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.
