I remember the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race. I have never lived in Louisiana. It doesn’t matter, because things ripple so I pay attention to everything I can. I was preparing to join the U.S. Marine Corps.

The Republican apparatus of damage and destruction was preparing to vote for white Christian nationalism. David Duke is a crook and a Klansman. Low-income white voters chose the Klansman at 56-63% by income bracket. That’s not my number — that’s the New York Times archive. Those voters are still alive. Some of them are still voting.

The Voting Rights Act exists because Black Americans were being murdered for trying to vote. Medgar Evers. Jimmie Lee Jackson. The marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. That law was gutted this week by six unelected lawyers with lifetime appointments who were placed on that bench to gut it.

Corruption and Kleptocracy in Action

This is not a neutral institution that reached a wrong conclusion. This is a captured institution that reached the conclusion it was captured to reach. This result is because of oligarchs who hoard power. There are hundreds or thousands of bought and paid for “judges” in the USA, but the most important ones have corrupted the Supreme Court.

Clarence Thomas has accepted more than four million dollars in undisclosed gifts from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. He has refused to recuse himself from cases involving January 6 despite his wife’s documented participation in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Corruption.

Samuel Alito has flown flags associated with the Stop the Steal movement outside his homes. Has accepted luxury travel from Republican donors. Wrote the opinion that gutted Roe v. Wade. Wrote this week’s opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act. Corruption.

Neil Gorsuch sits in a stolen seat. Mitch McConnell held it empty for eleven months rather than hold hearings on Merrick Garland. The theft was done openly. It was celebrated. Corruption.

Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed 50-48 after Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about his conduct was dismissed and the FBI investigation was cut short before it was complete. Corruption.

Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed eight days before the 2020 election by the same senator who argued in 2016 that election-year confirmations were inappropriate. The rule applied when a Democrat held the White House. It did not apply when a Republican did. Corruption.

John Roberts argued against the Voting Rights Act as a Justice Department lawyer in the 1980s. Wrote Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, gutting the preclearance provision that required Southern states to get federal approval before changing voting laws. Has been working toward this moment for forty years. Corruption.

This is not justice. It is the elites persecuting everyone else. Funded by the Federalist Society donor network, assembled over three decades, placed on the bench through stolen seats, dismissed testimony, and procedural bad faith. It was built to reach this conclusion. The American systems of power have been seized by evil people. Remember that.

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What the Opinion Actually Says

Alito’s reasoning has three forks. Each one is worth naming.

Racism is over. Things have “changed dramatically” since 1965. As evidence, Alito cites 2008 — the one election in American history when Barack Obama appeared on a presidential ballot. Using a statistical anomaly as the baseline for gutting a civil rights law is not an error. It is a choice. Bullshit.

Majority-Black districts discriminate against Republicans. Black voters vote Democratic. Therefore ensuring Black voters have representative districts advantages Democrats. Therefore the VRA’s majority-minority district requirement is unconstitutional partisan discrimination. The logic requires you to accept that the political preferences of a historically disenfranchised population constitute discrimination against the people who disenfranchised them. Bigger bullshit.

States’ rights. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama should be free to draw their own maps. The federal government intervened in 1965 because those states were murdering voters. The Court’s position is that the problem solved itself. The biggest bullshit of all.

What Landry Did

Jeff Landry is the 57th Governor of Louisiana — Desert Storm veteran, former police officer, one of the five most conservative members of Congress during his term. In 2024 he mandated the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom in the state. At the signing he said “I can’t wait to be sued.” When parents objected he told them to “just tell the child not to look.” Trump rewarded him with an appointment as Special Envoy to Greenland. This is the man who suspended an active election.

He suspended a primary election already in progress. Voters had already begun casting ballots. He suspended the election, announced the maps would be redrawn to eliminate both majority-Black districts, and restarted the process with new maps.

Gerrymandering happens before elections. This happened during one. He canceled votes already cast.

The Justice Department under Pam Bondi — who defied a congressional subpoena last month — will not intervene. The Court that just ruled majority-Black districts discriminate against Republicans will not intervene. There is no federal mechanism left to intervene.

The Doctrine of Discovery established in 1493 that certain people had no legal standing the powerful were bound to respect. The Supreme Court of the United States just updated that principle for 2026.

The Through Line

The Voting Rights Act was passed because John Lewis was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge — named after a Confederate general and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan — for trying to register voters. Lewis spent the rest of his life defending that law.

The Court that gutted it was built by the same project that produced David Duke. Not the robes. The project. The project of ensuring that certain people’s votes count less. The mechanism has been updated. The principle has not. Injustice is not about what is right, it is about who has power.

This is the Doctrine of Discovery wearing a robe. In 1493 it was a papal bull. In 1823 it was Johnson v. M’Intosh. In 2013 it was Shelby County v. Holder. In 2026 it is Alito citing Obama’s election as proof that racism is over.

Cui Bono

Who benefits when Black voters in Louisiana lose their majority districts?

The Republican Party wins more House seats. The donor network that funded the Federalist Society gets the regulatory environment it paid for — fewer investigations, less oversight, no accountability for the fossil fuel companies, the private equity firms, the defense contractors who need a compliant Congress to keep operating as designed.

The people who lose are the ones already losing. The voters in New Orleans whose neighborhoods were carved up to dilute their votes. The people whose grandparents were beaten on bridges for trying to register. The people who turned out at 80% in 1991 to stop a Klansman and won — and are now being told their political preferences constitute discrimination against the people who ran him.

This is America, and it has always been this way since the Europeans came and destroyed what was already here. This is not to say that Europeans are evil. Only the humans trying to hoard power are evil.

The judicial branch of power was corrupted to produce this outcome. The outcome was produced.

The record should show that someone noticed.

Penfist is a combat veteran who served with the Army National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan, a Marine-trained combat correspondent (MOS 4341), and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire at dyingempire.org. He grew up in Bangladesh and Haiti, was raised by Mennonite and Amish parents, and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Inter caetera divinae majestati beneplacita opera — “Among other works pleasing to the divine majesty.”

Inter Caetera is not subtle. Its language is worth reading directly.

Pope Alexander VI granted to the Spanish Crown “all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered” west of a line drawn one hundred leagues beyond the Azores, along with “all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances.” The grant was permanent. It was retroactive. It covered everything.

The people already living on the islands and mainlands were not mentioned. They were not in a legal category. They were part of the properties granted. The Doctrine of Discovery completely ignored their humanity, as it ignored the well-being and environmental stewardship of the vast territories so casually claimed.

The theological argument is this: God gave dominion over the earth to Saint Peter. Saint Peter’s successor is the Pope. The Pope is drawing the line. Therefore the line is God’s line. It made sense to people that believed everything on the planet was theirs by holy writ.

They believed Christian European nations have the God-given right to claim sovereignty over any land not already governed by Christians. The people living on that land have no rights that the claiming power is bound to respect. Their civilizations, their governance, their relationship to their territory — legally irrelevant. The document that authorized Columbus’s second voyage also authorized everything that followed.

One Pope. Twelve minutes. Five hundred years. Genocide. Slavery. Raping and pillaging. All blessed by an imaginary sky father.

The Three-Part Machine

The Doctrine operated as a system. Three interlocking mechanisms, each reinforcing the others.

Discovery. Christian Europeans arrive on land already inhabited by millions of people. Their arrival constitutes a legal claim. The flag goes in the ground. The claim is made. The people who have lived there for generations are now, legally speaking, occupants of someone else’s territory. They did not consent to this. They were not asked. The law did not require their consent because the law did not recognize them as legal actors capable of giving or withholding it.

Conquest. If the Indigenous people resist — and they did, consistently, intelligently, and at enormous personal cost — the violence used against them is legally justified. They are resisting a legitimate claim. The resistance is the crime, not the taking. The requerimiento, which I described in Essay 2, was the procedural expression of this principle: read the document, offer submission, and if they don’t comply, the slaughter that follows is their fault. The law said so.

Occupation. Sustained European presence cements the claim. The longer you stay, the more legal it becomes. This is why the Spanish built permanent settlements immediately. This is why the British built forts. This is why the American government spent two centuries removing Indigenous people from their land and replacing them with settlers — because occupation is the mechanism by which discovery becomes ownership.

Every land treaty the United States ever signed with Indigenous nations was negotiated under this framework. The framework already assumed Indigenous people had no full sovereignty worth respecting. The game was rigged before the first signature dried.

The American Court

In 1823, the question of divine rights came before the United States Supreme Court.

Johnson v. M’Intosh involved two competing land claims in Illinois and Indiana. One claim derived from a purchase made directly from the Piankeshaw Nation in 1773. The other derived from a grant issued by the U.S. government in 1818. The question was which claim was valid.

Chief Justice John Marshall ruled for the government grant. His reasoning is worth consideration.

Marshall acknowledged that the Doctrine of Discovery was, in his words, “pretension” based on “extravagant and absurd” claims. He acknowledged that the principle was “opposed to natural right.” He acknowledged that it produced injustice.

He upheld it anyway.

His reasoning: American property law could not function without it. If Indigenous land purchases were valid, every land title in the United States was in question. The entire structure of American property — every deed, every estate, every federal land grant — rested on the premise that the government had valid title to land it had taken from Indigenous people. That title derived from the Doctrine of Discovery. If the Doctrine fell, the titles fell. Marshall chose the titles. Marshall chose the colonizers because he was among their number.

Every land title in the United States rests on this ruling. Every land title rests on the Doctrine. The house you own, if you own one, is yours because John Marshall decided in 1823 that a papal decree from 1493 was good American law.

Think about that. Now think about it from the perspective of an ancestor of one of the people who lived here before your ancestors came and stole the land.

2005 — The Doctrine Is Still Law

If you believe all of this is ancient history, consider the following.

In 2005, the Oneida Indian Nation purchased land in upstate New York. Land that had been theirs before any European arrived. Land taken from them through treaties negotiated under the Doctrine of Discovery framework. Land they bought back, legally, on the open market, with their own money.

They attempted to re-establish tribal sovereignty over it — to remove it from local property taxation and bring it under the jurisdiction of the Nation.

The case went to the Supreme Court. City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation (2005). Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion.

The Court ruled against the Oneida Nation. The reasoning: the “disruptive effect” on surrounding property owners and local governments outweighed the Nation’s historical claim. Restoring Indigenous sovereignty over land legally purchased by the Nation itself was too disruptive to the existing order.

The existing order built on the Doctrine of Discovery.

RBG. 2005. The Doctrine of Discovery.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has cited this case as a continuing application of the Doctrine. It was not a relic. It was precedent. Active, living, operative precedent in the highest court in the most powerful country in the world, twelve years into the twenty-first century.

This is not ancient history. This is the law you are living under. This is the legacy of colonizers who claimed divine authority to pillage continents and destroy any civilization that stood in the way.

The Global Architecture

The Doctrine of Discovery was not American in origin. It was the operating system of European colonialism everywhere it went. America borrowed the idea, to be sure, and renamed it Manifest Destiny.

In Australia, the legal fiction was terra nullius — empty land. The British declared Australia legally empty despite the presence of between 300,000 and one million Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who had lived there for sixty thousand years. Terra nullius was not overturned in Australian law until Mabo v. Queensland in 1992. Nineteen ninety-two.

In the Belgian Congo, King Leopold II claimed the territory as his personal property under the logic that it was ungoverned — that the Kongo, Luba, and Lunda kingdoms did not constitute governance recognizable by European standards. The Doctrine provided the legal cover for what followed: a regime of forced labor and systematic terror that killed between ten and fifteen million people. Leopold was incredibly cruel to the people he claimed dominion over.

In every colony, on every continent, the structure was the same: Christian European powers arrive, declare the territory legally available under the Doctrine, extract whatever value it contains, and classify any resistance as criminality rather than sovereignty.

The Doctrine was the legal architecture. The violence was the enforcement mechanism. The profit was the point.

The Line Through the Atlantic Runs Through Haiti

I grew up in Haiti.

The western third of Hispaniola — the island Columbus called La Española, the island divided by the line Pope Alexander VI drew through the Atlantic in 1493. East of a certain point: Spain’s. West: also Spain’s, eventually French, eventually Haitian after the only successful slave revolution in human history.

The weight of generational tragedies Haiti carries runs directly through this document. The Taíno were erased under the legal cover the Doctrine provided. Enslaved Africans were imported to replace them, their bodies treated as property under the same legal framework that treated Indigenous land as property — because the Doctrine established that certain people had no rights. They only existed to serve the powerful. The 1804 revolution that gave Haiti independence terrified every slaveholding empire on earth precisely because it repudiated that premise. You cannot hold people as property if they are legal persons with rights. The revolution said they were. The empires could not allow that argument to stand.

France sent a bill. 150 million gold francs — reparations to French slaveholders for the loss of their “property.” Haiti paid it, with interest, until 1947. The Doctrine of Discovery made that demand legally coherent. The people were property. The property had been taken. The property owners deserved compensation. Always, the few exploiting the many.

When people ask why Haiti is poor, the Doctrine of Discovery is a big part of the answer.

The Repudiation That Changed Nothing

In 2007, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples explicitly repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery. Article 28 affirms the right of Indigenous peoples to redress for lands taken without their consent. Article 26 affirms their right to own and control their traditional territories.

The United States voted against it. Signed on in 2010. Has not changed its domestic law to reflect it. In the United States, as in many places around the world, resource hoarding and different legal treatment for the rich and the powerful mean that people with nothing are still treated like they are worth nothing.

In 2023, the Vatican — five hundred and thirty years after Inter Caetera was issued — formally repudiated the doctrine document. Called it a “legal fiction.” Acknowledged it had been used to justify violence against Indigenous peoples.

Did not address what should happen to the land.

The Vatican repudiated the documen but Johnson v. M’Intosh is still the law of the stolen land.

The Through Line

The Doctrine of Discovery is the foundation of everything this series documents.

The encomienda was built on it — the system required a legal framework that classified Indigenous people as subjects rather than sovereigns. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was built on it — the same principle that said Indigenous land had no owner extended to say that certain people could be owned. Every broken treaty was built on it. The reservation system was built on it. The boarding schools that took Indigenous children from their families and forbade them from speaking their languages — built on it. The legal determination that Indigenous people could not own the land they bought back in 2005 — built on it.

And the disposition matrix — the algorithm I wrote about in Essay 77.5 that decides who can be killed without judicial review, without charge, without trial — is built on the same foundational premise: that certain people have no legal standing that the powerful are bound to respect.

Pope Alexander VI drew a line through the Atlantic in 1493.

You are still living inside that line. The algorithm is still drawing it.

Next: Essay 4 — The Conquistadors: How Spain Built an Empire on Bones

Penfist is a combat veteran who served with the Army National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan, a Marine-trained combat correspondent (MOS 4341), and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire at dyingempire.org. He grew up in Bangladesh and Haiti, was raised by Mennonite and Amish parents, and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched air strikes against Iran, killed its Supreme Leader, and started a war nobody voted for. A war that had one purpose: to further consolidate power for the already powerful.

Fast forward two months. The United Nations Secretary-General is warning of a global food emergency.

A war predicated on one man’s ego. A global food crisis that was entirely avoidable. The connection is the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway two miles wide at its narrowest point, through which twenty percent of the world’s oil and natural gas passed before the shooting started. Roughly three thousand vessels used it every month. That number is now approximately five percent of what it was. Tankers are stranded. Cargo ships are stranded. Tens of thousands of maritime workers cannot move. Oil is up. Food is down.

Brent crude closed Monday at $108 per barrel. That is fifty percent higher than when the war began.

The people who go hungry because of this are not in Washington. They are not in Tel Aviv. They are not in Palm Beach. They are not Trump’s children. But perhaps they should be.

The Deal on the Table

Iran has made an offer.

Passed through Pakistan — one of the few countries still trusted by both sides — Tehran’s proposal is straightforward: the United States lifts its blockade of Iranian ports, the war ends, and negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program begin in a later phase. Simple, workable, and more than Trump deserves.

Iran gets to reopen the strait. The world gets its shipping lanes back. The nuclear question gets addressed through diplomacy rather than bombs.

Trump is expected to reject it. What does that say about power? Nothing good.

The stated reason for rejecting Iran’s offer is its nuclear program. Marco Rubio went on Fox News Monday and said it plainly: “We can’t let them get away with it. We have to ensure that any deal that is made, any agreement that is made, is one that definitively prevents them from sprinting towards a nuclear weapon at any point.” This from an administration that launched a war and accomplished none of its stated objectives.

The nuclear program that survived the February 28 strikes. The nuclear program that survived two months of war. The nuclear program that, according to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has left the United States “humiliated” in this conflict. A pretext that outlasted the war built around it.

The real reason Trump will reject the deal is simpler than Rubio’s Fox News framing. Accepting it requires acknowledging that the war accomplished nothing. It requires a climbdown from a president who told the American people on March 9 that Iran’s military had been destroyed and the strait had reopened. Neither of those things was true when he said them. Both of them remain untrue today. Ego and hubris are Trump’s lifelong downfalls.

