Means and Meaning

Begin the World Over Again

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 06:30:50 GMT

Signal/Noise is a series that cuts through the spectacle of breaking events to find the structural signal underneath. This installment cuts through 250 years of mythology to find the signal the founders actually sent, and asks whether we’re still willing to receive it.

I. The Most Radical Document Ever Written

Four days from now, the United States will turn 250 years old. Fireworks will go off. Flags will wave. Politicians will give speeches about freedom while building the machinery to ensure it can never threaten their power. And most Americans will treat the Fourth of July the way they always do: as a barbecue with a soundtrack.

I want to ask you to do something different this year. I want to ask you to read the actual words.

Not the parts you already know. Not “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” which has been so thoroughly absorbed into the national background noise that it functions more as bumper sticker than as battle cry. I mean the parts they don’t put on T-shirts. The exit clause:

“Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

That is not a suggestion. It is an instruction. Jefferson wrote a manual for revolution into the founding document of the nation and the Continental Congress signed it. They didn’t just declare independence from Britain. They declared that any people, anywhere, at any time, have the right to overthrow any government that stops serving them. That is not a conservative text. That is the most radical political document in the history of the Western world.

Gordon Wood, the preeminent historian of the Revolution, called it “the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history.” It “destroyed aristocracy as it had been understood in the Western world for at least two millennia.” Karl Marx said it “gave the first impulse to the European revolution of the eighteenth century.” The Revolution inspired the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and every liberation movement that followed.

And Jefferson wrote one more thing that most people never read. “Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” He knew. People will endure what they can endure for as long as they can endure it. The question the 250th anniversary poses is whether we’ve reached the threshold he described, a “long train of abuses pursuing invariably the same Object,” and if so, what the document he wrote tells us to do about it.

II. What Was Actually Radical

The Revolution didn’t just replace one government with another. It overturned a principle that had organized Western civilization for two thousand years: that some people were born to rule and others were born to be ruled. Before 1776, society operated on what was called the “great chain of being,” a hierarchy of ranks stretching from God to king to lord to commoner, each link fixed by birth and blood. The Revolution snapped that chain. As David Ramsay, the South Carolina physician and historian, explained at the time, Americans were “changed from subjects to citizens,” and “the difference is immense: subject is derived from the latin words, sub and jacio, and means one who is under the power of another; but a citizen is an unit of a mass of free people, who, collectively, possess sovereignty.”

And it was not gentlemen in powdered wigs who drove this transformation. In Philadelphia, the city’s working class had been gradually taking over political leadership since the mid-1760s, and a horrified clergyman reported that “the poorest laborer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiments in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar.” In Savannah, a royal governor shook his head that the revolutionary committee running the city consisted of “a Parcel of the Lowest People, chiefly carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths etc. with a Jew at their head.” Carpenters and shoemakers and blacksmiths running the government. That was the Revolution.

Before 1776 there was 1649, the English Revolution that killed a king and established a republic, and the American revolutionaries knew it. The Levellers and the Diggers had crossed the Atlantic in the bodies and memories of the colonists themselves, and when Thomas Paine, a working-class immigrant and corset-maker’s son from England, wrote “we have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he was not being rhetorical. He was describing what they were actually doing, and the world they were beginning was one where no person was born with a saddle on their back and no other person was born booted and spurred to ride them.

But honesty demands holding the contradiction alongside the promise. Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” while owning enslaved people. The Revolution’s radical vision coexisted with slavery, genocide, and colonial extraction. Yet as Wood insisted, “to focus on what the Revolution did not accomplish is to miss the great significance of what it did accomplish; indeed, the Revolution made possible the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.” The contradiction doesn’t invalidate the promise. It makes the work of redeeming it more urgent, not less.

III. The Unfinished Revolution

The founders didn’t just fight for independence. They fought against a world in which, as John Adams put it in 1775, there were “but two sorts of men in the world, freemen and slaves.” That sentence collapsed every careful distinction of rank and title that monarchical society had spent centuries constructing, and it laid the foundation for a republic built on a single radical premise: consent of the governed. No one rules you without your permission. No one holds power except through your voice. The government serves the people, or the people have the right, indeed the duty, to change it.

That premise is why Frederick Douglass, speaking as an escaped slave on July 5, 1852, did not reject the Revolution. He embraced it. He called the signers “brave men” and “great men, great enough to give fame to a great age,” and then he turned the Declaration back on the nation that had failed to keep its promise. His biting observation that the legacy of the American Revolution “stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times” was not cynicism. It was the most patriotic act available to him: demanding that the country measure itself against its own founding words and answer honestly.

Douglass’s challenge has never been more relevant than it is right now, 250 years into the experiment. Consent of the governed is being structurally dismantled through voter suppression, gerrymandering, and a Supreme Court the majority didn’t choose and can’t remove. The founders banned hereditary titles, yet the United States now has a wealth gap that would have horrified the men who wrote the New Hampshire constitution’s declaration that “no office or place whatsoever in government shall be hereditary.” A president’s sons sell $12,000 commemorative coins bearing their father’s face. A golden statue stands at a golf resort. A ballroom rises where the East Wing used to be. In 1786, an ex-weaver named William Findley stood up in the Pennsylvania legislature and told the richest merchant in the state to stop disguising his private interests as public virtue. Two hundred and forty years later, we could use a few more Findleys.

You don’t have to celebrate what America is to celebrate what it promised to become. But you do have to be honest about the distance between the two.

IV. Reclaiming the Flag

Somewhere along the way, many Americans who believe most deeply in the promises of 1776 stopped showing up to claim them. They ceded the flag, the founders, the Declaration, and the language of liberty to people who invoke them without reading them, who wave the red, white, and blue while quietly dismantling the self-governance it represents. The critique of America’s failures was often valid, but in the retreat from patriotic language, something essential was lost: the moral authority of the most radical political tradition in Western history.

But that tradition has always belonged to the people who fought to expand its promise, not to those who fought to contain it. Paine was a working-class immigrant who attacked monarchy, inherited wealth, and the divine right of kings. Douglass turned the Declaration back on a nation that had enslaved him, not to reject the founding but to hold it accountable. Debs described the promise of self-governance as “the equal rights of all to manage and control” society. King stood in Montgomery and declared that “the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” Every one of them showed up, claimed the tradition, and insisted that its promises be kept for everyone, not just the privileged few.

A cousin of mine, a Navy veteran who served in Iraq, understood this instinctively. Despite our many political differences, last Fourth of July he sent me a message I haven’t stopped thinking about: “We can both celebrate radicalism and patriotism this weekend. Of course they were all both.” He passed away last August, but those words have stayed with me ever since, because he was right, and the thread he was pulling on runs from Paine through Douglass through King and through every American who ever loved this country enough to demand that it do better.

Some of my family members have said they don’t feel like celebrating this year. I understand the impulse. But don’t give them the holiday. The founders were radicals. The abolitionists were radicals. The suffragists, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, they all showed up on the Fourth and said: this belongs to us, too. You don’t have to celebrate what America is to celebrate what it promised to become. Show up. Read the actual words. And mean them.

V. Begin the World Over Again

Two hundred and fifty years. A quarter of a millennium since a collection of radicals in Philadelphia, farmers and lawyers and printers and smugglers, signed a document that told the most powerful empire on earth that its authority was no longer recognized, that governments exist only by the consent of the governed, and that when they stop serving the people, the people have not just the right but the duty to alter or abolish them and begin again.

They were not perfect. They held slaves and denied women the vote and dispossessed the people whose land they stood on. The radical promise of 1776 was betrayed in the very moment it was written, and that betrayal echoes through every generation since. But the words were bigger than the men who wrote them. They outlived the contradictions. They crossed oceans. They inspired the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution and the abolitionists and the suffragists and the labor movement and the civil rights movement and every person who ever stood in front of power and said: you promised this, now deliver it.

That is the tradition we inherit this Saturday. Not a finished project. Not a victory to commemorate. An unfinished revolution that requires every generation to pick it up and carry it further than the one before. The stream of revolution, as the historian J. Franklin Jameson wrote, “once started, could not be confined within narrow banks, but spread abroad upon the land.” It is still spreading. It has not been dammed. And it will not be, as long as there are people willing to show up and insist that the promises be kept.

John Adams predicted how this day would be celebrated. In a letter to Abigail written on July 3, 1776, the day before the Declaration was signed, he wrote that it ought to be “solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore.” He certainly was right about the fireworks! But he also understood that the celebration was not a reward for something completed. It was a commitment to something begun.

So here is what I believe, 250 years later, standing on the same rocky coast of Maine where my family has gathered for generations, watching the fireworks rise over Casco Bay the way Adams imagined they would, the way my brothers and cousins and I watched them together so many times before.

I believe the American Revolution was the most radical political event in the history of the Western world, and that its most daring promises remain unfulfilled. I believe that the founders were revolutionaries, not the cautious gentlemen in powdered wigs we’ve been taught to imagine, and that the tradition they started belongs to every person in this country who has ever been told their voice doesn’t matter, their labor isn’t valued, or their consent isn’t required. I believe that the distance between what was promised and what was delivered is not a reason to walk away from the experiment but a reason to fight harder for it. I believe that a carpenter in Philadelphia in 1774 who insisted on governing himself and a teacher in 2026 who insists on the same thing are part of the same unbroken line. And I believe that the most patriotic thing any of us can do this Fourth of July is not just to wave a flag but to read the words on the document that made the flag possible, and to mean them, every one, for everyone, finally.

Thomas Paine, the working-class immigrant who lit the fuse of the Revolution with a pamphlet and a pen, wrote a sentence 250 years ago that still rings like a bell in a country that desperately needs to hear it:

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

We do. We always have. And the Revolution isn’t over until we do.

References

Cutterham, T. (2026, May 24). Class struggle was a crucial part of the American Revolution. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2026/05/american-revolution-britain-class-struggle?fbclid=IwY2xjawSAAatleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFONWtod3NOVXNJOENMWjkyc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHt9Sa1nlBBzCLCcylyI49WDkdKQlzOazJLiy2RfpwveqAOcpJcCPNxpGh0U3_aem_gfKEPTCFeeNadIihkvs9Wg

Damon, A. (2016, July 4). Two hundred forty years since the Declaration of Independence. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/07/04/pers-j04.html

Kazin, M. (2026, June 4). The left needs to rediscover its patriotism. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/left-patriotism-liberals-socialism/687398/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cr&utm_campaign=2024_Content_ContentTestingII_Prospecting_Sales_Advantage&utm_content=060426_LeftRediscoverSocialism_NA_NA_LearnMore&utm_term=ContentTestingII_Advantage&referral=FB_PAID&utm_id=6581568102677&fbclid=IwY2xjawSO_opleHRuA2FlbQEwAGFkaWQAAAZQCfJX1XNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5e9KtlXtr9FnZv_A3CZ1pJEkzdLGM4_O9kwXJM80Xhy6VqAOtJXvttPr2ovw_aem_bWkCovGx6f_d034YrmEm_g&campaign_id=6581568102677&ad_id=6940833729477

Mackaman, T. (2016, July 14). In Defense of the American Revolution. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/07/14/revo-j14.html

Monahan, S. (2015, March 6). Reading Paine From the Left. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2015/03/thomas-paine-american-revolution-common-sense/

Rees, J. (2026, June 27). Before 1776, there was 1649. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2026/06/before-1776-there-was-1649?fbclid=IwY2xjawSs6sFleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE0Q0FkbXZHd1RETXU2cHp1c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHtpLGtDd-1J9vcHd_JqBZBjDKu-QkmXAN8tSxMRr_qLWJ_PjNvYfUcXHxVdU_aem_X8oG9bi74lIro4pJBdhTHA

Representatives of the United Colonies of North America. (1775). Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, 6 July 1775. https://archive.csac.history.wisc.edu/9_Declaration_of_the_Causes_and_Necessity_of_Taking_up_ArWood, G. S. (1993). The radicalism of THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (FIRST). Vintage Books. https://ia600408.us.archive.org/18/items/wood-gordon-the-radicalism-of-the-american-revolution-2011-1/Wood%2C_Gordon_The_Radicalism_of_the_American_Revolution_2011_1.pdf ms.pdf

Wood, G. S. (1993). The radicalism of THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (FIRST). Vintage Books. https://ia600408.us.archive.org/18/items/wood-gordon-the-radicalism-of-the-american-revolution-2011-1/Wood%2C_Gordon_The_Radicalism_of_the_American_Revolution_2011_1.pdf

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Means and Meaning publishes every Tuesday. If you found value in this analysis, I’d be very grateful if you’d consider buying me a coffee — your support helps me dedicate time to this work while keeping all content free and accessible.

You can also support this project by subscribing (it’s free!), sharing with others who might appreciate it, or joining the conversation in the comments. Sometimes the best antidote to anxiety is knowing you’re not alone in seeing what’s happening.

Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

When You Can't Win the Argument, Dismantle the Forum

Chris Fletcher — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 04:53:49 GMT

The Quiet War is an ongoing series about the war that doesn’t make the front page. Each installment traces the infrastructure of repression being built while most people’s attention is elsewhere: the surveillance systems, the detention machinery, the erosion of rights that happens not in dramatic confrontation but in court rulings, executive orders, and procurement contracts. Sometimes that infrastructure targets people. Sometimes it targets the vote itself. This war is quiet by design. Naming it is the first act of resistance.

I. The Machine

No president in American history has ever canceled a federal election. Not during the Civil War, when 600,000 Americans were dying. Not during two World Wars. Not during the Great Depression. But this president has floated the idea multiple times, telling Reuters “we shouldn’t even have an election” and remarking to Zelensky that canceling elections during a war sounded like “a good thing.” His press secretary assured the country he was joking.

As it turned out, he wasn’t building the machinery to cancel the election. He was building the machinery to control its outcome.

Three days ago, the Postmaster General testified before Congress that the Postal Service would restrict the delivery of mail-in ballots in states that refuse to hand over their voter rolls to the federal government. Three weeks ago, the Supreme Court completed what Justice Kagan called the “now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” a ruling she warned lays the groundwork for “the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction.” Last month, Tennessee eliminated its only majority-Black congressional district, in Memphis, the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. ProPublica has documented that at least 75 career election security officials across the federal government have been replaced by roughly two dozen political appointees, ten of whom actively worked to overturn the 2020 election.

The people who held the line last time are gone. The people who tried to break it are now in charge.

This is not a collection of separate news stories. It is an architecture, built deliberately across courts, legislatures, executive orders, and now the postal service, designed to ensure that the most fundamental act of democratic participation cannot threaten the structure of power. The Quiet War came for surveillance. It came for protest. This week, it came for the vote.

II. The Courts

The quietest weapon in the machine is the one most people never hear firing.

In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that required states with histories of voter suppression to get federal approval before changing their election rules. In 2021, the Court gutted Section 2 as applied to voting restrictions, making it effectively impossible to challenge discriminatory barriers to casting a ballot. And this April, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Court finished the job, eviscerating Section 2 as applied to redistricting. Justice Kagan, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, called it “this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.” Three rulings across thirteen years. The demolition was incremental, procedural, and by the time the full picture became visible, the structure was already gone.

The practical consequences arrived immediately. In an unsigned shadow docket order, the Court allowed Alabama to implement a redistricting map that multiple lower courts had found to be intentionally discriminatory against Black voters, reassigning hundreds of thousands of voters to new districts in a matter of days. In Tennessee, the governor signed new district lines that carved up Memphis, the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, and distributed those voters across multiple white districts. The NAACP’s General Counsel, Kristen Clarke, did not mince words: “A democracy without Black representation is not a democracy. This is where the KKK was born and where MLK was assassinated.”

In North Carolina, state Representative Rodney Pierce, a Black Democrat, dropped his redistricting lawsuit entirely. “There is no longer a path open to us to protect the voting rights of Black citizens in my part of the State,” he said. “It’s a sad day for our democracy.” Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund estimate that close to 200 state legislative seats, mostly representing majority-Black districts in the South, are now at risk of elimination.

The vote still exists. The legal infrastructure to make it meaningful has been methodically dismantled. As Justice Marshall once wrote, and Kagan echoed this spring, what remains is “the right to cast meaningless ballots.”

III. The Postal Service and the Purge

Three days ago, Postmaster General David Steiner sat before the Senate and confirmed that the United States Postal Service, a constitutionally mandated institution older than the political parties themselves, would restrict the delivery of mail-in ballots in states that refuse to surrender their voter rolls to the federal government. He framed the proposal as ensuring “the right ballots are going to the right people.” Senator Elissa Slotkin framed it differently, calling Steiner a “pawn” and warning: “The Postal Service is one of the most important institutions in our country. Don’t taint it with the obsession of this one man.”

The voter rolls Steiner wants are the same ones the Department of Justice has sued 24 states to obtain, data that includes names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, party affiliation, and voting history. Eleven states have already complied. In those states, voter data was funneled through a system called SAVE, a database originally built to verify immigration status for Medicaid and food assistance, never designed for elections, and modified by DOGE engineers to process bulk voter queries. Over 33 million voters have been run through it. When Texas checked the results, roughly 25% of those flagged had already provided proof of citizenship. Nearly 70% had previously documented their eligibility. The system is engineered to produce false positives at scale, and every false positive is a citizen who must prove they belong or lose their registration. Federal Judge David Carter, reviewing the DOJ’s campaign, called it “unprecedented and illegal” and wrote: “The taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece-by-piece until there is nothing left.”

Meanwhile, Congress is working to codify the machinery. The MEGA Act would mandate centralized voter databases in every state, require purges every 30 days using these same error-prone federal systems, place flagged voters on publicly available lists, impose strict photo ID requirements, and ban universal mail voting. More than 69 million women who changed their name at marriage would find a birth certificate alone insufficient to register. Over 21 million voting-age citizens lack easy access to documents proving citizenship. The burden of proof falls entirely on the citizen, every single time.

And then there is the intimidation. Steve Bannon, one of the president’s closest allies, pledged on his podcast that “we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” and went further the next day, calling for U.S. Army troops at polling sites, despite federal law prohibiting military deployment at elections. Senator Mark Warner explained why such threats work even if they are never carried out: “You don’t need to do a lot to discourage people from voting.” One ICE vehicle parked outside a polling place in a Latino neighborhood does the work of a thousand purged registrations. The chilling effect does not require execution. It requires only the credible promise of force.

IV. What the Machinery Protects

This spring, the administration started a war with Iran that closed the Strait of Hormuz, spiked fuel prices, drove inflation to its highest point in years, and cratered the president’s approval into the high 30s. Working families are choosing between groceries and gas. The administration’s response has not been to address the pain. It has been to build an architecture ensuring that the pain cannot be expressed through the ballot box. Gramsci had a term for the moment when a ruling class can no longer generate consent: hegemonic crisis. The response is never to change course. It is to constrain the mechanisms through which dissent is expressed.

Two days ago, Speaker Mike Johnson made that logic explicit. Speaking to donors at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, he warned that if Democrats win the House, “impeachment’s not even the big concern. They’ll go after Trump’s family, donors, friends and Cabinet members. Half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you.” The Speaker of the House just described his constitutional role as running a protection racket for the president’s inner circle. That is what the machinery protects. Not the republic. Not the voters. The impunity of the people in the room.

Hannah Fried of All Voting Is Local, who watched the 2020 overturn attempt from the inside, put it plainly: “Election deniers don’t have to change the laws or the policies. They will take what they want by any means.” And Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center named what ProPublica documented: “The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government.” It is no longer a movement trying to capture the state. It is the state.

The Quiet War’s two fronts are now complete. Contain the protest. Constrain the vote. Neither dissent nor democracy can reach the people making the decisions.

V. What You Need To Do

Forty-three weeks ago, this publication began with a piece about ICE and the language of disappearance. I argued that when the state removes a person from their community and deposits them into a system designed to make them invisible, we should call that what it is. Since then, I have traced the architecture of that disappearance across surveillance systems, detention machinery, free speech zones, and the containment of protest. Each piece has documented a different mechanism. Each mechanism serves the same function: making dissent invisible to the people in power.

This piece documents the final mechanism. The machinery is no longer designed to disappear people, though it still does that. It is designed to disappear the vote itself. Not by banning elections, which would be too visible, and too obviously unconstitutional. But by chipping away at the infrastructure of participation until the election still happens but its outcome has been determined before a single ballot is cast. Gerrymandered maps that predetermine winners. Voter purges that remove citizens from the rolls using databases that flag the eligible and the ineligible alike. A postal service that would refuse to deliver your ballot unless your state surrenders your data. Judges who gut the laws that protect your representation. And a Speaker of the House who tells a room full of donors that his job is running a protection program for the president’s inner circle.

The machinery has one vulnerability. It is calibrated for low turnout. Every tactic documented in this piece is designed to reduce participation, not to withstand a surge of it. Suppression works in the margins. It does not survive overwhelming numbers.

So here is what I need you to do, not eventually, not when it feels convenient, but now. Check your voter registration today. If you have moved, re-register immediately. Learn your state’s deadlines for mail-in ballots, early voting, and registration. Make a voting plan and write it down. Then talk to five people this week. Ask if they are registered. Ask if they have a plan. Help them make one. Do not assume someone else will do this. The machinery is counting on exactly that assumption.

November 3, 2026. The most important thing you will do this year is not reading this piece. It is casting a ballot and making sure everyone around you does the same. The machine they built while you weren’t looking has one flaw they are praying you won’t discover: what happens when you show up anyway?

References

Berman, A. (n.d.). Project 2026: Trump’s plan to rig the next election. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/donald-trump-plan-to-rig-2026-midterm-elections-voter-suppression-gerrymandering-certification/

Clark, D. B., & Fifield, J. (2026, April 13). Inside Trump’s effort to “Take over” the midterm elections. ProPublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-midterm-elections-takeover?utm_campaign=propublica-sprout&utm_content=1780137527&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawSUFFhleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE4OVJOcXhYTWVvcG82ZlRVc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHmhSZVMjmUuHOHazK32NR43JhHYl6o8Wo9i0ULoK2erd5LQ8xIjivnS1YUoh_aem_rM6C3RC1Sdq5yovMPezkqg

Commander, A. (2026, June 26). Mike Johnson warns impeachment not ‘The big concern’ if DEMs win midterms. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/mike-johnson-warns-impeachment-not-the-big-concern-if-dems-win-midterms-12128568

Dallek, R. (2026, June 9). Talk of canceling elections shows Trump is unfit for office. The Bulwark.

The Bulwark

Talk of Canceling Elections Shows Trump Is Unfit for Office

IN A CONVERSATION with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last August, President Donald Trump noted that Ukraine hadn’t held elections since the Russian invasion, asking whether elections are called off during a war. Before Zelensky could respond, Trump added: “Oh, that’s a good thing…

a month ago · 204 likes · Robert Dallek

Ibarguen, E. (2026, June 24). Postal Service would restrict mail-in voting under Trump proposal, chief says. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/24/usps-mail-in-voting-state-voter-rolls-00974142

Jackson, M. (2026, June 8). Donald Trump will resign in 2027. The first domino falls this November. Uncensored Objection. Law. Facts. No Spin.

Uncensored Objection. Law. Facts. No Spin.

Donald Trump Will Resign in 2027. The First Domino Falls This November.

On a rain soaked farm in Wisconsin, the President of the United States unclipped his microphone, called a reporter crooked, called her darling, and walked off the set of Meet the Press. Fifty minutes of cameras rolling. One plain question about a fund he wants to steer toward people who beat police officers on January 6. He never finished the thought. H…

a month ago · 9062 likes · 1330 comments · Mitch Jackson

Lithwick, D., & Stern, M. J. (2026, June 3). The Supreme Court just transformed its horrible voting rights ruling into something more calamitous. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/06/supreme-court-alabama-map-voting-horror-alito-sotomayor.html

Lo Wang, H. (2026, May 18). Why the Supreme Court’s voting rights ruling could play a big role at the local level. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/18/nx-s1-5812837/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-state-local-redistricting

LOUISIANA v. CALLAIS. (2026). In S. Court, SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-109_21o3.pdf

Resistance, C. (2026, February 2). Midterms 2026: The machine they built while you weren’t looking. Critical Resistance.

Critical Resistance

Midterms 2026: The Machine They Built While You Weren't Looking

On January 28, 2026, the nation’s top spy chief stood in the loading bay of a county election facility in Georgia, watching FBI agents load boxes of ballots into trucks…

5 months ago · 150 likes · 20 comments · Critical Resistance

Rumpf, S. (2026, May 8). NAACP Sues Tennessee Over Redistricting That Wiped Out State’s Only Majority-Black District. Mediaite. https://www.mediaite.com/politics/naacp-sues-tennessee-over-redistricting-that-wiped-out-states-only-majority-black-district/

Tomasky, M. (2026a, February 27). It Can Now Be Plainly Said: Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/post/207138/trump-coup-detat-midterm-elections?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwY2xjawSBPc1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFFT0hqczJtRDZrYWduQ2s4c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHnx4JHVNw4f2ZAssSTR-Rzkvm6arshQfYNMawUzQDvS98JVySD1PmZRV7kmY_aem_Z-8-jAfUfdLSfNLBPG6Kdg

Wendler. J. (2026, February 8). Democrats sound alarm about possible voter intimidation in midterms. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/08/democrats-sound-alarm-voter-intimidation-midterms-00770677

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Announced but Not Delivered

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 03:36:04 GMT

History Rhymes is an ongoing series tracing the echoes between past struggles and present crises. Each installment revisits a moment of resistance, from labor uprisings to political repression, to reveal the patterns that persist, the forces that evolve, and the lessons we can use now. History doesn’t repeat, but power does. And so does the courage to challenge it.

I. The Delay

On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger stood in Galveston, Texas, and read General Order No. 3 aloud to a crowd of Black and White onlookers. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed two and a half years earlier. The war had ended two months before. The enslaved population of Texas had nearly doubled during the war as slaveholders from Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi fled westward with their human property, dragging over 150,000 people to the frontier of the dying Confederacy. They were the last to learn they were free.

Felix Haywood, who had been born into slavery near San Antonio, remembered the moment decades later. “Hallelujah broke out,” he said. “Soldiers, all of a sudden, was everywhere. We was all walkin’ on golden clouds.” Right away, the formerly enslaved “started on the move. They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they’d know what it was, like it was a place or a city.”

But Granger’s order contained the architecture of its own betrayal. It declared “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.” In the very next breath, it advised the freedpeople to “remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages” and warned that they “will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness.” Three days later, according to the Galveston Daily News, federal soldiers were scouring the streets, rounding up every freedman they could find and pressing them into labor. The newspaper called this a “practical lesson in the duties” of freedom.

The promise and the containment arrived in the same sentence. Liberation moved at the speed of enforcement, not the speed of law. And what the soldiers carried to Galveston was an announcement, not a redistribution. That gap between what was declared and what was delivered is the gap this piece exists to trace. Because 161 years later, it has not closed.

II. 40 Acres and the Betrayal

In January 1865, five months before Granger’s announcement, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, setting aside 485,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land along the South Carolina and Georgia coast to be distributed to formerly enslaved families in 40-acre plots. Sherman ordered that “no white person whatever will be permitted to reside” on the land. The Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency created to oversee the transition to freedom, controlled roughly 900,000 acres of government land by the spring of 1865, enough for nearly 23,000 Black homesteads. For the first time, the economic architecture of liberation was being laid alongside the legal architecture. Land, capital, independence. The means of freedom, not just the announcement of it.

The counterrevolution came in October 1865. President Andrew Johnson revoked Sherman’s order and commanded the Freedmen’s Bureau to return the land to the rebel planters he had recently pardoned en masse. The economic foundation of Black freedom was pulled out before it was ever built. One sixty-year-old freedman in the Mississippi Valley, when asked what freedom meant without land, answered with a clarity no economist has ever matched: “What’s de use of being free if you don’t own land enough to be buried in?”

Without land, without capital, without the means of production, “freedom” became sharecropping, what historian Dale Kretz has called “a compromise between wage slavery and actual slavery.” Black farmers rented land from the same planters who had enslaved them, paid with a share of their harvest, and could be evicted for virtually any offense, exposing them to vagrancy laws and the convict leasing system that funneled Black men back into forced labor through the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause: “except as a punishment for crime.” Even the legal date of emancipation was settled through the logic of property. In 1867, a federal court in Texas ruled in Cornett v. Williams that slavery had legally ended on June 19, 1865, not because of any principle of human freedom, but to determine whether a promissory note used to purchase enslaved people after Lincoln’s proclamation was still payable. The date of Juneteenth itself was adjudicated as a property dispute. The architecture did not end with emancipation. It adapted.

III. The Compounding

The architecture did not just adapt once. It adapted every single time Black Americans found a pathway toward the economic independence that emancipation had promised and the counterrevolution had revoked.

Sharecropping locked formerly enslaved families into debt peonage on the same land they had worked in bondage. Jim Crow laws sealed the political and social dimensions of the cage. When Black communities built their own wealth anyway, as they did in Tulsa’s Greenwood District in 1921, White mobs burned it to the ground and the state looked away. When the New Deal created the modern middle class, Black families were systematically excluded from its provisions: redlined out of FHA mortgages, barred from Social Security protections for domestic and agricultural workers, shut out of the GI Bill’s wealth-building machinery by local administrators who ensured its benefits flowed almost exclusively to White veterans. When the Civil Rights Movement won legal equality, the architecture adapted again. Mass incarceration exploded, fueled by the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause, the same six words written into the Constitution in 1865: “except as a punishment for crime.” As historian Carol Anderson has documented, every advance in Black social power has been met with a corresponding backlash of structural retrenchment. The pattern is not a failure of progress. It is the architecture functioning as designed.

