Today, Luigi Mangione stood in a federal courtroom and plead guilty. Not to murder…to stalking. Two counts of it: interstate stalking resulting in death, and using interstate communications to stalk a man until he ended up dead on a Manhattan sidewalk. The maximum penalty on the table is life in prison.

Sit with that for a second. The federal government just told us, in the plainest terms possible, that stalking is a murder-equivalent crime, deserving of a murder-equivalent sentence, the exact moment it results in a body.

Which raises the only question that actually matters: if stalking is dangerous enough to justify a life sentence after someone dies, why do we keep pretending it’s a shrug-worthy misdemeanor beforethey do?

I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit watching police suspect interviews and true crime breakdowns; murderers, serial killers, and the court cases that followed. Macabre, sure, but it makes checking off the chore list go faster, and unlike our justice system, I actually notice patterns. One pattern kept slapping me in the face, over and over: he had been caught stalking before.

Not once. Not maybe. Every time.

Before the murder. Before the spree. Before the “no one could have seen this coming” press conference, someone did see it coming. Victims reported it. Cops saw it. Courts saw it. Judges shrugged, and then people died.

This isn’t my gut instinct dressed up as data, either. The research backs it up harder than even most true-crime junkies would realize:

- 76% of women killed by an intimate partner were stalked first.

- Stalking precedes more than 75% of completed and attempted intimate-partner homicides against women.

- The landmark femicide research on this: McFarlane et al., found stalking, layered with physical assault, is statistically significant for predicting both murder and attempted murder. Not a maybe. Not a vibe. A documented precursor to lethal violence.

Stalking is not a coincidence. It is not a misunderstanding. It is not romance gone wrong. It is rehearsal.

What Stalking Actually Is (Because People Love to Pretend It’s Vague)

Stalking is not walking in the same direction for a few blocks. It’s not noticing you get off at the same train stop. It’s not one awkward attempt to say hello.

Stalking is patterned, repeated, unwanted intrusion into another person’s life:

- Following someone home, again and again

- Waiting outside their job, their apartment, their friends’ houses

- Monitoring their schedule

- Leaving “gifts” that read more like warnings

- Planting tracking devices

- Showing up “by coincidence” too many times to count

- Persistent contact after being told, explicitly, to stop

- Threats, spoken or implied, to the victim or the people they love

It is behavior that would make any reasonable person afraid for their life. And the most dangerous thing about it is how easy it is to get away with, because we’ve quietly decided “innocent until proven guilty” means “we have to wait until someone bleeds.”

That’s not a legal standard. That’s cowardice dressed up as principle.

The presumption of innocence was never supposed to mean the state ignores a clear, repeated, escalating pattern that any functioning adult recognizes as dangerous. When the law protects a stalker’s freedom of movement more fiercely than a victim’s right to live without terror, the law has failed at the one job it exists to do.

The First Amendment Is Not the Problem. Our Imagination Is.

Every time this comes up, someone hides behind the First Amendment like it’s a sanctuary for abusers.

It isn’t, and it never has been. Stalking is not speech. It’s conduct. Even when it involves words: messages, letters, posts, it stops being protected the moment it becomes a course of conduct meant to intimidate, control, or terrify someone. Courts already draw this line constantly. We already criminalize harassment, threats, witness intimidation, extortion, domestic abuse, all of which can involve speech, none of which get a First Amendment pass. Stalking belongs in that same category, and pretending otherwise is a choice, not a constitutional requirement.

Here’s what a stalking law looks like when it’s written to survive that scrutiny, regulating conduct, not content:

Felony Stalking Statute

A person commits Felony Stalking when they knowingly engage in a course of conduct directed at a specific individual that:

1. Involves two or more acts, including but not limited to: following or surveilling; appearing at locations associated with the victim; monitoring movements or communications; unwanted contact after explicit notice to stop; use of tracking technology without consent; leaving objects or messages intended to communicate presence or control.

2. Is unwanted and persistent.

3. Would cause a reasonable person to fear for their safety, or the safety of others, or to suffer substantial emotional distress.

Course of conduct - a pattern of behavior evidencing continuity of purpose. Felony Stalking is a violent felony offense regardless of whether physical contact has occurred.

Penalty:

- Mandatory minimum of 20 years imprisonment

- No suspension, no probation

- No early release without demonstrated rehabilitation and victim notification and consent

- Affirmative defenses do not include claims of romantic intent, misunderstanding, absence of an explicit threat, or the First Amendment

Why 20 Years Isn’t Arbitrary, It’s Preventative

Some people, usually men, let’s be honest, will read “twenty years” and act shocked while calling it excessive.

It isn’t. What’s excessive is how long we’ve treated stalking as harmless right up until someone ends up dead. Mangione’s plea today is the system quietly admitting the point: prosecutors reached for the stalking statute’s harshest tier: life, because they needed language equivalent to murder. The law already knows stalking-that-kills deserves a murder sentence. I’m asking why it waits for the killing to start punishing.

We already impose long sentences based on predictability of harm, escalation patterns, and resistance to deterrence. Stalking checks every one of those boxes. Short sentences don’t work on it, because stalking isn’t impulsive; it’s obsessive. It doesn’t respond to warnings, restraining orders, or slap-on-the-wrist penalties. It escalates precisely because the stalker learns, correctly, that the system can’t and won’t stop them. They ignore court orders, and will simply wait out short sentences. Victims, who need time more than anything else, get forced into rash decisions trying to outrun a clock the law won’t hold still.

A 20-year minimum does five things a soft sentence can’t:

1. Incapacitation - physically removes a known danger for years, not months

2. Interruption - breaks the escalation cycle before it turns lethal

3. Deterrence - signals that stalking isn’t a gray area, it’s a life-ending risk

4. Peace of mind - gives victims real confidence their safety is being taken seriously

5. Fear in the right direction - forces anyone considering this path to weigh a consequence that actually matters

This isn’t only about punishment. It’s about containment, interruption, deterrence, and giving victims the time to do whatever they need to do, instead of racing a release date. We intervene because we recognize pre-violence when we see it. Stalking is pre-violence. It’s the phase where obsession hardens into entitlement, where surveillance replaces curiosity, where the stalker stops seeing a person and starts seeing a possession that isn’t behaving. It is, provably, the first step almost every one of these men takes.

We already know how this story ends. We’ve watched it end the same way, over and over, in the news, in the true-crime documentaries, in police interviews with suspects, and, as of this morning, in a federal courtroom, where the government demanded that stalking, resulting in death, be worth a life sentence. The only real mystery is why we keep acting shocked that we saw it coming, when we could have done something about it the first time.

If we know stalking predicts murder, and we do, exhaustively, statistically, and undeniably, then refusing to treat it as a serious violent felony the first time isn’t caution. It’s negligence. And that negligence has a body count.

So let’s stop pretending we don’t know what this is. Let’s stop hiding behind the First Amendment like it’s a hostage negotiator for predators. Let’s build a legal system that intervenes before the blood, not one that waits for it.

Let’s make stalking a 20-year felony. Now. Nationwide. The first time.

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In February 2016, ultra conservative Supreme Court “JustUs” Antonin Scalia died suddenly, and handed then President Barack Obama a SCOTUS vacancy to fill on his way out the door. But within hours of Scalia’s death, before President Obama could even name anyone, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made an unprecedented announcement: the seat would stay empty until after the upcoming election, 10 months away. No hearing. No vote. A “principle” invented on the spot: that the American people deserved a voice in a nomination happening nearly a year before they’d even be able to cast a ballot, applied to a sitting two-term president exercising a power the Constitution gives him with zero qualification. McConnell’s law. President Obama had a decision to make: fight aggressively to fill the seat anyway, or try to disarm McConnell and the Republicans by offering a nominee they couldn’t refuse. He chose to try to disarm them.

He nominated Merrick Garland, at the time the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, a former federal prosecutor, and a Clinton-era pick who’d spent two decades building a reputation as the most institutionally respected moderate in the federal judiciary. He did so because Republican Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) had praised Garland by name in years past as exactly the kind of nominee the Senate should fast-track. But as Obama would find out, Garland was never going to be a concession. Instead, his nomination ended up being a trap disguised as a peace offering. What seemed like a nominee so consensus-built that refusing him would require Republicans to publicly abandon their own stated standards, became a way for them to get around the Constitution, Obama, and any semblance of standard principle.

McConnell simply refused to hold any hearings for Garland, while Hatch chose to tow the party line, proving that the GOP has no principles or standards. That’s the part people forget to be angry about. It wasn’t that Republicans out-argued Democrats; they just straight up ignored the rules, made up their own, and didn’t even bother arguing about it at all. President Obama tried to play the moderate, respectable, rules-following move. Republicans simply declined to acknowledge the rules even existed.

Then, we got the real test of Republican “principle” just four years later. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September of 2020, a mere 46 days before the election, not ten months. If there was ever any argument for the American people to have a say through their vote, this was it. But McConnell’s law, used to hold open a vacant seat for nearly a year under President Obama, was tossed aside like garbage so Republicans could ram through trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s hearing and confirmation in under a month, just weeks before voters went to the polls, giving them no say at all.

There was no reconciling those two positions. There was never going to be. McConnell’s law was never anything binding. It was simply a backhanded maneuver with a legal-ish label, deployed for exactly as long as it was useful, and discarded the moment it wasn’t. That’s not principle, and that’s the entire GOP model: hold on to power using whatever justification fits the moment, ditch it when it stops fitting, and count on the other side to keep treating your justifications like they’re offered in good faith. And boy are the Democrats good at keeping the faith.

Now fast-forward to December 2020. President Obama’s former Vice President and America’s newly-elected 46th President Joe Biden is picking his Attorney General, with a mandate to clean up after four years of trump’s pick Bill Barr treating the DOJ like the White House’s personal law firm. President Biden’s answer to that problem was the same answer former President Obama gave in 2016: pick the most unimpeachably institutional, rules-following, norms-respecting person available. Merrick Garland, again.

Now, the logic wasn’t wrong on its face. After Barr, “boring and apolitical” sounded like exactly what the DOJ needed. But it meant putting the country’s most consequential prosecutorial decision, whether or not and how fast to investigate a former president who’d incited an insurrection on the Capitol in an effort to change the outcome of the 2020 election, into the hands of a man whose entire professional identity was built on not moving until every institutional box was checked.

As a result, Garland’s DOJ didn’t appoint special counsel Jack Smith to investigate trump until November 2022, two years after January 6th, after the congressional hearings into trump were done and criminal referrals had been released, and after trump had already announced his 2024 election campaign, which conveniently gave Garland a fresh institutional justification (protecting the DOJ from appearing political) for the very delay that guaranteed the process would run into and be crushed by the machinery of a presidential election. From there, the classified documents case and the January 6th case both got tangled in pretrial appeals, a Supreme Court immunity ruling that took months to resolve, and a MAGA judge in Florida purposefully slow-walking the documents case toward dismissal. By the time any of it approached trial, trump had won the election, and the cases were over; not because he was cleared, but because the clock ran out and he took control and ended it himself.

Treat these as two separate stories and it just reads like bad luck struck twice. Treat them as the same story, and the pattern is unmistakable: Democrats keep choosing the institutionally respectable, rules-following option, on the assumption that playing it straight is itself a kind of protection. Republicans keep treating institutional rules as simple tools, binding when they need them to be, irrelevant when they don’t, and Democrats keep acting shocked and amazed every single time they do it. It’s the proverbial football pulled away from Charlie Brown, over and over again.

Merrick Garland wasn’t the problem because he wasn’t good at his job. He was the problem because the moment wasn’t calling for a good employee: it called for someone aggressive, who understood that the clock was ticking, who should have been willing to do whatever they had to do in order to get a conviction. In other words, Merrick Garland wasn’t the right man for the job, and Democrats couldn’t recognize it. In 2016, they brought a consensus nominee to a norm-breaking fight and got outmaneuvered by a manufactured, unchallenged rule they simply respected. In 2021, they brought that same instinct to a prosecutorial fight against a defendant explicitly campaigning to run out the clock, and got outmaneuvered again by the same absence of urgency they praised as integrity.

This is the move, over and over: Republicans treat power as something to be won and protected, by whatever means possible. Democrats treat process as the thing to be protected, even when protecting it costs them the very power that would let them fix the process later. That’s not two parties playing the same game at different skill levels. That’s one side playing to win and the other side playing to be correct, and only one of those strategies has ever produced a SCOTUS seat.

Democrats seem convinced that fighting like Republicans will cost them votes, and in turn, elections, but the evidence has never been clearer: being correct in this political climate is a losing strategy when you’re up against rule breakers. Dying with honor still means you’re dead, and one can only hope the Democratic Party will someday learn this devastating lesson.

Don’t hold your breath though.

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**disclaimer** Lindsey Graham died over the weekend while I was finishing this up, and some have been left with confusion over why his staff and Mitch McConnell’s staff have handled their respective situations so differently. If I had to bet, it’s because Graham’s party controls the process to replace him. Meanwhile, McConnell clings to “life” via support from machines plugged into an outlet in the wall because there’s a Democrat in the Kentucky governors seat. Now, on to the article!

Mitch McConnell has been dead for three weeks now. Nobody can deny that until they can prove he is alive, but all we have so far is a spokesperson repeating the same sentence over and over again, every few days like we’re all stupid: “he continues to improve, he’s working closely with staff,” and now the worst proof-of-life photo ever created, complete with a barely visible newspaper and his blood-sucking wife by his side, after vacationing in China without him. Bullshit.

I can’t understand why the Democratic Party is dropping the ball here. I get that in normal times, something like a Senator’s health might be something that needs to be handled with some sort of grace. But these are not normal times, and I want you to sit with a hypothetical for a second, because it will tell you everything about you need to know about what the GOP thinks about legitimacy, and how the Democrats regularly fail to stand up and challenge them.

Flip it. Imagine it’s a long term, consequential Democratic senator in that hospital bed, in a state with a Republican governor. Three weeks, no answers, aides going quiet, a cardiac scare that leaked out through a police scanner instead of a press release, etc. You already know what would happen. The MAGA media machine would have every chyron on TV counting the hours since we last heard from them. There’d be demands for medical records, calls for a competency hearing, maybe even a state legislator standing outside the Senator’s house, questioning whether they are even alive to give informed consent to their own medical care. The right wing machinery of doubt would be running at full volume by day two, and by the end of the first week? That Republican governor would have already declared them dead, and begun the process to replace them.

That’s not a guess. That’s just the modern Republican political strategy, as perfected and practiced for the last decade. Dianne Feinstein got a preview of it while she was still breathing in 2023, when McConnell’s Senate refused to let the Democrats replace her committee seat while she was sick and dying. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg got the full McConnell in 2020, when he dismissed his own made up 2016 rule, that no SCOTUS seat should be filled in an election year, to let trump fill hers as quickly as possible. Of course, Democratic President Barack Obama was in office back then, and it was the hugely conservative Antonin Scalia that was gone. It took 419 days to replace Scalia, but just 39 to replace Ginsburg.

