A New Year and a Manifesto for America
A New Year's Message from the Circus.
We stand at the edge of a new year and at the edge of an old question: Will this be a republic of citizens or a dominion of oligarchs?
The answer is not yet written. Not yet. But it will be written by what we do now, by what we do next.
This is a manifesto for those who choose citizenship. For those who remember that 400,000 Americans died in World War II to defend democracy against fascism. For those who refuse to accept that poverty in the wealthiest nation on earth is inevitable. For those who understand that technology deployed without democratic constraint becomes an infrastructure of extraction, not liberation.
Our forebearers proved what’s possible. In the aftermath of the worst thing humanity has ever done, with a debt burden that terrified the accountants and no historical precedent, they built the American middle class. They taxed the rich at 91% marginal rates. They created Social Security, Medicare, the GI Bill, public universities, interstate highways—and they did it by demanding it.
This manifesto declares: We will do it again.
Through specific structural reforms that break the mechanism of oligarchic capture. Through collective action that makes those reforms possible.
You don’t have to quit your job or become a policy expert to be part of this. Citizenship is scalable. Some of you will organize. Some of you will donate. Some of you will stop repeating the lies and start naming the mechanisms. But every one of you can take one step that weakens capture and strengthens constraint.
This is hope and implementation. The moral case and the mechanical solution. Together, they form a complete theory of democratic restoration.
This is how we win.
I. What We Inherit
We inherit a country built on a promise: that all are created equal. That governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. That concentrated power—whether political or economic—operates under democratic constraint.
We inherit the Declaration of Independence, which begins not with timid suggestion but with declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
We inherit the Constitution, which begins not with permission but with assertion: “We the People.”
We inherit Abraham Lincoln’s warning that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
We inherit Franklin Roosevelt’s rebuke of the “economic royalists” who sought to concentrate power beyond democratic reach.
We also inherit a tradition of opposition to concentrated power that once united Americans across the political spectrum. Adam Smith warned that merchants of the same trade conspire against the public. Thomas Jefferson feared the rise of a “single and splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and moneyed incorporations.” The original antitrust movement brought together prairie populists and classical liberals, socialists and small-business conservatives—all united against monopoly power.
Somewhere along the way, we forgot this. The right was convinced that all government constraints threatened liberty. The left was convinced that all market activity produced exploitation. Both abandoned the central insight: concentrated power is the enemy, whether it wears a crown, carries a gun, or writes a check.
We also inherit hard lessons. Poverty happens in rich countries when inequality runs unchecked. The Gilded Age—when America was the wealthiest, most technologically advanced nation on earth—produced desperate poverty, child labor, starvation wages, and company towns where workers lived in debt peonage.
Technology doesn’t save you. The railroads, telegraphs, and industrial machinery of the Gilded Age created massive wealth. Most Americans saw none of it.
But we also inherit the solution. Our grandparents faced the Great Depression, World War II, claiming 400,000 American lives, debt levels far higher than today’s, physical destruction and economic devastation across allied nations, and no historical precedent for what they were attempting. And they built the American middle class anyway.
They taxed the rich—91% top marginal rate under Eisenhower, a Republican. They created Social Security so seniors wouldn’t die in poverty. Medicare so that illness wouldn’t mean bankruptcy. The GI Bill ensured that education was a right, not a privilege. Public universities made knowledge accessible—interstate highways so commerce could flow. Labor protections so workers had dignity.
In one generation—from the 1930s to the 1970s—they went from bread lines to broad prosperity. An ordinary person working a regular job could buy a house, raise a family, send kids to college, and retire in dignity.
II. What We Face
We face a specific mechanism of oligarchic capture that our grandparents did not face at this scale: cross-sectoral coordination.
Cross-sectoral coordination is when the same actor can move money, law, narrative, and enforcement as one integrated instrument.
The oligarch doesn’t just have wealth. He has coordinating power across multiple sectors simultaneously. Deploy capital into startups. Advocate for deregulation publicly. Fund political candidates who promise to remove constraints. Use media platforms to normalize the policy. Secure government appointments that ensure favorable regulation. Portfolio companies benefit from the environment created.
