the constitution, strategized ahead of time. The same contempt for limits that enables seizure of Venezuelan leadership and national resources enables domestic execution. Although they occur in different theaters and the victims change, the justification remains constant. We do this because we can.

One System. Two Arenas.

The Maduro operation and the Good killing share a single governing premise. Power is entitled to act, which means accountability is optional, because outcomes justify the means. Externally, sovereignty is disposable. Internally, due process is ornamental. In both cases, the state claims necessity and demands compliance. Simultaneously, critics are dismissed as naïve and legal constraints are portrayed as luxuries ill-suited to dangerous times and incompatible with fictional emergencies.

This authoritarian system is trying to stabilize itself by testing boundaries abroad, where resistance is diffuse, and then normalizing violence at home, where fear disciplines dissent. Deliberate fragmentation of resistance and exhaustion wears down push-back and makes new behaviors habitual, thereby becoming unchallenged. The natural professional caution of counterveiling institutions that ought to know better leads to diminished resistance.

Institutional Cowardice

Most damningly, Congress has retreated, indeed, it has run screaming, from its constitutional role. Its oversight has withered, not just in the last year, but over the last few decades. Accountability mechanisms sit idle while long-established constitutional protections erode. Powers explicitly afforded the legislative branch are surrendered through inaction rather than defeat. This retreat did not happen overnight, but it has now become unmistakable. When Congress declines to act, executive overreach ceases to be contested and hardens into precedent.

Media and elite discourse complete the work. Actions are reported without confronting their moral or legal meaning. Acts of state violence are reduced to procedural disputes. Political figures express discomfort while urging patience and decorum. Commentators insist on treating “both sides” as morally equivalent even when only one side is exercising unchecked power. The false equivalence erases asymmetry of intent, authority, and consequence. It reframes an executive-encouraged assault on constitutional transfer as merely one extreme among many.

Language finishes the laundering. “Controversial” replaces unlawful. “Hard choices” replaces brutality. “National interest” replaces predation. Over time, the vocabulary of democracy is repurposed to shield its erosion rather than prevent it. This is not confusion. It is not paralysis. It is overreach enabled by omission.

Speed Matters

Authoritarian systems accelerate once they detect passivity. Each unpunished violation lowers the cost of the next. Delay does not preserve stability. It cedes terrain. Waiting for decorum to reassert itself is magical thinking. Elections matter, but they are not sufficient. Law matters, but it does not enforce itself. Our democracy will survive today only if people treat its erosion as an emergency rather than a policy disagreement.

History is unambiguous on this point. Institutional correction follows pressure, not persuasion. Antitrust after the Gilded Age emerged after substantial unrest in the form of riots, work stoppages, and armed conflict. Civil rights advanced after dramatic and public confrontation. Executive power is constrained only when a countervailing force becomes unavoidable and inexorable.

Rigidity Is the Point

This administration is not acting out of confusion or through incompetence. Its actions are morally depraved in both effect and intent on so many fronts. It seeks to govern through coercion, obscure responsibility through abstraction, and consolidate power by systematically dismantling traditional American norms and mores.

Our task now is not persuasion, it is forceful resistance. The focus needs to be on alignment, clarity, preparation, and refusal to accept the diminishment and rejection of the American Experiment. The necessary refusals are numerous. Refusal to normalize imperial behavior. Refusal to soften or euphemize state execution. Refusal to countenance the hijacking of our essential character of opportunity, freedom, and democracy for all.

Democracy will not collapse in a single moment from one assault on its character. It erodes when strongman behaviors are recognized but tolerated. The time demands something firmer than commentary or concern. It requires commitment to the fact that our leaders’ behavior is unacceptable. The work of 2026 will not be comfortable, but it is necessary. It is not the time for retreat and reflection on surviving 2025.

Stoic Moments

“He who does wrong does not hate virtue; he hates the witness of it”

— Seneca, Moral Essays (Section 16)

Authoritarian systems do more than suppress opposition. They deliberately make an effort to eliminate moral contrast. This is why regimes attack institutions, journalists, and citizens who insist on reporting reality. Virtue is threatening because it exposes corruption.

Need to Do Something?

Bear witness to the authoritarian acts. Imagine how different the discussion about Renee Good’s killing would be without the real-time cell phone videos of the horrific events. Be clear about values and the nature of good and evil. Elect clear-eyed moral leaders who have the personal strength and judgment to distinguish right from wrong. Seek and elect candidates who bring moral clarity and truth to their campaigns and office. Represent your beliefs by showing up for your country and fellow citizens. Strengthen your community through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, and contribute funds. Clean up your garden, plan for next Spring, check on your neighbors, and care for yourself and those you love.

Countdowns to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress: 303 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 1,033 Days

Claassen, C. (2023). Public support for democracy in the United States has declined. American Political Science Review, 117(4), 1231–1249.

Taub, A. (2024, October 29). The game theory of democracy. The New York Times Magazine.

Reuters. (2022, June 16). U.S. Capitol Jan. 6 panel turns attention to Pence at Thursday’s hearing.

Reuters. (2023, August 1). Trump charged in probe into efforts to overturn 2020 election. Reuters.

The Atlantic. (2021, January 9). Republicans Confront the Consequences of Their Doomsday Rhetoric The Atlantic.

U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. (2022). Final report.

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. (2021). Both-sidesing democracy to death.

America has experienced extreme concentrations of private wealth and accompanying political influence before. The pattern is recognizable. While markets consolidate, institutional control lags, and financial power expands into the public space.

The late nineteenth-century Gilded Age was defined by industrial dominance that did not stop at the factory gate. Railroads shaped state policy and demanded real estate concessions. Oil trusts bent regulators to lock in scale advantages. Steel magnates influenced labor law to keep that portion of its expenses low. Reform arrived only after concentration hardened into crisis.

Today there is a similar pattern. Wealth has reconcentrated in the hands of new plutocrats. Control now sits in technology platforms, financial capital, and energy systems rather than oil, rail and steel. The underlying economic mechanisms are different and the trajectory of change is greater. But the underlying tension is unchanged. Extreme wealth concentration and private economic power migrates into public authority, converting market dominance into political leverage and blurring the boundary between governance and self-interest.

The Gilding of America - Old-Style

The original Gilded Age was an organized dominance of the marketplace that established rules enabling businesses to de-risk opportunities for scale. Industrial monopolists constructed vertically integrated systems that eliminated competitors and dictated terms across entire sectors in the guise of doing what was best for the country.

John D. Rockefeller (oil), Andrew Carnegie (steel), and Leland Stanford (rail) did not rely on innovation alone. They used consolidation, preferential access, and market exclusion to build durable moats around their enterprises. Railroads discriminated on freight rates to favor the “club.” Energy pricing was managed in a similar fashion. Raw material costs for building hard assets were likewise structured to benefit aligned firms.

Banks supplied coordinated credit. Courts moved slowly. Federal regulatory capacity was thin and often ill-informed. Media frequently acted as an amplifier rather than a constraint, with newspapers dependent on industrial advertising and political access. Narrative alignment followed economic dependence.

In its mature phase, the Gilded Age, the boundary between corporations and politics was porous and had become transactional, such that patronage corruption was routine, state legislatures were directly influenced, and federal regulatory oversight capacity remained thin. Democratic institutions and constitutional authority persisted in form, but increasingly operated as a paper guarantee, unevenly enforced and weak in practice. Pushback emerged from a variety of quarters, muckraking journalists, agricultural cooperatives, and striking workers, who challenged monopoly power through exposure, collective action, and localized regulation. Early gains were modest and largely confined to states and municipalities, but they accumulated into more durable regulatory forms. Reform arrived only when economic imbalance became politically unavoidable, forcing the eventual creation of antitrust law, labor protections, and federal regulatory agencies.

Where Power Now Sits

Power concentrations today are less tangible but still very real and strong. Media platforms, capital allocation, supply chain infrastructure, and influencers exert authority in place of smokestacks and rail lines. The technology firms control commerce, communication, logistics, and data. Financial actors shape investment horizons and opine on policy feasibility. Embedded fossil fuel energy systems influence prices, resilience, and climate outcomes. So, while each sector exerts leverage independently, together they form a dense network of influence.

Today’s wealthy men like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel sit at important structural nodes. They occupy key points where capital, technology, and political access intersect, providing each with the opportunity to profit immensely from privileged information and the leverage their investments afford. Unlike the nineteenth century, wealth now scales globally and instantaneously. A single firm led by one of these men can reshape markets in months. A single decision can alter public discourse overnight. At the same time, institutional regulatory responses remain slow and comparatively feeble in their ability to control activities that aren’t in the best interest of the whole of society. The result is an oligarchy recognizable by the asymmetry of power it afforded and the questionable social outcomes that persist.

Mechanisms of Influence — Then and Now

Monopoly and market control continue to remain a foundational tool for aspiring oligarchs, even as their forms evolve. While railroads once dictated freight rates, digital platforms now determine access, visibility, and participation. Once oil trusts constrained supply, today digital infrastructure constrains attention, coordination, and economic advantage. At the same time, finance functions as a political filter. Capital allocation determines which technologies scale, which regions develop, and which policy pathways appear “practical.” Governments increasingly rely on private capital to execute public aims through public-private partnerships, quietly aligning public outcomes with private investment logic.

Political access and institutional capture persist, mostly on a procedural basis. Corporate campaign finance legalizes vast political “investments,” normalizing regulatory influence that predictably favors donors. Informal governance by the donor class deepens this alignment through advisory roles, revolving staff appointments, emergency coordination, and technical dependency on regulated industries. Media power has shifted in form but not its architecture: where newspapers once reflected industrial interests, digital platforms now shape reality through algorithmic distribution rather than speech itself. This pattern mirrors earlier eras of monopoly and capture, in which reform arrived only when resistance accumulated enough force to reopen institutional influence that corporate power had persistently limited.

Pushback

Extreme marketplace concentration reliably generates political resistance, often well before institutions are capable, or willing, to act on it. Public skepticism about monopoly power is rising, and some political rhetoric has followed, but enforcement is lagging. Despite periodic statements from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, consolidation has continued across sectors: media ownership has narrowed, technology platforms have expanded through acquisition, and private equity has rolled up traditional media, healthcare, housing, and local services with minimal constraint.

Where antitrust action against monopolistic behavior occurs, it is selective, slow and opaque to all but the experts. Litigation stretches over years, technical details are complicated, remedies remain narrow, structural breakups are rare, and deterrence is weak. Media consolidation illustrates the gap: mergers in broadcasting, local news, and digital distribution have proceeded with little intervention, thinning editorial capacity and weakening local accountability, not through overt propaganda, but through diminished breadth of coverage. Technology follows a similar path, as dominant digital platforms acquire potential competitors early, regulators intervene late, and courts apply standards mismatched to markets that have already tipped by the time cases conclude.

As a result, political resistance is increasingly expressed outside formal enforcement. Electoral outcomes in some cities and states reflect voter impatience with housing concentration, privatization, and cost-of-living pressure; labor actions target monopsony1 power as much as monopoly; and ballot initiatives signal renewed support for public provision where markets have failed. The emergence of figures such as Zohran Mamdani is an early diagnostic: voters are testing whether democratic politics can still contest concentrated power where regulatory institutions have stalled. This is not yet a correction, but it might well be the warning phase that historically precedes it.

Democracy at Risk

The core risk is not that billionaires influence politics; that concern has always existed. Instead, the worry is that social systems quietly adapt to the influence. For instance, as governments come to rely on private platforms for communication, private capital for investment, and private infrastructure for resilience, the balance of negotiating leverage shifts. In the new paradigm, public institutions move from governing to negotiating, and authority becomes conditional.

The legitimacy and function of democracy erode slowly under these conditions. Elections persist, but choices narrow; formal rules remain intact while outcomes drift toward the boundaries set by concentrated private power. This becomes a systemic imbalance. The Gilded Age ended only when the gap between formal democratic structures and actual outcomes became politically untenable. Today, the gap is widening again and hopefully so too is the appetite for change growing.

The Gilded Analogy has Limits

The comparison between The Gilded Age and has its limits. Today federal oversight capacity is stronger; antitrust law exists; transparency norms are higher; and media pluralism, though fragmented, remains real. The very platforms that are often dominated by large digital concerns also have low barriers to entry, allowing alternative information sources to arise quickly and powerfully. Public resistance is visible, courts still function, and elections still matter. These differences are not trivial. They preserve the possibility of correction and suggest that fatalistic interpretation is overblown.

However, unused democratic capacity atrophies. If our institutions, especially Congress, cede authority even while retaining formal power, the weakening will be substantial and perhaps permanent. Democratic strength matters only if exercised before legitimacy erodes beyond repair.

And Now?

American democracy has survived concentrated wealth before, but only when institutions reasserted their capacity to act. The first Gilded Age did not end because industrialists moderated themselves; it ended because sustained political pressure forced institutional response. Antitrust followed mobilization, labor protections followed unrest, and regulation followed imbalance. When that moment arrived, President Theodore Roosevelt demonstrated that democratic authority could still be reclaimed by disciplining concentrated power and restoring confidence that outcomes remained contestable instead of rejecting capitalism entirely.

The present moment has not yet reached that inflection. What exists instead is resistance without focus: electoral signals, labor action, public skepticism, and early refusal. These are not yet outcomes, but indicators, evidence that political energy is accumulating faster than institutional response. Political and institutional legitimacy is preserved when public institutions govern without first negotiating the limits imposed by private power, when citizens believe outcomes remain genuinely contestable, and when markets serve democracy rather than overwhelm it. Democracy rarely collapses in spectacle; it erodes when power no longer answers to consent. History suggests correction eventually arrives. The only open question is whether institutions act in time or wait until the imbalance hardens into permanence.

Stoic Moments

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

Focus on what is within your control, accept constraints without complaint, and act virtuously within them.

Need to Do Something?

Be clear about values and the nature of good and evil. Encourage clear-eyed moral leadership and judgment from our leaders, both elected and appointed. Seek and elect candidates who bring moral clarity and truth to their campaigns and office. Strengthen your community through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, and contribute funds. Clean up your garden, plan for next Spring, check on your neighbors, and care for yourself and those you love.

Countdowns to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress: 310 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 1,040 Days

Youvan, D. C. (2024). The trust giants’ grasp: Corporate power and political influence in the Gilded Age. ResearchGate.

Digital History. (n.d.). Overview of the Gilded Age. University of Houston.

Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. (2019). Politics and antitrust: Lessons from the Gilded Age.

Khan, L. M. (2020). The end of antitrust history revisited. Columbia Law Review, 119(4), 967–1013.

United States Congress. (1914). Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.

Martin, G. J., Mastrorocco, N., McCrain, J., & Ornaghi, A. (2024). Media consolidation (Working paper). Stanford University.

Roosevelt Institute. (2024). The political economy of the U.S. media system.

Khanal, S. (2024). Why and how the power of Big Tech is increasing in the policy process. Policy & Society, 44(1), 52–68.

Pew Research Center. (2020). Concerns about democracy in the digital age.

Taylor, L. (2021). Public actors without public values: Legitimacy, domination, and the regulation of digital technologies. American Journal of Law & Medicine, 47(1), 3–30.

Wu, T. (2018). The curse of bigness: Antitrust in the new Gilded Age. Columbia Global Reports.

Theodore Roosevelt Center. (n.d.). The Northern Securities case.

Encyclopædia Britannica. (2025). Theodore Roosevelt: Conservation, trust-busting, and the Square Deal.

Quote of the day by Theodore Roosevelt: ‘Do what you can, with what you have, where you are’. (2025, December 24) The Economic Times.

Today’s Neo-Nazi themes look different. Antisemitism does not need millions of voters or a formal party apparatus. It is not the arbitrary extortion of institutions of higher learning to prevent protests about the killing in Gaza. Instead, it gains attention, achieves proximity, and becomes a household name through online influence platforms where its proponents are treated as purveyors of legitimate political ideas. In an era defined by podcasts, livestreams, and algorithmic distribution, a small number of extremist figures exert outsized influence by attaching themselves to much larger political coalitions.

The recurring MAGA flirtation with figures like Nick Fuentes matters in spite of ritual attestations about rejecting antisemitism. The contradiction is both structural and instrumental, allowing neo-Nazi actors to extract legitimacy, reach, and recruits from a movement that refuses to enforce its own boundaries.

Politics of Adjacency

Fuentes does not require formal acceptance or ideological agreement. He benefits from something subtler and more durable: recognition within the movement’s media ecosystem. Appearances, shared stages, reposts, “debates,” and even condemnations that repeat his name all provide a platform for his evil. In a networked media environment, attention is the currency that matters most.

This is why debates framed around whether a politician or influencer agrees with Fuentes routinely miss the point. The real question is whether they are willing to absorb the cost of exclusion that comes with a rejection of the white supremacists. Rejection means refusing to engage with content that would otherwise generate traffic. It means tolerating backlash from online factions. It means drawing boundaries that reduce reach in the short term. In practice, many politicians, influencers, and media personalities choose ambiguity instead. Ambiguity preserves audience size and revenue, but it also grows extremist visibility.

The Political Economy of Attention

The apparent inconsistency of the online influence sphere is best understood as equilibrium behavior in current incentive conditions. Controversy produces private gains in attention and funding, while the costs of normalization are diffuse and weakly enforced. With no centralized authority capable of imposing discipline across a decentralized media ecosystem, individual actors pursue exposure-maximizing strategies, even when the collective outcome is reputational and moral degradation.

Boundary enforcement (rejection of extremism) is systematically penalized within this equilibrium. Public disavowals impose immediate costs in the form of backlash and audience loss, while the benefits of exclusion are diffuse and short-term. Silence, by contrast, carries a lower cost and is therefore routinely interpreted as a sign of tolerance. The result is predictable hesitation rather than decisive action. Under these conditions, a coalition need not endorse antisemitism for antisemitic actors to prosper; it need only fail to impose consistent constraints. Neo-Nazi actors capture attention and legitimacy from the host coalition without bearing the burdens of governance or majority persuasion.

This pattern reflects a stable but socially destructive equilibrium predicted by modern political economy. When private rewards are concentrated, collective costs are diffuse, and enforcement institutions are weak, rational actors choose exposure over restraint. Markets do not fail because participants are irrational, but because incentives are misaligned and enforcement mechanisms eroded. In attention-driven political systems, extremism becomes a profitable input rather than a disqualifying cost. Without correction, the equilibrium persists, even as its bad moral and democratic consequences compound.

Succession Pressure After Trump

This dynamic has intensified as MAGA confronts its post-Trump future. The President functions as a singular gravitational force. As his era of evil winds down, the movement is fragmenting into influencers, aspirants, and media entrepreneurs competing to define what “real MAGA” means.

In that environment, extremism becomes a positioning strategy. Extremist speech (or platforming) signals authenticity. Caution signals weakness. Boundary-testing becomes a way to claim ideological purity without taking responsibility for consequences. The result is a race toward provocation, where flirtation with figures like Fuentes serves as proof of seriousness and openness to new ideas rather than as a reputational liability.

Trump himself illustrated this dynamic in 2022 when he invited both Fuentes and Ye to Mar-a-Lago for dinner. The episode triggered bipartisan condemnation, but it also dramatically elevated Fuentes’ national profile without a penalty for promoting the unthinkable. The backlash was loud. But, the platforming effect was louder, paving the way for the Heritage Foundation's sanctioning of Fuentes this year.

Why This Matters Now

There is some thought that the concern about the platforming of neo-Nazis is overstated. Buy, data suggest otherwise. In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in America, the highest total since it began tracking in 1979. Beyond the obvious online speech, these incidents include harassment, vandalism, and physical assaults. The rise in incidents coincides with a 2025 shift in federal priorities, including reduced staffing and tracking tools for domestic terrorism investigations within the Department of Justice, weakening early detection and deterrence as extremist activity becomes more frequent.

This does not mean that Americans as a whole are extremists. It does indicate that current conditions are more permissive and that today’s social environments reward provocateurs. But it’s worth noting that extremist movements rarely begin with majority support; they gain traction when confrontation is treated as costly and ambiguity seems the easier path.

Our Test

The lessons of history allow no moral ambiguity on this point. Nazi antisemitism was not a rhetorical orientation or a cultural grievance. It was a governing ideology that systematically murdered more than 10 million Jews and other humans defined as “undesirable”. The outcome was not an accident of war. It was the logical conclusion to a process in which extreme ideas were first tolerated, then normalized, and eventually institutionalized.

History rarely repeats itself precisely. But the European experience of the mid 20-th century was a critical lesson nonetheless. Extremist movements do not announce their final intentions at the outset. They advance by testing boundaries, exploiting hesitation, and converting indifference into permission. What begins as edgy “provocation” ends, if unchecked, as policy.

This is why platforming matters. And this is why tepid claims of opposition to antisemitism ring hollow when ideological enforcement is optional and consequences hazy. A society does not have to endorse hatred to enable it. It only has to look away.

Forgetting where real antisemitism leads is not neutrality or impartiality. It is negligence. The historical record is settled and has a final moral verdict. The only question is whether we remember the lesson, rather than treat current events as an abstraction. The ideas of Nick Fuentes and his fellow travelers are wrong and evil.

Stoic Moments

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)

Evil does not require monstrous intent. It arises from the failure to exercise judgment. Moral failure stems from neglected reason, not demonic will. In this context, the Holocaust was enabled less by the abdication of moral agency.

Need to Do Something?

Be clear about values and the nature of good and evil. Encourage clear-eyed moral leadership and judgement from our leaders, both elected and appointed. Seek and elect candidates who bring moral clarity and truth to their campaigns and office. Strengthen your community through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, and contribute funds. Clean up your garden, plan for next Spring, check on your neighbors, and care for yourself and those you love.

Countdowns to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress: 317 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 1,047 Days

Anti-Defamation League. (2025). Audit of antisemitic incidents 2024: Executive summary.

Axios. (2022, November 25). Trump dined with Nick Fuentes and Ye at Mar-a-Lago.

Department of Justice. (2025). Hate crime statistics: FBI releases 2024 data.

Financial Times. (2025, December 26). Year in a word: Groyper.

North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge University Press.

Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. Harvard University Press.

Reuters. (2025, March 21). Exclusive: FBI scales back staffing, tracking of domestic terrorism probes, sources say.

The Week. (2024). What Nick Fuentes and the Groypers want.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (n.d.). Documenting numbers of victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution. Holocaust Encyclopedia.

The Washington Post. (2025, December 20). Tucker Carlson inflames a raging battle for MAGA’s future.

Two Political Logics

That distinction matters because modern politics increasingly collapses two very different logics into one undifferentiated mood of frustration. Reformation and transformation are treated as interchangeable impulses when, in fact, they describe fundamentally different theories of change. Reformation assumes continuity. Transformation assumes rupture. One believes institutions can be corrected, constrained, and redirected. The other concludes that institutions are structurally incapable of delivering justice, prosperity, or stability and must be replaced. Confusing these logics leads to failure, either by mistaking procedural pressure for moral surrender or by mistaking moral clarity for governing capacity.

The politics of reformation begins from an unglamorous premise. Institutions are flawed, often deeply so, but they remain the only mechanisms capable of coordinating complex societies at scale. Reformation works through law, regulation, budget authority, courts, and process. It values precedent not because precedent is sacred, but because legitimacy accumulates slowly and collapses quickly. Reform is incremental by design. It is cautious because it binds winners and losers to the same system after the vote is counted. The discharge petition forcing a vote on health care subsidies is not radical politics. It is procedural leverage applied to a standoff and a tragic institutional failure. That is what reform looks like when systems resist movement. Its weakness is dragging progress drifting into stagnation. Its vulnerability is bad faith. But when it succeeds, institutions remain standing, and outcomes endure.

The politics of transformation begins from a harsher diagnosis. Some systems, it argues, are not merely malfunctioning. They are producing harm by design. In those cases, correction becomes complicity. Transformation frames politics in moral and often existential terms. It mobilizes crisis, mass action, and delegitimation. It expands what can be said and imagined far faster than reform ever can. This is its strength. It surfaces structural truths reformers often avoid. But history is less kind to its second act. Transformation excels at dismantling orders. It struggles to replace them with institutions capable of surviving time, power, and human fallibility. Governance gaps follow disruption. Backlash fills vacuums. The moral energy that fuels rupture rarely translates cleanly into forward-looking administration. And it’s the same instinct that renders once reasonable healthcare costs unaffordable next month.

The First Reformation

This tension is not new, and it is not uniquely modern. The Protestant Reformation is often misremembered as a revolutionary break, in historically sloppy framing. Martin Luther did not begin as a revolutionary. He did not seek to abolish the Church. He sought to reform it. His objections were specific and doctrinal: the sale of indulgences, the corruption of clerical authority, the distortion of theology in service of institutional preservation. Luther appealed first to scripture and theology, then to existing authorities. Only when reform failed did transformation emerge, largely as an unintended consequence. The sequence is instructive. Internal critique met institutional resistance. Resistance produced delegitimation. Delegitimation produced fragmentation. Reformation, blocked, became transformation.

What ultimately endured was not the rupture itself, but the institutional settlements that followed. New churches. New doctrines. New governing arrangements. The Reformation succeeded where it did not because it burned structures down, but because it built alternatives capable of exercising authority without collapsing under the pressure of change. The historical lesson is uncomfortable but consistent. In the end, a small but significant portion of the Catholic Church splintered away, showing how an organized reform movement fractured a spiritual monopoly permanently.

A Modern Parallel

Today’s American politics occupies an unstable middle that would have been familiar to the heretic monk Luther. There are real challenges in climate change, health care, artificial intelligence, democratic legitimacy, and housing affordability. The challenges seem transformational in scale. Yet the tools available remain reformist: administrative rulemaking, legislative procedure, courts, budgets, and regulatory enforcement. The mismatch produces frustration across the spectrum. The evidence of 2025 further shows the weakness of the reformist tools.

Reform is dismissed as cowardice or complicity. Transformation is dismissed as unserious or ungovernable. Meanwhile, institutions drift. The Epstein file release debacle is not merely a scandal. It demonstrates institutional incompetence and intransigence in the open. And, it appears to be cracking the underlying foundation of legitimacy. The health care discharge petition is not revolutionary. It is evidence that procedural pressure is now being used as a last resort to force systems to perform their basic functions.

This is why reformation still matters, even now. Both the historical and current records are stark. Transformation without institutional replacement produces chaos. Reformation without ambition produces stagnation. The choice is not binary, but the sequence of resistance matters. The Protestant Reformation did not succeed because reformers rejected institutions. Removing ACA subsidies without a functional alternative is proving to be a trainwreck. The church reformation succeeded because, when existing institutions failed to adapt, new ones emerged capable of holding authority without reproducing the same harms.

Is the Rupture Coming?

Periods of stability reward reform. Periods of denial invite rupture. The present moment is neither fully stable nor openly revolutionary. It is transitional. Mistaking reform for retreat is an error. Mistaking transformation for seriousness is another. Systems change most successfully when reformist pressure forces institutional evolution before legitimacy collapses entirely. Our country’s window for that opportunity is narrowing. Reformation is not surrender. It is the final opportunity to change systems before transformation arrives without permission.

Stoic Moments

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself”

— Thomas Paine, Dissertations on the First Principles of Government (1783)

Paine emphasizes self-command, justice over emotion, and long-term moral discipline rather than reactive anger. Although more contemporary, he reflects the Stoic belief that virtue, not circumstance, determines freedom, and that restraint under pressure preserves order more reliably than retaliation.

Need to Do Something?

Recognize that the days are getting brighter. Encourage small actions off justice and moral judgement as it appears in our leaders. Seek and elect candidates who bring truth to their campaigns and office. Strengthen your community through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, and contribute funds. Clean up your garden, plan for next Spring, check on your neighbors, and care for yourself and those you love.

Countdowns to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress: 324 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 1,054 Days

BBC. (2014). Martin Luther and the Reformation.

Catholic Church. (1983). Code of Canon Law (Canons 751, 1364).

Catholic Church. (1994). Catechism of the Catholic Church (¶2089).

Congressional Research Service. (n.d.). Discharge petitions in the House of Representatives.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Martin Luther.

BBC. (2014). Martin Luther and the Reformation.

History.com Editors. (2017). Martin Luther and the 95 Theses.

Paine, T. (1783/2023). Dissertations on Government. National Archives.

PBS. (2003). Martin Luther (1483–1546). Empires: Martin Luther.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2019). Revolution.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2020). Robert Nozick’s Political Philosophy

The Atlantic. (2024, September). Start with a lie [Audio podcast episode]. The Atlantic Podcasts.

Letters to the POTUS reads less like a protest than like a witness. The project is a self-described “letter-writing vigil,” a phrase that feels both deliberate and historically grounded. A vigil assumes endurance and resonates the patience of Gandhi, Havel, and Mandela. The act itself matters because it speaks a simple truth in an environment of noise and clutter, even if no one in power responds.

That framing captures something essential about our moment today. As the federal government has become more extreme in its acts, centralized in its decision-making, and less transparent, many of the most consequential acts of resistance in 2025 have been quiet, local, and stubbornly analogue. They do not trend. They do not scale cleanly. But they persist, and they provide people a practical means to “do something”. And persistence, history suggests, is often the point.

Resonance with Pre-Gorbachev USSR

Local and personal acts of resistance sit within a much older lineage, one that predates social media, hashtags, and even nationally organized mass protest. They resemble something closer to samizdat: the self-published, hand-circulated texts that circulated outside official channels in the Soviet Union, preserving dissent when centralized authority controlled the press.

Samizdat was not simply about banned ideas. It was about parallel infrastructure, unofficial systems of writing, copying, and distribution that kept alternative civic narratives alive. Typed manuscripts passed hand to hand. Trust networks replaced institutions. Written communication supplants the fleeting nature of spoken memory.

The American risk environment today is obviously different from that of the 20th-century USSR. Writing a letter in the United States does not yet carry the same penalties as circulating forbidden literature in Russia in the 1950’s and 60’s. But the logic has returned. When centralized systems feel unresponsive or actively hostile, society rebuilds smaller ones.

Rejection of Traditional Media

As centralized communication systems lose public trust, society is rebuilding its own tools for expression, most visibly in the revival of DIY publishing. Across U.S. cities in 2025, zines have quietly re-emerged as tools of resistance. These publications are very explicitly conceived as tools. Folded sheets designed to be printed cheaply, passed quickly, and understood without context. Across the country, people gather in libraries, bars, and community spaces to make and distribute zines covering topics that algorithmic platforms often distort or suppress: how to document ICE activity safely, how to assert legal rights during enforcement encounters, how to support neighbors without exposing them, or yourself, to digital surveillance.

Alongside and often in complementary fashion to these paper tools, a quiet ecosystem of simple apps has also taken shape. These are not platforms but utilities, basic alert systems, legal-aid directories, neighborhood signal tools, built to be copied, shared, and replaced. Many are distributed informally, kept off app stores, or circulated as links and QR codes that can vanish overnight. Their simplicity is intentional. It makes them easy to replicate and hard to suppress. Some are flagged, throttled, or removed once noticed; others survive only as open-source fragments, renamed and redeployed as needed. Like samizdat, they assume surveillance, expect disruption, and value persistence over reach.

These efforts matter because they sidestep the fragility of digital attention. They don’t depend on reach impression metrics or platform performance. They create physical records, things that can be copied, archived, re-distributed, and rediscovered later. That durability is the samizdat instinct reasserting itself in a different political economy.

Legal literacy efforts follow the same pattern. Organizations like the Immigrant Defense Project have expanded Know Your Rights workshops and materials, explicitly updated for 2025, covering encounters with ICE and law enforcement. These are not designed for passive consumption. They are designed to be printed, taught, shared, and reused. Seventeen languages explain the details. Train-the-trainer tools allow ideas to spread exponentially without central coordination. Flyers are taped to refrigerators and carried in wallets. This is resistance built as capacity, not spectacle.

It’s Always the (subversive) Artists

Creative communities are doing parallel work. In late 2025, artists across the country organized hundreds of decentralized events under the banner Fall of Freedom: readings, performances, pop-ups, and benefit concerts. The organizing principle isn’t ideological purity or centralized messaging. It is refusal, refusal to self-censor, refusal to wait for institutional permission, refusal to let fear collapse public expression.

What unites these efforts, letters, zines, apps, workshops, and artistic performances, is not scale but structure. Each is deliberately local, grounded in trust, and built around physical artifacts and actions that can be shared, saved, and re-circulated. Implicit in all of them is a deliberate assessment that traditional social media is neither neutral nor sufficient for sustained resistance. That assumption is now widespread. Many participants consciously operate outside dominant platforms not out of hostility to technology, but because centralized systems are easily monitored, throttled, distorted, or simply made ephemeral, poor tools for work that depends on durability, credibility, and memory.

Where is this Heading?

Which brings us back to the letters. What Letters to the POTUS is doing is deceptively simple. Every few days, a letter of modest length (generally less than 450 words) explicitly identifies an important, powerful, moral, and common-sense observation about the contrast between POTUS and the rest of us living in the same world. Each letter becomes a timestamped marker: someone was paying attention here. We aren’t going to let the out-of-bounds speech, tweet, or action go unremarked. The record may matter later in ways it does not now. Samizdat writers understood this. They did not know when the wall would fall, only that memory mattered when it did.

If 2025 marked a return to small, stubborn practices, 2026 will make those efforts both obvious and unavoidable to the broader world. Not because they grow louder, but because pressure increases. As centralized authority tightens, effective resistance shifts away from spectacle and toward quiet exponential growth. Letters become archives. Zines become networks. Workshops become muscle memory. History, once again, is first written at the margins, before it lands in the textbooks.

Stoic Moments

“No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.”

— Seneca, On Providence, IV

Adversity is not merely endured but formative. In constrained political moments, the choice to continue writing, organizing, and bearing witness becomes the means by which character and civic responsibility are revealed.

Need to Do Something?

Continue to publicly witness off-key actions within our society. Seek and elect candidates who bring truth to their campaigns and office. Strengthen your community through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, and contribute funds. Clean up your garden, plan for next Spring, check on your neighbors, and care for yourself and those you love.

Countdowns to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress: 331 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 1,061 Days

Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Samizdat.

Immigrant Defense Project. (2025). Know Your Rights with ICE.

The Guardian. (2025, December 10). Gen Zine: DIY publications find new life as a form of resistance against Trump.

Immigrant Defense Project. (n.d.). ICE raids toolkit.

Associated Press. (2024, June 19). Apple removes ICE alert app after criticism from U.S. officials.

University of Toronto Libraries. (n.d.). About Samizdat.

Stoilas, H. (2025, November 20). Artists across the U.S. are staging hundreds of events to protest authoritarianism. Artnet News.

The American Tradition

Liberalism begins with the Enlightenment belief that individuals possess inherent dignity and equal rights. In this tradition, government exists to protect these rights and to ensure fair opportunity. Modern versions of liberal political theory accept the fact that regulated markets, social insurance, and civil rights protections make liberty meaningful for everyone. Its core has never changed: pluralism, due process, non-discrimination, and personal autonomy. This remains both the founding principles of a mostly successful national experiment and the architecture that allowed that nation to grow into a diverse, ambitious society without fracturing.

Classical conservatism respects inherited institutions and warns against the risks of rapid change. It values continuity and the accumulated wisdom embedded in constitutional structures, norms, and civic habits. At its best, conservatism provides stability and moderates extremes. It complements liberalism by reminding citizens that freedom relies on order and restraint. It, too, at times has been a positive source of steadiness, social cohesion, and a bulwark against impulsive and reactionary pressures. In recent years, however, this conservative mindset has been eclipsed by forms of reactionary radicalism that depart sharply from its traditional commitments.

Progressivism first emerged as a response to industrial-era inequality, corruption, and unsafe economic conditions. A later, post-war version took shape because liberalism had expanded the middle class yet failed to distribute its benefits fairly, while conservatism preserved institutional stability without addressing structural exclusion. This renewed progressivism highlighted inequities that neither tradition had fully recognized or remedied. It treated government as an instrument for reshaping social and economic systems and expanded the meaning of liberty from the protection of individual rights to the active correction of structural injustice. The aim was fairness, but the method often depended on centralized authority, broad regulatory power, and the pursuit of equity over procedural neutrality.

The unresolved ideological tensions of the post-war era now reappear in the rise of right-wing, populist nationalism. Its appeal rests on the perception that neither plural liberalism nor traditional conservatism succeeded in restraining what many viewed as the overreach of modern progressivism. The post-Cold War consensus promised opportunity but often produced economic insecurity, cultural dislocation, and the belief that elite institutions no longer respected the values of ordinary citizens. Liberal institutions struggled to adapt to rapid social change, while conservatism failed to mount a credible defense of stability without appearing to accommodate progressive priorities.

Populist nationalism fills the resulting vacuum with a politics organized around grievance and identity. It presents itself as a necessary corrective, not through revived liberal norms or conservative restraint, but through a populist revolt against institutions viewed as unaccountable and ideologically out of step. The aggressive posture of this stance has introduced instability that now threatens the American experiment itself, as personal power and factional loyalty eclipse constitutional obligation and the interests of all of the country’s citizens.

Liberal Democracy Under Threat

The United States was built on liberal commitments: individual rights, equal citizenship, the rule of law, and representative democracy (albeit initially for a limited portion of the population). These principles nonetheless held a diverse nation together by extending political belonging to people who differed widely in culture, belief, and origin. Liberalism protected minorities, sustained peaceful pluralism, and enabled the emergence of a broad middle class unmatched elsewhere.

Over time, however, the balance among America’s traditions has shifted. Progressivism’s increasing reliance on centralized authority has at times strained pluralism and weakened local autonomy, while conservatism, when left to operate alone, tends to preserve existing hierarchies rather than broaden civic fairness. Liberalism remains the tradition that holds the civic center together, pairing individual autonomy with shared obligations to create a framework flexible enough for disagreement yet stable enough to sustain democratic life.

The nation’s influence has never depended on perfection but on a recognizable ideal: individuals from many backgrounds can come here, build a life, and claim equal citizenship under the law. That is the liberal inheritance. When the country drifts toward technocratic progressivism, nostalgic conservatism, exclusionary nationalism, or market absolutism, that inheritance erodes. And when the thread that binds a plural republic weakens, national cohesion and global credibility do as well.

Fault Lines and Vision for the Future

Liberal commitments to individual rights, equal citizenship, and the rule of law formed the constitutional framework that allowed a disparate nation to cohere. Although imperfectly applied, these principles established the conditions for civic inclusion and democratic growth.

In the post-war era, the balance among the major traditions shifted. Progressivism expanded state authority to remedy structural injustice, while conservatism often prioritized continuity even when institutions excluded many citizens. Liberalism, positioned between them, remains the only tradition that reliably links personal autonomy with the shared obligations required for democratic stability.

America’s influence rests not on flawless governance but on a durable civic promise that people of varied backgrounds can build a life here and stand equal before the law. When the nation drifts from that liberal foundation, whether toward technocratic overreach, nostalgic retrenchment, exclusionary nationalism, or market absolutism, that promise erodes. As that common civic horizon fades, the country’s capacity to maintain internal cohesion and global credibility diminishes as well.

The American experiment depends on a renewed commitment to original liberal principles and to the institutions that embody them. Strengthening constitutional checks, protecting civil liberties, upholding the Bill of Rights, and reinforcing the rule of law are essential steps toward broadening opportunity and countering today’s ideological extremes that threaten democratic life.

American Enterprise Institute. (2025, January 20). William F. Buckley Jr. at 100: The state of American conservatism.American Enterprise Institute.

Brookings Institution. (2024, April 18). The future of liberal democracy: A conversation with G. John Ikenberry.Brookings Institution.

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2025). Report on the economic well-being of U.S. households in 2024.

Pew Research Center. (2022). Public trust in government: 1958–2025. Pew Research Center.

Pew Research Center. (2014, June 12). Political polarization in the American public.

Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. (2019). State of the Union: Pathways, 2019. Stanford University.

Silberglitt, R., Williams, J., & O’Mahony, A. (2022). Trends in American governance: Increasing polarization, declining trust, and the future of public institutions (RAND Research Report No. RRA112-7). RAND Corporation.

U.S. Census Bureau. (n.d.). Income and poverty. U.S. Department of Commerce.

U.S. National Archives. (n.d.). The Bill of Rights: What it says and what it means. National Archives and Records Administration.

Supreme Court of the United States. (n.d.). The Constitution of the United States: About Article III and the judicial branch.

Rauch, J. (2017, September). Why liberalism disappoints. The Atlantic.

The Economist. (2024, October 31). When politics is about hating the other side, democracy suffers.

Return to Banking Blindness

Financial stability, especially in the national banking system, depends on consistent supervision. When oversight weakens, leverage grows, and hidden risks multiply until they emerge during times of crisis. Financial system instability grows when financial innovation outruns regulatory capacity and public understanding. That same dynamic defined the pre-2008 system, where off-balance-sheet structures and lightly supervised institutions multiplied out of view, resulting in the subprime mortgage meltdown.

Today’s appetite for deregulation mimics the same structural vulnerabilities. Pressure rises to reduce capital requirements. Supervisory and regulatory staff shrink. Stress tests loosen or aren’t performed at all. Profits grow amid continued lobbying for lax enforcement that erodes safeguards and revives the dynamics that magnified losses during the mortgage meltdown. These conditions do not appear overnight; they accumulate gradually, the way structural cracks spread within a bridge long before collapse.

Cryptocurrency markets intensify the opacity of the banking system. Stablecoins and other digital asset platforms behave as modern shadow banks but are distinguished by poor transparency, weak jurisdictional oversight, and perverse incentives to chase yield without safeguards. Digital assets now play the same structural role that subprime-linked financial products played in the early 2000s: complexity that hides risk while making their owners vast sums of money. Weakened supervision heightens the systemic exposure and serves as a reminder that risk rises when oversight retreats. Without a basic foundation of rules, stability teeters, and markets can not self-correct quickly enough.

The Speed of AI

Financial stability requires steady and regular supervision. When oversight fades, and leverage grows, hidden risks accumulate until they surface without warning. History demonstrates that run-prone systems form when innovation outpaces regulation and public awareness. That pattern characterized the pre-2008 banking system, in which off-balance-sheet structures spread unseen and undermined both individual institutions and the broader system.

Artificial intelligence introduces a second form of systemic risk. The systems scale rapidly. But their decision logic remains opaque. That allows their failures to propagate quickly. Yet the regulatory architecture remains weak and fragmented, mostly ineffective in the face of the new AI tools. Large language models can produce unpredictable, ungrounded outputs and create systemic risks when their errors influence real-world systems. For instance, there is a direct link between AI adoption and systemic financial dangers. Algorithmic decision-making amplifies failures and erodes buffers that once protected against market crashes.

The pattern has features similar to earlier crises. Systems with high private value but poorly understood failure modes destabilize markets and institutions when oversight lags. AI magnifies that problem by embedding itself across industries faster than public agencies or even internal auditors can respond. Perhaps the experts who call generative AI “fundamentally unreliable” and caution that no existing method can ensure dependable, consequence-safe outputs are correct.

Social Media: The Collapse of Shared Reality

Social media accelerates the crisis by eroding the information system needed to recognize risk. Platforms reward outrage. Algorithms amplify conspiracy theories. Expertise struggles to compete with emotionally charged content. Public attention drifts toward spectacle and away from rational analysis.

It has been well established that engagement-driven platforms destabilize public understanding by elevating sensational content. Networked propaganda systems push audiences toward narratives that delegitimize regulatory institutions and treat expertise as partisan interference. Study of topics related to epistemic security1 shows how large segments of the electorate now reject factual information on reflex, creating a civic environment in which evidence-based policymaking becomes nearly impossible.

The erosion of fact-based dialogue directly and negatively affects the ability to manage both banking and AI risk. Regulatory warnings once commanded public respect. Today, they encounter skepticism, hostility, or outright dismissal. As a result, the system loses its ability to self-correct because the audience cannot agree on what the risk is, or whether it even exists.

Institutional Drive and Deregulation

The deregulation wave aligns with a political strategy that benefits from weakening oversight. Historically, political movements drifting toward authoritarianism frequently target institutions that enforce transparency and constraint, including central banks, scientific agencies, and regulatory bodies. These institutions serve as checks on executive power. Weakening them removes friction for would-be autocrats. As part of the move toward political control, populist movements often recast regulation as elite interference rather than as tools for public protection. This reframing turns oversight agencies into political targets. As a result, the public becomes more willing to accept regulatory retreat if they believe experts cannot be trusted. The cycle is stark. Weak institutions produce weaker oversight. Weaker oversight produces more political attacks on institutional legitimacy.

This feedback loop accelerates systemic risk. Banking regulators face pressure to loosen rules. AI oversight bodies lack enforcement authority. Social media companies operate with minimal constraints, even as their platforms destabilize the political environment needed for sound regulation. The dynamic mirrors the pre-2008 period, but with sharper ideological incentives and broader institutional vulnerability. Regulatory disarmament is no longer a byproduct. It is a political objective.

In 2008, one system unraveled. Today, several critical systems show signs of synchronized fragility. The stakes extend beyond financial markets. A society that cannot agree on facts cannot manage risk. A regulatory system that cannot enforce rules cannot prevent collapse. A political environment that treats expertise as partisan cannot sustain long-term stability. The warning signs stand in full view. The challenge lies in getting a fractured political culture to take them seriously.

A New Capacity for Truth

The United States faces intersecting dangers as technical risks, institutional weaknesses, and civic fragmentation reinforce one another. Consider the following:

• Deregulated banking revives structural flaws.

• AI spreads powerful tools with uncertain failure modes.

• Social media corrodes the shared factual ground needed for responsible governance.

Rebuilding factual authority is essential. So is strengthened supervision. Increasing transparency is also required. Finally, trust in expertise needs to be reinforced. These are not optional reforms. They are preconditions for national stability. Refusing to confront risk results in being overtaken by it. The next crisis will not wait for political discourse. The work to mitigate the problem must start now.

Stoic Moments

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.21

Pressure doesn’t remake leaders; it exposes them. This week’s fracture comes from the qualities that were always there, finally laid bare.

Need to Do Something?

The country cannot afford to drift while risks compound across finance, technology, and public life. The warning signs are clear, and action is needed to reinvigorate the role of data and science in our public discourse. The moment demands deliberate steps grounded in evidence and institutional strength. Strengthen your community through mutual aid: donate food, volunteer, and contribute funds. Clean up your garden, plan for next Spring, check on your neighbors, and care for yourself and those you love.

Countdowns to the next Election(s)

Countdown to the national mid-term elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress: 345 Days

Countdown to the national presidential elections, when we can express our opinions about the performance of Congress and the President: 1,075 Days

Admati, A. (2017). It takes a village to maintain a dangerous financial system. In D. Moss & C. C. Hanna (Eds.), Preventing regulatory capture (pp. 35–62). Cambridge University Press.

Applebaum, A. (2020). Twilight of democracy: The seductive lure of authoritarianism. Doubleday.

Aldasoro, I., Aquilina, M., Lewrick, U., & Lim, S. H. (2025). Stablecoin growth – policy challenges and approaches (BIS Bulletin No. 108). Bank for International Settlements.

Applebaum, A. (2020). Twilight of democracy: The seductive lure of authoritarianism. Doubleday.

Bair, S. C., & Vasisht, G. (2019, January 16). Growing threats to financial stability demand stronger oversight. The New York Times (republished via the Volcker Alliance).

Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Mitchell, S. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–623.

Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. Oxford University Press.

Berman, S. (2019). Populism and the decline of social democracy. Journal of Democracy, 30(3), 5–19.

Daníelsson, J., Macrae, R., Vayanos, D., & Zigrand, J.-P. (2022). Artificial intelligence and systemic risk. Journal of Banking & Finance, 142, 106553.

Gorton, G. B. (2010). Slapped by the invisible hand: The panic of 2007. Oxford University Press.

Krugman, P. (2025). Getting ready to party like it’s 2008. Substack.

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2023). Tyranny of the minority: Why American democracy reached the breaking point. Crown.

Marcus, G. (2025, June). Generative AI is fundamentally unreliable – and there is no apparent solution. Project Syndicate.

Nyhan, B. (2021). Why the backfire effect does not explain the durability of political misperceptions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(15), e1912440117.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2023). OECD framework for the classification of AI systems.OECD Publishing.

Tiffert, G. (2020). The authoritarian assault on knowledge. Journal of Democracy, 31(4), 28–43.

Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.

Wilmarth, A. E. Jr. (2025). The dangers of the current global deregulatory drive in financial regulation. George Washington University Law School Public Law Paper.