Now here we are, three weeks going on four into the Democratic Party allowing Republicans to gaslight the entire country into believing a dead man is not only still alive, but able to have multiple phone calls with multiple people, oh but only with partisan colleagues, and oh, only for exactly 20 minutes each, and oh no, he can’t call anyone else because he’s recovering, don’t you know? Oh but here’s a picture taken just yesterday, where he looks fully healthy and 20 years younger, and he’s even got a newspaper!

This is the opportunity a lot of people on the left have been waiting for: the Democratic Party can finally prove to the nation that the GOP is full of shit, and declare McConnell dead while moving forward with the process to replace him. Every incumbent Democrat should be saying he’s dead and the GOP are hiding it, and force them to produce some REAL proof of life evidence we all know he can’t deliver, like a live interview or press conference.

Instead, we have a garbage photo and a weak statement full of excuses anyone could have written. And the worst part? The GOP saw this coming, and prepared for it in front of the entire country.

In 2024, Kentucky’s Republican supermajority passed House Bill 622, or McConnell’s Law. Before that law, they had already made it so if a U.S. Senate seat opened up mid-term, the governor could only pick a temporary replacement from a list of three names supplied by the departing senator’s own party, but a real appointment nonetheless. HB 622 killed that. Now, if McConnell’s seat goes vacant before January, Governor Beshear has no appointment power at all. None. The seat sits empty until a special election, one with a filing deadline so tight it might not even happen before the seat’s regularly scheduled replacement takes office anyway.

Beshear vetoed the bill. The GOP legislature overrode him without blinking. Did you even hear about it? The MAGA media machine strikes again!

And notice the timing: HB 622 was introduced the day after McConnell announced he was stepping down as Senate GOP leader, February 21st, 2024. Not after some abstract concern about democratic principle bubbled up in a think tank somewhere. Once McConnell’s own political mortality became visible on the horizon, his party immediately moved to make sure his seat would never touch the Democratic Party, even for a matter of months.

One of the bill’s sponsors, state Rep. Steven Rudy, insists this was never about McConnell, it was about principle. “One person should never pick the senator,” he said, invoking the 17th Amendment like a man who just discovered the Constitution exists. That helps explain where their principles were back on February 10th, 2021, when this same legislature passed the first power stripping law, restricting the governor’s ability to appoint from whoever he wanted to a hand-picked list submitted by the outgoing senator’s own party. Neither of those were about democratic principles. That was just a party making sure the family keeps the house keys, until the moment the Democrats might get to use them, at which point the door gets bricked over entirely. That’s just the Republican way.

Going back to 2023, when Senator Feinstein died in office, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler to fill her California seat. No bill was introduced to make sure the Democratic Party protected the process with their supermajority. There was no manufactured doubt about whether Feinstein was alive, dead, or fit to serve in her final months, even though by then it was an open secret in Washington that she was struggling. Butler served out the term, Adam Schiff ran for the seat outright and won it in the next election, and the system did what it’s supposed to do: kept the seat functioning without treating the nation like they were hiding a body.

That’s the mirror. One party trusts the existing process. The other rewrote the entire process specifically to make sure it could never be used against them, and they’d always come out on top. Oh, and btw, McConnell’s law might not even survive itself.

Kentucky’s own constitution, Section 152, says the governor appoints when a statewide office goes vacant. Both bills conflicted with the state’s own founding document, but even though legal scholars are already flagging that Beshear has real constitutional grounds to challenge it, I guess we’re just going to wait until it can be tested in court. That’s right, the law Republicans built to guarantee they’d never lose this seat by accident could collapse the moment it’s actually needed, because they were in such a hurry to entrench power that they didn’t bother checking whether it was legal to take it, but that’s just how they operate: break the law now, deal with the consequences waaaaaaay later, when it doesn’t matter anymore.

This isn’t a story about McConnell’s health; he’s already dead. This is a story about a political party that understands power as something to be locked in, not earned, and never given up. This is a party that will invoke “the will of the voters” as a rhetorical shield while it’s busy making sure those voters have no say at all.

They didn’t write McConnell’s law because they trust elections. They wrote it because they don’t trust the voters’ choice in Andy Beshear, and they were willing to gut their own state’s constitutional authority rather than risk it. Remember that the next time the talking heads on TV tell you the GOP is the party of small government and local control.

Republicans are all about complete control of a government run solely by themselves, and they will do whatever it takes to get it, keep it, and destroy everyone else, and if it’s up to the Democratic Party to stop them, I got some bad news, my fellow Americans.

We’re fucked.

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Let’s talk about the lie that’s been running our politics for forty years. Not one of the little lies, the big structural one. The one baked into how you describe everything else. The lie is this: there is a “far left” that’s taking over, and it must be stopped.

There simply is no real left wing faction anywhere in America. In fact, in a modern political sense, there’s no such THING as the far left.

Let me explain.

When political scientists talk about the political spectrum; right, center, left, what they’re really measuring is power distribution. Who holds it. How concentrated it is. But I say it’s also about who answers to whom. That’s not the axis you may have been taught in class. In school, the left just meant the state or the collective owns the means of production, and right meant private hands do. That axis is fine for arguing about tax policy, but it’s useless for predicting what a government actually does to its people, because it says nothing about who’s ultimately making the decisions. A country can nationalize every factory and still be run by exactly one man, and that’s not a left wing position, it’s a right wing one. So forget ownership for a second. Ask a simpler question instead: once the dust settles, who is actually holding the power?

On the right: one person controls everything. The strong man. The king. The emperor. The supreme leader anointed by God, guns, or both. You obey or you die.

On the real left: no one controls anything. No rulers, no hierarchy, no state. Pure autonomy. Everyone answers to themselves. Freedom.

Real democracy sits in the middle of that axis, which they call the center. The people, collectively, decide through elected representatives what to do. Majority rule with rights protections so the majority can’t just crush whoever they outvote. Power distributed broadly. Accountability flowing downward toward citizens instead of upward to the rich and powerful.

That might sound like what you’ve heard the left wing is, but that’s just the center. That’s the whole premise of the American experiment, at least on paper.

To get even more specific: if you go far enough right, true, terminal authoritarianism, you get a king or an emperor, one man rules everything. By force, by divine right, by manufactured consent, whatever, the point is the people don’t decide anything, they just comply or they die.

If you go far enough left, you get true anarchism, no hierarchy whatsoever, chaotic freedom. No leaders, no rules, no state. Which sounds appealing until you realize it’s impossible to achieve in a society where wealth can be centralized.

The trouble is, no one that’s on the “left” in this country is arguing for any of that. In fact, the biggest criticism that the right likes to lob at the left are buzzwords like “socialism” and “communism”, and in both instances the examples given are places like China or North Korea, maybe Venezuela pre-trump, or even Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union. None of those countries are or were even remotely on the left though, they all have/had authoritarian rulers that were firmly on the right. Sure, the “State” owned the means of production, but the State also ran under one persons rule, accountable to no one else. Present day Russia can claim it’s a democracy because they hold elections, and Vladimir Putin was elected, but only a fool would think he’s anything but a dictator who rigs the elections so he always wins (and don’t you know, he always wins).

Once human beings figured out how to store food; to get through a winter, survive a drought, plan ahead, suddenly there was something defensible. Something worth controlling. And once something is worth controlling, someone tries to control it. Leaders emerge. Hierarchies form. The rest fall. The march rightward begins.

This is documented history. Anthropologists have traced it. Some have spent their careers mapping it, others have showed how the first states grew directly out of surplus agriculture.

The point: the true far left is a pre-civilization condition. It existed before wealth. It cannot exist within systems built around the accumulation and defense of wealth. In modern society, there simply is no far left. There’s a cliff where it used to start, just after the center, but if you walk off it, you land directly back on the far right, because nature abhors a power vacuum, and authoritarian structure will always rush in to fill one and seize the wealth once more.

Horseshoe theory says the far left and far right look alike because they converge. I’d say that’s wrong, and I present my cliff theory: the far left and far right don’t look alike at all because you can’t go far enough left; you fall off a cliff shortly after leaving the center, and you end up back on the right. The change is sudden. It’s fast. And it’s almost always irreversible once it happens. As long as wealth exists, it’s really just a cliff from the center to the far right, with the left off in the distance, unattainable.

All modern politics, every party, every faction, every ideology currently operating in any industrialized nation, exists on the right half of the theoretical spectrum. We’re all just arguing about how much hierarchy, and who it serves. To simplify, modern politics is a tug of war between the far right and the center, and if you start to move left of center, you fall off a cliff and end up back on the right.

The progressives, the liberals, the democratic socialists, the mainstream “left”, none of them are trying to abolish all power. They’re trying to distribute it away from the few and to the many. More people should have more say. Workers should have more power relative to bosses. Voters should have more power relative to donors. The many should have more leverage against the few. Now if that sounds closer to the center than anything else on the modern menu, that’s because it is the center.

Authoritarianism cannot beat that argument in a fair fight. “The people should collectively decide” is broadly popular. The country was founded on that idea, and it has always been popular here. You can’t run against it honestly, and so they don’t run against it honestly. They rebrand it.

They call Medicare for All “socialism.” They call Social Security “entitlements.” They call labor organizing “radical.” They call voting rights expansion “election interference.” They call any proposal that would shift power toward the many and away from the few “far left extremism”, and suddenly the center sounds like some scary fringe position you wouldn’t want to associate with.

It works because most people’s political identity is spatial. They think of themselves as somewhere on a line, and they want to be near the middle, where they assume everyone else is. If you can move the goalposts so that “the people should decide” is at the far edge, then anyone who agrees with it has to either identify as an extremist or abandon their position and move towards the “new” center, which is always further right.

That’s the game. That’s the whole game.

The only way an authoritarian ideology can compete with genuine democracy is to convince people that democracy is too radical. That demanding accountability is too extreme. That wanting the public to own what the public paid for is somehow un-American. That the New Deal was a bad thing.

It’s a lie, and they’ve used it to drag the country to the edge of a full on right wing authoritarian power grab, and they’re still warning everyone about the “far left.” So it’s important to know where you’re actually standing. Not at the fringe, and not on the radical edge of anything. You’re standing at the dead center, on solid ground, and someone’s been screaming at you for forty years to back up before you fall off a cliff. That you’re too far left.

Do not listen.

Every time they call the center “far left,” and you flinch and take a step right to prove you’re reasonable, you hand them a few more feet of ground. Do that enough times and the center doesn’t move, you do. That’s the whole trick. That’s the forty-year con. Not persuasion. Choreography. They just need you to keep stepping right until “reasonable” becomes “obedient” and nobody remembers the difference.

There is no far left waiting to take over. There never was. There’s only the center, the cliff straight back to the right…and the lie that tells you that’s the far left.

Stop stepping back. Hold your ground. The center is ours.

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“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit.”

- Elon Musk

Think about the last time you were in a voting booth. Really picture it. You’ve got a list of names in front of you. You’re not reading any biographies, there’s know introduction or mission statement, so you’re just scanning. You’re looking for something familiar. A name you recognize. And in a lot of races, especially down-ballot, a name is almost all you’ve got.

Ok, maybe not readers of the Aggressive Progressive, I know you’re all well informed and tuned in to what’s going on. But that’s not the reality for every voter. It’s not even the reality for most voters, and that’s not a flaw in American democracy. That’s just human cognition under low-information conditions. People remember last names. Campaign signs feature last names. Yard signs often only have last names. Your neighbor tells you to vote for Rodriguez, not “Jose Javier Rodriguez, Democratic state senator, District 37.” Just Rodriguez. And 9 times out of 10, that’s all you need.

Now imagine there are two Rodriguezes on that ballot.

Voters might not be sure which one they want. One Rodriguez has a party label next to the name they might recognize, sure. But one of them is listed as “no party affiliation.” That’s not a Republican, and the name. The name is the same.

So they pick one, and then they move on.

That’s the whole theory. That’s the whole trick. And it doesn’t require a sophisticated operation to work. It just requires a warm body, a filing fee, the same last name, and your average low information voter.

Florida, 2020. The Blueprint is Written

Florida state senator Jose Javier Rodriguez was running for re-election in Miami-Dade’s Senate District 37. He was the Democratic incumbent, and he was polling just ahead of the challenger from the right, which made him the perfect target.

A former Republican state senator named Frank Artiles had an idea for how that race should go. He was going to make sure Jose Javier Rodriguez would lose, not because the Republican challenger was strong enough to beat him outright, but because Artiles had a plan. He recruited a man named Alex Rodriguez, a down-on-his-luck truck parts salesman, to run as a no-party candidate. For the same race.

Alex Rodriguez was not running to win. He didn’t even campaign. He did not hold rallies or knock on doors or buy a single ad out of his own pocket. He filed, and his name showed up on the ballot. He did almost nothing else, and he got 6,382 votes.

Jose Javier Rodriguez, the incumbent, the man with the same last name, the man people thought they were voting for, lost to Republican Ileana Garcia by 32 votes.

Think about that math. A ghost candidate who never had to run a real campaign, who just by sharing a last name, pulled more than six thousand votes in a race decided by thirty-two. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a weapon.

And Artiles wasn’t subtle about it. He paid Alex Rodriguez to run. He flew from Miami to Tallahassee to register him. He covered the man’s rent. He paid his kid’s private school tuition on a credit card. He funneled at least $44,000 in payments to keep the ghost manifesting on the ballot.

In 2024, a jury convicted Artiles on three felony counts. The Senate GOP’s chief consultant, Patrick Bainter, acknowledged in a deposition that he gave the green light to the scheme and sent $100,000 to a dark money nonprofit Artiles controlled, money with, in his words, “no strings attached.” Nobody told him how to spend it. Nobody had to. Wink wink.

This wasn’t a rogue operation by one bad actor. This was the beginning of a new strategy, endorsed by leadership, and executed to great effect.

Florida Republicans also ran ghost candidates in three other state Senate contests in 2020. The goal was a Republican supermajority. Multiple spoiler candidates. Multiple Democrats targeted. Multiple dark money groups circulating campaign fliers for candidates who weren’t really running, perfectly timed to land in mailboxes right before Election Day.

In another South Florida race, a ghost candidate appeared under the same last name as another Democratic incumbent, drawing support away with zero campaign infrastructure. The pattern was identical. The funding trail led back to the same network. The Republican fingerprints were everywhere.

That’s not improvisation. That’s coordination.

Expanding the playbook

Here’s where it gets broader, because while the same-name trick is the most surgical version of this tactic, Republicans figured out you don’t need to share a last name. You can get the same results with a candidate who appeals to voters the Democratic opponent needs; someone left of center, idealistic, frustrated with the establishment, and you make sure they’re on the ballot.

Enter the Green Party.

Jill Stein ran for president in 2016 and 2024. In both elections, there is documented evidence of Republican operatives working to keep her on the ballot in battleground states, not because they believed in her platform, but because they believed every vote she would get is a vote Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris couldn’t make up.

In 2024, Stein’s legal team in Wisconsin included a lawyer who had worked to overturn the 2020 election results on behalf of Donald Trump. The Conservative Leadership PAC, run by a former national director of Youth for Trump, gathered signatures to put Cornel West on the Wisconsin ballot. Republican operatives in Georgia “supported” a socialist candidate’s ballot petition while Democrats tried to remove her. Republicans even passed state legislation in Georgia designed to make it “easier” for left-leaning third-party candidates to qualify for the ballot.