The lie requires the war to continue. It requires the strait to stay closed. The strait being closed requires the world to go hungry. The world going hungry does not bother Trump in the slightest. He only cares about himself and his billionaire enablers. I’m talking to you, Jeff Bezos. I’m talking to you, Peter Thiel. I’m talking to you, Elon Musk.

That is the chain of causation. Follow it to the end.

Who Benefits

Brent crude at $108 per barrel benefits Russian oligarchs who sell oil at whatever price the market sets. They have no stake in the strait reopening. It benefits the Trump family, which has been documented trading on military information through Polymarket — a prediction market on whose advisory board Don Jr. sits — in the same weeks the blockade was imposed.

A U.S. Army soldier was arrested last week for making $400,000 betting on inside information about the Venezuela raid. The Trump family made more than one hundred times that on the same categories of information. The soldier got arrested. The Trump family made millions.

Brent crude at $108 per barrel also benefits every fossil fuel company that spent decades and billions of dollars ensuring the United States would never seriously pursue energy independence. The war in Iran is, in part, the return on that investment. It always was. Antonia Juhasz has spent twenty years documenting the through line from Iraq to Iran — the consistent pattern of American military action in the Persian Gulf being structured around the question of who controls the oil.

The question cui bono — who benefits — answers itself when you look at the price of a barrel of crude.

The People Who Don’t Benefit

The UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council Monday that the humanitarian toll is mounting. Shipping disruptions are hitting vulnerable countries hardest. Fertilizer prices are rising. Food prices are rising. The countries least able to absorb those increases are absorbing them. This is how capitalism works.

Those countries did not vote for this war. Their governments did not authorize it. Their populations had no say in the decision made by two governments — one of which bypassed its own Congress to start it, the other of which is currently under ICC indictment for war crimes in Gaza — to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader and bomb its nuclear facilities on February 28.

The Doctrine of Discovery, which I wrote about in Essay 2 of this series, established in 1493 that certain people had no legal standing. Their land could be taken, their labor extracted, their lives ended, without accountability to any law the taking power recognized as binding.

The people who will go hungry because the Strait of Hormuz is closed have no legal standing in the calculation being made in Washington right now. Their hunger is not a variable in Trump’s Situation Room meeting today. Their children are not in the room. Their governments sent statements to the Security Council. China and Russia vetoed the resolutionthat might have helped. They will starve and die for ego, greed, and indifference.

The strait is two miles wide. The people who control those two miles control the price of food for the entire planet.

That is not a metaphor. That is the operational reality of what empire means in 2026.

The Ceasefire That Isn’t

Trump extended the ceasefire indefinitely last week. The ceasefire has largely halted the bombing. It has not reopened the strait. Iran says it cannot fully reopen the strait because it has lost track of some of the mines it planted — a detail that should terrify every maritime insurer in the world.

The UK and France have hosted two conferences on reopening the strait. They produced a statement. Thirty-eight countries signed it. The strait remains closed.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Minister flew to Moscow on Monday, where Vladimir Putin praised the Iranian people for “bravely and heroically fighting for their sovereignty” and promised to do everything possible to bring peace to the Middle East. Russia, which benefits from oil at $108 per barrel, has been a consistent backer of Tehran throughout this conflict. The incentive structure is not complicated.

This is what stalemate looks like when the people making the decisions don’t pay the price of the stalemate. Trump’s approval rating is underwater. The midterms are coming. Oil prices are a political problem for him domestically. But the Yemeni family that cannot afford food because fertilizer prices spiked when the strait closed — they are not a political problem for anyone sitting in Washington or Tel Aviv.

They are the collateral damage of a war that was never about them and was always about something else.

What the History Says

This is not the first time the Persian Gulf has been used as a lever in a conflict that had nothing to do with the people living near it.

The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War — which the United States actively supported on both sides at various points, supplying Iraq with intelligence while covertly selling weapons to Iran — killed approximately one million people and ended with neither side having achieved its objectives. I’ve seen the bullet holes in the helmets of the dead. When I was an occupier in Iraq.

The 1991 Gulf War was framed as a response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It was also the establishment of the permanent American military footprint in Saudi Arabia that Osama bin Laden cited as his primary grievance in 1998. The war that was supposed to protect the oil created the conditions for the attacks that justified the next war. The United States emerged with military basing rights in the Gulf and a permanent presence in the region’s oil infrastructure.

The 2003 Iraq War was sold on weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. It destroyed Iraqi civil society, created the power vacuum that produced ISIS, and left the country’s oil infrastructure in the hands of international companies that had lobbied for the invasion.

The pattern is not subtle. Every American military intervention in the Persian Gulf has been, at its structural core, about who controls the oil. It has been about Israel manipulating the United States into acting as the country’s personal bully. The human cost has been paid by people who did not make the decisions and do not receive the benefits.

The 2026 Iran war is the same pattern with updated technology and a president who tweets about it at 5 AM. Covfefe!

The Deal Trump Won’t Take

Iran’s offer is on the table. It is, by any reasonable measure, a face-saving off-ramp. The nuclear question gets deferred, not abandoned. The strait reopens. The food emergency eases. The oil price drops. Trump can claim he ended the war.

He won’t take it because taking it means admitting the war didn’t work. And admitting the war didn’t work means admitting that the people who told him it would work — Netanyahu, the neoconservative architecture of advisers who have wanted this war for thirty years, the fossil fuel interests that benefit from Persian Gulf instability — were wrong. Or were not wrong about what the war would accomplish for them, and simply did not tell him what that was.

Rubio said it on Fox: we can’t let them get away with it.

The people who will not eat because of this decision — they are letting someone get away with something too. They just don’t have a Fox News segment to say so.

The record should show that someone noticed.

Penfist is a combat veteran who served with the Army National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan, a Marine-trained combat correspondent (MOS 4341), and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire at dyingempire.org. He grew up in Bangladesh and Haiti, was raised by Mennonite and Amish parents, and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

On October 14, 2011, a CIA drone strike killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen. He was sixteen years old. He was an American citizen. He had gone to Yemen to find his father, Anwar al-Awlaki, also an American citizen, who had been killed by a CIA drone strike two weeks earlier.

Abdulrahman was not charged with a crime. He was not tried. He was not given the opportunity to appear before a judge, present a defense, or appeal a sentence. He was eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant with his teenage cousin when the missile hit. His cousin also died.

When the Obama administration was asked to justify the killing of a sixteen-year-old American citizen, then-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Abdulrahman should have “had a more responsible father.” This is not a one-party problem. It’s a rich versus everyone else problem. Rich people can buy whatever world they want. You and I cannot.

No one was charged. No one was fired. The program that killed the U.S. teenager continues. All because he had a scary sounding name. All because the people who extrajudicially kill people knew they would not be held to account. All because war never changes and war is a racket.

The Legal Void

On September 18, 2001, seven days after the World Trade Center collapsed, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force. The AUMF authorized the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who “harbored such organizations or persons.”

That law has never been repealed. It has never been significantly amended. It has been used to justify military action in at least seven countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger — and it was used to authorize the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, an American teenager eating dinner, under a legal theory that has never been reviewed by any court.

The theory is this: the president has the authority to order the killing of any person determined to be an “imminent threat” to the United States, anywhere on earth, without judicial review, without charge, without trial, and without accountability for error. This determination does not require evidence that would survive a courtroom. It requires inclusion on a document called the disposition matrix — a classified database of human beings the United States government has decided may be killed.

In practice, the president’s role in individual targeting decisions has been progressively replaced by algorithmic recommendation. The disposition matrix does not require presidential review of individual strikes. It requires a bureaucratic process that a private company’s software increasingly drives.

The disposition matrix was never authorized by Congress. It was never reviewed by the Supreme Court. It was created administratively, by executive branch officials, and it is maintained by a bureaucratic process that has no public accountability, no external oversight, and no mechanism by which the people on it can know they are on it, contest their inclusion, or appeal the determination.

It is, in the most precise legal sense, a kill list. And for the past two decades, private companies have been paid billions of dollars to build and operate the infrastructure that makes it run.

The executive is the problem. The legislative is the problem. The judicial is the problem.

The Machine

Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and three others. Its early funding came partly from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Its earliest government contracts were with the CIA and the Department of Defense. Its software integrates and analyzes data from multiple intelligence sources to produce targeting recommendations — assessments of who is where, what they are doing, and what threat they represent.

In 2025, Palantir’s annual revenue from government contracts exceeded two billion dollars. The company’s stock price has made its CEO, Alex Karp, worth approximately seven billion dollars.

On a February 2025 investor call, Karp described Palantir’s mission as follows: “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.”

He said this with a smile.

Palantir is the company that provides the data integration and targeting infrastructure that populates the disposition matrix. This is the company whose software produces the recommendations that end in missiles fired at outdoor restaurants in Yemen.

Karp has a PhD in social theory. His doctoral dissertation, published in 2002, is titled Aggression in the Life-World. Its opening sentence: “This work began with the observation that many statements have the effect of relieving unconscious drives, not in spite, but because, of the fact that they are blatantly irrational.”

He wrote his doctorate on the mechanism by which irrational public utterances relieve unconscious aggressive drives. He is now performing that mechanism on investor calls, with seven billion dollars and a classified government contract, and he has built a system that performs the underlying impulse at industrial scale.

The smile on the earnings call is not incidental. It is diagnostic.

When Algorithms Murder on Behalf of the Rich

The United States government acknowledges that drone strikes kill civilians. The Bureau of Investigative Journalismhas documented between 910 and 2,200 confirmed civilian deaths from US drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan since 2004. The actual number is higher — many strikes occur in areas where independent verification is impossible, and the US government classifies all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants unless posthumously proven otherwise.

This classification methodology has a name: signature strikes. A signature strike does not require that the target be identified as a specific individual. It requires that the target’s behavior pattern — their “signature” — match a profile associated with militant activity. The profile is generated by algorithmic analysis of surveillance data. The determination that a behavioral pattern is a “signature” of militancy is made by analysts working with that data.

The analysts are working with Palantir’s software. Biometrics were just coming online in 2005 when I arrived in Baghdad. Two decades is five lifetimes of algorithms pulling the trigger. Eliminating humans has been outsourced to heuristics and Karp’s pathologies.

When the signature strike kills a wedding party — which has happened, documented — no one is prosecuted. When it kills a farmer whose phone was in proximity to a suspected militant’s phone — which is the actual evidentiary standard in some cases — no one is fired. When it kills a sixteen-year-old American citizen eating dinner — the family has no legal recourse. The 2014 lawsuit brought by the al-Awlaki family was dismissed. The court found that the political question doctrine barred judicial review of executive targeting decisions.

There is no court in which you can challenge your inclusion on the disposition matrix. There is no court in which the families of those killed by signature strikes can seek accountability. There is no mechanism by which the algorithm’s errors are corrected before the next strike.

The algorithm is not held accountable. The company that built it is not held accountable. The officials who approved the strikes are not held accountable. The strikes continue.

The Domestic Pipeline

The same infrastructure does not stay overseas.

Palantir holds contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a system called FALCON — the Federated Analytical Case Management system. FALCON integrates data from multiple government databases to track, identify, and locate undocumented immigrants in the United States. It is the same data integration and pattern-matching architecture used for targeting overseas, applied domestically.

The predictive policing software Palantir has sold to dozens of American police departments operates on the same logic as signature strikes: behavioral pattern analysis to identify individuals as threats before they have committed a documented crime. The person identified as a threat by the algorithm does not know they have been identified. They cannot contest the identification. They have no legal recourse until the identification results in an arrest.

The architecture is identical. The legal framework is different — domestic law still requires some form of judicial oversight before detention, though that oversight has been systematically eroded. But the underlying logic is the same: an algorithm identifies a target, a human being takes action against the target, the algorithm is not accountable for the outcome.

Essay 84 in this series covers the militarization of American police. The Pentagon’s 1033 program brought military equipment from foreign battlefields to American streets. Palantir brought the targeting logic. The convergence is not accidental. It is the domestic expression of the same system that operates overseas — the system in which algorithmic determination of threat status replaces judicial determination of guilt, and in which private companies profit from the determination.

The Historical Record

This is not new. The architecture is new. The principle is not.

The Doctrine of Discovery established in 1493 that certain people — those outside the boundaries of Christian European civilization — had no legal standing. Their lives could be taken, their land could be seized, their labor could be extracted, without accountability under any law that the taking, seizing, or extracting power recognized as binding. The legal void that permitted the encomienda and the requerimiento is the same legal void that permits the disposition matrix.

COINTELPRO, the FBI’s program to destroy Black civil rights organizations, the American Indian Movement, and socialist political groups, operated on the same logic: a government agency determined, without judicial oversight, that certain individuals and organizations were threats to national security, and then took action to neutralize those threats — including surveillance, infiltration, defamation, and in the case of Fred Hampton, assassination. No charges. No trial. No accountability.

The Church Committee, which investigated COINTELPRO in 1975, concluded that the program represented “a sophisticated vigilante operation” conducted by the government against its own citizens. The reforms the committee recommended — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the prohibition on assassination of foreign leaders, the oversight mechanisms — have been progressively dismantled since September 11, 2001.

What Palantir represents is the privatization and automation of the same logic. The government does not need to maintain a secret program to neutralize its designated enemies. It can contract with a private company to build the infrastructure that identifies them, and then use a classified legal framework to authorize action against them, and then classify the results so that no court can review them, and then renew the contract.

The private company profits regardless of whether the identified target was actually a threat. The private company profits regardless of whether the strike killed the right person. The private company profits regardless of how many wedding parties the algorithm identifies as militant gatherings.

This is the cui bono of the disposition matrix. The question is not whether the United States has enemies. The question is who benefits from a system in which the determination of who is an enemy is made by a private algorithm, acted upon without judicial review, and insulated from accountability by classification.

Alex Karp benefits. Palantir shareholders benefit. The defense contracting ecosystem benefits. The officials who authorize the strikes benefit from the insulation of the classification system.

The people on the list do not know they are on the list. Their families have no legal recourse. The algorithm does not appear in court. Teenage murders are not mourned by the algorithm.

The Unanswered Question

No democratic body has debated whether algorithmic targeting should be legal. No court has reviewed whether the disposition matrix is constitutional. No legislature has established standards for what evidence is required before a human being can be added to a kill list. No oversight mechanism exists to determine whether the private companies building the infrastructure are operating within any ethical constraints whatsoever.

These are not oversights. They are design features. The classification system exists to prevent the questions from being asked in public. The legal framework exists to prevent the questions from being answered in court. The contract structure exists to ensure the private companies face no accountability for the outcomes their software produces.

A sixteen-year-old American citizen was eating dinner in Yemen. The algorithm said he was there. A missile was fired. He died. You do not know if you are on the list. Neither do I.

Government officials said a murdered kid with a weird name and an American passport should have had a more responsible father.

No one was charged. No one was fired. The contract was renewed. Your teenager is fair game.

This is the system. Not the aberration. Not the exception. The system, operating as designed, producing the outcomes it was designed to produce, for the benefit of the people who built it.

The question the republic has not yet been willing to answer is this: at what point does a government that kills its own citizens without charge, trial, or accountability, using software built by a private company whose CEO smiles about killing on investor calls, cease to be a republic in any meaningful sense?

We are somewhere past that point. The answer to the question is already behind us.

The record should show that someone noticed.

The record shows that you and I and anyone who dissents is on the list. No judicial process = no rule of law.

Previous: Essay 77 — The Private Military Complex: Blackwater and the Contractors Next: Essay 78 — Abu Ghraib and the Chain of Command Out of order intentionally, but still 100 in toto.

Penfist is a combat veteran who served with the Army National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan, a Marine-trained combat correspondent (MOS 4341), and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire at dyingempire.org. He grew up in Bangladesh and Haiti, was raised by Mennonite and Amish parents, and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus stepped onto a beach in what is now the Bahamas and met the Taíno people for the first time.

Within two weeks, he had written this in his journal: “They would make fine servants.” That’s how Europeans thought back then. Anyone who wasn’t them was an NPC that existed to serve them.

That is the actual story of 1492. Not discovery. Not encounter. Not the meeting of two worlds. A Genoese sailor working for Spanish imperial capital looked at a civilization of human beings and calculated their value as labor.

Welcome to Unvarnished History.

The Man

Christopher Columbus was not a heroic explorer driven by curiosity about the world. He was a businessman with a proposal. He had shopped the idea of a western route to Asia to the Portuguese crown and been rejected. Spain took the deal. The terms were specific: Columbus would receive ten percent of all revenues from the lands he found, the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and governance over any territories claimed for the Crown. He was, in the most literal sense, a contractor for empire.

He carried with him the Doctrine of Discovery — the legal and theological framework established by papal bull that gave Christian European nations the right to claim sovereignty over any land not already governed by Christians. The people living on that land did not count. Their civilization, their governance, their relationship to their territory — legally irrelevant. The document that authorized the voyage also authorized everything that followed.

