“‘Hey, snowmageddon is coming,’ then you get an inch of snow.” This is how Jeff Trebac described his experience last Friday as owner of Peppi’s Old Tyme Sandwich Shop, which has been serving subs to Pittsburghers since 1983. Without proper context, Trebac’s statement sounds absurd. Last Friday, the weather in Pittsburgh was about as gorgeous as it gets around here for late April: mainly sunny skies with highs in the low 80s. But what Trebac was describing was not the meteorological climate in Pittsburgh last weekend, but rather the city’s economic climate. The arrival of the NFL draft in the Steel City was hyped as an economic superstorm that would dump dollars by the foot onto vendors properly prepared to shovel up all the demand arriving on their doorstep. Instead, most Pittsburgh restaurants have shared the fate of Peppi’s, watching the NFL Draft blow through town without leaving more than a dusting of revenue on their overstaffed, overstocked establishments.

Disappointing sales were not confined to just restaurants. According to the Post-Gazette, “Pittsburgh’s NFL Draft hosted record-breaking crowds over the three-day event, but many local small businesses said their sales were lower than ever.” Take a moment to ponder that statement. Not only were sales disappointing compared to overblown expectations set by the NFL and public officials who pumped up the event, but sales were also disappointing compared to any average weekend. T-shirt vendors sat lonely in their stores, surrounded by mounds of unsold NFL gear. AirBnB hosts watched their properties go unbooked despite repeatedly lowering their prices from the once-in-a-lifetime rates they were told were sensible during the lead-up to the draft. Uber drivers were left sitting on the side of Pittsburgh streets without pick-up requests from riders. Even jewelers and juicers granted pop-ups near the beating heart of the Draft Red Zone found their sales lackluster and their prime positioning within the crowds not worth the squeeze.

While local small businesses told dark tales of unsold supplies and unmet expectations, the economic picture painted by the NFL and local politicians was bright and sunny. The NFL announced that Pittsburgh shattered Detroit’s previous record, attracting an unprecedented 805,000 attendees over the weekend, the most ever for an NFL Draft Host City. Governor Josh Shapiro praised Pittsburgh for putting on “a hell of a show,” while city and county representatives have not revised their bullish expectations that the Draft will bring in $125 to $200 million in revenue to the region.

So where is the disconnect? How can the political and business elites remain so cheery about the Draft while Pittsburgh’s small businesses report so much doom and gloom? The easy answer is that the NFL and the politicians are peddling their usual self-serving narratives and statistical fabrications. The NFL’s official number of 805,000 attendees double-counts anyone who showed up to watch draft events on multiple days. Meanwhile, it is no surprise politicians feel the pulse of economic dynamism when they are schmoozing with the wealthiest and most powerful visitors to the city, attending soirees in public spaces that have been beautified thanks to tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money spent to make Pittsburgh more attractive to the investor class.

Still, merely suggesting that the NFL and the politicians are callously out of touch with the common man fails to do justice to the deeper structural forces that have led to two radically different experiences of the Draft’s impact on Pittsburgh. The story of Draft disappointment is not so much a story of the NFL failing Pittsburgh as much as it is a story about the American economy failing everyone but a small, increasingly powerful elite. The widening divergence between the prospects of the rich and everyone else in post-COVID America has given rise to financial journalism’s buzzy catchphrase, “K-Shaped Economy.” Using the Letter K as a visual model, the rising wealth of those already at the top is represented by the top arm of the K. The declining economic prospects of the middle and lower classes are represented by the downward direction of the K’s lower arm. Overall economic growth is increasingly dependent on the consumer spending habits of a moneyed class, whose fortunes are less and less tied to income, driven instead by the inflated values of their assets and investments. The rest of America is working more and more jobs for less and less share of economic output, their spending decisions driven by a frenzied search for affordability as inflation gnaws away at their savings and real wages. The phrase K-Shaped economy is an antiseptic, Sesame Street-style way of describing our grim reality of living in two Americas whose economic fortunes are not only decoupled but potentially in deep contradiction with one another.

You don’t have to squint to see a K-shaped formation in the story of the 2026 NFL Draft’s impact on the economy of Western Pennsylvania. From their sunny perch on the top arm of the K, it is no surprise that business and political leaders regarded the Draft as a smashing economic success. Wealthy draft attendees booked the top hotel suites downtown months ago at over $2,000 a night, never even giving a thought to booking an Airbnb in one of Pittsburgh’s quirky, historic neighborhoods. They didn’t need Uber drivers when they had private black car service, and they would never grub their way through the discount t-shirt vendors in the Strip District when official top-end NFL merchandise purchased at the Draft Campus fails to make even the slightest perceptible dent in their budget. Better yet, they might even just be gifted Draft Merchandise in a swag bag handed to them at a VIP event, where they would be served the best cocktails and entrees the city has to offer. Why would they want to grab an Italian sub at an old-fashioned sandwich shop when they have their private chefs to make them lunch and the best chefs in Pittsburgh to make them dinner? And how could these VIP Draft attendees even stumble into a humble neighborhood small business at all when they are being whisked around town by local politicians eager to lure their investment dollars into economic development? “I’ve actually spent most of my time not doing football, but trying to entice these business leaders to set up shop here in Pittsburgh,” Governor Shapiro proudly told KDKA news when describing his Draft experience. So long as public officials like Shapiro see the proper function of political leadership as using public money to make for-profit ventures more enticingly profitable to an investor class that already has too much money, there is little hope we can reverse the economic divergence that defines the K-shaped economy. Pampering the investor class does, in fact, drive our K-Shaped economy, but it also drives a widening wedge between the haves and have-nots in an obscenely unequal America.

The darker, grittier perspective from the bottom arm of the K provides insight into why the Draft ended up being an economic bust for most of Pittsburgh’s small businesses. The same NFL hype machine that fueled dreams of once-in-a-lifetime profits for restaurateurs, short-term rental managers, Uber drivers, and parking lot owners also spawned nightmares in the minds of middle and lower-income football fans who feared watching the draft in person might vaporize several months’ paychecks. With affordability the key driver on the bottom half of the K-shaped economy, cost-conscious NFL fans made rational decisions that starved Pittsburgh's small businesses of revenue. Rather than book a charming Airbnb on the North Side’s Mexican War Streets for $700 a night, they booked Hampton Inn rooms 20 miles out at a fraction of the cost. Rather than Uber around the city, they drove their own vehicles to a park-and-ride lot and took the Pittsburgh Rapid Transit service provided free through a partnership with Sheetz. Transported directly to the Draft Campus, they had little opportunity to frequent the restaurants and apparel shops in the surrounding neighborhoods, especially when they could opt for more budget-friendly options like packing a homemade lunch and buying cheaper merchandise from an online seller through their phone. Any small business owners that could not seduce the cost-insensitive top arm or scrounge some dollars away from the cost-obsessed lower arm found themselves in the lonesome, desperate center of a hollowed-out K-shaped American economy.

Pittsburgh is nothing if not resilient. Pittsburgh's small businesses are an even scrappier subset of broader cultural grittiness. Most vowed to soldier on and work harder despite the disappointments of an NFL Draft bonanza that will never materialize in their April 2026 cash flow statement. If they are Pittsburghers, they have cut their teeth on repeated disappointments. The 2026 NFL Draft is just the latest in a long line of transformational national spotlights that were supposed to help Pittsburgh shed its Rustbelt image and open everyone’s eyes to how beautiful, charming, and friendly our town really is. There were multiple awards crowning Pittsburgh as not only one of the most livable cities in America but also in the world. There was the 2009 Pittsburgh Summit, when the Obama Administration showcased our city as the symbol of postindustrial resilience to all the world leaders representing the G20. There was the mid 2010s hype of “Roboburgh,” when Carnegie Mellon’s status as one of the world’s greatest educational institutions for Artificial Intelligence promised to transform Pittsburgh into a tech powerhouse. If the AI industry really delivered on its 2010s promises of job creation, Pittsburgh would be an economic behemoth by the mid 2020s. Instead, a decade later, even as AI is devouring the American economy whole and our city remains as charming and livable as ever, Pittsburgh still struggles to attract the kind of investment and immigration needed to truly turn the corner after decades of demographic decline.

Cyberpunk author William Gibson once said, “The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed.” Most Americans will be reassured by a narrative explaining the failure of Pittsburgh’s small businesses to capitalize on the 2026 NFL Draft as just a product of our city's struggle to escape its industrial past, just another instance where the Steel City gets the short end of the stick in the distribution of America’s future. But as our national economy becomes ever more K-Shaped and dependent on the success of Artificial Intelligence, there is a more disturbing interpretation of last weekend’s Draft, one that sees the future as now being disproportionately distributed in Pittsburgh’s favor. All the world class AI talent, all the affordable real estate options, all the rankings as a great place for young singles, all the picturesque cliffside vistas, all the James Beard nominated chefs, all the Perks of Being Wallflower wow factor of America’s most scenic “front-door” entrance, all the regional assets that are supposedly keys to success in the 21st century American economy are not sufficient to make Pittsburgh vibrant enough to support a thriving small business ecosystem. The failure of the NFL draft to bring a windfall to Pittsburgh’s small businesses is not a story of a town stuck in the past, but the story of a town that has already positioned itself to be part of a K-Shaped future in the Age of AI, the kind of future that promises only more and more disappointment to all but a smaller and smaller sliver of the American people. The future of America is already here in Pittsburgh, and that future is unequal, uninspiring, and unfulfilling.

If you’ve ever driven on Route 8, just north of Pittsburgh, there is a passage into another time hiding just behind Pascale’s Pizzeria. Anyone keeping up with the pace of traffic would likely never realize that somewhere in the strip mall blur between Starbucks and Kanlaya Thai Kitchen lies an 18th-century village nestled into the hilly landscape. But if, for some reason, you happen to make a turn on South Pioneer Road, you will likely stumble upon the Depreciation Lands Museum and Park, something like a miniaturized version of Colonial Williamsburg that somehow escaped being swallowed by the homogenized suburbia surrounding it on every side. From blacksmithing to butter churning, from flax planting to wool spinning, the Depreciation Lands Museum offers tutorials on the skills and techniques that sustained the material existence of Western Pennsylvania pioneers. If you ever wanted to sit inside an 18th-century log home while still being within walking distance of a 21st-century Home Depot (assuming you don’t get hit by a car), the Depreciation Lands Museum and Park is the place for you.

The story of the Depreciation Lands is a story of currency devaluation and economic crisis. Purchased by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania from the Iroquois Confederation in 1784, the Depreciation Lands comprised 700,000 acres, territory that would become what is now northern Allegheny County, Butler County, and Beaver County. The Depreciation Lands were acquired to compensate soldiers who had served in the American Revolution. The original payment issued to the veterans of the Revolutionary War was in the form of Continental Currency, money that lost nearly all its value when rampant overprinting completely decoupled the bills from gold deposits. The doomed fate of this early American currency lives on in the phrase, “Not worth a Continental.” In place of the Continental Currency, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania issued Depreciation Certificates, giving soldiers transferrable claims on tracts of land like the parcel where the Depreciation Lands Museum is located today in Hampton Township. The Deprecation Certificates helped spark the resurgence of a frontier economy teetering on the brink of an inflation-induced economic collapse.

Anyone keeping up with recent financial news will know that, 240 years later, fears of economic collapse remain, especially since the February 22nd release of Citrini Research’s Substack piece, The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. If there was any question about whether Substack impacts real life, the 1% decline in the S&P 500 in the wake of the Citrini piece, along with brutal losses sustained by companies ranging from IBM to MasterCard to Uber, put all doubts to rest. Substack is now a bona fide market mover.

Cleverly written as a retrospective from the year 2028, Citrini analysts James Van Geelen and Alep Shah present The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis as a thinkpiece, sketching out a scenario where the fulfillment of the most bullish predictions for AI adoption and optimization results in some of the most bearish outcomes for the overall fate of the American economy in the near term. Punctuated by headlines announcing unemployment rates of 10.2%, a 38% drop in the S&P 500, and Home Value indexes dropping by double digits in tech-centric markets like San Francisco and Austin, the Citrini piece follows two years of economic shockwaves unleashed by devastating AI disruption to industries ranging from software as a service to real estate to credit cards to private equity.

Describing the transformative effect of AI as a “feedback loop with no brake,” Van Geelen and Shah illustrate how companies’ desperate desire to keep up with AI-amplified competition compels them to slash white-collar jobs that currently represent “50% of employment” and drive roughly “75% of discretionary consumer spending.” Like a macroeconomic version of the tail-eating ouroborus snake, the ravenous mouth of AI devours the very consumers whose spending has fueled the engine of profit generation that justifies the adoption of AI in the first place. While the ouroborous of ancient and medieval mythology was a symbol of perpetual rebirth, the 21st-century AI ouroborous constricts our economy in a terminal deflationary death spiral, as AI helps companies cut production costs in a way that also slashes the disposable income of the newly unemployed and underemployed white-collar class. With less profits to be had from spending-impaired American consumers, companies will more aggressively adopt AI to cut production costs further, leading to more and more layoffs, striking higher and higher up the white-collar org chart. The cycle goes on and on with the AI ouroborous becoming all the more leaner and meaner with less and less profits available to feed the insatiable energy needs of its computational metabolism.

For AI accelerationists devoted to Silicon Valley’s cult of disruption, the Citrini piece reads as little more than a minor, temporary dystopian blip on the road to utopia. With the AI Revolution being hyped as an epic change on par with the Industrial Revolution or even the Agricultural Revolution, it is no surprise that some economic upheaval and personal financial hardship will be expected in the years to come. But this kind of nonchalant reading of the Citrini piece overlooks its most impactful rhetorical thrust: all the disruption is unleashed in a compressed two-year timeframe. In 1804, William Blake described the “dark Satanic Mills” of early industrialization, and a half-century later, Marx and Engels were still building entire theories around the perpetual immiseration of a working class that had yet to see much material benefit at all from the Industrial Revolution. Even 12,000 years after the Agricultural Revolution began in the Fertile Crescent, scientist Jared Diamond was calling the shift from hunting and gathering to farming The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. ‘

As human beings still grapple with the downsides of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution millennia and centuries later, it is foolish to blithely dismiss the impacts of an AI Revolution that could unfold in a matter of decades or even years. In the Citrini piece, Van Gellen and Shah hint at coming social turmoil when they paint a picture of a future where “The Occupy Silicon Valley movement has been emblematic of wider dissatisfaction. Last month, demonstrators blockaded the entrances to Anthropic and OpenAI’s San Francisco offices for three weeks straight.” The standard response to dealing with social tensions exacerbated by AI-induced unemployment is to talk of Universal Basic Income or Keynes’ dream of a 15-hour work week. But more free time and a subsistence-level allowance might only fuel the fire of a violent social revolt against an AI oligarchy siphoning off increasingly larger proportions of national productivity. Alienation, disaffection, and political instability will only fester as more and more Americans have more time on their hands, yet own a smaller share of the national wealth, even if UBI keeps most from starving in the streets and sustains the flow of discretionary spending needed to keep AI companies profitable. Income transfers will also do nothing to ease the humiliation and uncertainty that builds in the hearts of humans who feel completely dependent on systems they do not understand and cannot control.

As we ponder the consequences of the Citrini scenario potentially becoming reality, what government solutions should we look to that might bring meaning to the lives of displaced American workers? Strangely, the answer to this question may not lie in the think pieces of Silicon Valley techno-optimists or UBI-loving Beltway policy wonks, but rather in the workshops of the Depreciation Lands Museum and Park. Instead of paying Americans to do nothing but ponder their growing obsolescence and fading relevance, we should be paying them to perfect and preserve the skills learned from the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions that make the AI Revolution possible, skills like metalworking and wool spinning that are taught at the Depreciation Lands Museum. As AI marches onward, we may also need to pay Americans to preserve an understanding of 20th-century skills that made computing possible in the first place. With Anthropic’s Claude gaining mastery over the antiquated COBOL language previously only mastered by a handful of IBM specialists, the very foundations of computing could be lost to human consciousness. Just as we should pay Americans to maintain the foundational skills of agriculture and industry, we should incentivize engineers to maintain the skill of writing in foundational coding languages that are already far more economically efficient to entrust to AI agents.

From animal husbandry to flax cultivation to structural welding to punchcard computing, a National Job Guarantee would not just put Americans to work, create a supply of usable goods, and boost consumer spending; it would also serve as a means to protect and preserve the foundations of human civilization if the AI Revolution goes awry. Preserving historical skills through a National Jobs Guarantee would not be a make-work bullshit jobs program for artisan, hipster LARPers. It would be an investment in safeguarding the working memory of skills that have brought human beings to our current level of technological evolution. Money paid through a National Job Guarantee to American citizens honing and preserving civilization-sustaining skills is no more of a waste than the trillions of dollars paid in insurance premiums to protect against hazards that never came to pass. A National Job Guarantee would also yield tangible fringe benefits far superior to anything offered by other forms of insurance. We only have to look at the magnificent bridges and buildings built by the Works Progress Administration or read the priceless narratives of aging freed slaves gathered by the Federal Writers Program to understand the cultural and historic value of government-funded jobs programs created during the New Deal. A bigger and bolder 21st-century National Job Guarantee Program could enlist the talents and energies of those who have been displaced and replaced by AI, putting millions to work in enriching the cultural and material life of America, while preserving the skills needed to sustain human civilization in the process.

The 2028 setting of the Citrini piece serves an important function beyond just a reminder of the rapidity of AI-induced change. The piece also reminds us that an economic program aggressively addressing the potential impacts of AI needs to be a centerpiece in the platform of any serious candidate in the 2028 Presidential race. Democratic presidential candidates peddling Biden and Obama-era economic policies for a 2028 economy that could be radically reshaped by even a partial fulfillment of the Citrini scenario should be treated as obsolete as the software jobs currently being vaporized by AI adoption. A National Job Guarantee should be the centerpiece of any economic program that strives to create a more just material reality for the American people, rather than merely rebuild the inequality-generating institutions that spawned Trumpism in the first place. The tangible, material foundations underwriting Depreciation Certificates rescued the Pennsylvania frontier economy from the empty promises of Continental Currency. In the same way, the tangible material benefits of a National Job Guarantee can rescue 2028 America from the empty promises of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and their blind faith in the saving power of an AI Revolution.

“That kind of rhetoric is unacceptable. It is abhorrent, and it is wrong. Period. Hard stop. End of sentence.” In a recent interview with Fox News Special Report host Brett Baier, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro pulled no punches in his unequivocal condemnation of words he felt were escalating tensions over the expansion of ICE operations in cities across America. Who was the target of Shapiro’s indignation? Who did Shapiro think needed to “bring down the rhetoric, bring down the temperature?” Was it the federal agent who muttered the words “fucking bitch” after ICE Agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good on January 11th? Was it Trump Administration officials labeling Good and Alex Pretti “domestic terrorists” within hours of their deaths and without the slightest investigation into the circumstances of their killings by federal agents? Was it Donald Trump saying, “You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns,” essentially justifying the murder of Pretti based on his audacity to exercise his Second Amendment right to bear arms at the same time as exercising his First Amendment right to freedom of assembly? With so much inflammatory rhetoric coming from Trump and his Administration, and with so many Americans turning against the violent, unconstitutional overreach of ICE operations, it would seem like the perfect time for a 2028 Presidential hopeful like Josh Shapiro to demonstrate moral strength by forcefully condemning those on the right whose words and actions have radically destabilized our social and Constitutional order.

Unfortunately, the target of Shapiro’s sharp rebuke was not Trump and his minions. Shapiro was punching left at Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, likely the most notorious of the “woke, Soros-funded DAs” whose prosecution rates are grist for the mill of conservative media fixation. During the January 29th Fox News interview, Baier set up Shapiro’s takedown by quoting statements from Krasner’s speech at a recent rally where he referred to ICE agents as “a small bunch of wannabe Nazis” and vowed to “hunt them down” should they commit crimes against Philadelphia residents. Inflammatory words, for sure, but do Philadelphians really need Krasner to get them any more fired up than they already are? Their passions have already been inflamed by watching the siege of Minneapolis, while having fears that their city could be next confirmed by ICE purchasing warehouses in the surrounding suburbs that will soon be converted into detention centers…or worse.

Sadly for the people of Philadelphia, their Governor seems more concerned about shushing their District Attorney than challenging those who are ordering menacing hordes of federal agents to gather at the gates of the City of Brotherly Love. To Shapiro’s credit, he also did say that Trump’s policies were “injecting chaos” into America, but this was a mere statement of fact about policy impact, devoid of any moral judgment or condemnation of Trump’s shocking, sadistic expansion of state power. When asked about collaboration of state and local law enforcement with ICE, Shapiro affirmed his approval of such partnerships, provided they were “working together on a mission that is Constitutional.” It’s a slickly crafted, lawyerly answer, a response that will not outrage most Fox viewers but will also allow Shapiro to claim he is still an opponent of Trump and protector of Constitutional order. Yet the disparity between Shapiro’s timidly convoluted pledge to uphold Constitutional norms compared to his full-throated condemnation of Krasner speaks volumes.