This is the full arc of the strategy: place a confusion candidate with the same name when you can get away with it. When you can’t, fund an opponent from the left who’ll pull from the Democrat’s anyway. The weapon changes shape, but the intent and the results don’t.

Republicans did not accidentally stumble into this. They built the playbook. They funded the operations. They went to trial and got convicted for it.

Which brings us to present day Alaska

Senator Dan S. Sullivan is a Republican incumbent running for re-election in Alaska. His name is on the ballot. His brand is his name. He’s been Alaska’s senator since 2015.

This spring, a retired schoolteacher from the fishing village of Petersburg filed to run for U.S. Senate, as a Republican. His name?

Dan Sullivan.

The Republican Party immediately lost their minds.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee filed complaints. The incumbent senator accused Democrats of recruiting a “sham candidate” to confuse voters. Senate Republican Conference Chairman Tom Cotton called it “an outrageous attempt to trick Alaska voters.” Alaska’s election director initially removed the challenger from the ballot, concluding the candidacy was filed “with a purpose to confuse or mislead.”

Remind you of anything?

A Superior Court judge put him back on the ballot last Friday, ruling that the decision to remove him was based on criteria that doesn’t exist in the Alaska Constitution or state law. Republicans knew this, because they’ve done the research. This is the strategy they invented, and yet they cried, complained, and sued over it anyway.

So now the GOP is begging the judiciary for relief from a tactic they turned into a political weapon.

Let’s be clear: no one has even proven that Democratic Party officials orchestrated the second Dan Sullivan’s filing. He denies any coordination. The election director who removed him didn’t cite any evidence of it either. The circumstantial case involves a website with similar color schemes and a consultant who once worked with Democrats. That’s it. Meanwhile, the Republican Party was caught all the way to the top for endorsing a scheme to pay $44,000 to a ghost candidate they personally flew to Tallahassee to register, and they want to call both action the same thing.

But here’s the thing: even if Democrats did do it, even if they did run the same play, what exactly is the Republican Party’s argument? That ballot confusion is wrong? That sham candidates undermine democracy? That you should be able to remove someone from a ballot because their candidacy appears to be filed in bad faith to trip up voters?

They are describing the Florida Rodriguez case they lost. They are describing their own researched and executed strategy in Florida. Word for word, with 0 shame.

They Did This With Gerrymandering Too

If all of this sounds even slightly familiar, it’s because this isn’t even the first time the GOP has gone all-in on a tactic, and then screamed foul the moment the other side picks it up.

Republicans spent decades perfecting partisan gerrymandering. After the 2010 census, they implemented REDMAP; a Republican coordinated national strategy to capture state legislatures specifically to give control of the redistricting process exclusively to the GOP. It was brazen, and it was effective. They drew maps that locked in congressional majorities for a decade in states they barely won at the statewide level.

When Democrats eventually matched that energy, when states like New York and Maryland drew aggressive maps of their own, Republicans immediately ran to the Supreme Court. They cried about fairness. They whined about democratic representation. They made the case that hyperpartisan maps distorted the will of the voters.

They were not wrong. The maps do distort the will of voters. The argument for fairness was and is correct. It was just a little late coming from the people who built the whole machine, oh, and it also failed to include or even mention their own REDMAPed districts.

The pattern is always the same. Republicans identify a structural vulnerability in American democracy. They exploit it as hard as they can for as long as they can. And then when Democrats either do it themselves or it blows up in their own faces, they suddenly discover their principles, and fairness becomes paramount, but not a second sooner.

They didn’t think ghost candidates were a threat to democracy when their ghost candidate stole a Florida Senate seat for them by 32 votes. They went full throttle like it was just good, smart politics.

They continued to think it was good strategy, right up until a retired schoolteacher in Petersburg, Alaska filed as a Republican and reminded them that the door they left open means anyone can now enter.

Every Accusation Is a Confession

That phrase has been bouncing around left wing political circles for quite some time now, and it’s quickly becoming shorthand for a very specific pattern: the projection of the GOP’s own behavior and plans onto the left, usually deployed by their loudest, and guiltiest, members.

The Republican Party did not stumble into ballot confusion or gerrymandering, nor are they victims of it. They engineered it, funded it, coordinated it, and watched it deliver results for them. A man went to trial. A man was convicted. The receipts are in evidence. They had no problem polluting the political rivers in Florida.

Now they’re in Alaska, furious that the waters are just murky.

The problem with building a strategy around breaking the rules is that you can’t call for enforcement when someone else breaks the same ones against you. You can’t be the arsonist who only demands the fire department when your house is on fire. You don’t get to manufacture chaos and then demand order when the chaos finds you.

The GOP didn’t just write the playbook on voter confusion. They bragged about it, went to court over it, got convicted over it, and now they want to pretend to be victims of it.

What are they expecting, empathy?

I don’t know about you, but that sure sounds like weakness to me.

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I’m sure you’ve all heard the argument a thousand times: give someone a government handout, and you’ve doomed them to a life of never-ending dependency. “They’ll stop trying”. “They’ll get comfortable”. “They’ll milk the system forever and contribute nothing”. That’s the Republican case against welfare, against Medicaid, against any program that catches citizens when they fall, or helps citizens in need.

You know what? Fine. But let’s apply that logic honestly, and let’s go all the way up.

Elon Musk has received billions in government subsidies and federal welfare contracts. Tesla was built and is sustained on green energy handouts our tax dollars funded. SpaceX lives on NASA and Defense Department welfare contracts. His Boring Company promised to revolutionize transportation, but all he’s delivered is a single glorified tunnel in Las Vegas that moves fewer people per hour than a single city bus. And yet, our money keeps flowing to him. Clearly, all that free money has made him lazy and stupid.

Mark Zuckerberg has burned through over forty billion dollars chasing a virtual reality fever dream nobody asked for, and now his Metaverse, the magnum opus of his career to date, is a ghost town with cartoon legs. Meanwhile, Facebook’s success has completely depended on facing virtually zero serious antitrust consequences, which is a regulatory free pass worth billions by itself. Sounds like he could use a taxation kick in the ass.

Jeff Bezos spent decades abusing the post office and parcel carriers with Amazon’s explosive amount of home delivery packages before creating his own delivery company. He also spent twenty-five yearsbuilding a rocket company of his own, and managed to produce SpaceX’s slower, less interesting little brother. Blue Origin is what happens when a man has so much money that failure has no consequences. Oh, and the rocket he delivered to NASA just blew up and destroyed his only launch pad, and may push NASA’s moon landing mission all the way to 2028. Two years up in smoke, along with whatever money we as a nation had riding on it. That sounds like a man who needs to be taxed.

But sure, tell me more about how food stamps and insulin are the real drain on this country.

And that’s the tell. A lack of consequences. The entire conservative argument about welfare dependency rests on the idea that cushioning people from consequences makes them stop performing. Comfort breeds complacency. Remove the pressure and you remove the effort, so keep the pressure high!

So here’s the question they don’t want us to ask: what happens when you cushion someone already rich so completely that success is negligible? What happens when your wealth is so obscene that forty billion dollars in losses is just a rounding error? What happens when government contracts and subsidies keep flowing for failure?

You get lazy. You get stupid. You get the vacant Metaverse, the boring tunnel, and exploding rockets.

Any person on food stamps has more skin in the game than these weak men. Lose a job, miss a payment, fall behind on rent, the consequences for us are immediate and brutal. That pressure, conservatives tell us, is what builds character and drives unique performance. It’s what keeps us alive and constantly moving forward, and to be honest…they’re right. It’s what’s been missing in our society. But that means the most incentive-destroyed, dependency-addled, consequence-free class in America isn’t stuck in the projects, they’re lounging around on yachts and passing out in sprawling penthouses.

So let’s tax them into working hard. Cut the subsidies. Kill the sweetheart contracts. If the logic is sound (and they’ve been telling us for decades that it is) then the treatment needs to be the same. No more corporate government handouts. No more welfare contracts. It’s time to work for it. It’s time to earn it. The Billionaires of America have proven that they will not voluntarily offer any charity for her citizens, only more for themselves. Will her citizens rise up to defend her, or will they bow down to weak and lazy men whose only product is fear?

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Last week, the Democratic National Committee’s social media account took to X to celebrate and promote James Talarico, and Stephen Miller took the MAGA low road to troll them. But this time, the DNC showed up on that same road and loudly told Miller to shut up, called him ugly on the official party letterhead, and for once, didn’t blink.

Miller’s move was textbook MAGA: a cheap, transphobic shot at Talarico, a cisgender man, designed to bait Democrats into either defending trans people, which they assume will win them votes, or apologizing for one reason or another, which will lose Talarico and the left in general votes. It’s a win/win trap built on the assumption that Democrats will do what Democrats always do: flinch, explain, hedge, and spend three news cycles on defense while Republicans own the narrative, and then move on.

But this time, the DNC didn’t take the bait. This time, they threw the bait back where it’s always belonged; in MAGA’s face.

“Shut up you ugly fuck.”

Five words. No asterisks. No spokesperson walking it back an hour later. No apologies. No acknowledgment of Miller’s fears. No strongly worded statement about how “while we refuse to accept Mr. Miller’s disgusting and offensive framing, we remain committed to a bipartisan politics of discussion, dignity, and inclusion of all ideas…”

Just: shut up, you ugly fuck.

And the right lost whatever is left of its mind. Katie Miller dutifully ran to Fox News to hysterically call it violent political rhetoric. Violent. A mean tweet about her husband’s face. The man who perfected family separation, who made the architecture of cruelty the point that put children in cages, whose fingerprints are on every dehumanizing immigration policy of the last decade; his wife needs a fainting couch because someone called him ugly on the internet.

That tells you everything you need to know about MAGA and their thin skin.

Here’s the lesson Democrats have refused to learn for going on thirty years: the fascists on the right will call you unhinged no matter what you do, and you only have your own supporters to lose if you don’t reset the narrative yourself.

You can be Barack Obama: careful, dignified, historically restrained, and they will call you a socialist who hates America and wasn’t even born here. You can be Hillary Clinton: overqualified, solidly moderate, inoffensive to a fault, and they will call you a weak murderer who can’t make big decisions. You can be Joe Biden: literally the archetype of a decent midwestern grandfather, and they will call him senile, corrupt, and a puppet of the radical left.

The slander is not a response to your behavior. It never was. It’s the strategy. It does not matter how high you go. It does not matter how carefully you speak. The story was written before you opened your mouth.

So here’s the question Democrats need to finally, honestly answer: if you’re going to be called unhinged anyway, why are you pulling your punches?

Playing nice hasn’t won. Playing respectful hasn’t won. Playing high when they go low has given us a Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade among other terrible rulings, J6 with no serious accountability, a president with presumed immunity, and worst of all, a second trump term. Going high, as a modern day political strategy, is already a proven loser. It is the Lucy-pulling-the-football-away of American politics, but Democrats keep running it every. Single. Cycle.

It is time to stop.

Let’s talk about what MAGA actually is, stripped of the flags and the noise.

MAGA is not a values system. It is not a governing philosophy. It is three things, repeated endlessly in slightly different costumes: fear, laziness, and greed.

Fear of change. Fear of people who don’t look like them. Fear of a world that moves forward without their permission. They don’t want to competition, they want the game rigged so they just have to show up. They don’t want to earn respect, they want it handed down by birthright, worn proudly on their naked sleeves. Every policy, every culture war skirmish, every manufactured outrage traces back to the same root: I am terrified of a fair fight, and I will burn the rules down rather than take my chances in one.

Laziness of thought. The MAGA worldview requires no intellectual effort. It asks nothing of you except resentment. You don’t have to understand trade policy, just blame immigrants. You don’t have to grapple with healthcare economics, just scream about socialism. You don’t have to reckon with history, just call it fake news. It is the most intellectually passive political movement in modern American history, and it has been allowed to masquerade as populism by a media environment that intentionally mistakes volume for substance, and then dials it up even further.

And greed. Let’s not dress this up. The billionaires funding this movement: Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and their network of dark money flooding into MAGA infrastructure, are not patriots. They are businessmen. Buyers. They bought a politician, they bought a movement, and they bought a story about working-class rage to sell it to the people their policies are actively crushing. They used their purchase to buy a country, and the working men and women who show up to their rallies are voting for the very people picking their pockets.

That is MAGA. That is what Democrats are up against. And the response so far has been… measured statements and policy white papers.

That DNC tweet can’t just be a moment in time. It needs to be the glimpse of something the Democratic Party desperately needs and is moving toward: a spine in wartime.

The party needs to stop running campaigns designed to not lose and start running campaigns designed to win, completely. Not survive. Not hold the line. Not reassure nervous donors that everything will remain comfortable and predictable. Win. Take power. Use it. Make it mean something.

Because the right has told us, over and over, in both word and deed: they will use power whenever they get it. They have no interest in norms, in precedent, in the unwritten rules of political decorum. They packed a court. They threw out an election result. They forgave an insurrection. They ignored a convicted felon and made him president again. And through all of it, the official Democratic response was to appeal to the institutions those same people had taken over, and were dismantling in real time.

Decorum is not a value. It is a tradition, and the right started ignoring that tradition the moment it stopped them. Democrats need to recognize that the old rules of engagement are gone; do not mourn them, but adapt and get stronger to survive. Evolve or die.

That means fighting harder. It means fighting dirty when dirty is what’s called for. It means not sending out a strongly worded but boring and predictable press release when an unexpected five-word tweet will hit harder and land faster. It means making MAGA look like exactly what it is: a movement of scared, selfish men who need the system rigged because they know they can’t win a fair fight, so they’re rigging it.

Make them look small. Make them look afraid. Make every attack they launch look like confirmation that they see the accountability, they can see justice, they can see the left coming for them, and they are terrified.

Because here’s the thing about bullies, trump and MAGA, at their core, just bullies: they fold when you hit back, but only as long as you hit hard and don’t stop.

Stephen Miller called James Talarico transgender as an insult. The DNC told him to shut up and called him ugly. And suddenly Miller and his wife are the victims. Suddenly the people who cage children and strip rights and mock the vulnerable are clutching pearls about civility.

That’s fear masquerading as outrage.

Good. Make them more afraid.

The Democrats who are wringing their hands about the DNC tweet are solving the wrong problem. The problem isn’t that the party looks too aggressive. The problem is that for years it hasn’t looked aggressive enough; and voters, especially the disaffected, the young, the people who’ve been watching the machine grind them down, don’t want a party that’s polite about it. They want a party that’s pissed off and willing to fight about it.

The DNC offered five words of pure red hot fire last week to them.

Now give them a movement to rally behind.

The right broke decorum. They did it on purpose, and they did it because it worked. The only thing left to decide is whether Democrats are going to keep pretending the old rules still apply, or whether they’re finally ready to win this fight.

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Every election cycle, the same conversation plays out. The complaints about how both parties are the same gains steam, someone floats a third party candidate or a celebrity backed new party, then all the pundits warn about spoilers, the voters are herded back into their familiar red and blue pens, and the experts have another year of third party failure to point to. Next year, the cycle repeats, third parties fail again, nothing changes, and yet the issue never really goes away, because the frustration driving it is never solved.