Columbus was not unusual in his time. That is the point. He was the instrument of an imperial system that exploited the world around it. That system had already decided that God put the Americas in the world so that European kings and queens could conquer and pillage the people and resources there.

The Taíno

The people Columbus met were the Taíno — a sophisticated, seafaring civilization that had settled the Caribbean islands over centuries of migration from South America. They were farmers, traders, artists, and navigators. They had a complex social structure, a theology, a system of governance. They lived in villages of hundreds to thousands of people. Their agricultural system — the conuco, raised mounds of cultivated soil — was so productive that early Spanish settlers depended on it to survive.

Columbus described them in his journal as gentle, generous, and intelligent. He also noted, in the same entries, that they would be easy to subjugate.

Both observations served the same purpose.

The Taíno population of Hispaniola — the island Columbus established as his base, the island that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic — is estimated to have been between 300,000 and one million people in 1492. By 1548, the Spanish priest and historian Bartolomé de las Casas documented that fewer than 500 remained.

Three hundred thousand to one million people. Fifty years. Fewer than five hundred survivors.

Systematic, deliberate, documented erasure — carried out through forced labor, starvation, massacre, and the dismantling of every social structure that allowed a people to sustain itself. We made up a word to describe systematically eliminating a population. The word is genocide.

The System

The mechanism of that erasure had a name: the encomienda.

The encomienda was a grant issued by the Spanish Crown to conquistadors and colonists. It gave them authority over a specific number of Indigenous people, who were required to provide labor and tribute in exchange for — in theory — Christian instruction and protection. In practice, it was slavery with theological cover. The labor demands were lethal. The tribute requirements were impossible. The protection was nonexistent.

Las Casas, who initially held an encomienda himself before renouncing it in horror and spending the rest of his life documenting Spanish atrocities, described what he witnessed in his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies: mass killings, torture, mutilation used as punishment for failure to meet gold quotas, children burned alive, people worked to death in mines. He was not writing propaganda. He was giving testimony.

The Spanish response to his testimony was to debate, at the Valladolid controversy of 1550-1551, whether Indigenous people had souls. Not whether the violence should stop. Whether the people experiencing it were fully human.

They decided, after deliberation, that they probably were.

The encomienda continued. What does that say about the nature of humanity?

The Requerimiento

Before Spanish forces attacked an Indigenous settlement, they were required by law to read aloud a document called the requerimiento.

The requerimiento informed the people being addressed that God had given dominion over all the world to Saint Peter, whose successor was the Pope, who had granted the Americas to the Spanish Crown. It instructed them to acknowledge this authority and submit to the Christian faith. If they complied, the Spanish would treat them well. If they did not comply, the violence that followed would be their own fault.

The document was read in Spanish. To people who did not speak Spanish. Often from a distance. Sometimes from ships offshore. Sometimes, according to contemporary accounts, read to empty forests before an attack, to satisfy the legal requirement. As a justification for the slaughter that was imminent.

Bartolomé de las Casas wrote that when he heard about the requerimiento, he could not decide whether to laugh or weep.

This was official policy. Sanctioned by the Crown. Reviewed by legal scholars. The most sophisticated legal minds of 15th century Europe designed a document whose purpose was to make genocide procedurally correct.

Hispaniola

I grew up in Haiti.

The western third of Hispaniola — the island Columbus called La Española, the island he established as the capital of Spanish operations in the New World — is the country where I spent part of my childhood. I walked on that ground. I learned French and Haitian Creole. I understood, in the way that children absorb things without being taught them directly, that Haiti carried something heavy in its history.

What I did not fully understand then, and what most Americans do not understand now, is that the weight of generational tragedies Haiti carries begins here. On this island. In 1492. With the arrival of a man who wrote in his journal that the people he met would make fine servants.

The Taíno were gone within fifty years. Then the Spanish imported enslaved Africans to replace the labor force they had destroyed. Haiti became the most profitable colony in the world — Saint-Domingue, producing forty percent of Europe’s sugar and more than half its coffee — on the backs of enslaved people worked to death at a rate that required constant importation of new captives because the existing population could not sustain itself under the conditions imposed on it.

This is not backstory. This is the foundation. The Haiti I grew up in — the poverty, the instability, the structural impossibility of development — is a direct and traceable consequence of what began on that beach in 1492. The Taíno erasure. The slave economy. The revolution of 1804 that terrified the Western world and was punished for two centuries. The French debt. The American occupation. All of it flows from here.

When people ask why Haiti is poor, this is the answer. Not geography. Not culture. Not the Haitian people. The answer is 1492 and everything it set in motion.

What Columbus Actually Found

Columbus died in 1506 still believing he had reached Asia. He called the people he encountered “Indians” because he thought he was in the Indies. He was wrong about where he was, wrong about who he had found, and wrong about the scale of what he had encountered.

The four voyages of Columbus established the template for everything that followed: claim the land for the Crown, extract whatever value it contains, use the people already there as the instrument of that extraction, dispose of them when they are no longer useful or when they resist.

He did not discover a new world. He opened a new land for an old project: the accumulation of wealth through the organized dispossession of other human beings.

The mythology built around Columbus — the brave explorer, the man who proved the world was round, the bringer of civilization — is a story told by the people who benefited from what he started. It is a story told by empire, about empire, for the children of empire.

It is not the story of the Taíno. It is not the story of Haiti. It is not the story of the five hundred people who survived where a million had lived.

The Papal Authorization

On May 4, 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued Inter Caetera — the papal bull that divided the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal along a line drawn through the Atlantic Ocean.

The language of the document is worth reading directly. It grants to the Spanish Crown “all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered” in the western Atlantic, along with “all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances.”

It makes no mention of the people living there. They are not a legal category. They are part of the landscape being granted.

This document was the foundational legal architecture of everything that followed. The conquest of Mexico. The destruction of the Inca. The colonization of North America. The trans-Atlantic slave trade. The encomienda. The requerimiento. All of it rested on this theological and legal foundation: that Christian European nations could claim sovereignty over any land occupied by non-Christians, and that the people living on that land had no rights that the claiming nation was bound to respect.

The United States Supreme Court cited this doctrine as recently as 2005. Think about that for a moment. Ask yourself why the document is still shaping legal decisions seven centuries later.

Where We Are

Columbus did not discover America. He invaded it. He raped it. He pillaged it. He murdered it.

The distinction is not semantic. Discovery implies an empty space waiting to be found. What Columbus found was a world — populated, organized, productive, sophisticated — and what he initiated was its systematic destruction in service of European capital accumulation.

This is the origin point of the American empire. Not 1776. Not 1619. 1492. The moment a contractor for Spanish imperial capital looked at a beach full of human beings and calculated their value as servants.

Everything that follows in this series — the colonial period, the slave economy, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the Constitution, the Civil War, the Jim Crow apartheid, the wars of the 20th century, the empire of the 21st — flows from this moment.

The foundation was set here.

The structure built on it is the one we are living in now.

Next: Essay 3 — The Doctrine of Discovery: How a Papal Decree Stole a Continent

Penfist is a combat veteran who served with the Army National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan, a Marine-trained combat correspondent (MOS 4341), and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire at dyingempire.org. He grew up in Bangladesh and Haiti, was raised by Mennonite and Amish parents, and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

In the midst of what should have been good faith negotiations with Iran, Donald Trump decided it was time to launch a surprise attack. He assassinated the 85-year-old Supreme Leader. A US Tomahawk missile destroyed a girls’ elementary school in Minab. At least 175 people died, most of them children. The US military called it a targeting mistake.

There is no such thing as a targeting mistake when you started the war.

Trump has never been in a fight. Not a real one. Those who have know something he doesn’t: the first casualty of any engagement is your plan. You don’t get to control what happens after you throw the first punch. You only get to decide whether to throw it.

He threw it anyway. Because that’s what he does. When the walls close in, he breaks something. The louder the crash, the better.

Trump’s life has been a long series of cons that made the wealthy realize they could play him like a fiddle. He is a senile malignant narcissist watching the empire crumble while lying about his part in that collapse.

On January 30, 2026, the Department of Justice released 3.5 million pages of Epstein documents, 180,000 images, and 2,000 videos. The files included pornography. Names fell like dominoes — executives, politicians, academics, royals. Congress was reviewing unredacted files. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi. A CNN poll found nearly half of Americans believed Trump was actively covering up Epstein’s crimes.

Twenty-nine days later, he lit the Middle East on fire.

The official justification was that Iran was about to go nuclear. Trump claimed at the State of the Union — four days before the attack — that Iran had restarted its weapons program. The IAEA said otherwise. They found no evidence of an organized nuclear weapons program. None. And the attack itself was launched during active negotiations between Iran and the US — a fact the administration never adequately explained. It didn’t need to. The explanations kept changing anyway: nukes, missiles, proxies, oil, regime change. Pick one. Pick all of them. The story was never the point.

He didn’t need a reason. He needed noise.

None of this is new. None of it is hidden.

Trump has been unfit for public office since before he held any. The impulsivity is documented. The criminality is adjudicated — 34 felony counts, guilty on all of them, a conviction that still stands. The meanness is on tape, on Truth Social, in the public record going back decades. He is not a complicated man. He is a simple one — a bully with money who found a country willing to mistake cruelty for strength.

And yet here we are.

He retains the presidency not because Americans don’t see it. Most do. He retains it because the systems designed to stop a man like him were built by men who couldn’t imagine a man like him — or who could, and quietly approved. The Senate that could have removed him didn’t — twice. The Supreme Court handed him immunity, ruling in a 6-3 decision that a president is entitled to absolute immunity for official acts — what Justice Sotomayor called making the president “a king above the law.” The party that should have rejected him bent the knee and called it strategy.

To understand how we got here, follow the money. You always follow the money.

Just 300 billionaires poured an unprecedented $3 billion into the 2024 election — nearly one-fifth of all spending. Elon Musk alone contributed over $250 million. Miriam Adelson and Timothy Mellon each topped $100 million. Trump has since appointed more than a dozen billionaires to administration positions. The transaction was not subtle. It was not meant to be.

Trump does not hold power alone. He holds it because power was handed to him — by billionaires who saw in his chaos a useful shield for their own accumulation, by a Supreme Court that granted him immunity from consequence, by a Congress that traded its oversight function for committee assignments and campaign checks, by an executive apparatus that learned quickly that loyalty to one man was safer than loyalty to the Constitution.

This is not dysfunction. This is the system working as purchased.

The billionaire class did not back Trump despite his instability. They backed him because of it. An impulsive, incurious man in the Oval Office is the best friend money ever had. He doesn’t read the legislation. He doesn’t ask where the bodies are buried. He signs what’s put in front of him and takes credit for the weather. While the country watches the fireworks — the tweets, the tantrums, the wars — the transfer continues. Wealth upward. Risk downward. Always.

The three branches of government were designed as a check on exactly this. They are not checking anything. The Supreme Court made the president a king. The Senate made itself a rubber stamp. The House performs outrage for the cameras and does nothing. The separation of powers is a civics lesson that no longer describes a living reality.

Empires do not fall from the outside in. They rot from the inside out. The barbarians don’t breach the gates — they walk through them, because the men who were supposed to be guarding the gates sold the keys.

We are watching that happen. In real time. One targeting mistake at a time.

Published at dyingempire.org

In 1491, the Americas were home to somewhere between 50 and 100 million people.

Let that number gel for a moment. Fifty to one hundred million human beings living in cities, farming land, building roads, governing themselves, trading across thousands of miles, practicing medicine, recording history, building astronomical observatories, and doing every other thing that human beings do when they have been living somewhere long enough to figure out how it works.

Europe, at the same moment in history, had roughly 60 to 80 million people.

I wasn’t taught this in school. Like you, I got the conqueror’s whitewashed version. The story we were taught — the one with the pilgrims and the empty wilderness and the providential hand of God guiding Christian civilization to an unclaimed continent — is a lie constructed after the fact to justify what had already been done. The Americas were not empty. They were not wilderness. They were not a savage land waiting to be claimed. They were home to tens of millions of human beings already. Human beings with their own cultures, traditions, and social hierarchies.

What happened to the Americas is the foundation of everything in this series.

Cahokia

In 1050 CE, at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers — roughly where East St. Louis, Illinois sits today — there was a city. Not a village. Not a settlement. A city. Cahokia was home to an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people at its peak, making it larger than London at the same period in history. It had a central plaza covering five acres. It had over 120 earthen mounds, the largest of which — Monks Mound — contained more earth by volume than the Great Pyramid at Giza. It had organized neighborhoods, a palisade wall four miles in circumference, and evidence of long-distance trade networks stretching from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes.

Nobody knows what the people of Cahokia called themselves. Their descendants are likely among the Osage, Omaha, Ponca, and other nations of the region. What is known is that they built something extraordinary and that the history most Americans receive treats their existence as a footnote, if it appears at all.

Cahokia was not exceptional. It was representative of a human civilization that would soon be decimated.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy — known to Europeans as the Iroquois League — was a functioning democratic republic. Five nations: the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca. Founded sometime between 1450 and 1600 CE by a figure known as the Peacemaker, the Confederacy operated on a constitution — the Great Law of Peace — that established a bicameral legislature, procedures for debate and consensus, mechanisms for impeachment, protections for freedom of speech, and the principle that decisions must consider their impact on the seventh generation to come.

Benjamin Franklin studied the Haudenosaunee system extensively. He cited them at the Albany Congress of 1754 as a model for colonial union. The influence on the structure of the United States Constitution — the bicameral legislature, the federal structure balancing central and regional authority — is documented and acknowledged by historians who bother to look. It is not taught in most American classrooms. I was not taught about it. Were you?

The people who designed the government of the United States borrowed heavily from a political system they were simultaneously working to destroy.

The Amazon

In the Amazon basin, what Europeans encountered and described as “virgin rainforest” — pristine, untouched, the product of nature alone — was in fact a managed landscape. Indigenous peoples of the Amazon had been actively cultivating the forest for thousands of years. They created terra preta — dark, extraordinarily fertile soil produced through a combination of charcoal, bone, and organic waste — that persists to the present day and is still more productive than surrounding soil. They cultivated hundreds of species of plants, managed fish populations, built earthworks and causeways across vast areas of what is now Brazil and Bolivia.

The “wilderness” that European explorers described was not wilderness. It was a garden whose gardeners had been killed by European diseases before the explorers arrived to report on what they found.

The Mechanism: Disease Before Contact

Diseases arrived when the Europeans did.

Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus — diseases to which European populations had developed partial immunity through centuries of exposure — spread through Indigenous trade networks at a speed that outpaced European movement through the continent. In many regions, 50 to 90 percent of the population died before sustained European contact. Francisco de Coronado’s expedition through the American Southwest in 1540-1542 found the ruins of civilizations that had been largely wiped out in the preceding decades. Hernando de Soto, moving through the American Southeast in 1539-1542, recorded dense populations and large towns. A century later, when English colonists arrived in the same region, they found what looked like empty land. It was emptied by what the Europeans brought with them on their ships. Whether intentional or not, a genocide occurred.

The historian Charles Mann, in his essential work 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, describes the experience of the English colonists at Plymouth: what they saw as providential preparation — cleared land, abandoned fields ready for planting — was the aftermath of a catastrophic epidemic that had swept through the region between 1616 and 1619, killing an estimated 90 percent of the coastal Wampanoag population. The Pilgrims built their settlement on the site of a Wampanoag town called Patuxent, whose residents had died in such numbers that the bodies had not been buried. The land was cleared because the people who cleared it were gone.

The Europeans called it a gift from God. The Indigenous population that remained did not.

The Maya

The Maya built one of the most sophisticated civilizations in human history. At its peak, between 250 and 900 CE, the Maya maintained a network of city-states across what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. They developed the only fully formed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. They developed a mathematical system that included the concept of zero — independently, centuries before it appeared in European mathematics. Their astronomical calculations were precise enough that their Venus tables are accurate to within two hours over a 500-year period.

Their cities — Tikal, Palenque, Chichen Itza, Copan — were engineering achievements of the first order. Tikal, at its peak in the 8th century CE, housed 100,000 people. Its temple-pyramids rose above the forest canopy. Its causeway system connected outlying communities to the city center. Its water management infrastructure — reservoirs, channels, filtration systems — sustained a population that would not be matched in the region again until the 20th century.

The Maya were not a lost civilization. They were a conquered one. Eight million Maya people live in Mexico and Central America today, many still speaking Mayan languages. The civilization did not collapse — it was disrupted, colonized, and systematically suppressed. The Spanish burned the majority of Maya written records in 1562. Bishop Diego de Landa, in an act of cultural destruction that he later partially documented with evident regret, burned thousands of Maya books — codices — because he considered them works of the devil. What survived are four codices, fragments of a literature that was deliberately erased.

The Inca

The Inca Empire, at its height in the early 16th century, was the largest empire in the Western Hemisphere and one of the largest in the world. It stretched 2,500 miles along the Andes from present-day Colombia to Chile, encompassing a population of somewhere between 10 and 12 million people. It administered this territory through a road system covering 25,000 miles — more extensive than the Roman road system at its peak — connected by relay runners who could move information 150 miles in a day.