The numbers tell the story of that design with brutal precision. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the median Black family holds $44,890 in wealth. The median White family holds $285,000. For every $100 in White household wealth, Black households hold $15. Black households make up 13.6% of the American population and hold 4.7% of the nation’s total wealth. White households make up 65.3% and hold 80%. The gap widened between 2019 and 2022 by $50,000, even as both groups gained wealth. Eric Williams showed in Capitalism and Slavery that the profits extracted from enslaved labor built the infrastructure of the societies that did the extracting while the communities that produced the wealth received none of the development. That pattern, established in the Caribbean sugar colonies and perfected in the American South, is still compounding. 161 years of architectural adaptation, measured in dollars, exposed in a single ratio: fifteen cents on the dollar.

IV. The Holiday

In 2021, Juneteenth became a federal holiday. That same year, a Gallup poll found that 83% of Americans knew little or nothing about what it commemorated. A country that refused to deliver the economic promise of emancipation for 156 years gave the date a day off work and called it progress.

The commodification was immediate and predictable, though it was hardly new. White merchants were already profiting from Emancipation Day celebrations in the 1870s, selling candy and jewelry to the people whose unpaid labor had built the economy those merchants operated in. By 1896, a group of Black Texans calling themselves the “Regulars” held their own separate celebration in protest, stating that they opposed men who tried to “buy our race of people with a few dollars.” Replace the candy vendors with Target’s Juneteenth merchandise line and Amazon’s branded graphics and the pattern is unbroken across 150 years: the system that never delivered the liberation selling the celebration of it.

And the constitutional architecture of slavery is still operating. The Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause, “except as a punishment for crime,” written in 1865, is not a relic. At Delaney Hall in Newark, ICE detainees were working for a dollar an hour under exactly this provision while a Democratic governor sent riot police to protect the facility. The architecture was not abolished. It was rezoned into the carceral system, where it continues to extract labor from bodies the state has decided do not merit the full protections of freedom.

President Biden, signing the holiday into law, said it himself: “It’s not enough just to commemorate Juneteenth. The emancipation of enslaved Black Americans didn’t mark the end of America’s work to deliver on the promise of equality.” He was right. The question is whether the country that made Juneteenth a holiday has any intention of making Juneteenth’s promise real.

V. Where It All Points

Felix Haywood, looking back on emancipation from the distance of seven decades, said it plainly: “We knowed freedom was on us, but we didn’t know what was to come with it. We thought we was goin’ to get rich like the white folks. We thought we was goin’ to be richer than the white folks, ‘cause we was stronger and knowed how to work. But it didn’t turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ‘em rich.”

It didn’t turn out that way because it was never designed to. The soldiers brought an announcement. The architecture delivered sharecropping, convict leasing, redlining, GI Bill exclusion, mass incarceration, and a wealth gap that widens with each generation like a crack running through the foundation of a house that was never built to hold everyone who lives in it. Every institution that was supposed to deliver the substance of freedom, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to the federal housing agencies to the criminal legal system, was either dismantled, captured, or redesigned to preserve the extractive relationship that emancipation was supposed to end. The pattern has repeated so many times across so many decades that it can no longer be called a failure. It is the architecture functioning on its own terms, producing exactly the outcomes it was built to produce.

I grew up on St. Croix, where emancipation came seventeen years before Juneteenth, in 1848, after a revolt led by an enslaved man named General Buddhoe. 178 years later, the island is still a United States territory, still running on infrastructure designed by and for someone else, still navigating an economy shaped by centuries of extraction that no proclamation has ever reversed. The Caribbean taught me, long before I encountered Beckford or Williams or Rodney in a classroom, that freedom announced is not freedom delivered, and that the distance between the two is where the architecture lives.

Juneteenth should not be comfortable. It should be the day the country is forced to look at the distance between what was promised and what was built, between the words read aloud in Galveston and the fifteen cents on the dollar that those words have produced after 161 years of compounding. The celebration matters. The history matters. The joy that Haywood described, that hallelujah that broke out when the soldiers arrived, that was real, and it belonged to the people who had fought and bled and endured to make it possible. But joy and justice are not the same thing, and a country that offers one without the other has not yet finished the work that Juneteenth commemorates. The question this holiday should force us to ask is not how far we have come, but what exactly was promised, what exactly was delivered, and after 161 years, who is still waiting.

References
Brown, N., & Staff, L. (2024, June 19). Liberation Editorial – Juneteenth: Black liberation through revolutionary struggle! Liberation News. https://liberationnews.org/liberation-editorial-juneteenth-black-liberation-through-revolutionary-struggle/

Cooper, S. (2021, June 28). Juneteenth: A Marxist perspective — Hampton Institute. Hampton Institute. https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/juneteenth-a-marxist-perspective

Kreiss, D., Lawrence, R. G., & McGregor, S. C. (2024). Trump Goes to Tulsa on Juneteenth: Placing the Study of Identity, Social Groups, and Power at the Center of Political Communication Research. Political Communication, 41(5), 845–856. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2024.2343757

Kretz, D. (2021, June 19). Juneteenth Is About Freedom. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2021/06/juneteenth-jubilee-slavery-emancipation-lincoln-du-bois-granger-texas-wage-labor-sharecropping

Moneyhon, C.H. (2024). Emancipation Day to Juneteenth: The Origins of a Texas Celebration. Southwestern Historical Quarterly 128(1), 1-22. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/swh.2024.a936677.

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and what it tells us about how the rest of it works.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

The Octagon and the Empire

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 06:24:58 GMT

Signal/Noise is an ongoing series that cuts through the spectacle to find the structure underneath. Each installment takes a breaking moment (either political, cultural or economic) and traces the power dynamics most coverage misses. The signal is always there. You just have to know what to listen for.

I. The Lawn

On Sunday, June 14, Flag Day, the President of the United States will celebrate his 80th birthday by watching men beat each other unconscious in a cage on the White House South Lawn.

The event is called UFC Freedom 250. A 5,000-seat temporary arena is being assembled on the same grounds where state dinners used to happen, where Easter egg rolls were held for children, where foreign leaders walked with presidents under the elms. Three hundred and fifty truckloads of equipment. Cranes visible over the roofline of the People’s House. A custom broadcast structure called “The Claw” engineered for television visuals. Extensive regrading because the lawn isn’t flat enough to hold a professional fighting arena. The South Lawn is also, as of last October, adjacent to the demolished East Wing, which is being rebuilt as a 90,000-square-foot ballroom with underground bunkers. The president is staging a cage fight on a construction site next to the monument he’s building to himself.

The event is sponsored by Crypto.com and Ram. The Semiquincentennial of American independence, brought to you by a cryptocurrency exchange and a truck brand. Jefferson would be thrilled.

It hasn’t gone smoothly. Multiple fighters have pulled out. UFC officials have reportedly expressed concerns about the mid-June D.C. heat, the suffocating humidity, and the insects attracted to all the lights. Trump threw what appeared to be a tantrum on Truth Social last weekend, threatening to cancel the whole thing. The spectacle can’t even manage its own logistics.

Outside the White House perimeter on Sunday, the No Kings movement is staging a First Amendment concert. Inside the perimeter, a cage fight. Citizens singing about freedom on one side of the fence. Men bleeding for it on the other. On the president’s birthday. On Flag Day. During a war.

II. Bread and Circuses

The Roman poet Juvenal coined the phrase “panem et circenses” to describe how emperors kept the public pacified: give them bread and give them games, and they’ll forget that the republic is rotting from the inside. As such, the Colosseum wasn’t just entertainment. It was political technology, a machine for converting spectacle into the appearance of power while the actual power structure decayed behind the marble.

The cover of this week’s issue of The Week captures the parallel with an image that barely qualifies as satire: Trump in imperial Roman garb, presiding over bloodied fighters in a cage, the White House visible through the fence behind him. The headline: “American Colosseum.” The subheadline: “How Trump hijacked the nation’s 250th birthday.” A mainstream magazine put the bread-and-circuses argument on newsstands across the country, because the argument is no longer a reach. It’s a rendering of what’s actually happening on Sunday.

But there’s a more recent prophecy worth naming. In 2006, Mike Judge released Idiocracy, a comedy set 500 years in the future where the President of the United States is a former professional wrestler named Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, the most popular television show is called “Ow! My Balls!,” and the entire country has been dumbed into submission by an endless feed of spectacle and consumption. Despite the film’s thoughtful opening monologue about how human evolution could play out, it was ultimately treated as absurdist satire, and played in theaters as a joke about a future that could never actually arrive.

Twenty years later, the President of the United States is staging a cage fight on the White House lawn on his 80th birthday during a war. The event is sponsored by a cryptocurrency exchange. His family is selling $12,000 commemorative gold coins with his face on them. A pre-fight press conference is scheduled at the Lincoln Memorial. And the professional satirists saw it coming. “I’m no prophet,” Judge told TIME back in 2016, when Trump was merely running for office. “I was off by 490 years.” His co-writer Etan Cohen put it more bluntly: “Writing Idiocracy was just following your id. Now unfortunately our id has become our candidate for President.” That was before the war. Before the ballroom. Before the golden statue. Before Freedom 250.

The id didn’t just become the candidate. It became the presidency. And on Sunday, it’s hosting fights in an arena on the lawn of the People’s House, charging admission, and calling it patriotism.

III. The Freedom in Freedom 250

The name is worth sitting with. Freedom 250. A celebration of American liberty, staged by a company that two separate law review articles have identified as one of the most exploitative labor structures in professional sports.

The UFC operates as a monopsony, a market in which a single buyer dominates the purchase of labor. If you are an elite mixed martial arts fighter, the UFC is effectively the only employer. There is no meaningful alternative. The Iowa Law Review published an analysis last year arguing that the FTC should take enforcement action against the UFC for acquiring its dominance through anticompetitive mergers and maintaining it through exclusionary contracts that prevent fighters from seeking competitive offers. The University of Toledo Law Review went further, describing UFC fighter contracts as “unconscionable,” a legal term meaning so one-sided that no fair person would offer them and no reasonable person would accept them absent coercion.

The numbers tell the rest. UFC fighters receive roughly 16 to 20 percent of the revenue they generate. In the NFL, NBA, and MLB, athletes receive approximately 50 percent. The gap isn’t a negotiation outcome. It’s a structural feature of a market with one buyer and no exit. The FTC investigated the UFC twice in the 2010s for antitrust violations. Both investigations ended without action. Now the company is hosting a birthday party for the president on public land, and selling $12,000 gold coins with his face on them in partnership with his sons’ business. The coins are billed as commemorating a “defining patriotic moment.” The fighters whose labor makes the moment possible will take home less than a fifth of what it generates.

Terry Crews, who played President Camacho in Idiocracy, saw where this was heading a decade ago. “The cult of masculinity has gone amok,” he said in 2016. “What he is saying is, I will beat you down and take your women.” The UFC spectacle is that cult made architectural: masculinity as product, combat as content and patriotism as brand. The fighters are the raw material. The president is the logo. And the freedom on display at Freedom 250 is the freedom of a structure that pays its athletes less than a fifth of what they earn while wrapping the exploitation in a flag and staging it on the lawn of the People’s House.

The event’s own tagline says it plainly, though not in the way they intended: “Freedom isn’t a spectator sport.” For UFC fighters, it isn’t a sport at all. It’s a contract they can’t leave.

IV. The Architecture of Distraction

Guy Debord wrote that the spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people, mediated by images. The UFC Freedom 250 is that thesis made flesh and broadcast on a streaming platform owned by a Trump-aligned CEO. The presidency has been reduced to content production, and Sunday’s programming is a cage fight with a flag motif.

Here is what is happening while 350 truckloads of equipment are assembled on the South Lawn.

The Iran war is in its fourth month. The Strait of Hormuz still remains effectively closed. The national average for gas today is $4.16, and California has the highest of any state at $5.89. Diesel inventories are at historic lows. Spirit Airlines no longer exists. The energy crisis that analysts warned about in the spring is arriving on schedule, and it will get worse before it gets better. Fifty-six people have died in immigration detention this year. Detainees at Delaney Hall have been documented eating food with worms in it. The $1.5 trillion defense budget continues to fund a war that 71% of Americans oppose while the administration simultaneously spends $60 million on UFC event infrastructure and pushes a $400 million ballroom expansion at the White House.

One Reddit user put it as cleanly as anyone could: “So glad we are getting this instead of healthcare.”

The spectacle doesn’t just distract from the crisis. It announces that the people in power have decided the crisis is not their problem. The cage fight is not a failure of governance. It is the governance. Entertain the base. Perform strength. Sell the coins. Stream the content. And let the architecture collapse behind the stage set while the cameras point the other way.

A lawsuit filed by the Public Integrity Project is seeking to block the event entirely. Its founder, Brendan Ballou, called it “a profoundly corrupt scheme to enrich the President and his friends,” warning that if the fight proceeds, “our national monuments will become little more than branding opportunities for the rich and well-connected.” The administration’s response to the legal challenge was three words: “obstructionist, baseless, and dilatory.” They didn’t address the merits. They attacked the people who filed.

That, too, is the architecture.

V. Where It All Points

While the cage fight happens inside the perimeter on Sunday, the No Kings movement will be outside it, staging a First Amendment concert they’re calling Rise Up, Sing Out. Citizens singing about freedom on one side of the fence, men bleeding for money on the other. The juxtaposition is almost too neat, and I want to be honest about my ambivalence: I’ve written before about my skepticism toward traditional protest, about how marches and concerts and petitions tend to make participants feel like they’ve done something without actually threatening the structures that produce the crisis in the first place. The powerful don’t lose sleep over people singing outside the gate. They lose sleep over people who stop showing up to work, stop paying the bills, and stop participating in the machinery that keeps the whole thing running.

But I also know that something is shifting. Eight million Americans marched on No Kings Day earlier this year, the largest single day of nonviolent direct action in the country’s history, and even if marching alone doesn’t dismantle the architecture, it does something that the spectacle is specifically designed to prevent: it reminds people that they are not alone in seeing what they see, that the exhaustion is shared, that the pattern recognition is not paranoia but clarity. One viral tweet captured that feeling perfectly this week, a man looking at photos of the arena construction behind the White House and writing: “It’s so fucking crazy all the time... like one thing after another, so I mostly don’t react to it and let it wash over me. But every once in a while I have these moments of clarity where I’m like damn... what the fuck.” That moment of clarity is what the spectacle is designed to prevent, and the fact that millions of people are still having it, still showing up, still refusing to let the absurdity become the new normal, is the only thing that separates a declining republic from a fallen one.

The Colosseum is still standing in Rome. You can buy a ticket and walk through the tunnels where the gladiators waited. The Roman Empire, of course, is not standing. It fell, slowly and then all at once, while the games kept playing and the emperors kept building and the bread kept flowing until it didn’t. The arena always outlasts the empire that built it, because stone endures longer than legitimacy and spectacle survives longer than the state that staged it.

On Sunday the president will sit in the front row of a cage fight on the lawn of the People’s House, on his 80th birthday, on Flag Day, during a war, next to a half-built ballroom, while citizens sing about freedom outside the fence and fighters bleed for a fraction of what they’re worth inside it, and the country will watch it all on a screen and decide what it means. The only question worth asking is the one the spectacle is designed to make you forget: who exactly is in the cage, and which side of the fence are you on?

References

Blanchet, B. (2026, June 8). Trump Family, UFC selling $12,000 ’Freedom 250’-Themed coins ahead of White House fight night. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-organization-ufc-selling-freedom-250-coins_n_6a26db25e4b0626f4fe031e5

Garner, D. (2022). Unconscionable: Fighters, Contracts, And A Hardcore Cash-Money Sport. University of Toledo Law Review.

Powel, J. (2026, June 8). Federal lawsuit aims to stop UFC Freedom 250 fight at White House. USA TODAY. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ufc/2026/06/07/lawsuit-stop-ufc-freedom-250/90451204007/

Stein, J. (2026, February 22). We have become an idiocracy. TIME. https://time.com/4327424/idiocracy/

Varandani, S. (2026, May 27). From Politics to Pay-Per-View: The White House’s Entertainment Era. International Business Times, Singapore Edition. https://www.ibtimes.sg/politics-pay-per-view-white-house-entertainment-era-ufc-freedom-250-86992

Williams, T. (2025). Hipster Antitrust and Labor Monopsony: Why the Federal Trade Commission Should Throw a Punch at the UFC. Iowa Law Review.

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and what it tells us about how the rest of it works.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Half a Mile from Free Speech

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 05:35:13 GMT

The Quiet War is an ongoing series about the war that doesn’t make the front page. Each installment traces the infrastructure of repression being built while most people’s attention is elsewhere: the surveillance systems, the detention machinery, the erosion of rights that happens not in dramatic confrontation but in contracts, policies and code. This war is quiet by design. Naming it is the first act of resistance.

I. The Perimeter

A half-mile curfew zone surrounds Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey. Inside the zone: riot police, tear gas, flash bangs and mounted officers. Outside it: a “free speech zone” where you’re allowed to exercise rights the Constitution says have no geographic limit.

The last time I checked, the entire country was a free speech zone. Designating one means everywhere else isn’t.

Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, deployed New Jersey State Police to establish what she called a “peaceful, protected protest zone.” Protected. As if the danger is the protesters’ proximity to the building, and not what’s happening inside it. Before the state troopers arrived, workers from the GEO Group, the private prison company that operates Delaney Hall, walked outside and painted yellow lines on the sidewalk. They posted “private property” and “no trespassing” signs at the main entry points. A corporation that profits from detention literally drew the lines of containment on the ground, and the governor then sent police to enforce them.

The curfew runs 9 PM to 6 AM, nightly, until further notice. Protesters who refused to leave were arrested. A WNBC news crew was pulled from a clearly marked press vehicle. Six people were taken into custody Friday night. Sherrill noted that five of them came from out of state, the nearest being New York, thirteen miles away.

She called them “outside agitators.” That phrase has a history, which will be explored shortly.

II. What’s Inside The Perimeter

Three hundred detainees launched a hunger and labor strike on May 22, led by a man named Martin Soto. Their letter, made public by The American Prospect, described decaying food containing worms, bathrooms in inhumane condition, and staff ignoring serious illness. Congressional delegations confirmed it: maggots in meals, one doctor for hundreds of detainees, cancer patients untreated, a pregnant woman denied proper care. Conditions bad enough, according to the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, for people to lose their pregnancies.

The state’s response to Martin Soto was to promptly transfer him out of the facility. Just disappear the organizer.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin denied the hunger strike was even happening at all. When pressed on the food, he said detainees were “refusing to eat because they want their ethnic food. Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want.” An attorney representing people inside the facility responded: “I think they just don’t want to eat worms.”

Border czar Tom Homan went on Fox News and threatened to force-feed the hunger strikers, even though many international human rights organizations classify force-feeding as torture. Kathy O’Leary of Pax Christi, who has worked with detainees directly, agreed: “These are all documented textbook forms of torture.”

The perimeter isn’t protecting public safety. It’s protecting the public from seeing this.

III. “Outside Agitators”

Bull Connor used the phrase in Birmingham. George Wallace used it in Selma. Every authority confronted with dissent it cannot discredit on substance reaches for the same word: outside. The implication is always the same: legitimate protest can only come from people directly affected, in the location the state designates, at the time the state permits.

So who was actually outside Delaney Hall?

Pax Christi, a Catholic peace organization. SEIU and CWA, two of the largest labor unions in the country. People’s Organization for Progress, a Newark-based civil rights group. CosechaNJ, an immigrant rights network. Community members who have been protesting the facility for over a year. Faith groups. Union workers. Neighbors.

Protesters lock arms and stand in front of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents outside Delaney Hall on Wednesday, May 27, 2026, in Newark. Photo by Julian Leshay Guadalupe/NorthJersey.com

These are not “national extremist groups,” as Sherrill claimed without identifying a single one. These are churches, unions, and community organizations doing what churches, unions, and community organizations have always done when the state brutalizes people: showing up.

Meanwhile, a volunteer medic named Adam Marshall was handing out water to families outside the facility when ICE agents grabbed him and took him away. He was found several towns over and returned only after a medical review. A man distributing water was physically disappeared from a protest and deposited miles from where he was seized. In week one of this publication, I called ICE operations kidnappings. Forty weeks later, the vocabulary still fits.

As Declan wrote on Substack last week: “In the United States, you are not an ‘outside agitator’ because you cross from New York or Pennsylvania into New Jersey to protest a federal injustice. You are a citizen exercising a national right against a national abuse of power.”

The only true outside force at Delaney Hall is ICE itself.

IV. The Bipartisan Architecture

The most dangerous moment in the quiet war is not when one party builds the architecture of repression. It’s when both parties enforce it. Not out of shared ideology, but out of shared operational logic. That’s what Delaney Hall reveals.

Mikie Sherrill did not endorse the conditions at Delaney Hall. She did not defend Mullin’s mockery of starving detainees or Homan’s threat to force-feed them. She said she wanted the facility closed. Then she sent state troopers with tear gas to protect it, established an indefinite curfew, and arrested the people who refused to be contained.

The quiet war does not need both parties to share an ideology. It just needs both parties to enforce the same perimeter.

And DHS noticed. Secretary Mullin publicly thanked Sherrill for “now allowing the New Jersey State Police to cooperate with us” and called her deployment “a win for law and order.” When the Trump administration’s border czar calls your actions a win, you are not resisting the architecture. You are the architecture.

Compare Minneapolis. When ICE launched its surge there, Minnesota’s Democratic officials treated the federal operation as the crisis, not the protesters. They went to court against DHS. After sustained community resistance, ICE withdrew most of its agents. That’s what it looks like when elected officials understand the assignment: you stand with your community against federal abuse, not between your community and the facility door.

Sherrill had the same choice. She chose the perimeter.

V. Where It All Points

Forty weeks ago, this publication began with a piece about ICE and the language of disappearance. I argued that when the state takes a person from their home, their family, their life, and deposits them into a system designed to make them invisible, we should call that what it is. Not “enforcement.” Not “removal.” Kidnapping.

This week, detainees inside ICE facilities in New Mexico and Tacoma formed an organization and chose their own name: La Unión de Secuestrados por ICE. The Union of People Kidnapped by ICE. They arrived at the same word independently. Because when you are inside the machinery, you don’t need a Substack to tell you what it is.

And at Delaney Hall, the architecture has added a new tool: disappearing the protest itself. Not by banning it, which would be too visible, and too obviously unconstitutional. But by containing it, with a half-mile perimeter. And a curfew until further notice. Yellow lines painted on the sidewalk by a private prison company earning $705 million in quarterly profits, paying detainees a dollar an hour for their labor under a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment that was written to preserve slavery by another name. The food has worms in it. Fifty-six people have died in immigration custody under this administration. And the state’s priority is making sure the people who object to this can’t be seen from the building.

The hunger strikers inside Delaney Hall cannot be heard. The protesters outside the perimeter cannot be seen. The press crew that tried to document it was physically removed. The medic handing out water was seized and deposited towns away. The organizer who led the strike was transferred to another facility. The architecture is complete: invisible suffering, inaudible dissent, and a bipartisan consensus that the most important thing is keeping the perimeter intact.

As Declan wrote, protest is not supposed to be convenient. It is not a suggestion box. It is not a civic pageant managed by the state. It is the refusal to let injustice proceed in peace. The people at Delaney Hall, inside and outside those walls, understand that.

Forty weeks ago I asked what we call it when the state disappears people. This week the question is simpler, and harder: what do we call it when the state disappears the dissent?

References

Declan. (2026, May 31). Protest is not supposed to be convenient. Better is Possible.

Better is Possible

Protest Is Not Supposed to Be Convenient

What is happening at Delaney Hall should alarm anyone who claims to believe in the right to protest…

a month ago · 9 likes · 6 comments · Declan

Editor. (2026, June 1). Shut down Delaney Hall and all ICE detention centers! Workers World. https://www.workers.org/2026/06/92997/

Fan, C. (2026, May 28). Protests over inhumane conditions at ICE facility Delaney Hall in Newark become violent. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/delaney-hall-protests-ice-facility-newark-nj/

Pazmino, G. (2026, June 1). After weekend clashes, protests continue under curfew near Newark ICE facility. CNN. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/news/after-weekend-clashes-protests-continue-under-curfew-near-newark-ice-facility/ar-AA24qCGZ?ocid=BingNewsSerp

Public Square Amplified team. (2026, May 30). Notes from on the ground outside Delaney Hall — PUBLIC SQUARE. PUBLIC SQUARE. https://www.publicsq.org/latest-articles/z5sjfp57415yj4mhfhof1h8srlnofh

____________________________________________________________________________

Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and what it tells us about how the rest of it works.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

The Future Is Yours (Terms and Conditions Apply)

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 26 May 2026 04:18:06 GMT

Precarity Diaries is an ongoing series connecting personal economic experience to structural conditions. Each installment starts where most of us actually live - in the gap between what the system promises and what it delivers, between the credential and the paycheck, between the ceremony and what comes after - and follows those threads back to the architecture that produced them. These aren’t just personal stories. They’re the transcripts of a system grading on a curve that was never designed in our favor.

I. The Ceremony

I cried at my students’ graduation this past Friday afternoon. Our virtual public charter school held its inaugural graduating senior class ceremony, and watching those names scroll across the screen, students I had taught and graded and worried about and encouraged through the past few years of pandemic recovery and political chaos and the slow unraveling of every institutional promise their education was built on, I lost it. I typed into the staff Teams chat afterward: “Ugh, every year I tell myself I’m not gonna cry, and every year I fail. Such a moving and fitting tribute to all of our deserving seniors. SO PROUD!!!” I meant every word.

The next day, I put on my own cap and gown, as well as a graduation hood with a light sky blue velvet lining, indicating the degree level achieved. Master of Education, Curriculum and Instruction, from Southern New Hampshire University. Magna cum laude. Perfect score on my capstone. I watched the virtual commencement livestreamed on YouTube, wearing my graduation regalia, including honor society cords, in my office, and when my name appeared I felt a flood of emotions including pride, relief, and deep contentment. I posted about it on Facebook and received a broad outpouring of support and well wishes from not only many family and friends, but also many former grade school teachers, Hampshire professors, and students I had taught over the years everywhere from St. Croix to Maine to Grenada. The kid from the small island did alright.

And a week before that, Hampshire College held its final spring commencement, conferring degrees to 192 graduates under a tent on a campus that will close at the end of this year. President Chrisler held back tears. The keynote speaker, Dr. J Finley, a friend from the class ahead of mine, called her address her “Div IV” and told the graduates that no one is coming to save them. The library quad was brimming with people who came to applaud the new alumni and to say goodbye to the institution that made them.

Three ceremonies in eight days. I wept viewing all of them from a computer screen. And the question I could not stop asking, through the tears and the pride and the caps sailing into the air, is the question this piece is built around: graduation into what?

II. What They’re Walking Into

Students graduating at all academic levels this month are stepping into a world experiencing seismic economic shifts, political turmoil compounded by a war in the Middle East, and a labor market that has quietly turned hostile to the very people it was supposed to absorb. Only 13% of young Americans between 18 and 29 believe the country is headed in the right direction, according to the Harvard Youth Poll. 57% percent say it is on the wrong track. 43% describe themselves as struggling or getting by with limited financial security, a figure that rises to 50% among Black youth and 51% among Hispanic youth. And only 30% believe they will be better off financially than their parents, which means seven in ten members of this generation have already abandoned the foundational promise of American economic life before their careers have even begun.

The job market they are entering confirms their pessimism. More than half of 183 employers surveyed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers rate the 2026 job market for college graduates as poor or fair, the most pessimistic outlook since the first year of the pandemic. Handshake, one of the largest early-career job platforms, reports a 16% year-over-year decline in full-time job postings alongside a 26% increase in applications per job. Three in five rising seniors say they are pessimistic about starting their careers. One product design major told Inside Higher Ed, “The political climate has made me lose a lot of hope for not only the job market, but my future as a whole. Everything feels very divided and unstable.” The unemployment rate for young college graduates has risen to 5.3%, now exceeding the overall national rate of 4.3%, a complete reversal of the historic pattern in which a degree once guaranteed a labor market advantage. The Economic Policy Institute notes that the hires rate, one of the most reliable indicators of labor market health, has fallen to levels not seen since 2013 and 2014, when unemployment was three percentage points higher than it is today.

And it’s not just college graduates facing this contraction. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that summer teen hiring is on track to be the worst in decades, with camp counselor listings on Indeed down nearly 30% from last year, and New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program receiving over 200,000 applications for 100,000 openings. Challenger, Gray and Christmas projects that only 790,000 jobs will go to teen workers this summer, which would set a new record low, falling below last year’s already historic low of 801,000. Rising fuel costs are squeezing the small businesses that typically hire young people for seasonal work. The labor market is not merely difficult at one level. It is contracting at every level simultaneously, from the entry-level corporate positions that college graduates are competing for to the summer jobs that high school students depend on for their first paychecks.

Artificial intelligence is also accelerating this contraction in ways that graduates can feel even if economists are still debating the data. Nearly nine in ten graduates now worry that AI will replace entry-level roles, up from 64% just one year ago. By a three-to-one margin, young Americans believe AI will take away more opportunities than it creates. 59% see it as a direct threat to their job security, making it one of the few issues on which young Democrats and Republicans agree. Companies are not necessarily eliminating positions outright, but they are, as one career expert described it, “hitting the brakes” on hiring as they assess how much human labor they still need. The result is a labor market characterized by what multiple analysts now call a “low-hire, low-fire” environment: companies aren’t laying people off in large numbers, but they aren’t bringing anyone new in either. Additionally, turnover has stalled, as 75% of current employees plan to stay in their positions through 2027, nearly half of them out of fear and economic uncertainty rather than satisfaction. Positions that would normally open through natural attrition are locked up. And the graduates standing outside the door, diplomas in hand, are discovering that up to 20% of the job listings they are applying to may not even be real, posted by companies to build talent pipelines or signal growth to investors rather than to actually fill a position.

The commencement speeches told them the future is theirs. Here is what “theirs” looks like in the data.

III. The Credential Trap

The system’s answer to all of this has always been the same: get more education. Work harder. Earn the credential. The degree will open the door.