The real reason third parties keep failing isn’t that Americans don’t want an alternative. It’s that every alternative so far has been portrayed as unrealistic from the get go, because they’ve all been forced to start from the outside, and getting inside is nearly impossible when the people already inside are holding the doors shut. What’s needed is someone who is already on the inside, who can hold the door open, and lucky for us, those people are already in the building.

Look at the current Democratic Party today and what you actually see is two parties sharing a name. On one side are weak corporate Democrats who have spent years drifting rightward, courting former Republicans, softening their edges, and filling their donor rolls with the same Wall Street and special interest money that funds MAGA and the destruction of the country. On the other side, you have a strong progressive wing that keeps winning elections on bold and popular ideas, only to find itself perpetually sidelined by the corporates shills on the other side once the governing begins.

The result is a party whose stated purpose increasingly seems to be absorbing disaffected Republicans rather than representing the people who actually built it, growing the base to solidify its hold, or opposing the insanity of the right. To make things worse, as more former Republicans are wooed in to joining the Democratic Party, they will pull its center of gravity even further right, and the illusion of a true left-right choice in American politics will have completely dissolved. And MAGA is watching. A blurred, ambiguous Democratic Party is exactly the terrain they need to rehabilitate themselves in a post-trump political landscape, blending back into mainstream politics without ever truly being held accountable for what they enabled. The progressive caucus staying inside this structure isn’t loyalty. It’s a trap. As long as they remain Democrats, they will be helping to provide cover to a party that has a very different agenda, and they will never be able to build a true opposition.

But the solution isn’t another outside third party launch. No petition drives. No celebrity vanity campaigns. No recycled Green Party infrastructure that the duopoly has spent decades training voters to ignore.

The solution is a complete breakaway from inside Congress itself.

Imagine the incumbent members of the progressive caucus, lawmakers who have already won their elections and already survived inside a party structure designed to neutralize them, announcing together, right after the 2026 midterms, that they are done. Not retiring. Not primarying leadership. Done. A new party, already holding seats, already wielding institutional leverage, standing before the country and saying plainly what most Americans already suspect: the two parties really are the same, and we are no longer pretending they’re not.

This timing matters. Splitting right after the midterms gives the new party maximum runway before 2028, allows them to carry whatever gains progressives make in 2026 into a new structure, and denies corporate Democrats the ability to use the new party as a midterm boogeyman. It would be the first time in modern American history that a third party entered the arena with actual power from day one. Not a spoiler. A breakaway.

Skeptics will say what they always say: progressive politics can’t win. America isn’t ready for progressive policies. The USA can’t afford big ideas and bold plans. The New York City mayoral race suggests otherwise.

The results so far in that race, conducted under a ranked-choice voting system that we don’t yet have nationally, have demonstrated something important: when voters are given a genuine progressive option and a fair mechanism to express their preference, they take it. Ranked-choice isn’t the national standard, but the New York results are still proof of concept. Progressive politics is popular. It wins. The infrastructure to deliver that popularity nationally just hasn’t existed yet.

That’s what the breakaway can help.

One of the most powerful things a new Progressive Party could do in its earliest messaging is also its most important: simply brand what it is leaving behind, while declaring what’s new.

Not with bitterness, but with clarity.

Americans are already exhausted by politicians like Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, John Fetterman, and John Carney, figures who love to campaign as Democrats, but govern like Republicans-in-waiting, who are actively working harder to recruit non-MAGA conservatives into the party while the working class waits for relief that never comes. A new party doesn’t need to attack these people endlessly. It just needs to identify them, draw the contrast, and move on, because the contrast will sell itself.

On one side: bought, cautious, corporate-friendly politicians who have decided their future is to move the entire party right to make Republicans more comfortable.

On the other: proven progressive winners with real track records. AOC. Zohran Mamdani. Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren. Ro Khanna. Lawmakers who have demonstrated, repeatedly, that bold progressive politics doesn’t just inspire people, it gets votes, it wins, and it delivers. These heavy hitters are doing everything they can to return the Democrats to its roots, to fight for its base, and to represent the We the People.

Now the early messaging doesn’t need to lead with individual names or policies. It should start broader, with the feeling. Something like: “Americans above all demand a fair fight. Instead, the Democratic Party has given us weak knees. Americans deserve a fighter in their corner, and the Progressive Party has already been winning. There’s only one choice to move America forward, and that choice is only one left.” Once candidates win their primaries, the ads can localize. But the national frame, built by the early campaign, will give every local race a movement to attach to rather than a brand to explain from.

The new party’s greatest untapped resource isn’t disenchanted Democrats or lost Republicans. It’s the people who have never voted at all, and the young voters who are watching to see if anything is ever actually going to change. They’ve watched the march of left/right/left/right go in circles, and are tired of the outdated and boring ideas of the past. Reaching them will require throwing out the old political playbook entirely, and starting fresh and new.

Here’s a few ideas to get things started:

Forget television advertising. Forget the thirty-second spot and the focus-grouped talking point. The new party should flood digital feeds with content that feels less like a campaign and more like a conversation, memes, short videos, cultural messaging that travels because people want to share it, not because a consultant paid to place it.

Beyond content, the party should challenge voter registration laws directly through action. Voter registration flash mobs, groups showing up unannounced at parks, bars, concerts, transit hubs, and public spaces, registering people on the spot and dispersing just as quickly. No rallies. No speeches. Just access, delivered where people already are.

Normalize voting the way you normalize anything else, by making it social, and popularize it by making it cool. Conversations at bars and parks, not about policy necessarily, but about the simple act of participation. About how voting matters. About how the people in power are actively trying to stop certain people from voting, and why that alone should tell you everything you need to know about how much your vote is worth.

And then there are the lines.

Long voting lines have always been framed as a failure, a burden, evidence of suppression. That framing isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. The new party should start planning now, especially in blue cities inside red states, to transform those lines into an experience. Make them organized. Make them informed. Help people know exactly what to bring, what to expect, how to move through the process efficiently. Turn the line into a community. Because the goal of the people engineering those long lines is discouragement. Low turnout is the goal. Especially in midterms.

Don’t give them that.

Check Your Registration. Right Now.

This isn’t rhetorical. There is criminal intent inside our government, and your status as an eligible voter should not be assumed. Polling locations have already been moved without notice. Counties have already been consolidated to single voting sites. Voter rolls are currently and actively being purged. None of this is accidental or random.

Check your registration. Help everyone you know check theirs. Blue cities in red states especially need to begin organizing now, before restrictions tighten further, before polling places vanish entirely, before people show up on Election Day to find the location has moved and no one told them.

The goal is discouragement. The answer is preparation.

The path forward is actually straightforward, even if it’s not easy: Take whatever gains progressives make in 2026. Use that momentum to formalize the break. Demand that corporate Democrats abandon their PACs and special interest donors entirely, or be left behind. Build a party that is genuinely, visibly, and structurally different from what came before.

America already knows the two-party system isn’t working. It isn’t a secret and it isn’t a fringe opinion. The invasion of money in politics has spoiled the crop, and voters across the political spectrum feel it. What they haven’t had is a real alternative that started with power instead of hoping to earn it someday.

The progressive caucus already has that power.

The only question left is whether they’re willing to use it.

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Let me get something out of the way right upfront: I am not saying trump hired somebody to shoot at him. I’m not saying the Secret Service waved a gunman through a checkpoint and handed him a map to the rooftop. That’s not what I mean when I say these trump Assassination Attempts® are staged. What I mean, firmly and confidently, is that trump has created an environment where these attempts are not only allowed to happen, but to get just close enough, and trump is ready to capitalize, succeed or fail.

Here’s my theory in plain terms: trump doesn’t need to plan an attempt on his life. All he needs is for security to be loose enough for every event that someone could try. Leave the door cracked, and eventually someone will walk through it. And when they do, here’s trump, already ready with the cameras, the framing, the makeup, the poses, and the soundbite. That’s what is being staged. Not a fall guy or a for hire shooter, the response to a real shooter.

I also think, now that he has survived three of these Assassination Attempts®, trump genuinely believes he’s divinely untouchable. We may be looking at a man who has begun moving through the world like he thinks he has constant heavenly protection, who’s ready for anything because nothing ever really happens to him. He may be beyond seriously entertaining the possibility that one of these people could actually get him. So while his team builds in contingency plans for if something “crazy” happens, he’s no longer losing sleep over it. He’s probably even thrilled, because he knows what to do. Every close call is a resurrection story, and resurrection stories are good for business. And businesss?!?!

THATS THE TRUMP BRAND

The Butler Shooting Was the Closest It’s Ever Come

Think about what actually happened at the Butler Attempt®. That shooter took eight shots. Eight. The first one supposedly clipped trump’s ear, and after that it was IRL rage quitting, firing off 7 more shots because he knew he’d missed his shot, and ended up killing a bystander. A real shooter tried and failed, and he was killed before he got any other chances because they were ready for him. That’s not a conspiracy, that’s just what happened.

Consider how he even got to that roof. Consider the 7 to 10 seconds trump stood there, completely exposed, before anyone from the Secret Service made a move toward him. While Vice President JD Bowman-Vance was pulled away in seconds, trump just stood there like he was waiting for a photographer to get the angle right.

Then, and this is the part I think we all keep coming back to, they let him stand up like a dumbass and raise his fist. While the situation wasn’t fully contained. While no one had confirmed the shooter was the only threat. They let him stand up, pump his fist, and shout “fight, fight, fight” for every camera on the field. That is not standard protective protocol. That is a choreographed moment. That is staged. The only question was whether someone got the only shot that really mattered, and you KNOW they did.

Here’s what makes this different from a tinfoil-hat theory: I’m not asking you to believe that anyone on his team wants trump to be hurt in any way. I’m asking you to notice that the people responsible for keeping him safe seem strangely slow to act until it’s obvious he’s ok and that very few of them get hurt in the performance. Innocent bystanders catch the bullets that miss. People in the crowd die because the shooter had bad aim. The agents? They’re all fine. They got there eventually. Some even got promoted.

So the staged part isn’t that they knew the shooters, or that they were coming; it’s that the moment something started happening, everyone already knew what to do with it: let it begin, end the threat, get to trump, and make it look good. There’s a plan. There’s always been a plan. And so it’s not a plan to stage something going wrong, any more than it’s a plan to prevent something from going wrong. No, it’s a plan to have the stage ready for something to go wrong, and it’s a plan to leverage it when it does.

Now I know how this all sounds. Believe me, I’ve had the internal argument. Part of me doesn’t want to be the guy locked in a closet, connecting dots with pins and yarn on a board in florescent light, pale and sweaty, marble in hand. But we are living under a government operated by people who lie; not occasionally, not stretching the truth, not with embarrassment, or even for any kind of protection, but as simple strategy. Reflexively. Defensively. Without apology. Without consequence. And increasingly, without mercy.

The playbook is simple and they’ve been running it for years: lie about something big, hold the news cycle until the next big thing happens, lie about that, and then repeat over and over again until, by the time anyone circles back, the original lie is buried under twelve new ones. That’s not politics, that’s information warfare aimed at your own citizens. That’s the trump brand, and the staunch embrace of everything MAGA by the Republican Party proves it’s the modern political strategy of the right. The United States of America was supposed to be above this, even immune to it. But not only is it here now, but so far “We the People” have just absorbed it into some kind of new American reality. Instead of rising up, uniting to stand strong, or refusing to cooperate with fascism, Americans just get by. So much for the home of the brave, or whatever ridiculous “American” exceptionalistic fantasy we all thought we’d have in response to a moment like this. Turns out for the most part, it’s “Wow that sucks. Welp, time for work”

Now I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m just someone who’s been paying close attention for a long time. And paying attention right now increasingly means being willing to sit in the discomfort of not knowing what’s true while staying sharp enough to notice when something doesn’t add up.

And right now, a lot of things don’t add up

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I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of the Democratic Party protecting members who do NOT value being Democrats at all. Haven’t we learned this lesson by now? Weren’t Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin good teachers? I know Joe Lieberman wasn’t, but at least that was DECADES ago.

Oh you don’t know Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic nominee for VP who ran with Al Gore? The man who single handedly denied us Medicare For All? The Democrat who spoke at the RNC in 2008 and endorsed John McCain over Barack Obama?? Let’s learn a little about this weak coward in Democratic clothing, shall we?

Joe Lieberman was a man who never deserved to be elevated to the status he achieved. His selection as VP was an effort to show that Gore, who was seen as firmly on the left, was willing to operate in the center, which gives you a hint about what Lieberman was all about. They would go on to win the election, but Florida, Jeb Bush, and the Supreme Court intervened and handed the election to George W. Bush, and we began on the long, steady journey of Republican election interference, which continues unabated to this day. Did they argue and whine and complain about the stolen elections? Of course not, they’re Democrats! Lieberman would go on to be the deciding vote AGAINST the public option in President Barack Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, which would have been an incredible first step towards Medicare For All. Then he left the Democrats to become an Independent before disappearing in obscurity. He’s dead now, but we all continue to suffer from his awful choices.

And then came Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. Did the party learn? Absolutely not, but they sure did. They took Lieberman’s lame efforts, and put their own spin on it, knowing leadership would shrug and turn a blind eye. Let’s break it down.

Kyrsten Sinema was elected to the Senate from Arizona as a progressive Democrat in 2018, riding a blue wave of enthusiasm and grassroots energy. Then she got comfortable. She became famous for her theatrical thumbs-down vote against raising the federal minimum wage, smirking while doing it. She worked alongside Manchin to gut the Democrats attempt at filibuster reform that would have protected voting rights, and prevented a trump second term. She blocked key provisions of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Then, she left the Democratic Party entirely in 2022 to register as an independent, but only after collecting millions in donations from Democratic voters who thought they were funding a Democrat. Did the party give her the boot? I told you already, these are Democrats we’re talking about! She didn’t run for re-election in 2024, and Arizona flipped her seat true blue. Good riddance.

Joe Manchin was the senior senator from West Virginia, a state that had been trending red for years, which his defenders used as a permanent excuse for everything he did. And he did a lot, just not for average Americans. He watered down the Build Back Better Act until it was a shadow of itself. He killed the child tax credit expansion that had cut child poverty nearly in half, probably because he hates kids. He blocked climate provisions, dragged out negotiations for months, made Democrats beg repeatedly, and then often voted no anyway, a common GOP tactic. What did the Democrats do to punish him? Don’t make me laugh, like the jerks before him, he eventually left the party all on his own, announcing he wouldn’t seek re-election and briefly flirting with a third-party presidential run against Biden. Thankfully he’s gone now too.

But the pattern is impossible to miss. These members took Democratic votes, Democratic donations, and Democratic goodwill, and used their positions within the party to undermine their agenda at every critical moment. And the party let them get away with it. Leadership coddled them, negotiated with them, begged them, gave them committee seats, media attention, and legitimacy. The message to the base was clear: we will protect our members no matter what they do to us, or to you.