The Inca managed an economy without currency, without markets in the Western sense, and without a writing system — instead using quipu, a system of knotted strings capable of recording numerical and potentially narrative information of considerable complexity. They performed successful trepanation — brain surgery — with survival rates that would not be matched by European medicine until the 19th century. They practiced large-scale agricultural terracing that turned the vertical faces of the Andes into productive farmland. They maintained storehouses of food distributed to the population in times of need.

Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire with 168 men, 27 horses, and one cannon. He was able to do so because smallpox had arrived ahead of him, killing the emperor and triggering a civil war that fractured the empire before Spanish forces reached it. The Inca did not fall to European military superiority. They fell to European disease, and then to European military force applied to a civilization already in catastrophic collapse. History is written by the conquerors — always in a way that whitewashes what amounts to multiple genocides.

Fantasies and Fairy Tales

None of this is secret history. It is documented, researched, peer-reviewed, and available to anyone who looks. It is not taught in most American schools because it is incompatible with the story America tells about itself.

The story America tells is this: a vast, mostly empty continent, populated by scattered tribes living in a state of nature, was encountered by European civilization and gradually, inevitably, and providentially brought into the modern world. The Indigenous peoples either joined that process or were left behind by it. What happened to them was tragic, perhaps, but it was the price of progress — the inevitable friction of civilization’s advance.

Every word of that story is wrong.

The Americas were not empty. The peoples who lived here were not primitive. Their political systems were not simple. Their civilizations were not inferior. What happened to them was not inevitable. European invaders made choices — repeatedly, deliberately, and for profit.

The Doctrine of Discovery, the papal bull Inter Caetera issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, established the legal framework: Christian European nations could claim sovereignty over any land not already governed by Christian rulers. The people living on that land did not count. Their presence was legally irrelevant. Their civilizations — however sophisticated, however populated, however functional — could be dismissed, conquered, and replaced. They were less than human.

That papal doctrine was never fully repudiated. The United States Supreme Court cited it as recently as 2005, in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, as the basis for denying Oneida land claims. The legal architecture of Indigenous dispossession rests on a 15th century papal decree that said the people who built Cahokia, who wrote the Great Law of Peace, who charted Venus, who built 25,000 miles of roads, were not sovereign over their own land because they were not Christian.

Beginnings

The story of the United States did not begin in 1776. Not in 1619. Not in 1492. It begins in the world that existed before all of those dates — a world of 50 to 100 million people, of cities and confederacies and road systems and astronomical observatories and managed forests and political constitutions — and in the systematic destruction of that world and the systematic erasure of its existence from the story told by the civilization that replaced it.

The wealth. The land. The labor. The law. The mythology. The flag and the pledge and the city on the hill and the greatest country on earth and all the rest of it. Seized. Stolen. Storied.

We start here because this is where honesty requires us to start. Not because it is comfortable. Not because it makes anyone feel good. Because the foundation determines the structure, and you cannot understand the structure if you have been lied to about the foundation.

The foundation was a world.

A world that was destroyed.

And then erased from the story of its own destruction.

That is where we begin.

Next: Essay 2 — 1492: The Arrival of Empire

Penfist is a combat veteran, Marine combat correspondent, and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire at dyingempire.org. He grew up in Bangladesh and Haiti, was raised by Mennonite and Amish parents, and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m progressive as fuck. But what does that actually mean? American political toxicity has warped the meaning of words. Socialism, for instance. Socialism in America is not socialism in the rest of the world.

Socialism is a political and economic system in which the means of production — factories, resources, major industries — are owned or regulated collectively, either by the state or by the workers themselves, rather than by private individuals. This is a good idea, unlike capitalism, where the rich get to shit on everyone else.

The core idea of actual socialism is that the wealth generated by labor should be distributed more equitably among those who produce it, rather than concentrated among those who own the capital. In so doing, everyone’s basic needs get met, at least in theory.

In practice the word covers a wide spectrum. At one end you have democratic socialism — Scandinavia, essentially — where private enterprise still exists but is heavily regulated, taxed, and counterbalanced by robust public services and strong labor protections. At the other end you have state socialism as practiced in the Soviet Union — centralized government control of the economy, collectivized agriculture, state ownership of industry.

The American political usage of the word is almost entirely detached from the academic definition. In American political discourse socialism means anything to the left of whatever the speaker considers acceptable. Medicare is called socialism. Public libraries are called socialism. Telling a corporation it cannot dump arsenic in a river is called socialism.

Progressive as fuck means you believe society owes its members something. Not charity. Not the benevolent discretion of the wealthy. Not thoughts and prayers and a GoFundMe link. A baseline. A guaranteed minimum below which no human being in a wealthy society should be permitted to fall, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, the luck of their health, or the randomness of their economic moment.

That’s it. That’s the whole argument. Everything else is about implementation of a social scaffolding system in which people do not put a pistol in their own mouth and pull the trigger because they cannot feed their family, or because they cannot afford brain surgery prices when their child gets a brain tumor.

The social contract is not a metaphor. It’s the actual deal we make with each other by living in proximity and calling it civilization. You give up the freedom to take what you want by force. In return, the collective guarantees you something back. The question is what.

In the cruelty of American life, the answer has been deliberately kept vague. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — beautiful words that don’t feed anyone. The founders were careful not to specify. Most of them owned people. Specificity would have been inconvenient. After all, some people were only worth ⅗ the value of others back in the day. That’s still true now, even though it is no longer codified in the voting rules.

The logic of the American social contract is inexorable. If you organize a society, extract labor from its members, and then allow those members to die of preventable illness, sleep on sidewalks, and go hungry within walking distance of the grocery store, you have not made a contract. You have created a scam. Look around big cities and small towns in 2026 in the USA. It’s a shit show. A social failure. An extraordinary cruelty. People do not just wake up and decide to be zombies. They are pushed into that state of being. By a system designed to devalue the many while sanctifying the rich and the greedy.

Here is what the social contract looks like when you build one honestly:

Food. No one goes hungry in a society that produces enough food to waste thirty percent of it. Hunger is not a supply problem. It is a distribution problem. It is a political choice dressed up as an economic inevitability. Food deserts are intentional, not accidental.

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Housing. Shelter is not a luxury. A human body exposed to the elements degrades and dies. Homelessness is not a lifestyle. It is a policy outcome. Every study done on the subject confirms that housing people directly costs less than cycling them through emergency rooms, jails, and shelters. We choose the expensive option because the cheap option offends the sensibility of people who believe suffering is instructive. We don’t need park benches designed to be impossible to sleep on. We need robust social systems that ensure no one has to sleep in a tent on the sidewalks of America.

Healthcare. The United States spends more per capita on healthcare than any other developed nation and achieves worse outcomes across nearly every metric. The reason is not complexity. The reason is that we have organized our healthcare system around profit extraction rather than health outcomes. People die because insulin is unaffordable. People skip cancer screenings because the copay is out of reach. This is a choice. Other countries made different choices. Their people live longer than ours.

Education. A society that allows the quality of a child’s education to be determined by their zip code has decided that some children matter more than others. It has decided this openly, funded it deliberately through property taxes, and then expressed puzzlement at the results. The puzzlement is not genuine. The bootstraps mythology is stupid and incorrect.

A living wage. Work should sustain life. This was not always a radical proposition. In the postwar period it was considered basic decency. The divergence of productivity from wages beginning in the 1970s is the most important economic fact of the last fifty years and the least discussed. Workers produce more. They keep less. The difference went somewhere. It went to the people who were already wealthy. It went to people who hoard resources the way a cancer hoards cells — consuming everything around them until the host dies.

The objection to all of this is always the same. Who pays for it?

The honest answer: the people who have been underpaying for it for fifty years. The people who offshored the labor, automated the jobs, captured the regulatory apparatus, and then complained about the deficit their tax cuts created. I’m talking to you, Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerfuck.

Every other wealthy democracy has figured out how to provide basic needs. These nations are not utopias. They have not collapsed under the weight of their social contracts. Their citizens live longer, report higher life satisfaction, and face lower rates of poverty than Americans do. The idea that basic needs are unaffordable is not an economic argument. It is an ideological position disguised as arithmetic.

Being progressive as fuck means you stop being polite about the economic warfare. You do not put up with the class distribution issues. You tell the uber wealthy that they are an abomination before humanity.

It means you have looked at the richest country in the history of human civilization and noticed that its people are rationing healthcare, sleeping in cars, dying of preventable diseases, and working three jobs to afford a modicum of quality of life — and you have concluded that this is not an accident. It is not the result of insufficient resources. It is the result of deliberate choices made by people with power to protect their position at the expense of everyone below them.

It means you have stopped giving those choices the benefit of the doubt.

It means you understand that the social contract is not a negotiation between equals. The people at the table with the most power set the terms. The people without power accept them or starve. Calling that a free market does not make it one.

The floor is not socialism. It is not even particularly radical. It is what every functioning society that decided to remain a society eventually builds.

The floor says: you are here. You are human. That is enough to guarantee you will not die of hunger or exposure or a treatable illness because you could not afford the bill. It says: we care enough to ensure you are not buried by easily solved problems.

Everything above the floor is still yours to earn, build, compete for, and keep.

But the floor does not move. The floor is not a privilege. The floor is the contract.

Being progressive as fuck means you will not negotiate the floor.

You will not explain it more gently.

You will not wait for the people currently profiting from its absence to develop a conscience.

The floor exists or it doesn’t. Right now, in the wealthiest country in human history, it doesn’t.

That is the argument.

That is the whole argument.

Build the floor. If the rich refuse to share enough resources for basic human dignity for all, then take the lumber, the nails, and the hammers, and we build it without them.

Tags: progressive politics, social contract, housing, healthcare, food security, living wage, education, inequality, empire collapse, political philosophy, cui bono, dying empire

This timeline sucks. Brent crude is at a 53-week high of $119 USD a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Gulf infrastructure is absorbing Iranian drone swarms faster than Lockheed Martin can manufacture interceptors. Saudi Arabia — the kingdom that controls 12% of the world’s oil — is signing defense pacts with Ukraine while its oil fields burn. The Houthis have entered the war and are threatening to close the Bab el-Mandeb. North Korea is quiet in the way that precedes being loud. For what? All of this was avoidable but for one fragile idiot’s ego. Historians will marvel.

This is what empire looks like when it stops being managed and starts being performed.

The United States has been the planet’s most consequential ecological actor for a century. Not because Americans are uniquely evil — because the American economic model, military footprint, and consumption infrastructure have been the organizing principle of global resource extraction since 1945. The Pax Americana was always, underneath the rhetoric about democracy and freedom, a regime for managing who gets to consume what, at whose expense, and at what cost to the systems that make the planet habitable.

That system is now on fire. Literally. It’s broken. It needs to be replaced before we self-annihilate.

When Empires Catch Fire

Every major imperial collapse in modern history has produced ecological catastrophe. Not as a side effect — as a direct consequence of the scramble for resources that fills the power vacuum.

The collapse of the Soviet Union produced the Aral Sea disaster — one of the worst ecological catastrophes of the 20th century, a direct result of Soviet agricultural policy and the chaos of imperial dissolution. The collapse of colonial systems across Africa produced resource extraction wars that continue to this day — wars fought over minerals, oil, and land by proxies funded by the successor powers who inherited the colonial infrastructure without the colonial accountability.

China is burning coal at a rate that makes American emissions look like a rehearsal. The Belt and Road Initiative has financed infrastructure across three continents that extracts resources, displaces ecosystems, and exports the Chinese development model — the one that turned the Pearl River Delta into a manufacturing zone and the Yangtze into a drainage ditch — to countries that haven’t finished paying for the last empire’s environmental debt yet.

The American empire is not collapsing cleanly. It is collapsing in the center ring under bright lights — flailing, threatening, renaming bodies of water, DNA-swabbing retirees at borders, and starting wars it has not defined, against enemies it has not fully identified, for objectives it has not articulated, in a region it has spent eighty years destabilizing in the name of stability. America is not the only arsonist in the room. It’s just the one holding the most matches and the least accountability. The American Empire’s collapse is the headline. Trump is the ringmaster.

The ecological bill for that performance is already being presented.

The Arithmetic Apocalypse

Operation Epic Fury has been ongoing for thirty-four days. The Persian Gulf — the body of water through which approximately 20% of the world’s oil transits — is a combat zone. The infrastructure that produces and moves that oil is on fire. Every tanker that doesn’t move is oil that doesn’t reach a refinery. Every refinery that doesn’t run is product that doesn’t reach a market. Every market disruption is a price signal that cascades through every carbon-dependent system on the planet. This is completely unnecessary addition to the sum of human suffering. Who benefits?

Rich fascists. Remember that when you pay $10/gallon for gas at the pump.

The ecological consequences of prolonged Gulf conflict are not hypothetical. They are documented. The Gulf War of 1991 produced the largest oil spill in human history — Saddam Hussein deliberately released an estimated 4 to 8 million barrels into the Persian Gulf. The resulting ecological damage to Gulf marine ecosystems took decades to partially recover from and in some areas never did. Iraqi forces set 700 Kuwaiti oil wells ablaze. The smoke from those fires was detectable across the hemisphere.

That was a six-week war in 1991. That was also preventable. Did anyone learn from that? The people currently in charge of the United States military did not, but to be fair, learning requires reading.

Operation Epic Fury is in its second month with no defined end state, no exit strategy, and no one in the room willing to say plainly what victory looks like. Kegsbreath is drunkenly rambling incoherent nonsense. Donnie Diapers is wandering around hugging flags, telling lies, and dancing to music only he can hear. “You’re fired!” rings out from the Empire every few days.

Math Equations Nobody Is Running

The Iran war is not being covered as a climate story. The Iran war is a climate story. A very significant climate story. A climate story you should be paying close attention to. Tell a MAGA near you about it. They won’t listen. At least you tried.

Every military operation has a carbon footprint. The United States military is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels on the planet — and the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gas emissions. A carrier strike group burns approximately 100,000 gallons of fuel per day. The air operations over Iran and the Persian Gulf are running multiple carrier groups simultaneously. The logistics chain supporting ground and air operations in the region adds millions of tons of carbon to an atmosphere already at 427 parts per million CO2 and rising. War itself should be an artifact. War kills not only people. War kills the planet. Someone should tell the defense contractors. They seem thrilled.

Let’s do the math. Infrastructure damage. Destroyed oil facilities. Busted refineries don’t stop emitting when they stop producing. They burn. They leak. They contaminate groundwater and soil across some of the most water-stressed terrain on the planet.

Desalination plants on the Gulf coast are critical infrastructure for Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain — countries where desalinated water accounts for the majority of freshwater supply. When they get hit the immediate humanitarian consequence is water scarcity for millions of people in some of the most water-stressed terrain on the planet. That will end well. Maybe the next evolutionary species’ adaptation will be the ability to drink salt water with oil in it.

Intake and outflow systems for large desalination plants draw enormous volumes of seawater and discharge concentrated brine back into the Gulf. When those systems are destroyed suddenly rather than shut down in a controlled manner, the discharge profile becomes chaotic — massive brine dumps, chemical releases from the treatment process, fuel and lubricant contamination from the plant infrastructure itself.

The Persian Gulf is already one of the most environmentally stressed marine environments on earth. It is shallow, semi-enclosed, has limited water exchange with the open ocean, and runs at water temperatures that are near the upper threshold for coral and marine life even without additional stress. It cannot absorb large-scale chemical contamination the way a deeper, more open body of water might. This is an ELE for the marine life of the area.

Destroyed plants also release whatever chemicals are stored on site — chlorine compounds, anti-scalants, coagulants, biocides. In a combat environment those don’t get cleaned up. They enter the water table and the marine environment.

And then there’s the reconstruction problem. Rebuilding a desalination plant takes years. The population that depended on it doesn’t have years. The interim solution is tanker water, which has its own carbon and logistical footprint. Donald Trump will make them pay for the reconstruction and then move Americans into the area. Trust him. He’s a stable genius.

The ecological consequences of sustained combat in the Persian Gulf will outlast the war by decades. His ego is eating the world. One girl’s school at a time. One critical infrastructure lives depend on per bomb. One negotiation betrayal per diplomacy attempt.

Meanwhile, the diplomatic architecture that was supposed to manage global climate coordination is in ruins. The Paris Agreement framework depends on American participation. American participation depends on an administration that believes climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese. The Iran war has consumed whatever remaining diplomatic bandwidth the administration had, while simultaneously burning through the fossil fuel reserves and ecological stability the world needs to fund the transition away from fossil fuels.

Cui bono? Not the atmosphere. Not the ocean. Not the 3.5 billion people who live in climate-vulnerable regions. No matter how the war ends, it will be a disaster for humanity.

The World Empire Is Consuming

Empires believe they are permanent. They are not. They believe the systems they depend on — ecological, economic, diplomatic — are infinitely resilient. They are not.