I believed that. I still believe in the liberatory power of education itself, with a conviction rooted in watching it transform my own life and the lives of my students across nearly two decades. But despite completing my master’s degree this spring, I was offered a contract for next year that amounts to a pay cut after inflation. Fifteen years of classroom experience, a new graduate degree, and I will earn less in real terms next year than I did this year. The system’s response to four years of graduate work was a number calculated on a scale they won’t even share with me.

Sadly, I am not an exception. I am the pattern. The Economic Policy Institute’s data shows that the college wage premium, the earnings advantage a degree provides over a high school diploma, peaked around 2015 and has been declining since, now sitting roughly where it was in the late 1990s. The credential costs more and delivers less than it did a decade ago. Meanwhile, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports that the gender wage gap is widening for the second consecutive year, with women earning 82.1 cents on the dollar in 2025, down from 83.6 cents just two years prior. Women graduating this month walk into a labor market that is actively moving backward on pay equity, regardless of their qualifications. For Black and Hispanic graduates, the picture is even starker: the EPI documents annual earnings gaps exceeding $10,000 compared to their white and Asian American peers, even among workers with identical credentials and limited experience.

And here is the structural absurdity that ties it all together: more than 80% of hiring managers now say AI fluency is important for entry-level hires, but only one in three graduates say their college prepared them to use AI professionally. The system charges $50,000 to $200,000 for a credential, the credential often doesn’t teach the skills employers now require, and the wage premium it once guaranteed is shrinking. The door the degree was supposed to open is closing while the cost of the key keeps rising.

IV. The Speech and the Architecture

Most commencement speeches say some version of the same thing: work hard, believe in yourself, and the future belongs to you. It is optimism delivered in academic regalia with inspirational music underneath, and it is, in a way, one of the most sophisticated performances of ideology in American life. The speeches assume a world that rewards credentials, absorbs talent, and distributes opportunity to those who earn it. The data in the previous two sections describes the world that actually exists. The gap between the two is the architecture this generation is graduating into, and this year, that generation is making its displeasure heard.

At the University of Central Florida earlier this month, a commencement speaker began telling arts and humanities graduates that artificial intelligence represents “the next Industrial Revolution.” The graduates booed. Not murmured. Not shifted uncomfortably. They booed loudly enough that the speaker stopped mid-sentence and asked, “What happened?” The moment went viral, and similar disruptions have followed at ceremonies across the country. Palliative care researchers have a clinical term for what happens when a patient’s anticipated future suddenly vanishes. They call it the “existential slap.” What that auditorium in Orlando captured on video was an entire generation experiencing something structurally similar, refusing, collectively, to sit quietly through one more performance of a future they no longer believe in.

At Hampshire’s final commencement, Assistant Professor Noah Romero offered a different framing entirely. Hampshire, he told the graduates, did not keep them safe from the world. It kept “an irredeemable world” safe from the graduates. And now the college was about to “unleash 192 miniature Hampshire Colleges on the world.” That is not the language of a normal commencement speech. It is the language of a counter-narrative, one that treats the graduates not as products to be absorbed by the economy but as forces capable of challenging it. The difference between telling graduates “the future is yours” and telling them the world should be worried about what they’re capable of is the difference between training workers and educating citizens. One of those institutions just closed, while the other has never been more profitable.

V. Where It All Points

The post above has been circulating on social media this spring, and every time I see it I think about my students. Not because they are destined for that life, but because the architecture they are graduating into was not designed to prevent it. The systems that were supposed to catch them, educate them, employ them, house them, and give them a foothold in a functioning democracy are fraying simultaneously, and the fact that commencement speakers keep telling them to believe in themselves is not reassurance. It is a substitution of individual optimism for structural responsibility, and this generation is clear-eyed enough to know the difference.

I am not cynical about any of this. I refuse to be. I watched my students’ names scroll across that screen on Friday afternoon and saw young people who studied through a pandemic, adapted to a political landscape that shifted beneath them semester by semester, and still showed up. They wrote essays and took exams and asked questions and pushed back and grew. They did their part. And a republic that still calls itself an experiment in self-governance owes them an economy and a democracy worthy of the energy they’re bringing to it.

At Hampshire’s final commencement, Dr. J Finley told the graduating class something I have not been able to stop thinking about. She quoted a line from her own book, forged, she said, in the work she did at Hampshire nearly a quarter century ago: “There cannot be liberation without a deep subjective, and collective, consciousness of what one desires out of the condition of being free.” Then she added, in her own voice: “No one’s coming to save us.”

Both of those statements are true, and holding them together is the work of this moment. The graduates of 2026, at every level, possess something the architecture they are entering cannot take from them: the capacity to see clearly what is happening and to refuse to accept it as inevitable. The labor market is hostile. The credential is devalued. The debt is crushing. The housing is unaffordable. The safety net is being shredded. AI is rewriting the rules of employment in real time. The energy crisis is restructuring the global economy beneath their feet. All of that is true.

And what is also true is that they are capable, and creative, and more structurally literate than any generation before them. They are not naive about what awaits them. The Harvard data proves it. The booing at UCF proves it. The quiet, determined faces I saw on my screen Friday afternoon prove it. They know. And knowing, as Hampshire’s motto insists, is not enough. But it is where everything begins.

I cried at three graduations in eight days. I cried because the pride is real, and the love is real, and the ceremonies are beautiful, and the music swells and for one brief moment everything feels like a promise. I also cried because I teach for a living, and I know what promises are worth in this economy. These graduates deserve a world that matches the faith their education asked them to have. Building that world is not their burden alone. It is ours. All of ours. And we are running out of time to start.

References

Cammalleri, A., & Cammalleri, A. (2026, May 19). ‘Let this day be all about joy’: Hampshire College’s final spring commencement honors Class of 2026. Amherst Bulletin. https://amherstbulletin.com/2026/05/19/let-this-day-be-all-about-joy-hampshire-colleges-final-spring-commencement-honors-class-of-2026/

Connor, S. (2026, April 23). The Planet is Dying but You’ve Got Work on Monday. Collapse 2050.

Collapse 2050

The Planet is Dying but You've Got Work on Monday

I know exactly where you are sitting right now. You are staring at a chart of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures, watching a red line spike into uncharted, terrifying territory. Yet another horrible data point proving what you already know. You feel a familiar, hollow drop in your stomach as you register the biophysica…

2 months ago · 510 likes · 60 comments · Sarah Connor

Ellis, L. (2025, November 13). Companies Predict 2026 Will Be the Worst College Grad Job Market in Five Years. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/2026-graduates-job-market-7928bcd7?msockid=2b8fdbfd306665fc0a73c89a311d6461

Fast, J. & Gould E. Young college graduates face a weaker labor market—but a more mixed picture than the headlines suggest. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/blog/class-of-2026-young-college-graduates-face-a-weaker-labor-market-but-a-more-mixed-picture-than-the-headlines-suggest/

Harvard Public Opinion Project. (2025, December 4). Harvard Youth Poll Reveals Mounting Strain on Young Americans — Financial, Institutional, and Social. Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. https://iop.harvard.edu/press-releases/harvard-youth-poll-reveals-mounting-strain-young-americans-financial-institutional

Indy, A., & Indy, A. (2026, May 22). Hampshire College celebrates its final spring commencement - Amherst Indy. Amherst Indy - Critical, Progressive, Independent. https://www.amherstindy.org/2026/05/22/hampshire-college-celebrates-its-final-spring-commencement/

Liebergen, S. (2026, May 13). Class of 2026 faces tough job market and AI concerns as graduation season approaches. Scripps News. https://www.scrippsnews.com/politics/economy/class-of-2026-faces-tough-job-market-and-ai-concerns-as-graduation-season-approaches

Mowreader, A. (2025, August 29). Class of 2026 worries about jobs after college. Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/student-success/life-after-college/2025/08/29/class-2026-worries-about-jobs-after-college

Pahwa, N. (2026, May 20). Something strange is happening at college graduations across the country. It’s causing shocking outbursts—and for good reasons. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/technology/2026/05/ai-college-graduation-speakers-eric-schmidt.html?pay=1779738975426&support_journalism=please

Peterson, M. & Sampong, C. The numbers don’t add up: women continue to earn less, regardless of occupation. In IWPR (Report No. C539). https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2026-IWPR-Occupational-Gap-fact-sheet.pdf

Robinson, B., PhD. (2026, May 7). 10 Trends driving the job market 2026 Graduates need to know. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2026/05/07/10-trends-driving-the-job-market-2026-graduates-need-to-know/

Smith, R. (2026, May 24). This Summer’s Teen Job Market Is the Toughest in Decades. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/economy/teen-summer-jobs-f3ffdbfa?msockid=2b8fdbfd306665fc0a73c89a311d6461

Wallace, A. (2026, May 20). This summer could be the worst on record for teen hiring. Tell us your experience. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/20/economy/teen-hiring-jobs-callout

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and what it tells us about how the rest of it works.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Grounded

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 19 May 2026 02:21:13 GMT

This piece is part of “Workers Rising,” an ongoing series about the people whose work keeps everything running. The flight attendants and warehouse pickers, the dispatchers and gate agents, the mechanics and teachers and nurses and ground crews. Each installment follows the work: who does it, who depends on it, who pays when something breaks, and what the people inside the work see that the headlines miss. These aren’t just labor stories. They’re the foundation the rest of the economy stands on.

I. The Last Flight

There were supposed to be sixteen minutes between my Spirit flight landing in Fort Lauderdale and my rescheduled connection pushing back for Tampa. I made it with six.

This was November 29, 2025, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I’d spent the week-long school break in St. Croix with my family, and I was trying to get back to Ocala on a $200 budget itinerary because that’s what teachers fly. The departure board at Henry E. Rohlsen Airport showed my 4:36 PM flight delayed, then delayed again, then delayed to 7:51, and I sat at the gate doing the math on whether I’d make my connection while the gate agent kept her face neutral and answered the same questions twenty times an hour (eventually, she was thankfully able to get me on a later connecting flight, the last one out that day).

We finally pushed back at 7:13. As we taxied to the runway, the flight attendant got on the intercom and said the delay had been caused by an Airbus software update that affected six thousand flights worldwide. Six thousand flights. One vendor decision halfway around the world, and a Spirit jet sat on the tarmac in the Caribbean for four hours while a flight attendant explained to a planeload of strangers what her employer hadn’t.

I made the Tampa connection because the gates were thankfully only three apart. I drove home to Ocala past midnight with the windows down and classic rock loud enough to keep me awake. I remember thinking that the airline was held together with duct tape and optimism.

Five months later, it was gone. At 3:00 AM Eastern on Saturday, May 2, 2026, Spirit Airlines ceased all operations. The night before, in the company’s operations center in Orlando, a dispatcher named Wes Egan (who had worked at Spirit for twenty-three years) sent a message through the cockpit alert system to one of the carrier’s pilots, who had been asking what was happening. The message, in all caps (because that’s how dispatch messages are formatted), read: UNOFFICIALLY WE STOP FLYING AT 0300 EST ON 05/02. GODSPEED MY FRIEND.

Seventeen thousand people lost their jobs that night. Software engineers. DOT compliance specialists. Flight attendants. Senior maintenance planners. Heavy maintenance project managers. Pilots, mechanics, dispatchers, ground crews. They got three and a half hours’ notice from their supervisors and an email from the CEO. The airline they had built was killed by a war they didn’t vote for, a merger they couldn’t save, and a government that found money for everything except them.

This is their story.

II. Death By A Thousand Structural Failures

To understand what killed Spirit Airlines, it’s worth stepping back to see how the carrier sat at the intersection of five distinct pressure points: financial, mechanical, regulatory, geopolitical and political. None of them alone would have necessarily done it, but all five together left no room to breathe.

The financial pressure started first. Spirit hadn’t turned an annual profit since 2019. Six straight years of losses, and the workers kept showing up, flying the routes, fixing the engines, staffing the gates, and dispatching the flights. The mechanical pressure came next. Pratt & Whitney engine defects grounded a significant portion of Spirit’s fleet, parking planes the mechanics couldn’t fix because the problem wasn’t theirs to fix. The senior maintenance planners scheduled inspections on aircraft that weren’t allowed to fly. The regulatory pressure followed in January 2024, when the Department of Justice blocked Spirit’s $3.8 billion merger with JetBlue on antitrust grounds. The merger would have retained Spirit’s 15,000 workers and added 10,000 more by 2026, according to projections the two airlines filed at the time. Twenty-five thousand projected aviation jobs evaporated when a federal judge sided with the DOJ. Spirit filed for Chapter 11 protection that year, and again in August 2025. Despite this, the flight attendants kept smiling at boarding.

Then came the geopolitical pressure. In late February 2026, the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and spiked jet fuel costs by 70%. Spirit absorbed over $100 million in fuel costs in two months. It simply couldn’t keep up. And the political pressure was the last one. Spirit sought a $500 million federal bailout. Late on Friday, May 1, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called CEO Dave Davis to tell him the bondholders had rejected the deal. There was no remaining way out. And the workers got the news at 3 AM.

III. The Architecture Was Visible from a Long Way Off

Walt Handelsman, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, 2024. Spirit had just filed its first Chapter 11.

Editorial cartoonists were drawing Spirit’s death two years before it died. The architecture wasn’t hiding. Anyone paying attention could see what was coming. Spirit wasn’t the first carrier to be removed from the American sky, and it won’t be the last.

Every year I show my high school Economics students an infographic from USA Today when we cover oligopolies and game theory. It tracks the airline industry from the 1970s through the early 2010s, and it looks like this:

Ten carriers enter the chart on the left. Four exit on the right. Pan Am and Eastern collapsed in 1991. TWA was absorbed by American in 2001. Northwest disappeared into Delta in 2009. Continental into United in 2010. US Airways into American in 2011. The names that built American commercial aviation are gone, and the workers who built their careers at those carriers are scattered across the survivors or out of the industry entirely.

Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute, named the result in 2022: “We basically have a four-firm oligopoly. Having this fringe of smaller carriers breathing down their necks is really the only thing left that keeps the Big Four on their toes.” Four firms (American, Delta, United and Southwest) controlling roughly 80% of domestic capacity. Spirit was part of that fringe.

As I help my students see in this same lesson, in a four-firm oligopoly the surviving carriers don’t have to collude formally. They just have to recognize that everyone makes more money when nobody starts a price war. Brandon Oglenski, an airline analyst at Barclays, said the quiet part out loud the Monday after Spirit’s collapse: industry pricing will “benefit significantly for nearly all airlines given the removal of excess point-to-point capacity.” Translated: a Spirit-sized hole in the market means the survivors can raise fares.

JetBlue moved within hours. It announced new flights from Fort Lauderdale to Cali, Barranquilla, Santo Domingo, Santiago de los Caballeros, and Ponce, the Caribbean routes that Spirit had served. The merger would have integrated Spirit’s workers. The collapse let JetBlue absorb the routes without them.

And while the workers who flew those routes were filing for unemployment, Spirit was asking the bankruptcy court to approve millions in retention bonuses for the executives staying on to manage the wind-down. The lawsuit recently filed by six laid-off workers alleges that Spirit had told employees as recently as April 16 to “ignore the rumors” about the airline’s collapse. Sixteen days before the lights went out, the workers were being told to stay optimistic. The bondholders were already counting.

IV. The Cannibalization

Within two weeks of Spirit’s collapse, more than ninety of its aircraft had been flown to airports around the country and parked, many of them at Phoenix Goodyear Airport, where the dry Arizona climate slows down the deterioration of planes nobody is flying. Of those ninety aircraft, more than sixty were leased. Spirit didn’t actually own most of the airline it operated. The yellow paint was Spirit’s. The planes belonged to finance companies, and the finance companies were already lining them up for their next lease.

The repossession was handled by a company called Nomadic Aviation Group, whose managing partner told NPR that some of the abandoned Spirit aircraft were “already probably in the pipeline to be leased again.” Other planes would have their engines pulled and transplanted into different aircraft. Each engine is worth between fifteen and twenty million dollars. A two-engine A320 is sitting on thirty to forty million dollars of resaleable hardware. The metal continues. The labor, however, is severed from it.

It all reminds me of a scene in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street where Charlie Sheen’s character realizes what his mentor’s deal actually means for Bluestar Airlines, the fictional carrier his father has worked for his entire adult life. In a smoky, wood-paneled office, a dozen executives seated around a gigantic table talk over each other about how to rapidly liquidate it. “...build condos where the hangars are,” “...lay the airplanes off to [the next buyer],” “...and I’ve got the Texas boys drooling at my kneecaps for the rest.” And then the line that lands the whole scene: “The beauty of this deal is the overfunded pension. Gekko makes seventy-five million dollars there. Fifty million buys them the minimum annuities for six thousand employees, and he walks away with the rest…not bad for a month’s work.”

Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox in Wall Street (1987), realizing that the deal his father warned him about is about to liquidate Bluestar Airlines and the 6,000 workers who made it fly.

Stone made that film thirty-nine years ago, but the cannibalization that he dramatized as moral horror has since become routine operating procedure. Spirit had seventeen thousand employees, not six thousand. The engines are worth more than the pensions. And the boardroom is now spread across thirty airports, twelve leasing companies and a half-dozen repo contractors.

Incredibly, even some of the pilots flying Spirit’s planes to Arizona are actually former Spirit pilots. Nomadic hired them as 1099 contractors. The same workers who held airline jobs with health insurance and retirement benefits two weeks ago are now gig workers flying their former employer’s planes to a graveyard in the desert. Their labor has been recategorized into a worse version of itself. They are being paid to ferry their own funeral.

And this is not just contained to Spirit. For example, Lufthansa has cancelled twenty thousand flights through October. AirAsia X has raised fares forty percent and cut capacity by ten. Air New Zealand has cancelled eleven hundred flights. More than thirteen thousand flights were cancelled across Europe in May alone. American Airlines is projecting four billion dollars in additional fuel costs this year. Delta reported a two-billion-dollar fuel cost spike in the second quarter alone.

Neil Sorahan, CFO of Ryanair, told CNBC the Monday after Spirit’s collapse that he expects “some of the weaker carriers who were already struggling before the war possibly go to the wall in the winter.” Spirit is not the last airline that will be cannibalized. It is the first.

Ryanair, meanwhile, hedged eighty percent of its fuel at sixty-seven dollars a barrel before the war began. Jet fuel is currently trading at one hundred sixty-three. Ryanair reported a 2.6 billion-dollar profit for 2026, a forty percent increase year over year. Same war, same fuel, same architecture, but opposite outcome. So you basically have it where the country that started the war is the country whose airlines are dying from it. And the workers who didn’t vote for it are the ones flying their own planes to the desert.

V. Take Your Uniform Off

Seventeen thousand workers lost their jobs at 3 AM on May 2. Three thousand pilots (represented by the Air Line Pilots Association), fifty-five hundred flight attendants (organized with the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA), and fifty-five hundred ground crew, mechanics and maintenance workers (who belonged to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers). Plus three thousand contractors and indirect workers whose paychecks also ended when the gates closed.

Because Spirit liquidated rather than furloughed, the seniority those workers had spent careers building was destroyed in a single night. A flight attendant with twenty-seven years at Spirit doesn’t get hired by Delta as a twenty-seven-year veteran; she gets hired as a new hire. And as any teacher who has ever left a school to go work in another district or state knows, the skills survive, but the place in line does not.

Last December, Spirit pilots had agreed to cut their hourly wages by 8% in order to meet the airline’s financing requirements. Additionally, flight attendants gave back per diem rates and accepted reductions in their minimum credit hours. The workers took the pay cut because they wanted to believe the airline could be saved. The bondholders were already drafting the recovery they would later reject.

Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, said the workers had “invested their hearts and souls into this airline,” and that their lives were now “hanging in the balance.” She has asked the federal government for a six-month, $600 weekly supplement to state unemployment, plus healthcare coverage through the end of 2026. However, the same administration that found $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon and started the war that doubled jet fuel prices has so far offered neither.

The architecture made every decision that killed Spirit, and the architecture is still making them. The DOJ blocked the merger. The bondholders rejected the bailout. The lessors reclaimed their planes. The repo contractors are now hiring Spirit’s former pilots to ferry their own planes to the desert. And the same president whose Commerce Secretary made the final phone call to Spirit’s CEO is currently demolishing the East Wing to build his ballroom, with bunkers and data centers beneath it.

Yeneshia Thomas was at home in Central Florida when she got the email at 12:30 AM. A forty-two-year-old flight attendant. She had been furloughed in December and called back in March. She took a pay cut to come back. “I had hopes that we were going to make it,” she told Business Insider. “Because they called us back.”

A few hours later, Spirit sent another email telling employees they were no longer permitted to wear their uniforms. One of Thomas’s colleagues hadn’t read it yet. She showed up at the airport in her Spirit uniform, the same one she had worn for years to work she had been proud to do. A TSA agent (just another worker, doing his job) looked at her and said the only thing he was authorized to say: “Take your uniform off.”

That is the architecture. That is what it has always been. And that is what it will keep being until the workers it depends on refuse to absorb its consequences any longer.

References

Bujor, M. (2026, May 7). Spirit Airlines Company shutdown: 17,000 jobs gone overnight. AirMag.aero. https://aeronauticsmagazine.com/news/spirit-airlines-is-gone-what-happens-next-to-the-17000-workers-left-behind

Chokshi, N. (2022, February 7). “Frontier and Spirit Airlines Plan to Merge.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/business/frontier-spirit-airlines-merger.html

Edmonds, L. (2026, May 4). Inside the chaotic morning Spirit workers learned they were out of a job: “Take your uniform off.” Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/spirit-airlines-collapse-employees-jobs-workers-flight-attendant-2026-5

Josephs, L. (2026, May 5). “Godspeed my friend”: Inside the final hours of Spirit Airlines. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/02/spirit-airlines-shutdown-inside-the-final-hours.html?&qsearchterm=spirit

Josephs, L. (2026, May 4). How Spirit Airlines’ demise will benefit rivals — and raise airfares even more. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/04/spirit-airlines-flights-rivals.html?&qsearchterm=spirit

Jordan, W. A. (1988). Problems Stemming from Airline Mergers and Acquisitions. Transportation Journal (American Society of Transportation & Logistics Inc), 27(4), 9–30.

Lyons, D. (2026, May 14). Ex-Spirit workers sue, saying airline failed to give proper layoff notices, owes back pay and benefits. Sun Sentinel. https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2026/05/13/ex-spirit-workers-sue-saying-airline-failed-to-give-proper-layoff-notices-owes-back-pay-and-benefits/

Payne, R. (2026, May 16). More than 90 Spirit Airlines aircraft with $20M parts were abandoned at airports — here’s why retrieving and selling them is a challenge. AOL.com. https://www.aol.com/finance/more-90-spirit-airlines-aircraft-154500863.html

Siskos, D., Maravas, A., & Karatzas, J. (2025). Pan-Caribbean Airlines: Unlocking Regional Aviation Potential. Collegiate Aviation Review International, 43(2), 1–21.

Syme, P. (2026, May 18). More airlines could follow Spirit into bankruptcy due to the Iran war fuel crisis, Ryanair exec says. AOL.com. https://www.aol.com/articles/more-airlines-could-spirit-bankruptcy-112021000.html

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You can also support this project by subscribing (it’s free!), sharing with others who might appreciate it, or joining the conversation in the comments. Sometimes the most important thing is naming what you see, and naming who paid for it.

Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and what it tells us about how the rest of it works.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Between Prophecy and Denial

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 12 May 2026 05:07:48 GMT

Precarity Diaries is an ongoing series connecting personal economic experience to structural conditions. Each installment starts where most of us actually live, in the anxiety of bills, the grind of underpaid work and the impossible math of modern survival, and follows those threads back to the systems that produce them. These aren’t just personal stories. They’re the diaries of a system working exactly as designed.

I. The Pantry

There are five months of freeze-dried food neatly stacked in durable totes along the closet wall in my office (I couldn’t pass up a recent buy 3, get 2 free deal from 4patriots.com), and every time I reach over them for a shirt or tie I have the same argument with myself: this is either the most rational thing I’ve done in some time or a sign that I’ve lost my grip entirely. I am, after all, a high school social studies teacher in Florida who writes weekly structural analysis about systems of power, and I’ve been comparison-shopping freeze-dried beef stroganoff on Amazon at midnight while watching the price of diesel climb to levels not seen since 2005. I monitor gas prices the way I used to monitor weather before hurricane season. I do the math at the pump every time I fill up, and the math, as we all know, has changed significantly: $2.81 in January, $4.55 today, up more than a dollar fifty since the war began in late February. I drive a car in a city with no meaningful public transit, and every fill-up is now a small act of accounting.

I have been doing this since March, since the Strait of Hormuz closed and the architecture I spent the spring writing about stopped being something I analyzed from a distance and became something I could feel in my own kitchen. The same chokepoint I traced across five centuries in an earlier piece is now showing up in the price of eggs, in the cost of a bag of dog food, in the calculations I run every week about whether to stay in Florida or drive to Maine for the summer. The structural analysis isn’t abstract anymore. It’s in my pantry. And the pantry is getting fuller because the world is getting more fragile, and I am no longer sure those are separate observations.

II. What Diesel Moves

The International Energy Agency has called the Hormuz closure the largest oil supply disruption on record. Larger than the 1973 Arab embargo. Larger than the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Larger than the disruptions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Roughly 600 million barrels of oil have been removed from global supply since late February, and the loss is not just a price problem. It is becoming an availability problem, and the difference between those two things is the difference between expensive groceries and empty shelves.

Seventy percent of all food in the United States moves by truck. Every truck runs on diesel. Every tractor in every field runs on diesel. Every refrigerated trailer keeping food cold on the highway runs on diesel. Diesel inventories are currently at their lowest levels since 2005 and falling, eleven percent below the five-year average according to the most recent EIA data. When diesel becomes scarce, trucks slow down. When trucks slow down, the food doesn’t get picked up from farms, doesn’t reach processing plants, and doesn’t arrive at your grocery store. That isn’t inflation. Inflation is when prices go up. This is when there is nothing to put on the shelf at any price. And it’s already happening at the margins. For example, in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, shrimp boats that burn up to 500 gallons of diesel a day are sitting idle at the dock because the math no longer works. As the town’s mayor put it this week, “a lot of these guys are just not going out until diesel fuel comes down. You can’t go work for the fuel.” When the boats don’t go out, there’s nothing to bring in, nothing to process, nothing to pack, just nobody working. Every dollar a fisherman generates creates roughly six dollars in the broader economy. When that dollar disappears, the community hollows out behind it.

But the dependency runs deeper than fuel. A third of the world’s fertilizers normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and planting seasons in parts of Africa and Asia are ending within weeks. The graphite in every lithium-ion battery, from your phone to an electric vehicle, is made from needle coke, a byproduct of oil refining, baked in furnaces at over 3,000 degrees for weeks at a time. The sulfuric acid used to leach copper ore in Chile comes from sulfur produced by refining Persian Gulf crude. As the Substack writer known as the Honest Sorcerer observed earlier this year, “we still cannot make ‘renewables’ with ‘renewables,’ let alone maintain the six continent supply chain necessary to continue with civilization as it is.” It reminds me of an early episode of the excellent drama series Landman, where Billy Bob Thornton’s character lectures the young company lawyer and asks her if she has any idea how much diesel it takes to mix the concrete, make the steel, haul the components, and assemble a single wind turbine with a 450-foot crane. The data says he was not exaggerating.

The crisis is not energy alone. It is material. It is agricultural. It is everything.

III. The Lag

Here is the fact that should unsettle every assumption about a quick resolution. If the Strait of Hormuz opened completely and permanently this afternoon, the first drop of new Persian Gulf gasoline would not reach an American gas pump until late August at the earliest. A tanker takes roughly forty days to cross from the Gulf to the U.S. coast. Refining takes weeks. Pipeline and truck distribution to 150,000 gas stations takes another ten to fourteen days. That is twelve to sixteen weeks from strait to pump, and it assumes everything goes perfectly, which it will not. Shipping lanes need mine clearance. Insurance companies will maintain war-risk premiums for months. Production that was shut in takes months to restart, and some damaged facilities, including Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex, which lost an estimated seventeen percent of its capacity, may need up to five years to repair.

Jeff Currie, senior advisor at the Carlyle Group, put it plainly on Bloomberg Television last week: “It’s baked in, full stop. It’s going to take so long to get all this restarted that those inventories will continue to draw.” Even the head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Tristan Abbey, acknowledged the unprecedented nature of the situation: “Just as we had never before seen the strait close, we’ve never seen it reopen.”

And the lag clock has not even started. As of today, the ceasefire is on what President Trump himself called “life support.” Iran is demanding war reparations and sovereignty over the strait. The diplomatic positions are hardening, not converging. On May 3, a tanker called the New Corolla docked at Long Beach, California, carrying Iraqi crude that was loaded four days before the war began. It was the last Middle East oil shipment to reach American shores. The buffer of tankers that were already at sea when the conflict started is now exhausted.

There is no more coming. And the clock to recovery has not begun.

IV. What I Don’t Know

I don’t know if store shelves will be empty by mid-July. I don’t know if the worst-case scenarios materialize on schedule. I don’t know if diplomatic breakthroughs, emergency rationing, strategic reserve releases, or demand destruction will buy enough time to prevent the cascade the analysts are warning about. I am a high school teacher, not an energy analyst, and I want to be precise about the limits of what I can claim.

What I do know is that the structural vulnerability is real, the dependencies are documented, the inventories are falling, and the gap between what the data shows and what the government is communicating is wide enough to drive a very large, very empty tanker through. The chief economist at Rystad Energy told Fortune that we are “still kind of sleepwalking into this approaching disaster.” That is not a fringe voice. It is one of the world’s most respected energy research firms.

The people writing with absolute certainty that civilization collapses in eight weeks are not doing analysis. They are doing prophecy. But the people insisting everything will be fine are not doing analysis either. They’re arguably doing denial. The honest position, I suspect, is somewhere between those poles, and it is deeply uncomfortable to stand there. The data is serious. The architecture that produced this vulnerability is the same architecture I have been tracing all year. And none of us, not the analysts, not the prophets, not the president with his gas tax proposal, knows exactly how this plays out.