Which brings us to current Senator John Fetterman. Fetterman is not a moderate. He’s not a maverick. He’s not “keeping it real.” He’s just a miserable DINO, and it’s time the Democratic Party treated him like one.

Fetterman was elected in 2022 as a progressive working-class hero. He wore hoodies. He talked tough. Pennsylvania Democrats turned out for him, donated for him, and defended him through a serious health crisis, because they believed in what he represented, and he came out the other side on the other side. What a way to say thank you, eh?

He was the only Democratic senator to make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. He was the only Democrat to vote to confirm Pam Bondi, the woman who stood up and lied about trump winning Pennsylvania, Fetterman’s own state, as Attorney General. He co-sponsored Republican legislation to detain undocumented immigrants and send them to concentration camps. He backed trump’s military strikes on Iran and called it “a great thing.” He voted repeatedly with Republicans during the government shutdown fight and publicly undercut Chuck Schumer’s strategy while he was doing it. When asked who leads the Democratic Party, he said “trump Derangement Syndrome.” He said he doesn’t believe trump and his billionaire administration are fascists.

A recent poll found that 72% of Pennsylvania Republicans approve of John Fetterman. Only 22% of Democrats do. He has done that math himself and apparently decided he likes those numbers.

Here’s what the Democratic Party needs to understand: there is no version of this that ends well if they stay silent and let Fetterman continue to abuse his position. Lieberman, Sinema, and Manchin apparently taught them nothing. Every time the party absorbs this kind of betrayal without consequence, it tells voters that Democrats don’t fight for anything, don’t stand for anything, and won’t protect anything but themselves.

Kicking Fetterman out of the party won’t be easy. It will be messy and loud, and the right wing media machine will clutch their pearls for two weeks straight. But it would send a strong message to Democratic voters, donors, and supporters that is long overdue: the games are over. The gloves are off. If you want to vote with fascists, find a different party, not here dear. This one has a spine now.

Pennsylvania deserves a senator who actually represents them. Democrats deserve members that actually fight back. Americans deserve an opposition party that actually opposes something. And John Fetterman deserves exactly what Lieberman, Sinema, and Manchin never got:

Consequences.

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White America likes to tell itself a comforting and convenient story. A story where brave and intelligent men gathered in secret candlelit rooms, debated fiercely, compromised reluctantly, and produced a set of documents so powerful, so unique, that they could destroy and outlive kings and never needed an update. A story where we the People seized the reins of history and declared to the rest of the world; rulers and their subjects alike, the idea that we could govern ourselves, thank you very much.

And for a long time, white Americans were absolutely enthralled by that idea. Not because the idea was good, universal, and could be applied equally to everyone, but more so because the people, back then, looked just like them. At least, the people they considered people, but that’s another story for another time.

Democracy Was Easy to Respect and Love, When It Was Exclusive

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were written by white men, many of them wealthy, many of them enslavers, nearly all of them beneficiaries of a rigid racial and social hierarchy that gave them enough education to even determine they had the agency to make the decisions they made. But here’s the part that still matters: the ideals they came up with and wrote down were bigger than any of them were.

Liberty.

Equality before the law.

The consent of the governed.

Checks on power.

The radical notion that authority flows upward, not down.

And of course, the idea that ALL men are created EQUAL.

For generations, white America celebrated these principles because they were aspirational without being threatening. Democracy was a beautiful theory, one that could be selectively applied, delayed, or denied without challenging those who actually held power. And of course, those who held power were held in check themselves by the vote of the people; as long as “the people” still meant the rich, white, god fearing, “native-born”, and culturally dominant men, democracy felt safe.

The Moment Everything Broke

The rupture didn’t come because the Constitution failed. It came because the Constitution, that brilliant and awesome document created years ago and adhered to like gospel, started to work for the people that white America had been holding back.

Civil rights.

Voting rights.

Immigration reform.

Women’s liberation.

Labor protections.

Marriage equality.

Democracy began expanding. Slowly. Imperfectly. But undeniably, and with increasing force until suddenly, we the people weren’t just rich landing owning white men anymore.

They were Black Americans demanding equal protection under the law. They were immigrants from “teeming shores” the world over, not just Northern Europe.

They were workers organizing against corporate power.

They were women refusing subservience.

They were queer people demanding visibility and safety.

They were, in other words, exactly who the Statue of Liberty, itself a gift from our longest ally France depicting a woman embodying freedoms not available to women at the time, who asked for:

The tired. The poor. The huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

And for a large portion of white America, the love affair with democracy ended when those words finally began to ring true.

Equality Begins to Feel Like Theft

Over the last fifty years, the voting record tells a clear story.

Recently, a majority of white voters, acting as the most powerful political bloc in the country, have repeatedly supported movements that:

• Weaken voting rights

• Undermine faith in elections

• Attack the free press

• Expand executive power

• Politicize the judiciary

• Normalize political violence

• Redefine dissent as treason

…all while insisting they are the true defenders of the Constitution, and accusing everyone else of these same grievances they are committing. This isn’t because white Americans suddenly forgot what democracy is. It’s because democracy stopped guaranteeing dominance of the white male.

Equality was reframed as loss. Pluralism as chaos. Accountability as persecution. Shared power as oppression.

And instead of asking whether the system needed to grow stronger to include everyone, the critical mass began to choose something else entirely: control without consent.

The Blame Always Points Downward

Here’s the most revealing part.

As democratic norms erode, the blame is never placed where power actually sits.

Instead, immigrants are blamed for economic instability. People of color are blamed for crime and disorder. The progressive left is blamed for division. Protesters are blamed for violence. Journalists are blamed for mistrust.

Meanwhile, the group with the greatest ability to protect or destroy democratic institutions, the group that still dominates courts, legislatures, media ownership, law enforcement, wealth, and corporate ownership, refuses to acknowledge its own power and role in dismantling them.

This is not coincidence.

It’s displacement.

Yet the people most responsible for weakening our democracy insist they are its primary victims.

The Great Irony

The deepest irony in all of American history may be this: the group that authored the most influential democratic documents in human history began abandoning them the moment democracy stopped centering on them.

Not because the ideals were wrong, but because the ideals were finally being taken seriously by the rest of the population.

Democracy didn’t fail white America.

White America, or more precisely, a politically dominant majority within it, began to fail democracy. The most significant evidence of this is the 1964 Presidential Election, which was the last time the Democratic Party won the majority of the white vote. Lyndon B. Johnson won the election, but the undertones of the election signaled a political shift in the Deep South, who went from being a Democratic stronghold to voting for the anti-Civil Rights candidate of the time, Barry Goldwater, the Republican. After this election, Democrats would never again win a majority of the white vote. Republicans, beginning with Richard Nixon and hitting overdrive with Ronald Reagan, turned their backs on their own history of Abraham Lincoln and progressive politics, and began fully embracing the conservative policies instead.

What Was Actually Promised

The founding documents were never meant to preserve hierarchy forever. They were meant to limit power, not entrench it. They were meant to be expanded, argued over, and applied more fully over time. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson himself said:

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched…We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

The Statue of Liberty wasn’t carved in conditional freedoms. She doesn’t say “but only if you look right.” She doesn’t say “but only if you were here ‘first’.”

She just says: Send them.

And when America was finally asked to live up to that promise; not symbolically, but structurally, choosing comfortable nostalgia over the hard work of principles and progress was apparently just easier.

The Choice Still Standing

The question in front of the country is the same one it has always been:

Do we believe in democracy only when it protects status? Or do we really believe in the ideas of equity, justice, and the rule of law, and the promise that our democracy can deliver the greatest country on Earth?

So we can continue on this path of exclusivity, marching towards boring uniformity and the suppression of what makes us strongest, or we can embrace the reality that different experiences, ideas, and backgrounds grow us into a bigger, better, and stronger country overall.

What’s it going to be America?

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More and more frequently today, political discourse accidentally stumbles onto two ideas that don’t just coexist; they complete each other. Ideas that, when kept separate, feel aspirational. But when fused, become unavoidable.

I’m arguing that these two ideas are:

1. A national strike: a coordinated moment where working people collectively withhold their labor to remind this country who actually keeps it running.

2. Making Election Day a national holiday, because voting should never require permission from your boss.

On their own, both ideas get endlessly debated, endlessly delayed, endlessly diluted. We’re told that without strong Unions, a national strike is unrealistic. We’re told Election Day as a holiday is just straight up politically impossible. We’re told to wait. To be patient. To trust the same institutions that have been actively dismantling our ability to participate in them for decades.

So here’s a radical thought:

What if we stop asking?

What if we act like Election Day already matters more than work, and force the politicians and the corporate elites to deal with that reality?

Why this moment is different

Minnesota showed the nation it can happen last week. We are no longer arguing in theory. We are living under a second trump presidency that has made one thing brutally clear: democracy, the rule of law, and our all mighty Constitution are NOT self-enforcing.

Voter suppression is no longer subtle.

Labor rights can no longer assumed.

The Bill of Rights is an afterthought.

Authoritarian rhetoric is no longer a whimsical hypothetical; ICE is in the streets terrorizing immigrants and murdering American citizens in cold blood.

And we are running out of time.

If we can’t prove, physically, economically, unmistakably, that elections matter more than working for the man, then the people dismantling democracy and escalating war against its citizens will just continue doing so uninterrupted, unbothered, and unchecked.

So let’s merge the two ideas we all claims to support, but no one seems willing to implement: The proposal - Election Day as a people-made holiday where we all strike and vote for a new country.

For the 2026 Midterm Election Day: Tuesday, November 3, we treat it like the national holiday Congress refuses to make it, but it deserves to be.

Not symbolically. Not just online.

Materially.

We withhold our labor to cast our vote. We stop business as usual to prove this is NOT business as usual anymore. We show, in real economic terms, that when democracy is on the line, nothing else takes priority.

You vote. You help others vote. You defend polling locations. You stand in line if necessary. You participate.

And yes, if you’ve already voted early, by mail, or absentee, you still participate in the strike. Because this isn’t just about casting a ballot. It’s about defending the idea that the ballot is sacred enough to shut the country down for a day. If it’s not, then is anything in this country sacred?

“Isn’t a national strike unrealistic?”

Only if you assume Americans are incapable of coordination, which is exactly what those in power are counting on.

A general strike doesn’t start the day of the strike. It starts now:

• By talking openly about it to everyone you know

• By preparing financially where possible NOW

• By coordinating with coworkers, unions, mutual aid groups, and communities for advice and help

• By setting expectations instead of waiting for permission

• By registering to vote, and making sure everyone you know is too

Then it won’t be chaos, but will be disciplined and sustainable.

And that’s the first point we need to prove:

A national strike in the United States of America is not only possible, but inevitable when people decide their democracy is worth it.

“What about people who can’t afford to miss work?”

That’s not an argument against a strike. It’s an indictment of the very system that made missing one day of work a crisis in the first place, the one we are striking AGAINST.

A country that claims to value freedom but structures survival around constant labor compliance is not free. A democracy that punishes participation is not a democracy.

Which leads to the second point we must prove: That elections are more important than anything else in this society, and should be treated as such permanently.

A one-day national strike on Election Day doesn’t solve everything. But it makes the argument impossible to ignore.

This is participation to the fullest, democracy manifested by the people, for the people.

Let’s be clear, because bad-faith actors will try to twist this:

This is not “staying home.”

This is not disengagement.

This is not protest theater.

This is maximum participation in our democratic process.

It is voting and striking.

Democracy and leverage.

Civic duty backed by economic reality.

And those in power need to see it, respect it, and fear it.

The people hoarding wealth at the top love to remind us how “essential” workers are when times are tough, right up until those workers realize their power. So let’s remind them together.

If the billionaires are truly the hardest workers in the room (😂🤣😂🤣), then they can cover for us all for one day. Maybe then, they’d actually earn that morbidly obese paycheck they collect.

If democracy truly matters, the economy can afford to pause. It happened during COVID, and the economy survived. If it can’t, then we’ve learned something important about who this system actuallyserves, values, and protects.

The point isn’t permission. It’s precedent. This is for future generations, who won’t have to ask “What did you do?”

We did THIS.

Congress may never voluntarily give us Election Day as a holiday.

So we the people need to take it.

Once.

Together.

For ALL.

And once the country sees that it can be done; that the sky doesn’t fall, that participation increases, that democracy strengthens, the argument is over.

This may be our last clear chance to prove:

• That a national strike is possible

• That Election Day is sacred

• That “We the People” still means something

Preparation starts now. Not next year. Not when it’s convenient.

Now.

Because rights you don’t exercise, and power you don’t use, are rights and powers you are going to lose. Why give up that power to an undeserving class willingly?!?!

No.

We stop them here, and now.

CHECK YOUR VOTER STATUS HERE:

https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

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Grooming is a sick form of sexual “education” that predators use in the absence of actual sex education in schools. It is deliberate, strategic misinformation designed to make children believe that the abuse that is happening to them is normal, acceptable, loving, or something they are responsible for keeping secret.

From the beginning of time, we’ve known that knowledge is power. Christian mythology itself acknowledges this. The apple didn’t come from the Tree of Sex, it came from the Tree of Knowledge. And simply knowing how the world works was apparently enough to get humanity banished forever, because knowledge threatens control. Throughout history, books have been written, preserved, banned, burned, and buried because of the power they give people to recognize truth and resist harm.

The same principle applies here.

The easiest way to know if you are being harmed, and to stop it, is to understand what harm looks like in the first place.

So in a world where we are constantly uncovering abuse perpetrated against children by family members, family friends, peers, teachers, coaches, priests, pastors, republicans, and anyone else with authority, the question isn’t just why is sex education absent from schools? The real question is: why would anyone fight so hard to keep it out?

The answer is simple. And it’s disturbing.

They want our kids to be ignorant.

Because ignorance is a predator’s greatest ally.

Let’s be clear about what comprehensive sex education actually teaches, because once again, opponents rely on people not knowing any of this: It teaches anatomy, so kids know what the different parts of their body are all called.

It teaches consent, so kids can understand that no one has the right to touch them, or for them touch others, without their explicit and sustained permission.

It teaches boundaries, so kids know that secrets about being touched or touching someone else is not normal.

It teaches bodily autonomy, so kids know their body belongs to them, always.

And critically, it teaches kids that adults can be wrong, abusive, and criminal, not inherently trustworthy simply because they are adults.

That last part is what scares people.

Study after study has shown that children who receive age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education are more likely to recognize abuse, more likely to report it, and less likely to be successfully groomed. Organizations like the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the World Health Organization have all reached the same conclusion: sex education does not increase sexual activity, does not “sexualize” children, and does not corrupt them.

What it does is reduce vulnerability, and predators know that.

Most child sexual abuse does not involve a random stranger in a dark alley. It involves someone the child knows and trusts. Grooming works by normalizing violations slowly, introducing touch as “affection,” framing silence as loyalty, and reframing discomfort as love or obedience. Without education, kids don’t have the language to describe what’s happening to them. Without education, they don’t know that adults should never ask them to keep sexual secrets. Without education, they often believe, either by themselves or because of the abuser, that the abuse is their fault.

That’s not an accident. That’s the system working exactly as designed.