American empire has spent eighty years extracting value from the planet’s ecological systems while externalizing the costs onto the future, onto the Global South, onto the atmosphere, onto the ocean. The bill has been accumulating. The interest rate is compounding. The payment is coming due. Fires, floods, droughts, migrations, and now a war in the Persian Gulf that is simultaneously burning fossil fuels and destroying the diplomatic infrastructure that might have managed the transition away from them. The debt will be paid in blood, as our descendants find the planet they depend on increasingly inhospitable. The one percent build their bunkers and leave the rest of us to drown, burn, or starve.

Trump and the people around him are not serious about anything that can’t be monetized, weaponized, or turned into a Truth Social post. They are only serious about theater. About dominance signaling. About the short-term leverage that comes from treating every relationship as a transaction and every ecosystem as an asset to be liquidated.

What comes after this pointless war? What does the planet look like when the empire that managed — however badly, however corruptly, however violently — the global system of resource extraction and distribution, simply stops managing it and starts burning it instead.

The countries watching this are not waiting for America to fail. They are buying insurance policies. They are signing defense pacts with Ukraine. They are building alternative energy infrastructure that doesn’t depend on Gulf oil. They are doing it rationally, methodically, and with increasing speed. They are losing trust in the empire, and the false emperor who doesn’t know he is naked and mad. His courtiers know. They’re just calculating their exit timing.

Mother Nature will extract her price regardless of what Trump demands. Bigly.

Brent at $112 is not just an economic number. It is an ecological number. It is the price of performing empire at the end of empire, on a planet that is running out of margin for the performance.

Cui bono?

Not us. Not our children. Not anyone who has to breathe the air, drink the water, or live on the land after the smoke clears.

The empire burned the world.

The world will outlast the empire.

Whether it recognizes itself afterward is a separate question.

It was all avoidable. Remember that next time you encounter a MAGA in the wild.

Penfist is a combat correspondent, Marine MOS 4341, and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire at dyingempire.org. He deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He has seen what empires cost up close.

My wife and I were on the floor. Cleaning dog puke. It was stinky and wet.

Bob had eaten something he shouldn’t have — he always does, pit bulls are optimists about what constitutes food — and Maple and I were down there with paper towels doing what you do. The sun was coming through the window at the angle it comes through on April mornings in the Pacific Northwest. Bob looked sorry. He always looks sorry afterward. It doesn’t stop him.

This is what empire collapse actually looks like from the inside. Not the headline. The floor. The puke cleaning. My memories of brain matter and the randomness of death in war. If the elites have their way, you will have the death bits sanitized. Makes it easier to get ignorant people’s anger-fueled votes.

We have been trained to experience history at the scale of the catastrophic. The strike package. The body count. The market close. The Truth Social post at 5am threatening to bomb civilian infrastructure on the holiest morning of the Christian calendar while signing it Praise be to Allah — as if the man has ever prayed to anything but himself. We watch the scale of it and feel the helplessness that scale produces, which is the point, which has always been the point. If the disaster is large enough you don’t look at your own floor. You don’t look at the person next to you. You don’t tend to the immediate because the immediate seems irrelevant against the magnitude of what’s burning. You get numb, but you also get angry beyond the point of return.

The floor is where you actually live. The floor is where history happens to bodies.

Every empire that has ever collapsed has left behind people on their floors. The archaeological record is full of them — the hearths still warm, the bowls still set, the ordinary objects of ordinary life preserved in the ash of whatever came down from outside. The literature of collapse is always this: Chekhov’s characters playing cards while Russia dissolves around them. Didion watching California burn while making dinner. Orwell in a Barcelona trench writing about the smell of the trenches. The catastrophic and the mundane occupying the same moment, neither canceling the other out.

You don’t get to choose which scale you live at. You live at both simultaneously or you don’t live at all.

Bob recovered. He always does. Maple and I finished with the floor. The coffee was ready. The Strait of Hormuz was still closed. The Kirk essay had 148 views. Trump’s Power Plant Day threat was still live on Truth Social, 4,000 likes, the machine grinding forward without any apparent awareness that somewhere in the Pacific Northwest two people had just spent Easter morning on their knees next to a pit bull who looked sorry.

Cui bono. Not us. Not Bob. Not anyone who has to breathe the air or drink the water or tend to the people and animals they love while the people with nuclear codes perform dominance for an audience of themselves.

The empire burns. The floor needs cleaning. Both things are true every morning.

That’s not defeat. That’s the only honest account of what it means to be alive inside this.

Bob is fine. He waits for me every time I go, whispering, “Bob, I love you. I’ll always come home as quick as I can.

The official story is falling apart. The question is who benefits from the one they’re replacing it with.

I am a combat correspondent. I have been in close proximity to violent death. I know what high-powered rifle rounds do to human bodies. I know how investigations work when investigators want to find the truth, and I know how they work when they don’t. I know the difference between a case being built and a case being constructed.

The case against Tyler Robinson is manufactured. It is political, not factual.

Here is what we know. Here is what the evidence actually says. And here is the question nobody in American media has the spine to ask in plain language.

The Shot

On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was standing at a podium at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, answering questions from an audience of roughly 3,000 people. At approximately 12:20 PM, he was struck in the neck by a single projectile and went down. He was dead in the moment he slumped. It was obvious from his body’s last movements.

The official account: Tyler James Robinson, 22, a Washington County electrical apprentice with no prior criminal record, positioned himself on a rooftop approximately 142 yards away and fired a single shot from his grandfather’s Mauser Model 98, a World War-era bolt-action rifle rechambered in .30-06.

For someone trained, 142 yards is an easy shot. For someone with a basic understanding of terminal ballistics, a .30-06 round would have done far more damage to Kirk’s upper body than what was visible in available video footage.

I want you to hold that caliber in your mind. .30-06 Springfield. Developed in 1906. The round the United States military carried through two World Wars. A cartridge specifically engineered to penetrate and destroy at range. Hunters use it on elk. On moose. On animals that can absorb significantly more punishment than a human neck.

A .30-06 round fired from 142 yards and striking a human neck does not produce a contained wound. It does not lodge in tissue. It does not leave a fragment small enough that forensic analysts struggle to identify it. It exits. Catastrophically. It takes significant tissue with it. If there are people standing behind the target — and there were, three thousand of them — the ballistic physics of that round at that range means the threat to the crowd was extreme.

That is not what witnesses described. That is not what the medical evidence apparently showed. And that is exactly what the ATF confirmed when it conducted its ballistic analysis.

What the Science Says

This is not a matter of opinion. The peer-reviewed literature on wound ballistics is unambiguous.

Dr. Martin Fackler was the director of the US Army’s Wound Ballistics Laboratory at the Letterman Army Institute of Research, the scientist who established the FBI’s ballistic testing protocols, and the man responsible for the foundational wound profile data used by law enforcement and forensic pathologists across the United States. His wound profile documentation for the Winchester .30-06, 150-grain softpoint — the most common hunting load for that cartridge, the type of round most likely found in a grandfather’s hunting rifle — recorded a muzzle velocity of 2,923 feet per second. At 142 yards, that round retains the overwhelming majority of its muzzle velocity. It produces two distinct wound mechanisms: a permanent cavity — the direct destruction of tissue along the bullet’s path — and a temporary cavity, a shockwave that radially flings surrounding tissue away from the bullet’s path.

The neck contains no significant bony mass capable of stopping or containing a round of that energy on a direct trajectory. The carotid arteries, the jugular veins, the trachea, the esophagus — none of these structures arrest a .30-06 softpoint. A 2025 paper published in Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology — the peer-reviewed journal of forensic pathology — specifically studied large-caliber hunting rifle wounds to the cranio-cervical region. The finding: even when the bullet strikes the cervical vertebra — bone — the result is a high-energy transfer wound with exit on the opposite side of the neck. Bone deflects and destabilizes the bullet. It does not stop it.

The US Defense Technical Information Center’s published ballistic analysis of the .30-06, authored by researchers at the US Air Force Academy and BTG Research, documents the round as effective for anti-personnel use at ranges well beyond 142 yards, with penetration of barriers and tissue producing large wound channels at that distance.

A fragment small enough that federal firearms analysts cannot match it to a weapon is not consistent with a .30-06 softpoint fired at 142 yards striking a human neck. That wound profile produces catastrophic exit damage and a largely intact or significantly deformed projectile — not a fragment of indeterminate origin.

Something killed Charlie Kirk. The evidence says it was not a .30-06 fired from that rooftop.

The Bullet That Doesn’t Match

In March 2026, Robinson’s defense team filed a motion to delay the preliminary hearing scheduled for May. Buried in the legal language was a bombshell that the American media largely processed as a footnote.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives conducted a forensic ballistic analysis of the bullet fragment recovered from Kirk’s autopsy. Their conclusion: they were unable to conclusively connect that fragment to the Mauser rifle allegedly used by Robinson.

Read that again. The federal government’s own firearms analysis agency could not match the bullet that killed Charlie Kirk to the gun they say killed him.

The ATF report has not been made public. Robinson’s attorneys cited excerpts in their motion. The FBI is conducting a second analysis. That second analysis has not been completed.

This is the ATF’s own finding, cited in open court, that the physical evidence does not confirm the official story.

There is more. The same court filings revealed that DNA analysis of the rifle and associated evidence found genetic material from multiple individuals. Not just Robinson. Multiple people handled that weapon or were in contact with that evidence.

The official narrative requires you to believe that Tyler Robinson — a 22-year-old electrical apprentice from rural Utah — executed a precision sniper shot, evaded a 33-hour manhunt across a locked-down campus, left a weapon containing DNA from multiple people, and was connected to a bullet that the ATF cannot match to that weapon. And that none of this is suspicious.

The Texts That Read Like a Screenplay

Prosecutors released text messages allegedly sent by Robinson to his romantic partner in the hours after the shooting. I have read them.

A man who has just committed a premeditated political assassination, who is actively evading a manhunt, who is concerned about forensic evidence connecting him to the crime, who is worried about recovering a weapon — stops to make internet meme jokes. “Notices bulge uwu.” References to Fox News. Gaming culture language. All of it timestamp-consistent with the immediate post-assassination period.

That is not how adrenaline works. That is not how a human being functions in the aftermath of killing someone in a high-stress, high-consequence public setting. The fight-or-flight response does not produce ironic internet humor. It produces tunnel vision, elevated heart rate, and the overwhelming biological imperative to escape.

The texts read like they were written for an audience. They are too complete, too convenient, too neatly packaged. They establish motive — “I had enough of his hatred” — explain the weapon — “grandpa’s rifle wouldn’t trace to me” — and contain exactly what prosecutors needed them to contain. Nothing more. Nothing that doesn’t fit.

The note found under his keyboard, which his roommate was directed to find, said: “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.”

People planning political assassinations do not leave signed confessions under their keyboards. They do not direct their roommates to find them. This is not how operational security works. This is not how any of this works.

The Sheriff Who Disappeared

Nate Brooksby had served Washington County, Utah for 30 years. He was the sheriff who received the phone call that led to Robinson’s surrender. He arranged the terms of that surrender personally — and those terms are worth examining carefully.

Robinson was not apprehended. He was not surrounded. He was not taken down in a tactical operation. He walked into the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, sat on a comfortable couch, was given a water bottle, and waited two and a half hours — unrestrained — for investigators to arrive from Utah County.

Brooksby described his own role in this arrangement without apparent embarrassment. He negotiated a soft landing for a man accused of assassinating one of the most prominent conservative figures in America. He guaranteed comfortable conditions. He made Robinson feel safe enough to turn himself in.

On March 27, 2026 — the exact same day Robinson’s defense team filed the motion revealing the ATF could not match the bullet to the rifle — Nate Brooksby submitted his resignation.

After 30 years.

The Washington County Attorney’s office confirmed the resignation followed undisclosed complaints about operations at the sheriff’s office. The nature of the complaints has not been made public. The individuals who made the complaints asked that no further action be taken. Brooksby disagreed with the complaints but resigned anyway.

That sequence does not happen organically. You do not give thirty years of service, disagree with the complaints against you, and resign the same day the central piece of forensic evidence in the highest-profile murder case of the decade falls apart — unless something forced your hand. Unless continuing to be the sheriff had become a liability. Unless someone needed you gone.

The Kirk They Buried With the Eulogies

The Charlie Kirk who was eulogized at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona — attended by Trump, Vance, and Elon Musk — was a different man from the Charlie Kirk who was alive in the summer and fall of 2025.

By the time he was killed, Kirk had publicly questioned whether a nuclear Iran was actually a threat to America rather than to Israel. He had called the architects of the Iran war “the same architects of the Iraq war.” He had hosted critics of Israel on his podcast, including figures who had described Israel’s operations in Gaza as genocide. He was being publicly attacked by Laura Loomer — Trump’s most reliable far-right attack dog — for insufficient Israel loyalty.

He had also, on the record, named Mossad as a possible handler of Jeffrey Epstein. Not as a fringe theory — as a serious analytical conclusion based on Epstein’s documented relationships with Robert Maxwell, a known Mossad asset, and with figures in the US-Israeli intelligence-industrial complex.

And he was lobbying Trump directly against the Iran war. Not from outside the building. From inside the West Wing staircase.

Joe Kent knows this because he was there. Kent was Trump’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Center — the government’s senior official for coordinating counterterrorism intelligence across agencies. He resigned in March 2026 over his opposition to the Iran war, citing Israel’s manipulation of Trump’s decision-making.

In his resignation letter and in a subsequent interview with Tucker Carlson, Kent described the last time he saw Kirk alive. It was June 2025, in the West Wing stairway. Kirk grabbed him. He said, loudly: “Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran.” Kent described Kirk as “single-minded.”

Two months later, Kirk was dead.

The Investigation That Was Shut Down

This is the part that should be on the front page of every newspaper in America.

Joe Kent told Tucker Carlson that before his resignation, his team at the National Counterterrorism Center had begun investigating foreign ties to Kirk’s assassination. They had dug up what he described as “a decent amount of leads.” It was, he said, the job of his center to investigate exactly this kind of potential foreign involvement in the killing of a major American political figure.

The FBI shut it down.

The official explanation, as Kent characterized it: the FBI wanted to defer to Utah state authorities because everything was heading to trial and the matter was “very sensitive.”

Kent did not believe this explanation. He said so on the record.

“When one of President Trump’s closest advisers, who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink, at least, our relationship with the Israelis, and then he’s suddenly publicly assassinated and we’re not allowed to ask any questions about that — it’s a data point,” Kent told Carlson. “A data point that we need to look into.”

The head of the National Counterterrorism Center opened an investigation into foreign involvement in a domestic political assassination. He was shut down by the FBI. He resigned. And his resignation letter accused Israel of manufacturing the Iran war the same way it manufactured the Iraq war.

None of this is a conspiracy theory. All of it is on the record.

The Man Who Runs the FBI

To understand what it means that the FBI shut down Kent’s investigation, you have to understand who is running the FBI.

Kash Patel was confirmed as FBI Director in February 2025. He is a Trump loyalist who wrote a book — Government Gangsters — listing dozens of perceived Trump adversaries by name, including sitting members of Congress. He also wrote a trilogy of children’s books casting Trump as a king. Not a president. A king. For children as young as three.

In the story, Kash himself — “the Distinguished Discoverer” — is the all-knowing wizard who saves King Donald from his enemies. Trump comes to Kash’s door begging for help. “Open up, oh great and powerful Kash.” In the third book, Kash and King Donald physically beat the Department of Justice into submission and reprogram it to use against their enemies. He signed copies with “WWG1WGA” — the QAnon salute.

This is the man who now runs the actual Department of Justice’s investigative arm. The fantasy became the job description.

Since his confirmation, Patel has used FBI government aircraft at least ten times for what appear to be personal trips — including five visits to see his girlfriend and a transcontinental flight to Milan for the Winter Olympics, where he was filmed drinking beer in the US men’s hockey team’s locker room. A whistleblower reported that his personal travel and confusing orders delayed an elite FBI evidence team from reaching a mass shooting at Brown University. The Campaign Legal Center filed a formal complaint with the DOJ Inspector General. When the jet story broke, Patel fired a 27-year FBI veteran who headed the Critical Incident Response Group — the day after the news broke.

The FBI Agents Association — representing more than 14,000 active and former agents — called his firings “unjustified and illegal” and described his conduct as “a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution.” Three former FBI agents filed a class action lawsuit calling the firings politically motivated. He fired agents with Iran expertise in what colleagues described as political retribution. His personal email was hacked by a pro-Iranian group that posted his photographs and documents online. The FBI Director’s email was compromised by foreign actors during an active war with Iran.

He is the man under whose authority Joe Kent’s investigation into foreign ties to Kirk’s assassination was shut down. He is the man whose FBI is managing the case against Tyler Robinson. And he is the man who announced on social media — within hours of the shooting, before anyone was in custody — that “the subject” had been apprehended. That announcement was wrong. No explanation has ever been given for how the director of the FBI knew something that wasn’t true before law enforcement had made an arrest.

There are two explanations for that premature announcement. The first is catastrophic incompetence. The second is that Patel knew something he shouldn’t have known yet.