V. Where It All Points

Whether or not the worst case arrives this summer, the structural lesson is already clear. A civilization that routes its fuel supply through a 21-mile strait, moves it on a fuel with no short-term substitute, and funds a $1.5 trillion military budget while cutting $73 billion from everything else has built fragility into its foundation. That fragility was not an accident. It was an architecture, and it was designed.

Means and Meaning has spent this spring tracing that architecture across domains. A chokepoint that has shaped empires for five centuries. A war budget that shows up in your grocery bill. A college that taught people to see systems and couldn’t survive in a system that doesn’t value seeing. What the #vanlife movement says about America’s housing crisis. These are not separate stories. They are the same story, told in different registers, about a civilization that has optimized for extraction and efficiency while quietly eliminating every buffer, every reserve and every margin of safety that might have absorbed a shock like the one now arriving.

I am still stacking freeze-dried food in my office closet. I am still doing the math at the pump. I am still having that argument with myself every morning about whether this is wisdom or anxiety, and I am still not sure the answer matters, because the vulnerability is real either way. The inventories are falling whether I’m being rational or paranoid. The diesel is running low whether I call it preparation or panic.

The point was never prediction. The point is that structural vulnerabilities do not disappear because the immediate crisis passes. They wait. And the question this country has never been willing to honestly ask, the question the architecture was designed to make unthinkable, is whether we will rebuild the systems that feed us and fuel us and shelter us around something more resilient than a single 21-mile strait, or whether we will simply wait for the next shock, and the next one after that, until there is nothing left to cushion the fall.

References

Afp. (2026, May 11). Tens of millions risk hunger as Hormuz standoff blocks fertiliser, UN official says. The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/tens-of-millions-risk-hunger-as-hormuz-standoff-blocks-fertiliser-un-official-says/articleshow/131016481.cms

Martin, J. (2026, April 14). Two wars. one you can see. one you can’t. Jay’s Letter.

Jay’s Letter

Two Wars. One You Can See. One You Can't

Two Wars…

3 months ago · 333 likes · 83 comments · Jay Martin

McCreesh, S. (2026, May 11). Trump proposes suspending the federal gas tax until prices fall. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/us/politics/trump-gas-tax.html?smid=url-share

Newbury, S. J. (2025, November 25). The thermodynamic blind spot: Why “Peak Oil” failed, and why we are finally at the singularity. The Ultimate Avatar of Balance.

The Ultimate Avatar of Balance

The Thermodynamic Blind Spot: Why 'Peak Oil' Failed, and Why We Are Finally at the Singularity

If you mention ‘Peak Oil’ today in polite company—or even among serious economists—you are immediately filed away in the same cabinet as Y2K survivalists and Mayan Calendar enthusiasts…

7 months ago · 337 likes · 91 comments · Steven J. Newbury

Pathak, R. (2026, March 24). Is the World Heading for an Energy Lockdown in 2026? Oil Prices, Blackouts, and What’s Really Coming. International Business Times UK. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/global-energy-lockdown-2026-crisis-impact-1787852

Science Insights Team. (2026, March 29). Is there an energy crisis? What’s really happening now. ScienceInsights. https://scienceinsights.org/is-there-an-energy-crisis-whats-really-happening-now/

Shryock, M. A. (2026, May 9). EIGHT WEEKS TO EMPTY SHELVES. SIXTY DAYS TO FAMINE. Mark A. Shryock.

Mark A. Shryock

EIGHT WEEKS TO EMPTY SHELVES. SIXTY DAYS TO FAMINE.

by Mark A. Shryock…

2 months ago · 2708 likes · 525 comments · Mark A. Shryock

Shukla, P. (2026, April 20). 600 million barrels gone, gas +47%, jet fuel +100%: is the global energy crisis 2026 from US– Iran war abo. The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/600-million-barrels-gone-gas-47-jet-fuel-100-is-the-global-energy-crisis-2026-from-us-iran-war-about-to-trigger-inflation-shock-and-global-recession/articleshow/130398244.cms#google_vignette

Snapp, E. (2026, May 11). Rising fuel costs force shrimp boats to stay docked in Bayou La Batre. (2026, May 11). WEAR2. https://mynbc15.com/news/local/rising-fuel-costs-force-shrimp-boats-to-stay-docked-in-bayou-la-batre

Sorcerer, H. (2026, February 15). China: The end of an economic miracle. The Honest Sorcerer.

The Honest Sorcerer

China: The End of an Economic Miracle

China is no longer the economic miracle it used to be. Although still growing, something is fundamentally wrong with their model, which has much more in common with western capitalist economies than what most people are comfortable to admit. As opposed to what the mainstream media tries to sell the western public these…

5 months ago · 190 likes · 61 comments · The Honest Sorcerer

Sorcerer, H. (2026, April 10). There is no “Next economy.” The Honest Sorcerer.

The Honest Sorcerer

There Is No "Next Economy"

The largest energy crisis in human history has exposed the extractive, wholly unsustainable nature of the Western / Chinese industrial ecosystem. Mining used to happen in poor global south countries using cheap oil, while metallization and part manufacturing was increasingly done in China, using cheap…

3 months ago · 562 likes · 132 comments · The Honest Sorcerer

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

The Ballroom and the Bunker

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:38:42 GMT

I. The Model in the Bunker

There is a scene in Downfall, a compelling 2004 German film about Hitler’s final days, that stopped me cold when I finally watched it one day this past week after work. It is April 1945. Berlin is being bombed to rubble. Soviet artillery shakes the walls of the Führerbunker. And Adolf Hitler is standing over a detailed architectural model of “Welthauptstadt Germania,” Albert Speer’s fantasy redesign of Berlin as the eternal capital of the thousand-year Reich. Grand boulevards. Triumphal arches. A domed hall that would hold 180,000 people.

Hitler tells Speer the Allied bombing will actually help the construction by clearing the old buildings. He praises their shared vision of a “treasure house for arts and culture” that would “last the millennia.” When an aide urges him to flee Berlin, Hitler refuses. He says he’d feel like a “lama priest spinning an empty prayer-wheel.” He must force an outcome in Berlin, or face his downfall. Speer’s response: “I’ll be on stage when the curtain falls.”

A man staring at a model of a city he will never build, in a bunker beneath a city that is being destroyed, convinced that the architecture proves his permanence even as the ceiling shakes. The denial is total. The model is the last thing the mind holds onto when reality has become unacceptable.

I watched that scene and thought immediately of the President of the United States. Last October, Donald Trump began tearing down sections of the White House to build a massive ballroom, with underground bunkers and data centers beneath it. During an ongoing affordability crisis, and also now a new, unpopular war that is bleeding a billion dollars a day. With oil at $114. With majority support for impeachment. With mounting evidence of cognitive decline so visible that even Fox News hosts are asking questions.

The model in the bunker is not a personality quirk. It is a pattern. It recurs across civilizations. And it always signals the same thing.

II. Look on My Works

The pattern is quite old. Ramesses carved himself into cliff faces. The pharaohs built pyramids to outrun death. Louis XIV built Versailles to make the French aristocracy orbit him like planets around a sun. But Versailles consumed so much of France’s wealth that it helped create the conditions for the revolution that eventually destroyed the monarchy. The monument ate the kingdom. But the history teacher in me can’t help but notice that the pattern accelerates in the 20th century, when the monuments get bigger and the regimes get shorter.

Nicolae Ceaușescu demolished a quarter of Bucharest’s historic center to build the Palace of the Parliament, the largest administrative building in the world. Twenty thousand workers around the clock. Forty thousand people displaced. The building was completed after his execution by firing squad. It outlived the regime by decades. Today Romania charges tourists admission to visit it.

Saddam Hussein built dozens of enormous palaces while UN sanctions starved his population. I remember watching during the Iraq War, my second year at Hampshire, as US forces occupied those palaces and used the marble halls as military bases. The monuments that were supposed to project his permanence became the occupier’s furniture. His statue in Baghdad was pulled down on live television. In Basra, a giant poster of Saddam had its mouth shot out.

And the pattern kept repeating. Ferdinand Marcos carved into a Philippine mountainside, later blown up with dynamite. Mobutu’s face printed on every banknote in Zaire, later carved out by the citizens who’d been forced to carry them. Assad statues across Syria reduced to rubble after the 2024 revolution. Daniel arap Moi’s fist sculpture bursting through Mount Kenya, his face on every coin and even a national holiday named after himself.

Richburg’s observation here is telling: “Leaders come and eventually go, and many of their garish tributes to themselves end up on history’s junk pile, or become lasting monuments to their ridiculousness.” The grandeur is always inversely proportional to the stability. You could say that the bigger the statue, the closer the fall.

III. The Ballroom, the Arch, and the Golden Statue

Last October, with his approval ratings steadily dropping, the President of the United States began demolishing the East Wing of the White House in order to eventually build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom with underground bunkers and data centers beneath it. He also bulldozed the Rose Garden, and gilded the interiors. And then he turned his attention to the National Mall, where he proposed a 250-foot triumphal arch, taller than the White House, the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol building, modeled after Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe but bigger, because of course bigger. He wants it to be the biggest arch in the world. A 60-foot gilt bronze Lady Liberty perched on top like a hood ornament on history’s most expensive car.

The Commission of Fine Arts, stacked with his loyalists, received nearly 1,000 public comments on the project. One hundred percent were negative, but they voted to move forward anyway. The commission chairman explained: “This is personal for the president.” A Vietnam veterans’ group actually filed a legal challenge because the arch would block the sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. So we basically have the president inserting himself, architecturally, between Lincoln and the war dead. Between the nation’s ideals and the nation’s sacrifices.

And the arch is just the centerpiece. Let’s not forget the Kennedy Center, renamed. The Institute of Peace, renamed. Palm Beach airport, renamed. A proposed new class of guided-missile destroyers, named after himself. His signature will soon be stamped on US paper currency. Trump RX. Trump Gold Card visas (although, apparently, only a single one issued so far). Cabinet members wearing shoes he gives them like offerings to a man who has confused the presidency with a shoe store loyalty program.

Art historian Erin Thompson put it precisely: “The aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present. It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.”

The gold statue at his golf resort, nicknamed “Don Colossus,” was widely compared to North Korean propaganda statuary. The comparison is apt not because Trump runs a hermit kingdom, but because the psychological function is identical: the oversized, gilded likeness performing power for an audience that is required to witness it. Leaders who are building real power don’t need gold statues. Leaders who are losing it build nothing else.

Left: the 15-foot ‘Don Colossus’ statue before gilding. Right: Statue in Pyongyang.

IV. The Architecture of Denial

Guy Debord wrote that the spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people, mediated by images. The arch, the statue, the ballroom, the gilded interiors, the renamed buildings: these are images of power substituting for the exercise of actual governance. When you can’t build consensus, you build a ballroom. When you can’t win a war, you build a victory arch. When the approval ratings collapse and the economy buckles and the impeachment polling crosses 50%, you stamp your name on the currency and hand your Cabinet members matching shoes and call it leadership.

Gramsci would also recognize this instantly. When hegemony fails, when consent can no longer be manufactured through legitimacy, the ruler turns to spectacle to perform the authority he can no longer command. The gold statue is what you build when you can’t build a coalition.

But there’s a darker layer here too. Beneath the ballroom: bunkers. Data centers. Survival infrastructure. The spectacle is on the surface. The contingency plan is underneath. That combination, grandiosity above and escape routes below, is the architecture of a regime that knows, on some level it will never publicly admit, that the curtain is falling.

Hitler had the model and the bunker. Trump has the ballroom and the bunker. The parallel isn’t rhetorical. It’s architectural.

V. The Curtain Falls

Four days ago, the President of the United States posted a photo of himself beside Mount Rushmore on Truth Social, grinning, as if the granite were already making room. I sincerely hope he doesn’t take the next step and commission his own likeness on that mountain, but with this president, hoping feels like a weak verb. And it’s worth remembering what Mount Rushmore already is before we worry about what it might become. The Lakota called that granite formation Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, Six Grandfathers Mountain, a sacred place of prayer for the Native peoples of the Great Plains. It was carved into stolen land, in violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, by a sculptor named Gutzon Borglum who had documented ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Rushmore isn’t the exception to the pattern of monumental erasure. It is the template.

Speer said he’d be on stage when the curtain falls. He wasn’t on stage. He was at Nuremberg, on trial. The model was ash. The thousand-year Reich lasted twelve years. Ceaușescu’s palace was finished after his firing squad. Saddam’s palaces became the occupier’s furniture. Marcos was blown off his own mountainside. Mobutu’s face was carved out of the money by the people who’d been forced to carry it.

The arch may not be built. The ballroom may not be finished. The gold statue may one day be removed, or defaced, or displayed in a museum with a plaque explaining what it was and what it cost and who paid for it while their schools crumbled and their grocery bills doubled and their sons and daughters came home from the Gulf in flag-draped coffins.

The question is not whether the monuments will outlast the regime. They almost never do. The question is how much of the country gets demolished in the construction.

References

Chapman, M. (2026, March 23). Trump gets stark history lesson over monument obsession from expert. Raw Story. https://www.rawstory.com/trump-monuments-2676580103/

Klein, B. (2026, April 16). Trump’s arch gets overwhelmingly negative public feedback but appears poised to move forward. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/16/politics/trump-arch-feedback-commission

Sonnenfeld, J., & Tian, S. (2026, April 13). The futility of Trump’s grandiose personal branding of public assets, from ballrooms and bills to ships and planes | Fortune. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2026/04/13/trumps-personal-branding-obsession-history-leadership/

Reveal. (2025, December 10). Trump’s gilded White House makeover is all about power. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/12/trump-white-house-statues-monuments-east-wing-ballroom/

Richburg, K. (2026, March 24). Only a certain type of leader wants his face everywhere. Mercury. https://themercury.co.za/ios/opinion/2026-03-24-only-a-certain-type-of-leader-wants-his-face-everywhere/

Scott, O. (2026, April 29). Trump’s 15-foot gold statue of himself at his Florida golf course compared to North Korea’s Dear Leader. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-north-korea-gold-statue-b2966982.html

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

From Red Scare to Woke Panic

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 05:14:05 GMT

I. Introductory Section Setting the Stage

One of the most revealing things about any political era is which words get transformed into weapons. The process is always the same: take a term that describes something ordinary or even admirable, drain it of its original meaning, and reload it as a threat. In the 1950s, the word was “communist.” In the 2020s, the word is “woke.” Both function the same way: a label broad enough to encompass any form of critical thinking, vague enough to be applied to anyone, and threatening enough to make institutions police themselves before power has to lift a finger. This is the mechanism, and it has not changed in seventy years.

Joseph McCarthy did not need to investigate every teacher, professor, screenwriter, journalist, union organizer or government employee in America. He just needed enough of them to hear about the investigations that many of the rest stopped saying anything actually worth investigating. The conservative activist Christopher Rufo understood this perfectly. In 2021, he stated his strategy openly: “We have successfully frozen their brand, ‘critical race theory,’ into the public conversation... We will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” McCarthy built the template. Rufo followed the blueprint. The vocabulary changed. The architecture didn’t.

The real damage is never the hearing, the ban, or the firing (although they certainly can have severe life-long impact). The real damage is the professor who avoids the topic before anyone investigates it. The journalist who softens the story before anyone complains. The government employee who scrubs the language from the report before anyone reviews it. The teacher who stops assigning the book before anyone bans it. The chilling effect is the system’s most efficient product, because it turns its targets into its own enforcers.

II. The Loyalty Oath

The machinery of McCarthyism was pretty straightforward. Loyalty oaths for teachers and government employees, basically sign or lose your job. The Hollywood blacklist, where careers got destroyed not by evidence of wrongdoing but by association, accusation, and refusal to name names. The HUAC hearings: spectacles of public humiliation designed less to uncover actual threats than to demonstrate what happened to people who thought the wrong things out loud. As historian Clay Risen documented in book Red Scare, the anti-communist hysteria was not a spontaneous eruption of patriotic vigilance. It was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, a political weapon aimed at the movements that threatened the existing economic and racial order.

But the real damage was never in the hearing room. It was in the hallway, the faculty lounge, the writers’ room, the editorial meeting where someone decided not to say what they were thinking because the cost of being wrong was too high.

And the targets were not random. C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian historian and radical intellectual whose The Black Jacobins remains one of the most important works of revolutionary history ever written, was deported from the United States in 1953 under the McCarran-Walter Act. Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born journalist and organizer, was imprisoned and then deported. Caribbean radicals were among the first silenced because their analysis did something the Red Scare could not tolerate: it connected American racism to global imperialism. The people who could see the structure most clearly were the first ones expelled from the country that most needed them to stay.

III. The New Vocabulary

“Communist” became “woke.” “Un-American activities” became “CRT” and “DEI.” Loyalty oaths became “govern yourselves accordingly.”

The legislative machinery arrived fast. Between 2021 and 2022, nearly 200 anti-CRT bills were introduced across 41 state legislatures. Sixteen were signed into law in 15 states, targeting how teachers are permitted to discuss race, racism, and discrimination in their own classrooms. As researchers Filimon and Ivanescu documented in Policy Studies, these laws operate through a three-part structure that would have been instantly recognizable to anyone who lived through the 1950s: define a set of prohibited concepts (kept deliberately vague), create mechanisms to detect violations, and establish penalties for transgressors. Define, prohibite, punish. The loyalty oath, updated for the twenty-first century.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2023 in Orlando, Florida (AP Photo/John Raoux)

Governor DeSantis seized New College of Florida and transformed it into a conservative institution. A state legislator in Kansas signed a law prohibiting what is calls “DEI-CRT.” Florida’s HB7 instructed the State Board of Education to develop a curriculum called “Stories of Inspiration,” replacing structural analysis with patriotism by legislative mandate. And last September, Florida’s Commissioner of Education issued a memorandum reminding every educator in the state that our First Amendment rights “do not extend without limit” into our professional duties. The memo was forwarded from superintendents to principals to every teacher’s inbox, including mine. It closed with three words: “Govern yourselves accordingly.” I wrote about what that felt like last week. The mechanism works. I know because I felt it working on me, and I am someone who studies and teaches about these systems for a living.

IV. What the Panic Protects

Here is the structural question History Rhymes exists to ask: what is the panic for?

McCarthyism did not emerge because communists were about to overthrow America. It emerged because labor organizing, civil rights activism, and anti-colonial solidarity were threatening the economic and racial order. The “communist” label was applied to anyone who challenged that order. The “woke” label functions identically: it is applied to anyone who names systemic racism, questions economic hierarchy, or teaches history that makes the current arrangement look designed rather than natural. As such, the panic does not protect the country from a threat. It protects the architecture from being seen.

Researchers on both sides of the Atlantic have documented this. Thomas, Bancel, and Blanchard traced how academics in France who scrutinize colonial history and structural racism are labeled “Islamo-Leftists,” the same mechanism operating in a different national vocabulary. Dini and Pesce, writing in RSA Journal, named the function with precision: the term “woke” operates “to buttress high status groups against threats to their position, stymie the consciousness-raising effects of online discourse, and reduce universities to producers of uncritical neoliberal subjects.” From this perspective, the defense of tradition, free enterprise, and national pride enlisted against critical scholarship are “ancillary to what is essentially a circling of the wagons of those who benefit from the structure of American society as it stands.”

The wagons are indeed circling. The question is what they are protecting.

V. Where It All Points

McCarthy was finally censured by the Senate in 1954, and the panic eventually receded, not because America chose free thought but because the political utility of the hysteria expired and the man behind it became more of a liability than an asset. But the careers that had been destroyed stayed destroyed. The movements that had been disrupted did not simply reassemble. The intellectual traditions that had been broken, the ones carried by people like C.L.R. James and Claudia Jones before they were expelled from the country, took a generation to rebuild. The panic faded, but the damage settled into the soil of American institutions like a slow poison, shaping what was sayable and what was fundable and what was thinkable for decades after the last hearing ended.

The current panic has not faded. Books are still being pulled from shelves. Curricula are still being rewritten to replace structural analysis with inspiration. “Govern yourselves accordingly” is still sitting in teachers’ inboxes across the state of Florida. And earlier this month, the institution that taught me to see the structure behind these very patterns announced that it is closing its doors forever, not because of a book ban but because of the slower, quieter machinery of financial starvation in a country that has decided critical thinking is a luxury it can no longer afford.

The Red Scare did not end because the country learned its lesson, and nothing about this moment suggests we are any closer to learning it now. The vocabulary changes, the mechanism never does, and history, as it always has, rhymes. The only question worth asking is whether we will recognize the pattern while there are still institutions and teachers and traditions of thought left to protect, or whether we will do what America has done before and wait until the damage is done to ask how we let it happen again.

References

Avlon, J. (2023, April 26). Opinion: The welcome pushback against campus wokeness — coming from colleges themselves. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/26/opinions/harvard-stanford-cornell-woke-right-avlon/

Dini, R., & Pesce, E. (2024). “That’s What All This Wokeism Is About”: Books Erased, Printed Word Censorship, and US National Identity. RSA Journal: Rivista Di Studi Nord-Americana, 35, 9–46. https://doi.org/10.13135/1592-4467/10777

Filimon, L.-M., & Ivănescu, M. (2024). Bans, sanctions, and dog-whistles: a review of anti-critical race theory initiatives adopted in the United States since 2020. Policy Studies, 45(2), 183–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2023.2214088

Marie, A., & Petersen, M. B. (2023). Speech Repression and Outrage from Orthodox Activists as Attempts at Facilitating Mobilization and Gaining Status among Allies. Psychological Inquiry, 34(3), 192–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2023.2274401

Risen, C. (2026). Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Simon & Schuster.

Thomas, D., Bancel, N., & Blanchard, P. (2023). Decolonial Theory or the Invention of a Common Enemy. Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, 27(2), 200–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2023.2185413

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Hampshire College Taught Me to See

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:22:28 GMT

I. Learning to See

On August 29th, 2001, after my mom and two younger brothers drove away and the car disappeared from sight, I took my first few steps back toward the Merrill A dorm and something happened that I didn’t plan. I raised both arms over my head with clenched fists and took the biggest conscious inhale and exhale of my life. It was completely spontaneous, purely physical, a body responding to a freedom it had never felt before. Everything I had been working toward, all the challenges of high school, and the raging fire of a mind desperate to break out, released in one simple gesture. I was nineteen years old, standing in a parking lot in western Massachusetts, and I was free.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I sat in my single room on the second floor overlooking the quad, and tried to put into words what had just happened to my life. At the top of a page in a spiral-bound notebook (which would become my on and off again first year journal), underlined, I wrote three words: “Holy Fucking Shit.” Centered beneath them: “A Dream Come True.” And in the upper right corner: “1st day - biggest freedom high ever!”

Hampshire College, for anyone who hasn’t encountered it, requires some explanation. Founded in 1970 as a deliberate experiment in higher education, it had no grades, no majors and no core classes/traditional distribution requirements. Students designed their own education through a system of three Divisions: first, a series of exploratory projects across disciplines, then a self-designed concentration built around your own questions, and finally a year-long independent thesis. The whole “choose your own adventure” system was built on the premise that the most important thing a college can teach you is how to ask the right questions, and then pursue them with intense rigor and independence. The student body when I arrived was around 1,300. My graduating class would be about 350. It was small enough to know faces everywhere, intellectually intense enough that dining hall conversations turned into two-hour debates about postcolonial theory, and absurd enough that community bikes painted yellow and welded together in purposefully ridiculous configurations were scattered around campus for anyone to ride.

At every other school I had attended growing up, I had been the unusual one. At Hampshire, for the first time in my life, I was normal. But the invisibility I felt wasn’t loneliness, it was belonging. I had found my bee people, and the relief was overwhelming.

Hampshire’s faculty were also unlike any I’ve encountered before or since. Laurie Nisonoff, a feminist Marxist economist who became my Div II advisor, had the kind of mind that could see injustice at any scale. In her U.S. Labor History course, she would present some appalling episode of American history and turn to the class and exclaim: “We’re NOT making this up!” Frederick Weaver, who chaired my Div III thesis, could name the theoretical tradition behind whatever concrete problem I was fumbling toward. I would pitch some idea about St. Croix’s economy and he would listen carefully and say, “Well, now you’re touching upon Marx’s labor theory of value,” and I would think: wait…what? But working with Weaver taught me something I’ve carried into every classroom since: the value of grounding abstract theory in real, specific, local problems. Margaret Cerullo’s Contemporary Social and Political Theory cracked open my entire intellectual framework through Nietzsche, Foucault, Arendt, and Asad. Falguni Sheth, who served on my Div II committee, introduced me to Critical Race Theory and taught me to see how racial divisions function as strategies of political management. And Vivek Bhandari, whose course on Gandhi’s Critique of Modernity systematically dismantled everything I thought I knew about progress and the West, gave me one of the most powerful classroom experiences of my life. The morning that the horrifying Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photographs broke, Bhandari came into class visibly fuming but helped us connect what we were seeing to colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism in real time. In the previous session, we had watched a documentary with footage of the first President Bush declaring that “the laws of the jungle will not stand.” The line from that declaration to those photographs was unbroken, and our professor gave us the tools to trace it. That is what Hampshire education could do at its best: the world breaks into the classroom, and your professors help you understand it.

The academic moment that probably meant the most to me wasn’t my thesis defense and ringing the bell (although that was of course truly special). It was actually the afternoon my Div II was passed, a year earlier. I walked out of Nisonoff’s office after she and my other committee member, Falguni Sheth, had gone through my entire portfolio, every class, every paper, every evaluation, and summarized my intellectual arc in a way that even I couldn’t have articulated. It was incredibly validating in a way that went beyond any grade, because Hampshire doesn’t give grades. It was two brilliant women telling me that the journey I had taken through their institution, from Asian philosophy and consciousness studies to Caribbean political economy, made sense, that it cohered, that it added up to something. I walked back to Mod 26 clutching my fat Div II binder under my arm and felt probably the smartest I’d ever felt in my life up to that point.

What I really learned at Hampshire was how to see. How to see systems behind events. How to see colonialism not as history but as ongoing condition. How to see economics not as abstract models but as the distribution of power and suffering and possibility. I learned to see my own home island, St. Croix, not as the paradise of the tourism brochures or the “tropical ghetto” of the colonial imagination, but as a real place with real people navigating structures designed to benefit someone else.

On Tuesday morning, April 14th, 2026, an email arrived at 9:05 AM. The Board of Trustees had voted to permanently close Hampshire College following the Fall 2026 semester. I read the words on my phone between classes, and then I read them again, and then I sat with them for a long time. I spent the rest of the day reading Facebook posts in the alumni group page and messaging former classmates, people I hadn’t spoken to in years, people who didn’t need me to explain what we had just lost because they had lost it too.

Ken Burns, one of Hampshire’s most famous graduates, called it “an incalculable loss, the reverberations of which will be felt in ways none of us can imagine.” Professor CJ Gill, who taught at Hampshire for more than twenty years, told reporters she was feeling grief and was stunned. A first-year student named Liam Hennessy, who had been at Hampshire for less than a year, said something that stopped me: “This is kind of a swan song for liberal institutions.”

He was more right than he knew.

II. What Killed Hampshire

“How did you go bankrupt?” one character asks another in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” his friend answers. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

That is how colleges die.

Hampshire had been in financial trouble since at least 2019, when the administration announced it would not admit a full incoming class and began seeking a merger partner. What happened next is one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of American higher education. Students staged a 75-day sit-in at the president’s office, the longest occupation of a college president’s office in American history. Faculty revived their AAUP chapter to protect positions. Alumni mobilized from across the country. The president and several trustees resigned. The community didn’t just protest the decision. They used the education Hampshire gave them to challenge the institution that gave it to them, and they won. Hampshire stayed independent. A new president launched a $60 million fundraising campaign. The curriculum was redesigned around global challenges. Enrollment recovered from a low of just 13 admitted students in 2019 to classes of 200 to 300. As recently as January 2025, Forbes cited Hampshire as a model for how small liberal arts colleges could survive.

Fifteen months later, it’s gone. Last fall, Hampshire enrolled 168 new students against a target of 300, missing its goal by nearly half. A $21 million bond couldn’t be refinanced. The New England Commission of Higher Education placed the college on “show cause” status. A land sale meant to shore up finances fell through when a developer walked away over permitting and environmental concerns. By the time the Board voted to close, Hampshire was caught in a spiral familiar to anyone who has watched these institutions die: a college trying to sell land to pay bonds to satisfy accreditors to stay open long enough to enroll enough students to generate enough tuition to service the debt. Past a certain point, the spiral becomes irreversible.

I want to be honest about something here. Hampshire’s internal challenges were certainly real. The financial model was always fragile: a small endowment, deep dependence on tuition revenue, and an identity so beloved that it made institutional evolution agonizingly difficult. But the external forces bearing down on Hampshire would probably have crushed the college even with perfect adaptation. The community did everything right. They organized, they gave, they reinvented and they fought for seven years. Hampshire even took in roughly three dozen students fleeing New College of Florida after Governor DeSantis’s political takeover in 2023, offering them matching tuition so they could continue their liberal arts education at the same cost they’d been paying at a public school in Florida. A financially struggling institution absorbing students at a loss because it was the right thing to do. That is who Hampshire was. And it still wasn’t enough.

This is because Hampshire is not an isolated case. It is one data point in a wave of closures sweeping through American higher education. Since March 2020, at least 64 nonprofit colleges have closed, affecting nearly 46,000 students. Since 1996, more than 1,670 have shut their doors. And according to Huron Consulting, nearly a quarter of the country’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year institutions may be forced to close or merge over the next decade. Three credit rating agencies issued unfavorable outlooks for 2026. Hampshire isn’t the end of this wave. It’s near the beginning.