Now let’s address the excuses, because every single one of them collapses under scrutiny.

“It’s the role of the parents to teach this to their own kids at home.”

Many parents simply don’t. Some can’t, because they never got a sexual education themselves. Some won’t, because they’re too busy, uncomfortable, or otherwise unable to. And of course, some are the abusers. A system that relies on every household being self informed and proactive about promoting sexual safety is not a child protection system, it’s just simple negligence.

“Kids are too young to learn about sex.”

Predators don’t wait until kids are “old enough.” Abuse happens early. Yes, even that early. Education saves kids before harm escalates, or at the least, gives them the information they need to ring the alarm.

“Sex ed violates religious beliefs.”

Your beliefs do not override a child’s right to safety. Full stop. If your ideology requires children to remain ignorant of sexual abuse, then your ideology is the problem.

“Sex ed encourages promiscuity.”

This is provably, laughably false. States and countries with comprehensive sex education have lower rates of teen pregnancy, lower rates of STIs, and higher rates of abuse reporting. Reality does not agree with the panic, and it raises suspicion in my opinion.

Because here’s the part no one wants to say out loud:

If you oppose sex education, you are siding, intentionally or not, with the conditions that allow predators to thrive.

You are choosing adult comfort over child safety.

You are choosing silence over prevention.

You are choosing control over protection.

Predators depend on confusion. They depend on shame. They depend on kids not knowing that what’s happening to them is wrong. They feed off of it. They weaponize ignorance, and they have been getting away with it for too long.

Sex education blows it all up.

That’s why it works.

That’s why it’s attacked.

And that’s why the backlash is so loud.

This isn’t about “values.” It’s about power. It’s about who gets to define reality for children, and whether kids are allowed to understand their own bodies well enough to defend themselves.

If we actually cared about protecting children, sex education wouldn’t be controversial at all. It would be mandatory, standardized, evidence-based, and nationwide.

The fact that it isn’t in a male run society tells you everything you need to know.

Ignorance has never protected a single child.

Knowledge has, does, and will.

Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is either deeply, tragically misinformed, or are simply protecting something they don’t want exposed. Bring on the light of knowledge.

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Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: men rule the world.

Everything that exists, everything that happens, and most importantly, everything that doesn’t happen, is because of men. Thats not a slogan. It isn’t ideology. It’s a basic, observable, provable fact. Governments, courts, police departments, corporations, religious institutions, all overwhelmingly male-dominated, all built by men, all maintained by men.

Even the progress women have fought tooth and nail for hasn’t meaningfully disrupted that reality. In many cases, the women who do break through are pressured to overcorrect, to lead like men, to prove they’re “tough enough” for systems that were never designed to protect anyone vulnerable in the first place.

So when you see tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands, of rape kits sitting in police evidence rooms collecting dust, understand this clearly:

That is the fault of men.

And it’s the fault of men twice over.

First, because a man raped someone. Second, because men currently run the system that refuses to punish them properly.

There is no national emergency declaration about rape kits. There is no universal mandate to test them within any time frame. There is no sustained outrage from men in power. There isn’t even much talkabout it.

And if you’re wondering why, you don’t need to look far.

Turn on the news. Look at what’s happening with the Epstein files right now. Look at the frantic efforts to delay, redact, minimize, and black out information that could implicate powerful men. Theres your first clue.

Because rape kits don’t just hold DNA.

They hold truth, and truth is dangerous to men who rely on silence and time to allow them to continue their crimes.

The second clue is the deliberate destruction and omission of meaningful sex education in our schools. That’s not an accident. It isn’t incompetence. It’s strategy.

Children who don’t know what consent is can’t know when it’s been violated.

Children who don’t have language for abuse can’t identify it, much less report it.

Children who are scared and confused are easier to manipulate.

And children are supposed to be our

Predators depend on ignorance. And entire political movements are built around preserving it.

Which brings us to France and the Pelicot trials, and to Gisèle Pelicot, whose husband, Dominique, drugged her and facilitated her rape by 51 different men over years.

The French media has referred to these men as “Mr. Everyman,” because they had no criminal records, no obvious red flags. They were men from all walks of life. Husbands. Fathers. Brothers. Workers. Neighbors. Men who blended in perfectly.

And that’s exactly the point.

The most dangerous lie patriarchy tells is that monsters look like monsters. That rape is committed by strangers in dark alleys instead of by men who go home afterward and kiss their wives and tuck the kids in bed before kissing them goodnight.

The Pelicot case shatters that lie. And it’s precisely why every single rape kit on file must be tested.

Because rape kits don’t care how “normal” a man seems. They don’t care about his reputation. They don’t care about his job, his church, his family, or his excuses.

They expose patterns.

They connect crimes.

They reveal serial predators who depend on the male assumption that women are isolated, unreliable, disposable, or even complicit.

And here’s the part that really makes powerful men uncomfortable:

Some of those men are police officers.

Which is why any serious effort to end rape culture must include mandatory, verified DNA and fingerprint submission for all law enforcement officers, accessible through a nationwide database. No exceptions.

Active officers. Former officers. Fired officers. Retired officers. Anyone who has ever held law enforcement authority should be required to participate.

This isn’t anti-police. It’s pro-accountability.

If officers aren’t committing sexual violence, they have nothing to fear. If they are, the badge should not protect them, nor should they have access to the very kits that would implicate them.

The fact that this idea is controversial tells you everything you need to know about who they’re protecting.

Because the patriarchy does not protect women.

It protects men, especially violent ones, from any meaningful consequences.

Untested rape kits aren’t a bureaucratic failure. They’re a moral choice. A declaration that women’s pain is inconvenient, that justice can wait, and that powerful men are more important than the truth.

Now, testing every single rape kit won’t end the patriarchy overnight. But it will do something the patriarchy cannot survive long-term:

It will make men accountable.

It will drag predators into the light.

It will replace silence with evidence.

And that’s why it’s resisted so fiercely, and why it must be taught against with absolute severity.

And if anyone still thinks this is abstract, if anyone believes the failure to test rape kits is just “underfunding” or “bureaucratic backlog”, then they need to learn the name John David Norman.

Norman was not hiding in the shadows.

He was a known child sex trafficker operating openly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He ran an organized trafficking ring targeting homeless and runaway boys, advertising his operation under the fake cover of a “youth service” foundation. He networked with other predators. He moved children across state lines. He left paper trails. Victims reported him. And he was caught. Multiple times.

And the government let him continue.

Over and over again.

Norman was arrested. Released. Allowed to relocate. Allowed to rebrand. Allowed to keep operating. Law enforcement agencies knew who he was. Courts knew what he was doing. And instead of dismantling his network, they treated him like a simple inconvenience, a problem to be shuffled elsewhere.

That is not failure.

That is permission.

Norman’s crimes didn’t persist because evidence didn’t exist. They persisted because the men in power chose not to act on it. Why? Because exposing him would have meant exposing other, powerful men. Because following the truth all the way through would have made those powerful men uncomfortable.

Sound familiar? Thats because that is how Jeffery Epstein operated. Lots of powerful people knew for years what was going on, yet he never really paid for his crimes. Even when he finally ended up in a cell, the patriarchy allowed him to die before he could stand trial and reveal too much, and how he died it can’t explain, and will never have to. Because men are in charge.

This is exactly why untested rape kits are so dangerous.

Because predators like John Norman, Jeffery Epstein, and Dominique Pelicot do not operate alone. They rely on systems. They rely on silence. They rely on other, powerful men to protect them. They rely on the assumption that no one will connect the dots.

Rape kits are those dots.

They are time-stamped, location-anchored proof that patterns exist. They can show repeat offenses. They can expose networks. They can reveal that “isolated incidents” are anything but.

And when those kits go untested, the state isn’t neutral. It’s complicit.

Which is why testing them quietly, behind closed doors, is no longer enough.

If we are serious, truly serious, about ending sexual violence, especially against children, then rape kits must be tested publicly.

Not theatrically.

Not vindictively.

But transparently, in real time, with full documentation.

Every kit logged. Every test recorded. Every match announced. Names included. Positions included. Badges, titles, offices, churches, corporations, everything included.

Front-page news, because secrecy is the oxygen predators breathe.

John David Norman, Jeffery Epstein, and Dominique Pelicot survived to abuse for as long as they did because their crimes were treated as embarrassing, inconvenient, or too disruptive to fully expose. Because institutions prioritized stability over women and children. Because these men trusted that silence would protect them. And it did.

Public testing removes that protection.

It tells every predator in every position of authority: You will not be shielded. You will not be quietly transferred. You will not be allowed to disappear.

More importantly, it tells survivors: Your evidence matters. Your truth will not be buried. You are important.

And it tells the next John David Norman, Jeffery Epstein, Dominique Pelicot, and the man who is operating right now, under a different name, with better lawyers and institutional cover, that the era of protection is over.

Some “men” will say this is too extreme. Because there’s always an excuse.

What’s actually extreme is allowing tens of thousands of rape kits to sit untested while children are abused, women are silenced, and predators are quietly protected by the very systems meant to stop them.

Testing every single rape kit publicly won’t erase past harm.

But it will do something patriarchy has never voluntarily done:

It will choose truth over power.

It will choose children over institutions.

It will choose accountability over comfort.

And that is why it terrifies the men who benefit most from silence, and why it must happen now.

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One of the basic truths we’re taught from birth is that you should always tell the truth. The truth will set you free. Honesty is the best policy. Liars burn in hell. We are raised to believe that truth is a moral good that carries its own power. But over the last two weeks, we’ve been learning more and more about truth, and about how many, MANY, people tried to tell it. Unfortunately, who they told that truth to turned out to be more important, or at least more consequential, than the truth itself.

The lie isn’t that victims aren’t believed.

The lie is that belief leads to justice.

Instead of bringing truth into the light, too many people are working overtime to make sure those truths stay hidden, buried, or quietly neutralized. Which means we now have to confront a darker reality: it simply isn’t enough to tell the truth. You have to tell it to the right people. That raises a question we should have answered a long time ago: who do we trust with the truth, and how do we make sure it gets out, and stays out in the open?

Media is not a reliable option. The current legacy media landscape is billionaire-owned and billionaire-operated. The rich are completely complicit, as evidenced by the Epstein file debacle and the soft-glove reporting around the crimes and connections of the current billionaire administration. Media can expose. Media can outrage. Media can bury. Media can generate clicks and move on. What it cannot do is enforce consequences.

Law enforcement is also not a reliable option, because being taken seriously is far too often a coin flip. As a wise man once said, “some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses,” and that truth becomes more apparent the more stories you hear from women, girls, and yes, men, who report abuse to the “right” people and get absolutely nowhere. Rape kits get collected and then sit on shelves for years, untested, untouched, forgotten. The people we trust to enforce the law also possess the power to break it with impunity; and they will use that impunity when it suits them, or the people they know. A lot of bad people commit crimes in the first place because they know someone on the force, or someone in the courthouse, will have their back. That’s how charges get reduced to nothing. That’s how cases disappear. That’s how monsters stay free.

Which brings us to two cases you may or may not be familiar with: Brock Turner and Jesse Mack Butler.

Brock Turner was caught on top of an unconscious woman behind a dumpster by two heroic men who intervened and held him down until police arrived. He was convicted of three felony counts: assault with intent to rape an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object, and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object. Prosecutors recommended a six-year prison sentence. Judge Aaron Persky, who attended the same college as Turner, sentenced him instead to six months in jail. Turner served three.

Six years was already a light sentence. Reducing it to six months was a moral catastrophe. Persky would later be recalled by California voters, the first judge removed from the bench in 86 years, after it came to light that this was not an anomaly. In a prior case, he allowed photos of an underage rape victim taken at an unrelated party a year later to be shown to a jury; a not-so-subtle way of telling them she “asked for it.” When confronted during the recall, Persky said he had no regrets and would rule the same way again. Sixty-one percent of voters disagreed.

Then there’s Jesse Mack Butler, a case that is, somehow, even worse.

Butler strangled his girlfriend until she passed out, videotaped himself raping her, and threatened to kill her and her family if she told anyone. Doctors said she was close to death. He’s also accused of committing similar acts against another victim. The photos of the abuse are sickening. Facing up to 78 years in prison, Butler should never have seen daylight again. Instead, Assistant District Attorney Debra Vincent pushed to have him designated a youthful offender, a move Special Judge Susan Worthington approved. The result? A plea deal. Community service. Counseling. Rehabilitation.

Ten rape-related charges. Two victims. One protective order violation. Seventy-eight years reduced to a slap on the wrist.

How is this possible?

Connections.

These two cases are not outliers. They are proof of concept. They show that you can tell the right people, present evidence, endure a trial, even secure a conviction, and still be ignored when it matters most. You can expose a monster, and the law will let him walk. And yet, victims are still asked, “Why didn’t you say something?” or “Why did you wait so long?”

Here is the answer: even when you do everything right, the system can, and will, still betray you.Sometimes telling the truth leaves you worse off than if you’d just stayed silent and tried to survive on your own.

So the question becomes unavoidable: who can you tell? What options do victims have to hold offenders accountable when the justice system refuses, or outright fails to do so? How do you make sure crimes are never allowed to be quietly forgotten in the absence of real punishment?

Right now, the answer is uncomfortable but honest: nothing exists.

So let’s make it exist.

What we need is a public, searchable database of offenders who received disproportionately light sentences for violent sexual crimes, a sentencing accountability registry. Not based on rumor. Not based on accusations. Based on convictions, plea deals, sentencing guidelines, and outcomes.

If someone was convicted of rape, sexual assault, or violent sexual abuse, and the punishment was drastically reduced from prosecutorial recommendations or statutory guidelines, that record should not vanish into obscurity. The database would show the charges, the original sentencing range, the final sentence, the judge, the prosecutor, and the stated rationale for leniency. No editorializing. No commentary. Just facts.

This would not be a new punishment. It would not violate due process. Courts already publish this information; it’s simply scattered, inaccessible, and intentionally difficult to connect. This would be transparency, not vengeance. Accountability, not outrage.

And here’s the point: if the justice system insists on forgetting, public memory must become its own form of accountability.

Paired with a public awareness campaign, this database would ensure these cases don’t quietly disappear. Journalists could reference it. Advocates could cite it. Communities could use it to pressure prosecutors and judges. Survivors would know that someone, somewhere, is keeping score when the system refuses to.

Because “rehabilitation” without accountability is just protection by another name. Leniency is not mercy, it’s permission, and identification. And when the system repeatedly identifies with perpetrators over victims, it forfeits the right to control the narrative.

We tell people to be brave enough to tell the truth.

What we never tell them is that truth still needs the right audience to matter.

If the courts won’t remember what these men did, then we must.

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America already has a doctrine that says you don’t have to run when your life is in danger. It’s called stand your ground. But let’s stop pretending this law is neutral. It isn’t. It was built by men, interpreted by men, enforced by men, and overwhelmingly benefits men; specifically men who know how to weaponize calm voices, authority, and plausible deniability.

Women don’t seem to ever get that luxury. Women get cross-examined. Women get doubted. Women get told they misunderstood, overreacted, provoked it, stayed too long, left too late, trusted the wrong person, or “should have known better.”