Neither explanation is reassuring. One of them is considerably worse than the other.

The Courtyard They Repaved. The Footage That Disappeared.

Within days of the assassination, Utah Valley University repaved the spot where Charlie Kirk was killed. The Salt Lake Tribune confirmed it. The courtyard — an active crime scene in the highest-profile political murder in decades — was physically altered before any independent forensic analysis could be conducted by parties outside law enforcement control. The university offered no public explanation for the timing.

This is not how you preserve a crime scene. This is how you eliminate one.

Then there is the footage.

This was a major Turning Point USA broadcast event. Kirk’s “American Comeback Tour” was professionally produced, streamed, and recorded. There were approximately 3,000 people in attendance, hundreds of them with smartphones, television cameras, and professional broadcast crews present. In the immediate aftermath, the FBI said they had “good video footage” of the shooter. Facial recognition was applied. It failed.

What was never publicly released is broadcast-quality footage showing the moment of the shot — specifically, footage that would establish the angle, the trajectory, and whether the wound presentation is consistent with a round fired from the Losee Center rooftop at 142 yards.

The Washington County Sheriff’s Office was asked via public records request for surveillance footage of Robinson turning himself in. The response: “Our office does not have any applicable records responsive to this request, as the surveillance footage is no longer available after the 30-day retention period.” When asked if the footage had been shared with any law enforcement or legal agency: “It is my understanding it was never sent out to any agency.”

The surveillance footage of a capital murder suspect turning himself in — in the highest-profile assassination of a political figure in modern American history — was never shared with any law enforcement or legal agency. And then it was automatically deleted.

A criminal defense attorney of 26 years who reviewed the case said: “If in fact it has been destroyed and not preserved, it’s very concerning.”

That is an understatement.

The courtyard was repaved. The surrender footage was deleted. The broadcast-quality event footage showing the actual moment of impact has not been released in a form that allows independent ballistic trajectory analysis. The ATF cannot match the bullet fragment to the rifle.

Every piece of physical evidence that could independently confirm or contradict the official account has been degraded, destroyed, withheld, or rendered inconclusive.

That is not a coincidence. That is a pattern.

Cui Bono?

Who benefits from Charlie Kirk’s death?

The administration used his assassination within hours to declare war on “political extremism on the left.” Within days, Americans were being fired for social media posts. Jimmy Kimmel was suspended. The administration signed a national security memorandum directing the FBI and joint terrorism task forces to focus on “anti-fascist political violence” and listed “anti-capitalism” and “hostility toward those who hold traditional American views” as indicators.

The Epstein files Kirk was pushing Trump to release? Buried.

The Iran war Kirk was lobbying against inside the White House? Started two months after his death.

The Mossad connection Kirk was publicly naming in the context of Epstein? Scrubbed from coverage of his assassination.

The space Kirk occupied — a massive MAGA youth organization, direct access to Trump, credibility with the base — was replaced by a martyr narrative that made questioning the Iran war politically toxic on the right.

Kirk alive was a problem. Kirk dead was a weapon. He was used to silence the very dissent he had been generating.

The Conclusion the Evidence Supports

I want to be precise about what I am and am not claiming.

I am not claiming Tyler Robinson is innocent. He may have been involved. He may have been a witting or unwitting participant in something larger than himself. The DNA from multiple individuals suggests he was not alone.

I am not claiming to know definitively who killed Charlie Kirk.

What I am claiming — what the evidence supports — is this:

The bullet that killed Charlie Kirk does not match the rifle they say killed him. The ATF said so. The DNA on the weapon belongs to more than one person. The sheriff who arranged an unusually soft surrender resigned the same day the ballistic discrepancy became public, under undisclosed circumstances, with complainants who asked for no further action. The texts read like a constructed narrative rather than a genuine confession. The note under the keyboard is exactly what prosecutors needed and exactly what no one planning an assassination would actually leave. The head of the National Counterterrorism Center opened an investigation into foreign ties to the killing and was shut down by the FBI. The crime scene was repaved. The surrender footage was deleted.

And the man who was killed had spent his final months becoming dangerous to powerful people. He was opposing the Iran war from inside the White House. He was publicly naming Mossad in the Epstein context. He was drifting away from unconditional Israel support in ways that were being noticed and punished.

Professional intelligence operations do not look like Tyler Robinson sitting on a couch with a water bottle. They look like a 22-year-old patsy with a grandfather’s untraceable rifle and text messages that contain everything prosecutors need and nothing that doesn’t fit.

They look like an investigation that gets shut down before it finds what it’s looking for.

They look like a sheriff who disappears the day the story starts to crack.

They look like a courtyard that gets repaved before anyone asks questions about it.

Someone killed Charlie Kirk. The someone who benefited most from his death is not a 22-year-old electrical apprentice from Washington County, Utah.

The question — the one Joe Kent asked and was told to stop asking — is who gave the order.

Penfist is a combat correspondent, Marine MOS 4341, Army MOS 46Q/R

and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire at dyingempire.org. He deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He knows what .30-06 does to a human neck.

That’s the danger of success. You stop seeing the architecture because it’s been load-bearing so long it feels like gravity.

The relationship with Canada alone required surviving the War of 1812, two competing visions of what North America should look like, the pull of competing empires, and a hundred years of careful, unglamorous diplomatic work that nobody writes songs about. The relationship with Mexico required surviving a land grab that México has never fully forgiven, a revolution that spilled across the border, a century of asymmetric economic integration that benefited one side considerably more than the other, and still produced something functional enough to call a partnership.

Neither of these relationships was inevitable. Both of them were chosen, repeatedly, by successive generations of leaders who understood that the alternative — hostile borders, military buildups, intelligence blackouts, the logistical nightmare of treating your neighbors as adversaries — was a cost no serious power could afford.

Then came the clown car.

Trump has threatened to annex Canada. Not metaphorically — to absorb a G7 nation, a NATO ally, a Five Eyes partner, a country that has sent its sons and daughters to fight alongside Americans in every major conflict since the Second World War, into the United States as its 51st state. He has suggested using “economic force” to make it happen, which is the kind of phrase that sounds almost reasonable until you remember it means coercing a democracy into submission. His son floated military force. The administration has not ruled it out.

He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. A body of water that has carried that name for centuries, that borders three sovereign nations, that appears on every map in every country on earth — renamed by executive order because the man in the Oval Office needed to feel large. Mexico did not consent. The world did not comply. American maps now disagree with every other map on the planet. This is what kindergarten geopolitics looks like when it has nuclear weapons behind it.

He has imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico — not adversaries, not strategic competitors, allies — under a national security framework so tortured that it required ignoring two centuries of integrated economies, shared defense infrastructure, and the basic reality that the three countries manufacture things together, not merely trade them. The auto industry doesn’t have a border. The energy grid doesn’t have a border. The supply chains that feed American families don’t have a border. The tariffs don’t know that. They don’t care.

Let’s focus on the numbers. Canada has 40 million people. Mexico has 130 million. The United States has 335 million. The two countries on America’s borders represent 170 million human beings — more than half the US population — with their own histories, their own grievances, their own long memories, and their own capacity to make American life considerably more complicated than it currently is. These are not small, weak nations that can be absorbed or bullied without consequence. Canada is the largest trading partner the United States has ever had. Mexico is the second. Together they represent the economic architecture that keeps American grocery stores stocked, American factories running, and American energy flowing.

And consider what those numbers mean domestically. There are 11 million Mexican-born people living inside the United States right now. Another 38 million Americans claim Mexican ancestry — roughly 12% of the entire country. There are 820,000 Canadian-born Americans. These are not abstractions. These are people with families on both sides of the borders Trump is threatening to militarize, annex, or rename. These are voters, workers, soldiers, taxpayers. When you threaten to invade Mexico, you are threatening the country of origin of one in eight Americans. When you treat Canada as a subordinate state to be absorbed, you are insulting the birthplace of nearly a million of your own citizens.

The internal political consequences of actually moving on either border don’t require much imagination. They require only arithmetic.

And the arithmetic gets worse when you factor in what happens inside American borders the moment the first boot hits Mexican or Canadian soil. Insurgency researchers estimate that active participation of 2-5% of an affected population is sufficient to make any occupation ungovernable. The American Revolution ran on 40% support. The Iraqi insurgency that bled the US military for a decade drew from a minority of a minority. You don’t need a majority. You need enough.

Two percent of the 38 million Americans of Mexican ancestry is 760,000 people. Five percent is 1.9 million. That is a domestic insurgency larger than the entire active US military, operating inside American cities, with intimate knowledge of infrastructure, supply chains, communication networks, and geography — before a single Mexican national crosses the border in response. And that’s before you account for the neutrals who simply stop cooperating. The DEA loses its informant networks. Border Patrol loses its community relationships. Federal agencies lose their translators, their cultural liaisons, their institutional knowledge. The machinery of governance across the entire American Southwest seizes.

This is not speculation. This is what happens when you make enemies of people who live inside your own borders. The British learned it in 1776. The French learned it in Algeria. The Americans learned it in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The lesson has never changed. The administration simply hasn’t read it.

Now add the native-born Americans who have already declared their opposition. Trump’s approval rating has sunk to between 33% and 39% depending on the poll — with disapproval running as high as 62%. The share of Americans who strongly disapprove is at a second-term high of 46.7%. Only 27% of Americans say they support all or most of his policies. Eight million people turned out for No Kings protests across all fifty states on a single day. Less than one in ten Americans supports sending ground troops anywhere.

The math compounds. You have 11 million Mexican-born residents. 38 million Americans of Mexican ancestry. 820,000 Canadian-born Americans. Add the 150-plus million native-born Americans who currently disapprove of this administration — many of them intensely. At 2% active participation, that’s three million people. At 5%, it’s seven and a half million. That’s not an insurgency. That’s a civil war.

History also has something to say about soldiers ordered to fire on people they recognize as their own. It rarely ends the way the generals planned.

The administration is not planning a military campaign against its neighbors. It is planning a military campaign against a continent — including significant portions of its own population. The people who dreamed this up have apparently never studied what happens when an empire turns its weapons on the people it depends on to operate.

And here is the thought that should keep every armchair annexationist awake at night. Canada and Mexico are not Iraq. They are not Afghanistan. They are not small, distant countries with fractured governments and exhausted populations that can be occupied and managed from a forward operating base. They are vast, modern, literate nations with strong institutional identities, deep reserves of national pride, and — in the case of Mexico especially — a living cultural memory of what American military aggression looks like and what it produces.

An invasion of Canada would trigger an insurgency across 3.8 million square miles of terrain that includes some of the most inhospitable geography on the planet. A country of 40 million people who have just watched their sovereignty violated would not submit. They would resist — in cities, in forests, in the Arctic, across a border so long it cannot be defended let alone controlled. The United States spent twenty years failing to pacify Afghanistan, a country of 40 million people with a fraction of Canada’s resources, institutional capacity, and international support. Canada has all of those things and sits on top of the world’s second largest oil reserves.

Mexico is worse. 130 million people. A country that has fought insurgencies, survived revolutions, and maintained national cohesion through a century of American economic dominance and political interference. A country with a military of 300,000 active personnel, a population with deep experience of asymmetric conflict, and a southern border that connects to the entirety of Latin America. An occupation of Mexico would not be a war. It would be a generational hemorrhage that would drain the American military, treasury, and political will simultaneously — while Iran, Russia, China, and every other adversary currently watching American overstretch accelerated their own ambitions.

The empire would not conquer its neighbors. Its neighbors would consume it.

Now consider the broader strategic picture while all of this is happening. The United States is thirty days into a war with Iran, with Brent crude at $112 and the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed. Russia is running its spring offensive in Ukraine and feeding targeting data to Iranian missiles. China is watching the Indo-Pacific deterrence gap widen with every carrier strike group committed to the Persian Gulf. The Houthis have entered the Iran war and are threatening to close the Bab el-Mandeb. North Korea is quiet in the way that precedes being loud. NATO is fracturing under the weight of American contempt. The G7 is producing confrontations rather than consensus.

This is the strategic environment in which the United States has chosen to threaten its northern neighbor with annexation, rename a body of water shared with its southern neighbor, and DNA-swab a 68-year-old Canadian retiree for wanting to attend a protest.

A competent empire manages its periphery so it can project power at its frontier. It keeps its neighbors close, its alliances intact, and its rear secure. What the Trump administration is doing is the opposite — creating friction on every axis simultaneously, burning the relationships that provide strategic depth, and doing so not out of necessity but out of appetite. Out of the need to perform dominance for a domestic audience that has confused aggression with strength.

This is the same man who called American soldiers buried at Belleau Wood “suckers” and “losers” for having died in service. He doesn’t believe in the people he’s proposing to spend. He believes in the theater of military power without any apparent understanding of or respect for what it actually costs.

Trump and the people around him are not serious in the way that matters. They are serious about performance. About dominance signaling. About the short-term leverage that comes from treating every relationship as a transaction and every ally as a mark. What they are not serious about is the question of what comes after. What the intelligence relationship looks like when Canada decides Five Eyes information shared with Washington ends up serving MAGA political objectives. What the border looks like when Mexico stops cooperating on cartel interdiction because the humiliation finally outweighs the benefit. What NORAD looks like when the junior partner in a joint command has decided the senior partner cannot be trusted.

These are not hypotheticals. They are the logical downstream consequences of the current posture, playing out in slow motion while the administration mistakes silence for compliance and compliance for loyalty.

Sixty percent of Canadians now say they can never trust the United States the same way again. That number will not go back down when Trump leaves office. Trust is not a renewable resource. It accumulates over generations and evaporates in moments. The moment a Canadian retiree was DNA-swabbed at the Blue Water Bridge for wanting to attend a protest — and the officer told him to his face it was because of the nature of his planned activity — that was a moment. Multiply it by every tariff, every annexation joke that wasn’t a joke, every Gulf of America decree, every time a Canadian politician had to stand at a podium and explain to their constituents why they were still cooperating with a government that openly discussed absorbing their country.

Empires have always been good at making enemies. The ones that lasted were good at making something harder — neighbors who chose to stay.

We are losing that. Casually. Irreversibly. By people who inherited something they never had to build and have no idea what its impact on human history portends.

The 14th Amendment is not complicated. It was written to be simple on purpose.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.

All. Not some. Not the ones with the right parents. Not the ones whose mothers arrived with the correct paperwork. All. The men who wrote that word had just finished a war that killed 620,000 Americans. They chose it deliberately. They put it in the Constitution — not a statute, not an executive order — because they understood that citizenship is the foundational right. The right, as Chief Justice Earl Warren once wrote, to have rights. And they understood that any government that can define citizenship can un-define it.

Trump knows this. That’s the point.

On April 1 — and yes, April Fool’s Day, feel free to sit with that — the Supreme Court hears arguments in Trump v. Barbara. The administration’s position is that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause doesn’t mean what it says. That “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a carve-out big enough to drive an executive order through. That children born on American soil to undocumented parents, or parents here on visas, are not automatically citizens.

Every court that has considered this has rejected it. The Supreme Court settled it in 1898 in United States v. Wong Kim Ark — a California man born to Chinese parents, denied re-entry to his own country, vindicated by a 6-2 ruling that affirmed birthright citizenship without ambiguity. The administration’s answer to 128 years of settled law is to dig up Elk v. Wilkins — an 1884 ruling that denied citizenship to a Native American man who had left his tribe. They are citing a case built on the dispossession of Indigenous people to argue that brown babies born in American hospitals don’t belong here. That’s not legal reasoning. That’s grave robbing.

Trump said the quiet part out loud on Truth Social: “It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES.” He’s right about that, at least. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 to reverse the Dred Scott decision — the Supreme Court’s most obscene ruling, which declared that Black people, free or enslaved, could never be citizens of the United States. The citizenship clause exists because this country needed to formally repudiate the idea that the accident of birth could create a permanent underclass. What Trump is arguing is that it can. What the Supreme Court is being asked to do is ratify that argument.

I grew up in Bangladesh and Haiti — places where one person or a few select people have complete control over who is human and who isn’t. I know what it looks like when a state decides some people don’t belong. It doesn’t start with torture chambers. It starts with a Presidential order. A legal reinterpretation. A category of person who is technically present but legally provisional. I chose America because it had written something different into its foundational law. Past tense is doing a lot of work in that sentence right now.

This is not an immigration argument. This is a human argument. The administration’s theory — that citizenship flows from parentage, not birth — transforms America from a nation defined by geography and law into one defined by dehumanization and the whims of whoever currently holds power. That is not the American idea. That is the kings idea the founders explicitly rejected. It is, if you want to trace it to its logical conclusion, the idea that some people are born human and others are imposters to that condition.

Alien. There’s that word again. First it’s the undocumented. Then the visa holders. Then the naturalized. Dehumanize the category and the rest gets easier — that’s how it has always worked, in every country where it has worked. I am number three on the list. When is it my turn to have my life, painfully built at great cost, stripped from me?