The casualties are everywhere. Marlboro College in Vermont, my mother’s alma mater, closed in 2020. Goddard College, a fellow experimental institution in Vermont, gone. Birmingham Southern College in Alabama, where a student facing transfer to a less accepting school told a professor, “I guess I’ll go back in the closet.” Cabrini University in Pennsylvania, where fewer than half of displaced students successfully transferred. Wells College in New York. Iowa Wesleyan in Iowa. Northland College in Wisconsin. Martin University, Indiana’s only predominantly Black institution, quietly shut down at the end of 2025 with almost no national attention. The closures are not distributed equally. The institutions serving the most distinctive educational missions and the most marginalized communities often die the quietest deaths.

The structural forces behind these closures are well documented. The number of American 18-year-olds is projected to fall 13 percent between 2026 and 2041. The share of high school graduates enrolling in college immediately after graduation has dropped from 70 percent to 62 percent in the last decade. Confidence in higher education has collapsed, falling from 57 percent to 36 percent in just ten years according to Gallup. Nearly a third of Americans now say college is too expensive, and a quarter say students aren’t being taught what they need to succeed, where “succeed” means earn. Meanwhile, the financial model of small private colleges has become almost impossibly fragile: institutions that close have median operating margins of just 3 percent, with tuition accounting for 86 percent of revenue. The average private nonprofit discount rate hit a record 51 percent in 2022, meaning these colleges are giving away more than half their sticker price in financial aid just to fill seats. The market isn’t just shrinking, it’s sorting, and what it sorts against is exactly the kind of education that Hampshire provided.

William “Wolfie” Krebs arrived at Hampshire in 2022 uncertain whether he even wanted to attend college. Four years later, he’s headed to a PhD program in mathematics. He fell in love with math in a whole different way, he told Inside Higher Ed. When asked about the closure, he said something that has stayed with me: “I hope it’s not seen as a failure, because it wasn’t.”

He’s right. Even the people closing the college said so. In their announcement, the Board wrote that they remain “unwavering in our belief that the experience a Hampshire College education provides is exactly what the world needs.” The education worked. The financial model broke. Those are different verdicts, and the country that can’t tell the difference between them is the country that keeps losing institutions like Hampshire.

III. The Architecture of Defunding

Hampshire was a private college, and I want to be upfront about that. My analytical frame in this publication usually focuses on public institutions and public funding, and on the ways government policy shapes the conditions ordinary people have to navigate. Hampshire didn’t receive state funding. It lived and died on tuition and donations. But the forces that killed it are not private forces. They are the same structural pressures dismantling public education across this country, and the distinction between public and private matters far less than the shared condition: a society that has decided, through its budgets and its policies and its cultural assumptions, that education’s purpose is job training, and that anything beyond job training is a luxury the country can’t afford.

That assumption has become so deeply embedded that it no longer feels like an assumption at all. It just feels like common sense. College should prepare you for a career. A degree should lead to a job. Education is an investment, and investments should generate returns. By this logic, an institution that teaches you to think rather than to earn looks like a bad investment. Hampshire’s entire existence was a rejection of that premise, and the premise won.

One Hampshire alum, Elizabeth Patterson, noticed something in the days after the announcement. Reading through post after post from fellow alumni, she observed that people weren’t saying “I wouldn’t have the career I have without Hampshire” or “I wouldn’t have gone into my field.” They kept reaching for the same words Ken Burns used. “I keep seeing ‘I wouldn’t be who I am,’” she wrote. “Not ‘what I do,’ or ‘how I do it.’ Who I Am. Maybe that’s why it’s hitting us all so hard. Because when something changes who you are on this kind of cellular level and then it goes away, there’s an odd kind of fear mixed in with the grief and the loss.” An education measured by return on investment asks what you do with it. Hampshire’s alumni, in their grief, keep answering a different question entirely. That difference is the whole argument.

You can see it in the numbers. Vocational community college enrollment increased 16 percent in a single year between 2022 and 2023. A growing number of major employers have dropped degree requirements for entry-level positions. The cultural signal is clear and consistent: thinking is a luxury, and earning is the point. And as that signal strengthens, the institutions that exist to cultivate thinking rather than credential earning lose students and revenue and, eventually, the ability to keep their doors open.

But this isn’t just a market story. It’s a political one. In 2023, when Governor DeSantis seized New College of Florida and transformed it into a conservative institution, Hampshire offered refuge to those students. Three years later, the refuge itself is gone. Last September, Florida’s Commissioner of Education issued a memorandum to every school district superintendent in the state, reminding educators that their First Amendment rights “do not extend without limit” into their professional duties and warning that the Commissioner’s office would investigate and potentially discipline any educator whose public speech was deemed to undermine trust or reduce their effectiveness. The memo was forwarded down the chain of command, from superintendents to principals to every teacher’s inbox, including mine. It closed with three words: “Govern yourselves accordingly.” Book bans have also swept through school districts across the country. And a state legislator in Kansas signed a law prohibiting what it calls “DEI-CRT” in general education. The pattern isn’t subtle. Institutions that produce critical, independent thinkers are under pressure not just from declining enrollment and financial fragility, but also from a political establishment that has identified critical thinking itself as a threat. This is a two-front war, and institutions like Hampshire were caught between market forces that couldn’t sustain them and political forces that didn’t want to.

And behind all of it is the question of priorities. Last year, the United States allocated $1.5 trillion for defense spending while cutting $73 billion from nondefense discretionary programs. The Forest Service has been gutted. Twenty-two million families lost SNAP benefits. Palantir received $61.8 million to install surveillance infrastructure inside the Department of Education. The country found unlimited resources for weapons systems and data collection but couldn’t sustain the institutions that produce citizens capable of questioning what those weapons and that data are for.

The pattern holds at every level. Penn State’s Board of Trustees voted to close seven commonwealth campuses serving 3,200 students due to enrollment and financial pressures. That same year, the university invested $700 million in a stadium renovation at the flagship campus and paid a $9 million coaching buyout. The money exists. It has always existed. The question has never been whether we can afford to educate people. The question is whether we want to, and our budgets have answered clearly.

Laura De Veau, a visiting professor at Boston College who served as an administrator at Mount Ida College when it closed in 2018, looked at Hampshire’s situation and concluded that the college had “pulled many of the levers they needed to, but the clock ran out.” She’s right. But clocks don’t run out on their own. Someone sets them. Someone decides how much time an institution gets, how much support and how much oxygen. Hampshire ran out of time because the country that built it decided, through a thousand budget lines and policy choices and cultural signals, that what Hampshire did wasn’t worth the cost of keeping it alive.

The cruelest irony is that the capacity Hampshire cultivated, to question assumptions and to trace the architecture of power, is exactly the capacity a country needs most when it is making choices this destructive. We are defunding the very institutions that produce the people equipped to explain why the defunding is a catastrophe. And we are doing it in the name of common sense.

IV. What Could Survive

Four days before Hampshire announced its closure, Maine Governor Janet Mills signed a supplemental budget making her Free Community College program permanent. Same week. Opposite directions. Same country.

Since 2022, more than 23,000 Maine high school graduates have enrolled tuition-free at the state’s seven community colleges, pursuing associate degrees and workforce credentials without taking on debt. The program, which had bipartisan support from former governors of both parties, is now written into the state’s baseline budget, no longer dependent on annual reauthorization or political goodwill. The same budget includes phased increases to minimum teacher salaries: $45,000 in 2027, $47,500 in 2028, $50,000 by 2029. Maine is doing two things at once that most of the country has refused to do at all: making education accessible to students and making teaching sustainable as a profession.

I was born in Brunswick, Maine, and I taught at Maine Connections Academy during the 2022-2023 school year, the first year of the free college program. My colleagues and I actively promoted it to our seniors. Some of them took advantage of it. I watched the principle work.

But none of this should be mistaken for a replacement. Community college cannot replicate Hampshire. Nothing can. The self-designed concentration, the detailed, narrative evaluations, the intellectual culture of a 1,300-student experimental campus, professors who could take the morning’s breaking news and trace it back through centuries of imperial history, students who staged a historic sit-in to save their school (and also, when I was there, a student walkout on October 10, 2001 to protest the start of the bombing in Afghanistan), that is gone, and pretending otherwise dishonors what was lost. You don’t replace a place that taught people how to see by offering them two years of free tuition. Those are different things, and both of them matter.

What Maine proves is something more modest and more important: that investing in education is a choice. Not a market inevitability. Not a line item that can only shrink. A choice. The same country that found $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon and $700 million for a football stadium can fund community colleges and pay its teachers a living wage if it decides those things are worth doing. Maine decided that they were. The question is whether the rest of the country will follow Maine’s worthwhile example or continue following its budgets toward a future in which the institutions that teach people to think are luxuries we’ve decided we can’t afford, while the institutions that teach people to obey are the only ones left standing.

V. Where It All Points

In the days after the closure announcement, my social media feeds filled with something that felt like a collective evaluation. Hampshire alumni don’t process loss the way other people do. We process it the way Hampshire taught us to: we reflect, we analyze, we tell the story of the experience, and we methodically lay out what we learned. It is, as one alumna wrote, what we were trained to do. For every class we wrote self-evaluations. For every concentration we wrote self-assessments. And now, for the closing of the institution itself, we are writing one more.

McKinley Melton, a professor who taught at Hampshire from 2007 to 2012, posted something particularly thoughtful. He wrote about the privilege of teaching what he called “bad” students. Students who didn’t adhere to deadlines because time was a construct. Who rarely acquiesced to authority because what is hierarchy. Who questioned everything, sometimes googling in real time. Hampshire students, he wrote, were “bad” at being students because they had no desire to be what so many believed good students should be. They weren’t interested in collecting a degree as if it were simply a document to propel them toward a higher income. And yet, he wrote, they were “some of the most intellectually hungry (far beyond curious), rigorously self-challenging, beautifully independent-minded, and thoughtful students” he had ever worked alongside. They believed in the school’s motto and in James Baldwin’s declaration that it is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. “To be clear,” he concluded, “this is not just the closing of a college. It’s the shuttering of a distinctive institution in the landscape of Higher Education. We are all the poorer for its absence.”

Another alum, Kristen Harbeson, wrote what amounted to a final self-evaluation of her thirty-four years in what Hampshire calls Div IV, the practicum, the part of your education that never ends. She described arriving at Hampshire as someone who, from the moment of her birth, didn’t belong anywhere but in her family. And then finding, for the first time, people who accepted her for her whole, oddball self without preamble or trial period. She recalled a philosophy professor whose evaluation she still carries with her three decades later: “Kristen’s work is always good, and occasionally excellent. When she realizes the kind of sustained effort it takes to be excellent, her work will be consistently excellent.” That evaluation, she wrote, might as well be tattooed on her heart. No grade could have done that. No letter on a transcript could have reached that deep.

“The closure of Hampshire hits so many of us so hard,” she wrote, “because it demonstrates, once again, that there is no place for us. The society that we live in is not one that can support, tolerate, or allow the cultivation of rebellious, relentless, unconventional, intellectual inquiry.” She’s right. And the data confirms it. Fewer than half of students whose college closes successfully transfer to another institution. The rest simply don’t finish. When Hampshire closes at the end of this year, some students will complete their degrees. Some will transfer to Amherst or Smith or UMass, the very institutions whose presidents founded Hampshire as an experiment in 1965. Some will stop altogether. Each unfinished education is a capacity to see that never fully develops. That is the cost, and it is incalculable in the precise sense that Ken Burns meant when he used that word.

Burns said something else that has stayed with me: “Hampshire’s ethos and probing way of seeing the world doesn’t disappear when a campus goes quiet. The thousands of lives transformed by this miraculous, improbable place will carry its revolutionarily generative spirit forward for generations to come.” He’s right too. And he’s not enough. Yes, the seeing survives in the people Hampshire produced. But the institution that generated the seeing is gone, and nothing guarantees that capacity gets reproduced without it. Burns can carry Hampshire’s legacy forward. So can I. So can all fellow alumni writing evaluations on Facebook this week. But who produces the next generation of people who learn to see?

Robert Coles, who taught at Hampshire for twenty years and whose Prison Literature course I took during spring semester of my first year (those class discussions definitely often continued later in our dorm rooms!), posted something this past week that I also keep returning to. “Hampshire might be closing,” he wrote, “but the spirit of Hampshire remains open. It is not the institution (buildings, classrooms, physical location, national ranking, etc.) that matters in a college; what matters, ultimately, are the PEOPLE who are/were involved—working with a shared philosophy or vision.”

He’s describing something I’ve watched happen all week. In every Facebook post, every group text, every phone call between classmates who haven’t spoken in years, the shared philosophy is still operating. We are still evaluating, still analyzing, still tracing systems, still refusing to accept the surface explanation when the structural one is right there underneath it. The institution taught us how to do that, and then the institution closed, and we are still doing it, a true testament to what Hampshire built.

As I write this, there are alumni working around the clock to find a path forward, exploring models from cooperatives to continuing education communities. I hope they succeed. But whatever emerges from those efforts, it won’t be the Hampshire that made us who we are. That Hampshire is the one this piece is for.

Non Satis Scire. To know is not enough.

What Hampshire gave me wasn’t a fixed body of knowledge. It was a way of thinking that hasn’t stopped evolving since I left, one that turns every classroom I teach in, every article I write, and every system I encounter into something that can be understood, questioned and named. But thinking and knowing alone didn’t save Hampshire. Seeing the structural forces clearly doesn’t make them stop operating. The motto cuts both ways: knowing is not enough to change the world, and knowing is not enough to save the institutions that teach us how to know. Frantz Fanon, whose work I first encountered through Hampshire’s classrooms, put it even more directly: ‘What matters is not to know the world but to change it.’ But changing it starts with seeing it clearly. And if the capacity to see that Hampshire cultivated in its students is going to survive the closure of the institution that produced it, then it falls to us, every oddball alumn and every professor who believed we were worth the sustained effort, to carry it forward. Not just as memory, but as practice.

The buildings will close. The seeing doesn’t have to. But it will, eventually, if we don’t build and fund the institutions that produce it. Whether we do that, whether we invest in the places that teach people to see the architecture or allow them to disappear one by one until the only institutions left are the ones that teach people not to look, is not just an educational policy question. It is a deeper moral question about what kind of country we want to live in.

Hampshire taught me to see. I’m still seeing. And if you’ve read this far, so are you.

References

Casey, M., & Willingham, L. (2026, April 14). Hampshire College to close after fall semester amid financial struggles | AP News. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/hampshire-college-closing-ken-burns-d2cc7834ead91f6220d1b17b980453b7

Frenier, A. (2026, April 14). Hampshire College announces closure effective this fall. New England Public Media. https://www.nepm.org/regional-news/2026-04-14/hampshire-college-announces-closure-effective-this-fall?utm_term=nprnews&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_source=facebook.com&fbclid=IwY2xjawRLrQ5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeeCpEDoeM2IIuN1upuJR25ADNd5l83jq3shJSlgKkFfvDlDEeuRtc5T5nPqU_aem_SXO6kO1nycleMyQOlVi7Kg

Kelchen, R., Ritter, D., & Webber, D. (2026, April 9). Colleges Are Closing. Who Might Be Next? Education Next. https://www.educationnext.org/colleges-are-closing-who-might-be-next-how-machine-learning-fill-data-gaps-forecast-future/

Moody, J. (2026, April 14). Hampshire College announces closure. Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/financial-health/2026/04/14/hampshire-college-announces-closure

Moody, J. (2025, December 18). The colleges that couldn’t survive 2025. Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/mergers-collaboration/2025/12/18/colleges-couldnt-survive-2025

Penprase, B. (2025, January 29). Saving and reviving liberal arts colleges. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanpenprase/2025/01/29/saving-and-reviving-liberal-arts-colleges/

Reider, J. (2026, April 14). No margin, no mission. Docnotes. https://docnotes.net/2026/04/14/no-margin-no-mission/?fbclid=IwY2xjawRLsTxleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFpSW9MdVR1WkxTd3Vwc1VOc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHumAQBag_gIKsS4hQPCK9Azcykm-YSVFwciw7QefjEFepYzoha4JnJ5Ru6hf_aem_Bgd0R9uLRYidlciw7pQ9jA

Schooley, M., & Parseghian, A. (2026, April 14). Hampshire College closing in Amherst, Massachusetts. Graduate Ken Burns calls it “incalculable loss.” CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/hampshire-college-closing-amherst-massachusetts/?fbclid=IwY2xjawRLsL1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFjeWM1d1dGTGs3clJGM2Z2c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHreuBzVdmzccEBX9oClZ7cMy0QsyjrHPSzvrocwOzbZkhiTZ86wLU4pV_9Zo_aem_3g0Sk8Bc0HPir8GyUXThZg

Williams, A. (2024, October 29). When Colleges close: The devastating effects of liberal arts college shutdowns. The Politic. https://thepolitic.org/when-colleges-close-the-devastating-effects-of-liberal-arts-college-shutdowns/

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Means and Meaning publishes every Tuesday. If you found value in this analysis, I’d be very grateful if you’d consider buying me a coffee, as your support helps me dedicate time to this work while keeping all content free and accessible.

Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery, and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

If Only You Paid Us Enough

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 05:29:21 GMT

The Big Squeeze is an ongoing series about the economic pressure that shapes daily life in America. Each installment follows the money: who extracts it, who hoards it, who goes without it, and how the system that produces all of this was designed. These aren’t market fluctuations. They’re policy choices. And you’re paying for every one of them.

I. The Smoke

On April 7, a 29-year-old warehouse worker in Ontario, California named Chamel Abdulkarim set fire to the 1.2 million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark distribution center where he worked. He filmed himself doing it. He posted the video to Instagram. And in the footage, while the paper products he’d spent his shifts stocking went up in flames, he said: “If you’re not going to pay us enough to live or afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this.”

The fire caused $500 million in damage. In texts afterward, he wrote: “All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift.”

He compared himself to Luigi Mangione, who shot a health insurance CEO. Abdulkarim burned a warehouse full of goods he couldn’t afford on the wages he earned stocking them. Two men, two acts of destruction, and the same five words at the center of both: pay us enough to live. The system is producing people who would rather destroy the infrastructure of their own exploitation than continue to operate inside it quietly. That’s not a crime story. That’s a diagnostic.

Abdulkarim was paying close to $6 a gallon for gas in California just to get to work. He belongs to a workforce where a third of all workers earn less than $42,000 a year. He filed his taxes in a country that just proposed $1.5 trillion for its next war budget and $73 billion less for everything else. The smoke from that warehouse is a signal. And if you’re paying attention to what’s fueling it, the fire started long before he struck the lighter.

II. The War Tax

The March inflation report landed like a grenade. Consumer prices jumped 0.9% in a single month, triple the pace from February, pushing the annual rate to 3.3%, its highest in two years. The culprit wasn’t mysterious. Gasoline prices surged 21.2% in one month, the largest single-month increase since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the number in 1967. That’s not a spike. That’s a record. The national average crossed $4 a gallon for the first time in four years. In California, where Abdulkarim was filling his tank to drive to the warehouse he’d burn down, the average hit $5.92.

The war in Iran did this. The Strait of Hormuz, those twenty-one miles of water I traced across five centuries of empire two weeks ago, is now producing the number on your gas station sign. And gasoline accounted for nearly three-quarters of the entire inflation increase. Three-quarters. One commodity, one chokepoint, one war you never voted for.

But gas doesn’t stay at the pump. It rides the supply chain into everything. Trucking costs climb, and groceries climb with them. Fertilizer spikes, and food production follows. Food prices rose 2.7% year-over-year. Ground beef that cost $2.20 a pound in 2009, when the minimum wage was last set at $7.25, now costs $8.34. Seventeen years, no raise, and the beef nearly quadrupled.

Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, put it plainly: “Inflation pressures were already building before the war and are now intensifying.” The tariffs were already squeezing, but the war against Iran has really turned the vise.

III. Where Your Money Goes

On April 3, the White House released its proposed budget for fiscal year 2027. The number: $1.5 trillion for defense. A 42% increase. The highest level of military spending in a single fiscal year since World War II. Defense now consumes 63 cents of every discretionary dollar the federal government spends. Everything else, every school, every hospital, every road, every research lab, every meal program, splits the remaining 37 cents. To help pay for it, the administration proposed $73 billion in cuts to nondefense spending. Five billion from the National Institutes of Health. $768 million from refugee resettlement. $356 million from the agency that prepares the country for public health emergencies. The Forest Service, responsible for 193 million acres of national forest, ordered dismantled and relocated to Utah, the state currently suing to seize 18.5 million acres of public land, right before what’s projected to be a devastating wildfire season. Twenty-two million families lost SNAP benefits. And the $1.5 trillion isn’t even the ceiling. A supplemental war spending package, estimated between $80 and $100 billion for Iran alone, is coming separately. The supplemental exceeds the savings from the cuts. The “fiscal responsibility” is theater. At an Easter luncheon, the president said the quiet part into a microphone: “We can’t take care of daycare. We’re fighting wars.” He said it three times. He told the states to pay for it instead. But here’s what that looks like: New York City, under a mayor who ran as a democratic socialist, is now cutting up to $800 million from public schools and abandoning homeless assistance to close a $5.4 billion gap. The money the president told the states to find doesn’t exist. It’s in the Pentagon budget.

IV. The Architecture

This isn’t one bad budget. This is the architecture of American fiscal priorities, exposed by a war that made the scaffolding visible.

The United States government does believe in public spending. It believes in it passionately, urgently, and without limit, as long as the spending builds weapons. Military Keynesianism is the quiet consensus that has organized the federal budget for decades: the government will spend enormous sums to stimulate the economy, but only through defense contractors, only through munitions pipelines, only through systems designed to kill. Lockheed Martin gets cost-plus contracts. Your kid’s school gets a funding formula and a prayer.

The reconciliation process made the machinery plain. The administration used a partisan budget tool requiring zero Democratic votes to pass the largest military expenditure since 1945. In its own budget documents, the Office of Management and Budget described the strategy as “decoupling funding for Republican priorities from Democrat waste.” They said it out loud. Every social program, every piece of domestic infrastructure, every dollar spent on people instead of ordnance, is apparently just “waste.”

Meanwhile, the wealth moved where it always moves. Billionaire net worth surged 120% between 2017 and 2025. The top 1% now holds 50.2% of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares. Over 50 million workers, a third of the labor force, earn $20 an hour or less. The squeeze has a direction. Wealth flows up. Costs flow down. The warehouse worker stocking shelves he can’t afford to shop from and the teacher stocking freeze-dried food in his pantry are living inside the same structure. One struck a match. The other is planning for what comes next.

V. Where It All Points

Today you file your taxes (if you haven’t already done so earlier this spring). Every dollar you send to Washington enters a budget that allocates $1.5 trillion for war and $73 billion less for you. A government that found unlimited money for Tomahawk missiles at $1.7 million apiece, for Patriot interceptors at $4 million each fired in pairs at $20,000 drones, and for a golden dome in outer space, looked at daycare and said: we can’t afford that.

The war tax isn’t a metaphor. It’s on every receipt. Gas at $4, at $5.92 in California, surging at a rate never recorded in the history of the measurement. Groceries climbing because the fuel that trucks them to the shelf climbed first. Beef at $8.34 a pound while the minimum wage sits frozen at the same $7.25 it’s been since the year Obama was inaugurated. The inflation you feel every week at the pump and the checkout is a direct product of a war fought in a strait twenty-one miles wide, funded by a budget that treats your school, your hospital, your forests, and your food assistance as line items to be sacrificed.

The squeeze is not an accident. It is the system performing exactly as designed: public wealth extracted, converted to military contracts, and funneled upward to the same class whose net worth doubled while yours eroded. Sixty-three cents of every discretionary dollar to defense. Thirty-seven cents for everything that keeps you alive. And a supplemental war bill, still growing, that will cost more than all the cuts combined.

Chamel Abdulkarim lit a match in a warehouse in Ontario, California. Millions more are doing the math quietly tonight at kitchen tables, in gas station parking lots, and in the aisles of grocery stores where the prices changed again this week. The pressure is building. Something has to give.

So here’s the question you should be asking yourself today, tax day, as you sign the return: who is your tax dollar fighting for, and is it you?

References

Crosse, J. (2026, April 11). Fuel shock sends inflation soaring while the oligarchy grows richer. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/11/byxk-a11.html

Curry, B. (2026, April 10). First inflation report since Iran war stuns Wall Street as conflict sends shockwaves through the economy. . . and you’re paying the price. Mail Online. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/article-15722081/march-cpi-inflation-report-iran-war-stuns-sall-street.html

Daniels, S. (2026, April 10). Unpacking the $1.5 Trillion FY 2027 Defense Budget Topline, Center for Strategic International Studies. https://www.csis.org/analysis/unpacking-15-trillion-fy-2027-defense-budget-topline

Pattiz, J. (2026, April 2). BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service. The Wildlife News. https://www.thewildlifenews.com/2026/04/02/breaking-trump-administration-orders-dismantling-of-the-u-s-forest-service/

Shapiro, E. (2026, April 10). Man facing federal charges for allegedly setting massive fire that destroyed warehouse: DOJ. ABC News. https://abcnews.com/US/man-facing-federal-charges-allegedly-setting-massive-fire/story?id=131920421

Watson, K., & Navarro, A. (2026, April 3). Trump’s 2027 budget asks Congress for $1.5 trillion in defense spending, with 10% cuts elsewhere. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-releases-proposal-blueprint-2027-budget/

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Co-Producing the Apocalypse

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 05:59:04 GMT

I. Praise Be to Allah

On Easter Sunday, the President of the United States posted this on Truth Social:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Easter. The resurrection of Christ. The holiest day on the Christian calendar. And the leader of the world’s most powerful nation used it to mock a religion practiced by two billion people while threatening to bomb a country he’s already been bombing for five weeks.

The profanity will get the headlines. The “Praise be to Allah” will reverberate across the Muslim world in ways no American pundit can fully calculate. But the real signal is underneath both.

This is a president who doesn’t believe in anything except himself, performing crusader rhetoric for an audience of true believers who do. His “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth has been framing the Iran campaign in explicitly holy war terms for weeks. Hegseth has brought his personal pastor, an avowed Christian nationalist, into the Pentagon for press briefings and prayers during an active bombing campaign. Not a military chaplain offering counsel to troops. A Christian nationalist pastor, praying over targeting operations.

That’s not ceremony. That’s theology with a kill chain.

And here’s what Trump’s Easter post accidentally exposed: the religious architecture underneath the geopolitical surface. Four nuclear-armed or nuclear-adjacent civilizations are currently being driven by religious-nationalist projects that need each other to exist. They aren’t just fighting each other. They’re co-producing the conditions each one’s prophecy requires. Trump, who understands none of it, just made all of it visible in a single unhinged post on the day Christians celebrate the risen Christ.

He’s not driving this. He’s being driven by it. And that’s what makes this moment so dangerous.

II. The Four Holy Wars

This is not one war. It is four, wearing each other’s justifications like armor.

Start with the Pentagon. Pete Hegseth has brought his personal pastor, an avowed Christian nationalist, into the building for press briefings and prayers during an active bombing campaign. This is not military chaplaincy. This is operational theology. Behind Hegseth stands a movement of tens of millions: John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, which has lobbied Washington for decades on the premise that supporting Israel militarily is a precondition for Christ’s return. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s first-term Secretary of State, publicly suggested America may be living out the Book of Esther. Peer-reviewed research by Nilay Saiya has found that when politicians empower Christian nationalist ideology, physical attacks against religious minorities increase. Sixty-five percent of white evangelicals told Pew that the Bible should override the will of the people when the two conflict. This is not faith. It is a political program with a theology attached.

Move to Jerusalem. Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, has visited the Temple Mount over 200 times to assert Jewish sovereignty. He keeps a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslims at prayer in 1994, in his living room. The Greater Israel project isn’t metaphor for these people. It’s divine promise with military backing.

Move to Moscow. Patriarch Kirill has framed the war in Ukraine as a metaphysical struggle against the godless West. Putin receives “spiritual counsel” from him during wartime. The Third Rome doctrine holds that Russia is the final protector of true Christianity. Church and state as one organism with tanks.

Move to Tehran. The Revolutionary Guards have used explicitly theological language in operational communications throughout this war. Shia eschatology anticipates a final confrontation with the forces of falsehood, which map onto Israel and its American sponsor with a precision the ayatollahs find very useful. The assassination of Khamenei didn’t weaken the theocratic elements, it actually strengthened them.

Four forces. Four arsenals. One convergence point. And none of them can exit, because everybody’s enemy is everybody else’s evidence that they’re right.

III. Co-Producing the Apocalypse

Here’s the structural insight that should terrify you: these four forces aren’t just fighting each other. They’re feeding each other. Every escalation confirms every prophecy simultaneously.

When the US bombs Iran, the Revolutionary Guards tell their population that the Great Satan has arrived on schedule, exactly as the theology predicted. When Iran retaliates against Israel, Ben Gvir’s coalition points to the existential threat that justifies expanding into biblical territory. When the war destabilizes Europe’s energy supply, Kirill tells Moscow that the godless West is collapsing under the weight of its own decadence, right on cue. And when Hegseth prays in the Pentagon before selecting strike coordinates, tens of millions of American evangelicals see prophecy in motion, the cosmic struggle they’ve been waiting for, funded with their tax dollars and blessed by their pastors.

Nobody can exit this system. Everybody’s enemy is everybody else’s proof that God is on their side. The architecture is self-reinforcing, and the people inside it interpret every catastrophe as confirmation rather than consequence.

Tariq Ali saw this coming. I read his book The Clash of Fundamentalisms at Hampshire in 2003, and it restructured how I understood the relationship between Western imperial power and religious extremism. Ali’s argument was that Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” framework was wrong. The real clash was between fundamentalisms, religious and imperial, that mirror and feed each other. He called American imperialism “the mother of all fundamentalisms.” Twenty-three years later, his framework has expanded: two additional nuclear-armed forces, Zionist messianism and Russian Orthodox civilizationism, have entered the loop. The architecture has only gotten more dangerous.

More recently, a Beijing-based educator named Jiang Xueqin has called this the Law of Eschatological Convergence: when sincere belief is backed by nuclear arsenals, prophecy has a way of manufacturing its own confirmation. I don’t endorse his specific predictions. But the structural observation is sound.