And for some women, trafficked women, sex workers, undocumented women, Native American women on reservations, trans women, the system doesn’t just doubt them. It barely even acknowledges they exist.

Abuse Is Not a Moment, It Is a System, and This System Protects Abusers

The law still pretends violence is a single, simple event: a flash of danger, a sudden choice, spirit the moment decisions, a nice clean narrative.

That fiction collapses immediately when you look at how abuse actually works.

Abuse is ongoing.

It is predictive.

It is designed to trap, and blend in.

And one of its most ignored and most lethal forms is stalking.

As previously discussed, stalking is NOT awkward persistence or unwanted attention.

It is pre-violence.

It is surveillance.

It is rehearsal.

It is a warning shot that says: I know where you are, and I can reach you whenever I want, and currently, the law says yes sir, you absolutely can.

For women who are stalked, especially by partners, pimps, traffickers, or former clients, the threat is not hypothetical. It is not “potential.” It is active.

Yet the law insists they all wait for the final act to at least be attempted, before it can even begin to think about acting to defend them.

Vulnerability Is Not Random. It Is Engineered.

Let’s be clear about who the current system fails the hardest.

Trafficked women

Trafficked women are already living under coercion, violence, debt bondage, and constant surveillance. Yet when they defend themselves against traffickers or buyers, they are almost never treated as survivors. They are treated as criminals who “chose” their circumstances. In other words, you should have known better.

Self-defense laws must explicitly recognize trafficking and coercive control as ongoing, life-threatening conditions, not isolated incidents.

Sex workers

Prostitutes are among the most assaulted, stalked, raped, and murdered women in America. And yet the law treats them as inherently unreliable, inherently guilty, and inherently disposable. In other words, she was asking for it.

If a woman cannot rely on police for protection, because calling them might get her arrested, then the law has already abdicated its role. In that vacuum, self-defense must be absolute.

Undocumented women

Illegal immigrants are uniquely vulnerable to abuse because their abusers know exactly how to silence them: deportation threats, custody threats, financial threats. Because let’s face it, calling the cops for these women just simply isn’t an option. In other words, you don’t belong here anyway.

A woman who knows calling 911 could destroy her life is still entitled to survive it. Her immigration status should never be used to question the legitimacy of her fear or her right to defend herself.

Native American women on reservations

Native American women experience some of the highest rates of sexual assault and domestic violence in the country, often at the hands of non-Native men who know jurisdictional loopholes will protect them. In other words, no one cares about you.

When the law refuses to act because it “doesn’t have jurisdiction,” then it forfeits the moral authority to punish those women who act to save their own lives.

Trans women

Trans women, and especially trans women of color, are among the most violently targeted people in the country. They face disproportionate rates of assault, sexual violence, stalking, and murder, while simultaneously being treated by police, courts, and juries as deceptive, unstable, or inherently suspect. When trans women defend themselves, their gender is often put on trial before their attacker ever is. In other words, you shouldn’t even exist.

Many trans women avoid police entirely because contact with law enforcement runs the risk of escalating danger rather than reducing it; misgendering, harassment, arrest, or outright dismissal are common outcomes. In prisons and jails, “protective custody” often means solitary confinement or placement with male populations, creating further opportunities for violence. The message is crystal clear here: the system will not protect you, and it may actively harm you, because the system is not here for you or your kind.

Men Are Given All Sorts of Leeway and Benefits of the Doubt. Women Are Given Nothing But Suspicion and Dismissal.

This is the core imbalance. Men are allowed to:

• claim fear without proof,

• escalate without consequence,

• frame themselves as victims even when history says otherwise.

Women, meanwhile, are expected to:

• meticulously document their terror,

• endure escalating harm,

• survive long enough with proof to convince someone else it was all real.

A man can kill a stranger in a parking lot and tell everyone he felt threatened, and *BOOM*, the law says “you were free to stand your ground, sir!”

A woman can survive years of abuse, stalking, trafficking, or confinement and still be asked “why, if you was so scared, did you not just walk away honey?”

That is NOT justice, or fair. It’s gendered leniency dressed up as neutrality, and it’s beyond time it’s expanded to cover the real victims.

Police Must Stop Treating Abuse as a “Both Sides” Dispute

Nowhere is this failure more obvious than in law enforcement.

By the time police are called and arrive on the scene, abusers are calm, cool, and collected. They joke around with the male officers, express bewilderment to any officers that are women, and maintain innocence. Survivors, on the other hand, are often traumatized, incoherent, panicked, or in any other state of shock, and understandably so. But far too often, police see the calm, cool, collected man, and believe him.

Officers must be trained, and legally required to:

• recognize coercive control,

• understand trauma responses,

• and defer to women’s accounts in domestic, stalking, and exploitation cases, even when the man claims to be the victim.

Especially when the woman belongs to a group the system already marginalizes. Because “neutrality” in an unequal system is just bias with extra frosting.

Rewrite the Law. Explicitly. Unapologetically.

If stand your ground laws can presume a man’s fear is reasonable, simply because he feels it, then the law can, and must, presume a woman’s fear is reasonable, whether there is evidence of abuse, stalking, trafficking, coercive control, or just because she feels it.

That means statutes must explicitly include:

• Stalking as a qualifying imminent threat

• Patterns of abuse, not just single incidents

• Trafficking, prostitution, and coercion as non-consensual ongoing danger

• A presumption of reasonableness for women acting against documented abusers out of fear

• Immunity from prosecution when force is used to end a credible, ongoing threat; including lethal force.

Yes. Including that.

Because when the state fails to protect women, it does not get to punish them for surviving.

Abuse Should Trigger Immediate Legal Escape

The law must also give all women a guaranteed, lawful exit:

• Immediate divorce upon credible evidence of abuse or stalking

• No waiting periods

• No forced mediation

• No confrontation requirements

• No ineffective restraining orders

• Full financial, housing, and custody protections

A woman should not need permission to leave someone who has already proven they are dangerous. And that proof needs the be believed when it’s reported, or none of this matters.

This Only Sounds Radical, Because It’s Overdue.

This is not about encouraging violence. It’s about acknowledging reality, and protecting those who do what needs to be done, when no one else will act.

The system already decides whose fear matters. It already decides whose life is expendable. It already decides who gets grace and who gets a cold cell.

Right now, those decisions favor men, including violent ones, and abandon the women most at risk, who need the protection more than anyone else.

If America can understand a man standing his ground in a parking lot, it can understand a woman standing her ground against an abuser, a stalker, a trafficker, or a system that refuses to protect her.

And if it can’t? Then the law isn’t about justice.

It’s about control, and women, all women, have paid that price long enough. In 2026, things need to change.

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In 2026, let’s normalize something we’ve all spent far too long pretending is radical: protecting women before they’re assaulted, kidnapped, or murdered. Let’s stop waiting for bruises, bodies, and chalk outlines before the law decides it’s allowed to care. Let’s start giving women the legal tools they need to defend themselves from the predators we KNOW exist, and start putting these monsters away before they leave a trail of bodies. First up on the journey: making stalking a felony nationwide with a 20 year minimum sentence.

I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit listening to YouTube documentaries about murderers, serial killers, and the court cases that followed them. It’s macabre, sure, but it makes folding laundry and other chores easier, and unlike our justice system, I actually notice patterns. And one pattern kept slapping me in the face. Over and over again, the same detail would surface: he had been caught stalking before.

Not once. Not maybe. Every single time.

Before the murders.

Before the spree.

Before the “no one could have seen this coming” press conference.

Victims reported it. Law enforcement saw it. Courts saw it. Judges shrugged at it. And then people died.

Stalking is not a coincidence. It is not a misunderstanding. It is not romance gone wrong. It is rehearsal.

Now let’s be clear about what stalking actually is, because people love to intentionally pretend it’s vague.

Stalking is not walking in the same direction for a few blocks. It’s not noticing you get off at the same train stop. It’s not awkwardly trying to introduce yourself once.

Stalking is patterned, repeated, unwanted intrusion into another person’s life.

It’s following someone home, again and again.

It’s waiting outside their job, apartment, house or even friends houses.

It’s monitoring schedules.

It’s leaving “gifts” that feel more like warnings.

It’s planting tracking devices.

It’s showing up “by coincidence” too many times to count.

It’s persistent messages after being told to stop.

It’s threats, spoken or implied, to the victim or their family.

Stalking is behavior that would make any reasonable person afraid for their own safety. And the most dangerous thing about it? It’s shockingly easy to get away with.

Because we’ve decided that “innocent until proven guilty” means “we must wait until someone bleeds.”

That’s not a legal standard. That’s cowardice dressed up as principle.

“Innocent until proven guilty” was never meant to be a force field that allows known predators to operate openly while victims are told to document their fear and hope for the best. The presumption of innocence does not require the state to ignore clear, repeated, escalating conduct that any functional adult understands as dangerous.

When the law protects the stalker’s freedom of movement more aggressively than the victim’s right to live without terror, the law has failed at its most basic purpose.

The First Amendment Is Not the Problem. Our Imagination Is.

Every time this conversation comes up, someone hides behind the First Amendment like it’s a church for abusers.

Here’s the reality: the First Amendment does not protect stalking. It never has.

Stalking is not speech.

It is conduct.

And even when it involves words, messages, letters, and posts, it becomes unprotected the moment it turns into a course of conduct intended to intimidate, control, or instill fear in someone else.

Courts already recognize this. We already criminalize:

• Harassment

• Threats

• Witness intimidation

• Extortion

• Domestic abuse

All of these can involve speech. None of them are protected.

The Constitution does not require us to pretend that a months-long pattern of obsession and surveillance is the same thing as simply expressing an opinion. The law has always distinguished between expression and repetitive behavior that causes harm.

Stalking sits firmly in the second category.

Here’s what a serious stalking law looks like; one that survives constitutional review because it regulates behavior, not content.

Felony Stalking Statute

A person commits the offense of Felony Stalking when they knowingly engage in a course of conduct directed at a specific individual that:

1. Involves two or more acts, including but not limited to:

• Following or surveilling

• Appearing at locations associated with the victim

• Monitoring movements or communications

• Unwanted contact after explicit notice to stop

• Use of tracking technology without consent

• Leaving objects or messages intended to communicate presence or control

2. Is unwanted and persistent

3. Would cause a reasonable person to fear for their safety or the safety of others, or to suffer substantial emotional distress.

Course of conduct means a pattern of behavior evidencing continuity of purpose.

Felony Stalking is a violent felony offense, regardless of whether physical contact has occurred.

Penalty:

• Mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years imprisonment

• No suspension or probation

• Early release prohibited without demonstrated rehabilitation and victim notification and consent

Affirmative defenses shall not include claims of romantic intent, misunderstanding, lack of explicit threats, or First Amendment rights.

Why 20 Years Is Not Arbitrary, It’s Preventative and Necessary.

The knee-jerk reaction from some (most likely male) will be: “Twenty years? Isn’t that excessive?”

No. What’s excessive is how long we’ve pretended stalking is harmless until someone ends up dead. It’s appropriate.

Stalking is one of the strongest predictors of future lethal violence. Not a weak correlation. Not a maybe. A documented, repeated, statistically undeniable one.

We already impose long sentences for crimes based on:

• Predictability of harm

• Escalation patterns

• Resistance to deterrence

Stalking checks all three boxes.

Short sentences do not work because stalking is not impulsive, it’s obsessive. It does not respond to warnings, restraining orders, or slap-on-the-wrist penalties. It escalates precisely because the stalker learns the system will not stop them. They can easily wait out short sentences, and it forces victims, who need time more than anything else, to make rash decisions to avoid the stalker reoffending once they get out, and goes the stalker more reason to act violently toward the victim.

A 20-year minimum does many critical things, including:

1. Incapacitation- It physically removes a known danger for a long period of time

2. Interruption- It breaks the escalation cycle before it turns lethal for YEARS

3. Deterrence- It signals that stalking is not a “gray area,” but a life-ending risk that will not be put up with

1. Peace of Mind- It gives victims the understanding and the confidence that their safety is taken seriously.

2. Puts Fear in Criminals- It forces those who may be thinking of stalking to weigh the very real, severe punishment for their actions.

This isn’t about just about punishment. It’s about containment, prevention, deterrence, and the opportunity for victims to do whatever they feel they need to, with time to spare. We need to intervene because we recognize pre-violence when we see it.

Stalking is pre-violence.

It is the phase where obsession hardens into entitlement. Where surveillance replaces curiosity. Where the stalker stops seeing another human being and starts seeing a possession that refuses to behave, and needs to be heeled. It’s literally the first step all killers take.

And we already know how this story ends, because we’ve watched it end the same way over and over again. The only mystery isn’t what happens next, it’s why we keep pretending we didn’t see it coming, or that we couldn’t do something about it.

A society that refuses to act on stalking until after someone is physically harmed is not defending liberty. It is outsourcing violence to the future and pretending to be shocked when it finally arrives.

If we know stalking predicts murder, and we do, then failing to treat it as a serious violent felony isn’t caution, it’s straight up negligence.

And that negligence has a body count.

So once again, in 2026, let’s stop pretending we don’t know what this is. Let’s stop hiding behind the First Amendment like it’s a hostage negotiator for predators. And let’s finally build a legal system that intervenes before the blood. Let’s give women the safety and comfort that only comes from truly helping them. Let’s make stalking a 20 year felony, nationwide.

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Europe, sit down for a second. An American ally, trapped under trump’s second regime, is trying to hand you a warning from the future. Because what Viktor Orbán is doing to you right now is the exact same mistake America made when Joe Biden decided to play by the rules and politely hand over power to a man he openly said was a fascist, who doesn’t play by the rules, and was set on dismantling democracy in America.

Now we’re living inside the flaming wreckage of that “peaceful transition.”

The European Union is currently unable to give Ukraine the military support it desperately needs because of one man. One autocrat. One petty dictator from Hungary who has discovered that EU unanimity is basically a “press this button to paralyze Europe” cheat code. And he’s smashing that button like it’s his life’s purpose.

Let’s be honest here: this is not diplomacy. This is not democracy. This is sabotage from inside the house.

And the rest of the EU? You’re acting like your hands are tied by rules that were designed for a world that no longer exists.

You’re telling yourselves, “Well, we have unanimity requirements, and we have to respect the process, and we can’t just ignore a member state.”

Yes, actually, you can.

And you should.

And if you don’t, the cost will be catastrophic.

Let me be blunt in the very American way:

Rules that are being used against you are no longer rules. They are weapons.

And you do not owe obedience to a weapon pointed at your own head.

Europe, You Need to Admit What’s Happening

You have a country inside your union whose leadership is actively working on behalf of Putin’s interests. Orban isn’t neutral. He isn’t cautious. He is not “the dissenting voice in a diverse coalition.”

He is a saboteur.

And a functioning union cannot allow one saboteur to dictate the future of an entire continent.

Because that’s what this is: the future of Europe.

Mutual protection. Mutual defense. Shared prosperity. That was the whole point of the EU. The ideal was simple: no one stands alone anymore. But now? You’re allowing one corrupt little tyrant ALONE to hold 450 million people hostage because “those are the rules.”

But here’s the truth:

The rules were written assuming everyone in the room was acting in good faith.

Your problem is that you kept the rules but lost the good faith.

Welcome to America’s January 2025 Moment

I need you to understand just how familiar this looks from over here.

In early January 2025, President Biden was still in office. The entire Democratic Party was openly telling the country, loudly, repeatedly, that MAGA and trump was a fascist, authoritarian movement. That he’d dismantle democracy. That he’d weaponize the state. That he’d go after his enemies. That he’d unleash chaos at home and surrender to Putin abroad.

They believed it.

They campaigned on it.

They warned everyone.

And then, when the moment came…they decided to respect norms and hand him the keys anyway.

They chose decorum over safety.

They chose tradition over preservation.

They chose the image of democracy over the substance of it. And their excuse? This is what America voted for.

And now America is living through the consequences, which could have been avoided if one man had the courage to break the rules. Would it have been right? Of course not. Does that matter?

NO.

This is where Europe is standing right now: at the exact same cliff’s edge.

If you don’t remove the obstacle in your way, if you don’t neutralize the saboteur inside the union, if you aren’t willing to do whatever it takes, you are going to wake up one day and realize you politely allowed Putin to redraw the future of your continent.

Because Here’s the Question Nobody in Brussels Seems Willing to Say Out Loud:

Who is going to stop Putin if you can’t?

If you can’t do whatever it takes stop him now, while Ukraine is still fighting tooth and nail, what makes you think you’ll magically find the strength later?

What makes you think he stops at Ukraine?

What makes you think he isn’t watching your paralysis with absolute delight?

Putin is doing whatever it takes to win. He is going to do whatever it takes to win.

You cannot keep waiting for things to “get better.”

They will not.

You have to make things better.

And sometimes making things better means choosing survival over process. Breaking some rules. Doing whatever it takes to win, because winning really is all that matters.

Hard Times Need Hard People

This moment is exactly why alliances exist.

This moment is what the EU was built to prevent: unilateral aggression, unchecked authoritarianism, and the continent sleepwalking into disaster because polite politics got in the way of common sense.

One country should never be able to overrule the will of the entire union, because that’s not democracy, that’s a hostage situation. And this hostage taker is wearing a Hungarian flag pin.

You need emergency systems in your institutions for moments exactly like this. If unanimity means inaction, unanimity must be abandoned. If a member state is actively undermining the union, it must be sidelined. If the rules are being exploited to guarantee your defeat, you have a moral obligation to break them, and you can rewrite them later, when you WIN.

Not because breaking rules is good, but because survival is always more important than decorum.

Europe, you must choose safety over ceremony.

Because if you don’t, Ukraine will fall.

If Ukraine falls, Europe will fracture.

If Europe fractures, Russia will expand.

And once that happens, you won’t be debating procedural legitimacy anymore; you’ll be debating borders, refugees, energy blackmail, and the re-arming of the continent for the largest conflict since 1945.

If you want peace, you need to fight for it now.

If you want stability, you need to defend it now.

If you want a Europe worth passing on to the next generation, you cannot let a mini-autocrat dictate the fate of 27 nations.

Kick Hungary out.

Ignore Hungary.

Work around Hungary.

Strip their voting power until they rejoin reality.

Whatever you choose, do something.

Just don’t repeat America’s mistake.

Don’t surrender your future in the name of politeness.

Because trust me: the regret comes fast, the consequences come faster, and hope fades quickly.

DO. NOT. FAIL.

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“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

- John F Kennedy

For years, in the warped landscape of modern politics, in the era of MAGA and trump, Fox News, billionaire propaganda, and the endless assault on the social safety net, that quote might sound suspiciously like an anti-welfare punchline that might have come out in today’s news cycle. The kind of thing Republicans weaponize to suggest that poor people are freeloading welfare queens and the government shouldn’t lift a finger to help anyone, less those lazy people become dependent on government.

That framing always felt wrong to me. But out of context, it makes sense, and it wasn’t until I finally dug into the actual context of the line that I realized just how wrong it was, and how evil it is to twist its meaning.

Kennedy wasn’t lecturing the poor.

He wasn’t scolding the vulnerable.

He wasn’t laying out some proto-Reagan “bootstrap” lifting gospel.

He was doing the complete opposite.

He believed, fiercely, in using government to help people survive, thrive, and live with dignity. The man expanded Social Security, expanded food programs, expanded housing support, expanded unemployment benefits, and laid the groundwork for Medicare. His efforts helped define for an entire generation what an American citizen was. He literally said:

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

So no, Kennedy wasn’t telling people to reject help. He was telling the rest of us to show up for our democracy. He was saying that America isn’t a spectator sport. He was calling for civic service, participation, and solidarity. Get involved. Get excited about your country, and your country will excite you.

That’s the context I never heard. And once you hear it, it changes the whole meaning. It makes you wonder why we don’t all already know it. Because Kennedy wasn’t warning people about “dependency.”

He was warning us about complacency.

And that brings me to the real question I want to pose today, the question we should all be screaming into the national void:

What’s the point of being an American?

Because let’s be honest: the right has spent decades trying to redefine what an America is, from the city on a hill, into some twisted Hunger Games tribute to rugged individualism, where starving people are blamed for their own hunger, where hard working but struggling families are mocked as failures, and where every social program to help anyone in need becomes a punchline for a Fox News host who hasn’t see the inside of grocery store in decades.

They love to paint welfare recipients as lazy losers, the “dregs of society,” moochers, parasites, whatever slur-of-the-moment their consultants have means tested in the suburbs that week.

But here’s the thing they will never say out loud:

Nobody WANTS to be on welfare.

If welfare were the luxury lifestyle Republicans pretend it is, if it were actually an endless buffet of free cash, free time, and zero responsibility, then guess what?

THEY would be on it too.

Are they idiots for choosing to work?

Of course not.

They know welfare isn’t a joyride.

They know it’s survival.

And they know they can’t survive on it.

So why do they say it?

Because they think we are the idiots.

Because they think if they repeat a lie long enough, we’ll just accept it blindly as fact.

Because they only need one person to fall for it, one neighbor, one uncle, one Facebook conspiracy theorist, and suddenly the lie has a host body. It grows legs, gains credibility, spreads like a virus, and before you know it, half the country is infected with a story that never had a molecule of truth in it, an the other half is struggling to counter it.

It’s divide-and-conquer 101.

And here’s the part we always forget:

Unity is the most powerful force humanity has ever created.

A united front is unstoppable.

A united people are unbeatable.

A united working class; across race, gender, region, income, and ideology, is the single greatest threat to the oligarchs and authoritarians who currently control our political machinery.

That’s why the right is anti-union.

That’s why they attack collective bargaining, teachers’ unions, nurses’ unions, Amazon workers, Starbucks workers, even civil unions for our queer sisters and brothers, any form of solidarity at all. But you live in the UNITED States of America. THATS A UNION.

And unity threatens their control.

Right now, we are losing because we are divided.

We’re losing because we’ve forgotten that citizenship requires participation.

We’re losing because so many of us were tricked into believing that democracy is something that happens to us instead of something that depends on us.

When Kennedy unleashed his challenge on America, he was saying:

You live here. So stand up for this place.

You benefit from this country. So defend it.

Your freedom exists because others fought for it. So carry it forward.

Today, we need that message more than ever; not as a call for sacrifice on behalf of billionaires, but as a call for solidarity on behalf of each other.

Our representative democracy is the beating heart of this nation, and it only survives if we show up for it; not just on Election Day, but every other day too. In our communities. In our workplaces. In our conversations. In our refusal to be divided against ourselves.

Because if we fail; if we let ourselves be turned against our neighbors, if we let lies define our politics, if we let apathy replace action, then Kennedy’s other line becomes the prophecy that kills the republic:

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

And he was right.

If we abandon the many, we lose the Whole. Damn. Thing.

So I’ll ask it again one more time for the rich:

What’s the point of being an American?

If it isn’t solidarity, if it isn’t unity, if it isn’t dignity, if it isn’t community, if it isn’t democracy, if it isn’t power…then what the hell are we even doing here?

It’s time to decide.

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PREFACE FROM ME

What follows is a partial transcription of the MAGA Healthcare Reform Act of 2025, an internal draft circulating among high-ranking officials and approved advisors to president trump.

I got in. I copied everything I could. And I got booted out.

After 40 seconds, the system detected unauthorized access.

At 90 seconds, files began self-encrypting.

And after only 120 seconds, I got locked out so hard my computer screamed.

As a result, this is only a portion of the full bill, the pieces I could copy/paste before the digital death squads terminated my session. The rest is buried in a classified folder stamped:

“IF LEAKED, DENY. IF CONFIRMED, DENY.”

What you’re about to read is not satire from their perspective.

It’s only satire to sane people…

THE REPUBLICAN HEALTH CARE PLAN OF 2025 (TrumpUltraCare)

A Bill To Modernize American Healthcare, Expand Freedom, Reduce Costs, and Ensure Americans Receive Care

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as:

“The Common Sense Healthcare Act.”

(aka, internally: “TrumpUltraCare Plus”)

⸻

SECTION 2. PURPOSE AND FINDINGS.

Congress finds that:

1. The United States healthcare system is burdened by unnecessary regulations, overuse by sick people, and an excessive number of citizens refusing to simply “walk it off,” or “rub some dirt on it.”

2. Government intervention in healthcare has produced a culture of dependency where individuals expect treatment even when they can’t afford it.

3. The best way to ensure high-quality care for all Americans is to make sure fewer Americans live long enough to need it.

Therefore, this Act shall return healthcare to its rightful owner: the Free Market, guided by God, trump, and whatever insurance companies decide is medically cost-effective.

TITLE I: GENERAL PROVISIONS

SEC. 101. TRUMPULTRACARE ESTABLISHED.

(a) TrumpUltraCare™ will replace existing federal healthcare programs with a more flexible system in which Americans can purchase whatever care they can reasonably beg, borrow, or crowdsource.

(b) TrumpUltraCare™ shall allow healthcare providers to:

1. Set any price they want.

2. Decline treatment for “unprofitable vibes.”

3. Charge a Freedom Fee™ for simply entering the building.

(c) Hospitals may display patriotic slogans such as “EARN YOUR HEALTH, “BLEEDING IS A CHOICE,” or “PAIN IS PATRIOTIC, WHINING IS TREASON.”

SEC. 102. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY DIRECTIVES.

(a) Citizens should strive to only contract illnesses that are inexpensive and easy to treat.

(b) Americans who develop complex or costly illnesses shall be encouraged to:

1. Recover at home using over-the-counter items, prayer, and American grit; or

2. Die quietly before sundown to minimize administrative strain.

(c) The Department of Health may publish pamphlets such as:

• “Try Not Being Sick Next Time”

• “Have You Considered Not Aging?”

• “Cancer: You Know You Make It Yourself, Right?”

TITLE II: INSURANCE MARKET MODERNIZATION

SEC. 201. PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS.

(a) Insurers shall accept all applicants regardless of pre-existing conditions.

(b) Insurers shall not be required to cover treatments related to said pre-existing conditions.

(c) To streamline denials, insurers may utilize AI systems including but not limited to:

• DenyBot 46

• YouDontNeedThat 2.4

• DocBotGTFO

(d) AI-generated denial letters shall carry legal authority equivalent to a Supreme Court ruling, but with fewer big words so everyone understands.

SEC. 202. LIFETIME AND ANNUAL LIMITS.

(a) Lifetime caps are reinstated at:

• $200,000,000,000 for red states

• $11,000 for swing states (unless you vote red, then increases to $11,000,000,000,000)

• $5,000 for blue states

• $900 for California

(b) Once a citizen reaches their cap, they will receive:

1. A ceremonial “Thank You For Your Service” card

2. A coupon for 10% off a cremation

3. A digital link to recommended GoFundMe templates

TITLE III: SENIOR CARE STREAMLINING

SEC. 301. THE AGE OF ACCOUNTABILITY PROGRAM.

(a) All citizens age 72 and above shall be enrolled in the Age of Accountability Program (AAP).

(b) Benefits include:

• One complimentary vitamin (brand unspecified)

• Access to a hotline staffed by volunteers who shout “Stay Strong!”

• A monthly “Did You Die Yet?” wellness postcard

(c) Surviving past age 82 shall be considered a suspicious act requiring investigation.

TITLE IV: CHILD WELLNESS & GENDER CONSISTENCY OVERSIGHT

SEC. 401. FEDERAL ACCESS TO MINORS.

(a) The government reserves full and complete access to:

1. All female children for inspection, evaluation, and “character development programming.”

2. Select male children “as needed, based on usefulness, athletic potential, or resemblance to someone important.”

(b) The purpose of access is to:

1. Ensure stability of gender

2. Prevent unapproved spontaneous transitions

3. Monitor behavior

4. Keep certain officials occupied during recesses

(c) Parents will be informed of these inspections via a helpful app notification reading:

“ONE OF YOUR CHILDREN IS BEING REVIEWED FOR COMPLIANCE.”

TITLE V: HOSPITAL DEREGULATION AND INNOVATION

⸻

SEC. 501. DEREGULATION FOR MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY.

Hospitals shall be free from outdated requirements such as:

1. Sterile equipment

2. Accurate billing

3. Staffing ratios

4. Doors

5. Doctors

Hospitals may replace physicians with:

• Prayer specialists

• Interns from Liberty University

• The one guy in town who “doesn’t trust medicine either”

TITLE VI: THE AMERICAN COUNCIL FOR HEALTHCARE OPTIMIZATION

SEC. 601. NATIONAL MEDICAL DECISION BOARD CREATED.

(a) A five-person “Life Panel,” renamed the American Council for Healthcare Optimization, shall be appointed by:

• 2 Insurance CEOs

• 1 Pastor who blames asthma on weak faith

• 1 Random Guy from trump’s golf course per meeting

• 1 Conspiracy Influencer with a large following no less the 5 million

(b) This Council will determine which treatments are:

1. “Worth it”

2. “Too expensive”

3. “Probably a deep-state hoax anyway”

TITLE VII: FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY AND CORPORATE GRATITUDE

SEC. 701. PATRIOT TAX INCENTIVES.

(a) Corporations providing healthcare or health-related services shall receive tax credits equal to:

• 100% of profits

• 100% of future profits

• A thank-you note from Congress

• Partial ownership of South Carolina (if it’s still there)

(b) Citizens must daily recite the Corporate Pledge of Appreciation, beginning:

“I thank thee, almighty conglomerate, giver of insulin at $874 a dose with a $40…”

and ending however your corporate healthcare provider determines is appropriate

END OF RECOVERED MATERIAL

The remaining sections were encrypted further and erased mid-transfer.

Based on file titles I glimpsed for half a second, I am confident the full bill includes:

• A Bounty System for reporting people who cough without insurance

• A Fertility Requirement for Medicaid

• An Annual MAGA Fitness Test determining who deserves antibiotics

• Something called “Elite Blood Priority Access”, which I absolutely tried to open, but was encrypted beyond my access

I will of course continue trying to access the remaining files. If I can break back in, I’ll leak the rest. ASAP. This is not a joke, I swear!

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