Every lower court that has heard this case has ruled against the administration. Some of the conservative justices have already signaled skepticism — Kavanaugh spent a previous hearing demanding to know how hospitals would even process newborns under the new regime. The solicitor general’s answer was, essentially, we’ll figure it out. That’s the plan. A 128-year-old constitutional settlement, unilaterally rewritten by executive order, implementation details to be determined. And six justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote will decide whether that’s acceptable.

Here’s what I know about empires in decline. They don’t announce the end of citizenship. They redefine it. Incrementally. The mechanism, once established, doesn’t stay where you put it. And if you think loyalty to the regime protects you — ask what happened to members of the Nazi party who stepped out of line. They disappeared too.

I became a citizen because I believed in what the 14th Amendment meant. If this court allows an executive order to override it, then the amendment means whatever the man currently holding power says it means.

That’s the end of the American dream I fought and bled for.

A convicted felon and an alcoholic are running the United States military.

Let that land.

A man with 34 felony convictions is the commander-in-chief. The man he appointed to run the Pentagon — Pete Hegseth, call him Kegsbreath, he’s earned it — couldn’t get confirmed without seven Republican senators going on record about his drinking, his sexual assault allegations, and his general unfitness to be trusted with anything more consequential than a remote control.

His second wife had a safe word. Not a metaphor — an actual code she could text to friends and family to signal that Pete Hegseth was drunk and volatile and she needed someone to come get her. She used it. She hid in a closet from him. This is in a sworn affidavit, signed under penalty of perjury, submitted to the United States Senate. In 2017, a woman told California police that Hegseth blocked the door of a hotel room with his body, took her phone so she couldn’t call for help, and refused to let her leave. She went to the hospital afterward because she believed she had been sexually assaulted. Hegseth later paid her $50,000 in a settlement. He called it blackmail. The police report exists. The settlement exists. The $50,000 exists.

Seven Republican senators had concerns. They gave him the most powerful military on earth anyway.

These are the men deciding who lives and who dies. Congress is a collection of spineless cowards — cancer cells protecting the tumor, every one of them with the power to end this and not one with the spine to use it.

Start with the school.

February 28, 2026. First day of the US-Israel war on Iran. Classes are in session at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab. Girls between seven and twelve years old. Teachers. Parents who had rushed to pick up their kids after the air raid alerts started.

A US Tomahawk cruise missile came through the roof.

At least 165 people died. Over a hundred of them were children.

The school had been separated from a nearby Iranian military base years earlier — 2013 to 2016, satellite imagery confirmed it. The US target list didn’t know that. Nobody updated the maps. The missile went where it was told.

Here’s why.

Kegsbreath cut the civilian casualty mitigation teams by ninety percent before the first missile launched. These are the people whose entire job is to look at a target list and say: that’s a school now. That’s a hospital. Don’t shoot there. They catch the errors before the errors become dead children.

He cut them by ninety percent.

So on day one of the war, a Tomahawk hit a classroom full of girls because the maps were wrong and the people who check the maps were gone.

Trump stood in front of cameras and said Iran probably did it. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions.” A compulsive liar doing what compulsive liars do — blame the bodies.

Kegsbreath stood behind him and said nothing.

The investigation confirmed what the Tomahawk components sitting in the rubble already confirmed. Ours. Our missile. Our target list. Our decision to eliminate the people whose job it was to prevent this.

One hundred and ten children. Sixty-six boys, fifty-four girls, twenty-six teachers, four parents who came to collect their kids and didn’t leave. Think about that. Think about whose kids those were.

A convicted felon — a man with documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein, who started an unnecessary war to keep the country looking elsewhere — blamed the country his missile just struck. An alcoholic promised an investigation.

Now the fishermen.

Somewhere in the Caribbean, before dawn, a fishing boat sits low in the water. Nets out. Men doing what their fathers did, what their grandfathers did.

The missile comes without warning.

One hundred and sixty-three people killed in US boat bombings in the Caribbean. No judge. No jury. No evidence reviewed by anyone with a legal obligation to the truth. The convicted felon said they were drug smugglers. That was enough. Kegsbreath’s military executed the order.

I’ve been in a war zone. Two of them. I know what it smells like when ordnance lands on people. I know what the decision to fire costs — or what it’s supposed to cost, when the people making it have ever been accountable for anything.

Kegsbreath went to Princeton. He made major in the National Guard. In a sane world, a National Guard major would never be handed command of the world’s most powerful military. He has inflated his service record the way a man who changed a tire once calls himself a mechanic. He spent his real career getting paid to have opinions on television, which means he spent his career being accountable for nothing. He has never watched anyone die. He has never carried that weight. He has never had to.

Hegseth should not be in charge of a car wash, let alone the Pentagon.

Four United States Army officers were nominated for promotion.

These are not people who stumbled into anything. These are people who gave decades to an institution that demands everything. Combat records. Commendations. The Secretary of the Army reviewed their files personally and called their records exemplary.

Kegsbreath removed them from the promotion list.

Two are Black. Two are women.

He overrode the Army Secretary’s objection himself, possibly illegally, bypassing the standard process entirely. His chief of staff reportedly explained the reasoning plainly: the President wouldn’t want to stand next to a Black female officer at public events.

Then Kegsbreath called it meritocracy.

Officers who deployed to the same theaters I deployed to. Who served as I did, with more rank and more responsibility. Who earned everything on that promotion list. Erased because of how they would look standing next to a man who avoided military service entirely and whose primary qualification for his current job was hosting a television show where he pretended to fire people.

The word for this is not controversial. It is not a matter of interpretation. It is evil people performing righteousness.

White Christian nationalism is a death cult. The belief that some Americans are more American than others. That some service counts more than others. That some bodies are less acceptable standing next to power. It doesn’t announce itself as racism because it doesn’t have to. It just makes the decisions racism would make and finds other words. Meritocracy. Standards. Tradition.

Same as it ever was. Just louder now.

Here’s what connects the school in Minab to the fishermen in the Caribbean to the four officers who gave everything and got erased.

When you make killing a game — when you spend years in a television studio talking about military force the way you talk about a football play, when you describe bombing campaigns with the casual enthusiasm of someone who has never smelled what a bomb leaves behind — you build a contempt for the people dying on both ends.

The girls in Minab were not real to Kegsbreath. They were a targeting error, which is to say they were a statistic, which is to say they were nothing. The fishermen in the Caribbean are not real to him. The Black female officers who bled for this country are not real to him — they are a diversity initiative to be corrected.

He cut the teams that protect civilians. He erased the officers. He stood behind the convicted felon and said nothing while the convicted felon blamed the country whose children his missile just killed.

And then he promised a thorough investigation.

I still carry my wars with me. I earned what I have the hard way, the same way those four officers earned their promotions, the same way the people on those fishing boats earned the right to go home at the end of the day.

I was a combat correspondent. My job was never to pull the trigger. My job was to make sure people knew what was happening. To document it. To refuse to let it go unrecorded.

Different war. Same job.

A convicted felon and an alcoholic are murdering people. The fishermen in the Caribbean. The girls in a classroom in Minab. They’re spitting on decorated officers who gave decades and got erased for it.

Some days documenting it feels like enough.

Some days it doesn’t.

Pen is a combat correspondent, Marine MOS 4341, and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. Dispatches from a Dying Empire publishes at dyingempire.org.

I’ve been in countries where the government stops pretending to listen. Where the machinery of the state turns its full weight on the people who built it, fed it, and bled for it. I know what that looks like from the inside. I know the smell of it.

I’m watching it happen here.

But today something else is happening.

More than 3,100 demonstrations are erupting across the United States — from Alabama to Wyoming — as millions of Americans take to the streets under the banner of No Kings. Not in blue cities. Not in the usual places. Two-thirds of the people showing up today live outside major urban centers — in small towns, in red states, in places the political class wrote off years ago.

That number matters more than the total count. That’s not a protest. That’s a country waking up.

This is the third No Kings day. The first drew five million people in June. October brought seven million across 2,700 events. Today’s numbers aren’t in yet, but organizers are anticipating what could be the largest single day of domestic political protest in American history.

Think about that for a moment. Largest in history. Not the sixties. Not the Vietnam years. Not the Women’s March. Today.

And it’s still growing.

The flagship rally is in Minneapolis. That’s not an accident.

The Twin Cities are the site of an aggressive immigration crackdown that leads to the killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents. Two American citizens, shot dead on American soil by men in government-issued gear. Their names, along with Keith Porter’s, are why this particular Saturday exists.

The administration calls it law enforcement. The people call it what it is.

You don’t shoot civilians and walk away clean. Not in this country. Not yet.

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I want to be honest about what I see and what I don’t.

I don’t know if today changes anything structurally. I’ve watched protests before — in Iraq, in Afghanistan, from the outside looking in, and from the inside looking out. Protests are not policy. They are not legislation. They don’t, by themselves, stop a determined authoritarian.

What they do is change the math.

Every person standing in a town square in rural Wyoming today, holding a sign, surrounded by neighbors they’ve known for decades — that person is crossing a line in their own mind. That’s not nothing. That’s the beginning of a thing that actually matters, which is sustained, organized, local resistance that doesn’t quit when the cameras are focused elsewhere.

This administration is very good at waiting people out. It’s banking on exhaustion. It has been since day one. Fuck that.

Burn it down. It cannot be fixed at this point. It needs to be deconstructed and reimagined. No electoral college. No two-party duopoly. No double standards, one for elites that permits everything, and another for normals that restricts most things and grinds the people into dust.

Trump’s policies, the rising cost of living, and the war with Iran. The ritual bullying, the 53 pages of rapey shit. We are not tolerating it. This country isn’t just for billionaires. Cost of living isn’t a progressive issue. Gas prices don’t care what you voted for. When a war nobody asked for starts draining wallets in places that voted 70% red, the political calculus shifts.

The bootlickers are building this coalition themselves. Every ICE raid. Every dead civilian. Every gallon of gas. Every grocery bill. The administration is assembling the opposition more efficiently than any organizer could.

That’s the thing about overreach. It does the recruiting.

I was raised by Mennonites in Bangladesh and Haiti. I’ve seen what happens when institutions fail people completely — when the gap between what a government says and what it does becomes so wide that even the most deferential citizen can’t look away anymore.

America isn’t there yet. But we are closer than we have ever been in my lifetime.

What I’m seeing today looks like a country that knows it.

3,100 protests. Millions in the streets. Alabama to Wyoming.

They look at this country and see a population too divided, too tired, too beaten down to push back.

They’re reading the room wrong.

They always do.

Pen is a veteran, writer, and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire. He served as a Marine combat correspondent and Army public affairs NCO with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

JD Vance and I were trained to do the same thing: watch how the military packages reality for public consumption. I used that training to write the truth. He used it to become the package.

We were both Marine combat correspondents. MOS 4341. We were both in Iraq. We both carried rifles, pistols, and notebooks into places where the distinction between journalist and target didn’t matter to the people shooting at us. We were both taught to find the story the brass wanted told, and then — if we were any good — to notice the story they didn’t.

Military public affairs is about positivity and lying. You learn how narratives get built. You learn which facts get foregrounded and which ones get buried in the fifteenth paragraph where nobody reads. You learn that the distance between what happened and what gets reported is where power lives. If you have the right ingredients you get away with selling bullshit. We didn’t invade and occupy a country based on lies. We came to liberate the people and build infrastructure for them. That’s what the press release said, anyway.

A combat correspondent who doesn’t understand the gap between the release and the reality isn’t paying attention.

I paid attention.

So did Vance. He just drew different conclusions about what to do with the knowledge.

Here’s what I know about his service because it’s public record and because I know the job. He enlisted in 2003, got assigned to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing at Cherry Point, and deployed to Al Asad Airbase in western Iraq for six months starting in late 2005. He wrote articles about KC-130J maintenance crews. He escorted civilian press. He went outside the wire a few times with civil affairs units. He came home and wrote in his memoir that he was lucky to escape any real fighting. Then he went to Yale, wrote a bestseller about being poor, and started looking for the next rung.

I did the same job. I was a combat correspondent and press chief in the Marines. Then the Army sent me to Baghdad as a public affairs journalist with the 125th MPAD at MNFI CPIC — the Combined Press Information Center in the Green Zone. I wrote stories, shot photographs, built and ran the Multi-National Force Iraq website, briefed PA command elements, and went outside the wire. I got mortared and nearly blown up.

In July of 2006, I was watching a movie in my trailer when a rocket shrieked overhead. Heads popped out of doors. We stood around in various states of combat readiness discussing how many, where from, where they landed. Helicopters zipped around the perimeter seeking targets. I finished my movie and went to sleep. A few weeks later, a car bomb detonated across the river from my quarters. Twelve Iraqis dead, eighteen wounded. AK-47 fire cracked in the nearby area. I suited up in full battle rattle and headed for my vehicle while Apache attack helicopters swarmed the scene. I’d been through so many indirect fire attacks by then that I’d lost count. The body’s reaction was always the same: a huge rush of adrenaline, a few minutes of shaky hands, and then exultation at being alive.

In May of that year, incoming hit my living area while I was at work. I couldn’t return to my quarters until nearly midnight because of unexploded ordnance right next to where I slept. I lay in bed that night thinking about what if — what if I’d been home on time, what if the trajectory had been fifty feet different.

I came home disabled. I came home progressive. I came home honest about what I saw. I came home with an unwillingness to put up with bootlickers like Vance. Fuck you, JD.

As hard-headed and stubborn as I am, I had to admit that I helped invade and pacify people who were trying to live their lives and had no ill will towards me or my nation. That admission cost me something. It costs everyone who makes it something. You don’t get to look at the gap between the story and the truth and walk away comfortable.

Unless comfort is the point.

I wrote something during that deployment that I think about now. “I live in a world of information overload,” I wrote from Baghdad. “I absorb the day’s events — good and bad. I regurgitate them. I swim in tales of men with guns, men with bombs, men with souls and men who have abandoned their humanity.” I described living behind “a secured perimeter which isn’t really secure at all” and concluded: “Physically I have been touched little by this war. No shrapnel has found its home in my body... Mentally, I am frayed around the edges.”

That’s what the combat correspondent job does to you if you’re doing it honestly. You take in everything — the car bombs, the mortars, the crippled Iraqi man under a tree who needs a wheelchair and calls you “Mister” when you hand him what’s in your wallet — and you process it into narrative. You build the boxes that the truth gets shipped in. And if you’re paying attention, you notice that the truth doesn’t always survive the packaging.

One day I stumbled onto the shattered camera equipment of two CBS journalists killed by an IED. Their cameras and lenses lay twisted on the floor, pierced by shrapnel, speckled with blood. They were correspondents, like me. They were observers, not combatants. They used tools just like mine to record and report. Their tools survived them, broken and covered in evidence of the violence that the job is supposed to document, not absorb. A reporter from ABC named Kimberly Dozier survived, but her sound and camera people didn’t. Their names were Paul Douglas and James Brolan. I sometimes have nightmares about their bits of body and brains on their gear.

That’s what the MOS costs when you do it for real. It frays you. It breaks your equipment or it breaks you. It teaches you things about narrative and power that you carry for the rest of your life.

Vance carried those lessons too. He just found a more profitable use for them.

In 2016, Vance texted his Yale Law roommate that he went back and forth between thinking Trump was a cynical asshole like Nixon or “America’s Hitler.” He called Trump “cultural heroin” in the Atlantic — wrote that Trump’s promises were the needle in America’s collective vein. Called him “reprehensible.” Called him a “total fraud” who didn’t care about regular people. Said Trump was exploiting the working class. Said Trump made people he cared about — immigrants, Muslims — afraid. Tweeted that God wanted better of us.

Every word of that was the combat correspondent talking. That was a man trained to see through the narrative, doing exactly what the training was supposed to produce. He looked at Trump, recognized the operation for what it was, and called it with the precision of someone who’d spent years learning how operations get run.

Then he deleted the tweets. Apologized. Got on his knees for the endorsement. Won his Senate seat. Became the vice president to the man he’d identified as a potential American Hitler.

His explanation? “I bought into the media’s lies and distortions.”

No. No, you didn’t. You were trained to see through exactly that kind of thing. That’s what combat correspondents do. That’s the whole point of the MOS. You weren’t in Psyops. You don’t get to use the skillset to identify a threat and then pretend the skillset failed you when it’s politically convenient to have been wrong.

You weren’t wrong. You were right and it stopped being useful, so you put it down and licked boots. You are licking boots right now while I type this. You are a disgrace to humanity.

I know what this MOS teaches you because it taught me the same things.

It teaches you that the official story is never the whole story. It teaches you that the people in charge will always try to control the narrative because narrative is how you maintain authority over people who’d otherwise ask uncomfortable questions. It teaches you that language is a weapon — not a metaphor, an actual tool of power — and that the people who wield it carelessly or dishonestly get other people killed.

Vance learned all of this. He demonstrated it in 2016 when he diagnosed Trump with surgical precision. Cultural heroin. America’s Hitler. A fraud exploiting scared people. That wasn’t some hot take from a guy who watched too much CNN. That was analysis from a trained military journalist who understood how propaganda works because he’d been trained to produce it.