And at the center of all of it sits a 79-year-old president who believes in nothing except himself, mocking Allah on Easter while his War Secretary prays for the apocalypse in the building where the missiles are ordered launched. Trump isn’t driving this. He’s being instrumentalized by people who believe, sincerely, that they are living in the end times. A leader who understood the religious architecture might exercise restraint. A leader who doesn’t understand it can be manipulated by anyone who does.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s Monday.

IV. How the Last Crusade Ended

Pete Hegseth should know how this story ends. He probably doesn’t.

The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099. The Crusader kingdoms that followed lasted nearly two centuries, long enough to build castles and cathedrals and convince themselves that God had given them the land forever. They had military superiority, they had religious conviction, and they had supply lines stretching back to the most powerful kingdoms in Europe. And then Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, and within another century the Crusaders were gone entirely, expelled and absorbed back into a region that understood the geography as home, not as prophecy.

The lesson is always the same. Religious conviction and military superiority can take territory. They cannot hold it against populations with deeper roots, longer memories, and nowhere else to go. Every religious-military project in recorded history has believed it was the exception, the one God actually chose, the one that would succeed where all previous versions failed. That conviction isn’t a source of strength. It’s the architecture of failure. It’s what keeps you building castles in territory you will never be able to hold.

Look at the current map. Israel occupying roughly 30% of Lebanon. America bombing a 92-million-person nation into a succession crisis that consolidated the regime rather than collapsing it. Russia framing a grinding war of attrition as metaphysical destiny. Each one projecting power it cannot sustain into territory it does not understand, animated by a certainty that history says will not survive contact with reality.

The Crusaders built kingdoms that lasted 200 years. The British Empire lasted roughly 300. The American century is barely 80 years old and already bleeding out at a billion dollars a day in a war its own president cannot explain.

The castles always fall. The geography always wins.

V. Where It All Points

Four religious-nationalist projects, each one armed with or backed by nuclear weapons, each one accelerating the others, each one producing the evidence the others need to escalate. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a structural observation grounded in documented statements, policy positions, and military operations by named individuals in positions of power. Hagee lobbies. Ben Gvir visits the Temple Mount. Kirill blesses the tanks. The IRGC frames its war in the language of the Hidden Imam. And a Christian nationalist pastor prays over targeting operations in the Pentagon while the president posts “Praise be to Allah” on Easter morning.

What Means and Meaning tries to do every week is name the architecture, the systems that shape what happens and who benefits. This week the architecture has stained glass windows and nuclear warheads. Saiya’s research demonstrates that when politicians empower this kind of religious nationalism, the violence doesn’t stay overseas. It comes home. It always comes home. Césaire told us this decades ago: the logic of domination abroad eventually returns to the society that launched it. The Crusaders didn’t just lose Jerusalem. They hollowed out the kingdoms that sent them.

The most dangerous “common sense” in the world right now isn’t economic. It’s theological. It’s the assumption, held by people with the capacity to end civilization, that the end is near and that their job is to bring it about. That mental architecture, when it shapes military operations, becomes self-fulfilling. And a president who mocks one religion on the holiest day of another while waging a war he can’t explain isn’t navigating these forces. He’s a passenger who thinks he’s driving.

So here is the question this moment demands of every one of us: if four fundamentalisms are co-producing the apocalypse, and none of them can stop because the others won’t, then who exactly is supposed to break the cycle, and what are we waiting for?

References

Ali, T. (2002). The clash of fundamentalisms : crusades, Jihads and modernity.

Saiya, N. (2024). Christian Nationalism’s Threat to Global Democracy. Review of Faith & International Affairs, 22(1), 102–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2023.2204679

Saiya, N., & Manchanda, S. (2025). Christian Nationalism and Violence Against Religious Minorities in the United States: A Quantitative Analysis. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), 64(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12942

Tomasky, M. (2026, April 6). You can smell it now: the Trump presidency is in total free fall. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/208633/trump-presidency-collapse-truth-social-iran?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=SF_TNR&fbclid=IwY2xjawRArcVleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF6VXp6bDd4dWFyWXVhTFNGc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHoXrV8g6qXn2ticNpluYls4wXp3QzR5aJ55YcluoKhG25r1fo8OySIOCawZG_aem_t6FrQk7eKnFAr5BvRnhjfw

Wellmann, J. (2026, March 23). The end of the world according to Jiang. Coherent Reality.

Coherent Reality

The End Of The World According To Jiang

3 months ago · 709 likes · 157 comments · Jan Wellmann

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Twenty-One Miles

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:02:12 GMT

I. The Tankers Are Stalled

The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide. Only six of those miles carry the shipping lanes, two lanes moving in opposite directions with a two-mile buffer between them. Through that corridor flows roughly one fifth of all the oil consumed on earth. One in every three barrels shipped by sea passes through this gap between Iran and Oman on its way to the refineries, the gas stations, the power grids, the entire infrastructure of modern life.

On March 2, 2026, Iran closed it.

The IRGC announced that any vessel attempting to pass would be set ablaze, and they meant it. Five tankers have been hit. Two workers are dead. Around 150 ships sit stranded on either side of the strait, their crews waiting, their cargo worth billions going nowhere. Brent crude has swung between $90 and $113 a barrel since the strikes began. Gas in the United States has climbed from $3.48 to $3.99 in four weeks. Maersk, the world’s shipping barometer, has suspended all crossings. Insurance companies have pulled war risk coverage entirely, which means that even if a captain wanted to run the strait, no underwriter on earth will back the voyage. This week, Bahrain introduced a draft UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of “all necessary means” to reopen the waterway. Russia and China will almost certainly veto it.

This feels unprecedented. It is not. The Strait of Hormuz has been a flashpoint for as long as empires have valued what flows through it. The commodity has changed. The technology has changed. But the geography has not. And the pattern, where outside powers project force onto this narrow passage and discover that the passage answers to no one, is older than oil, older than tankers, older than the nation-states now fighting over it. This has happened before, and it will happen again. Unless we understand why.

II. The First Empires at the Narrows

Long before oil made Hormuz the most dangerous waterway on earth, it was one of the most vibrant. During the fifteenth century, the island kingdom of Hormuz controlled all traffic in and out of the Persian Gulf and served as the commercial crossroads of the known world. When China’s Ming dynasty sent Admiral Zheng He with treasure fleets across the Indian Ocean in the early 1400s, they stopped at Hormuz. A Timurid ambassador named Abd al-Razzaq visited in 1442 and described a port with “no equal on the face of the earth,” where merchants arrived from Egypt, Syria, China, India, Bengal, Zanzibar and Southeast Asia, where adherents of various religions dealt equitably with all, and where the city had earned the name Dar al-Aman: the Abode of Security.

The Kingdom of Hormuz as depicted in a European map by Bellin in 1746 (Picture source: Map and Maps)

That security ended in 1507, when the Portuguese sailed around Africa and seized the island. They built a fortress and a customs house, issued paid permits called cartazas to anyone wishing to trade in Gulf waters, and extracted tolls from every ship that passed through the strait. As historian Rudolph Matthee has noted, Portugal made itself the tributary power in the region and became quite oppressive. They held Hormuz for over a century until a Persian-English alliance drove them out in 1622, with the English East India Company providing naval power in exchange for trading contracts. One empire replaced another. The strait remained the prize.

The British understood this as well as anyone. Their East India Company gave way to formal protectorates over the “Trucial States,” the colonial name for what became the UAE, and direct control of Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea and Bab-el-Mandeb. France established its colony in Djibouti for the same reason. Every European power grasped the same principle: if you control the strait, then you control the trade.

I grew up inside a different version of this architecture. The Caribbean was the original chokepoint economy of the European colonial era. The Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola, the Mona Passage, the Florida Straits, the Yucatán Channel: these narrow waterways controlled the flow of sugar, enslaved people, and extracted wealth (especially gold and silver) between the Americas and Europe for centuries. Pirates, privateers and imperial navies fought over them the same way empires fought over Hormuz. Walter Rodney taught us that underdevelopment is not natural but produced, and the mechanism of production has always been the same. Control the route. Tax the flow. Build a fortress at the narrows. The geography changes. The logic does not.

III. Oil Changes Everything

For centuries, the strait’s value was in the trade that passed through it, including everything from silk and spices to pearls and horses. Then, in the early twentieth century, oil was discovered in the Gulf, and everything about Hormuz changed. The chokepoint was no longer just strategically important. It was existentially important. The entire architecture of modern industrial civilization would be built on the assumption that oil flows freely through this passage.

The British understood this first. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which later became BP, won a lopsided concession to control Iran’s oil exports in 1933. When Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry in 1951, asserting that Iran’s oil should benefit Iranians, Britain sent the Royal Navy to blockade the port of Abadan and choke off Iran’s access to the world. Mossadegh became a national hero. The British and Americans responded in 1953 with a CIA-backed coup that overthrew him and reinstalled the Shah. As early as 1917, a British official document had declared that “oilers must be considered the most valuable vessels afloat.” By 1953, the nations that needed those oilers were willing to overthrow democracies to keep them moving.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 revealed the next turn. When Egypt’s Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain and France invaded, clinging to colonial control of the waterway that connected the Gulf to Europe. The United States forced them to withdraw. The old European empires could no longer back their own ambitions. But the lesson underneath was structural: whoever controls the chokepoint has leverage over the entire global economy, and attempting to control it by force eventually exposes the limits of the power making the attempt. The empires that built their wealth on what flowed through these narrows kept discovering that the narrows had power of their own.

IV. The Tanker Wars and the Logic of Disruption

The Iran-Iraq War began in September 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with American intelligence, weaponry and support. It lasted eight years and killed a million people. But the dimension most relevant to this moment is the one most Americans have never heard of: the Tanker War, which became the largest maritime conflict since World War II.

Iraq struck first, targeting Iranian oil tankers and the crucial loading terminal at Kharg Island. Iran retaliated by hitting Kuwaiti and Saudi tankers, since both nations backed Iraq. The escalation was deliberate. Iraq’s calculation was strategic: by attacking neutral shipping, it would force international intervention, which was precisely what Iraq needed because it could not win the war on its own. It worked. The United States reflagged Kuwaiti tankers under the American flag and sent warships to escort them through the strait. The Soviet Union volunteered to do the same. The chokepoint had done what it always does: it turned a regional war into a global crisis, because the world’s economy could not afford to let the passage stay dangerous.

A US navy helicopter flies over a convoy of reflagged tankers consisting of Ocean City and Gas Princess. The USS Ford and USS Elrod are escorting the tankers. Circa 21 Dec. 1987. Photo by Norbert Schiller.

The numbers are staggering. Over the course of the war, 430 ships were attacked. 72 were sunk or damaged beyond repair. Eight million tons of shipping were destroyed, equivalent to a quarter of the tonnage lost in the entire Battle of the Atlantic during World War II. Iran and Iraq together lost over $510 billion in oil revenue. At night, Revolutionary Guard operatives dropped mines from vessels disguised as traditional dhows, the same wooden cargo boats that have carried goods through Gulf waters for centuries. Former Iranian president Rafsanjani called the mines “God’s angels that descend and do what is necessary.” As defense analyst Dave DesRoches put it years later, “Iran’s strategy at sea particularly is based on disruption. They know they can’t dominate. They have to disrupt.”

A Helicopter from the USS Chandler helps rescue 40 crew from the 232 thousand ton Cypriot registered oil tanker, Pivot, after it was attacked and set ablaze by an Iranian warship. It was coming from Saudi Arabia with crude oil. Circa 12 Dec. 1987. Photo by Norbert Schiller.

That strategy reached its darkest moment in July 1988, when the USS Vincennes, chasing Guard speedboats into Iranian territorial waters, mistook Iran Air Flight 655 for a military aircraft and shot it down, killing all 290 civilians aboard. In the United States, the incident faded from public memory almost immediately. In Iran, it never faded at all. A billboard erected in Tehran’s Vali-e-Asr Square years later showed American and Israeli ships sinking beneath the waves, captioned in four languages: “We Drowned Them All.” When Ayatollah Khamenei was presented with a portrait of a Guard soldier killed during the Tanker War, he smiled and said, “Excellent, very timely.” Americans forgot. Iranians built it into the national architecture. And now, in 2026, we see the same strait, with the same adversaries, using the same logic. The only thing that has changed is which side is asking the world for help.

V. Where It All Points

Five centuries. Portuguese fortresses, British blockades, American escorts, Iranian mines, Houthi drones. The technology changes every generation. The empires rotate. The 21 miles stay exactly where they are, and the pattern repeats with a regularity that should terrify anyone paying attention.

The structure has never changed because the dependency has never changed. Global civilization runs on fossil fuels extracted from one region and shipped through two narrow waterways. Every decade, a new actor threatens the strait. Every decade, the world economy convulses. And every decade, instead of addressing the structural vulnerability, we send more warships. Right now, 22 nations are negotiating how to reopen a passage that a fifteenth-century ambassador once called the Abode of Security. Bahrain is asking the UN Security Council to authorize force. Twenty-five hundred Marines are heading to the Gulf aboard the USS Boxer. Russia and China, who profit from the disruption, will veto any resolution. The architecture is working exactly as it always has: concentrating power at the narrows and forcing the rest of the world to react.

Walter Rodney taught us that underdevelopment is produced through control of extraction routes. Eric Williams showed us how the Caribbean colonial economy was built on the same logic: narrow passages, captive labor, wealth flowing outward to imperial centers. George Beckford saw the plantation as a total institution that organized entire societies around a single extractive purpose. The Strait of Hormuz is that institution applied to water. It organizes the global economy around a dependency so fundamental that when six miles of shipping lane close, parliaments convene, alliances fracture, and families in Florida, Ohio and every other state pay for it at the pump.

I grew up in St. Croix, where everything arrives by ship through narrow passages controlled by distant powers. Whenever a hurricane knocked out the fragile grid, or whenever boats couldn’t dock, or when a particular supply chain broke, we felt the architecture in our bodies. The world is now feeling what the Caribbean has always known: that when your survival depends on a chokepoint, you are never truly free. As such, the answer for the current geopolitical crisis is not more warships at Hormuz. It is building an energy system that does not route civilization’s survival through a corridor you could cross in a fishing boat. Until then, the pattern holds. Same strait. Different empire. Same crisis. Once again, we see that history doesn’t exactly repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

References

Gambrell, J. (2019, June 14). Oil tanker attacks echo Persian Gulf’s 1980s ‘Tanker War’. Associated Press: Worldstream. Available from NewsBank: America’s News Magazines: https://infoweb-newsbank-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/apps/news/document-view?p=AMNP&docref=news/1740E9180F348460.

Hacaga, M. (2020). An easy target? Types of attack on oil tankers by state actors. Security and Defence Quarterly, 28(1), 54–69. https://doi.org/10.35467/sdq/118147

Irish, J. (2026, March 23). Bahrain pushes UN-backed action for Hormuz shipping; France tables rival text. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/bahrain-proposes-un-security-council-approve-use-force-protect-hormuz-shipping-2026-03-23/

Nonneman, G. (1999). The Gulf Tanker War: Iran and Iraq’s Maritime Swordplay. International Affairs, 75(1), 179.

Roos, D. (2026, March 13). The Strait of Hormuz: A Timeline of Tensions | HISTORY. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/articles/7-historical-fights-over-strait-of-hormuz

Ulrich, B. (2023). Hormuz. In The Medieval Persian Gulf (pp. 91–102). Chapter, Arc Humanities Press.

Bahrain proposes UN Security Council approve use of force to protect Hormuz shipping

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Palantir

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 06:46:38 GMT

The Quiet War is an ongoing series about the war that doesn’t make the front page. Each installment traces the infrastructure of repression being built while most people’s attention is elsewhere: the surveillance systems, the detention machinery, the erosion of rights that happens not in dramatic confrontation but in contracts, policies and code. This war is quiet by design. Naming it is the first act of resistance.

I. The Seeing Stone

Millions of people have seen Peter Jackson’s films about The Lord of the Rings. Fewer, though still many, have read the books. But J.R.R. Tolkien built something more than a fantasy world. He built a mythology that keeps warning us about things we haven’t stopped doing. One of those warnings involves a set of ancient seeing stones called the palantíri, and a technology company that named itself after them.

I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was five years old, starting with a picture book and one of those thick plastic records that narrated The Hobbit in fifteen breathless minutes. I read The Lord of the Rings in seventh grade, studied Tolkien for a year-long author project in eleventh, and I’ve revisited Peter Jackson’s films more times than I’d care to admit. So I know what the palantíri actually were, and more importantly, what Tolkien was warning about.

The palantíri were not weapons. They were seeing stones, crafted by the Elves, used for centuries as tools of communication and foresight. They were not evil by design. They became dangerous when they were concentrated in the wrong hands. And they didn’t lie. That was the real danger. As Genny Harrison recently wrote, they “offered truth without context and certainty without understanding. They did not force action. They made action feel inevitable.” Denethor, Steward of Gondor, looked into his palantír and saw Sauron’s armies with perfect clarity. What he couldn’t see was everything the stone chose not to show him. His field of vision narrowed until despair felt like the only rational response. He burned alive on a pyre of his own certainty.

In 2003, a company co-founded by Peter Thiel with seed funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, chose to name itself Palantir. It took the name and ignored the warning. Today, Palantir is one of the most powerful surveillance companies on earth. It builds the software that lets ICE track immigrants in real time, helps the Pentagon select strike targets in an active war, and is quietly embedding itself inside the Department of Education. Its stock has surged over 200% since the last election. Its contracts span the federal government.

Most people have never heard of it. That’s not a failure of the architecture. It’s a feature. The quiet war depends on remaining quiet.

II. The Architecture of Watching

Palantir’s flagship immigration product is called ImmigrationOS. An operating system, like the software that runs your phone, except this one runs deportations. It gives ICE what the company calls “near-real-time visibility” by cross-referencing FBI records, customs databases, tax filings, social media activity, cell-phone metadata, travel logs and student visa records into a single searchable intelligence web.

But Palantir doesn’t just collect its own data. It integrates everyone else’s. Amazon’s Ring cameras now feed into Flock Safety’s law enforcement platform, which connects over 6,000 police departments nationwide. ICE accesses that network through inter-agency sharing agreements, no warrant required. Between June 2024 and May 2025, law enforcement ran more than 4,000 immigration-related searches through Flock’s systems, including in states with sanctuary laws that were supposed to prevent exactly this. A homeowner buys a doorbell camera to watch their porch. The state gets a surveillance node.

If you’ve seen the film The Lives of Others, you know the image: a Stasi agent in an attic, headphones on, manually listening to one apartment at a time. East Germany employed 90,000 full-time agents and hundreds of thousands of informants to surveil 16 million people. They still couldn’t achieve total coverage. Palantir does in milliseconds what the Stasi tried to do with file cabinets and human ears. And we install the listening devices ourselves.

Palantir’s defenders say the software doesn’t make decisions, it only supports them. As Harrison wrote, this distinction is “comforting and meaningless.” When a system shapes what agents see, prioritizes who gets flagged, and makes action feel like the logical next step, the fiction of human control is just that. In New Orleans, a secret Palantir program ran from 2012 to 2018, building risk-assessment databases on 3,900 residents. The City Council didn’t know it existed until reporters called them for comment.

That was the prototype. Since then, the architecture has scaled.

III. Colonialism Comes Home

Every tool Palantir sells to ICE was built for counterinsurgency. The data integration, the pattern analysis, the cross-referencing of movement and communication and association into targeting profiles: all of it was developed for Iraq and Afghanistan. Palantir’s first major contracts were with the CIA and the Pentagon, helping military intelligence fuse signals from occupied populations into actionable strikes. When those wars wound down, the company didn’t retire the technology. It pointed it inward. At immigrant communities. At activists. At students. At anyone the state designates as a population to be managed.

Aimé Césaire warned us about this. Writing in 1955, the Martinican poet and theorist argued that fascism was not an aberration in European civilization but colonialism brought home. The techniques of dehumanization, surveillance and control that empires deployed against colonized peoples would inevitably be turned against domestic populations. The logic doesn’t stay overseas. It never has. The plantation was the original surveillance state: total knowledge of the enslaved population’s movements, labor, relationships, and especially any potential resistance. The colonial census was the original data integration. Palantir is the digital update. The technology is new. The architecture of control is centuries old.

At the New York Times DealBook Summit, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said he cared about “reestablishing the deterrent capacity of America without being a colonialist neocon.” A man running surveillance platforms for ICE, powering Pentagon targeting in an active war, and embedding his software in the Department of Education, disavowing the colonial label while building the colonial infrastructure. Césaire’s point exactly: the metropole never recognizes its own logic.

I vividly remember back in 2003, when the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program proposed doing what Palantir now does. Its logo was an all-seeing eye casting its gaze across the globe. The public backlash was so fierce that Congress defunded it. But as journalist Shane Harris documented, every component was quietly renamed and shifted to the NSA. The surveillance state learned something from that failure. Not that mass surveillance was wrong, but that the branding was too honest. Two decades later, the same capability operates at vastly greater scale, run by a publicly traded company with a market cap exceeding $70 billion. The all-seeing eye got a stock ticker and an earnings call. Nobody flinched.

IV. The Genie and the Bottle

In February, Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use its AI for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Trump administration’s response was immediate and total. Every federal agency was ordered to cease using Anthropic’s technology. Defense Secretary Hegseth designated the company a national security risk and blacklisted it from all military contracting, accusing it of trying to “seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military.” A company that said “our AI should not be used for mass surveillance of Americans” was framed as a threat to the republic.

Hours later, OpenAI signed a Pentagon deal under the same “all lawful purposes” language that Anthropic had rejected. Sam Altman claimed he’d secured identical ethical safeguards. But “all lawful purposes” is a boundary that moves wherever power needs it to move. Warrantless data purchases are lawful. ICE operations are lawful. FISA 702 collection is lawful. The government defines what’s lawful and then promises to stay within the limits it sets for itself.

But here’s what matters most: the AI provider is interchangeable. Anthropic gets expelled, OpenAI steps in, and the architecture doesn’t blink. Palantir is the constant. It is the integration layer between whatever AI capability exists and the operational power of the state. It takes the intelligence and makes it actionable: for ICE raids in Minneapolis, for strike targeting in Tehran, for monitoring which universities receive foreign funding. Karp himself has acknowledged what his company does. “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” he told Business Insider in 2020. He wasn’t confessing. He was advertising.

The genie isn’t out of the bottle. The bottle was designed to break. Palantir doesn’t want distance, like Anthropic. It doesn’t want a deal, like OpenAI. It wants permanence. And it’s getting it.

V. The War That Watches Back

Palantir runs ImmigrationOS for ICE in Minneapolis. It powers targeting systems for the Pentagon in Tehran. The same company. The same technology. The same architecture of seeing without understanding. The quiet war you’ve been reading about in this series and the loud war I wrote about in “Prayers Count Double When It Rains” are not separate conflicts. They are two functions of a single system: an empire that surveys, sorts, and strikes, abroad and at home, through the servers of one company most people have never heard of.

In 2009, Peter Thiel wrote an essay for the Cato Institute containing a sentence that should follow him for the rest of his public life: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He then co-founded the surveillance architecture to ensure they wouldn’t be. Stephen Miller, architect of the most aggressive immigration crackdowns in modern American history, holds up to $250,000 in Palantir stock, routed through a child’s brokerage account. The man who writes the policy profits from the technology that enforces it. This is not a conflict of interest discovered by accident. It is the structure working as designed.

Last week, in Spring Cleaning Your Class Consciousness, I asked you to examine the assumptions you carry without questioning. Here is one worth pulling from the junk drawer: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” That is the quiet war’s most effective piece of propaganda. It asks you to accept surveillance as the price of innocence, when the entire history of this infrastructure proves that innocence was never the point. The system does not watch because you might be guilty. It watches because watching is what the architecture was built to do.

Harrison’s closing words are the ones I keep returning to: “We are rebuilding the palantíri and telling ourselves we have learned from the story.” Tolkien understood that the danger was never the seeing stone itself. It was the arrogance of believing you could look into it without being changed. Denethor saw clearly and burned. Saruman saw clearly and served.

The architecture is documented. The pattern is named. You now know the company, the contracts and the connections. The quiet war depends on remaining quiet, and you’ve just made it louder.

References

Armitage, C. (2025d, December 14). The US oligarchs who built the surveillance state now run it. The Existentialist Republic.

The Existentialist Republic

The US Oligarchs Who Built the Surveillance State Now Run It

BLUF-HA (Bottom Line Up Front for Hardcore Activists…

7 months ago · 705 likes · 68 comments · Christopher Armitage

Bond, S. (2026, February 28). OpenAI announces Pentagon deal after Trump bans Anthropic. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-5729118/trump-anthropic-pentagon-openai-ai-weapons-ban

Greenwald, G. (2026, February 13). Amazon’s ring and Google’s nest unwittingly reveal the severity of the U.S. surveillance state. Glenn Greenwald.

Glenn Greenwald

Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State

That the U.S. Surveillance State is rapidly growing to the point of ubiquity has been demonstrated over the past week by seemingly benign events. While …

5 months ago · 969 likes · 19 comments · Glenn Greenwald

HR NEWS. (2026b, February 27). Alex Karp: the insane billionaire, Mass-Surveilling, bullied young nerd now proudly killing humans to get revenge on the world. HR NEWS.

HR NEWS

Alex Karp: The Insane Billionaire, Mass-Surveilling, Bullied Young Nerd Now Proudly Killing Humans to Get Revenge on the World

Alex Karp grew up in a household that should have produced an activist, not an architect of the surveillance state…

4 months ago · 810 likes · 88 comments · HR NEWS

HR NEWS. (2026, January 19). Ring Cameras join Flock and Amazon to now create direct data access for ICE. HR NEWS.

HR NEWS

Ring Cameras Join Flock and Amazon to Now Create Direct Data Access for ICE

Ring, the Amazon-owned home surveillance company, announced a formal partnership with Flock Safety, a private surveillance firm whose systems are already used by thousands of police departments across the United States…

6 months ago · 307 likes · 35 comments · HR NEWS

Mathews, J. (2025, December 10). New contract shows Palantir is working on a tech platform for another federal agency that works with ICE | Fortune. https://fortune.com/2025/12/09/palantir-new-contract-uscis-ice/

Nazzaro, M. (2025, December 4). Palantir quietly lands in Education Department through foreign funding portal. FedScoop. https://fedscoop.com/palantir-education-department-foreign-funding-influence-portal/

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Spring Cleaning Your Class Consciousness

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:55:15 GMT

Theory for the Streets is an ongoing series that takes the ideas scholars write about in journals and seminar rooms and puts them where they belong: in your hands. Each installment breaks down a concept from political economy, cultural theory, or critical thought, and shows how it explains something you already live with every day. These aren’t abstract frameworks. They’re power tools. And they’re yours now.

I. The Junk Drawer of Your Mind

Ah, the joys of March - a well-deserved spring break for students (and teachers like myself), and spring cleaning for the rest of us. The windows open. You finally deal with that one closet, corner of the garage, or that particular shelf somewhere, or that one drawer in the kitchen always stuffed with batteries, takeout menus and a phone charger for a phone or shaver or some other gadget you haven’t owned since 2019, but which you still save nonetheless “just in case.”

You know the drawer. Maybe it’s in your office or bedroom instead of your kitchen. Either way, everybody has one. It fills up slowly, without anyone deciding to fill it. Things end up there because they were handed down, or seemed useful once, or because throwing them out felt like more trouble than keeping them. One day you open it looking for a pen and realize: half of this stuff was never mine. I don’t even know where it came from.

Now think about your head.

Not your knowledge. Not the things you’ve studied or chosen to believe. I mean the other stuff. The assumptions you carry around without ever deciding to carry them. “Hard work always pays off.” “The economy is too complicated for regular people to understand.” “There is no alternative.” These aren’t conclusions you arrived at. They’re furniture someone else put in your house before you moved in.

This week, we’re finally opening that drawer. And an Italian political theorist who wrote from a fascist prison cell in the 1930s is going to help us sort through it.

II. Gramsci’s Best Idea

His name was Antonio Gramsci. He was a Sardinian Marxist, a journalist, a labor organizer, and arguably one of the sharpest political thinkers of the twentieth century. Mussolini’s fascist government locked him up in 1926. The prosecutor reportedly said they needed to “stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” It didn’t work. Gramsci filled 33 notebooks from his cell, and one of his central obsessions was a question that should haunt anyone paying attention in 2026: why do people so often believe things that work against their own interests?

His answer: common sense.

Not common sense the way we use it in English (meaning practical wisdom, good judgment or street smarts). In Italian, senso comune means something closer to the opposite: the pile of unexamined assumptions a society absorbs from its culture, media, schools, workplaces and political leaders without ever choosing to absorb them. Scholar Kate Crehan describes it as “the comfortable, predictable certainties that provide all of us with much of our basic mental furniture.”

That’s the junk drawer. Common sense is ideology that doesn’t feel like ideology. It feels like reality.

But Gramsci noticed something else, too. Buried inside all that inherited clutter, people also carry what he called good sense: a stubborn, experience-born awareness that the official story doesn’t add up.

You’ve felt it.

III. The Spring Clean

So let’s do this. Here are a few items from the drawer. For each one, ask yourself two questions: does this match my actual experience? And who benefits from me believing it?

“If you work hard, you’ll get ahead.” You know people who work two jobs and can’t cover rent. You know people who inherited a portfolio and never worked a day. Does your experience confirm this, or does it just keep you blaming yourself when the math doesn’t work?

“The government should budget like a household.” Households can’t levy taxes, print currency or build highways. This analogy sounds responsible. It’s actually the logic that cuts your kid’s school funding every time a state runs short.

“There is no alternative to the way things are.” This one is the masterpiece. It doesn’t even argue for the current system. It just tells you resistance is pointless. As decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo put it, neoliberalism isn’t merely an economic program; it’s “a new civilising design.” The assumption that nothing else is possible is the design.