Each step is legal. The coordination is structural, not conspiratorial. There’s no smoking gun because the gun is the system itself.
Example: Cross-Sectoral Coordination in the Wild
Marc Andreessen controls venture capital through a16z, influences cryptocurrency, shapes tech policy through donations, coordinates narrative through media like the All-In podcast, and now has direct political access through administration appointments, including David Sacks as AI and Crypto Czar. He published a manifesto listing a literal fascist among his intellectual heroes—Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who founded Italian Futurism and aligned with Mussolini. He declared democratic constraint on technology to be “murder of preventable progress.” He paid $2.5 million to secure protection from the administration that would remove regulatory friction. Now he funds infrastructure marketed as innovation: “Physical observability” means surveillance cameras across American cities. “Agent-primacy design” means systems optimized for machines, not humans. “Healthy MAUs” means continuous biometric monitoring as a subscription. “Year of me” means personalization that destroys collective power.
This is extraction dressed as progress. Domination is marketed as abundance. The bicycle for the mind has become a prison for the heart.
Andreessen is the case study. The mechanism is the point.
The propaganda is coordinated, too. When Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani appointed retired EMS Chief Lillian Bonsignore as FDNY Fire Commissioner, the oligarch ecosystem sprang into action. Bonsignore is a 31-year FDNY veteran who rose from EMT to EMS Chief, led the department through COVID, and oversaw 4,000 EMS providers handling 1.5 million calls annually. But she’s never been a frontline firefighter.
Elon Musk responded on X: “People will die because of this. Proven experience matters when lives are at stake.” The phrase went viral. Conservative media amplified it. The narrative spread through coordinated channels: she’s a “DEI hire,” she’s “unqualified,” her identity as the first openly gay FDNY commissioner supposedly matters more than her three decades of operational experience.
The technique: Selectively isolate one credential she lacks. Bury her extensive qualifications. Flag her identity prominently. Let the audience conclude: diversity hire, unqualified.
Meanwhile, the oligarchs themselves claim universal competence. Musk runs government efficiency with zero government experience. Sacks influences AI and crypto policy, having never worked in government. Andreessen shapes regulation in sectors where he has billions deployed.
The technique: Oligarchs demand narrow operational credentials from public servants while claiming domain expertise across everything themselves.
This is how you delegitimize democratic institutions. This is how you normalize oligarchic capture. This is how you get Americans fighting each other instead of fighting upward.
First, they came for those on public assistance, and we did not speak out because we were not on assistance. Then they came for the trade unionists, and we did not speak out because we were not in unions. Then they went for the middle class, and there was no one left to speak for us.
If you keep allowing the economic structure of your society to eat people from the bottom up, eventually you will be eaten. And who will protect you then?
Proof of Concept: A Documented Map of Cross-Sectoral Immunity
I’m not asking you to share every inference about Epstein. I’m using Epstein as a documented map of cross-sectoral immunity: finance, law, politics, media, plus academia.
Congress ordered the Department of Justice to release the files. The DOJ released 11,034 documents, then admitted they had over a million more. The FBI knew in 1996 that Epstein was selling nude photos of children to buyers and identified 10 co-conspirators in 2019. FBI Director Kash Patel testified to Congress that there was “no credible information” Epstein trafficked to others—the files prove this was false. New York Times journalists uncovered what federal agents with subpoena power could not: how Epstein used stolen money to buy political access, legal protection, academic prestige, and banking relationships. The bipartisan protection is documented—Trump, Clinton, and Larry Summers all appear.
Finance plus politics plus law plus academia plus media equals 23 years of operation after the FBI had evidence. This is what cross-sectoral immunity looks like when it works.
III. What We Demand
We demand the same principle that saved us in 1933 and again in 2010: separation of functions that create self-dealing incentives when combined.
The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 separated investment banking from commercial banking because combining them allowed banks to gamble with depositors’ money. Its repeal in 1999 enabled the 2008 financial crisis. Dodd-Frank restored partial separation.
We now demand a Dodd-Frank for capital markets.
The Three Locks
We will break cross-sectoral coordination. Sectoral ownership limits prevent billionaires from coordinating power across multiple domains simultaneously. Once your wealth crosses the billion-dollar threshold, you pick one sector for controlling interest. Everything else becomes a passive investment through regulated vehicles. Criminal penalties for using those passive vehicles to coordinate. Tiered oversight that intensifies as wealth grows.
Marc Andreessen can still be a billionaire. But he can’t simultaneously control venture capital, cryptocurrency, media, and political appointments. He picks one domain. Everything else gets separated.
This isn’t radical. It’s the same principle we applied to banking. It doesn’t limit wealth—it limits coordinating power.
This reform serves multiple principles simultaneously. If you believe in free markets, you should support this—because markets only work when participants can’t rig the game through cross-sectoral coordination. If you believe in limiting concentrated power, you should support this—because it prevents economic power from becoming political power. If you believe in constitutional government, you should support this—because it enforces the same separation-of-powers logic that makes our political system work.
The modern right abandoned antitrust and called it freedom. The contemporary left abandoned markets and called it justice. Both were wrong. This reform reclaims what both traditions once understood: liberty requires constraint on concentrated power, and markets require rules that prevent coordination from replacing competition.
This is a baseline, not a ceiling. Some will argue we should go further—that billionaires shouldn’t exist at all, that specific sectors should be publicly owned, that workers deserve board seats and profit-sharing. Those are legitimate debates for a democratic society to have. But this reform is the minimum required to restore democratic constraint over concentrated power. Whatever else we build, we build on this foundation.
The same principle that prevents one person from holding legislative, executive, and judicial power simultaneously applies to economic power. Separation of functions isn’t punishment—it’s the price of operating in a system where popular sovereignty remains the final authority.
If you can’t accept structural limits on cross-sectoral coordination, you’re not defending free markets—you’re defending feudalism with stock tickers. And the republic has no obligation to accommodate that.
For the complete structural proposal, see A Dodd-Frank for Capital Markets.
We will restore constitutional enforcement. Statutory cause of action for DHS, ICE, and CBP violations to close the post-9/11 immunity gap. Restoration of Fourth Amendment protections. Masked federal agents kidnapping people off the streets without warrants must be illegal, unconstitutional, and prosecutable.
We will protect the information commons. Democratic veto over infrastructure. Auditability of systems affecting public life. Exit rights that don’t punish people with low incomes. Bans on coerced biometric surveillance.Rigidd walls between political favor and regulatory enforcement.
Energy as Democratic Infrastructure
We also demand a managed transition to abundant, clean energy: solar, battery storage, and modern nuclear, not because of climate evangelism, but because it’s the foundation of everything else we’re building.
Elon Musk may have lost his mind, trapped by his own algorithm on X, but his instincts about energy are correct. Solar, battery, and safe modern nuclear are the future. The energy transition will lead to incredible increases in living standards, improved environmental stewardship, less suffering, and abundance. We must do this.
But here’s what the oligarchs won’t tell you: this transition only creates broad prosperity if it’s built as public infrastructure for the common good, not private extraction for coordinated profit.
Energy is the substrate of sovereignty: if the grid is captured, everything above it is negotiable.
The government should mandate and subsidize this future, not through corporate giveaways that privatize gains and socialize losses, but through direct public investment in infrastructure that serves everyone. Build the grid. Build the storage. Build the reactors. Then let markets compete atop abundant, cheap, publicly owned energy infrastructure.
This serves every principle we’ve outlined. If you believe in free markets, you should support this—because cheap energy is the foundation of competition and innovation. If you believe in limiting concentrated power, you should support this, because energy independence means no oligarch controls your access to basic life. If you believe in environmental stewardship, you should support this—because abundance through planning beats scarcity through extraction.
The choice isn’t between energy and environment. It’s between energy as a public good and energy as an extraction vehicle, between abundance for everyone and profit for the coordinators.
