Our Eroding Empire: Max Unfiltered.

Kakistocracy (noun) | kak·​is·​toc·​ra·​cy ˌkakə̇ˈstäkrəsē | Plural: kakistocracies | Definition: government by the worst people; a weak government run by the least capable and most corrupt officials who value loyalty over competence.

I’ve been critical of the aptitude of this administration and Trump’s cabinet but my thoughts on the matter are evolving. There’s plenty of corruption to go around, which would be a kleptocracy. But I’m no longer confident in my assertion of wholesale incompetence.

Trump 1.0 was incompetent. That was the true kakistocracy. But not Trump 2.0. This administration is nailing every one of its objectives but I’m only now beginning to see the whole picture.

For the better part of the last year we’ve been deep in the economic weeds because there’s something wrong with the economy. And here’s my fear. Those dearly beloved Democratic leaders still don’t see it. And I know this because the institutional response to Zohran Mamdani’s victory—based entirely on tapping into the economic insecurity felt among voters, many of whom broke for Trump by the way—was that of fear and immediate retaliation. Their mission objective appeared to be to “bury that man’s message by all means necessary.”

They did it to Bernie. To Dennis Kucinich. Jesse Jackson. When an outsider breaks through with a message that truly aligns with Big-D Democratic principles—let alone small “d” democratic principles—they close ranks. You get performative marathon speeches from Cory Booker and Hakeem Jeffries and lame press conferences from Chuck Schumer. They send their attack dog Buttigieg to make the rounds on podcasts. All in service of crowding out authentic voices for change.

• “Sound reasonable, practical; but outraged by Trump.”
• “Be the adult voice in the room.”
• “Appeal to the manosphere.”
• And the grand overarching strategy,“The GOP will shoot themselves in the foot, they always do. So we just have to wait to assume power at the midterms to stop them in their tracks. Maybe we’ll even impeach him again. If they fuck things up enough we’ll take back the Senate and then we’ll really make his life miserable. Either way, we’ll take the House and tie his hands for two more years and then we’ll take the White House again and put it all back together.”

Spoiler alert: Putting it back together will be a lot harder than you think and what was there wasn’t good enough so that’s not really a goal now is it? Because this whole “put it back together” means going back to the same disillusioned place that delivered us Trump…both times. A new, radical politics is required to not just halt the Republicans but to change course altogether.

Instead we have Democrats hand-wringing over free buses and some so-called leftist and liberal pundits and influencers trying to appeal to their right wing brothers and sisters to come back to their senses.

• “Remember that time you voted for Obama? It can be like that again.”
• “We agree more than we disagree.”
• “Look, now we’re both upset about the Epstein files! And Ukraine. (Let’s just not talk about Gaza in polite company.)”
• “I’m sick of climate change and wokeness too, and enough with these pronouns, amirite?!?!”

Get this through your heads if you think the GOP is salvageable:

Among GOP respondents to every credible survey in existence, his approval rating is above 90%. And that’s after they passed the One Big Beautiful Bill, terrorized communities across the country with the American Gestapo known as ICE, bombed Iran, gave the green light to Netanyahu to clear out Gaza, gave tax breaks to the wealthy and took a fucking luxury plane as a gift for the presidential library.

They’re not coming over. They’re not coming back.

Battle Stations

This is a war. You don’t win a war by trying to recruit the other side to fight on your side. You win by rallying the troops to fight for your cause. And here’s the wild part of the whole thing: We’re the better side.

We actually want people to eat. To not go bankrupt when they go for cancer treatments. We want the people we interact with every single day in restaurants, and stores, and car washes, auto mechanics, HVAC repair companies, farmstands and grocery stores to become citizens. We want our seniors to be cared for in clean, reputable facilities or in their own homes without having to spend out their entire life savings. We want people to have a roof over their heads. Kids to have top notch education. Families to not have to do a GoFundMe for a loved one’s funeral. To spend something less than 40% of income on rent. To breathe clean air.

And yet, somehow, we’re losing to a party that just guaranteed none of these can happen in America any longer. And what is the establishment worried about? A Muslim kid from Queens who wants to make buses free and food available. “Capital flight,” they cry. “What if all our billionaires leave?”

You’re telling me that a multi-millionaire, centi-millionaire or billionaire who makes their money from New York, lives part-time in a penthouse apartment among other vacation homes is going to…what? They’re going to leave New York and build a business and wealth somewhere else? Like Florida or Texas? Uproot everything and everybody?

Buena suerte. Get after it big boy. You can move to Austin. Hang out at Joe Rogan’s comedy mothership. Say the R word a lot. That’ll teach us. Fuck off.

Here’s the thing about New York and other blue state cities—we might be going down, but we’re going down last.