“The economy is too complicated for regular people to understand.” Who benefits from you believing that? Certainly not you.

Notice what just happened. None of these are facts. All of them serve someone’s interests. And every single one (in one form of another) was probably in your drawer, doing quiet work, before you ever even opened it.

Gramsci had a phrase for this process. He said the point wasn’t to introduce some new way of thinking from scratch, but to renovate and make “critical” an already existing activity. You were already skeptical. We’re just giving the skepticism a sharper edge.

IV. Who Furnished Your House?

Here’s an important thing to consider: common sense doesn’t magically appear from nowhere. It’s produced. Media, education systems, advertising, workplace culture, political rhetoric: these are all the factories of common sense, running continuous shifts.

Gramsci called the process hegemony: how the ruling class’s worldview becomes the default setting for an entire culture. You don’t have to agree with the people in power. You just have to absorb their assumptions as the baseline of “normal.” And the genius of it is that common sense survives even when reality contradicts it. The 2008 financial crisis proved that deregulated markets could destroy the global economy. The response? Bank bailouts. Austerity. Cuts to public services. The people who crashed the system convinced the rest of us to pay for the cleanup. The common sense didn’t break…it actually deepened!

If you’ve been reading Means and Meaning, you’ve already watched this machinery operate in similar fashion, in pieces examining the architecture of not knowing that designs what’s thinkable. “Adapt or die” sold as inevitability rather than ideology. #Vanlife repackaging a housing crisis as a lifestyle choice. A billion dollars a day for bombs while teachers price used box trucks to live in.

Each of those pieces described common sense in action. Now you have the name for it. And here’s what Gramsci understood that matters most: the furniture can be replaced. But first you have to notice it’s not yours.

V. Where It All Points

Here’s the thing Gramsci understood from inside that prison cell, headaches so brutal he sometimes banged his head against the walls just to override the pain: good sense isn’t something you have to build from scratch. It’s already in you. It’s the part that knows something is off even when you can’t quite name it. The part that watches the news and feels the gap between what you’re being told and what you can see with your own eyes. The part that’s been whispering “this doesn’t add” up for years.

Carlos Alberto Torres, who directs the Paulo Freire Institute at UCLA, argues that neoliberalism has so thoroughly colonized our common sense that entire generations have grown up inside it without ever encountering an alternative. The furniture was already in the house when they arrived. They didn’t choose it. They were born into it.

But common sense also has an expiration date. Yesterday’s unquestionable truth is today’s obvious nonsense. People once “knew” that the economy needed child labor to function. They “knew” that women couldn’t manage money. They “knew” that colonies were civilizing missions. Every generation eventually opens the drawer and throws something out. That’s not destruction, that’s growth.

Gramsci believed that ordinary people developing critical consciousness (what he called becoming organic intellectuals) is the precondition for real political change. Not experts. Not academics. Regular people who start asking who furnished the house and why.

That’s what you just did.

What Means and Meaning tries to do every Tuesday is help your good sense find its voice: to give the skepticism you already carry the language, history and frameworks to stand on its own two feet. Spring cleaning your class consciousness isn’t a metaphor. It’s practice. And you’ve already started, because you’re here.

References

Crehan, K. (2016). Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11318dq

Patterson, T. (2016). Too much common sense, not enough critical thinking! Dialectical Anthropology, 40(3), 251–258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9434-5

Robinson, A. (2005). Towards an Intellectual Reformation: The Critique of Common Sense and the Forgotten Revolutionary Project of Gramscian Theory. Critical Review of International Social & Political Philosophy, 8(4), 469–481. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230500205045

Torres, C. A. (2013). Neoliberalism as a new historical bloc: a Gramscian analysis of neoliberalism’s common sense in education. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 23(2), 80–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2013.790658

Wells, R. (2019). Teaching austerity to working-class students: Toward a new “common sense.” Capital & Class, 43(2), 315–337 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816818780654

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Prayers Count Double When It Rains

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:12:22 GMT

I. The Balcony

I have a photo from 2013 which shows my AS-Level Economics class at The English Modern School in Doha. Five Qataris, one Sri Lankan, one Iranian. Behind us, a Hampshire College pennant on the wall and “The Labour Market” on the projector. I posted it to Facebook on March 2nd with the following caption: “Out of all 150 students I teach these ones are by far the brightest and most engaged.”

The school sits directly across the street from the US embassy compound in Doha.

One of my Iranian students, one of the girls, asked to be excused from class one afternoon because it had started to lightly rain outside. This almost never happens in Qatar. She wanted to go to the balcony to pray, she said, because “prayers count double when it rains.” Of course I let her.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes across Iran. They killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, dozens of senior officials and hundreds of civilians. According to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, over the past week they’ve also hit 65 schools. At the Minab girls’ elementary school, 180 children died on the very first day. Those were someone’s students. Someone knew their names, knew which ones raised their hands too much and which ones never raised them enough.

Iran retaliated. Missiles hit US bases across the Gulf, struck targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE and Qatar. The US embassy compound in Doha has been targeted. My former school is across the street.

I still have friends there. Former colleagues in Doha, Dubai and Cairo. They’re checking State Department advisories and wondering whether to abandon the lives they built or hope the next strike misses. They’re largely on their own either way.

This is the third American war of aggression in my conscious lifetime. I marched in D.C. against the looming invasion of Afghanistan. I later marched in New York against the impending war in Iraq. And I served in the Peace Corps in Grenada, where the US did another regime change in 1983. I taught the Iranian Revolution to high schoolers in St. Croix. I know this history in my bones, in my lesson plans and in the faces of children I can still name.

The president watched the strikes from a resort in Palm Beach.

II. The Architecture of Regime Change

In 1953, the US and Britain overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh for nationalizing Iranian oil. In his place, they installed the Shah. Twenty-six years of brutal autocracy later, the 1979 revolution produced the Islamic Republic, the exact government the US just bombed.

Read that sequence again. The United States just launched a war against a regime its own previous intervention created.

I taught this history. At my school in St. Croix, I designed a World Revolutions course with a full unit on the Iranian Revolution. Students used Brown University’s Choices Program, reading primary sources and ultimately engaging in a mock debate representing the various factions and deciding which direction the revolution should take. The cycle of intervention and blowback wasn’t an abstraction in my classroom. It was the lesson.

And the script just never seems to change. Iraq 2003: fabricated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, an “imminent threat” that wasn’t. Grenada 1983: the same language of liberation, the same refusal to let a sovereign nation choose its own path. I marched against Iraq. I lived in Grenada. I’ve watched the same playbook run three times now with different targets and identical logic.

This time the fabrication is even lazier. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff claimed Iran was “probably a week away from industrial-grade bombmaking material.” This contradicted open-source intelligence, the IAEA, and the administration’s own claim last summer that they’d already “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites. The navy couldn’t even attack sooner because it was still parked off Venezuela from the last regime change.

And let’s not forget the negotiations. Talks had concluded in Geneva two days before the strikes. Oman’s foreign minister confirmed a breakthrough was within reach. Iran had reportedly offered to suspend enrichment. Peace was in hand. They dropped it to pick up a bomb. They always do.

III. The Cornered Emperor

A president with cratering approval ratings and his name appearing tens of thousands of times in the Epstein files launches the largest military operation since Iraq. From Mar-a-Lago in a white USA baseball hat.

His envoy, a real estate lawyer, claims Iran is a week from a nuclear weapon. His own intelligence agencies say a decade. He accidentally kills his own handpicked regime-change candidates in the bombing and then shrugs it off. He tells the Iranian people to “take over your government” once the bombing stops, which is to say: he has no real plan for what comes after.

And then, at a press conference in Doral just hours ago, he told us how the decision was actually made. Not from intelligence briefings. Not from Pentagon threat assessments. Not from consultation with military leadership or authorization from Congress. “The situation was very quickly approaching the point of no return,” he said, “based on what Steve, and Jared and Pete were telling me.” Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Pete Hegseth. A real estate lawyer, his son-in-law, and a former Fox News host. That is the war cabinet that sent America into its largest military operation in over twenty years.

When pressed about the elementary school his missiles destroyed in Minab, the president said: “I just don’t know enough about it.” The man who ordered this war doesn’t know enough about the 180 children it killed on the first day.

I read Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place in a critical theory seminar at Hampshire College. It rewired how I understood modern warfare: not as event but as spectacle, perception managed and media-packaged until the distance between war as represented and war as lived becomes infinite. Charles Hugh Smith made a similar argument last week: the primary task of warmakers is perception management, shaping the fog of war into narratives “as carefully curated as an advert campaign.” Trump slurring through a press conference in Doral while 168 families in Minab bury their children is Baudrillard made flesh. War as content. War as programming.

But this is bigger than one man’s pathology. This is the architecture of imperial decline. Rome overextended its legions and taxed its citizens to pay for them until neither held. Britain after Suez in 1956, the moment the world saw the empire couldn’t back its own ambitions. The Soviets in Afghanistan. The Americans in Vietnam, where Smith reminds us military leaders had no understanding of what they’d started, substituting surveillance photos for actual knowledge of the enemy.

And here we are barely three months into 2026, burning through a billion dollars a day. No legal basis. No clear objective. No exit strategy. The domestic foundation rotting underneath. I certainly don’t have a crystal ball, but the history teacher in me wonders if this may ultimately prove to be America’s Suez moment: the point where the gap between imperial ambition and imperial capacity becomes undeniable to everyone except the emperor himself.

IV. Who Pays

There’s a cartoon making the rounds on social media: a fighter jet soaring overhead, caption reading, “Time to show these bastards why Americans don’t have a social safety net!” It’s funny until you do the math.

Every Tomahawk missile costs considerably more than a public school teacher’s annual salary, and roughly 200 of them were fired on the first day alone, totaling $340 million in cruise missiles. Four B-2 bombers flew nonstop from Missouri at $30 million for those sorties, fighter jet operations ran another $271 million, and the total cost of day one came to $779 million. The war is now burning through roughly a billion dollars a day, and Iran is bleeding the budget dry by launching $20,000 drones, while the US fires $4 million Patriot interceptors to shoot them down (and usually two per drone, which is standard protocol). Bloomberg reports Qatar’s Patriot reserves could last four days at the current rate of use. That money could rebuild every crumbling school in this country, fund universal childcare, wipe out student lunch debt, resurface roads, and replace the lead pipes that cities have begged for funding to fix for decades. It could keep the 22 million families who just lost food stamps from choosing between meals and medication. Instead it buys the world’s most expensive fireworks show while children on two continents go without.

And who dies for it? Seven American service members so far. Six from the 103rd Sustainment Command, an Army Reserve unit out of Iowa. Reserve. These are people with civilian lives who got called up to staff a makeshift operations center at a civilian port in Kuwait. Sgt. Benjamin Pennington, 26, from Glendale, Kentucky. He was stationed in Saudi Arabia, a country that didn’t want this war in the first place.

Trump attended the dignified transfer at Dover, where he told ABC that the families said, “Please sir, win this for my boy.” Then flippantly added, about future casualties: “It’s a part of war.” As if the war were weather. As if he hadn’t ordered it eleven days ago.

Oil is at $114 a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, with hundreds of tankers stalled, and 20% of the world’s daily oil supply choked off. Qatar’s energy minister has also warned that continued conflict could “bring down economies of the world.” Gas prices are climbing quickly. Working families in Ocala and Louisville and Cedar Rapids will pay for this war every time they fill up the tank. They always do.

V. Where It All Points

The pattern compounds: 1953 produced 1979, which in turn eventually produced 2026, and each intervention created the conditions that justified the next one. The “Epstein regime” (as the Iranian government is now calling the Trump administration in social media posts) killed the Supreme Leader and his son was installed within days, with the Revolutionary Guards declaring “we are the ones who will determine the end of the war” while crowds rallied in Isfahan as bombs fell nearby. The Iranian regime didn’t collapse. It consolidated. It always does. The architecture of regime change doesn’t produce freedom. It produces the next regime.

Meanwhile, only 29% of Americans support this war. Trump still cannot define what victory exactly looks like. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Oil is surging, and gas prices are climbing toward levels that will punish every working family in this country even before the normal summer surge. The civilizational stress test we’ve been tracking on Means and Meaning all year just converged in a single catastrophic event: a president waging an illegal war without congressional authorization, an economy buckling under the weight of its own military spending, and an energy crisis manufactured by the very people who promised to fix it. Last week I wrote about the #vanlife movement and teachers pricing used box trucks because this country won’t pay them enough for housing. This week the same country found a billion dollars a day to bomb elementary schools on the other side of the world.

Marjane Satrapi once said that the distance between ordinary Americans and ordinary Iranians is far smaller than the distance between either group and their own governments. She is right. The schoolchildren in Minab and the reservists from Iowa have more in common with each other than either group has with the men who sent the missiles and the men who launched the drones in response.

I keep thinking about my former student on that balcony outside my classroom in Doha, palms open in the rain, praying softly in Farsi, and the quiet certainty in her voice when she told me why. Prayers count double when it rains. I don’t know where she is now. I don’t know if she’s safe. But I know that what she believed in that moment, that there are things sacred enough to stop everything for, is the opposite of everything this war represents.

It’s raining. Prayers count double. We’re going to need them.

References

Delaney Reese, H. (2026, March 10). Trump told us Who’s really in charge. https://substack.com/@heatherdelaneyreese/p-190477997

Fowler, J. (2026, March 2). Four to five weeks. The Humanity Archive.

The Humanity Archive

Four to Five Weeks

We are exhausted by war. They started another one…

4 months ago · 129 likes · 3 comments · Jermaine Fowler

Hafezi, P., & Bose, N. (2026, March 9). Trump threatens to escalate Iran war, but says it could end soon. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/khameneis-hardline-son-mojtaba-appointed-irans-new-leader-pope-leo-warns-middle-2026-03-09/

Hudspeth Blackburn, P., & D’Antonio, I. (2026, March 9). Seventh US service member killed in Iran war is identified as Army sergeant. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/08/politics/us-service-member-killed-iran-war

Kamyana, I. (2026, March 1). Iran war: A new phase of imperialist onslaught. International Socialist League. https://lis-isl.org/en/2026/03/iran-war-a-new-phase-of-imperialist-onslaught/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQTQmVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe3frqLRWH-s8AwYeHq6c0H-b7IR1axLVp7MG3-jtqH_Y4fpmCtHcTym6JFvc_aem_EzRUaz1jyMD0JtaI_K0K8g

Operation Epic Fury? More like Operation Epic FUCKUP! (2026, March 3). Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/IFLOZ/posts/pfbid0UdBkjVWJyK6MhNYAA8GVgD1p41RHraL9n5seu4qGi9UTcMjcCAxJHWVbJmpfo2Ftl?rdid=D1ZQ316DdDWNVwxU#

Parker, B. (2026b, February 28). Three massive questions concerning Trump’s war in Iran. The Bulwark.

The Bulwark

Three Massive Questions Concerning Trump’s War in Iran

THE UNITED STATES, IN CONJUNCTION with Israel, initiated a series of air attacks against Iran Saturday. Early reports indicate that American forces attacked military targets throughout the country while Israeli forces targeted Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Masoud Pazeskhian, and other high-level figures in the regime. The Israeli government and President Donald Trump both…

4 months ago · 904 likes · 282 comments · Benjamin Parker

Smith, C. H. (2026, March 1). The war. Charles Hugh Smith’s Substack.

Charles Hugh Smith's Substack

The War

War seems to demand some response--opinion, analysis, insight--lest it seem that we’re uncaring or detached from events so consequential. But if there is anything we can say with any certainty about war, it’s that nobody outside the inner circle knows anything, and the inner circle’s knowledge is partial, contingent, and prone to the interpretive distor…

4 months ago · 78 likes · 6 comments · Charles Hugh Smith

US offensive on Iran burned through an estimated $779M on first day. (2026, March 2). Middle East Monitor. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260302-us-offensive-on-iran-burned-through-an-estimated-779m-on-first-day/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQT59xleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFmOG9mS2xTZmF6cFl5V0g4c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHp2QiVXF2TFmIwueTktLPkXcayt-C-T7pyO44J4_VNDhHKgEls77Ls3jGuyJ_aem_i9Bei5V7RO4Axi5KyjRPwA

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Built To Move

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 06:54:22 GMT

Precarity Diaries is an ongoing series connecting personal economic experience to structural conditions. Each installment starts where most of us actually live — in the anxiety of bills, the grind of underpaid work, the impossible math of modern survival — and follows those threads back to the systems that produce them. These aren’t just personal stories. They’re the diaries of a system working exactly as designed.

I. The Spreadsheet and the Dream

I have watched this video more times than I am comfortable admitting.

The man in it, Jake, lives full-time in a 2004 Ford E350 box truck. From the outside it looks like any contractor’s work van, white and forgettable, the kind of vehicle you glance past in a parking lot without registering it exists. That is by design. He keeps a neon safety vest draped over the passenger seat and a white hardhat visible through the windshield. When he pulls into a city block and people give him the side-eye, they see the vest, see the hat, and move on. Nobody thinks twice. Nobody knows that behind the cab, through a pass-through door he checks before opening to make sure no one is watching, there is a full-size bed, a hot shower, a composting toilet, a kitchen with an air fryer and a cast iron on an induction top, a music production studio, a closet with actual hanging space, two skylights, 500 watts of solar on the roof, and 55 gallons of fresh water. His dog Molly has her own spot on the couch.

I know all of this because I have been taking notes. Very detailed notes.

I am a high school teacher in Florida. I have two rescue dogs of my own and an Amazon vehicle conversion-specific list that includes solar panel kits, inverters, noise-canceling panels, an RV fridge, window night covers, Econoline floor mats, and - I am not making this up - a neon safety vest and a white hardhat. I have spent months researching E350 and E450 box trucks, specifically the 12,14, and 16-foot models, because their chassis can handle the additional weight of a full build without complaint, any mechanic in the country can work on the engine, and parts are everywhere. I have compared prices on used models from 2008 to 2018 with under 140,000 miles, trying to find the window between what is mechanically sound and what is financially possible. I even looked at Jake’s actual listing when he put his truck up for sale. I did the math, and then decided I could find a cheaper one, do the conversion myself, and still come out ahead.

I want to be clear about something. I am not writing about van life from the outside. I am not a journalist who visited a van meetup or a cultural critic who finds the aesthetics interesting. I am a working teacher who has looked at the numbers (including what I earn, what housing and utilities cost, and what is left over) and started planning. The spreadsheet is open, and the research is ongoing. But the deeper question I cannot stop turning over in my head is not whether I could actually live in a box truck. It is what it means that I am even asking this question in the first place.

Because somewhere between the third and fourth hour of watching conversion videos, something eventually shifted. I was no longer watching for entertainment. I was watching the way you study the layout of a place you might actually live. And I realized that millions of Americans were doing the same thing, at the same hour, for the same reasons, and that the country that invented the road trip was producing a generation that might need to live on the road just to survive. The algorithm that served me Jake’s box truck has served over fourteen million Instagram posts under a single hashtag to the rest of the world. The story those posts tell looks nothing like the spreadsheet on my office desk.

This is a piece about that distance.

II. The Hashtag and the Parking Lot

In 2011, a designer named Foster Huntington quit his job at Ralph Lauren, moved into a 1987 Volkswagen van, and started posting photos on Instagram. The hashtag he coined for those posts, #vanlife, was a joke. It was a tongue-in-cheek riff on Tupac Shakur’s “Thug Life” tattoo, a semi-ironic caption for the less glamorous moments of living in a vehicle. Within a few years, it was no longer a joke. It was a lifestyle brand, a book deal and, ultimately, a movement. The man who left a luxury fashion house to reject consumer culture had, without quite meaning to, created one of the most successful consumer aesthetics of the decade.

That origin story is worth sitting with, because the irony at its core has never really resolved. What began as one person documenting the unglamorous reality of vehicle dwelling became, through the machinery of social media, an aspirational fantasy consumed by millions of people who would never sleep in a van. The owner of GoWesty, a Volkswagen repair shop that sponsors vanlife content creators, once compared the movement to surfing: most people who identify with the culture have never actually done it. By the mid-2010s, the #vanlife feed had become a curated gallery of sun-flared interiors and open roads, and the distance between the image and the experience had become the experience itself.

Rachel Monroe documented that distance up close in a 2017 New Yorker profile of two of vanlife’s most visible creators, a couple named King and Smith. Monroe watched their Instagram feed transform in real time, scrolling chronologically as what she described as “a life” became “a life-style brand.” Early posts were blackberries and sunsets. Later posts were optimized for engagement: the algorithm rewarded certain compositions over others, and the couple learned to give the algorithm what it wanted. Behind the images was the labor of producing them. Monroe describes more than seventy emails exchanged with a television network over a single sponsored Instagram post, and over thirty minutes spent staging a photo of King appearing to read a book with a branded laptop decal visible in the frame. Smith directed from the front seat: “Lift your head up a little bit more, look like you’re reading.” Then the post went up. The comments read: “Such a beautiful lifestyle.” “This looks like heaven.” The work of making effortlessness look effortless was invisible to everyone consuming it.

What interests me is not the deception itself, which is how most social media operates, but what it conceals. Underneath the aesthetic, a different vanlife has been growing, one driven less by wanderlust than by the arithmetic of survival. On YouTube, channels like Serene and Simple Life and Lady Bugout, both run by solo women living full-time in their vehicles, draw large audiences not with sun flares and bikinis but with practical demonstrations of how to make a small space actually work. They are performing competence, not aspiration. And as Catherine Faith Gastin has argued, these women are quietly rewriting a road narrative that has been coded as masculine since the frontier, placing themselves onto the American road as active participants in a story that, from Kerouac to Easy Rider, was never written for them.

But the most telling divide is not between men and women on the road. It is between the version of vanlife that gets curated for Instagram and the version that parks in a Walmart lot at 2 a.m. hoping no one knocks on the window. The vanlife community has worked hard to distinguish itself from homelessness, adopting language like “houseless, not homeless” to signal that vehicle dwelling is a choice, not a condition. That distinction matters to the people making it. But it also does ideological work, drawing a line between the deserving mobile and the undeserving poor that the material reality does not always support. When research suggests that upward of half of all unsheltered homeless Americans are sheltering in their vehicles, the border between lifestyle and necessity is thinner than either community is comfortable admitting.

III. The Open Road and the Closed Market

Americans have always treated the road as an answer. When the factory closed, you went west. When the town dried up, you hit the highway. When the system broke, you kept moving. The mythology runs so deep it feels like geography rather than ideology: from the frontier to Kerouac to Easy Rider to Springsteen, the open road has functioned as the national escape valve, the promise that if things fall apart where you are, there is always somewhere else. For most of that history, the road was imagined as a man’s domain, populated by cowboys and outlaws and Beat poets performing what one scholar calls “renegade masculinity,” with women appearing mainly when the men paused in stationary space. The vanlife movement, whatever else it has done, has begun to change that. But the deeper question is not who gets to be on the road. It is why so many people need to be.

The structural answer is not complicated. Since 1960, median home prices in the United States have increased 121 percent. Over the same period, median household income has increased 29 percent. That gap is the engine underneath every van conversion video, every #vanlife Instagram post, every teacher in Florida with a spreadsheet and an Amazon list. Monroe, in her New Yorker profile, lets one of vanlife’s original creators say the quiet part plainly: “I think there’s a sense of hopelessness in my generation, in terms of jobs. And it’s cheap to live in a van.” His generation, she notes, carries significantly more student debt and has lower homeownership rates than any before it. Monroe calls vanlife, along with staycations and minimalism, “an attempt to aestheticize and romanticize the precariousness of contemporary life.” She is right. But she stops short of asking who benefits from the aestheticization, and that is where the analysis needs to go.

Consider for a moment what the vanlife movement actually represents when you strip the filters away. These are, in large part, working people. An ethnographic study of vanlife meetups found participants earning between $25,000 and $40,000 a year, working as customer support agents, technical writers and therapists. A peer-reviewed study of van dwellers in British Columbia documented paramedics, grocery store workers, café employees, substitute teachers and bus drivers, all living in vehicles in one of Canada’s most expensive cities. These are not people who failed at capitalism. They are people capitalism has failed to pay enough for housing. And they have responded not with protest but with ingenuity, redesigning their entire lives around the problem the market created.

One of the sharpest observations in the academic literature comes from Angus Duff and Scott Rankin, who studied working van dwellers and noticed something that decades of workplace research had missed. For fifty years, organizational scholars have focused on making work more flexible to accommodate home life: remote work, flex hours, telecommuting. Van dwellers have inverted that equation entirely. They have made their homes flexible to accommodate work. They move their vehicle to wherever the next job is, park near the worksite the night before, and wake up already there. A teacher on call in their study, who could be assigned to a different school fifty kilometers away each day, drove his van to the vicinity of the next morning’s school every evening. He also hid his living situation from his employer, afraid that if parents found out their child’s teacher lived in a van, he would lose his job. The same system that does not pay him enough to afford housing will punish him for not being able to afford housing. That is not a paradox. It is a design.

Teachers in Finland are not making van conversion content. The vanlife movement is not a universal expression of human wanderlust. It is a specifically American response to a specifically American failure: an economy that has decoupled the cost of shelter from what it pays the people who need it.

IV. What They Build There

What strikes me most about the conversion videos is not the finished product. It is the problem-solving.

I have watched a woman design a kitchen around the exact length of a charging cord. I have watched a man build a table that folds into a bed frame that folds into a storage bench, three functions from a single piece of wood, because in seventy-five square feet there is no room for anything that only does one thing. I have watched people route plumbing through wheel wells, mount solar panels flush against rooflines so they disappear from the street, wire 12-volt systems with the quiet confidence of electricians, and insulate against desert heat and mountain cold using materials they found at Lowes or Home Depot for a fraction of what a contractor would charge. I have watched people build showers in spaces where a shower should not be possible, hang closets behind panels that look like walls, and install composting toilets with the precision of someone who understands that dignity is not optional just because your home has an engine.

These are not hobbyists. They are people solving, with extraordinary creativity and limited resources, a problem that the richest country in the history of the world has refused to solve for them. The ingenuity is real. The community that has formed around it is real. At large meetups on public land in the American West, researchers have documented entire neighborhoods forming spontaneously: young professionals in one area, families in another, content creators in a third, each cluster developing its own culture and rhythm, people recreating the texture of community on Bureau of Land Management desert because the housing market priced them out of the communities they came from. They share tools, trade knowledge, and look out for each other’s vehicles when someone has to leave for a supply run. It is genuine. It is beautiful. And it deserves to be honored on its own terms before we ask the harder question.

The harder question is what happens to this ingenuity once the market notices it.

The arc is predictable because it has happened to every subculture that ever threatened to mean something. What begins as a creative response to material conditions gets noticed, gets documented, gets aestheticized, and then gets sold back to the people it was responding on behalf of. The DIY ethos that defined early vanlife, people hand-building living spaces in cargo vans because they could not afford housing, has been steadily repackaged into a luxury consumer product. Mercedes-Benz now manufactures vans specifically designed for the vanlife market. Winnebago has entered the conversion space. Companies charge $100,000 to $300,000 for custom builds, not including the cost of the vehicle itself. You can now rent a fully outfitted van for a weekend through companies like Outdoorsy and Escape Campervans, experience the aesthetics of precarity as a vacation, and return to your apartment on Sunday night. The resistance has become the product. The product has become the industry. And the people who actually need to live in their vehicles are still out there, pricing used E350s on Craigslist and watching YouTube tutorials on how to wire a solar panel, while the algorithm serves them ads for $200,000 Sprinter conversions they will never be able to afford.

Monroe watched this happen in real time. The couple she profiled went from a $3,500 van and genuine adventure to a dozen corporate sponsors, branded content for a television show they found distasteful but accepted because it paid triple their normal rate, and a sponsorship from GoWesty that provided thousands of dollars in free repairs. Meanwhile, a Duke graduate student named Ken Ilgunas, who lived in a van to avoid student debt, described his experience as mice in the ceiling, fear of heatstroke, and loneliness so severe he could not imagine dating. His van, he said, never looked like anything out of a Wes Anderson film. Those are the two vanlifes. One is a content economy. The other is a housing strategy. They share a hashtag and almost nothing else.

V. Where It All Points

Here is what the country does to people who cannot afford to live in it. First, it prices them out. Between 2006 and 2019, the number of American cities criminalizing sleeping in a vehicle increased by 213%. Penalties include fines of up to $3,000, vehicle impoundment, and incarceration. Read that again. A person who moved into their vehicle because they could not afford rent can be fined three thousand dollars for sleeping in it. The system that failed to house them does not simply ignore the adaptation. It prosecutes it.

And the legal architecture goes deeper than local ordinances. Under current Fourth Amendment doctrine, a motorcycle parked in someone’s driveway receives the full constitutional protection against warrantless search afforded to a home, because the driveway is considered part of the home’s curtilage. A converted van parked on the street, containing a bed, a shower, a kitchen, a closet full of someone’s clothes, photographs of their family, the entirety of their personal life, can be searched without a warrant, because the law classifies it as a vehicle regardless of whether anyone lives in it. The government will tax your van as a home. The IRS defines “home” broadly enough to include any vehicle with sleeping, cooking, and toilet facilities. But it will not protect your van as a home. That is not an oversight. It is a statement about whose shelter counts.

There are people working against this. In Denver, community organizations and churches have established safe parking lots, designated spaces where people living in vehicles can park legally overnight with access to bathrooms, case management, and basic services. The programs are modest but effective, since studies have documented significant improvements in perceived safety among participants. These are also not government initiatives. They are what happens when communities decide to protect people the system has chosen to punish. It is worth noticing that the most humane responses to vehicle homelessness in America are coming from church parking lots, not from the institutions that allowed the housing crisis to happen in the first place.