We choose abundance. We choose public infrastructure. We choose democratic control over essential resources.
Preventing Dynasty
We also demand the restoration of strict estate taxation on concentrated wealth. Not to punish success, but to prevent what the Murdoch family demonstrates: multi-generational capture of democratic institutions.
People who believe in entrepreneurial capitalism, risk-taking, and the frontier should despise multi-generational political-economic capital. That was the culture of 1980s Silicon Valley. The hippies who built it understood something the current generation has forgotten: inherited wealth kills the very dynamism that creates it.
Bill Gates, for all his faults, gave away his fortune to do good. Noblesse oblige. He understood that accumulating wealth beyond what you could ever spend was an obligation to society, not a right to a dynasty. The great industrialists who built America—Carnegie, Rockefeller—gave it away. They knew that keeping it would turn their children into aristocrats rather than entrepreneurs.
The Murdoch story proves why this matters. Rupert inherited a single newspaper from his father and built an empire. Now at 93, he’s fighting in court to ensure his chosen heir, Lachlan, maintains that empire’s political orientation after he dies. The family trust was explicitly structured to pass wealth and control across generations. The result: nearly a century of coordinated media power shaping elections in multiple democracies, protected from democratic accountability by dynastic succession.
This is what happens when concentrated wealth becomes inherited power. Your grandparents understood this. The estate tax reached 77% on the most prominent estates during the period when the American middle class was being built. They knew that democracy and the concentration of hereditary wealth cannot coexist indefinitely.
We should restore progressive estate taxation with rates that increase sharply above $10 million, reaching 70% or higher on estates exceeding $1 billion. Allow exemptions for farmland, small businesses, and family homes. But concentrated wealth in financial instruments, media properties, and corporate control? That should be subject to serious taxation upon transfer.
This serves every principle we’ve outlined. If you believe in free markets, you should support this—because markets work when success comes from competition and innovation, not inherited position. If you think in entrepreneurial capitalism, you should support this, because nothing kills entrepreneurship faster than a class of people who never had to take risks. If you believe in limiting concentrated power, you should support this—because the greatest threat to democracy is power that reproduces itself across generations without democratic consent.
Markets are powerful tools for innovation and for lifting us out of material hunger. But they can never fill the soul. And that is why they must answer to democratic institutions.
The objection will be that this punishes success. Wrong. The person who has built wealth has already succeeded. They got rich, built companies, and lived well. Estate taxes don’t touch that. What they prevent is turning private success into public power that operates across generations. The children can inherit wealth. They cannot inherit the coordinating power that lets them shape democracy without accountability.
Some of us believe estate taxation should be even higher—that no one should inherit a billion dollars, that dynastic wealth should be impossible. Others believe these rates are sufficient if combined with sectoral ownership limits. Both can support this baseline.
The Murdoch empire shows what’s at stake. One family, three generations, coordinated media power across multiple democracies, shaping elections and policy while remaining accountable to no one but themselves. That’s not free markets. That’s not entrepreneurship. That’s aristocracy.
We choose citizenship over dynasty. We choose democratic renewal over inherited control. We choose the frontier over the manor.
Additional Reforms
Alliance restoration. Rebuild democratic partnerships with Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, France, and Germany. Reject treating allies as enemies while cozying to autocrats. Remember that 400,000 Americans died to build this structure.
IV. How We Will Win
Americans don’t ask permission. We declare.
Not “yes we can.” Yes, we will.
This will not be won by heroes. It will be won by ordinary Americans doing what they can.
Understand how cross-sectoral coordination works. How reactionary propaganda operates. How surveillance arrives as “observability” and extraction as “innovation.”
Share this analysis. These reforms. The structural diagnosis. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Make people see the mechanism.
Demand sectoral ownership limits. Democratic veto over infrastructure. Criminal penalties for coordination. These specific reforms are not an abstract change.
Stand in solidarity. Fight together rather than alone. Protect people at the bottom because eventually you’ll be the bottom. Stand together because that’s where hope comes from.
Organize. Join groups demanding these reforms. Support politicians who will pass them. Primarily, those who won’t. Build collective power that makes structural change possible.
The 2026 midterms begin now. Not in November. Now. Primaries are where these reforms live or die. The general election is often too late—by then, you’re choosing between candidates who’ve already been selected by party machines and donor networks.
Go to the town halls. Show up to the candidate debates. Ask them directly: Will you support sectoral ownership limits with criminal penalties for coordination? Will you vote to restore estate taxation that prevents dynasty? Will you close the post-9/11 immunity gap? Make them answer on the record. Film it. Please share it.
Former Republican campaign adviser Steve Schmidt has named the core problem: Congress has inherent contempt authority under the Constitution—an absolute power to compel compliance from the executive branch, including detention for non-compliance. It’s been used many times in American history. But the current Congress refuses to use it while the executive branch ignores congressional subpoenas, defies court orders, and treats the legislative branch as subordinate.
Schmidt puts it directly: “The entry position of all people on all of these issues is that the Democratic side cannot, for some reason, use the same level of power that is being used against them lawfully, constitutionally. It’s just wiped away. Can’t happen. Why? I don’t know. But unless it does happen, we’re in danger of losing the republic.”
So add this to your questions at town halls and candidate debates: Will you commit to using Congress’s full constitutional authority, including inherent contempt power, to compel executive branch compliance with the law? Will you vote to detain executive officials who defy congressional subpoenas or court orders? Make them answer. One side uses every available constitutional tool. The other appeals to norms and procedural propriety. That asymmetry is how republics die.
The candidates who won’t commit to structural reform? Primary them. Find someone who will. Support that person with time and money. This is how the Tea Party changed the Republican Party. This is how democratic socialists won seats in safe Democratic districts. The primary process works when people show up.
Vote. Every election. Every primary. Every local race. Build the coalition that will pass these reforms.
Small acts with structural targets.
The coalition we build will include people with different visions of the ideal economy. Some believe that once democratic constraint is restored, markets will self-correct. Others believe that even with constraints, specific sectors should be publicly owned or worker-controlled. Some want to defend the small-business owner from both government overreach and corporate capture. Others want to redistribute wealth and power fundamentally.
These arefundamentall disagreements. We don’t paper over them. But here’s what unites us: the current system serves none of these visions. The oligarchs have captured both market competition and democratic governance. They’ve made “free markets” mean freedom for the powerful to coordinate. They’ve made “regulation” mean rules written by those being regulated.
Before we can have an honest debate about how free our markets should be or how much the government should do, we need to break the coordination that prevents both markets and democracy from functioning. Right-libertarians and democratic socialists have been fighting each other while the oligarchs have captured everything. Time to restore the conditions where our disagreements can be settled democratically rather than by those with the most money.
The people fighting just for themselves are pessimistic about the future. The people fighting together believe things will get better—because they’re building the power to make it happen.
That’s not sentiment. That’s structural truth. Collective action creates the political conditions for structural reform. Structural reform creates the conditions where collective action succeeds.
Small acts with structural targets. Understanding, sharing, demanding, organizing, voting.
That’s how we will win.
V. Why Character Matters
This is not merely about mechanisms. It is about who we are.
Character matters. The reasons we fight matter. What matters most of all is that we discuss those reasons together—that we deliberate, argue, persuade, and decide as citizens, not subjects.
That’s what we do in this shining city on the hill. That’s what makes pilgrims still approach these shores despite everything we’ve gotten wrong. Not our wealth. Not our weapons. The promise that here, ordinary people can shape the world they live in. That here, power answers to the people, not the other way around.
That state of becoming—forever striving toward ideals we’ve never fully realized—is what we must be.
We have been lied to by those who claimed technology would liberate us while building infrastructure to surveil us. We have been stolen from by those who extracted wealth through coordination we couldn’t see until it was operational. And now we watch as some among us maim and kill for spectacle, as masked agents kidnap people off American streets without warrants, as constitutional protections dissolve in the name of efficiency.
