"When Do We Sign Up For The Revolution?"

Epstein Files, ICE murders, billionaire theft, concentration camps, blatantly racist media campaigns by the administration—when does the full-blown revolt begin?

Epstein, possibly the most prolific sex trafficker in human history, spent the last decade of his life investing in technology that would help Russia, as he wrote in a 2013 email, “leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21st century.” He was fascinated by websites like 4chan and technology like Bitcoin and was personally invested in the success of far-right politicians in the US and Europe. He believed he was months away from ushering in a new world order that would allow him to continue with his monstrous passion projects, like creating a super-race of children with his own DNA and building fascist nation states to manage overpopulation and climate collapse. And he wined and dined the world’s most powerful men (none of whom seemed to have an issue with these ideas), inviting them to his island and his ranch, and made sure they were surrounded by an endless supply of young girls. And I’m just not sure what we’re supposed to do with that knowledge.

—Ryan Broderick, “Here’s how Epstein broke the Internet”

If there’s one thing that is a guarantee in America this year, it’s that people are absolutely fed up with elites. The people who affect every part of our lives, from banks, massive multinational corporations, and technology firms to megachurch pastors, government leaders, and media figures are about as close to persona non grata as you can be amongst the average person. If there’s one thing that’s become patently obvious over the last decade, it is that our institutions have failed us, and those institutions are run by the very elites who behave as if there are no consequences. As Broderick noted in the quoted piece above, what are we supposed to do with that knowledge? What are we supposed to do with the knowledge that professors, authors, judges, bankers, tech leaders, senior members of three different European royal families, ex-presidents and prime ministers (people who had nuclear weapons at their disposal, no less!), were chummy with a billionaire sex trafficker? What are we supposed to do with the fact that many of them maintained those links after he’d already been caught once? My wife asked me Friday night, “Why isn’t everybody in the streets already?” I think the only reason we haven’t all stopped everything and gone into the streets is because most of us don’t know what to do next.

We’re fighting off an endless series of crises, many inflicted upon us by the government supposed to serve the people—but who were long ago co-opted by the elites. We’re constantly having to determine whether the things we were brought up to trust in—churches, police, the justice system—are worthy of that trust. We have to spend extra time deciphering whether the video we just watched or the photo we just saw or the article we just read is real or a hallucination created by artificial intelligence; that artificial intelligence has been forced into our lives by the same cadre of elites is, in my view, not an accident. It is a feature of the system, one more obstacle between the very broad proletariat who are absolutely tired of being held down and lied to and stripped of our collective resources for the benefit of a relatively narrow club of elites. AI is simultaneously being designed to further reduce the numbers of humans that can work jobs with living wages and to make it far more difficult for humans to perceive reality—and that’s before you factor in how hideously destructive it is to our ecological balance.

Data centers fueling artificial intelligence are rapidly depleting and destroying the clean water necessary for people to survive. Tainted water keeps humans from having the ability to be hydrated, water crops, cook, bathe, etc. Water is a necessary ingredient to live, and artificial intelligence is destroying it as surely as Skynet destroys humanity in the Terminator films. Those films worked off the premise that as artificial intelligence became sentient, it would seek to erase humans from the Earth. AI doesn’t need to become killer robots to destroy us. The destabilization caused by lack of fresh water and clean air, the lack of jobs to support increased cost of living, and the lack of trust in anything you see, read or hear because AI can create such realistic false videos, audio, and images will surely do the job on its own. It doesn’t have to turn violent. It just has to keep riding the wave of greed that its champions justify its existence with.

Theoretically, our government is supposed to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Once upon a time, that was true—Harry Truman, Gerald Ford¹, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama reached the heights of leadership without wealthy parents or benefactors greasing the skids. Those are the only four presidents elected in the last century who did not have that help, though. Coolidge, Harding, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr., Trump, and Biden all benefited from immense war chests and high dollar corporate donations. If the majority of presidents are elected through the munificence of the same elites destroying everything else for their personal gain, how can we possibly believe that government is for the people? This current government is certainly not. The Supreme Court, Congress, the president, all of these institutions are run by megalomaniacs and greedy opportunists, with the occasional dash of “Christian” faith that’s mainly used to justify the greed and the oppression of everyone else.

In short, Americans are fighting a battle on all fronts against these forces, and it has created feelings of hopelessness for many. That’s understandable. I fight against those feelings every single day—but there is also great cause for hope. Minneapolis has been organized to a degree most thought impossible in this day and age. Signal group chats, PTO meetings, wine moms, all of these have been organized into a force of tens of thousands who are following DHS everywhere and making it that much harder to inflict violence and create chaos, let alone kidnap anyone that doesn’t have pale skin. Organizing is key, and it takes time, and it’s not something that can be done in a hurry. At the same time, building those groups, building support systems, is vital because what can happen in a hurry is a collapse of the current order.

There’s a long-neglected book by former U.S. Navy captain and National Security Council area expert Dr. Gary G. Sick called All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter With Iran in which he details the modern history of Iran, the Iranian revolution, and the hostage crisis. One thing that the book shows is that governments and autocrats can look impregnable to the outsider, but on the inside, the structure is rotten, and it caves in with one swift, sharp kick. As we’re all trying to digest the depths of depravity these leaders stooped to, as we’re wrapping our heads around how a small conspiracy of billionaires obtained outsized influence over the entire globe, we are in much the same position as Iranians in 1978. As Sick wrote, they are a culture long accustomed to the belief that grand conspiracies are behind every trauma, every setback, every suffering, and it’s driven by the fact that foreign powers have, indeed, often invaded Iran and dictated the use of its resources, the distribution of its wealth, and the policies of its governments.

In 1978, therefore, the fifteenth year of some level of protests against the Shah’s government, there was no reason for the protestors to believe anything would change quickly. It was the mere adoption of a protest cycle that used every excess of the Shah’s own secret police, the SAVAK, against them in subtle fashion. The pattern went like this: religious leaders called a protest, and SAVAK would inevitably end up killing marchers. Shi’a Islam calls for a public memorial service 40 days after the death of a martyr. The pressure would die down, and then ramp right up again at the 40 day mark, because SAVAK had begun doing what DHS is doing now—interrupting religious services and storming into mosques and religious schools—and in the process would inevitably kill resistors. This, in turn, triggered another forty day cycle, and it repeated itself for months on end. SAVAK became increasingly worn thin by the inability to be in all places at once, and were unable to get ahead of each fresh protest. By the end of the year, the Shah had fled into exile and the government had been toppled. Obviously, as we all know now, Ayatollah Khomeini deftly maneuvered his way into power and then eliminated his opponents. One repression was ultimately traded for another.

However, it doesn’t have to be. Unlike a place like Iran or Iraq after Saddam Hussein, or Afghanistan after the Taliban fell in 2001, the United States has a rich history of democracy. We have a legal system that, despite its current weaknesses and failures, still provides an excellent framework for how to proceed. There are more of us than there are of the elites, and inevitably, they will have to agree to a more egalitarian society and an end to the abuses of the administration, or they will go the way of the Shah: exiled, vilified, and ultimately forgotten.

You want to know where to sign up for the revolution? Join with a group of friends, neighbors, or like-minded people who believe in mutual aid, support, empathy—all of the tenets that flowed from early Christianity. The oppressors claim the mantle of Christ, but they wouldn’t recognize him or his parables if he was preaching right in front of them. Organize, and be ready—you never know when the moment will come, but I promise you, Donald Trump is fading, and the harder he’s squeezing all of us, the more desperate he really is.

1. Ford was not elected, he was appointed to the vice presidency and the presidency through a literal once-in-a-million-years sequence of events