What the GOP hasn’t figured out and the Democratic Party is still trying to ignore is that the middle of this country is fucked. The states with the highest percentage of federally covered Medicaid, all red.

And here’s the thing about Medicaid. Medicaid is coverage; it’s not a payment. No one is “pocketing” Medicaid checks. It’s coverage. Reimbursement for services rendered. It means those hospital stays, those emergencies, those medications and treatments are going to be there. They’re still going to happen. Not to mention, the overwhelming majority of Medicaid recipients already work but might not work enough to satisfy the new GOP work requirements. Or, what they do isn’t considered work like raising children, caring for elders or a relative with disabilities. Maybe they’re working a gig job (or two) or hustle to make a buck off the books because that’s what’s available to them.

The new requirements are going to be so onerous and stringent that millions will lose coverage by not living up to the new standards. And we’ve already debunked the “immigrants on Medicaid” lie.

So call it what it is. This is the end of Obamacare.

Here’s what happens next. People will continue to get sick and need care, and they will go to providers and they will get as much care as that provider can manage to offer. And when the patient doesn’t pay for it, they’ll go to collections. And after enough accumulated interest, they’ll go bankrupt. Just like it used to be. And the hospital will eventually go under as well because there will be no reimbursement for their services. And as a result, the rest of us with insurance will bear the cost with increases even larger than the annual increases we took on before the Affordable Care Act.

They did it. They ended Obamacare. It’s over. They won. It took them a while, but they did it. And that returns me to the original point. This is no kakistocracy. In fact, this is no longer even a political enterprise.

How did this happen? (Rewind!)

After World War Two, the United States had two seismic advantages that allowed us to build the biggest economy in the history of the world: Industrial capacity and the dollar as reserve currency. Our factories were prime for industrial production by converting from a wartime economy to a manufacturing economy; the money was supplied by the nations of the world who had to pay us in our own currency to settle their wartime debts.

There were two competing visions at the time. The wealthy, white power brokers who saw the growth of government as a threat and the Keynesian peace brokers who envisioned America as an economic tide that lifted all boats.

Those wealthy power brokers were divided into multiple camps. The economists from the Austrian tradition formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 and hatched monetary plots to reduce government interference. The John Birch Society members splintered and took aim at higher education, the legal system, Christian families and voting rights.

Separately they were powerless to fight the surge in economic productivity that led to social reforms. That’s what happens when a nation has the wherewithal and courage to improve the lives of its inhabitants. And so the greatest period of social, cultural and economic welfare reform was set in motion characterized by Medicare, Medicaid, entitlement programs, education funding and an industrial labor policy that guaranteed participation at every social, geographic and demographic level.

It wasn’t until 1954 that the seeds of reversal were planted with the passage of Brown v. The Board of Education. Economic progress was one thing. Integration was another matter entirely.

With billionaire backing from wealthy families like Coors, Koch, Olin, Scaife and DeVos, a coalition formed. James Buchanan took aim at education. Doug Coe brought in the evangelicals. Michael Horowitz created the blueprint to take over the judicial system by starting in the law schools. Lewis Powell galvanized the business community. Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Aaron Director, Ronald Coase and Gary Becker crafted the economic playbook. They formed think tanks and even colleges steeped in their perverted libertarian doctrine designed to beat back the state by chipping away at welfare reforms, voting rights, banking regulations, monetary policy, federal agency oversight and social reforms.

And then they found an asshole from Australia willing to build a media conglomerate designed to package and sell the lies to the asses.

The Trump administration isn’t an accident of history.

This Supreme Court isn’t rogue.

Income inequality isn’t a byproduct or a mistake.

Deportations of Brown people and Muslims aren’t an unfortunate coincidence.

Project 2025 wasn’t the manifesto, it was the coda. The epilogue.

And now we’re in something new altogether. Throughout our journey we’ve attempted to give this post neoliberalism phase a name and examined myriad theories. You can probably list them by heart. Stanley Deetz’s Corporate Colonialism. Sheldon Wolin’s Inverted Totalitarianism. Immanuel Wallerstein and Neofuedalism. Yanis Varoufakis and Technofeudalism. Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning.

Whatever you want to call it, we’re here.

Before I reveal how my thoughts about Trump are evolving, evidence of their complete victory to overthrow democracy can be found in two simple presidential powers. Earlier this year the Supreme Court gave Trump complete presidential immunity. And this week, they gave him what looks to be the unfettered ability to dismantle federal agencies without Congressional approval.

That’s a wrap folks. From here on out, this guy is gonna be a freight train.

That’s why I’m speaking so emphatically with the greatest sense of urgency to stop fucking around with policies no longer work in the modern economic environment. Enough with the middle lane. The Third Way Democrats. The Problem Solvers caucus. Blue Dog Democrats. And for the love of god, stop with the wooing Republicans or disaffected MAGAs. It’s not just that the path forward is progressivism, it’s literally the only thing that will deliver us from what’s about to happen. Because the next three and a half years will be like nothing we’ve ever lived through in this country.

The budget for ICE was around $8 billion per year heading into the Trump recession budget. It’s scheduled to increase to $37.5 billion annually starting the next fiscal year. That’s bigger than the entire military budgets of all but 15 nations. And it’s not included in our military budget, which is $850 billion. The balance of Homeland Security (DHS) is about $72 billion and the intelligence services that combine for $101 billion. That’s a whopping $1 trillion dollars in military, border patrol and surveillance.

Remember when we were outraged by kids in cages? Now we’re disappearing children, parents, workers, neighbors from the streets and holding them in detention camps while the head of DHS takes sexy selfies before they’re sent to countries they may or may not even be from.

A media company was so scared of a Trump lawsuit over a 60 Minutes promo they handed him $16 million. Colleges are firing people and closing DEI initiatives because they’re so afraid of this guy. Palantir is scraping your information as you read this and building a dossier to determine how likely you are to be a dissenting voice. A Palestinian graduate student at Tufts wrote an op-ed for in the college review that said we should stand with Palestine and she was fucking kidnapped. Birthright citizenship is in the Constitution and it might not matter. And on and on.

This is a war and we’re losing. If we don’t start channeling some righteous rage into the political process and demanding the establishment move aside in favor of the will of the people then our quiet acquiescence will be viewed as a green light for the oligarchs to finish the job.

Which brings me to my evolution of thought on the Trump regime. I had thought him a useful idiot but now I understand differently. And it all ties back with stunning clarity and precision to the belief system hatched at Mont Pelerin. A new global order of currency and exchange that strips nation states of the ability to manage monetary policy and places it in the hands of very, very few people. And Trump is planning to be one of them.

A Hint at Trump’s Endgame

Yes, the purpose of Project 2025 is to inflict maximum pain on the masses by dismantling the institutional protections we’ve erected in the post-war Bretton Woods era. Yes, they want to return to the pre-industrial utopia of the late 19th Century where wealthy industrialists played god and children toiled in factories. All of it. And whereas I previously thought that was the endgame, I now see that it’s bigger than that.

I previously said the Big Beautiful Bill was the last piece of meaningful legislation the Republicans will pass, but I may have been only partially correct in my prediction. I think they have a couple of bullets left in the chamber but it won’t be legislation that impacts the nation as we know it, rather the shadow oligarchy that will serve in its place.

In the coming weeks we’re going to talk a lot about legislation such as The Genius Act, one of the bullets in the GOP chamber that hapless Democrats will undoubtedly support after they dance around the campfire in a performative protest. Having won the 70-year neoliberal war of attrition, they are about to revive a perversion of Friedrich Hayek’s vision of private currency rooted in Mont Pelerin discussions throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s and formulated formally in his 1976 book, The Denationalization of Money.

I should have seen it earlier. I was surrounding it but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The ultimate long con.

If I do it right, I think you’ll be as stunned, enthralled and terrified as I am about what comes next. And if I really do my job, then it will spark a broader conversation about the need to adopt a revolutionary political mindset to do more than just defend the status quo. We’ve been outworked, outgunned and outmaneuvered so deftly it’s truly humbling. And the person I presumed to be the useful idiot is a lot more than that.

Even if the GOP gets nothing more done on crypto legislation and private stablecoin development, the core of what we’re tackling next, Donald Trump has already laid the groundwork to absorb tens of billions of dollars post-presidency. That’s his starting point. But there’s a chance he can exit the presidency with the ability to become one of the wealthiest people on the planet.

It’s time to get active. Have hard conversations. Look at our 5 Non-Negotiables of the Left and start an activist text thread, online forum, or meet up in your area. Maybe start using Signal (just don’t invite Hegseth). Start thinking big and getting loud about Medicare for All. About regulating AI. Pushing back on schemes that threaten to place the global monetary system in the hands of crypto pirates and corporate raiders. Support candidates that look more like Mamdani. Show up at Democratic town halls to yell, scream and interrupt with demands like Medicare for All, a Civilian Labor Corps, getting money out of politics, housing first, free public education, free and fast transportation and taxing the ever living shit out of the wealthy.

This is class warfare and they started it.

I typically end with a quote from the Sean Connery character in The Untouchables: “Here endeth the lesson.” Instead I’ll use another of his. “What are you prepared to do?” Because so far we’re the ones bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Also, here endeth the lesson.