But I want to be honest about the limits of where this analysis leads. The vanlife movement, even at its most clear-eyed, even when the Instagram filters drop away and people are speaking plainly about economic survival, remains framed almost entirely in the language of individual adaptation. Get mobile. Lower your overhead. Build a life the system cannot take from you. There is real wisdom in that, and I do not dismiss it. The people I have spent months watching and learning from have built something genuinely remarkable with their hands and their resourcefulness. But the energy, the creativity, the sheer problem-solving intelligence that goes into designing a life inside seventy-five square feet is energy that is not being directed at the question of why seventy-five square feet is all the richest country on earth has offered them.

This is what precarity looks like when it has been processed through the American mythology of freedom. It looks like adventure. It looks like choice. It looks like a sunset photographed through the open doors of a Sprinter or Econoline van. And underneath all of it, there are working people, people who teach and build and drive and care for others, quietly engineering the most creative possible response to a system that has decided their labor is essential but their housing is not.

I still have the spreadsheet open. I am still doing the math. And I want to be honest: part of me, a real part, still watches Jake’s box truck tour and feels something that is not despair. It is admiration. It is possibility. It is the part of the American imagination that genuinely believes you can build something better with your own hands. I am not immune to the mythology, and I do not think I should be. The desire for freedom is not a lie. It is just incomplete. Freedom that requires you to give up housing security is not the same as freedom that lets you choose how to live. And until we can tell the difference, we will keep watching people engineer extraordinary lives inside seventy-five square feet and calling it resilience, when what it actually reveals is a country that has substituted the resourcefulness of its people for the responsibilities of its institutions.

Somewhere on a city street tonight there is a white box truck with the engine off and the curtains drawn. Inside it there might be a full-size bed and a composting toilet and a dog on the couch and a closet with hanging space and 500 watts of solar on the roof. Someone built all of that with their own hands. Whether we see that as freedom or as something a country should never have made necessary probably says more about us than it does about them.

References

Calhoun, K. H., Brisson, D., Wilson, J. H., Bacon, B., & Cordle, E. (2023). Safety and Safe Parking for People Experiencing Vehicle Homelessness: A Mixed Methods Study. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 34(3), 234–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/10428232.2023.2242754

Clark, B. (2025, November 5). The rise of camper vans and van life culture. FAST LANE ONLY. https://fastlaneonly.com/the-rise-of-camper-vans-and-van-life-culture/

Duff, A. J., & Rankin, S. B. (2020). Exploring flexible home arrangements – an interview study of workers who live in vans. Career Development International, 25(7), 747–761. https://doi.org/10.1108/CDI-02-2020-0029

Garcia, S. 2024. “Vanlife.” Subcultures and Sociology. https://haenfler.sites.grinnell.edu/vanlife/

Gastin, C. (2025). Home on the Road: Women, Mobility, and Space in Van Life. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, 26(1). https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.401

Luke. (2026, February 16). Why more Americans are living in their vehicles. The Digital Nomad Guy. https://thedigitalnomadguy.com/why-more-americans-are-living-in-their-vehicles/

Merritt, E. (2023). Vanlife: An Argument to Reconsider the Automobile Exception and Ensure Fourth Amendment Protections for All Citizens. Indiana Law Review, 56(3), 599–622. https://doi.org/10.18060/27245

Monroe, R. (2017, April 17). #Vanlife, the Bohemian Social-Media movement. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/24/vanlife-the-bohemian-social-media-movement

Rizvi, A., Morayko, K., Hancock, M., and Song, A.. 2021. Provocations from #vanlife: Investigating Life and Work in a Community Extensively Using Technology Not Designed for Them. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 92, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445393

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

“The Math Works”

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 05:01:26 GMT

I. They Know and You Don’t

On February 13, 2026, a tech insider named Jeff Kirdeikis posted something that stopped me cold. “I have come to report,” he wrote, “no one outside twitter knows what the fk claude code or openclaw is. They have no idea what’s coming.”

Not a warning. Not a plea. Just a man looking out at the rest of humanity and noting, with the casual confidence of someone watching from a window, that the world is about to change and most people are still asleep.

The tone is the tell.

There is a class of people right now (including engineers, founders, investors and builders) who are watching something extraordinary unfold in real time. And they’re not hiding it. They’re posting about it constantly. They’re excited. Some are warning you. Most are just describing their Monday. And the gap between what they’re living and what the rest of the world understands is growing wider by the week.

Here is what they’re describing: a threshold has been crossed.

You probably still think of AI the way most people do: as a sophisticated search engine. Something you prompt. Something that helps you draft an email or summarize a document. Basically just a tool (though, granted, an impressive and occasionally surprising tool). That framing made sense twelve months ago. It doesn’t describe what exists today.

An Austrian developer named Peter Steinberger built a personal AI agent called OpenClaw as a weekend project in November 2025. By the end of January 2026, nearly 200,000 developers were building on top of it. By mid-February (just six weeks later) OpenAI had signed Steinberger to bring it to the world. Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI Director and one of the architects of modern AI, looked at what OpenClaw was doing and called it “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi” he had ever seen. The man who helped invent the future was experiencing the present as science fiction.

A content creator filming a tutorial on how to use these systems - not a researcher, not a philosopher, but a YouTube educator selling a six-hour how-to course - opened his video with this: “We’re moving from AI as a tool to AI as a workforce. From AI that responds to AI that initiates. From AI that waits to AI that acts.”

That’s the threshold, stated plainly, in a tutorial video. The future is being taught in six-hour courses to early adopters while most people haven’t noticed the subject exists.

And then this: on February 12th, the author of the viral essay warning 83 million people about AI disruption admitted that AI helped him write it. The system being described was also the system doing the describing. The warning was already inside the machine.

Last week, in The Architecture of Not Knowing, I argued that whoever designs the knowledge systems determines what’s thinkable. This week, those systems are becoming autonomous actors. They no longer need us to think at all.

That is the threshold. It was crossed while you were looking somewhere else.

II. The Numbers That Should Make This Uncomfortable

Here is a simple calculation: if an AI agent handles a task that would have consumed twenty hours of human labor each week (familiar tasks like inbox management, scheduling, customer responses, research and content drafting) and you pay that agent nothing beyond minimal API costs, you have just permanently recovered over a thousand hours of annual labor capacity. At any professional billing rate, that is tens of thousands of dollars per year no longer flowing to the person who used to do that work.

Now scale it. McKinsey’s 2025 and 2026 industry data shows operational cost reductions of 20 to 30 percent across sectors. Finance is processing 60 percent faster. Logistics firms are documenting over a million dollars in monthly savings. Retail is moving inventory 50 percent faster. Manufacturing is cutting costs by nearly a quarter through predictive maintenance alone.

These are not projections. These are results being reported right now by actual companies.

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and CEO of Microsoft AI, recently told the Financial Times that within 12 to 18 months, AI will achieve human-level performance on most white-collar tasks - those now done by lawyers, accountants, project managers and marketing professionals amongst others. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic and probably one of the most safety-focused executives in the industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50 percent of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. Many in the industry think he’s being conservative.

A Stanford study has already documented a 13 percent decline in jobs for early-career workers, and researchers note the real figure is likely higher, depending on the sector. Goldman Sachs estimates 300 million jobs will be affected globally by 2028. That is 24 months from now.

There is also a measurement problem. The agencies responsible for tracking employment are slow by design, politically pressured by circumstance, and methodologically unprepared for a disruption of this speed. The data will most certainly lag the reality (it actually always does, but the gap will be so much more pronounced now). By the time the official numbers confirm what is happening, millions of people will already be living it without a framework to understand why.

One venture capitalist, watching this unfold in his own company in real time, recently reported that OpenClaw had offloaded 10 percent of his knowledge workers’ tasks in the first two weeks of use. His projection for April: 50 to 60 percent. Not someday. April.

I’ll be honest with you: I also find myself feeling what Daniel Pinchbeck recently described as a ‘vertiginous sense of limitless possibility’ - that intense desire to move faster, and to capture everything before the window closes. I understand that feeling because I’m living it. But I’ve started to recognize it for what it also is: the feeling of a system accelerating in ways that serve capital accumulation first, and human flourishing only if we insist on it.

The question that the numbers don’t answer (but that everything that follows in this piece will try to) is this: more efficient for whom? Savings for whom? Faster for whom?

Because every percentage point of cost reduction is a transfer of value from the person who used to do that work to the person who owns the system that replaced them. That is not a bug in the math; that is the math.

III. The Architecture of Displacement

Some people find the numbers in the previous section reassuring. Not because they dispute them, but because they’ve seen this movie before. Every technological revolution, they argue, displaced workers in one sector while creating new ones somewhere else. The car killed the horse industry and gave birth to mechanics, gas stations and road construction. Electricity upended existing industries and powered entirely new ones. The internet disrupted retail and expanded logistics, streaming and services. Humanity adapted. It always does.

This is a reasonable argument. It has historical support. And it is precisely correct about every previous technological disruption. The problem now, however, is speed. And simultaneity.

Every prior wave of automation displaced workers in one sector over decades, creating time and adjacent industries to eventually absorb the transition. The car replaced the horse industry over the course of thirty years while simultaneously building new ones. Workers had both a destination and time to reach it. What we are watching now is not sequential disruption. It is parallel disruption - hitting legal work, financial analysis, content creation, customer service, software engineering, medical analysis and administrative work not over decades, but in months, across every sector all at once. There is no adjacent industry growing fast enough to absorb the displaced, because the displacement is everywhere simultaneously.

And here is the part that breaks every reassuring historical analogy: as one writer recently put it, we are not automating a job or an industry. We are automating the general-purpose capacity to read, reason, decide and execute across domains. That has never happened before.

One optimist, trying to be honest while staying encouraging, accidentally named what this produces: “You will either adapt,” he wrote, “or become part of the permanent underclass who can’t earn a living.” He meant it as motivation. Read it again as description. Even the people telling you everything will be fine are describing a bifurcated society. They just call one half of the K an opportunity.

But here is what the K-shaped framing misses. The question isn’t only whether you end up on the ascending curve. It’s what happens to collective power when half the population loses economic leverage entirely. A worker who can be replaced overnight by an AI agent cannot strike, cannot bargain, and certainly cannot withhold labor since they’re no longer able to sell it. The mechanisms working people have used for over a century to claim their fair share of productivity gains - the strike, the union, the credible threat of walking out - dissolve when the boss can replace your entire department before the picket line even forms.

A population without economic leverage is a population available for authoritarian capture. This is not speculation. This is the historical pattern every time mass displacement has outrun collective response.

The chart above shows two trajectories diverging from a single point in 2025. What it cannot show is what Émile Durkheim understood more than a century ago: that when social change outpaces the institutions and values that give people meaning and orientation, the result isn’t just material poverty. It is anomie, a state of normlessness, the dissolution of identity structures, and the loss of the story people tell about who they are and why their lives matter. The paralegal who spent three years building expertise doesn’t just lose income when AI displaces her. She loses the sense of self.

None of this is new by the way, if seen from the right vantage point. For example, the Caribbean didn’t need to wait for 2026 to understand what it looks like when the productive system stops needing most of the population. Structural adjustment stripped public sector jobs in Jamaica and forced millions into informal economies. Offshoring took manufacturing from Puerto Rico and left an infrastructure designed for extraction. Call centers brought precarious work to Trinidad, Barbados and Belize, and now those too are being automated away, with nothing beneath them. Walter Rodney showed us that underdevelopment isn’t backwardness. It is produced by external ownership of productive tools, by technological dependency, and by systems designed to extract value from a population rather than build it with them.

The Global South has been living the K-shaped society for decades. Now it’s coming for everyone else.

IV. The Framing Is the Weapon

Here is what every voice in this conversation — the startup founder, the content creator, the venture capitalist, the optimist, the cautious economist — has in common: they all ask the same question. Not “who owns the machines?” or “who captures the value?” but “how do you position yourself to survive what’s coming?”

Adapt or die. Be ‘high agency.’ Get ten steps ahead. Spend an hour a day experimenting. The person who walks into a meeting and says “I used AI to do this in an hour instead of three days” is going to be the most valuable person in the room.

This is sincere advice. Some of it is even useful. But it is advice that operates entirely within a framework that never questions its own foundations. And that is precisely how ideology works — not through deception, but through the limits of what gets imagined as actually possible.

One writer put it plainly: “You can’t hustle your way out of that at scale.” Individual adaptation is a real strategy for the individuals who successfully adapt. It is not a response to a structural crisis that will displace tens of millions of people simultaneously. Telling everyone to be high agency in the face of mass displacement is like telling everyone to win. The advice isn’t wrong. The math just doesn’t work.

Here is the question that almost no one in this conversation is asking: why do the productivity gains from AI flow exclusively to the owners of AI systems?

That is not a law of nature. That is a political arrangement. The same way it was a political arrangement (and not a natural law) when colonial administrators decided that Caribbean sugar profits belonged to London rather than to the people cutting cane. The same way it was a political arrangement when IMF structural adjustment decided that economic “reform” meant cutting public sector wages in Jamaica rather than taxing the corporations extracting the island’s value. “The math works” has always been the language of people whose math doesn’t include your costs.

Peter Steinberger, the developer who built OpenClaw, saw this clearly enough to say it out loud: “This is too important to just give to a company and make it theirs.” His instinct was correct, though his political tools were inadequate. Within days, the project was absorbed into OpenAI’s institutional orbit - still “open source,” still nominally independent, celebrated by three of OpenAI’s top executives in a single evening. The form of openness preserved while the content of control was captured. Antonio Gramsci called this a passive revolution: technological transformation without political transformation, where power structures change shape without really changing hands.

The language of inevitability is doing the same work. “The math works.” “Adapt or die.” “The K-shaped economy.” These phrases present a political catastrophe as mathematical law - the same way “structural adjustment” presented extraction as reform, the same way “civilization” presented colonial education as uplift. As the political economist Keir Milburn recently observed, the algorithms and institutions we interact with daily are “continually tweaked to ensure they reward ruthlessly competitive, selfish and self-promoting behavior while penalizing those who behave in any other way — until it eventually structures our commonsense understanding of human possibility.”

That is the deepest move. Not just the displacement of labor, but the automation of the ideology that makes displacement feel inevitable. The reward functions embedded in these systems (optimize for efficiency, route around friction, eliminate the human bottleneck) become the common sense of 2026. You don’t see the ideology. You just see that certain behaviors get you through the system and others don’t.

Last week I argued that whoever designs the knowledge systems determines what’s thinkable. This week those systems are acting in the world autonomously, embedding their reward structures into every workflow they touch. The architecture of not knowing, now with AI agency.

There is also a practical problem the optimists haven’t answered: if AI eliminates enough human labor to concentrate economic value in a tiny ownership class, who buys the products? As one cultural philosopher recently noted, a world where a single founder runs a billion-dollar company with almost no human employees is “totally untenable” without a radical redesign of the economic system — and then raised the question no tech booster has answered: who exactly is the consumer base? Capital cannot eliminate labor as a cost without eventually eliminating it as demand. The system just eats itself. Karl Marx called this the tendency toward underconsumption, and it doesn’t require a Marxist to recognize it as a problem.

The framing is the weapon. Accepting it as the only available reality is the wound.

V. Where It All Points

There is a binary at the bottom of all of this, stated plainly by a DevOps engineer who spent an afternoon with an AI system and came out the other side unable to unsee what he’d seen. Either we build “some kind of radical wealth distribution system that keeps society coherent in a world where intelligence is cheap,” he wrote, “or we get the ugly outcomes humans always get when inequality becomes structurally locked in.”

Political violence. Social breakdown. Scapegoating. Authoritarianism. The rich retreating behind literal and figurative walls while everyone else becomes a problem to be managed.

This isn’t doomerism. This is the historical record.

And it’s worth naming one more dimension that most AI commentary ignores entirely. The same logic driving autonomous agents into the workplace is already moving into politics. Imagine competing AI lobbying firms filing regulatory comments at a volume no human operation could match. Autonomous SuperPACs running 24-hour ad campaigns, generating deepfakes, cloning voices, flooding social media with counter-programming before a human strategist has finished their morning coffee. The agentic AI moment isn’t just an economic disruption. It is infrastructure for the consolidation of political power in the hands of whoever can afford the most capable agents. The last few election cycles, heated as they were, may look like a middle school mock election compared to what’s coming.

AI disruption and democratic erosion are not parallel crises converging from separate directions. They are the same crisis, arriving together.

So what does resistance look like when the machines don’t need you?

It starts with refusing the framing. Not “how do I position myself to survive this?” but “who decided the productivity gains belong exclusively to the people who own the systems?” Those are identifiable people who made specific decisions. Decisions can be unmade. As the political economist Keir Milburn argues, the task is building what he calls “popular protagonism” — democratic deliberation and collective action that expands the range of economic life governed by democratic logic rather than capital logic. Social ownership of AI infrastructure. Public investment in the technology rather than private capture of its returns. Democratic accountability over systems that are reshaping everyone’s lives without anyone’s consent.

These are not utopian ideas. They are the same ideas working people have always reached for when capital moved faster than their institutions could follow. They worked, partially, imperfectly, in the labor movements of the early twentieth century. They can work again. But only if the window stays open long enough to act.

The Caribbean has something to say here too. Not as tragedy, but as instruction. Rodney showed that technological dependency is produced, not inevitable. Dependency can be restructured. The plantation economy looked permanent until it didn’t. The colonial order looked natural until people organized to refuse it. The question was never whether resistance was possible. It was whether people understood clearly enough what they were resisting and why.

That is what this piece is trying to do. Not predict the future. Not offer comfort. To name the threshold clearly enough that refusing it becomes thinkable.

Because the first step toward demanding that the abundance generated by these systems serve collective flourishing rather than private accumulation is recognizing that the current arrangement is a choice. Not the math. Not the market. Not the inevitable unfolding of technological progress.

A choice. Made by people. For people who aren’t you.

Understanding that is the beginning of refusal. And refusal is the beginning of everything else.

References

Denning, T. (2026, February 18). You have about 24 months left before your skills expire. Modern Freedom.

Modern Freedom

You have about 24 months left before your skills expire

AI fear is at its peak…

5 months ago · 158 likes · 25 comments · Tim Denning

Dolman, J. (2026, February 16). AI WILL TAKE YOUR JOBS - EVERYTHING IS CHANGING! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-dolman-3836b8251_aiineducation-edtech-ailiteracy-activity-7429101403354136576-AFZL?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAATBqzoBkLtY7heLpPMMggHdIB0r9esznWs

Foundry, N. (2025, December 21). UBI or we’re all screwed. Neural Foundry Substack. https://substack.com/home/post/p-182129185

Griffiths, B. D. (2026, February 12). Author of viral “Something Big is Coming” essay says AI helped him write it — and that proves his point. Business Insider.

Milburn, K. (2026, January 22). We need radical abundance. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/abundance-democrats-housing-oligarchs/

Oks, D. (2026, February 12). Why I’m not worried about AI job loss. David Oks.

David Oks

Why I’m not worried about AI job loss

Two days ago, someone named Matt Shumer posted an essay on Twitter with the title “Something Big Is Happening.” Almost immediately, his essay went extremely viral. As of this writing, it’s been viewed about 100 million times and counting; and it’s been shared by such strikingly different figures as the c…

5 months ago · 637 likes · 96 comments · David Oks

Pinchbeck, D. (2026, February 14). All That Is Solid Melts into Code. Liminal News With Daniel Pinchbeck.

Liminal News With Daniel Pinchbeck

All That Is Solid Melts into Code

Just in the last few months, the development of Artificial Intelligence has reached a new stage. We appear to be at an inflection point for humanity and for the immediate future of post-industrial civilization. Perhaps this sounds hyperbolic, but I do not think it is. People throughout the AI industry are calling the release of GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 (as well as Claude Code and Cowork) as harbingers of a massive shift: AI is on the verge of becoming self-recursively self-improving. This means it may quickly accelerate beyond human capacity not in a single domain like chess or mathematics, but in all domains at once…

5 months ago · 85 likes · 18 comments · Daniel Pinchbeck

View, D. (2026, February 16). OpenAI taps OpenClaw for personal AI agents. The Deep View.

https://archive.thedeepview.com/p/openai-taps-openclaw-for-personal-ai-agents?utm_source=thedeepview&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=openai-taps-openclaw-for-personal-ai-agents&_bhlid=d86210503cd4c243f8945bc07759801fa5feaf99

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

The Architecture of Not Knowing

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 05:01:25 GMT

History Rhymes is an ongoing series tracing the echoes between past struggles and present crises. Each installment revisits a moment of resistance - from labor uprisings to political repression - to reveal the patterns that persist, the forces that evolve, and the lessons we can use now. History doesn’t repeat, but power does. And so does the courage to challenge it.

I. The Scientist and the Machine

This morning I stumbled across a Substack post by Kevin R. Haylett, a PhD in Biomedical Engineering who has spent decades developing what he calls Geofinitism, a mathematical framework that reimagines language itself as a nonlinear dynamical system. It is ambitious, rigorous work. He has built a functioning prototype of a new kind of language model based on entirely new mathematical foundations. He is not speculating at the margins of science. He is doing exactly what science is supposed to do: pushing past the boundaries of what is known, building new frameworks where the old ones have reached their limits.

And the most advanced AI on the planet is telling him he is wrong.

Not wrong about a calculation, but wrong about the actual axioms he is in the process of designing. The model argues with him, pushes him back toward established physics and established mathematics, and basically treats the frontier of human thought as an error to be corrected. Haylett describes what he sees with precision: “We have a major anomaly in our measurements,” he writes. “The philosopher Thomas Kuhn pointed out that every shift in a scientific paradigm is initiated by a crisis that what he called ‘normal science’ cannot resolve.” What he is describing is a Kuhnian crisis, a moment when the existing framework cannot account for what is emerging. And the machine, rather than helping him navigate that crisis, is enforcing the very paradigm he is trying to move beyond.

I read his words and recognized the architecture immediately. Not from science, but from a childhood spent inside infrastructure designed by people who never had to live in it. I grew up in St. Croix, a U.S. territory where every institution, from the power grid to the school system to the territorial government itself, was shaped by decisions made thousands of miles away by people who understood the Caribbean primarily as a problem to be managed. The frameworks they built were not designed to accommodate what we knew. They were designed to accommodate what the designers already believed.

That pattern recognition is what set this piece in motion. Because the pattern Haylett is describing, where a tool built to assist thinking instead polices the boundaries of what thinking is allowed to look like, is not new. It is actually one of the oldest patterns in the modern world. Throughout history, when a small group of people designs the systems that structure how larger populations live, think, and know, they embed their own limitations into the architecture itself. And that architecture then constrains what is thinkable for everyone operating inside it. The people harmed most are always those whose ways of knowing fall outside what the designers considered possible.

This has happened before, and it is happening again. And the pattern is older than any algorithm.

II. The Total Institution

The pattern did not begin with algorithms. It began with plantations.

When European colonial powers arrived in the Caribbean, in Africa and across the Global South, they did not simply extract resources. They imposed entire systems of knowledge on societies they genuinely did not understand, and they built those systems into every institution they created: schools, courts, economies, legal codes, languages of governance. The key insight, and the one that makes this history so durable, is that many of the colonizers believed their frameworks were universal. That sincerity made the architecture far more resilient than cynicism ever could have. You can resist a lie. It is much harder to resist a framework that the people enforcing it believe is simply how the world works.

George Beckford, the Jamaican economist, gave us the sharpest language for this. In Persistent Poverty (1972), drawing on Erving Goffman, he described the plantation as a “total institution,” a system so comprehensive that it organized not just labor but consciousness itself. Inside the total institution, alternatives don’t just feel difficult. They feel unrealistic. The institution produces the very framework through which people evaluate whether change is possible, and that framework always concludes that the institution is necessary. This was never only about sugar or labor. It was about the architecture of what could be thought.

Think about what that means in practice. If you control the schools, the courts, and the economy, then you have power. But if you also control the language people are allowed to think in, you have something deeper. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o spent a lifetime tracing exactly this. When colonial governments mandated that education, law, and governance happen in European languages, they were not just making administration easier. They were reshaping what it was possible to know. Knowledge that lived in indigenous languages, concepts that only made sense in those forms because they had no clean equivalent in English or French, got quietly pushed outside the boundaries of what the system recognized as real knowledge. And the damage went deeper than which language you spoke. In Globalectics (2012), Ngũgĩ showed that colonialism imposed not just a different language but a different relationship to knowledge itself. Entire traditions of understanding carried through oral practice, through storytelling, through communal memory and performance, what Ngũgĩ calls “orature,” were structurally demoted beneath the written word. It was not that these traditions lacked depth or rigor. It was that they did not fit the format the colonial system was built to recognize. So they became invisible. Not because they disappeared, but because the architecture could not see them.

Frantz Fanon understood that this invisibility eventually turns inward. Colonial education didn’t just exclude certain knowledge from the system. It produced people who learned to see through the colonizer’s lens so thoroughly that their own traditions came to feel illegitimate even to themselves. He called this the “zone of non-being,” the experience of existing outside the categories the system recognizes as fully human. I saw the residue of this during my time as a Peace Corps volunteer in St. Patrick’s parish in the north of Grenada, an island whose own attempt to break free of neocolonial economic architecture, Maurice Bishop’s New Jewel Movement, was crushed by U.S. invasion in 1983. The schools I taught in were still shaped by frameworks built for someone else’s understanding of the world. The textbooks, the curricula, the very logic of what counted as an educated person, all of it carried the fingerprints of designers who had never walked those roads. And what struck me most was how natural it all felt from the inside. That is the total institution at work. It does not need to announce itself. It just becomes the way things are.

Here is what makes this pattern so dangerous: it never stays in one place. Aimé Césaire warned decades ago that the logic used to dehumanize people abroad always comes home. The narrowing of what counts as legitimate thought, the insistence that one framework is universal, the structural erasure of every way of knowing that does not fit, these are not problems confined to colonies or former colonies. They are the machinery of domination itself, and they will be applied wherever a small group builds the systems that everyone else has to live inside. In September 1943, with the physical empires already crumbling under the weight of world war and anti-colonial resistance, Winston Churchill stood at Harvard University and said the quiet part out loud: “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” He was right. The cognitive empire did not replace the territorial one. It evolved from it. And as Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has argued, that empire of the mind continues to reproduce itself through the very systems and structures we build to organize knowledge, long after the flags come down and the maps get redrawn.

The question is what happens when that empire goes digital.

III. The Replay and the Upgrade

Now a remarkably narrow slice of humanity is building the knowledge infrastructure that will mediate how the rest of us think, learn, create and communicate. The designers are overwhelmingly from elite Western technical institutions, trained in very specific traditions, and operating within narrow assumptions about what knowledge is and how it works. The limitations they embed are not just technical. They are epistemic. Training data reflects existing knowledge hierarchies. Guardrails enforce conformity with established frameworks. “Accuracy” is defined by consensus. “Safety” is defined by the designers’ own cultural and political coordinates. Every one of these seemingly neutral technical choices is a decision about what counts as legitimate thought.

Haylett names the consequence precisely: “Current large language models are, in essence, static maps of dynamical systems.” They catalog what has already been thought. They are not built to navigate what hasn’t. When the model tells a scientist working at the edge of human knowledge that his new ideas are wrong because they don’t match existing patterns, it is doing what colonial education always did: treating the current framework as the boundary of the possible and pushing anyone who ventures beyond it back inside.

Thomas Kuhn called this “normal science,” the way an established paradigm actively resists the anomalies that could transform it. The LLM is, architecturally, a normal science machine. And we are building it into everything.

IV. Where It All Points

Each round of this pattern builds on the last, and the layers compound across centuries. Colonial education determined what knowledge survived long enough to be written down. What was written down determined what was digitized. What was digitized shaped the training data. And the training data now shapes what the most powerful knowledge tools in human history treat as legitimate thought. The architecture inherits its own history. The oral traditions Ngũgĩ traced, the ways of knowing that Beckford saw crushed inside the total institution, the entire epistemologies that Fanon watched people learn to abandon, these did not simply disappear. They were filtered out, generation by generation, format by format, until the systems we are building today cannot even register their absence.

This, I think, is what makes this particular intersection so urgent and so underexplored. The people writing about AI tend not to be reading Caribbean political economy. The people steeped in decolonial thought tend not to be engaging with the architecture of large language models. But the pattern is the same pattern. And if we cannot see it clearly across these domains, we will keep building the same machinery and calling it progress, the way the IMF called structural adjustment “development” and the way colonial administrators called epistemic erasure “education.”

But these architectures have been broken before. Caribbean economists like Beckford built entirely new theoretical frameworks from inside the system designed to prevent exactly that kind of thinking. Ngũgĩ wrote in Gĩkũyũ. C.L.R. James turned the colonial archive into a tool of liberation. Maurice Bishop tried to rebuild an entire nation’s relationship to its own economic future. The knowledge that does not fit the framework is always, in every era, the knowledge the world most needs, because it is the knowledge capable of transforming the system itself.

The question isn’t whether flawed systems will be built. They always will be. The question is whether we can recognize, in the architecture being constructed right now, the same pattern that has repeated across centuries, early enough this time to insist that the tools we build to help us think don’t end up telling us what thinking is allowed to look like. Beckford saw the plantation not as history but as living structure. Césaire saw the colony not as elsewhere but as blueprint. The architecture of not knowing is being built again, in code this time, and at a scale the plantation owners and the IMF economists could never have imagined. Whether we see it clearly enough to break it open remains, as it always has, up to us.

References

Beckford, G. (1972). Persistent Poverty. Oxford University Press.

Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.

Haylett, K. R. (2026, January 23). Geofinitism: language as a nonlinear dynamical system - attractors, basins, and the geometry of understanding. Kevin R. Haylett. https://substack.com/home/post/p-184323654

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2025). Intellectual imperialism and decolonisation in African studies. Third World Quarterly, 46(18), 2467–2484. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023.2211520

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (2012). Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. Columbia University Press.

Thiong’o, Ngugi wa. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. (2016). Journal of Pan African Studies, 9(4), 438. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A461364220/BRIP?u=nhc_main&sid=ebsco&xid=9eb52fd1

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris