Mike McCready

Tag: history

  • Russia gets Ukraine, China gets Taiwan, And the US gets Greenland…. Wait! What?

    Russia gets Ukraine, China gets Taiwan, And the US gets Greenland…. Wait! What?

    For about 80 years, the United States pulled off something historically insane.

    We’re under 5% of the world’s population, yet after WWII we helped design—and then manage—a global system that made us wealthy, secure, and absurdly influential. Not because we were saints. Because we were smart.

    We didn’t run the world like a cartoon villain twirling a mustache.

    We ran it like a country that finally learned the lesson every previous empire missed:

    Fear works fast.

    Consent works longer.

    So instead of ruling by intimidation, we built a system other countries could live with—even benefit from.

    Alliances instead of vassals.

    Rules instead of permanent brinkmanship.

    Open sea lanes so global trade didn’t require every cargo ship to bring its own navy.

    A dollar-centered financial system that quietly turned the U.S. into the tollbooth for global growth.

    Were we perfect? Obviously not. Vietnam. Iraq. CIA adventures best left out of the brochure.

    “We’re here to help” has preceded some deeply unhelpful moments.

    But the model worked because power was paired with legitimacy. Countries didn’t just tolerate American leadership—they chose it. That’s why the unipolar moment didn’t immediately collapse. The world didn’t instinctively band together to knock us down the way it usually does with dominant powers.

    That wasn’t accidental. The arrangements we built were often win-win. Other countries gained security, access, and stability, while we gained influence, markets, and leverage. Everyone could live with the math.

    Then Trump arrived and declared America had been run by idiots.

    He rejects win-win deals on principle. If someone else benefits, he assumes we’re being cheated. That’s why he keeps insisting the U.S. has been “ripped off” by everyone—from allies to trading partners—and why his solution is always the same: make sure someone else loses harder than we do.

    His complaint wasn’t that the U.S. enforced the rules.

    America always enforced the rules.

    His problem was how.

    Where previous presidents used enforcement backed by legitimacy, Trump decided legitimacy was overrated. Too slow. Too many meetings. Too many adults in the room.

    Why persuade when you can threaten?

    So the tone shifted.

    Tariffs as punishment.

    Cooperation replaced with compliance.

    Diplomacy reduced to: Do what we want or your exports get 25% more expensive in the US market.

    That’s a shakedown.

    And shakedowns have a cost.

    Countries governed by fear don’t align—they hedge. They rewrite trade relationships. They diversify supply chains. They quietly build exits.

    They start asking a very dangerous question:

    What if America is the risk now?

    That’s how trust turns into contingency planning.

    At the same time, we’re being sold a shiny new global vision:

    A world carved into spheres.

    Russia handles “its” region.

    China handles “its” region.

    America pulls back to its own region, throws its weight around selectively, and keeps everyone nervous with tariffs.

    Congratulations. We’ve rebooted the 1914 server that brought us WWI.

    A tripolar world isn’t stable. It’s anxious. Transactional. Every country doing math it never wanted to do:

    Who protects me now?

    Who do I appease?

    Who do I pay off?

    What happens when the big guys disagree and I’m standing in the middle?

    That’s a tinderbox.

    So who in their right mind would trade global dominance for this?

    At first glance, it looks like incompetence.

    But there’s another explanation that fits the facts much better.

    If your goal is preserving American power, this strategy is insane.

    If your goal is personal enrichment, it makes perfect sense.

    A stable, rules-based world limits leverage.

    A fearful, fragmented world is ripe for shakedowns.

    A presidency spent at Trump-branded properties, charging governments and lobbyists for access.

    Foreign policy that mysteriously flatters regimes doing business with the Trump orbit.

    A son-in-law leaving government service and immediately receiving $2 billion from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund—over his own advisers’ objections.

    Policy “evolutions,” tariff exemptions, and sudden reversals that just happen to benefit friends and punish critics.

    No conspiracy theory required.

    It’s public. Documented. Often defended as normal.

    But taken together, the pattern is hard to miss.

    Trump isn’t dismantling the postwar order because he misunderstands it.

    He’s dismantling it because it doesn’t serve him.

    We didn’t build the American-led world out of charity.

    We built it because it made us rich, safe, and powerful beyond historical precedent.

    Tearing it down for personal gain isn’t populism.

    It’s looting Uncle Sam.

  • People sometimes ask if my politics are “far left.”

    People sometimes ask if my politics are “far left.”

    People sometimes ask if my politics are “far left.”

    They’re not.

    I’m center-left by any serious U.S. standard. Boring. Functional. Regulated-capitalism-with-guardrails center-left.

    I believe markets are useful but not moral.

    Capitalism works best when it’s regulated.

    Voting should be easy.

    The law should apply to everyone.

    Healthcare and education should be accessible.

    Public education should be well funded and not ideologically captured.

    Peaceful protest should be protected—even when it’s uncomfortable or disruptive.

    Religion should be protected—but not imposed.

    Pluralism is a strength, not a threat.

    That used to be called mainstream.

    I didn’t move left.

    I stayed put.

    If this now sounds radical, it’s not because these ideas changed.

    It’s because we quietly stopped agreeing on what democracy requires.

    In 1995, this would’ve made me a normal Democrat—or a very reasonable Republican.

    In 2026, it apparently makes me dangerous.

    What changed is the scenery.

    At some point, the party that wrapped itself in the American flag started flirting with foreign strongmen, talking about “illiberal democracy,” and—small detail—waving the Union Jack at rallies while lecturing everyone else about patriotism.

    That’s new.

    So when people call views like mine “radical,” I can’t help but wonder:

    When did believing in elections, rule of law, and regulated capitalism become the extreme position?

    If this is “far left,” the news isn’t where I stand.

    It’s how far the map has shifted.

    That’s where I stand.

  • How The US Stayed On Top for Decades

    How The US Stayed On Top for Decades

    For most of modern history, great powers didn’t have allies — they had enemies in waiting. When a country gets strong enough, everyone else starts planning for the day it turns on them.

    The United States was the exception.

    Not because we were perfect.

    Because we understood something basic: power works better when it looks like leadership instead of entitlement.

    I’ve been traveling internationally for about forty years. Here’s something that would shock most Americans who haven’t left the country in a while:

    Much of the world has moved on.

    Cities are cleaner. Infrastructure is newer. Trains run on time. Healthcare is simpler. Daily life, in many places, is smoother, safer, and more modern than what we tolerate at home.

    In some corners of the U.S., we look like the developing country now.

    You don’t see that if you never leave.

    And here’s why that matters.

    For decades, other countries put up with our messiness because we were predictable, fair enough, and broadly aligned with a rules-based system that benefited everyone.

    That’s changing.

    We walk away from international institutions like they’re optional.

    We talk openly about “running” other countries and taking their resources.

    We stop using the language of partnership and start using the language of ownership.

    That doesn’t project strength.

    It projects risk.

    And our allies are reacting exactly the way history says they should.

    Europe is building trade and security plans that don’t depend on Washington.

    Canada is quietly reassessing whether the relationship is still special.

    Mexico is hedging — paying protection money while preparing backup options.

    These aren’t acts of rebellion.

    They’re acts of self-preservation.

    Once a superpower starts saying, “Power entitles,” every smaller country asks the same question:

    Entitles you to what? And am I next?

    That’s how leadership collapses without a single shot fired.

    That’s how “America First” becomes “America Alone.”

    History is full of strong nations that ruled by fear.

    It’s also full of strong nations that woke up one day surrounded by better, calmer, more functional alternatives.

    America avoided that fate for a long time — not because we were saints, but because we understood that trust compounds.

    We’re burning that capital fast.

    And once the world learns it doesn’t need you, it doesn’t come back just because you feel tough.

    That’s the path we’re on.

    And it ends badly — not for them.

    For us.

  • That Was An Impressive Military Operation

    That Was An Impressive Military Operation

    Let’s admit something up front. There’s a visceral thrill when the U.S. military pulls off something genuinely hard. Precision. Surprise. Professionals being professional. The capture of Nicolás Maduro had serious action-movie competence. You can respect the execution without apology.

    I do. I’m human.

    I also tend to like things Russia hates. Same with China. Just the kinda guy I am, I guess. And they hate this. Which brings us to the cognative dissonance many of us feel but don’t know quite how to articulate.

    Because impressive isn’t the same thing as smart.

    And capability isn’t the same thing as judgment.

    Trump, naturally, was thrilled. Not just about the operation — about the idea of it. Talk drifted quickly from “mission accomplished” to “maybe we’ll just run Venezuela for a while.” Oil. Management. Fixing things. As if this were a distressed private equity deal and not a sovereign nation.

    Think about that for one second.

    This is the same guy who couldn’t run a casino, struggles to run the country he’s president of, and still hasn’t delivered on the things he actually campaigned on. Grocery prices? Healthcare? But sure — let’s add a collapsed petro-state to the to-do list. What’s one more tab left open?

    And let’s not pretend the timing is random. This is also a spectacular way to change the subject from the Epstein files. Trump himself once warned that desperate presidents start foreign conflicts to distract from bad news. He was right then. He just didn’t realize he was writing his own future Yelp review.

    Yes, Maduro was indicted years ago on drug charges. That part’s real. But when Trump starts openly talking about oil, the “this is about drugs” explanation starts to feel like set dressing. If this were really about narcotics, the press rollout would look very different.

    Here’s a quick thought experiment.

    If a foreign power snatched Trump out of the White House tomorrow and announced they’d “run the country for a bit,” would J.D. Vance nod gravely and say, “Well, fair is fair”? Of course not. He’d be on TV before the rotors stopped spinning, explaining why this was the end of civilization.

    Which brings us to the part that actually matters.

    This sets a precedent.

    Not a legal one. A behavioral one.

    And yes, people will notice. Especially Ukraine. When the most powerful country on Earth demonstrates that regime change is acceptable if you feel justified enough, you don’t get to act surprised when others adopt the same logic.

    So yes — the raid was slick. I won’t deny it. Who doesn’t enjoy watching the good guys win?

    The only problem is the quiet question underneath it all:

    Are we still sure we’re the good guys?

    Because adrenaline isn’t morality. Skill isn’t legitimacy. And flexing power without consistency isn’t leadership.

    It’s just bad precedent.

  • Why It’s So Hard To Change Someone’s Mind

    Why It’s So Hard To Change Someone’s Mind

    I used to believe facts were currency.

    If I put enough solid data on the table, I assumed the other person would eventually look at the pile, nod, and cash out their wrong opinion.

    This belief lasted longer than it should have. About as long as I believed eating cereal for dinner was a phase, not a lifestyle choice I would later defend vigorously.

    Here’s the uncomfortable reality:

    Facts don’t compete with other facts.

    They compete with identity.

    Most arguments fail not because the evidence is weak, but because the argument is aimed at the wrong target. We assume people are trying to be correct. Usually, they’re just trying to belong.

    Beliefs aren’t opinions.

    They’re uniforms.

    When you challenge someone’s belief, you’re not disputing a fact. You’re challenging their tribe, their past decisions, and the role they’ve been playing for years.

    That’s not a debate.

    That’s a threat assessment.

    This is why evidence loses to belonging.

    Once something becomes tribal, truth becomes secondary. Agreeing with the “wrong” fact isn’t growth — it’s defection. And people don’t defect casually, especially not in public, and especially not online.

    At that point, the argument is no longer about truth.

    It’s a loyalty test.

    This also explains why correcting people rarely works.

    Correction doesn’t feel helpful. It feels like exposure. The brain doesn’t hear new information — it hears you’re in danger. Curiosity shuts down. Defenses go up.

    The cleaner the correction, the harder people cling to the position. From the outside, this looks like stupidity. It usually isn’t.

    It’s self-preservation.

    Changing your mind is expensive.

    It costs pride.

    It costs status.

    Sometimes it costs relationships.

    Admitting you were wrong doesn’t update a belief. It rewrites a story. It forces you to revisit things you said, shared, defended — and sit with the possibility that you were wrong.

    Most people would rather be wrong than embarrassed.

    So bad arguments survive. Not because they’re persuasive, but because they’re safe. They keep you in good standing. They let you avoid that quiet, unwelcome realization — usually late at night — that you might have been played.

    I’m not exempt. I’ve held losing positions far longer than I should have because exiting felt like admitting defeat. Doubling down feels like strength, even when it’s just damage with confidence.

    Facts still matter.

    Just not on the timeline we want, and not in environments where being wrong carries a social cost. Facts work when accepting them costs less than ignoring them.

    Most public arguments fail for a simple reason.

    They think they’re debating information.

    They’re negotiating identity.

    And until we’re honest about that, we’ll keep wondering why the facts were solid…

    and the argument went nowhere.

  • Why a Photo from 2004 Looks Like It Was Taken Last Tuesday

    Why a Photo from 2004 Looks Like It Was Taken Last Tuesday

    You can look at a photo from the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s and instantly know the decade.

    Not the year.
    The decade.

    It’s in the lapels. The hair volume. The posture. Even the font on a street sign in the background feels time-stamped. Blur the faces and you’d still know where you were in the timeline.

    Now try that with a photo from 2003. Or 2012. Or last Tuesday.

    Remove the cell phone model from the frame and you’re guessing. A photo from 2004 could be from 2024. Step back far enough and the last twenty-five years collapse into a single, flat visual moment, like a hotel hallway designed to offend no one and be remembered by no one.

    Yes, digital photos don’t yellow. Everything looks permanently “now.”
    But the stagnation isn’t technological. It’s cultural.

    The monoculture is dead.

    For most of the 20th century, there was a current. You either swam with it or against it, but everyone was responding to the same force. In the 70s, you wore the polyester or you rejected it. Even rebellion was legible—because you knew exactly what it was rebelling against.

    Now? Every style that has ever existed is available simultaneously, usually for about fifteen dollars and free shipping. Nothing ever leaves. Nothing has to mean anything. We aren’t inventing new aesthetics—we’re just curating better playlists of the past.

    There is one exception, of course.

    Historians won’t struggle to date photos of people in MAGA hats and merch. Those will be instantly identifiable as 2015–2025—preserved in high resolution, forensically searchable, and destined to cause a very specific kind of generational embarrassment.

    Our cities followed suit. Neutral palettes. Exposed brick. The same sans-serif fonts everywhere. Drop a café from Brooklyn into Berlin or Barcelona and no one would blink. We built a global architecture of anywhere—comfortable, inoffensive, and, like Taylor Swift, impossible to date.

    So if fashion, architecture, and culture no longer mark time, what does?

    Politics.

    It’s the last remaining monoculture—the one thing we all still see, whether we want to or not. When culture fragments into a thousand niches, collective attention has to go somewhere. It went to the fight.

    The past had eras defined by how we looked.

    We have a long, endless present defined by what we scream at each other.

    And if future historians want to date our photos, they won’t look at the hemline or the haircut.

    They’ll look at the panic in our eyes.

  • I Fed My Entire Life Into ChatGPT and All I Got Was… Insight? Closure? Mild Humiliation? Hard to Say.

    I Fed My Entire Life Into ChatGPT and All I Got Was… Insight? Closure? Mild Humiliation? Hard to Say.

    At some point in adulthood, a man has to confront the paper trail he’s been leaving behind since childhood — the journals, the planners, the frantic lists written in moments of optimism and panic. Most people shove theirs in a box and wait for their kids to one day throw them out.
    I, on the other hand, uploaded mine into ChatGPT.

    Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this:
    If you give an AI 40 years of your handwriting, it will happily psychoanalyze you without even blinking.

    And yes, ChatGPT can read handwriting now.
    Let me repeat that for the people in the back:

    ChatGPT. Can. Read. Handwriting.

    Cursive. Print. Scribbles.
    The stuff I wrote in 1986 when my hormones were louder than my personality.
    The frantic 1991 Barcelona planner pages that read like I was being chased by creditors, self-doubt, and the ghost of my future obligations.
    The Day One digital entries chronicling my existential crises, business collapses, emotional resurrections, and occasional triumphs.

    It gulped it all down and said, essentially:
    “Thanks, Mike. Delicious. Here’s your life.”

    Apparently other people are doing this too.

    I thought I was being innovative — the first man to hand his entire autobiographical archive to a machine.
    Turns out, no.

    People across the internet are feeding their diaries, old letters, family archives, grief journals, therapy notebooks, and even high-school love notes into GPT. Some want closure. Some want clarity. Some want to rediscover who they were before life flattened them into mortgage-paying, sleep-deprived adults.

    We’re all out here saying, “Hey AI, decode me,” like it’s the world’s weirdest confessional booth.

    And honestly?
    It works.

    The Throughline of My Life, According to My AI Biographer

    After reading everything from my baby book to my Barcelona meltdown years, ChatGPT came back with a diagnosis I didn’t expect:

    I am a man who has been trying to get his life together since 1981.

    Not in a sad way.
    In a charming, heroic, repetitive way — like if Sisyphus had a Franklin Planner and high hopes.

    Every notebook, every decade, every entry seems to include some variation of:
    “Tomorrow I get my shit together.”

    It’s practically my family crest.

    The other throughlines didn’t surprise me as much:

    • I reinvent constantly.
      Apparently I have shed more skins than a reptile with commitment issues.
    • I archive everything.
      Why live a life when you can also footnote it?
    • I’m brutally hard on myself.
      If anyone else talked to me the way 1991 Mike talked to me, I’d block them.
    • Beneath all the ambition is a tender streak.
      Who knew? Not me.
    • I care too much and forgive too slowly.
      A winning combination if you enjoy emotional turbulence.

    But the most unexpected observation?

    Despite everything — the failures, the reinventions, the wrong turns — the same hopeful, restless kid is still in there.
    The one who wants to do something meaningful.
    The one who believes tomorrow’s list might actually work this time.
    The one who thinks the next version of himself might finally be the one who sticks.

    The Unlikely Threads

    Every life has themes. Mine has… tangles.

    Here are a few of the threads GPT pulled on — the ones I didn’t notice until a machine laid them out like evidence:

    1. The Eternal Reset Button

    I am the human embodiment of “Okay, starting Monday.”
    This has been going on for forty years.
    Consistency is my inconsistent superpower.

    2. The Archivist Instinct

    I documented my life long before influencers made it fashionable.
    Except I did it with spiral notebooks and regret instead of ring lights.

    3. The Geography of Reinvention

    Nebraska → Spain → New York → Barcelona → My companies → The Music Industry → Trading → Writing → Whatever’s next.
    My life story reads like someone was trying to outrun themselves — and accidentally became interesting.

    4. The Reluctant Optimist

    Every time I wrote a harsh entry, there was always this little shimmer of hope.
    Some people have grit; I have recurring optimism with a head injury.

    5. The Overdeveloped Sense of Responsibility

    My journals reveal that I’ve been blaming myself for global events, interpersonal dynamics, and weather patterns since adolescence.

    So… was it worth it?

    Honestly, yes.
    Handing my life to ChatGPT didn’t break me, ruin me, or reveal that I’m a secret sociopath.
    Instead, it gave me something I’ve never had before:

    A clear view of the narrative arc beneath the noise.

    It showed me the patterns I repeat.
    It showed me the parts of myself I carry from decade to decade.
    It showed me that the kid who wrote, “I hope I become someone someday,”
    actually did.

    Not perfectly.
    Not cleanly.
    But unmistakably.

    Tomorrow I’ll try to get my life together again.
    Some traditions shouldn’t die.

  • I Was Offline for a Week. Now Hitler’s Back.

    I Was Offline for a Week. Now Hitler’s Back.

    I’m late to this. I’ve been offline, living like it’s 2003. No news alerts, no rage-scrolling, no exposure to a single influencer or pundit. It was glorious. But then I plugged back in and saw it: Young Republican leaders caught in group chats saying “I love Hitler,” joking about gas chambers and rape, sneering about “watermelon people,” and casually tossing around words like “faggot” and “retarded”—like they were just swapping fantasy football picks.

    A decade ago, even whispering something like “I love Hitler” would have ended your political career, your public life, your dating prospects, your gym membership—hell, even your WiFi password might’ve stopped working out of pure moral inertia. Now? You get a wink, a shrug, and maybe a spot on someone’s podcast.

    This isn’t just about antisemitism, although it is deeply, virulently that. It’s deeper. It’s a willful rejection of decency itself. Like they’ve looked straight at the moral floor and said: “Nah. Let’s keep digging.”

    And look—racism isn’t exactly a new bug in the human operating system. It’s baked into our wiring. Infants as young as six months show preference for faces of their own race. One study even found that children tend to trust people who sound and look like them. Tribal bias is an evolutionary leftover—like the appendix, or Twitter.

    But the whole point of civilization is to override our worst instincts. We educate. We empathize. We evolve. We try to beat that tribal lizard-brain back into its cage, one generation at a time. Or, in the more cynical version of human progress, we just wait until all the bloodlines blend into one and racism becomes logistically impossible.

    MAGA seems uninterested in either path.

    I have MAGA friends—smart ones—who are slowly, quietly backing away from Trump. They don’t say it aloud, but I can see it. They’re starting to wince at the Proud Boys merch and the screaming matches at school board meetings. But they still can’t quite let go. They’ve convinced themselves MAGA is the “lesser of two evils,” that the left is so deranged that they must cling to the burning ship out of duty.

    But here’s the uncomfortable truth: while one of those “evils” is arguing over pronouns, the other one is now literally flirting with Nazi ideology. Not metaphorically. Not “like Nazis.” Actual Nazi language. Actual Nazi aesthetics. One staffer literally put a swastika-shaped American flag on his Capitol Hill office wall, like it was an ironic dorm poster.

    The GOP took a hard right, blew past Reagan, sideswiped Goldwater, and now fishtails somewhere between Franco and full-blown fascism, headlights off, tiki torch on.

    And still, my MAGA friends won’t change the channel. Even when they know they’re being lied to. Even when they feel the disgust in their gut. Tribalism is a hell of a drug. It overrides reason. It punishes doubt. It turns moral nausea into partisan loyalty.

    That’s how people who never would’ve said the word “Hitler” outside a history class end up defending it as a “joke.” That’s how the descent happens—not in a single leap, but in a thousand rationalizations, one meme, one tweet, one group chat at a time.

    This isn’t just a MAGA problem. It’s a human problem. We are all wired to pick sides and defend them, even when the facts rot out from underneath us. The only antidote is constant moral clarity—across the board, not just when it’s convenient. When you see people celebrating cruelty, racism, and violence, you don’t stay quiet. You don’t look for whataboutisms. You say: No. That’s not who we’re supposed to be.

    Because once the tribal drums drown out your conscience, you’ll look up and realize you’ve been goose-stepping for a while—and didn’t even notice the rhythm change.

  • Stop Calling It a Democracy! (Wait… Why?)

    Stop Calling It a Democracy! (Wait… Why?)

    You may have noticed a curious trend lately. Some of our friends on the right no longer refer to the United States as a democracy. That word, they insist with increasing vigor, is leftist propaganda. No, no—we’re not a democracy, they say. We’re a Constitutional Republic! As if they’ve just uncovered a glitch in the Matrix that invalidates everything from Schoolhouse Rock to centuries of American political thought.

    So what’s going on here?

    Well, I did some digging. And the main reason this talking point is echoing through the right-wing influencer ecosystem is that they believe calling the U.S. a “democracy” is part of a sinister leftist plot to abolish the Electoral College. You heard that right. The logic goes: if we keep calling this place a democracy, people might start thinking majority rule should actually mean majority rule—gasp—even in presidential elections.

    This line of reasoning usually shows up in social media debates where someone on the left refers to American democracy being in peril, and someone on the right jumps in with a “correction”: “We’re not a democracy. We’re a constitutional republic.”

    Now, I don’t want to be unkind, but if you’re one of the folks who thinks this is some sort of mic drop, I gently suggest you request a refund from your high school civics teacher. Because you’re not wrong—you’re just… not quite right enough to be taken seriously.

    Let’s break it down:

    America is, in fact, a democracy—that’s the genus. The species is constitutional republic. Think of it like this: If you have a dog at home, that’s the overall category. Golden retriever is the type of dog you have. Saying “the U.S. isn’t a democracy; it’s a constitutional republic” is like saying “that’s not a dog—it’s a golden retriever.” Technically true, but also deeply unserious.

    There are different flavors of democracy around the world. Some countries are parliamentary democracies (like the U.K. or Canada), others are social democracies (like Sweden or Norway), and some are semi-presidential republics (like France). We, for better or worse, are a constitutional republic with representative democracy baked into the cake.

    That means:
    We elect people to make decisions for us (representative democracy),
    Those decisions are limited by a founding document (constitutional),

    And, despite what your uncle insists, the will of the people is supposed to matter.

    That doesn’t mean pure majority rule. Nobody’s suggesting we run the country by Twitter poll (though let’s be honest, that might still yield better outcomes than certain state legislatures). But it does mean that the people—yes, all the people—are meant to be the ultimate source of authority. That’s the beating heart of any democracy, constitutional or otherwise.

    The right’s sudden allergy to the word “democracy” isn’t really about semantics. It’s about power. More specifically, it’s about preserving minority rule through institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate—where a few hundred thousand voters in Wyoming get more say than millions in California. And let’s not even talk about gerrymandering. (No, really, let’s not. My blood pressure.)

    So the next time someone tells you that “we’re not a democracy,” feel free to smile politely and respond: “That’s not a dog—it’s a golden retriever.” Then, if you’re feeling generous, you can remind them that the Founders literally used the word “democracy” in their writings—Jefferson, Madison, Franklin—all of them. They warned about its dangers, yes, but they were also building toward it, not away from it.

    This wordplay trend might seem harmless, but words matter. Pretending we’re not a democracy opens the door to justifying all kinds of anti-democratic behavior. If the people don’t really matter, then voter suppression, gerrymandering, and minority rule start to look like features, not bugs.

    And when a former president is back in office promising to be “your retribution,” that’s not the time to start downgrading the concept of democracy. That’s the time to defend it like it’s the last golden retriever on Earth.

  • When the MAGAverse Starts Salivating Over Violence, You Should Pay Attention

    When the MAGAverse Starts Salivating Over Violence, You Should Pay Attention

    The assassination of Charlie Kirk should have been a moment of unified horror. A line no one crosses. A point where even the most jaded among us stop the memes, take a breath, and agree that political violence is off-limits.

    Instead?

    MAGA took a torch to that line.

    They didn’t mourn. They mobilized.

    Overnight, Kirk’s death became a rallying cry—not just for justice, but for vengeance. Not just against the shooter, but against everyone not wearing a red hat. The same people who once screamed “false flag” at every mass shooting suddenly found deep clarity: This was the left’s fault. This was Biden’s America. This was war.

    You could feel it pulsing through Telegram threads and X posts like a glitch in the Matrix: This wasn’t grief. This was glee. A strategic opportunity. The narrative hardened within hours—before the body was even cold: “The left did this. The media did this. The FBI did this. Now it’s time to respond.”

    And that’s when I started to feel really uneasy.

    Because underneath the performative rage and red-faced shouting, you can detect something quieter—and far more dangerous: calculation.

    There are elements on the far right who want unrest.

    Not just because it makes for good fundraising, or because it fires up the base.

    But because chaos can be useful.

    If society feels like it’s spinning out, you can justify extraordinary responses. Crackdowns. Curfews. Maybe even martial law.

    Sound far-fetched? It’s not. Trump already floated the idea of postponing the 2020 election. His allies pushed martial law as a real option after he lost. There’s precedent—not legal precedent, but emotional precedent—for crossing these lines when the moment feels just unstable enough.

    And now?

    We’re teetering.

    The institutions meant to hold the line are wobbling. Public trust is cratering. FBI resources for investigating domestic terrorism were gutted not long ago—dismissed as political overreach by the very people who now act shocked that political violence is escalating.

    They didn’t want the threat exposed. Because some of them saw political gain in pretending it didn’t exist.

    But here we are.

    Kirk is dead. Other politicians have been assassinated. People online are openly calling for civil war like it’s just a slightly spicier sequel to January 6.

    And the temperature keeps rising.

    The truth is, when elections feel rigged, when facts feel fluid, and when citizens feel voiceless, violence starts to look like a microphone.

    That’s not a left-wing or right-wing problem. That’s a human problem. And it’s one we’ve seen before—in history books, in failed democracies, in collapsing regimes where conspiracy becomes currency and strongmen promise “order” in exchange for obedience.

    You think that couldn’t happen here?

    It’s already trying to.

    And when MAGA influencers start spinning assassinations into political momentum—not in spite of the violence, but because of it—it’s not just disgusting. It’s terrifying.

    This is the moment where we need to get our damn heads on straight.

    Because if we keep feeding this beast, it won’t stop at speeches or Senate hearings. It will demand more blood. More enemies. More obedience.

    And once the fire gets hot enough, it doesn’t care who it burns.