Those who did this must face justice. Not revenge—justice. Accountability under law. The restoration of constitutional order. The prosecution of those who violated their oaths.
This is the moment to act. Not to calculate whether you’re the right person to speak up. Not to wonder what people will think. Not to wait for someone else to do it. Not to ask whether you have the correct subject position or the proper credentials or the right platform.
Somebody is suffering right now. Somebody’s dignity is being denied. We need to stop that from happening. Point to what you know. Point at evil and call it evil. Consider what’s right and do what’s right.
That’s the folk philosophy our republic was built on. Direct moral perception. This person is suffering → stop it. This structure enables extraction → limit it. Masked men kidnapping people off the streets → illegal, unconstitutional, prosecutable.
But more than that: We must prove to posterity that we are better than this.
An Invitation
This manifesto is an invitation.
To those who call themselves libertarian: Remember that Adam Smith’s invisible hand only works when the powerful can’t coordinate to rig markets. Remember that Hayek warned against planning, but corporate coordination across sectors is planning, just with private profits. Remember that your tradition once led the fight against monopoly because concentrated economic power is as dangerous as concentrated political power. The Constitution separates legislative, executive, and judicial power for the same reason we must separate economic power across sectors. This isn’t betraying your principles—this is returning to them.
To those who call themselves socialists: Remember that democratic accountability is the foundation on which everything else is built. Remember that without democratic constraint on concentrated power, there’s no path to economic justice—just different elites making decisions for everyone else. Remember that your tradition has always understood that power must answer to the people, whether held by capitalists or commissars. This reform doesn’t ask you to abandon your vision of a more equal society. It asks you to help create the conditions where that vision can be democratically chosen rather than oligarchically prevented.
To those who’ve given up on politics entirely: We understand. You watched the right promise of smaller government while building corporate welfare. You watched the left promise economic justice while serving financial elites. You watched both sides get rich while you got poorer. You learned that the system is rigged and nothing changes.
You’re right about the diagnosis. You’re wrong about the prognosis. Not because the system isn’t rigged, but because it’s been unrigged before—by ordinary people who organized, demanded, and refused to accept that concentrated power was inevitable.
The oligarchs want you to stay home. Want you to fight each other over whether the problem is “big government” or “big business” while they coordinate both. Want you to believe change is impossible, so they can keep extracting from everyone.
We’re building a coalition that includes people who disagree about what comes after we win. That’s fine. First, we restore the conditions for actual democracy. Then we’ll have those arguments like citizens, not subjects.
The Promise
We will pass these structural reforms. Sectoral ownership limits that break cross-sectoral coordination. Democratic veto over infrastructure that affects public life. Criminal penalties for those who coordinate power to bypass democratic constraint. Constitutional enforcement that restores Fourth Amendment protections. Alliance restoration that remembers what 400,000 Americans died to build. Energy infrastructure that creates abundance for everyone, not extraction for the few. Estate taxation that prevents dynasties and preserves democratic renewal.
But we will do more than that.
We will restore the character of this republic. We will become the kind of people who demand accountability from power, protect those at the bottom because we know eventually we’ll be the bottom, fight together rather than alone, deliberate rather than declare, persuade rather than dominate, and build rather than extract.
We will prove that Americans are not subjects waiting for oligarchs to decide our fate. We are citizens who shape our own future through collective action.
We will prove that democratic constraint is not weakness—it is the only source of legitimate power.
We will prove that technology can serve human flourishing rather than human subjection—but only when deployed under democratic control.
We will prove that concentrated wealth and democratic citizenship can coexist—but only when wealth cannot coordinate power across sectors to write its own rules.
We will prove to posterity that when this republic faced oligarchic capture, when surveillance infrastructure was being built, when constitutional protections were dissolving, when democratic alliances were crumbling—we did not accept it. We fought back. We organized. We voted. We won.
Not because we were heroes. Because we were citizens who remembered what that word means.
We will restore constraint, because constraint is what makes a republic possible.
The Responsibility
We must remind ourselves of what Americans have always known: we are responsible for governing ourselves. And we do that through self-government.
Not by waiting for someone else to fix things. Not by hoping the right leader appears, not by accepting that this is just how things are.
By showing up. By speaking. By voting. By organizing. By demanding. By refusing to accept that concentrated power is inevitable or that democratic constraint is impossible.
The path is open to us. The mechanisms are known. The reforms are achievable. The coalition is forming.
We have to walk it.
The Covenant
This is our covenant with future generations.
We will leave you a republic where ordinary people working regular jobs can live in dignity, where democratic institutions constrain concentrated power, and where technology serves coordination rather than extraction, where the Constitution means what it says, where America’s word to its allies is sacred, and where wealth does not buy immunity from law, where character matters more than net worth.
We will leave you a country where the reasons we fight matter as much as the outcomes we achieve, where we discuss those reasons together as citizens. Where the state of becoming—forever striving toward our highest ideals—defines who we are.
We will leave you proof that when democracy was threatened, Americans did not accept oligarchy. We restored the republic.
Not “yes we can.” Yes, we will.
Because that’s what Americans do, we don’t accept domination. We don’t bow to concentrated power. We don’t surrender our sovereignty.
We declare our independence from those who would rule us. We organize to make that independence real. We vote until we win. We build the world we want to live in.
Your grandparents did it. We will do it again.
For a republic of citizens. Against the dominion of oligarchs.
For the character of America. For the promise to posterity.
This is our manifesto. This is who we will become.
2026 begins now.
Remember what’s real. Keep walking the wire.
Let me add the 400,000 Americans who are documented deaths due to Trump's egomaniac and blanket stupidity in domains of knowing for which he is a stranger (e.g., COVID-19 as one of many).
I am fully in agreement with the hopes that the founding fathers had for this country. They did not start off well, bringing the First Peoples to their knees, and slaughtering human life just as they slaughtered the buffalo. They and those that followed, similarly have done relatively little to alter the bigotry and racism that we have seen between those accepted into the "fraternity" versus those newly arriving on site (e.g., Irish, Italians, Jews, Asian, Latinos, and now those of Islamic faith or those from African nations). Maybe these "truths" are self-evident, but they are not self-fulfilling without the mindfulness and the sympathies of others.
It is my contention that consumerism pushed out virtue. That what we could buy displaced how we raised a family. That aspiring to live like the rich and famous, glorified by media, let us forget how critical the education of our children must be. It is not simply a Wordsworthian critique about getting and spending and failing to see the beauty of nature, it is more the failing to see the interconnectivity of all aspects of life- both biotic and abiotic. Love thy neighbor as thou love the Earth. We have the opport unity to see unity, but we have lost our human unity (humanity).
I love and honor the words "We, the People." As a grade school student, I felt the love of past historical legends like Lincoln: with malice toward none, with charity for all. But in my 83 years, I have not felt remotely that we have had anyone in high office that comes close to his "affection" for all. I do sense this in Raphael Warnock (Senator from Georgia) but I doubt the significant component of racism in the American electorate would vote for him (please, I hope to be wrong). When I heard Abigail Spanberger's accept speech, I felt that she too could realize greatness if her rhetoric was translated to deeds.
Now, as a master diagnostician of human disease, I feel or sense in my diagnostic skills that this nation will not endure another three year of Trumpism. There is a need of revolution to rid the country and the world of this lunatic. I cringe seeing him with Zelensky and find it inexplicable why there is no humongous outcry from every freedom-loving person and country about what has happened in Ukraine. Are we this fucking stupid not to remember the Budapest Memorandum of 1994?
The Budapest Memorandum (1994) was a security agreement where the US, UK, and Russia pledged to respect Ukraine's independence, sovereignty, and existing borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal. Key promises included refraining from threats or use of force, avoiding economic coercion, and consulting if Ukraine faced aggression. While the US and UK offered "security assurances," these were political, not military, commitments, meaning they wouldn't send troops but would seek UN action.
WTF happened? Do we, like sponge-brain Trump, have syphilitic brains-so porous that our remembrance is that short-lived? Do those in NATO (forgetting the US) not remember Hitler's Anschluss or his invasion of the Sudetenland, or how he had a peace treaty with the USSR before he invaded Russia.
There is a lot of myth about the land of the free and the home of the brave. We have been and are even more, an imperialistic country. So much of our national debt is related to our military arsenal that I do believe, "as you live by the sword, so shall you die by it." We have invested our revenues poorly.
Mike points out social security and Medicare. Of the latter, I will tell you that ours is a truly fucked up non-healthcare system. It is a business bilking billions or trillions from the American taxpayer. Drugs here are 3-10x more expensive than in Europe. Service here had diminished to being a "sick" joke. I have had MD visits for my complex healthcare that have involved a 30-minute consultation that failed to include a decent history or physical exam. If presented to my medical school class in 1963, the students would have torn it apart. The EHR (electronic health record) is a means to billing for large hospital corporations. A one night stay in an ER led to a bill for $50,000. Doctors are gaming Medicare, and patients are gaming Medicaid. We have in our country Welfarism as a real "occupation." Is the care worse elsewhere? Yes, but we are not much above that "worse" threshold. A recent patient from Mumbai had a better evaluation with impressive testing than most patients I have seen from the US.
Mike points out "cross-sectoral coordination." I would simplify this in saying that a nation that allows profit to replacement principle, is destined to self-destruct. This is not just a "Party" thing, it is the lack of ethic that pervades almost all of American life. We work to get. We do not work to live.
Mike aptly points out the value of deed, not spiel. We saw what Musk was all about- spiel. DOGE had nothing to do with government efficiency but more to the DOGE (Destroy Our Great Experiment), first thousands of government employees, probably to leave more money for Trump and others in his "family" to steal. The American people should rely on an old adage, and not the bullshit that spews out of the mouths of Fox News commentators, past and present.
"The proof of the pudding is in the eating." — William Camden, Remaines Concerning Britain, (1605). In a more philosophic language: "Love is as love does."
As for the Epstein files, this entire matter stinks to holy hell. It's not a Trump thing only. We had Democrat administrations-- what the fuck did they do about following up on the original complaint from 1996? As far as I am concerned, I did not see any greatness in the recent Democrat Presidents we have had, not in Clinton, Obama and certainly not in the effete Joe Biden. Where are the demonstrations of LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision)? Tell me one thing that stands out in your memory that tells of the greatness of the presidents we have had for the last 30 years?
I will not comment on what should be done regarding business; it is beyond my realm of knowing. I do know that we need Integrity demanded of those who seek office. That integrity is not simply honesty but it is in bringing together parts into a whole, seeing the interactions of all aspects of human, non-human and abiotic entities and being creative (as in the Creation).
We are so fucking fortunate to live on this incredible globe, Earth. There is so much beauty, not just in its nature, but in the nature of all aspects of life. And we are blowing it. We have pettified (created word) the meaning of living, of loving, of happiness. We have reversed our priorities and turned a silk purse into a sow's ear-- or we are certainly headed in that direction.
Everyone I have met in the tens of thousands of miles I have traveled wants the same thing. So why is their this huge disconnect with those that govern us? Simple. We have been a bunch of lazy slobs when it comes to who we elect to run our households. We remain children focused on "me, me" and have yet to assume a tikkun olam level, i.e. we are stewards of this world and all within it. We are the responsible agents for the moral, spiritual and material health of society. We perfect and repair the world.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when? — Rabbi Hillel - (30 BC-9AD)
I had to stop halfway through Mike's editorial. It is indeed a Manifesto and perhaps should be written as such in a booklet for mass distribution. It is good stuff.
I love this manifesto and will share it with family and friends. Also Mike, I often listen to your writings using the “play” option on the Substack app while I’m driving to or from work. But the voice is AI and it often gets words and the inflection wrong. It would be great if you’d record your essays as well and post them. You would be able to reach a larger audience that way, and I think many more people would benefit from hearing what you have to say.