There are many words to describe a Democratic politician going on a right-wing news broadcast and saving his harshest criticism for those on his left rather than his right. In a February 3rd interview, Larry Krasner used one of the more blunt words available to describe Shapiro’s groveling posture toward his political opposition. “Gov. Shapiro is not meeting the moment. ​​The moment requires that we call a subgroup of people within federal law enforcement — who are killing innocent people, physically assaulting innocent people, threatening and punishing the use of video — what they are. Just say it. Don’t be a wimp.” Krasner punched back and punched back hard. Krasner’s counterpunch is particularly devastating because it hits Shapiro where it hurts: his tendency to ingratiate himself with those who hate him most. Wimp is a harsh word, but it’s hard to watch the Fox News Special Report interview and not agree that it’s a fair description of Shapiro’s performance. There are few actions more wimpy in a politician than attacking those who should be your political allies to curry favor with those who are undoubtedly your enemies.

What would compel Shapiro to put on such a wimpy display? Most likely, it’s Shapiro’s failure to realize that the imminent threat of ICE to our Constitutional order eclipses all of the early 2020s woke culture war baggage attached to the name Larry Krasner. As a local official serving on the lowest level of Pennsylvania politics, I understand Shapiro’s concern about aligning too closely with Krasner and his ilk. In 2023, I saw the down-ballot impact of a Soros-backed DA candidate at the county level shatter our hopes of achieving a Democratic majority on the Township Board of Supervisors, suffering gut-wrenching defeat in races that broke by the thinnest of margins. Such campaign considerations may have mattered during the cultural woke wars of 2023, but with America’s city streets looking more and more like actual war zones, in 2026, concerns about coming off too woke seem more than a little out of touch. Yet Shapiro’s campaign staff doesn’t seem aware that times have changed. I’m sure they looked at the opportunity for the Governor to go on Fox News and distance himself from the wokeness associated with Krasner as an astute political maneuver to position Shapiro as a commonsense centrist against MAGA Republican gubernatorial challenger Stacy Garrity.

What Shapiro and his team are overlooking is the fact that some questions transcend cyclical electoral politics. Some questions are moral, foundational to our identity as an American people. Where a candidate stands on the Trump Administration’s use of ICE to strip Americans of their Constitutional rights is one of those foundational questions. It is a question whose answer will determine whether our nation conceived in Liberty can long endure. If Krasner is meeting this moment and taking a correct moral stance in resisting an ICE invasion of Philadelphia, then Shapiro's distancing himself from Krasner politically may result in Shapiro distancing himself morally from his obligation to protect the Constitution. Shapiro and his team need to wake up and realize that their obsession with positioning the Governor on the other side of a woke divide from Larry Krasner could result in situating Shapiro on the wrong side of history at a time when principled leadership must transcend petty politics.

If Shapiro prioritized moral considerations over political machinations, he could have easily gone on Fox News and noted his differences with Krasner while affirming their common cause in protecting the United States Constitution and the people of Pennsylvania. Shapiro might have easily said something like, “Look, there are a lot of criminal justice issues Larry and I disagree on, and out of respect for the millions who perished in the Holocaust, we must be cautious about throwing around the word Nazi. But what Larry and I both agree on is the need to protect and defend the constitutional rights of all Pennsylvanians.” Shapiro could have saved his “period,” “full stop” condemnations of “abhorrent” rhetoric for the likes of Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump himself. If Shapiro had the moral compass and toughness of character needed to rebuild this country after Inauguration Day 2029, he would have no problem marching right into Fox News studios and punching hardest at those who are beating down Americans in the streets for exercising their Constitutional rights. Instead, he wimped out, punched left, and pivoted toward a center that simply does not exist when you must pick a side to stand on during a divisive authoritarian power grab.

Questions of moral integrity aside, from a purely strategic perspective, who do Shapiro and his team even think they are appealing to by calling for moderation when the Trump Administration is so obviously using ICE brutality to turn America into a house divided against itself? Moderate Democrats like Shapiro reflexively pivot to the center, their instincts resembling a political version of phantom leg syndrome, trying to move a segment of the electorate that no longer exists. Like Chuck Schumer’s imaginary friends Joe and Eileen Bailey, “a fictional Long Island couple meant to represent the average American and serve as the guiding force behind his political decisions,” Shapiro’s team conjures up in their minds a full voting bloc of Pennsylvanians who are smack dab in the center of an issue purposefully pushed by the Trump Administration to polarize America. Even the NRA can use strong language (the kind Shapiro saves for Democrats to his left) to condemn the Trump Administration’s dismissal of Second Amendment Rights as “dangerous and wrong.” Steven Nekhaila, the chair of the Libertarian National Committee, is openly calling for the abolition of ICE, and 71% of independents think ICE operations have gone too far. Who does Shapiro think he’s going to convince with his lawyerly, split-the-baby analysis that calls for law enforcement cooperation with ICE on only Constitutional missions? Any American still supporting ICE has already essentially bought into a Schmittian “state of exception” that calls for the suspension of the Constitution to save America from the supposed national emergency of illegal immigration. They have no interest in Shapiro style sophistry and instead justify support for ICE with a litany of non sequiturs: “they have a job to do, stay out of their way,” “I voted for this,” “we are a nation of laws,” “I support American safety and border security,” “Laken Riley was a nurse too,” and so on and so on. Anyone who is not appalled by ICE right now has no use for the weak sauce served by a mushy, moderate “pick-me” Democrat like Josh Shapiro, when they can get the red meat they crave from MAGA Republicans.

In the end, Josh Shapiro's pivot to the center will likely result in being stranded in the lonely middle, a desolate place where he may search in vain for any voters who enjoy both sharp rebukes of woke DAs along with wimpy, nuanced critiques of ICE operations. If there is any Pennsylvanian who is morally muddled and cognitively befuddled enough to buy into Shapiro’s senseless centrism, it is probably Senator John Fetterman. Unfortunately for Shapiro, Fetterman has not shied away from publicly criticizing the Governor. Concerns of mental fitness aside, Fetterman has shown he still has enough wits about him to recognize and denounce Shapiro’s insatiable “political ambition.” With enemies to the left of him, foes to his right, and not even a friend in the middle, Shapiro may very well find himself alone in the center of a growing national divide over ICE when all along he just wanted to be lonely at the top as the next President of the United States.

There is the sound of ICE cracking in Minneapolis even though daytime highs remain in the single digits. After the murder of Alex Pretti by federal agents, the warming hearts of the American people are leading to signs of a partial ICE retreat from Minnesota. Video of the gruesome, extrajudicial murder of the ICU nurse has caused a massive shift in public opinion away from the unconstitutional, inhuman orgy of cruelty the Trump Administration has unleashed on the City of Minneapolis. While I was game planning worst-case-scenario strategies to oust Trump and Vance and replace them with a Libertarian Republican, the soul of America was transforming in ways few could have anticipated after the callous response to ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s murder of Renee Good just a few short weeks ago.

I’ll let others try to explain why the shooting of an armed white male with a concealed carry permit would have far greater impact on American public opinion than the shooting of an LGBTQ mom in an SUV. One thing is for sure: this time is different. The Trump Administration has lost all but its most sadistic and servile followers. The NRA called the Trump Administration’s suggestion that Pretti’s death was justified because he lawfully exercised his 2nd Amendment rights while simultaneously exercising his 1st Amendment rights, “dangerous and wrong.” Steven Nekhaila, the chair of the Libertarian National Committee, joined the rising chorus of Americans shouting “Abolish ICE!” Growing numbers of Republicans are calling for full investigations into Pretti’s slaying rather than pointing the finger at Minnesota Democrats for merely reminding their constituents that they have a Constitutional right to protest oppression and naked aggression. The Trump Administration has found that partisan loyalties can only withstand so many obvious lies, so many shameless slanders, so much unrestrained lawless cruelty, so many flagrant violations of the Constitution before everyone other than their demented loyalists starts to scream ENOUGH!!!

Visible cracks are forming in the ICE occupation of Minnesota. Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, the diminutive Third Reich-coded face of DHS operations in the Twin Cities, has been fired. Trump is boasting about having a “very good telephone conversation“ with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey rather than talking about arresting him for fomenting domestic terrorism. The MAGA occupation of Minneapolis appears to be maneuvering toward partial retreat.

Now is the time for Democrats to take the offensive and break ICE for good, not become complacent and cheer the faintest, fleeting signs of decency and accountability coming from the Trump Administration. From George Washington’s retreat out of New York to Mao’s Long March, partial retreats have led to ultimate victory before. If the slightest relaxation of Trump’s grip on the throat of Minneapolis makes Democrats worry about appearing soft on immigration in future elections, the battle to preserve the Constitutional Rights of Americans from the MAGA menace could be lost in the long run. Democrats will lose all moral momentum if they worry at all about the need to get immigrants out of the country when we need to get murderous violators of the Constitution out of the White House.

Average Americans have met the moral moment of Alex Pretti’s death by dramatically shifting the call to abolish ICE from a fringe, woke pipe dream to the plurality opinion of the polled electorate. The question now remains: will Democrats meet this moral moment and use what leverage they have to end the nightmare in Minneapolis? That leverage comes from a spending bill that is now before the Senate. The legislation that must pass this Friday to avoid another government shutdown is actually a minibus combination of six separate funding bills, only one of which funds the Department of Homeland Security, with yet another $10 billion going to ICE. So far, Republicans have rebuffed calls by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to remove the DHS appropriations and have ICE funding considered in a separate bill.

Democrats cannot flinch. They must shut down the government as long as it takes to get the DHS appropriations removed from the general funding bill. Even if Republicans relent and remove DHS funding from the minibus bill to avoid a government shutdown, Senate Democrats must not go the route of seven cowardly House Democrats, who voted yes on funding the Department of Homeland Security with additional resources being funneled to ICE. Senate Democrats must hold the line against all DHS funding until sweeping reforms are made that bring a permanent end to this flagrant abuse of federal power. Not a dime should be given to DHS until all of the following demands are met:

• All federal agents must be unmasked and wear badges that clearly identify their name and position.

• Halt all constitutionally objectionable directives (e.g., assaulting protestors exercising their 1st Amendment right to free speech and assembly, breaking into private residences without a judicial warrant in violation of the 4th Amendment, the detention and deportation of individuals without judicial oversight guaranteed by their 5th Amendment right to due process, etc.)

• Immediate withdrawal of ICE and Border Control agents from Minneapolis and all other cities 100 miles or more from the U.S. Border for a 60-day cooling-off period.

• Immediate Firing of U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Christy Noem and U.S. Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller.

• Issue public apologies to the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, along with payments made to the families of each in the amount of $10 million. Their families deserve the $5 million given to the family of Capitol insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, multiplied by two because of slanderous lies against their name made by high-ranking Trump Administration officials.

• Full Congressional investigations into the deaths of the dozens of other victims who perished in ICE custody, including testimony from victims who have survived abuse at the hands of DHS agents.

• Full access given to local law enforcement and elected representatives to all ICE detention facilities.

In an America where the majority of us want to abolish ICE, these are moderate demands. These kinds of substantive demands are what politics should look like, negotiating for real results not only for the interests of your constituents but for the very soul of your nation. Mere reforms to ICE, like body cameras and enhanced training, are not signs of shrewd dealmaking but weak capitulations born out of naive trust in reforming agencies that now have a core culture of disrespect for following the rules and disregard for honoring the rule of law. With ICE on the retreat, we must completely cut off the supply lines of taxpayer money that have fueled the unconstitutional war machine that overran and nearly overwhelmed Minneapolis.

This is a moment for Democrats to redeem themselves, to show they have some principles, to demonstrate that they are worthy of representing the Americans who have risked life and limb to protest, march, speak out, and rally against this desecration of our Constitutional heritage. This is a moment when Democrats can restore our shattered faith in a party whose members of Congress have an abysmal job approval rating of 18%. Despite their sheepish fear of government shutdown, Democrats must realize that at this depth of disapproval, they cannot become less popular by holding the line and refusing to vote for any bill that funds a rogue Department of Home Security that has declared war on Trump’s political enemies and targeted any American with the courage to exercise their Constitutional rights to stand in ICE’s way. This is a matter of our most sacred, fundamental, inalienable rights as Americans. From the War of Independence to the Civil War to the World Wars fought against monarchs and dictators, Americans have sacrificed far more than an indefinite government shutdown to protect their fundamental rights. We, the People of the United States of America, have met this moment, and we are ready to fight for the liberties that have defined us as a nation over the past 250 years. Let’s see if the Democratic Party is strong enough to stand with us and stand their ground against DHS funding, even if it leads to a government shutdown with no end in sight.

Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact. I do not throw around the hero term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman.

These are the loving words written by the parents of Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse who was swarmed and shot to death by a pack of DHS agents yesterday morning. Anyone with a heart, a mind, a soul, and eyes that can see who has taken time to watch the video of the altercation that ended Alex Pretti’s life would agree with his parents that their son was a genuine American hero. Alex Pretti died not only to protect our rights as Americans but also because he exercised his own First Amendment right of freedom of assembly and his Second Amendment right to lawfully carry a firearm. If the United States survives long enough for the history of 2026 to be written, Alex Pretti will be remembered as an American hero on par with the victims of the Boston Massacre in 1770, the Union soldiers who held their ground at Gettysburg’s Cemetery Ridge in 1863, and the brave GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in 1944.

Of course, while Alex’s lifeless body was still warm, the Trump Administration was lying about his intentions and slandering his name. Of course, Alex’s death is met with nothing but a chorus of “FAFOs” from the MAGA faithful. To Trump’s followers, “Fucking Around” equates to even the slightest resistance to State power, including the peaceable exercise of rights guaranteed by the Constitution. “Finding Out” is a euphemism for being on the receiving end of an extrajudicial execution perpetrated by unrestrained agents of the State. The perverse moral equation of FAFO that controls the thinking of the MAGA base starts at the very top. The Trump Administration slandered Renee Good as a “domestic terrorist” (thereby unworthy of Constitutional rights) without the slightest investigation of her shooting by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. J.D. Vance declared Ross enjoyed “absolute immunity” from state prosecution after the shooting, effectively sanctioning ICE agents to strip Americans of protections secured by the Bill of Rights and even deny them the Declaration of Independence’s guarantee of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Internal memos show ICE being instructed to enter homes without a judicial warrant, a grotesque and unprecedented violation of the Fourth Amendment right of the people to be free from unnecessary searches and seizures. The position of the Trump Administration is becoming hideously clear: no Constitutional rights are guaranteed to the American people without complete submission to the regime.

There is now no doubt that MAGA is not a wholesome return to traditional American values, but rather the most radical threat ever posed to the Constitutional order that has held our republic together for nearly 250 years. At least the Confederacy seceded from the Union on legal pretexts forged from the Founders’ failure to adequately resolve the “slavery question” during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The Southern Segregationists could rely on States’ Rights guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment or Supreme Court rulings like Plessy v. Ferguson. MAGA, on the other hand, has no credible legal justification for laying siege to Minneapolis and stripping its citizens of all Constitutional rights unless they bow down and submit to the commands of masked, heavily armed, untrained, unidentified agents of the State. There is no law and order governing the Trump Administration, just the lust to inflict violence against their perceived political enemies. Trump and Vance have declared war against the American people, and their Administration is the greatest threat to the Constitution in our nation’s history.

The nation must now grapple with the fact that Trump and Vance have committed Treason and are guilty of the highest of High Crimes: murdering innocent Americans for exercising their Constitutional rights. They deserve to be impeached and convicted as enemies of the American people and desecrators of our Constitutional heritage. The only question left to be answered is how to administer such justice with the House and Senate controlled by the Republicans. Complicating the matter further is the fact that the 2026 midterms become less and less likely to be free and fair elections the more the public turns on the Trump regime and shows the desire to install a Democratic majority in Congress. Trump himself has stated openly his anticipation of being impeached if an anticipated blue wave sweeps the country in November. While MAGA’s assault on the Bill of Rights is unprecedented, suppression of voting rights has been a staple of GOP policy throughout their recent history. The presence of heavily armed ICE and Border Control agents swarming the polls in November seems all but inevitable at this point. With a regime acting more and more hellbent on fomenting civil war, we cannot rely on or wait for the midterms to save us.

We must therefore devise a strategy for impeachment and regime change that we can set in motion long before Inauguration Day 2027. Articles of Impeachment require a simple majority vote of the House. Even with the current slim Republican majority of 5 seats, the thought of Trump and Vance being impeached by the House seems outlandish. If the Trump Administration pulls federal forces out of Minnesota and ceases to trample on the Constitutional Rights of Americans, then impeachment will likely be neither possible nor necessary. But the scenario we are sketching out is one where Trump increasingly escalates his oppression of Minneapolis and other cities, flagrantly tearing up the Constitution, stirring flames of insurrection in the streets, and forcing a permanent shutdown of the Federal Government over DHS funding, thereby unleashing a whole new level of social and economic chaos in its wake. As historian John Ganz said after Alex Pretti’s murder, “We’re gonna find out if libertarians are real.” If Trump continues to upend our Constitutional heritage in the coming months, we are going to find out if just 5 of the 218 Republican members of Congress believe at all in defending the Constitution, protecting the Rule of Law, and honoring the principles of limited government.

Even amidst unprecedented oppression of Americans’ Constitutional rights and widespread social upheaval, it will still be a challenge getting an impeachment vote on the floor with spineless Trump sycophant Mike Johnson serving as Speaker of the House. Thankfully, Mike Johnson is one of the weakest, most vulnerable Speakers of the House in American history. If there is enough support within the Republican Party to vote to impeach Trump, there is surely enough support to oust Mike Johnson through a Motion to Vacate.

Think back to your high school Civics class, and you will remember how critical a decision it will be in choosing who will replace Mike Johnson. Assuming President Trump and Vice President Vance could ever be impeached and convicted, the third person in the Presidential Line of Succession to take over the reins as Chief Executive is the Speaker of the House. Whoever becomes House Speaker will not only guide the vote of impeachment charges but also be waiting in the wings as the next President of the United States if Trump and Vance are convicted by the Senate.

So now the most important question of all: what Republican could Democrats and Constitution-respecting GOP members rally around to become the next Speaker of the House and potentially the next President? The logical choice is Trump’s arch-nemesis in the Republican Party, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie. Massie has been a thorn in Trump’s side, working with Democrat Ro Khanna as bipartisan cosponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, one of the few Republicans with the decency to prioritize protecting child victims of sex abuse over the interests of a party leader intimately linked to the global pedophile ring. Massie openly criticized Trump for using military force against Venezuela without Congressional authorization. Most importantly, when seven cowardly House Democrats voted to allow another $10 billion in funding to the DHS despite ICE’s lawless occupation of Minneapolis, Massie was the lone member of the GOP with the moral integrity to vote No on taxpayers ponying up more money to fill Trump’s slush fund for authoritarian violence.

Even if Massie secures the Speakership and successfully leads the House to impeach Trump and Vance, a two-thirds vote by the Senate to convict is undoubtedly still a formidable mountain to climb. Murderous Constitutional violations, social upheaval, and economic collapse would need to reach chilling levels for 16 Republican Senators to turn against Trump, not to mention barely closeted MAGA fanboy John Fetterman on the Democratic side of the aisle. Getting 16 Republicans to flip on Trump may be very tough, but not impossible, given that 5 are retiring in 2027 and another 17 are up for re-election. But the question isn’t whether the conviction of Trump and Vance followed by the installation of Thomas Massie will be easy. The question is whether this nonviolent scheme is easier and simpler than an outright coup of a deranged Trump led by top military brass or civilian guerrillas, installing a new President outside the Constitutional line of succession.

The time is now for even the most progressive Democrats to get behind the Massie Plot and test its feasibility before even entertaining more violently romantic fantasies of Trump’s removal that could leave unimaginable numbers of Americans dead or wounded. Massie is no woke RINO. He is a principled libertarian who walks the walk and believes no man is above the law, especially not the Constitution. Liberal Democrats might not want to look too closely at Massie’s record on issues like abortion, LGBTQ rights, or climate change. Still, the purpose of a Massie presidency would not be the passage of substantive legislation but rather the preservation of our Republic, protection of our Constitutional Rights, and the guarantee of free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028. Moreover, Massie’s policy positions that are seen as liabilities in the eyes of liberals will serve as assets when building coalitions with the Republicans needed to impeach Trump in the House and convict him in the Senate. Even a mere credible threat of a Massie-led GOP insurgency could intimidate Trump into a TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) shift on ICE and Constitutional liberties that he is known for in foreign policy.

Whether they dream of Newsom or AOC, Democrats must realize that there may be no Presidency for their favorite candidates to assume in 2029 without curbing Trump’s power by at least trying to install a new Republican president who will ensure the 2028 elections are free and fair. To protect our Constitutional heritage and honor the sacrifice of American hero Alex Pretti, let’s move quickly to end this national nightmare by starting a Thomas Massie for President campaign in 2026.

On Monday night, I placed a hand on my First Communion Bible and swore an oath to “support, obey, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Less than 48 hours after getting sworn in for my second term as a Township Supervisor, I would see a video of Renee Good being gunned down by an ICE agent on the snowy streets of Minneapolis. The ICE agent, attempting to detain a citizen without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, fired two shots through her head despite video showing that her moving vehicle posed minimal threat to his safety. What I saw in that video was a gruesome act of state violence and a disgrace to the rights enshrined in the Constitution. The flagrant lies spouted by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem about the victim and the altercation, followed by J.D. Vance’s insidious assertion that the officer enjoyed “absolute immunity” for the killing, contradicted all the principles of justice taught to me from the Bible. I could not hold my hand up to God and swear to protect the United States Constitution without coming to an undeniable conclusion: Abolish ICE.

Abolishing ICE is easier said than done if you are just a local official like me who is outnumbered by Republicans on my Township’s Board of Supervisors. Even the mayors of America’s largest cities with direct supervisory authority over the PD have only so much power to stop ICE operations within their jurisdiction. As engaging as it might be to watch Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey step up to the mic and tell ICE to “Get the fuck out of Minnesota,” the harsh reality is that he is asking rather than telling these federal agents to leave his city.

To make matters worse, as long as ICE enjoys the authority that comes with being a “law enforcement” agency, local officials from big city mayors to small township supervisors are vulnerable to the charge of endangering rather than protecting public safety when they critique ICE operations. The murky overlap between local law enforcement and ICE’s special jurisdiction over undocumented immigrants provides cover for the homicidal abuse of power we saw in Minneapolis while blurring the line in the eyes of the public between trained and unionized local police and recklessly untrained new federal hires. Growing anger toward ICE will likely create disorder that puts our legitimate local police on the front lines in clashes incited by this illegitimate overreach of federal power. Our EMS and fire services will be strained by dispatch calls responding to ICE-related events. As someone who has spent a sleepless night or two fretting over sad stories of breakdowns in EMS coverage, it was especially upsetting to hear that Renee Good may have died not only from the two bullets shot into her face but also from the inability of paramedics to administer life-saving aid due to federal officials impeding first responder access to the scene. Serving as a first responder is challenging enough even without the turmoil being caused by ICE. But is next to impossible for first responders to come to our aid in a timely fashion while also deciding whether the ICE agents they may work with are properly operating within the bounds of constitutionally legitimate authority granted by the 2003 Homeland Security Act or are serving instead as chaos agents for a vindictive and deranged president. So long as ICE enjoys the authority of being a legitimate “law enforcement” agency, ICE agents will become ever more entangled with our first responder systems. The only way to protect our first responders from the extra strain and risk caused by Trump’s weaponization of federal immigration agents is to revoke the authority created in 2003 and abolish ICE once and for all.

Congress created ICE, and Congress can abolish ICE. Unfortunately, the mainstream Democratic Party has instead focused on merely reforming ICE, thereby reinforcing its reputation as a legitimate law enforcement authority. As long as this reformist rather than abolitionist position remains the party line of the Democrats, significant segments of the population will fall for Trump and MAGA’s strongest argument that it is not ICE itself but disrespect for ICE’s “law enforcement” authority that is leading to the deaths of Americans like Renee Good. If she just obeyed the officer’s orders and respected their authority, Renee Good would be alive today. It’s a seductive argument, especially while most Democrats still affirm ICE’s legitimate authority. Yet those who understand the magnitude of this moment realize the peril of submitting to an authority that is obviously being used to trample on our fundamental freedoms and destabilize our constitutional order. Nathan Hale would have never been hanged if he followed orders and respected the authority of the British Crown over its colonial subjects. Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have never been executed if he had not plotted against Adolf Hitler and instead just followed orders and respected the authority of the Third Reich. Martin Luther King would have never been shot if he just kept quiet and respected the authority of Southern states to enact Jim Crow laws. History teaches us that you cannot both effectively resist oppression while affirming the authority of the oppressor. Congressional Democrats who encourage individual citizen resistance to ICE operations without exercising their own power to push for the agency’s abolition are putting innocent lives in danger while inadvertently doing the handiwork of Donald Trump and his apologists.

So why don’t more Democrats want to abolish ICE? Barack Obama and Joe Biden entered office with Democratic control of both the House and Senate. The opportunity was available to abolish ICE if the party wanted to do so. The lack of action to abolish ICE demonstrates the peculiar mixture of arrogance and insecurity that defines our current Democratic Party. Democrats rarely relinquish or abolish constitutionally dubious powers because they smugly believe that they have the superior intelligence, virtue, and professionalism needed to wield those powers more responsibly than Republicans. We saw this tendency play out in the foreign policy arena when Obama expanded drone strikes and authorized the bombing of Libya without Congressional authorization. Such “responsible” use of constitutionally questionable power by Democrats makes it harder to condemn Trump’s flagrant attack on Venezuela. The moral high ground needed to criticize Trump for parading a bound and blindfolded Nicolas Maduro around like a prize buck starts to crumble when we remember Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton giddily chuckling about the brutal killing of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi. Similarly, on the domestic front, there is no doubt that mainstream Democrats are still harboring the delusion that they can reform ICE and make it a more professional and competent agency when they take power. Nevermind the fact that the purging of respected professionals from the DHS and the outright recruitment of white supremacists will result in ICE being an irredeemable personal police force for Trump and Vance by 2028. It takes a potent strain of elite arrogance for Democrats to fail to realize that abolishing ICE is not an act of woke virtue signaling but rather a practical necessity if the Party is ever to regain de facto and not just de jure control over a federal government that has been warped to serve the interests of Donald Trump.

The Democrats’ arrogant belief that they can be responsible caretakers of dangerous state power is tightly entwined with their deep-felt insecurity about being seen as weak by coveted independent and undecided voters. In an effort to appeal to the supposed “law and order” sensibilities of moderate voters, most Democrats will avoid any policy position with the slightest whiff of 2020 Defund-the-Police-Prison-Abolitionist wokeness. This insecure fear of looking soft on crime for the sake of their own personal and professional interests pushes Democratic politicians toward “Republican Lite” positions that actually make them appear much weaker than if they had the guts to stand on principle. Any Democrat who can look at what is happening in Minneapolis right now and not see that ICE is being used as an instrument of lawlessness and disorder does not have the insight or courage to be a leader. In a country where a demented aspiring dictator is undermining the rule of law and weaponizing the executive branch against politically unaligned communities, the true “law and order” position is to abolish ICE.

Escalating violence should make Democrats realize they must renounce the arrogance and insecurity that have allowed ICE to survive under their power in past administrations. In place of arrogance, they must choose humility and admit that ICE has become an entity beyond redemption and reform, even in the hands of the most responsible Democratic administration. In place of insecurity about appearing weak on crime, they must realize that authentic confidence and strength will allow them to explain to all voters that they are safer and more secure in an America without ICE. There is little future for the Democratic Party or maybe even democracy itself unless our leaders can boldly proclaim that the only way to support, obey, and defend our Constitution is through the swift and total abolition of ICE.

Wow, 2025 was a great year!!! I’m sure someone has uttered these words over the past week. Not me, or anyone I’ve been around, but someone, somewhere has said it. Maybe they received an unlikely clean bill of health from their oncologist after years of battling a rare cancer. Maybe they landed a dream job offer after months of what seemed like hopeless searching. Maybe they were present for the birth of their first grandchild. There were many reasons to be happy in 2025, but few of those reasons had anything to do with politics.

In the world of politics, 2025 was a year of disappointment, devastation, destruction, and decay. Those on the political left watched in horror as the Second Trump Administration wreaked havoc on every part of American life they could touch, seemingly only limited by their own idiocy and gross incompetence: dismantling the federal bureaucracy with the help of the richest man on earth, enlisting hordes of masked ICE agents to snatch residents off the streets and ship them to overseas to be tortured, bombing fishing boats on the pretense that they are transporting narcoterrorists - the devastation goes on and on. The fundamental difference between American voters is no longer between those who believe the Trump Administration is fascist and those who do not - it is between those who are enjoying the fascism and those who are resisting it.

That is not to say that the first year of Trump’s Second Administration has been a happy time for everyone on the right who set this debacle in motion on November 5, 2024. While the MAGA faithful will gleefully claim I voted for this, Trump has disappointed nearly every American who voted for him for reasons other than sadism. He’s disappointed the price-conscious, egg-centric voters who thought Trump’s tariff plans would finally bring an end to “Bidenflation.” He’s disappointed those who bought his rhetoric of being the “Peace President” by not only failing to stop the slaughter in Gaza and Ukraine but also stoking the flames of needless war against Venezuela. He’s disappointed the crypto bros who thought Trump wholeheartedly shared their libertarian dream of private currency rather than opportunistically using digital tokens to siphon money away from his followers and into the pockets of his family and cronies. He’s disappointed Latino and Indian voters who thought MAGA meant traditional values and supporting small business, rather than raw, unfiltered racism. The disappointment goes on and on. While Trump entered 2025 enjoying a nearly even net approval rating with independent voters, he will end the year with a net approval rating of -43 with the politically unaligned. For all but the most devoted followers of his cult of personality and his oligarchic buddies in on the scam, Trump’s 2025 carnival of chaos has left the American people exhausted, repulsed, and desperate for something different.

Across the political spectrum, 2025 has been a year of disappointment and distress. Yet as this annus horribilis draws to a close, let’s ponder how all of this institutional destruction and decay creates fertile ground for something new to emerge in 2026.

AI (Re)alignment

The phrase “AI Alignment” refers to the pressing engineering challenge of ensuring actions taken by artificial systems align with the goals of the human beings who programmed them. Whether AI systems will align with the interests of humanity is an ominously open question. But what 2025 taught us is that America’s elites have fully aligned with AI expansion, drawing MAGA Republicans, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, Big Tech, Big Oil, and Big Banks in an accelerationist stance on data center construction. From Donald Trump using an Executive Order to pre-empt state laws blocking data center construction to Josh Shapiro trying to prevent local Pennsylvania officials from protecting their constituents from data center developers, politicians from both parties are aligning with AI accelerationism despite cost of living impacts from energy rate increases, glaring environmental hazards, and most importantly the potential existential risk of a rogue AI that might emerge with objectives completely out of line with the perpetuation of the human species.

2025 was a year of immense pressure from the top down for the construction of AI data centers, triggering popular resistance from the bottom up. The promotion of billion-dollar development projects for an obviously job-killing technology like AI is waking up Americans in both Red and Blue states to the fact that the “job creation” rhetoric of politicians has always been a flagrant lie used merely boost the profits of their corporate patrons. Americans are waking up to the fact that the ungodly concentration of wealth accumulated by tech, energy, and finance moguls is not a reward for improving the lives of average Americans but plunder from an economy rigged by the politicians they have bought and sold. The alignment of our political and corporate elites with the interests of AI data centers in 2025 may provide an unprecedented opportunity for a nonpartisan populist revolt against parasitic enemies of the people in 2026.

The Rightward Vibe Shift Flop

If you listened to the media class chatter at the beginning of 2025, Trump’s victory was more than just a typical electoral win; it was a tectonic cultural shift that would alter the very landscape of American politics for years, if not decades, to come. As a social class whose professional advancement and financial prospects depend on hyping up every event as earth-shattering and era-defining, the press can be forgiven for hyperbole. It’s not hard for old timers like me to remember headlines in 2009, heralding an Obama victory as ushering in a new age of unstoppable, demographically predetermined liberal hegemony. What could not be forgiven in 2025 was the Democratic Party blindly following the press’s Rightward Vibe Shift hype machine by shamelessly flip-flopping on immigration and gender, railing against “wokeness” while dropping f-bombs, and trying to incubate a “liberal Joe Rogan,” all in an effort to appeal to a supposed new conservative American mainstream ushered in by Trump’s 2024 victory.

The foolishness of Democratic overreaction to media hype would be demonstrated by the fact that the Rightward Vibe Shift would not survive to see the end of 2025. If there was a “Reichstag Fire” moment that could have transformed 2025’s Rightward Vibe Shift from a vague cultural milieu to a palpable political reality, it was the gruesomely public assassination of Charlie Kirk in September. The so-called martyrdom of Charlie Kirk would seemingly give the Trump Administration the public opinion support to not only culturally eclipse the Left but also persecute political enemies through actions like the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. And if there was a moment when the Rightward Vibe Shift could lock American mainstream culture in its vice grip, it would be the Town Hall Interview of Kirk’s widow, Erika, by Bari Weiss, “Free Press” defector from the liberal New York Times and editor in chief of CBS News, newly installed by the Trump-aligned oligarchic Ellison family. Rather than capture and accelerate America’s emergent right-wing zeitgeist, Weiss’s interview of Erika Kirk became fodder for memes and mockery. Weiss’s mousy demeanor withering in the presence of Erika Kirk’s demonic blue eyes gave the showcase event optics that felt more like a failed exorcism than a folksy town hall reaffirming America’s commitment to Charlie’s dubious legacy as a promoter of free thought. Weiss’s subsequent shame of trying to bury a 60 Minutes feature on the gruesome torture of Trump Administration deportees to El Salvador’s CECOT prison would further reveal the pathetic grift of right-shifted advocates of “free speech” who now actively cover up the atrocities of this floundering fascist farce of an Administration.

What 2025 taught us was not that there was a coherent rightward shift in mainstream American Culture, but that we live in a political reality devoid of coherence, where the mainstream has forked off into an endless array of neurotically fetid rivulets. Trump’s 2024 win was a testament to the schizophrenic, paranoid, traumatized state of an American political psyche tortured by tech algorithms, agitated by economic precarity, and crippled by social isolation. Trump won because he provided a more sensational narrative, identifiable enemies, and simple solutions to a nation that understood its fate to be far more dire than the rosy picture painted by Biden and Harris. Yet Trump only worsened Americans’ quality of life in 2025. In 2026, Democrats will need clarity of purpose and a principled commitment to material improvements if they are to capitalize on the potential bipolar swing of the American political pendulum. 2025 gave us previews of 2026 political schizophrenia in the surprising phenomenon of the Trump-Mamdani voter and the public endorsement by Groypers of looksmaxxing Gavin Newsom over the less aesthetically pleasing J.D. Vance. Upcoming primaries featuring progressive candidates like Graham Platner in Maine and Kat Abughzaleh in Illinois promise the possibility of a 2026 Leftward Vibe Shift well beyond the suffocating restraints of the establishment Democratic Party.

Release the Files!!! Impeach His Ass!!!

There have been few pipe dreams more distracting and destructive to the Democratic Party over the past decade than the false hope of impeaching and convicting Donald Trump. Back in 2017, Trump had barely even been sworn into office before liberals began reassuring themselves that white knight Robert Mueller would topple the Donald by exposing his shady dealings with Russian oligarchs. When Russiagate fizzled, liberals saw a quid pro quo gotcha moment in Trump’s 2019 phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, leading to Trump’s first impeachment by the House and subsequent acquittal. Trump’s second impeachment (and acquittal) would come just weeks before leaving office in 2021 for his involvement in stoking the January 6th insurrection. Once out of office, Trump would be convicted of 34 felonies, yet Joe Biden and Special Counsel Jack Smith would fail to land the knockout blow to prevent Trump’s return to the Oval Office. Despite Trump’s incessant crying about “lawfare,” liberal dreams of impeachment and conviction have been little more than just that…dreams.

For the past decade, I have been a skeptic of liberals’ fantasies of impeaching and convicting Trump. But 2025 has shown me something different. Unlike previous impeachment scenarios that confirmed liberals’ caricatures of Trump’s super villainy, the Epstein files strike at the heart of conservative narratives of Trump’s super heroism as a defender of traditional values and dismantler of globalist pedophile rings. The bad guys that Trump allied with in previous liberal impeachment fantasies, like shadowy Russian operatives and J6 protestors, were either irrelevant or sympathetic to the moral framework of conservative America. But Epstein and his band of elite pedophiles have been archvillains in the QAnon-tinted moral vision of Trump voters for the past decade. Fallout from the Epstein Files has turned Marjorie Taylor Greene from Trump’s greatest defender to one of his loudest critics. Trump’s transformation into Pedophile Protector in Chief has made best buddies of conservative Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie and progressive California Democrat Ro Khanna, who are now bringing inherent contempt charges against Attorney General Pam Bondi for her failure to release the Epstein Files in good faith. An impeachment of Trump and prosecution of the crooks running the DOJ and FBI will force every political actor in America to choose a side in the fight against child sex abuse. Trump’s efforts in 2025 to protect rather than prosecute all implicated in the Epstein files offer the potential for an epic political realignment in 2026 capable of finally making the Trump impeachment and conviction fantasy a reality.

Fertile ground does not guarantee a bountiful harvest. The ground must be tilled, seeds must be sown, irrigation and fertilization must happen, all followed by the crops being harvested before they rot. The destruction and decay we witnessed in 2025 have no doubt fertilized 2026 America for a new politics. Populist revolt against AI, rapid schizophrenic vibe shifting, and an impeachment-hobbled Trump provide opportunities for novel political dynamism not yet seen in 21st-century America. Yet to harvest this new political reality, we must sow the seeds of compelling ideas, irrigated by networks devoted to clear policies with tangible goals, fertilized by principled and unwavering candidates who can harvest material gains for the American people in electoral cycles to come. The harvest is bountiful, and the laborers are few. But as we wait for the ground to thaw during the dawning of this new year, let’s pause to appreciate the fact that 2026 holds far more promise for us than the wretched year of destruction that has passed.

Away in a manger, within the nativity scene outside St. Susanna’s Parish in Dedham, Massachusetts, there is an emptiness where we would expect to find the Baby Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph. In the place of the Holy Family, there is a sign reading, “ICE Was Here.” The St. Susanna’s nativity display serves as a shocking but necessary piece of political commentary at a time when Christians around the world honor a homeless, refugee family fleeing the oppression of a violent, narcissistic tyrant hellbent on snatching away their newborn child. It’s often said that the Christmas story is timeless. But the message of Christ’s birth seems more timeless and more timely than ever in 2025, as our nation comes to grips with the damage wrought by the first year of Donald Trump’s Second Administration.

Being part of a movement inspired by so-called Christian Nationalism, Trump’s followers would be aghast at the suggestion that their hateful, lawless, and mentally unhinged leader could ever be regarded as “anti-Christian.” Isn’t Trump the greatest defender of all things American, Christian, and Capitalistic?

That is the message behind Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence (NSPM-7), which explicitly instructs the Executive Branch to disrupt and dismantle all organizations whose “common thread” is “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.” NSPM-7’s chilling effect on 1st Amendment rights, the widespread unconstitutional kidnappings by ICE, reckless threats to kill or jail members of the Democratic Party, amd the ruthless bombings of shipwrecked passengers in the Caribbean are just a few of the shocking shifts toward fascism that have caused many concerned Americans to ask not only how to stop Trump in the present but how to prosecute him and his henchmen in the future. Evan Stern’s American Nuremberg and Joe Wrote’s Dick Cheney Is Why Donald Trump Must Face Consequences provide compelling arguments for why and how to hold MAGA leadership accountable after this national nightmare comes to an end. Yet, like the original Nuremberg Trials, many proposed prosecutions of Trump and MAGA rely on a retroactive justice that imposes punishments on the perpetrators without a preexisting legal basis for their prosecution. But what if there already was a law that could be used against MAGA to hold them accountable for their crimes and dismantle their networks once Trump is out of power? What if NSPM-7 sets a legal precedent to prosecute MAGA as the nation’s main perpetrator of “Domestic Terrorism” and “Organized Political Violence”? What if NSPM-7 could be co-opted by a Democratic administration to hold Donald Trump and his cronies accountable for their anti-Christian cruelty and greed, their anti-American assault on Constitutional rights and the rule of law, and their anti-Capitalistic orgy of corruption and self-dealing?

MAGA is Anti-Christian

As the nativity scene at St. Susanna’s parish reminds us, Donald Trump has much more in common with the villain of the biblical Christmas story, King Herod, than he does with the homeless, refugee Baby Jesus. Donald Trump also stands in stark contrast to the adult Jesus, whose message of peace and justice bears no resemblance to the hatred, violence, and lawlessness at the heart of the MAGA movement. Christ tells his disciples that in the Kingdom of God, the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the excluded are blessed (Luke 6:20-22). In America today, skyrocketing Medicare costs and tariff-fueled inflation have made the poor poorer and the hungry hungrier. Those who are marginalized because of race, gender, sexuality, or immigration status have become the favorite target of Trump, subjecting them to more exclusion and heartache than many could imagine a year ago. The most blessed in the Kingdom of God are the most oppressed in Donald Trump’s America.

But what about Trump’s self-proclaimed role as defender of the Christian faith? What about his exalted status among Christian Nationalist ministers in megachurches across the nation? Doesn’t Trump’s declaration that he was saved by God from a 2024 assassination attempt, his promotion of Trump-branded Bibles, and the AI-generated images of him in Papal attire suggest that MAGA is anything but an anti-Christian organization? Not at all. Throughout the New Testament, the Anti-Christ is portrayed not as an outright opponent of religion but one who cloaks himself in religion in an attempt to usurp the power of God for his own purposes. 2 Corinthians proclaims “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” 2 Thessalonians describes the Anti-Christ as “man of lawlessness” who will “exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” This is not to say that Trump is actually the Anti-Christ, just that his lawless, blasphemous self-aggrandizement bears far more similarity to the biblical Anti-Christ than the blue-haired, non-binary atheists that are the target of Trump’s “anti-Christianity” designation in NSPM-7.

It is not my place to judge the souls of others. I am not God. I am not Jesus Christ. But neither is Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, or Kash Patel. If they are determined to put the Department of Justice in God’s place to judge the souls of the American people, to say who is Christian and who is Anti-Christian, then they must heed Christ’s warning, “Judge not, lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1). By using NSPM-7 as a mechanism for the executive branch to judge the Christian virtue of Americans, the Trump Administration is setting itself up to be judged by the next regime for MAGA’s blatant anti-Christian violence and greed. Any tribunal using the actual teachings of Christ rather than the ravings of grifting fundamentalist ministers will rule that Donald Trump and his minions are an anti-Christian stain on American history.

MAGA is Anti-American

Make America Great Again…doesn’t get more pro-American than that, right? How could MAGA ever be considered anti-American? The answer to that question requires us to reflect on what it means to be an American. Throughout a nearly 250-year history, what set America apart was the fact that we were uniquely a country whose bonds were forged not by blood and soil but by shared principles and common ideals, such as democratic governance, freedom of speech and religion, the rule of law, etc. Franklin D. Roosevelt summed up this traditional idea of what it means to be an American when he declared, “The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.” Even as the principal dismantler of the New Deal economic structure, Ronald Reagan, echoed FDR’s belief that becoming an American only requires a sincere embrace of our nation’s common principles: “You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Trump and MAGA claim to want to restore traditional American greatness. In reality, they are seeking to radically redefine what it means to be an American in ways that our forebears would undoubtedly condemn as blatantly anti-American. Within the Second Trump Administration, no one has played a more prominent role in MAGA’s obscenely anti-American redefinition of Americanism than J.D. Vance. During a July 5th speech at the right-wing Claremont Institute, Vance argued for a shift away from the traditional “creedal” view of citizenship (i.e., what makes us American is a set of common beliefs and principles) and toward a “heritage” view that emphasizes ancestry and culture as defining features of what it means to be a true American. “America is not just an idea,” Vance declared, “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” As a Yale-trained lawyer, Vance is clever enough to avoid coming out with a full-throated endorsement of blood and soil ethno-nationalism as the defining feature of what it means to be an American. But the trajectory of Vance’s rhetoric is revealed in the Trump Administration policies that attack our traditional, creedal definitions of Americanism: e.g., ending birthright citizenship, detaining and deporting legal residents without due process, pardoning insurrectionists impeding free and fair elections, chilling free speech in the media and higher education through harassment and revocation of funding, etc. Vance is providing the ideological velvet glove to cover Trump’s iron fist that is currently smashing our traditional creedal definition of Americanism in favor of a concept of nationhood based on common ancestry and culture. Just as MAGA’s definition of what it means to be a Christian completely contradicts the teachings of Christ, MAGA’s definition of what it means to be an American completely contradicts the words of our Founding Fathers and our greatest modern presidents. In the right hands, NSPM-7 could be used to root out MAGA extremism as one of the most dangerous and violent “anti-American” forces in the country.

MAGA is Anti-Capitalist

To the MAGA faithful, Donald Trump is seen as the shining face of American Capitalism - billionaire real estate mogul, branding genius, reality TV star, social media savant, businessman extraordinaire. To his critics on the Left, Trump is the face of all that is wrong with American Capitalism - the greed, excess, and cruelty of the system incarnated in orange flesh and cold blood.

Trump can rightfully be seen as the face of America’s current economic system, but to call that system “Capitalism” is to give too much credibility to the economic processes that brought about Trump’s riches and too much respect for the man who hijacked those processes to his own benefit. Calling our economic system Capitalism suggests that the wealthy, like Trump, reached their status through determination, innovation, and successfully catering to the needs of the consumer in a way that is more efficient and effective than the competition. In reality, Trump has been a serial failure at business, having racked up six bankruptcies. Trump’s wealth is a product not of ingenuity and hard work, but of inheritance, flagrant breach of contract, unending litigation, tax breaks from government allies, social media provocation, and fraudulent self-promotion. Over the past year, the Trump family has seen its greatest increase ever in net worth, not by providing anything of value to society but by using their political and media clout to promote various sleezy crypto projects that have invariably increased the wealth of Trump and his inner circle at the expense of nearly every MAGA supporter who fell for the scams. Trump’s personal wealth is not the result of skillfully playing by the rules of Capitalism but rather his ability to thrive in our actual economic system, a unique strain of oligarchic parasitism I have labeled Collusionism.

Trump has also proven a threat to idealized Capitalism, not just in his personal conduct, but also in the policies he has enacted over the past year. From erratically transactional tariff schemes that have wreaked havoc on world markets to using taxpayer money to purchase shares in companies like Intel and MP Materials to negotiating a “golden share” for himself in Nippon Steel after allowing their acquisition of US Steel, Trump’s deviation from the principles of idealized Capitalism has drawn the ire of free market libertarian purists like Rand Paul and the Cato Institute. In the same way that MAGA’s fraudulent brand of Christianity and Americanism will do far more damage to faith in God and Country than could ever be inflicted by a flag-burning atheist, MAGA’s scam version of Capitalism will inflict far more damage on Americans’ faith in our economic system than the efforts of all the country’s Socialists and Marxists combined.

Whether anyone with the guts to prosecute MAGA leadership would even care about protecting the ideals of American Capitalism is a valid question. But assuming those determined to punish Trump valued Capitalism at all, the “anti-Capitalism” clause of NSPM-7 could be invoked to punish MAGA for substituting the rule of law, fair competition, and laissez-faire principles for outright corruption, corporate favoritism, self-dealing, and erratically transactional trade protectionism.

Light in the Darkness

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. (Isaiah 9:2)

The message of Christmas is one of rebirth, of seeking light even in the darkest times. More and more Americans are waking up to the fact that we are now living in a land of deep darkness. To maintain our faith in ourselves and in our country, we must plan for a brighter future where those who have plunged us into this darkness face real consequences for their actions. To judge Trump and the MAGA elite by the terms of NSPM-7 is to hold them accountable by the terms they have imposed on the American people. The punishments should be just and merciful, but without real punishment for the MAGA ringleaders, there will be no justice or mercy in this land. Regardless of what you believe, I hope this holiday season you take some solace in the words of the Gospel of John, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” To overcome darkness, we must look to the light and the hope that those who caused so much pain are brought to justice, and that in Christmas Future, Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus will safely return to the nativity scene at St. Susanna’s Parish.

If you’ve participated at all in the American political process, you have assuredly voted for a candidate who promised to “fight for you.” For decades, both Democratic and Republican candidates have gone out of their way to convince us that we are the ones they are fighting for, yet all the while, the material, social, and psychological conditions of the average American have deteriorated.

If they are fighting for us and our lives are getting worse, it begs the question: who are these politicians fighting on our behalf? The short answer is mainly just each other. Increasingly acrimonious partisan squabbling has been a fixture of 21st-century American politics. Given the deterioration of life in both the red heartland and blue coastal cities, it is easy to cynically dismiss this fighting between Republicans and Democrats as nothing more than political theater, like the kayfabe of studio wrestling, staged conflict created mainly to capture the frenzied attention and campaign donations of each side’s most rabid fans.

Is the idea that our representatives are “fighting for us” all just a facade? Even those who dismiss the conflict between Democrats and Republicans as a mere spectacle of a duopolist political system must admit that over the past few weeks, the fighting between the parties has taken a very dark turn, away from mere rhetoric toward the imminent threat of very real physical violence. On November 20th, six Democratic lawmakers with military backgrounds (Michigan Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, as well as Representatives Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, and Jason Crow) addressed a video to America’s troops affirming their right and duty to refuse illegal orders. President Donald Trump promptly took to Truth Social to respond to the video claiming the Democratic lawmakers’ behavior amounted to “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR,” punishable by DEATH.”

Even after nearly a decade of hearing the phrase “this is not normal” to describe Trump’s conduct, the overt threat of physical violence against Democratic lawmakers marks a new low point in dangerous abnormality for a President who has become an unhinged 79-year-old poster child for the necessity of the 25th Amendment as a mechanism to remove the deranged from office. The sinister energy of Trump’s psychotic meltdown hit particularly close to home for us in Western Pennsylvania, as his rage was directed at our Congressman, Chris Deluzio. As a local elected official, I have met and worked with Congressman Deluzio on numerous occasions. When my Township needed to fix a dangerously crumbling railroad tunnel, Congressman Deluzio jumped at the chance to help protect our community by directly contacting the CEO of Canadian National Railway, motivating the company to make long-neglected repairs. Even on smaller matters, Chris has always been responsive. This spring, Chris and his kids lent our local Democratic Committee a hand in helping clean up trash from our local park. Congressman Deluzio is a down-to-earth, sincere, and dedicated public servant who our community is lucky to have representing us in Congress.

Most sane Americans are repulsed by hearing the President threaten death and violence to his political enemies. But that disgust reaches another level when threats of violence are directed at a person who you’ve seen cleaning out Cheerios from his kids’ car seats to make room for staffers helping document a crumbling railroad tunnel on a winding country road. Chris Deluzio showed up to help protect our community from corporate greed and neglect. It is only right that I speak out to help support Congressman Deluzio, whose offices have faced multiple bomb threats since Trump’s tantrum, almost surely the work of sick MAGA fanatics eager to take the satisfaction of the President’s bloodlust into their own hands, even as the White House makes efforts to walk back the obviously malicious intent of the Truth Social posts.

The surreal experience of seeing someone you know be threatened with death by the President of the United States conjured up thoughts I had during my own re-election campaign about the complex relationship between fighting for the people and protecting the people. Whether in campaign literature or during doorstep conversations, I rarely use the word “fighting” to describe my political efforts. This is maybe a bit odd, since few other elected officials in my area have gotten into as heated arguments as I have with my Republican colleagues on the Board of Supervisors. From fiercely defending my constituents’ right to circulate petitions in the Township to warning the other Supervisors of the need to recuse themselves in situations that bear even the whiff of conflict of interest, my impassioned outbursts come as close to “fighting” as we get around here in local politics. But fighting Republicans is not an end in itself to be celebrated. It is an unpleasant means of protecting the rights of the people against the corporate interests that too often dupe the Board majority. Protection, not fighting, is the heart of my political project. This is not a paternalistic one-way relationship where the representative protects the people, but rather a collective effort to inspire us to protect each other as a community. I protect the citizens. The citizens protect me. The citizens protect each other. And in so doing, we name the enemies of the people who threaten our well-being, from Ryan Homes to Range Resources, and when possible, name the individuals who represent these faceless entities that view our community as nothing more than a site for profit extraction. Serving as a public official has taught me that our job as representatives is to act as Protectors of the People. Fighting for our constituents is sometimes necessary, but always secondary to our primary duty of protecting them.

As a Navy man, Chris Deluzio often implores, “Don’t give up the ship,” a rallying cry to not back down in the face of opposition. No one would doubt that Chris Deluzio and the rest of the so-called “Seditious Six” are fighting Donald Trump. It’s a sad commentary on these dark times when quoting the Uniform Code of Military Justice amounts to a “seditious” act of fighting the President. Yet it remains to be seen whether fighting Trump on this issue will do more to protect the American people from his overreach of power than it will endanger the members of Congress who made the video. The danger to Congressman Deluzio and his colleagues is heightened by the video’s the lack of specificity about which orders were potentially illegal (like I don’t know…maybe the alcoholic Secretary of War ordering “kill everybody” when alerted that survivors were clinging to the wreckage of a civilian fishing vessels blown up for supposedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean) and the lack of recourse for rank and file troops who may be unsure whether their orders are legal. The video may be a brilliant tactical move in baiting Trump and his bumbling goons, Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth, to open investigations into Congressional Democrats whose moral fiber and service to country far outshine anyone working for this despicable administration. But with tensions rising and the “Seditious Six” rhetoric intensifying, only time will tell whether the Democratic leadership has the right long-term strategy to protect the six Democrats (let alone the American people at large) from political violence and civil disorder.

To come out victorious in this standoff with Donald Trump, Congressional Democrats must position themselves as not just fighters against MAGA Republicans but true Protectors of the People. Fighting Donald Trump is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for Democrats to rescue this country in 2026 and 2028. If anything, Donald Trump has proven to be too compelling a villain over the past decade, distracting the Democrats from the broader forces of greed, corruption, and deception that Trump reinforces and represents. Democrats’ hyperfixation on fighting Trump has done little to impede the MAGA movement, as evidenced by the failed Biden/Harris campaign of 2024 that cast Trump as a singular supervillain while leaving all the other billionaire parasites ruining this country off the hook. By focusing too much on fighting just the opposing party, Democrats have handed the Republicans the advantage of being able to lure voters with promises of protection from enemies that exist outside the DC Beltway. Republicans offer protection from threats that are often imaginary or overblown: e.g., migrant “terrorist” gangs, Radical Marxists, transgirls playing high school sports, DEI professors, etc. To truly discredit this protection peddled by Republicans as fraudulent, Democrats must do more than merely fight Donald Trump and the GOP. Democrats must become aggressively vocal Protectors of the People against those enemies who have inflicted the most harm on the average American: e.g. healthcare lobbyists who trap us in a system that is twice as expensive and significantly less effective than in other developed countries, the unholy alliance between Fossil Fuels and Big Tech that has cynically used AI as a taxpayer-funded lifeline to profitability for industries that have inflicted incalcuable harm on the planet and our collective psyche, the Big Banks that get preferential rates to borrow from the Federal Reserve only to turn around and crush our nation’s poorest residents with brutal overdraft fees and high interest loans, and the private equity vampires who saddle viable enterprises with crushing debt only to extract dividends for themselves while leaving companies hollowed out and their workers unemployed.

My hope that Congressman Deluzio will emerge safe and strong from this needless “Seditious Six” scandal rests in the fact that he has been a proven Protector of the People for my community. His efforts to restore the crumbling Little Deer Creek tunnel protected our community from the negligent disregard of Canadian National Railway. In joining Bernie Sanders on the Fighting Oligarchy tour, Deluzio demonstrated that he understands something many centrist Democrats fail to comprehend: that the enemies of the people extend beyond just Trump and the MAGA Republicans and include the entire Billionaire Class. During his speech at the Fighting Oligarchy rally, Deluzio showed that he understood the need to name the enemies of the people, “We ought to make hard work pay off, but we gotta take on the villains. We know who they are. It doesn’t matter if you call them oligarchs, robber barons, or corporate jagoffs — I gotta bring a little Pittsburgh here — we know who they are. I know which damn side I’m on. Are you with me?”

As a proud constituent of Chris Deluzio, and can wholeheartedly say, yes, I am with him, not only in his coming fight against Donald Trump but also in the struggle to protect the people’s interests against those who have created and perpetuated this predatory economy. In fighting forces beyond just Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, Congressman Deluzio has established himself not just as our representative but as a legitimate Protector of the People. With Congressman Deluzio’s very life threatened, it is now time for the people of Western Pennsylvania to return the favor and protect him from the morally depraved regime hellbent on doing him harm.

Of all the dark prophets of late 20th-century America, few were darker or more prophetic than Samuel Francis. One of the many “conspiracists and con men” of the early 1990s profiled by John Ganz in When the Clock Broke, Francis was arguably the most notorious proponent of right-wing nationalist paleoconservatism, a movement that emerged from the fringes to become the dominant political force shaping our nation during the Trump Era. The writings of Samuel Francis both predicted and produced this dark reality, embracing unabashed white racial consciousness, trade protectionism, virulent anti-immigrant xenophobia, and the glorification of a Caesarist presidency capable of crushing the bureaucratic, corporate, and educational establishment.

In his 1982 essay, Message from MARs, Francis advocated appealing to what he regarded as an emerging social formation, a large segment of the American population he labeled “Middle American Radicals,” MARs for short. For Francis, Middle American Radicals were the disaffected and neglected white middle class, those whose standing in American society and material conditions had been “sandwiched” by the interests of an upper-crust cosmopolitan establishment and the urban poor who were the unworthy beneficiaries of welfare state pampering. Francis saw the limousine liberalism of Boomer Democrats and the stodgy, stuffy conservatism of the Old Right as being completely unfit to tap into the restive political energy building within Middle America. In Francis’s eyes, only a New Right could channel this growing rage and resentment. Breaking from the old guard of the Republican party, Francis declared, “The New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one.”1 It is not hard to hear a prophetic prediction of the institutional destruction wrought by the Second Trump Administration when Francis states, “the New Right should make use of the presidency as its own spearhead against the entrenched elite and should dwell on the fact that the intermediary bodies - Congress, the courts, the bureaucracy, the media etc. - are the main supports of the elite.”2 Sam Francis may have died two decades ago. But he is more alive than ever in the radical New Right spirit of a MAGA movement that has pushed our country to the brink of authoritarianism and social chaos.

Francis thought the populist, nationalist New Right that has culminated in the second Trump administration would be the balm to soothe the wounds of the Middle American Radical. The past year of incompetence, betrayal, and deepening economic inequality has proven Sam Francis to be far more astute at diagnosing than at relieving the pain of the average small-town American. Rather than being the Caesarist conqueror of the oligarchic establishment, Trump has created an administration run by and for the billionaire class, with a who’s who of the world’s richest men standing at his inauguration. Rather than being a defender of traditional Middle American values and a crusader against global pedophile rings, Trump’s clumsy suppression of the Epstein files has exposed him as a pedophile defender in chief, and quite likely a pedophile himself. All the while, lawless immigration enforcement, erratically aggressive trade protectionism, and the reckless dismantling of federal bureaucracy show no signs of improving the conditions of Middle American Radicals, who are suffering more material hardship, more collapse in community spirit, and more psychic despair than before the Trump era began. Sam Francis’s New Right dream has become a reality, but it has only worsened the waking nightmare that has been the fate of Middle America over the past half-century.

While campaigning for my re-election as Supervisor of Indiana Township District 5, I found the spirit of the Middle American Radical still restless in my purple Western Pennsylvania community, where Democrats slightly outnumber Republicans. Knocking on hundreds of doors and talking to voters from both parties, my interactions often brought to mind Sam Francis’s assessment of the fears that haunt the Middle American psyche: “perceived injustice, unrelieved exploitation by anonymous powers that be, a threatened future, and an insulted past.”3 Tapping into this frustration did not require a compromise of my principles; if anything, the spirit of the Middle American Radical dovetailed neatly with my passion for fighting the corrupting corporate influences that threaten the fabric of my community. Anyone who has read this Substack knows that my stances on national economic policies track with the Far Left, positions barely represented in the current Democratic Party. I believe in Universal Healthcare, a Universal Job Guarantee, an aggressive Wealth Tax to expropriate the Billionaire class, and whatever is left to salvage from the much-neglected Green New Deal. With these left-wing beliefs in mind, it strikes me as odd that I captured not only a large segment of my District’s Republican voters, but also had many registered Republicans put my signs up in their yard or join me in knocking doors during my campaign. The Horseshoe Theory (the idea that the far left and far right are often closer in agreement than they are to centrists) seemed to have played out in the results of my election. The key to successfully employing this Horseshoe Theory was not in watering down my beliefs but rather presenting my deep-felt anti-corporate, anti-establishment views in a manner that appealed to the Middle American Radical who has been betrayed by Samuel Francis, Donald Trump, and the entire New Right.

“The developers, land speculators, and frackers have all been put on notice…as well as all their collaborators in all levels of government. If you try to make a buck at the expense of our community’s quality of life, no one will fight you harder than Indiana Township District 5.” These are the thoughts I shared with my constituents while announcing the results of my election on Facebook last week. Sam Francis was not on my mind while writing this. Yet, as I gave it more thought, I realized how my words could resonate with the fears and frustrations of the Middle American Radical that Francis described so vividly in Message from MARs. By aggressively advocating for the rights of my neighbors over the interests of corporate developers, I appeal to my constituents’ “perceived injustice” of watching the other Supervisors callously vote in favor of an unaffordable, unsustainable housing development despite the outcry of over 100 residents and no citizens of the Township voicing their support for the project. By successfully blocking the oil and gas interests (as well as their backroom allies in state and local government) that tried to rezone our Township to frack just a mile from our schools, I have given my constituents hope that we can end “unrelieved exploitation by anonymous powers that be.” By standing up to preserve the natural beauty and small-town charm of Indiana Township that we know and love, I have worked with so many other impassioned citizens to protect our “threatened future” and restore the dignity of our “insulted past.” While my own election was just the tiniest ripple in a blue wave that washed across America on November 4th, it provides hope that the failures of Trump and the New Right will provide an opportunity for those on the Left to craft a populist, anti-establishment platform that not only appeals to the Middle American Radical but actually relieves the root causes of their suffering.

In the weeks to come, I will publish a series of Local Election Reflections, diving deeper into themes drawn from my campaign trail experiences that might guide the Democratic Party in crafting a more effective response to the continued unraveling of our country during the Second Trump Administration. The lessons I’ve learned stand in stark contrast to much of the advice being peddled by the establishment Democratic Party’s consultants, pundits, and Beltway wonks. Democrats must not cynically tinker with their surface-level messaging to appeal to presumed prejudices and assumed ignorance of the Middle American Radical. Zhuzhing up Democratic messaging with the right doses of anti-immigrant xenophobia, transphobia, f-bombs, and woke bashing will not woo the Middle American Radicals, who are often more adept at clocking phoniness than the experts paid by the party to study them. Middle American Radicals know that messaging is just a fancy word for manipulation. Similarly, the pathetic pro-corporate pandering of moderate Democrats’ Abundance Agenda will also prove disastrous, as even Sam Francis placed large corporations on the “enemies list” of the Middle American Radical.4 “Playing Dead” like James Carville suggested or meekly surrendering to Republican demands (like the eight Senate Democrats who voted to end the shutdown with little to show for it), will not kindle excitement in the Middle American Radical for the anemic centrism of moderate Democrats. To win the Middle American Radical, Democrats must demonstrate strength, determination of will, and clarity in their policy commitments: the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 only to vote for Zohran Mamdani in 2025 provide a preview of this rapidly evolving political ecosystem. Manhattan and Queens might be a far cry from Middle America. Still, the surprising shift in voters from Trump to Mamdani suggests that the Democrats would be foolish to neglect the Horseshoe Theory in the heartland in 2026 and 2028.

The Middle American Radical knows that our economy is rigged, that our politicians are bought off, that our communities are crumbling, and that the simple dream of owning a home and starting a family is becoming all the more unreachable. They know that the tech oligarchy, the richest men in this country, have made their billions by distracting us from worsening material conditions, tearing apart communities by stoking political differences, and preying upon the insecurities of our children. Now is the time for the Far Left to take the lead and do what the New Right could not: restore the dignity and prosperity of the Middle American Radical by punishing the economic and political elites that are leading this country toward ruin.

In the end, though, the most important factor in shifting the Middle American Radical to the left will be a commodity in scarce supply in the current Democratic Party: sincerity. The success of my little election rested fundamentally on the fact that I sincerely wanted the same things my neighbors wanted: to protect our land, to protect our social fabric, and to protect each other from the for-profit predation of outside influences. My goal was not to make leftists of my neighbors, not to get them to register for the Democratic Party, not to set myself up for a run at even higher office. My goal was to build the political power of my community itself, strengthening our collective resolve to defend each other against not only corporate greed but also the politicians from both parties who have sold out Middle America time and time again. Zooming out to the national level, there is a clear path for a seismic shift in the political orientation of the Middle American Radical as we emerge from the wreckage of the Second Trump Administration. Whether the Democratic Party will run candidates who have the sincerity and determination to lead the Middle American Radicals leftward is not so clear.

Buyer’s regret. Those are probably the two words most likely to pop into the brains of Pennsylvania Democrats any time the 2022 Senate Primary is mentioned. On the fateful day of May 7th, 2022, Pennsylvania Democrats put their faith in a burly, tattooed iconoclastic bad boy over a clean-cut, well-mannered good boy. The narrative that Pennsylvania Democrats’ choice of John Fetterman over Conor Lamb was a vote for progressivism over centrism would unravel quicker than Fetterman’s mental state in the months after his May 2022 stroke. As a Senator, Fetterman’s politics would shift shockingly right, well past both progressivism and centrism, becoming his party’s most prominent apologist for both Donald Trump’s authoritarian power grab and the State of Israel’s unrestrained slaughter in Gaza. To his credit, Conor Lamb has reemerged as a loud and vocal critic of the Second Trump administration. While Fetterman scolds Democrats for labeling Trump a fascist, Lamb has spoken out about the dark turn the country has taken, rightfully asserting that “The second Trump presidency is far worse than the first. It felt like we were on a path where people were afraid to dissent. In politics, you have to mount open physical resistance to add political pressure.”

The fact that Lamb is itching for a rematch with Fetterman is readily apparent from his recent barnstorm tour of Pennsylvania. Lamb’s plan for another Senate run is the second-worst-kept secret in 2028 Pennsylvania politics, eclipsed only by Josh Shapiro’s naked ambition to be elected President. Lamb’s early shadow candidacy is refreshing to many Pennsylvania Democrats sick of Fetterman styling himself as “independent,” despite being so morally bankrupt and cognitively impaired that he would collaborate with an authoritarian regime that is tearing apart the United States Constitution with a ferocity unmatched in the country’s 249-year history.

Lamb’s recent return to the spotlight is not just a performance for disgruntled Pennsylvania voters; it is also a showcase for the moneyed and connected party elites looking for a Senate candidate to rally around in 2028. There is no better indication that Lamb’s shadow candidacy promises a return to centrist, pro-corporate Democratic politics than his recent criticism of Maine Senatorial candidate Graham Platner, who has energized the Left with his aggressive anti-oligarchy and anti-genocide platform. In a Substack piece entitled “Maine Character Energy,” Lamb claims that Platner’s candidacy gives him “flashbacks to 2022,” portraying Platner as the second coming of Fetterman - just another gruff, burly, tattooed everyman who should be met with skepticism because of “obvious character issues.” Lamb concludes, “Character, in my view, should be weighed by the voters irrespective of moderate vs progressive or young vs old.”

The scion of a prominent Pittsburgh political family with military service and an Ivy League legal education, Conor Lamb embodies just the kind of “character” that makes Democratic party insiders and the donor class swoon. On a surface level, Lamb strikes the perfect contrast to the gritty, rough-around-the-edges image projected by both Fetterman and Platner. The “obvious character issues” that Lamb ascribes to Platner have been well-documented and much discussed over the past few weeks, from his chest tattoo with Nazi symbolism, to racially insensitive Reddit posts, to his service as a mercenary for the private military contractor Blackwater. Leakage of these stories by Platner’s establishment rival for the Democratic nomination, current Maine governor Janet Mills, has rightfully caused his credibility to be questioned not just by mainstream political pundits but also by his most ardent supporters on the far left of the Democratic Party. Yet as the impact of these stories sinks in, Platner’s stature and standing with his growing fanbase have only intensified, and his backing from current Senators like Bernie Sanders and Chris Murphy has remained solid.

The enduring support for Platner should be a wake-up call for centrists like Conor Lamb. The kind of “character” Democratic voters are looking for in 2025 is not a squeaky-clean image and an impeccable resume from cradle to Congress. Americans have been sold out time and time again by “high character” Democrats with all the right Ivy League, armed service, and Junior Achievement credentials. Having knocked on doors the past two months to be re-elected Supervisor of my purple Pennsylvania district, I can tell you voters are absolutely sick of the establishment Democratic Party’s fixation on “character,” “messaging,” and “optics.” Americans are looking for a different kind of character, the independent crusading spirit that comes from taking on and fighting the vampiric elites who have drained this country into a desiccated husk of its mid-20th-century greatness. In barely a month of campaigning, Graham Platner has exhibited more of this brave, anti-establishment character than Conor Lamb and John Fetterman have shown in decades of political service.

Beyond the superficial bad boy similarities between Platner and Fetterman, the current Pennsylvania Senator shares far more in common with his golden boy Democratic primary opponent than he does with the oysterman from Maine. Like Lamb, Fetterman was an Ivy League grad, beginning his political career just a few short years after graduating from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Teach for America would lead Reading-born Fetterman to the other side of Pennsylvania, to the desperately poor and decaying steel town of Braddock, just a few miles up the Monongahela from Pittsburgh. Within four years, the towering 6-foot-8 giant with a shaved head would be elected mayor of a town whose dwindling population was over 70% black. Fetterman’s tenure as Braddock’s mayor would bring both national notoriety and accusations of an opportunistic white savior complex, thrusting the small town of 1,700 residents into the national spotlight with a compelling narrative of either rustbelt revival or hipster poverty porn, depending upon your perspective. Fetterman’s greatest successes often came from bringing outside attention to the town, from a Levi’s advertisement filmed on location to his Colbert Report appearance to bringing an acclaimed chef to open a high-end restaurant in an abandoned car dealership. While Fetterman cultivated and capitalized on a gritty persona that fit the progressive zeitgeist of the mid-2010s, like most Democratic politicians, his connections within the party and the outside media were often prioritized over his connections to the constituents he represented. His relationships internally with the Braddock community would be questioned, including an incident where he pulled a gun on a black jogger, and his distant relationship with the town council. Once Fetterman turned his horizons beyond Braddock, his so-called progressive stance on policy rarely extended beyond symbolic gestures to culture war issues like gay marriage and marijuana legalization, causes that posed no threat to the class interests of liberal elites and Democratic Party insiders. If anything, the idea that Fetterman was a “socialist” was promoted by none other than Conor Lamb, whose 2022 red-baiting ad was deemed “false” by both Politifact and Factcheck. Despite differences in aesthetics, both Fetterman and Lamb exhibit the tendencies of ambitious lifelong politicians whose every move is calculated to climb as high up the ladder as possible. Fetterman crafted a persona marketed to a different demographic than Conor Lamb while still peddling the same product beneath his unorthodox packaging: liberal social values, pro-corporate economic policies, and complete devotion to the Democratic Party establishment.

Graham Platner’s unscripted, unpolished life story stands in stark contrast to the lifelong politicking of Lamb and Fetterman. While Lamb and Fetterman were calculating their next political move, Platner was wandering the wilderness from Afghanistan to Reddit chatrooms, giving no thought to long-term electability. As someone who did not build his career on favors from powerful patrons in politics and business, Platner has the courage and independence to call out those who have driven our country to the brink of ruin. “I am running as a Democrat, despite my party trying to destroy my life,” Platner declared on October 27th. In launching his campaign, Platner stated plainly and unequivocally, “The oligarchy is the enemy.” This is the true independent character Americans crave, the ability to name the true enemies of the people and critique the two major parties who have sold us out time and time again on behalf of their oligarchic overlords.

In all his years as a phony “progressive,” Fetterman’s independence rarely went beyond shaving his head, wearing cargo shorts, and flying a weed flag. Now, during his tenure as Senator, Fetterman’s brain-damaged sense of “independence” is nothing more than licking the boots of MAGA authoritarians with a gusto unmatched by any other Democratic Senator. While in Congress, Conor Lamb’s single greatest act of independence from his party involved siding with Republicans on the 2018 Volcker Rule Regulation Harmonization Act, which would have allowed banks with less than $10 billion to make risky investments with customers’ money - an eyebrow-raising break from the Democratic Party line from a Congressman whose father, Thomas Lamb, is a banking lobbyist. After losing the Senate primary to Fetterman, Lamb would then join an organization that promotes spending billions of taxpayer dollars on dubious hydrogen hub projects that provide a lifeline to the oil and gas industry. For all his holier than thou talk of Graham Platner’s “obvious character issues,” Conor Lamb is out of touch with the fact that Democratic voters in this day and age are less likely to see bad tattoo choices and unwise Reddit posts as character flaws than being a pliant political servant of the banking and fossil fuel industries that have immiserated the lives of the average American in the 21st century.

Democrats want a Lion like Graham Platner that will roar at the elites who have betrayed them, not a well-groomed Lamb that will sheepishly flash a golden smile at the people while docilely doing the bidding of the donors and lobbyists behind closed doors. If the Democratic Party is to have any future at all, that future belongs to candidates who talk like Graham Platner and call out the elites as enemies of the people. Whether Platner will walk the walk or if he will become a turncoat grifter like Fetterman remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure. There is no future for the Democratic Party in candidates like Conor Lamb, whose connections run far deeper with corporate donors and party insiders than they do with the common people.

“It’s pretty hot out there. Want to step inside for a bit? Can I get you a glass of water?” It hadn’t even been two hours since I began door-knocking, but I knew I was looking pretty thrashed. Unseasonably warm and brutally dry conditions had caused the leaves to change their colors early. The roads I walked were dusty and lonesome, other than the cars rushing by as I made my way from door to door. Even for a local elected position as inconsequential as Township Supervisor, summoning the motivation to hit the campaign trail is not always easy in a time as bleak as September 2025. As I walk these lonely roads, I try to imagine it’s for some higher purpose: to restore faith in democracy, to make the most of what might be the last free election, or maybe to heal our community’s wounds inflicted by the national political chaos that seems to be closing in on us. On the longer stretches of road, I feel like some kind of penitent or pilgrim, and now that I have been invited into one of my constituents’ homes, it only amplifies the oddly biblical aura of the moment: I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in. (Matthew 25:35).

“You know my wife and I are both Republicans. But we are sensible people…working class people,” he tells me. He knows I am a Democrat. “We appreciate you coming out and talking to everybody, especially with how crazy things are these days.” He expresses gratitude for my efforts to build a bipartisan coalition within our district to fight against unsustainable, unaffordable developments that destroy the natural environment, provide no real relief to the housing crisis, and only line the pockets of wealthy developers and large landowners. It’s an effort that might not win me much love from Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and the Abundance faction of the Democratic Party. But it’s nice to hear that at least some of the folks I represent appreciate my commitment to being a tough negotiator on behalf of our community, advancing their expressed interests to the greatest extent the law will allow.

“I’m just so worried about where this country is headed,” he confesses. I hold my breath, wondering where this conversation is headed. Yet his concerns do not mirror the talking points on Fox News. He does not mention Antifa, trans extremism, or Venezuelan gangs like Tren de Aragua. Most notably, he does not mention the one issue that has collapsed our country into a black hole of imminent civil unrest: the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And yet his deepest concern is not completely unrelated to Kirk’s gruesome murder and the right-wing calls for vengeance that have come in its wake. “What really concerns me,” he tells me, “is that all of this awful hatred these parties are whipping up is going to make people in this community start actually hurting each other.”

I share this concern. I think about it almost every day. My position comes with the obligation to preserve public safety. But how will public safety be preserved when neighbor turns against neighbor, when we look for mortal enemies on our own street?

“All we can do is make sure that Indiana Township District 5 serves as an example to the rest of the country,” I tell him as I walk back out into the heat. “We just got to stick together and stay united against these outside moneyed interests that aren’t just trying to ruin our community but the entire country.”

I wave goodbye and, once again, I am back out on the road, heartened by this latest interaction but still apprehensive about the next one. Every door you knock could be opened by someone who believes the Democratic Party is hellbent on orchestrating a godless Marxist overthrow of the American Republic. I’ve had my share of dicey run-ins while knocking on doors. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. But in 2025, reaching out and speaking to all your neighbors, regardless of their political leanings, feels riskier and riskier with each passing day.

How do we ease the tensions? How do we pull the country back from the brink of civil unrest? In this atmosphere of heightened political unease, it is tempting for Democrats to try to calm the political storm by falling into the trap of glorifying Charlie Kirk as a national treasure and a beacon of free speech, rather than a supremely gifted partisan organizer and charismatic communicator who used his talents to foment and intensify the culture wars tearing our country apart. Despite Kirk’s divisive legacy, liberal pundits and Congressional Democrats are falling over themselves to go along with the MAGA project of recasting Charlie Kirk as a national hero rather than a relentless culture warrior. In a move that baffles the understanding, last Thursday, both the House and Senate Democrats voted to pass resolutions marking October 14th as “National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk.” It is one thing to respect the dead, mourn the unimaginably painful loss of a husband and father, and reaffirm the sanctity of all human life. It is quite another thing to rewrite the life of one of the 21st century’s most skilled partisan tacticians as a symbol of national unity. If the resolutions passed in the House and Senate merely condemned the violence that took Kirk’s life, then every Democrat should have voted for them. But the resolutions go far beyond condemning Kirk’s assassination and heap effusive praises on his unapologetically partisan political career, gushing acclamations that 98 Democratic House members and every Senate Democrat affirmed in their votes for the resolutions. The votes of the Democratic Senators are much more understandable, as the Senate resolution provided a much more sober appreciation of Kirk’s career as opposed to the House resolution, which reads much more like a hagiography glorifying Kirk’s moral character and the righteousness of his lifelong conservative crusade.

We do not know whether these House Democrats actually believe the exaltation of Charlie Kirk they signed onto, or whether it was just a tactical maneuver made by careerists and opportunists more concerned about consultant polling than concrete principles. But we must question how these House Democrats square the words in the resolutions they passed with the words Kirk spoke about the liberal causes they supposedly hold dear. What do we make of Democrats who defended Biden’s 2024 candidacy to the bitter end (despite his glaringly obvious mental decline), turning around and signing off on the idea that Kirk “worked tirelessly to promote unity” when he openly called for Biden to be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America? What should we think of the Democrats who have affirmed that Charlie Kirk always sought to “elevate truth, foster understanding, and strengthen the Republic” when he openly peddled election denialism and proudly proclaimed his role in sending 80 buses of Trump supporters to the January 6th protest to “fight for the president”? How should we regard white Democrats who embraced 2020’s “Racial Reckoning,” now honoring Kirk’s “respect for his fellow Americans” despite his claim that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake” and that Martin Luther King “was awful” and “not a good person”?

The House Democrats who voted for this shocking reinterpretation of Kirk’s legacy should ponder whether they are willing collaborators in the core authoritarian project of rewriting history. They are not healing the wounds of partisan division by effusively honoring Kirk, but dangerously recasting those who challenged Kirk’s ideological project as nefarious enemies of a national hero rather than good faith participants in a national dialogue about the future of the country. It’s hard to understand this dramatic betrayal without concluding that the House Democrats who voted for the Charlie Kirk Day of Remembrance resolution are only doing so to save themselves, revealing that they never stood for anything more than their own political careers. It is no wonder that despite the growing distaste for the Trump Administration, Americans still have no confidence in the Democratic Party’s ability to stand for anything, let alone stand up to the mounting tide of authoritarianism and meet this historic moment head on. In 2025, October 14th will be a Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk. In the future, it may also mark a Day of Remembrance for the failed Democratic Party, a political organization that perished due to its own inability to stand on principle.

Say what you want about Charlie Kirk, but he was someone who believed deeply in the philosophical principles of conservatism. In both life and death, he fought to see his ideological project aggressively pursued across the entire American political landscape. Charlie Kirk was always a true believer. The same cannot be said for the House Democrats who voted for the language contained within his National Day of Remembrance resolution. As someone who stands for very defined political and philosophical principles, I at times find it easier to respect and empathize with Charlie Kirk than with Democrats who stand for nothing. The lesson that Charlie Kirk can teach Democrats is not to move reflexively rightward toward the positions of Turning Point USA, as Gavin Newsom pathetically did on the issue of trans sports participation during his podcast interview with Kirk this March. No, the lesson Democrats should learn from Charlie Kirk is recognizing the power of welcoming the passion and harnessing the ideological zeal of activists whose positions may not align with “popularist” preferences of the perceived average voter. While Charlie Kirk was welcomed into the very center of MAGA Republican power, similar activists on the Left are shunned by the establishment Democratic Party. Young idealists on the Left are sneered at as immature and disruptive when they pressure the Democratic elites to get behind single-payer health insurance, a national job guarantee, a wealth tax on oligarchs, or an immediate end to the taxpayer-funded slaughter in Gaza. Trumpism has reached ascendance not because of the popularity of its policy positions but because of its ability to channel the principled passions of young right-wing ideologues like Charlie Kirk, who was a principal architect of a victorious 2024 campaign. The Democratic Party is not impotent and incompetent because of the unpopularity of its policy positions, but because of its perversely bureaucratic structure that stifles and snuffs out the principled passions of young left-wing ideologues who dare to dream of a better future.

As I head back out to knock on doors this weekend, only time will tell whether the traumas of the Charlie Kirk assassination will continue to fester or begin to fade in intensity. Whether I win or lose this upcoming election, I will always remember the lessons I’ve learned from representing a district that is almost equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. The trust and support I receive from citizens of all parties comes not from being a moderate with a precisely crafted centrist position, but from standing firm on the principle that the citizens should come first and that their interests should take precedence over those of the Township government and the business ventures that only come to our community to make a buck. The unity we have forged within Indiana Township District 5 comes not from us agreeing on all the hot-button national political wedge issues that were Charlie Kirk’s bread and butter, but in us rallying together to protect our collective material well-being against parasitic and predatory for-profit operations.

Similarly, the resistance to Trump will not come from the feckless Democrats who will stagger to the right on any issue in a clumsy attempt to win back voters lost to Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA. Only those Democrats who are as sure in their principles and convictions as Charlie Kirk was in his are fit to lead us in the years ahead. And the road to national unity will be a lonely one, not built on us aligning on all the culture war issues created to distract us, but instead on summoning the collective will of the American people to shatter the unholy alliance between the political and corporate elites that is destroying our society, our economy, and our democracy. Healing will begin when neighbors come together to realize their material interests and basic rights will not be protected by fighting in culture wars, but by joining forces to fight against those who foment them. Reconciliation will not happen through sensational on-campus debates that were Charlie Kirk’s claim to fame. True reconciliation will not be televised, taped, livestreamed, uploaded, shared, liked, reposted, or algorithmically sorted to reinforce the partisan prejudices of those who ingest news through their social media feed. Reconciliation will happen through private conversations on front porches between neighbors of different political persuasions, through the good faith and goodwill that compels us to welcome the stranger and offer a glass of water to those who are thirsty.

On October 14th, all so inclined should pray for the soul of Charlie Kirk. But we should also pray for the soul of a Democratic Party that has been completely incapable of learning the right lessons from Charlie’s life and death.

On the banks of the Allegheny River, just north of Pittsburgh, sits the small town of Springdale. On the leafy streets of Springdale, there sits an old wooden farmhouse, painted white with green shingles. In the old wooden farmhouse, a young girl grew up in the early 1900s, exploring the surrounding forests while cultivating a sense of wonder about all the beauty and complexity of the natural world. That little girl was Rachel Carson. Rachel would grow up to pen the influential science book Silent Spring, educating the world about the unpredictable systemic threats of pesticide use, a bestseller that would inspire the emergence of the modern environmentalist movement.

Like many towns nestled within the Allegheny Valley, Springdale fell on hard times in the late 20th century. The population of Springdale today is little more than half of what it was when its most famous resident, Rachel Carson, published Silent Spring in 1962. The factories that once provided jobs and wages for the people of Springdale would go the way of rust and dust. Yet in a community blessed with such natural beauty and rich history, deindustrialization offered an opportunity to restore and remold Springdale into a community embodying the spirit of Rachel Carson. There was no site in Springdale more enticing for green redevelopment than the 200 acres of riverfront property opened up by the demolition of the coal-powered Cheswick Generating Station earlier this year. There were real hopes that the site would be used to honor Carson’s legacy, leveraging Springdale’s unique status as the only place on earth that could claim arguably history’s greatest environmentalist as its native daughter. Last September, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review reported, “The township…envisions turning the properties into an environmental, educational and recreational area — tapping into the history of Springdale native and world-renowned environmental researcher Rachel Carson.” Large public building projects are not so easily executed in this day and age. But for just a fraction of $1.6 billion in tax benefits that the State of Pennsylvania kicked in to help Shell build a fracking-fueled plastic plant on the Ohio River, a world-class facility could have been built in Rachel Carson’s honor, employing hundreds, drawing in tourists and academics from across the globe, injecting unprecedented levels of new energy and revenue into a town struggling to provide public services and revitalize its business district.

The dream of a Rachel Carson Center on the banks of the Allegheny River would vanish this May with reports that the 200-acre site had been sold to a “large multi-national experienced data center developer.” Fears that the riverfront site would be home to an energy sucking AI-data center were confirmed earlier this month at the August 6th meeting of the Springdale Planning Commission. Brian Regli, a representative of Allegheny D.C. Property Co., presented a proposal to build “a 565,000-square-foot hyperscale data center and a 200,000-square-foot mechanical cooling plant” on the site. The data center would be the size of PPG Paints Arena (home to the Pittsburgh Penguins) and consume enough energy to power 150,000 homes in a town with a population just above 3,000. While details on where that power would come from and what impact it would have on the local grid are lacking, most likely the energy will be generated by burning natural gas extracted through fracking in the Pittsburgh region. What could have been a site honoring a pioneer of the environmentalism movement and showcasing Springdale’s unique history would instead be home to one of hundreds of generic data centers sprouting up throughout the country, significantly straining our power grids and spiking carbon emissions that are already tipping our planet closer to a climate catastrophe.

It was no coincidence that the proposal for a Springdale “hyperscaler” came just a few weeks after the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at nearby Carnegie Mellon University, attended by both President Donald Trump and Governor Josh Shapiro. The event announced over $90 billion in private investment, tapping into the Pittsburgh region’s prowess in producing both AI talent and fossil fuels. Trump’s interest in pushing an AI data center boom is no secret. His 2024 electoral victory was funded by a who’s who of billionaire AI maximalists like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel. The mind-boggling spike in energy usage required to fuel AI computing also throws an enticing lifeline for the Republicans’ most faithful donor base, the fossil fuel industry, whose drilling and extraction were supposed to be sunsetting this decade due to the rapid adoption of green energy. For centrist Democrats like Shapiro, backing the AI data center boom burnishes his bona fides with the Abundance faction of the party that believes we must build, build, build our way out of the inequities and inefficiencies of a stagnating American economy.

This bipartisan capitulation to AI dominance is not particularly shocking, given that nearly every one of the ten most valuable companies in the world is deeply invested in the race for Artificial General Intelligence. All other horizons of human creativity and innovation have darkened, with an unprecedented percentage of investment capital now wagered on a bet that machines will solve all the problems that their human creators (who do not fully understand the internal workings of AI) could not. The dream of a Rachel Carson Center in Springdale died due to the lack of vision, courage, and leadership of centrist Democrats like Shapiro, whose fealty to corporate donors prevents them from even considering economic growth that does not pad the profit margins of the already obscenely wealthy oligarchic class. While Shapiro has proven a tough enough fighter against the Trump Administration on issues like education funding cuts to receive the fawning coverage of liberal media like The View and The Colbert Show, he has been more a collaborator than a fighter against the corporate elites that have slashed work forces, polluted the environment, and hollowed out the heart of towns like Springdale. With no credible opposition to fight the Republicans’ drive to rape and pillage the natural world, AI maximalism will swallow up the social resources and political energy needed to build projects that could benefit the world as a whole, projects like a Rachel Carson Center in her hometown of Springdale.

A deeper look into the sad story of Springdale reveals an even more disturbing view into the corrupting influence AI money will play on the policies of both major political parties in the years to come. Brian Regli, the lead developer who pitched the hyperscaler data center to the Springdale Planning Commission, did not assume his role based merely on an understanding of AI computing and real estate development. His political connections undoubtedly propelled his ascension to a position that will have him pitching AI data centers all throughout Western Pennsylvania. As the Pittsburgh Tribune Review reported, Regli “served as executive director of the Office of Critical Investments in Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration until April.” The fact that the lead developer was a former member of the Shapiro Administration confirms suspicions of the utterly amoral transactional nature of American politics, breeding a cynicism that often results in voters preferring the vulgarly flagrant greed of heartless Republicans over the thinly-veiled, two-faced greed of hypocritical Democrats. Under Shapiro’s “leadership” Springdale will likely lose its last best chance to honor its most famous resident, erasing its historical legacy, becoming just one of hundreds of American towns that will sacrifice their electricity, water, and unique character to be passive targets of profit extraction whose fate and future lie in the hands of the world’s most powerful corporations and wealthiest oligarchs.

“It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility,” Rachel Carson wrote in her essay, The Sense of Wonder. The spirit of the AI Revolution stands diametrically opposed to the sense of wonder toward the natural world that Rachel Carson hoped to inspire in her readers. AI enthusiasts instead seek to reorient our entire civilizational project toward a sense of wonder for all that is artificial, inhuman, and soulless, guided by a spirit of hubris rather than the humility urged by Rachel Carson. AI’s sense of wonder for the artificial leads us toward the destruction of the very natural world that gives us life, all in the naively arrogant belief that humans might give birth to a superintelligent being capable of undoing the unprecedented ecological destruction that brought it into existence.

Experts within the field of computer science routinely warn us that Artificial General Intelligence might destroy humanity and the earth itself, resulting in a silence more permanent, totalizing, and horrifying than anything Rachel Carson could have ever imagined. We should not forget that it was not inevitable fate but the deliberate choice of self-serving politicians that led us down this dark path, toward a bleak future where Springdale lies silent, except for the low, dystopian hum of a soul-sucking and energy-guzzling AI Data Center. A better world is possible, where the Springdale riverfront is alive with the buzzing of insects, the singing of birds, the laughter of children, and the conversations of environmental scientists from across the world. That world of natural beauty and fulfilled human potential will never come to pass until the corporate and political elites forcing the AI Revolution upon us are removed from power for good.

A few weeks ago, while writing a piece on Artificial Intelligence, I touched briefly on the concept of Roko’s Basilisk. A 2010 thought experiment named after the handle of a poster on the LessWrong rationalist web forum, Roko’s Basilisk, describes a monstrous superintelligence that would reward all who facilitated its development and punish all who tried to impede the rise of AI. Roko’s Basilisk is essentially a reboot of Pascal’s Wager for the digital age. In the 17th century, Blaise Pascal argued that belief in God was rational since the infinite rewards in heaven given for a life of faith multiplied by even the slightest chance of God’s existence would provide an expected return far greater than the sum of all the finite joys of faithless hedonism (not to mention the chance of eternal damnation that might come from living such a life). The Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment follows a similar line of thinking. Humans should faithfully promote Artificial Intelligence development since even if there is only the slightest chance of an all-powerful superintelligence like Roko’s Basilisk being created, that probability multiplied by the infinite pleasure or pain the Basilisk could inflict would make it rational to live according to the interests of our future AI overlord.

Does anyone outside AI web forums and Silicon Valley even care about Roko’s Basilisk? It’s hard to say whether the thought experiment has had any real-world consequences beyond sparking the unlikely romance of Elon Musk and EDM artist Grimes. Even if our elites are completely oblivious to the thought experiment, the willingness of both parties to take an “all in” energy strategy to satisfy AI’s unquenchable thirst for electricity suggests that the bizarre Silicon Valley cult of AI is mutating into a state religion that would be quite pleasing to Roko’s Basilisk.

Despite our political leaders bowing down at the altar of Artificial Intelligence, skeptics and critics of AI can rest easy for now. Nothing approaching Artificial General Intelligence is on the immediate horizon, and certainly nothing with the power, omniscience, and vindictiveness of Roko’s Basilisk. But there is another digital being already out there that should concern us, one far less complex and conscious than Roko’s Basilisk yet still capable of showering riches upon its believers while potentially inflicting financial ruin on those who doubt it and stand in its way. If the basilisk of Western mythology could be likened to a serpent or dragon, this digital creature would be much closer to a protozoan or a virus. But just like biological viruses can wreak havoc on world trade and destabilize governments, this simple digital organism has the potential to collapse our economy and facilitate the final oligarchic destruction of our Republic. The digital creature I am referring to is Bitcoin.

What could something so unintelligent and basic as Bitcoin have in common with the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful Roko’s Basilisk? If Bitcoin does anything well, it is remembering. As the first blockchain currency, Bitcoin’s main claim to fame is that it is an immutable ledger maintained by a decentralized network keeping track of every transaction ever made. This indelible memory allows Bitcoin to exhibit the Roko’s Basilisk-like quality of knowing exactly who supports it the most (i.e., who owns the most coins) and those who do not support it at all (i.e., those who own none at all). Like Roko’s Basilisk, Bitcoin’s supporters thrive (i.e., become richer) when Bitcoin becomes stronger (i.e., its price increases). Most importantly, this alignment of interests with a digital overlord (even one far less intelligent than Roko’s Basilisk) gives Bitcoin maximalists the incentive to boost its value even if that could mean accelerating climate change, destroying the dollar, and destabilizing democracy in the process.

The idea of a Bitcoin Basilisk provides a chilling new perspective to view the fiscal nihilism at the heart of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which adds $3.9 trillion to our national debt. Such reckless spending by Trump is most often explained by referencing the Republicans’ toxic blend of greed, stupidity, and cruelty. That point is hard to dispute when the ruling party is slashing Medicaid to fund billionaire tax cuts, armies of masked ICE agents prowling America’s streets, and the construction of detention camps surrounded by alligators. The fact that the One Big Beautiful Bill also causes a dangerous ballooning of national debt is explained away by the idea of Republicans playing a short-term strategy based on electoral cycles, knowing Democrats will have to share the long term fiscal conseqences of this debt burden and will quite likely have to shrink the size of a federal government that Republicans are all too happy to dismantle. But what if Republicans weren’t just indifferent and careless about our unsustainable national debt? What if there were a way for Republicans to personally profit from running up the national debt while simultaneously redistributing national wealth across partisan lines?

“For all cost cutting Republicans, of which I am one, REMEMBER, you still have to get reelected. Don’t go too crazy! We will make it all up, times 10, with GROWTH, more than ever before,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social June 29th, bullying the few remaining Republicans still wary of the disastrous fiscal consequences of his One Big Beautiful Bill. Passing deep tax cuts justified by the debunked notion that the cuts will drive economic growth has become a hallmark of the modern Republican Party. But unlike Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and himself in 2017, Donald Trump in 2025 is deeply invested in a business that stands to directly benefit if the creditworthiness of U.S. treasuries crumbles and our country descends into a sovereign debt spiral. Bitcoin Jumps After Trump Says Growth Will Offset Deficits, Boosting Bull Case for Bitcoin and Gold, CoinDesk declared shortly after Trump’s Truth Social post. The “Bull Case” mentioned in the article is an investment thesis prevalent in the crypto community asserting that America’s national debt is unsustainable, the dollar (like all fiat currencies) will inevitably fail, and eventually all investors will seek out gold, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as the only reliable stores of value in a world where the global reserve currency has faltered. Since the value of a Bitcoin is most often measured in dollars, there is no meaningful difference between the implosion of the dollar and the explosion of Bitcoin, as well as all the lesser cryptocurrencies that swim in its wake. Trump’s One Big Beautiful feeds the Bitcoin Basilisk in two ways: (1) making dollar-dominated assets like US Treasuries more risky and less appealing to investors seeking a stable store of value; and (2) redistributing wealth away from public spending and into the deep pockets of the richest private investors who can buy more crypto now that their money is no longer going to Medicaid recipients or funding green infrastructure projects. The One Big Beautiful Bill is a wondrous gift to the Bitcoin Basilisk, and with the Trump family all-in on crypto (reportedly boosting their net worth by $2.9 billion), we are now facing a frightening scenario where the sitting President of the United States could grow his personal wealth exponentially if the United States defaults on its debt obligations and the dollar nosedives.

Since Trump was sworn in for his second term, the dollar has suffered its worst six months since 1973. Since Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill on July 4th, Bitcoin has broken out to a new high above $120,000. This price movement represents not just the change in a digital asset’s price, but also a change in the distribution of national wealth from those whose fortunes are tied to dollar-based assets and those whose wealth is concentrated in crypto. During previous crypto booms, this wealth shift had minimal political impacts. Just a few years ago, Donald Trump was calling Bitcoin “a scam against the dollar,” while crypto whiz kid Sam Bankman-Fried was the second largest contributor to his rival Joe Biden’s campaign. Yet, during Trump’s exile, he came to the realization that aligning himself with the Bitcoin Basilisk could lead to greater political power and more personal riches. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration and its SEC chairman, Gary Gensler, undertook measures to regulate the crypto industry that only agitated the Bitcoin Basilisk rather than significantly weaken it. Sensible, educated liberals spurned crypto as a scam and a Ponzi Scheme. Democratic lawmakers gave little thought to the political impact of a crypto boom and instead focused on mitigating the damage done to individual consumers and the banking system when crypto inevitably failed. What followed was the most terrifying mutation of the Bitcoin Basilisk we’ve seen to date: the alignment of crypto interest along partisan lines, with the fortunes of MAGA and crypto bros tightly intertwined.

During the next three and a half years, the Bitcoin Basilisk could very seductively whisper into Trump’s ear the most sinister of self-serving plans: defaulting on fiat dollar-denominated debt and pegging a new dollar to Bitcoin or a basket of cryptocurrencies. Trust could tout the benefits of inflating away our country’s debts to foreigners based on old dollars, while championing the long-term stability of a new dollar tied to a decentralized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin with a fixed supply of 21 million coins. Even just a Truth Social post from a deranged president hypothesizing such a plan could send shockwaves through the world financial system and profoundly reshape the distribution of national wealth away from dollar-invested Democrats to crypto-crazed Republicans. It is hard to see Trump having the self-restraint to resist such an opportunity to increase the wealth of not only his family empire but also the wealth of tech oligarchs and his MAGA followers. It is even harder to see him resist an opportunity to inflict financial pain on all the know-it-all liberals who have turned their noses up at crypto in favor of responsible investing in safe dollar-based assets like U.S. Treasuries. With the crypto industry emerging as one of the largest sources of campaign donations, a significant weakening of the dollar to the benefit of cryptocurrencies will profoundly shift the balance of political power, helping the Bitcoin Basilisk grow to monstrous proportions and influence electoral races across the country.

What can the Democrats do? Just bow down before the Bitcoin Basilisk and surrender to Big Crypto like they have surrendered to Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Tech? Hope that the Bitcoin Basilisk becomes collateral damage of Trump’s erratic tariff policies, or that it will be destroyed forever by advances in quantum computing capable of cracking the cryptography that secures the Bitcoin network? Continue pushing the kind of incrementalist efforts to regulate crypto that did little to thwart the rise of the Bitcoin Basilisk, even when they controlled the White House and both houses of Congress?

To defeat the Bitcoin Basilisk, Democrats should consider the strategy used to defeat the original basilisk of Western Mythology. Able to turn its enemies to stone by just looking them in the eye, the mythical basilisk could not be defeated by straightforward attacks but could only be slain by holding a mirror up to its eyes, turning its powers against itself. If we held a mirror up to the Bitcoin Basilisk, it would see that it is nothing more than the latest monstrosity spawned by an economy dominated by speculation and financialization, paired with the corrupting influence of runaway wealth inequality on democracy. With Democrats’ direct attacks on crypto likely to be as futile as straightforward attacks were on the mythological basilisk, they should instead focus their energies on building a populist movement for a Wealth Tax capable of reversing the most devastating impacts inflicted by the Bitcoin Basilisk. Unlike attacks by the mythological basilisk or Roko’s Basilisk, the Bitcoin Basilisk’s attack is neither permanent nor fatal, so long as we have a mechanism for wealth redistribution strong enough to reverse any impacts caused by Trump radically devaluing the fiat dollar against cryptocurrency. Our current income tax system will not be sufficient. Crypto whales with large stashes of highly appreciated coins would never sell them so they can avoid triggering income tax, and would instead employ the “Buy, Borrow, Die” strategy of borrowing devalued dollars against the collateral of their crypto horde. We need a Wealth Tax to directly tax the unrealized gains on assets like Bitcoin if they appreciate significantly. Without a Wealth Tax, one crazy move by Trump to peg the dollar to Bitcoin could reshape the landscape of American political and economic power for generations to come.

Even if crypto collapses on its own and the Bitcoin Basilisk ceases to be a threat, a Wealth Tax is the only way to undo the corrupting effects of obscene economic inequality. In a country where a small oligarchic elite can rig our elections and manipulate financial markets, it will only be a matter of time before monsters even more menacing than the Bitcoin Basilisk emerge from its carcass.

When you first see the child’s smiling eyes on the screen of your cellphone, you do not yet know her fate. If you take a moment to scroll down to the caption or click the story link in the Facebook Comments section, you will see one word that tells you what happened. Sometimes that word describes a joyful report of good fortune, like “rescued” or “saved.” More often, your heart sinks when you see the word “deceased” or “perished.” Other times, you see words like “recovered” or “lost,” words that are ambiguous until you read the article and realize that these girls also died in the flooding event that hit Central Texas in the early morning hours of America’s 249th birthday. At least 80 people have been confirmed dead in the aftermath of the flood, 27 of whom were campers at Camp Mystic, an all-girls Christian Camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River.

As a dad who has nervously dropped his daughters off at an overnight camp, it is sometimes too overwhelming to look into the eyes of the children lost in one of the worst floods to hit our country in decades. It is tempting to just scroll downward and numb yourself by watching a Facebook video of a middle-aged man opening packs of 1989 Upper Deck baseball cards or check out photos of RZA from the Wu Tang Clan attending a Phish concert. But even when you scroll downward, even when you turn off your phone, the eyes of the children lost in the flood haunt you, filling you with pangs of survivor’s guilt and the sinking feeling that in this age of unprecedented digital human connection we lack the ability to make meaningful changes that could honor the lives of the children lost by protecting other children who might be spared from the next climate catastrophe.

In a proper civilized society, our leaders would be moved by such a devastating loss of innocent life to seek any political solution that might prevent a similar tragedy from happening in the future. A proper civilized society would realize that the increasing frequency of these violent “once-in-a-century” meteorological events completely aligns with the warnings of climate scientists who have been pleading with us to address the threat of a warming planet for decades. A proper civilized society would take immediate action to reduce carbon emissions to fight global warming while increasing funding to enhance weather forecasting abilities and facilitate the exchange of information between meteorologists and local officials who can spread public awareness of weather threats and mobilize rescue operations before it is too late. Trump has done the exact opposite, gutting the Biden Administration’s green infrastructure projects and tax credits while enlisting Elon Musk and his DOGE goons to slash the budget and workforce of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency that oversees the National Weather Service. In a May open letter to the American public, former National Weather Service directors warned, “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.” Even Elon’s own Artificial Intelligence chatbot, Grok, affirmed the glaringly obvious logical conclusion that the Trump Administration’s policies contributed to the tragic loss of life at Camp Mystic.

Despite clear evidence that his policies exacerbated the death and suffering in Central Texas, Trump has shown no signs of contrition or self-reflection, instead pulling out the typical Republican talking point that any discussion of climate change or federal preparedness in the aftermath of the flooding is a “shameful and disgusting” act of politicizing a tragedy. To make matters far worse, the Congressional Democrats have defaulted on their duty as the supposed opposition to politicize a tragedy that was obviously worsened by the political choices of the Republicans. Both House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer issued statements that failed to mention climate change or NOAA cuts, and merely thanked first responders while adding weak promises to “closely monitor the situation.” With such a heartless ruling majority and such a gutless minority opposition, it is no wonder that average Americans feel powerless to advance political changes that could make themselves and their families safer.

The smiling eyes of the children lost in the Central Texas floods haunt us even more when they bring to mind the eyes of children who died in past tragedies with political implications that were never resolved out of fear that seeking solutions would be labeled “politicizing a tragedy.” In particular, they remind us of the 20 children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. The senseless slaughter of an entire first-grade class by a deranged gunman with a Bushmaster AR-15 felt like a turning point in a long-stagnated national debate on gun control. Barack Obama, the “Hope and Change” president, had just been re-elected, and there were few things Americans hoped to change more than the country’s lax regulation of high-powered firearms. Not only was the President freed from the political constraints of a re-election campaign, but Americans also had Facebook at their disposal, a social media platform that at the time was hailed as a game-changing tool to mobilize collective political action. This was before the bitter disappointments of the Facebook-based Arab Spring democracy movements became apparent, before the massacre of Rohingyas was stoked by Myanmar’s ruling junta’s use of Facebook, before Cambridge Analytica would use Facebook data to aid in Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 Presidential election. Sharing photos of the Sandy Hook victims on Facebook felt like the kind of mass action that could get Congress to act on gun control. Instead, the Sandy Hook tragedy would establish the algorithm for collective political inaction that today looms like an impenetrable barrier to any progress being made in the aftermath of the Camp Mystic tragedy. Liberals call for action on an issue, conservatives condemn them for politicizing a tragedy and offer nothing but “thoughts and prayers” instead, liberals mock the meaninglessness of thoughts and prayers, conservatives condemn the mockery of their supposedly sincere religious sentiments, liberals become repulsed that conservatives would care more about their hypocritical religious feelings than the lives of innocent children, conservatives would say the liberals were actually the snowflakes obsessed with their own feelings. The loop would go on and on, exhausting the psychic and political energy of all involved with little more to show for it than increased Facebook profits and the Sandy Hook parents being the object of impotent liberal pity and the target of harassment by vicious conspiracist conservatives. No change would come, and only hopelessness would remain.

The faces of the girls who perished at Camp Mystic also bring to mind another tragedy, one that happened a century before Sandy Hook, before the age of social media, television, and even broadcast radio. On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, most of them young women and girls. Many of the victims perished after jumping 9 stories to their deaths when they found some of the exits to the building had been locked by the company owners to make sure the garment workers stayed on task. Progressive reformers, union activists, and women’s suffragists were quick to politicize the tragedy, helping to galvanize widespread support for workplace safety regulations, labor rights, and child labor laws that we take for granted today.

Seeing recent Facebook posts blaming the tragedy at Camp Mystic on parents allowing their daughters to stay in cabins next to the Guadalupe River or Bill Gates and the Democrats for engineering artificial weather catastrophes, I wondered what would have resulted from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire had it happened in the age of social media. It is not hard to imagine how Facebook’s algorithm of collective political inaction might have stifled all the social progress made by the labor organizers and women’s rights advocates who unabashedly politicized that tragedy. Passionate voices of change would have taken primarily to their keyboards and cellphones rather than to the streets and the halls of political power. Principled and thoughtful discussion of social progress would have descended into a doomed loop of accusation and innuendo: blaming the workers themselves for smoking and dropping ashes into a basket of discarded cloth scraps, “thoughts and prayers” of factory owners mocked by their critics and defended by their supporters, completely unfounded conspiracy theories that socialists committed arson to advance their ideology, accusations of anti-Semitism against critics of the Jewish owners of the factory (even though most of the victims were also Jewish), mocking of the “luxury beliefs” of the upper class women who were advocates of reform, smug reminders that some of the exits were still left unlocked (no matter they were blocked by walls of flame), alarmist outcry about job losses that would result from stricter labor laws etc. The collective social momentum for change sparked by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire would have been exhausted on endless social media discourse rather than projected into domains of political power until meaningful legislation was passed.

Seeing Mark Zuckerberg standing front and center at Trump’s second inauguration should be definitive proof that social media is not a tool for collective political action on behalf of the masses but an instrument of social control used to protect the interests of an increasingly smaller and increasingly richer global elite. If we cannot honor the children who died at Camp Mystic by taking meaningful action on climate change, we should honor them by dismantling the social media giants who have made that kind of collective political action seem completely impossible. We should enact an aggressive Wealth Tax against the Zuckerbergs of the world, returning to the people the ill-gotten gains these tech oligarchs have made by destabilizing and demoralizing our society. We should convert social media platforms to public utilities that work on behalf of all of us rather than engines of rent-seeking profits for those who already have more money than they could ever hope to spend. Americans made real progress on child welfare, workplace safety, and labor rights in a time before Facebook. We should begin visualizing a future after Facebook if we want to make similar progress in fighting the scourges of gun violence and climate change that have taken the lives of far too many children without any meaningful change to show for it.

“Democrats have crossed the line by elevating a 100% Communist Lunatic,” Donald Trump declared after Zohran Mamdani emerged victorious in last week’s Democratic Primary for Mayor of New York City. Coming from Trump, who is fond of branding even the most milquetoast corporate-friendly Democrats “radical Marxists,” the scathing assessment of the 33 year-old Democratic Socialist assemblyman was no surprise. Yet in the days after the mayoral primary, it would not just be Trump and his MAGA groupies condemning New York City voters for making a colossal error in picking Mamdani. The Economist characterized the Mamdani win as a victory for Trump. The Washington Post’s editorial board declared the voter selection of a socialist as “bad for New York and the Democratic Party.” For the centrists, Mamdani’s victory amounts to nothing short of political suicide by New York City voters, putting forth a radical leftist Muslim with unabashed pro-Palestinian sympathies as a very public face of the Democratic Party when the country is still supposedly within the grips of a rightward cultural vibe shift in the wake of the 2024 presidential election.

Those eager to contain the Zohran contagion to just New York’s Five Boroughs liken Mamdani to the second coming of Brandon Johnson, the progressive mayor of Chicago, whose 6.6% approval rating set a new standard for political ineptitude. Both veterans of the late 2010s and early 2020s activist movements calling for police reform and increased public spending on social services, Mamdani and Johnson fit a similar progressive stereotype. But while Johnson arose through the gears of Chicago machine politics (public school teacher to active member of the Chicago Teachers Union to County Councilman to mayor), Mamdani secured a primary victory by taking on Andrew Cuomo, heir to one of the greatest dynasties in the history of New York State politics. While Johnson is chronically indecisive and finds ways to alienate even his one-time staunchest allies, Mamdani is confident and charismatic. Even to those who do not share his politics, Mamdani shines as a preternaturally gifted politician. RememberAmalek, a user on the crypto-based betting platform Polymarket, bet on a Mamdani victory after studying Zohran’s speeches and social media feed, concluding, “this guy was brilliant, but a narcissistic sociopath.” Recognizing Mamdani’s political potential when the socialist long shot was only polling 8%, RememberAmalek would rake in over $300,000 in Polymarket winnings for correctly guessing the unlikely outcome of the New York City mayoral primary.

Let’s play a political word association game. When I say “narcissistic sociopath,” what politician do you think of? Probably not Brandon Johnson. Even if you are a Republican, you probably couldn’t help but think of Donald Trump when hearing those words. Which makes us wonder, what if Zohran Mamdani is not the next progressive flake to tarnish the Democrats’ brand but rather the Democratic Donald Trump that party strategists have searched for in vain over the past decade?

Comparing Zohran Mamdani to Donald Trump will likely trigger waves of nausea in each one’s respective political base. Could there be anything more different from a 33-year-old immigrant, socialist Muslim, than a 78-year-old white Republican who has gained power through the ugliest mix of crony capitalism and xenophobic racism? Maybe not, but that does not mean there aren’t parallels between Trump and Mamdani that go beyond a similar Big Apple swagger. Both have been able to acknowledge their privileged upbringings without losing their populist shine: Trump brushed off his real estate mogul father’s financial support as a “small loan,” while Mamdani (son of an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and Ivy League professor) slyly admitted “nepotism and hard work go a long way.” Both have shown an ability to brush off statements that any sober strategist would deem career ending for a less gifted politician: Trump made significant gains with Latino voters despite calling Mexicans “drug dealers, criminals, rapists,” Mamdani won the mayoral primary in a city boasting the largest numbers of Jews outside Israel despite defending the slogan “globalize the intifada.” Most importantly, both Trump and Mamdani have a mastery over media that allows voters to feel an immediate personal connection to them. Trump harnessed everything from tabloid journalism to reality TV to Twitter in its infancy to simultaneously cultivate an image of billionaire grandeur and everyman accessibility. Mamdani’s famed TikTok videos run the gamut from disarmingly goofy to soberly urgent, all the while forging a personal bond with the viewer. Mamdani’s political career has been a short one. But from what we’ve seen so far, few Democrats have shown more potential for becoming a legitimate Donald Trump of the Left than Zohran Mamdani.

It would be easy to overemphasize the autobiographical and stylist similarities between Trump and Mamdani without digging deeper into the true root cause of their appeal. Too often, Democratic strategists attempting to neutralize Trump’s appeal focus on transparent messaging gimmicks and half-hearted pivots to the right on policy, e.g., taking shots in the media against wokeness, camouflage Harris-Walz trucker hats to rival the bright red MAGA standard, tough on immigration rhetoric during reelection years, etc. This fixation on superficialities prevents many Democrats from seeing what may be the primary source of Trump’s appeal to his followers: an ability to push the horizons of political possibility in clear, tangible ways. From forcing Mexico to build a wall on the Southern Border to seizing control of Greenland to the deportation of migrants by the millions, Trump presents to his followers a vision of America transformed by his policies, a new reality that voters could see and feel in their everyday lives. Revulsion toward the cruelty and chauvinistic nationalism animating these policies has prevented liberals from understanding that a true Democratic counter to Trump can only come from a candidate who also presents a vision of expanded political possibility built on policies that change the material reality of voters’ lives.

Zohran Mamdani’s surprise primary victory and emergence as a rapidly rising star on the national political scene are attributable more to the substance of his platform than the style of his campaigning. Just like Trump tossed red meat to right-wing voters tired of establishment Republicans’ vague promises of “immigration reform,” Mamdani’s platform makes clear, tangible promises of financial relief to voters who are tired of establishment Democrats’ vague promises of an “opportunity economy.” Mamdani promises a rent freeze, free mass transport, free childcare, and city-owned grocery stores. These are solutions to pocketbook issues with an impact that voters can immediately and tangibly see in their pocketbook without going through the typical Democratic Rube Goldberg Machine of means testing, tax credits, and corporate subsidies. To right-wing Republicans and a good many Wall Street liberals, Mamdani’s platform will come off as repellent as Trump’s immigration policies are to Democrats. Any Free Enterprise Fundamentalist who has bothered to read the introduction of a Milton Friedman book will scoff at the idea of any government service being “free” and warn of the black markets to be created by rent freezes. But to the Democrats who voted in New York City’s primary, it is Mamdani’s boldness to push against the limits of what we deem politically possible that inspired them to vote for him. Voters want candidates who dare to try something that the pundits and experts tell them cannot be done. Mexico never built the wall, Denmark still owns Greenland, and Trump’s enforcement of mass deportation orders looks more like a futile theater of cruelty than a genuine solution to America’s economic woes. Yet in promising bold things, Trump has won the ardent devotion of his followers. Zohran Mamdani might never get that city-owned grocery store up and running, but his efforts to expand the horizons of political possibility will likely win him a similar level of devotion from New Yorkers who gave him their vote.

There is a word we use to describe those who expand our horizons of political possibility. They are called leaders. Love him or hate him, Trump has been the most transformative leader in 21st-century American politics. Similarly, the nationwide excitement sparked by the New York mayoral primary is attributable to the fact that Zohran Mamdani is something Democratic voters rarely get to see: a true leader. Sure, we are all familiar with the leaders of the Democratic Party, but that does not mean we get the opportunity to vote for true leaders from the Democratic Party, candidates that inspire us to believe that a truly better America is possible. This was not always the case. FDR led our nation through the Great Depression and much of the Second World War, inspiring us to believe in a society where all Americans could be assured that their basic material needs would be met. LBJ led America through the heartbreak of the Kennedy Assassination and inspired us to believe that we could win a War on Poverty, protect the civil rights of all citizens, and establish the Great Society. Yet with the emergence of the professionalized New Left, the Democratic establishment would place its faith not in leaders of society but in managers of government bureaucracy and public opinion. Lacking a clear policy agenda, Jimmy Carter was enlisted to manage America’s crisis of confidence and spiritual malaise in the fallout after Watergate. Bill Clinton managed the reconciliation of Baby Boomer liberals’ desire to advance the cultural priorities of the 60s with their growing embrace of the economic policies of the Reagan 80s. Barack Obama managed to channel America’s desire for hope and change toward symbolic and tokenistic achievements while leaving intact Wall Street and Silicon Valley’s dominance over the Democratic Party. And Joe Biden was entrusted with managing America’s path to post-Trump normality, only to have his obvious struggles with managing his aging self open the door for a more vengeful and demented second Trump Administration than what would have been installed had he won reelection in 2020. Democratic power brokers have created a culture where becoming a leader of the Party requires attributes of a meek follower rather than a bold leader of society at large, a trend that reached its tragicomic climax when 2024 nominee Kamala Harris could not name one thing she would have done differently from her boss, Joe Biden. In such bleak circumstances, it is no surprise that Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign would inspire hope in Democratic voters starving for real leadership.

The Democratic establishment must reform a culture that elevates followers over leaders to positions of power if they don’t want Americans led by the likes of Donald Trump or Zohran Mamdani. If a candidate is not free-spirited and charismatically compelling enough to be accused of being a “narcissistic sociopath,” they are not capable of being the kind of true leader this moment in history requires. Moderate Democrats will take some solace in the one crucial fact about Zohran Mamdani that prevents him from ever truly being the liberal Donald Trump: born in Uganda to non-American parents, Mamdani could never become president without a most unlikely amendment to the Constitution. Mamdani’s ineligibility for the highest office should not make the Democratic establishment complacent. Power is not limited or defined by official titles. If the Democratic establishment can give us presidents who are not true leaders, then their grip on power might need to be broken by a true leader who could never be president.

AI is a cult. You hear this claim thrown around so often that it has taken on the ring of a cliche or a truism. But like most truisms, the expression wouldn’t have caught on without there being more than a little truth behind it. Like most cults, AI culture is built around an end times narrative, an eschatology centering on the “singularity” (the pivotal point of recursive superintelligence when computers become better at building themselves than humans) that can skew either apocalyptic or utopian depending on one’s perspective. AI culture comes with its own myths and monsters, like Roko’s Basilisk, born out of a thought experiment positing that once a sufficiently powerful and conscious Artificial General Intelligence was birthed, it would punish or reward all human beings based on their previous efforts to either stifle or facilitate the rise of AI. The Zizians, a bizarre cult-like group allegedly responsible for a cross-country murder spree leaving six dead, originated in rationalist communities of programmers bitterly divided over whether AI was the salvation or damnation of humanity. The question of whether the Artificial Intelligence industry itself is a cult may still be open for debate, but the fact that AI can inspire cult-like thinking and behavior is beyond dispute.

Having lived in Silicon Valley for a decade and a half, I had a few firsthand run-ins with AI enthusiasts whose faith and fervor could be described as nothing less than religious. AI promised an inversion of traditional creation myths: imperfect humanity would now be the creator, not the creation of a perfect superintelligence. When I left Silicon Valley to return to my hometown of Pittsburgh in 2018, I would have wholeheartedly agreed with the statement that AI was a cult. Now I am not so sure.

Cults, by most definitions, are marginal communities, existing on the fringes of society, sequestered away in remote compounds and rural retreats. Cults have minimal interactions with cultural trends and economic systems, often maintaining their ritual purity and control over members by removing them from the day-to-day affairs of mainstream society. While cults can wield political power, they usually do so in communities that are themselves on the fringe of the broader national culture, e.g. Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in the extremely liberal 1970s Bay Area, or the Christian Identity Posse Comitatus movements in far-right Mountain West communities in the 1980s and 1990s. Cults survive and thrive on society’s cultural, economic, and political margins.

With the Artificial Intelligence Industry now firmly implanting itself within the center of America’s cultural, economic, and political mainstream, we need to rethink the common trope of describing AI as a cult. Describing it as a cult makes AI sound far more fringe, and therefore far less menacing, than it actually is. Culturally, the impending impact of AI is undeniable. On a daily basis, we see pieces written by illustrators, screenwriters, graphic designers, architects, and actors warning of AI’s potential to fundamentally alter artistic production. Politically, both major parties have tightly aligned with the AI industry, from AI Accelerationists like Mark Andreeson emerging as key figures in the new MAGA coalition that reinstalled Trump in the White House to the Abundance liberals promoting a Democratic economic policy that would push aggressive all-of-the-above energy production to feed AI’s insatiable thirst for electricity.

Of course, this political and cultural influence is a function of AI’s growing centrality within the American economy, especially the grotesquely outsized role AI investment will play in the long-term financial future of the country. Google “Top 10 most valuable companies by Market Cap” and then Google “Ten Best AI Companies.” You will find it hard to differentiate the two lists. Other than Saudi Aramco, all of the 10 most valuable companies in the world are deeply focused on AI. The most valuable company in the world, Microsoft, revived itself from a 90s has-been primarily through its exclusive early partnership with OpenAI inked in 2016. NVIDIA, a close second in market cap, is the world’s leading maker of GPUs needed to run the most advanced AI processors, fueling an over 10x growth in NVIDIA’s stock price since AI mania took off in 2022 with the unveiling of publicly accessible ChatGPT. To make matters much worse, the market cap of these most valuable companies dwarfs the value of smaller companies by a magnitude unprecedented in modern stock market history. The Top Ten most valuable stocks (nearly all heavily invested in AI) now account for 38% of the entire value of the S&P 500 - since 1880, the highest prior level of top-heavy concentration peaked at 28%. In other words, America has staked unprecedented amounts of our national wealth on the economic viability of a technology that even its developers admit to not truly understanding. Having wagered our cultural, political, and economic future on the uncertain emergence of Artificial General Intelligence, it is clear that AI has transcended its cult-like origins to become a force that more closely resembles an official state religion of 21st-century America.

By “official state religion” I am not talking about some repressive theocracy like Taliban Afghanistan or even the Islamic Republic of Iran (which Trump has committed American blood and treasure to attack), but rather something more along the lines of the Anglican Church of England in the UK or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Finland. To be an official state religion, there need not be a coercive attempt to get the citizens to practice or even believe the faith, just special protections and privileges bestowed upon it by the ruling elite and significant financial support extracted from the general population. For today’s primarily secular Brits and Finns, official state religions may have no impact on their spiritual life while still influencing their nation’s culture, politics, and economy.

We see AI taking a similar role in the lives of millions of Americans who might have no meaningful opinion on a technology that seems poised to consume and subsume every element of their day-to-day life within years. Collective social spending (public and private combined) on AI in America dwarfs social spending on state religions in modern countries and is approaching the level of wealth ancient and medieval civilizations spent on their houses of worship and veneration. The Mesopotamian elites built Ziggurats. Ancient Egyptians built pyramids. Medieval Christendom built cathedrals. 21st-century Americans build endless stretches of server farms and power plants to sacrifice a warming planet in hopes that a benevolent or at least benign superintelligence will emerge to save us. Techno-optimists will scoff at such a comparison, claiming that these monumental building projects to create AI infrastructure are guided by science, not superstition. Yet with the very creators of AI like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei admitting, “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work,” the line between faith and reason is becoming less and less easy to discern. This blind faith in AI development marks a critical inflection point where we have gone from a speculative economy to a speculative civilization, ruled by elites whose legitimacy is now dependent upon a technology they no longer understand. Like all societies committed to an official state religion, we are devoting enormous amounts of our social resources to accommodate a higher power beyond the control of mere mortals.

The fact that AI is morphing into a state religion does not necessarily mean it has shed all of its cult-like attributes. Cults can still grow and flourish within the protective shell of a state religion. Rasputin was a mystic cult leader whose influence was based in part on his reputation as a monk operating under the auspices of the Russian Orthodox Church, even if he held no formal position within the empire’s official state religion. Rasputin gained power over Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, by offering hopes for the future of the Romanov Dynasty, claiming to miraculously heal the hemophiliac czarevich Alexei. Over 100 years later, the cult-like svengalis of AI Acceleration are whispering in the ears of America’s political elite, offering a miraculous cure for an anemic economy beset by decades of stagnation and growing inequality. Without any clear plan of how to harness AI to protect humanity, how to deal with its impact on labor markets, or even an understanding of how and when Artificial General Intelligence will emerge, the AI accelerationists are the miracle faith healers of our ailing economy, offering a panacea to save our corporate and political elites from the failed trickled down promises of the neoliberal era.

Whether AI evangelists like Sam Altman or Mark Andreesen will damage Trump’s legitimacy in the same way Rasputin discredited Czar Nicholas II remains to be seen. What we do know is that the fate of our current elites hangs in the balance of how this all-in bet on AI cashes out. In the same way that World War I was the last gasp of the Old World aristocratic elites (who made themselves fabulously wealthy through colonialism while providing only modest benefits to their subjects), the rise or fall of AI will be the defining moment for the Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites (who have made themselves fabulously wealthy through financialization of an economy that has yielded very modest returns for the average American). If AI turns out to be the Mother of All financial bubbles, then we will witness the same level of elite wealth destruction not seen since the euthanasia of the rentier class triggered by World War I and World War II. This may result in greater wealth equality like America experienced from the period of 1945-1975, but not without wreaking havoc on the vast numbers of average Americans whose pensions, 401(k)s, and retirement savings are dangerously overinvested in companies exposed to the AI industry. Yet, the average American may be even worse off if the all-in bet on AI pays off and tens of millions of jobs are automated away at a time when our political leaders seem more interested in unraveling our social safety net rather than reinforcing it. Even if the monumental bet on AI pays off for the elites, the average American looks set to lose unless dramatic amendments are made to our social contract. All the Studio Ghibli image generators, shrimp Jesuses, and the other forms of AI Slop better prove to be a stronger “opiate of the people” than anything ever devised by a state religion. Otherwise, our elites and their AI false messiahs may join the Romanovs and Rasputin in the dustbin of history.

If there is a moment of peak pop culture cringe surrounding the social justice movements of the late 2010s, the crown would have to go to Pepsi’s 2017 commercial “Live For Now.” The commercial centers around a mass of telegenically diverse millennials gathering in protest, carrying signs with vaguely progressive messages like “Love” and “Join the Conversation.” As a line of police officers face down the protestors, the tension is broken by model Kendall Jenner approaching one of the cops and handing him a Pepsi. The commercial was widely panned and promptly yanked from the airwaves after Pepsi received backlash for blatantly trivializing and monetizing Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements that were gaining momentum during Trump’s first presidency.

While Pepsi’s “Live For Now” campaign has been relegated to the Advertising Hall of Shame, Democratic lawmakers and liberal pundits have reacted to the ongoing demonstrations in Downtown Los Angeles as though those protesting ICE’s crackdown on immigrant communities were all carrying signs reading, “Join the Conversation.” Endorsements of peaceful protest against Trump’s immigration policies were quickly qualified by unsolicited advice on messaging, optics, and decorum: quit torching Waymo driverless taxis, knock off the profane graffiti, maybe swap those Mexican flags with American ones.

It’s a peculiar habit of today’s Democrats to interpret every act of resistance against authoritarianism as a statement in some broader national dialogue, a conversation that every important Democrat is compelled to join and moderate to assure optimal results in the next electoral cycle. A similar sense of ownership over right-wing protest does not appear to be a Republican thing. I don’t remember conservative pundits advising participants in Charlottesville’s 2017 “Unite the Right” rally to maybe ditch the torches for glow sticks to give the event a more friendly rave vibe rather than the hellish glow of a Klan Rally. On January 6th, 2021, I recall Republican Senator Josh Hawley giving the angry mob a triumphant fist pump rather than reminding them that violence is never the answer and that law enforcement personnel should be respected. There is something unique within the Democratic Party’s ideological DNA that compels its members to compulsively gesture solidarity with protest movements while simultaneously critiquing the tone and tactics of its participants.

The Democrats’ sense of ownership over mass demonstrations is maybe not all that surprising, given that the Party’s current power structure was forged in the New Left student protest movements of the 1960s. The New Left would emerge as the dominant force in the aftermath of the disastrous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago that pitted college-educated anti-war baby boomers against an Old Left dominated by labor unions and big city bosses who ruled over white ethnic neighborhoods like personal fiefdoms. Through the closing decades of the 20th century, the Democrats drifted more toward neoliberal centrism on economic issues but still regarded themselves as the responsible outlet for the restive energies of protestors calling for social justice and the inclusion of historically oppressed minorities. Democrats regarded the young, idealistic activist as the larval stage of party members who could one day metamorphose into pragmatic, moderate statesmen like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Youth activists were enlisted as ground troops for getting out the vote, yet in exchange for recognition by the party, any liberal movement would need to listen to the advice of elder statesmen eager to temper any overzealousness that might alienate the Democrats from the much-coveted swing voter. If activists were taking their message to the streets, the Democratic Party felt that they had the right and the imperative to join the conversation to ensure youthful enthusiasm did not torch the party’s political capital like a wounded Waymo.

The stand-offs in the streets of LA over the past week should make us question the wisdom of Democrats’ compulsion to “Join the Conversation” every time there is resistance to the authoritarian overreach of Republicans. Unlike the upcoming “No Kings” demonstrations, which are being funded and promoted by “Good Billionaire” heiress Christy Walton, the LA protests were not premeditated, hierarchical operations planned with a calculated attempt to shift the opinion of the electorate. From what we know, the Angelenos who first rose up in resistance to ICE were acting from a much more personal, primal impulse to protect friends and family from being disappeared by an administration that often takes sadistic glee in terrorizing immigrant communities and flouting the rule of law. Of course, other elements have joined the LA protests to advance their own agendas, but those who initiated this resistance were probably not looking to start a national conversation; they were fighting against the very real possibility that those they loved might never be seen again. The raw human emotion at the root of these protests is trivialized by reducing it to a dialogue that any member of the liberal commentariat or the DNC is entitled to guide with unsolicited advice on messaging discipline.

It’s time to face the fact that this intimacy between the Democrats and American protest movements is a mutually detrimental relationship. The sense of ownership Democrats feel over protests inevitably paints them as sympathetic to the demonstrators’ most destructive actions, despite relentlessly differentiating in interviews between good, peaceful protesting and bad rioting. The limits of lawful, peaceful protest in the face of the Trump administration’s lawless violence were put on shocking display Thursday with the forceful removal of California Senator Alex Padilla from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference. If Trump is willing to rough up a Senator to “liberate” Los Angeles from “socialists,” there is no telling what he will do to any of Padilla’s nameless constituents who challenge his authority in the streets. By instructing protestors to keep protesting but remain peaceful, sympathetic Democrats give Trump the cover of saying his political opponents are inciting insurrection while leaving protestors vulnerable to physical brutality at the hands of federalized forces under Trump’s command. More cautious Democrats who are obsessed with wooing independent voters should refrain from coaching protesters to do better and instead wash their hands of responsibility entirely, suggesting that these kind of reactions are inevitable in the face of Trump’s tyrannical policies while asking voters whether they think $134 million to round up hardworking day laborers and domestics is taxpayer money well spent. If anything, independent voters would likely have more sympathy for the LA protests if they felt participants were reacting out of the understandable fear of having their families torn apart rather than trying to push a national dialogue to help the Democrats take the midterms.

We only have to look at the track record of protest movements since the rise of the New Left to further confirm the intuition that those demonstrating in the streets of LA might be better off without overcoaching by Democratic lawmakers and liberal pundits. The Kent State massacre of 1970, a tragedy that many thought would finally confirm the righteousness of the anti-war cause, only played into Nixon’s narrative that a Silent Majority was exhausted by liberal protest movements stoked by Democrats. Relentless marches by feminists throughout the 1970s could not get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. The LA Riots of 1992 did little more than push both the Republicans and the Democrats to the right. The Battle of Seattle in 1999 could not stop the WTO from bringing China into the fold. The economic gap between the 1% and 99% has grown drastically wider since Occupy Wall Street packed up and left Zuccotti Park in 2011. March For Our Lives did not yield much other than quasi-celebrity status for school shooting survivor David Hogg, whose position as a DNC Vice Chair was scuttled after he suggested primarying ineffective Democrats, not a surprising stance after the failure to pass meaningful gun control promoted by the 2018 march he led. 2020’s Summer of Reckoning, after the murder of George Floyd, gave us the spectacle of white Congress members kneeling in Kente cloth and new standards of speech and decorum in professional spaces, but little racial progress outside the purely symbolic realm. It is hard to look back on the past 60 years of American history and not suspect that the New Left Democratic Party has been more of a shock absorber than a facilitator of social change.

If anything, the assumed leadership by the Democratic Party over protest movements has created the worst of both worlds: fodder for the Republican narrative that Democrats are a party of radical agitation, while Democrats simultaneously sap the spontaneous, grassroots energy of the movements they try to direct. We are at a crossroads where passively joining the conversation is no longer an option. Democrats must either join the movement as private citizens out in the streets or refrain from offering unsolicited advice to spontaneous and organic acts of defiance against Trump. Merely offering passive support and advice to protestors will be construed by Trump as seditious obstruction of justice anyway. If Trump is hellbent on escalating tensions toward civil war, then resistance to his authoritarian impulses is too important to be led by a Democratic Party that has abysmal approval ratings and a National Committee Chairman who whispers privately, “I’m not sure I want to do this anymore.” The more Democrats try to passively direct anti-Trump movements, the greater the chance that political violence will escalate across current partisan lines, putting both elected officials and demonstrators in greater danger. The suffering and loss caused by a Red vs. Blue conflict is almost too painful to fathom. This morning’s assassination of Minnesota State Representative Mellissa Hoffman and the attempted assassination of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman, both Democrats, presents a chilling preview of potentially dark days ahead.

We may be approaching a point where the only way to avoid a violent struggle between millions of Republicans and millions of Democrats is to reorient these partisan energies toward a nonviolent struggle between 902 billionaires and the rest of the nation. The struggle against Trump needs to be part of a broader populist people’s struggle against the corporate and political elites who failed us, not the heightening of partisan tensions until the bullet is substituted for the ballot as a means to resolve conflicts between Democrats and Republicans. Until the Democratic Party is ready to make the leap from “No Kings” to “No Billionaires,” any attempt to lead resistance movements against Trump will only make this moment in history all the more perilous.

There is something peculiar about the Abundance debate supposedly raging within the Democratic Party. In the months since the release of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s New York Times bestseller Abundance, the debate over this new vision for Democrats feels both tediously stale and woefully underdeveloped. Maybe it’s because many of Klein and Thompson’s most vocal critics on the progressive left, who dismiss Abundance’s deregulatory agenda as rebranded neoliberalism, have admitted to never even reading the book. Maybe it’s because those like me who have read the book found it so lacking in details about the political power dynamics needed to make Abundance a reality that there wasn’t all that much of substance to engage with. It’s hard to argue against promises of cheap electricity and affordable housing, especially if there is no honest accounting of who would be the winners and who would be the losers in a Democratic regime guided by the Abundance agenda.

My sense of why this debate seems so fruitless and why many Abundance skeptics never even bothered to read the book is that we know the debate really isn’t happening at all within the Democratic Party. Consequential debates don’t usually happen within the highest ranks of the Democratic Party, at least not until something undeniably dire happens, like watching a sitting President struggle so badly in a debate that casual observers are forced to question whether he is capable of caring for himself, let alone capable of leading our entire country another four years. Anyone with a keen ear listening to the way Democratic superstars have been talking lately will realize that there is no debate about the Abundance agenda within the party establishment. The Abundance agenda is a done deal. In its recent article Can the ‘Abundance Agenda’ Save the Democrats? The Wall Street Journal has keyed us in on just how deeply entrenched Klein and Thompson’s thinking has become within elite Democratic circles:

Democratic politicians are rushing to embrace the new mantra. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis have all name-checked it publicly. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker discussed it at length in his recent 25-hour Senate speech. Former Vice President Kamala Harris and the U.S. Senate’s Democratic caucus are among the many politicians who have recently sought the authors’ counsel. Not one but two congressional caucuses have recently formed to push legislation advancing the ideas laid out in the book.

In the party’s typical top-down, hierarchical style, the Democratic establishment has decided its voters are getting the Abundance agenda whether they like it or not. We are now even getting glimpses of how Abundance would work as a Democratic agenda, not just in messaging but also in proposed legislation. In Pennsylvania, our Governor Josh Shapiro unveiled his “Lightning Plan,” an ambitious program to jumpstart an abundant energy future while paying homage to our state’s legacy of energy innovation stretching back to when Ben Franklin was conducting electricity from the sky with his kite. Like Ezra Klein’s Abundance, Shapiro’s vision is full of wonderful advancements that I would love to see in Pennsylvania’s future: cheaper utility rates, a more reliable electrical grid to endure intensifying storms, and 35% of the state’s energy generated from renewable sources by 2035. To make the Governor’s vision a reality, Pennsylvania’s Democrat controlled General Assembly introduced Pennsylvania House Bill 502, which would take the approval of energy-generating and storage facilities out of the hands of local municipalities and invest it in a newly formed Reliable Energy Siting and Electric Transition (RESET) Board. The accompanying memo to House Bill 502 sounds like snippets pulled directly from Klein and Thompson’s book, lamenting how “red tape” stifled energy innovation and declaring, “It’s time to build big things again in Pennsylvania.” What will actually get built is the big question. Will the RESET board be used to fast-track solar production in rural areas awash in Big Oil misinformation, or will it be co-opted by fracking companies eager to push forward gas-powered electricity plants without all the public outcry they normally face at municipal-level meetings? Only time will tell. But within House Bill 502, there are ominous signs that advancement of the Abundance Agenda in Pennsylvania will come at the cost of reinforcing some of the Democrats’ greatest political liabilities.

Abundance is Elitist

Within Democratic circles, Abundance has been presented as the more sensible alternative to the economic populism sweeping the country in the form of Bernie Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy tour. Despite recent polling showing Americans far more receptive to the populist message of fighting corporate power than the Abundance message of cutting red tape and pushing deregulation, Abundance enthusiasts have tried to avoid the elitist label by recasting the elites as busy-body rich liberal NIMBYs blocking new housing and energy projects rather than large corporations accumulating greater and greater amounts of our country’s financial wealth and political power.

Looking over the composition of the RESET Board created by PA House Bill 502, the charge of elitism against Democrats will be harder and harder to shake once Abundance principles are put into action by state legislatures. Who gets to sit on the RESET Board and decide where energy sector projects are sited in Pennsylvania? The Secretary of Community and Economic Development, the Secretary of Labor and Industry, the Chairperson of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, The President of the Pennsylvania Building and Construction Trades Council, The President of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, the Chairperson of the department's Environmental Justice Advisory Board etc. House Bill 502 takes power away from local elected officials and places it in the hands of unelected, appointed officials in Harrisburg, politically-connected elites from the state bureaucracy and industry trade groups. While this may be necessary for Governor Shapiro to advance his Lightening Plan and cement his status as one of the Abundance faction’s top candidates for a 2028 presidential nomination, House Bill 502 will only strengthen Republican portrayals of Democrats as an elitist party that takes power away from the people and their elected representatives only to transfer that power to the remote, faceless bureaucrats of the managerial state.

Abundance is Anti-Democratic

As a local elected official, I have found the best way to rebuild the trust in the Democratic Party is to be a relentless defender of my constituents against outside corporate interests seeking to profit off projects that threaten the public’s health, safety, and welfare. Taking a populist approach, I negotiate as hard as the law allows me against developers and frackers who want to make money in our Township but do not have to suffer the negative consequences inflicted on those who live around their operations. Maybe it was just a rationalization to find meaning in my relatively insignificant position as Township Supervisor, but I was inspired by the idea of local officials acting as protectors of the people’s interest as a way for the Democrats to win back the hearts of rural and suburban fringe voters who have felt abandoned by the party.

For those of us who campaigned or voted for Josh Shapiro, local control over the energy industry has been a sore spot of bitter disappointment. As our Attorney General, Shapiro convened a Grand Jury in 2020 that found the right to clean air and water guaranteed by the Pennsylvania Constitution was infringed by fracking operations closer than 2500 feet from residences and other inhabited structures. Under the 2012 law signed by fracker-funded Republican Governor Tom Corbett, local municipalities faced extreme legal risks when attempting to extend setbacks from fracking operations beyond 500 feet. With Shapiro’s win in the 2022 Governor’s race, there was a hope that even if he didn’t extend statewide fracking setbacks to 2500 feet, he would at least allow local elected officials to increase setbacks without facing crushing lawsuits from gas companies. He has done neither, instead choosing to cut deals with the same gas companies like CNX that he once prosecuted as AG, allowing them greater ability to self-regulate in exchange for trivial increases in setbacks far short of those deemed to be the constitutional right of all Pennsylvanians.

Rather than invest democratically accountable officials with greater local control over the energy operations our constituents fear and loathe, PA House Bill 502 builds upon Pennsylvania’s sullied legacy of stripping local communities of the power to safeguard citizens’ rights to clean air and water. Shapiro weakening democratic local control over energy projects without enacting the safeguards his own Grand Jury found to be the right of every Pennsylvanian is a slap in the face of every municipal-level Democrat who must now admit to their constituents that the Governor has weakened rather than strengthened our ability to protect them. We must tell the mom of the child struggling with asthma or the resident recovering from thyroid cancer that their safety is not in the hands of the person they know and voted for, but in the hands of unelected political insiders far away in Harrisburg. The Abundance Agenda enacted through PA House Bill 502 further solidifies the Republican talking point that Democrats are, in fact, not particularly fond of democracy.

Abundance is Corporate Coddling

No one who has interacted with me in the local political sphere would regard me as sympathetic to developers and frackers. But even I can feel vicarious discomfort watching their representatives squirm at a public hearing when the citizens pack the room to shout down their proposed projects in my Township. It’s a hard job, pitching these projects to the wary public. But that’s the way it should be. It is in these packed town halls where the voice of the people can be heard and the will of the people is felt. Unlike the Abundance crowd’s stereotype of the NIMBY as rich liberal hypocrites, those who show up at Public Hearings in my Township are often rural folk whose drinking well could be tainted by fracking fluid, whose homes could be inundated by run off from construction, and whose children’s lungs could be compromised by increased pollution. Rather than the tree-huggers and Nader’s Raiders villainized in Abundance, some of the strongest voices against these projects have come from residents wearing MAGA hats, thin blue line t-shirts, and other right-wing coded apparel. Unable to afford an attorney, many residents rightly view the Public Hearing at the town hall as the only chance to make their voices heard and protect their community.

Thanks to House Bill 502, Pennsylvania energy companies no longer have to pitch their projects in front of elected representatives who are directly accountable to the sometimes angry mob. Instead, they get to present their case to a RESET Board composed of members who are much more likely to know the corporate applicant’s Harrisburg-based lobbyists than any of the residents potentially adversely affected by approval of the project. A Public Hearing is still required under House Bill 502, but it does not require that the hearing be held in the municipality where the project is to be sited. Shielding companies from such intense public scrutiny is an exceedingly generous gift to the corporate sector, but in the eyes of Josh Shapiro and the rest of the Abundance crowd it’s the kind of red tape cutting we need to “Get Shit Done.”

You want to cut red tape? Fine, I do too. But access to clear air and water is not red tape, it is the constitutional right of every Pennsylvanian. If Josh Shapiro doesn’t want citizens to think he cares more about burnishing his presidential resume than the health, safety, and welfare of Pennsylvanians, he would at least protect us with 2500-foot setbacks from fracking operations before any energy projects get fast-tracked. The proposed RESET Board is not unique - most states rely on such boards rather than local officials to approve large-scale energy projects. But what is unique to Pennsylvania is our feeling of betrayal by Democratic state officials who we thought would fight to protect our constitutional rights from corporate interests, rather than shower those companies with tax breaks. Without a robust protection of citizens’ rights, Abundance is weak groveling at the feet of corporate interests masquerading as the kind of strong leadership needed to “Get Shit Done.” Prioritizing getting shit done without protecting the basic rights of the people will assure that whatever does get done will be shit for everyone but the corporations and the politicians who coddle them.

Will a full embrace of the Abundance Agenda doom the Democrats’ chances of reclaiming the White House in 2028? Not necessarily. The levels of incompetence and growing internal division within the Trump Administration (e.g, the escalating Elon-Trump catfight) coupled with an enduring mood of anti-incumbancy could all but guarantee a Democratic victory regardless of whether the party embraces Abundance elitism or anti-oligarchy populism. But a widespread adoption of Abundance policies will bang the final nail in the coffin of the Democratic Party’s tradition stretching from Jefferson to Jackson to FDR of standing up for the little guy against the moneyed elites. This is a serious political gamble, not the rosy win-win arrangement peddled by Klein and Thompson. Democrats are sacrificing the short-term political capital of being the common citizen’s defender of health, safety, and welfare in the hope that it will pay off in greater long-term political capital generated by job creation, cheaper energy, more affordable housing, etc. A similar gamble was made by the Biden Administration with an industrial policy wagering that the short-term costs of corporate-friendly tax breaks and monetary stimulus would be offset by long-term improvements in energy, transportation, and the cost of living. We know painfully well how those long-term strategies turned out in 2024 for Biden and his successor, Kamala Harris. John Maynard Keynes’ famous admonition, “in the long run we are all dead,” is all the more relevant within the four-year cycles of presidential politics. Before wagering all of our current political capital as defenders of the people against corporate interests, Democrats should heed Keynes’ warning and think twice about betting the farm on Klein and Thompson’s long-term vision of liberal Abundance. If the Democratic Party succumbs to death by Abundance, the supposedly sensible pro-corporate wing of the party will have no one to blame but themselves.