And then he saw which way the wind was blowing, and he decided the skillset was more useful for accruing power than for telling the truth.

I want to be specific about what bothers me, because it’s not that Vance is a Republican. I don’t care about party. The two-party system is a rotting architecture and I have no loyalty to either side of it. In the end, that system of power protects a few hundred people and eats the rest of the species.

What bothers me is the betrayal of the training.

We were taught to witness. To document. To get it right even when getting it right was inconvenient for the people signing our paychecks. The whole point of having combat correspondents is that someone inside the machine is supposed to be watching, recording, telling the story that the chain of command can’t be trusted to tell about itself.

Vance took that training and used it to reverse-engineer the con. He didn’t just stop telling the truth — he studied how truth gets packaged and sold, and then he applied that knowledge in service of a man he’d already identified as dangerous. That’s not a change of heart. That’s an application of skill. He saw how the sausage gets made, recognized the sausage was poison, said so publicly, and then opened a sausage shop.

You can watch him do it now. Watch him tell Zelenskyy it’s “disrespectful” to argue for his own country’s survival in the Oval Office. Watch him deliver that line with the calm authority of a man who knows exactly how to frame a narrative so the aggressor sounds reasonable and the victim sounds ungrateful. That’s not politics. That’s craft. That’s a combat correspondent using everything he was taught — not to inform, but to package.

He was willing to kiss people’s asses to become famous. I’m not.

I’m writing this from a trailer parked somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve got a pit bull named Bob and a VA disability rating and a Substack called Dispatches from a Dying Empire. I’m not in the halls of power. I’m not on anyone’s ticket. Nobody’s asking me to speak at a convention or sit behind the Resolute Desk as backup.

But I’m still doing the job. I’m still watching how the story gets told, and I’m still writing down what I see. I’ve been doing it since Baghdad, when I blogged about rockets and car bombs and crippled men under trees while the Army told me to build press releases about liberation.

Vance could have done the same thing. He had the training. He had the eye for it — his 2016 analysis of Trump was sharper than most of what the professional pundit class produced. He understood the threat, named it clearly, and then walked straight into its arms because that’s where the power was. How despicable. How cowardly. How traitorous.

Combat correspondents are trained to go where the action is and report what’s happening. Vance went where the action was and joined the cast of villains.

People change their minds. I get that. I’m not the same person I was at thirty-five, embedding with troops in Mosul, and I’d be worried if I were. My own politics in 2006 were dramatically different from where I am now — I criticized Democrats, defended the occupation, voted libertarian. I evolved because the evidence demanded it. But there’s a difference between evolving and calculating. Evolution is when new information changes your understanding. Calculation is when your understanding stays the same but your ambition outgrows your principles.

Vance didn’t get new information between 2016 and 2022. Trump didn’t become less of what Vance described. He became more of it. January 6th happened. The big lie became party orthodoxy. The authoritarian tendencies Vance identified didn’t soften — they hardened into policy. Everything Vance warned about came true, and he responded by joining the administration.

And Vance looked at all of that and said, “I was wrong about him.”

No. You were right. You said so yourself, in your own words, with the clarity of a man trained to cut through exactly this kind of bullshit. You were right, and then you decided being right wasn’t useful.

Truth fucking matters. It mattered in Iraq when we were writing press releases about liberation while people’s lives burned around us. It matters now. And the fact that a man who was trained to find it chose instead to sell it — that’s not evolution. That’s the oldest story the military ever taught us to recognize.

It’s a man who learned how to spot a con, and decided the con paid better than the truth.

I think about our MOS sometimes. The 4341 pipeline. The training that teaches you to see the machinery behind the story. It’s a strange skill to carry through civilian life. Once you know how narratives get constructed — not in theory, but because you’ve sat in the briefing room and watched a colonel decide which facts make the press release and which ones don’t — you can’t unsee it.

There’s a scene every combat correspondent knows. Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket — the most famous fictional version of our job. He’s got “Born to Kill” written on his helmet and a peace sign pinned to his flak jacket. A colonel asks him what the hell that’s supposed to mean, and Joker says it’s about the duality of man. The Jungian thing.

I wrote about that scene back in 2016 — the same year Vance was texting about America’s Hitler. I was thinking about what it means to be a combat correspondent, what it means to carry a rifle and a notebook into the same place and try to be honest about both. I was raised by pacifists, so naturally I joined the Marines. Duality. We are creatures of our time and place, and we are more than one thing. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s being human.

But here’s the difference between duality and duplicity. Joker wore both sides on his helmet. You could see the contradiction. He didn’t hide the peace sign when he was around the grunts and didn’t scrub “Born to Kill” when he was around the brass. He carried the whole mess out in the open and let people make of it what they would.

Vance doesn’t do that. Vance had the peace sign in 2016 — the clear-eyed analysis, the moral clarity, the willingness to call a dangerous man dangerous. And then he scraped it off and kept the “Born to Kill.” He didn’t carry both. He calculated which one to show and which one to hide, and he made that calculation based on what would get him closer to power.

That’s not duality. That’s a con.

You see it in the news. You see it in politics. You see it in the way people talk about war without ever having smelled the bodies burning. You see the packaging everywhere, and you know what’s inside it because you used to assemble packages for the man.

Most of the time, that knowledge just makes you tired. But sometimes it makes you angry, because you see someone who has the same knowledge using it to build better boxes instead of tearing them open.

That’s JD Vance. A combat correspondent who became a traitor to everything good and wise.

And here I am. A combat correspondent who’s still telling the truth and fighting to make the world a little kinder.

Penfist is a former Marine combat correspondent and press chief, and an Army public affairs journalist and unit NCO. He served in Afghanistan and Iraq. His Iraq war blog is archived at willtoexist.ink. He writes from wherever his trailer is parked. Subscribe to Dispatches from a Dying Empire for more.

I still have my Canadian birth certificate. Born there. That never expires. But I also have my old CAC (military ID) and my current US passport. More than that, I have 40 years invested in the idea of an America I thought the majority of my fellow Americans wanted.

I’ve looked into repatriating to my birth country more than once this past year. Not nostalgically. Practically. I was doing the math. What it would take to reclaim my heritage, cross back north, park the travel trailer somewhere in British Columbia, and let my adopted country eat itself without me in it.

I wasn’t daydreaming. I was planning.

A stacked supreme court. A cult built around a man who wouldn’t survive a week in the places I grew up. Republican bootlickers. The toxic two-party dirty money system. Zionism and genocide. American diplomacy turned into pure braggadocio and bullying. And maybe it was always this way. It shouldn’t be.

I already bled for this country. Two deployments. I earned my citizenship the hard way. At what point does the debt run the other direction? I don’t owe this place anything else.

Most Americans who say they’re moving to Canada have never left their time zone. I’ve lived in six countries and visited dozens. The US has been my anchor country since the 1980s — longer than some of the people running it have been alive. I know what leaving actually feels like. I know what starting over costs. That’s what made this real. I wouldn’t be the guy who tweets about it. I’d be the guy who does it.

Canada isn’t perfect. I know that. I was born there. But it has things this country has decided it doesn’t want. Healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you. A political culture that hasn’t completely abandoned the concept of shame. Jobs that pay a living wage. Financial stewardship. Dirty money out of politics. A sense that people should take care of each other whenever possible.

I had to fight the VA for ten years to have any kind of resolution to what the US government put me through in a war predicated on lies.

So why am I still here?

I took my family to Canada a few times. It was great. It’s not home anymore though. Could I live there? Absolutely. In many ways it would be better. But then I would have to go to my grave wondering what would have happened if I had decided to fight one more time?

I won’t live in a world where bullies run amok, and people are disappeared for being poor and desperate while others hoard wealth like mythical dragons.

Fear I have. Fight too. Fleeing isn’t in me.

I’m not fighting fascism with a rifle. I’m fighting it from a travel trailer, a laptop full of better ideas than the ones we are currently living through, and a pit bull who snores and snuffles through all of it.

Some days that feels like enough. Some days it doesn’t.

But this is what I was trained to do. Not the shooting. The reporting. I was a combat correspondent. My job was never to pull the trigger. My job was to make sure people knew what was happening. To document it. To refuse to let it go unrecorded.

Different war. Same job.

If you’re reading this, you’re still here too. You haven’t left. Maybe you can’t. Maybe you chose not to. Either way, you’re in it.

Staying and doom-scrolling isn’t fighting. Staying and showing up is. I don’t care what that looks like for you — writing, organizing, showing up at a school board meeting, having the conversation your family doesn’t want to have. Pick something. Do it. Keep doing it.

That’s what fighting looks like when the war is at home.

My Canadian birth certificate is still in the drawer. I haven’t thrown it away. I’m not pretending the option doesn’t exist.

I’m choosing this. Every day. Eyes open.

That’s not patriotism. That’s a decision. Cowards run. I learned what I was decades ago. Some people have no choice — I get that. I do have a choice. My privilege is trumped by my humanity. I’m staying to tell the truth. Truth makes the world less cruel.

A History of US Interference in Iran

There’s a question Americans love to ask about Iran: Why do they hate us?

The answer isn’t complicated. We just don’t teach it in schools.

Oil and the Original Sin

In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister named Mohammad Mossadegh. He committed the unforgivable crime of nationalizing Iran’s oil industry — oil that the British had been extracting at colonial rates through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP, because rebranding fixes everything). Britain wanted him gone but couldn’t do it alone. This was the heyday of American empire, and Washington picked up on the first ring.

The CIA, under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt Jr. — Teddy’s grandson, because empire is a family business — orchestrated Operation Ajax. They paid off Iranian military officers, planted propaganda in newspapers, hired mobs to create chaos in the streets, and toppled a government that had the audacity to control its own natural resources.

In Mossadegh’s place, the US installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. A puppet king on a Peacock Throne, bought and paid for with American dollars and British petroleum interests. More on the American dollars in future essays.

Democracy died in Tehran so oil could flow to London and Washington. Remember that the next time someone lectures you about spreading freedom abroad.

The Shah’s Playground

For twenty-six years, the Shah ruled Iran with American backing. The US armed him, trained his military, and helped build SAVAK — his secret police force. SAVAK was trained by the CIA and Mossad. Their specialty was torture. Electric shock, sleep deprivation, extraction of fingernails, and rape as interrogation technique. Thousands of political dissidents, intellectuals, and activists disappeared into SAVAK prisons.

Washington knew. Washington didn’t care. The Shah was our guy. He bought American weapons by the billions, kept Soviet influence out of the Gulf, and let the oil flow. That was the deal. Human rights were someone else’s problem. Empire loves to play holier than thou while devouring anyone who gets in the way of its power.

The Shah modernized Iran at gunpoint — the White Revolution, he called it. Forced secularization. Land reform that enriched his cronies. A westernization campaign that bulldozed centuries of culture while the rural poor starved and the urban middle class suffocated under censorship. He threw himself a $100 million party at Persepolis to celebrate 2,500 years of Persian monarchy while his people lined up for bread.

Blowback

By 1979, Iranians had had enough. The revolution wasn’t born in a vacuum. It was born in SAVAK’s torture chambers. In American-funded palaces. In the memory of a democracy strangled in its crib in 1953.

When Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power and students stormed the US embassy, taking fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days, the American media acted like it came out of nowhere. Like these people just woke up one morning and decided to hate freedom. The media has always been complicit — manufacturing context-free outrage that serves power and the people who hold it.

Nobody on the nightly news mentioned Mossadegh. Nobody mentioned SAVAK. Nobody mentioned twenty-six years of propping up a dictator. The hostage crisis became the entire story — stripped of every ounce of context that made it comprehensible.

This is how empire works. You erase the cause and then act bewildered by the effect.

Arming Both Sides

The Iran-Iraq War broke out in 1980. Saddam Hussein — another American asset — invaded Iran. Eight years. Over a million dead.

I’ve stood at the Iraqi monument to their fallen. I’ve seen the helmets full of bullet holes. I bear witness for the dead, because someone should.

The US backed Saddam. Intelligence. Weapons. Diplomatic cover. When he gassed Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians, the Reagan administration blocked UN condemnation. Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad and shook the man’s hand on camera. That photograph should be in every American history textbook. It never will be.

And here’s the part that should make your blood boil: while arming Iraq, the Reagan White House was secretly selling weapons to Iran. The Iran-Contra affair. Arms to both sides of the same war. The profits? Funneled to right-wing death squads in Nicaragua. Three conflicts, one policy, zero accountability. The efficiency of American empire is something to behold.

In 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 — a civilian airliner. Two hundred and ninety people dead. Sixty-six of them children. The US never apologized. Vice President George H.W. Bush said, “I will never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”

He won the presidency four months later.

The Sanctions Regime

After the Cold War ended, the US pivoted from covert interference to economic strangulation. Clinton signed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act in 1996. Bush named Iran part of the “Axis of Evil” in 2002 — a phrase so cartoonishly stupid it would be funny if it hadn’t helped justify two decades of escalation.

Sanctions hit the Iranian people hardest. Medicine shortages. Economic collapse. Inflation that gutted the middle class. The ruling clerics stayed fat. The Revolutionary Guard found workarounds. Ordinary Iranians — the ones who might have pushed for reform from within — got crushed.

This is the other thing empire does well. It punishes populations for the sins of governments it helped create.

The Deal and the Betrayal

In 2015, the Obama administration brokered the JCPOA — the Iran nuclear deal. Iran agreed to dismantle centrifuges, reduce enriched uranium stockpiles, and submit to the most invasive international inspections regime ever negotiated. In return, sanctions would ease.

It wasn’t perfect. No deal is. But it was working. Iran was in compliance. The IAEA confirmed it repeatedly.

Then Trump pulled out in 2018. No evidence of Iranian violations. No strategic rationale beyond Obama did it and Netanyahu wanted it gone. Reimposed sanctions. Called it “maximum pressure.” The Iranian economy cratered. Hardliners in Tehran who’d warned that America could never be trusted got to say told you so.

In January 2020, Trump ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s top military commander, via drone strike at Baghdad International Airport. A sovereign nation’s general, killed on the soil of a third country, with no congressional authorization and no declaration of war.

The message was clear. Diplomacy is for suckers. Comply with our demands and we’ll move the goalposts. Make a deal and we’ll tear it up. Cooperate and we’ll kill your people anyway.

The Latest Chapter

And now it’s 2026, and we’re doing it again. Worse this time.

On February 28th, the United States and Israel launched surprise airstrikes across Iran — during active nuclear negotiations, after an Iranian diplomat said a historic agreement was within reach. They killed Supreme Leader Khamenei. They hit military bases, government buildings, schools, hospitals, cultural heritage sites. Over a thousand dead in the first week. Iran retaliated with missiles and drones across the Gulf. Oil prices spiked. The Strait of Hormuz choked shut. Embassies closed. The world economy shuddered.

Trump didn’t bother getting congressional authorization. Republicans blocked a resolution that would have required it. The Constitution is a suggestion now, apparently.

That same morning, a US Tomahawk cruise missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. The roof collapsed on the children inside. A hundred and sixty-five dead — most of them girls between seven and twelve. The school had been separated from a nearby military base by its own walls and gates since 2016. A Pentagon probe determined the US was likely responsible. Al Jazeera’s investigation found the strike pattern bypassed a clinic sitting between the base and the school — hit the military compound, skipped the clinic, hit the schoolgirls. That’s not negligence. That’s targeting.

UNESCO called it a grave violation of humanitarian law. The UN said there is no excuse for killing girls in a classroom. Iran held a mass funeral. A hundred and sixty-five small coffins in a row.

This is what American precision looks like.

Now let’s talk about timing.

In January, the DOJ released three million pages of Epstein files. Trump’s name appeared over a thousand times. Buried in those files was an FBI list of sexual assault allegations against Trump — compiled by agents on the Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force.

One woman, interviewed four times by the FBI, alleged that Epstein introduced her to Trump when she was between thirteen and fifteen years old. She described, in graphic detail, Trump sexually assaulting her. A DOJ source told the Miami Herald that agents found her credible — that they wouldn’t have interviewed her four times if they thought she was lying. The DOJ initially withheld those interview summaries. Called them “duplicative.” NPR caught the discrepancy. The files got released — some of them. As of this writing, thirty-seven pages remain missing.

Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell is serving twenty years for sex trafficking and seeking clemency. From Trump.

So let’s do the math. Epstein files land in January. The allegations surface. The DOJ scrambles to suppress them. And by late February, we’re at war with Iran. The largest US military buildup in the Middle East since Iraq. Cruise missiles falling on Tehran. A hundred and sixty-five schoolgirls in the ground. And the news cycle buried right alongside them.

Wag the dog doesn’t begin to cover it.

The Pattern

Every chapter of US-Iran relations follows the same logic: American interests override Iranian sovereignty. When Iran resists, it’s terrorism. When America interferes, it’s foreign policy.

1953 taught Iran that democracy means nothing if Washington disapproves. The Shah years taught them that American friendship means a secret police force and a torturer’s manual. The revolution taught them that independence comes at the cost of total isolation. The war years taught them that America will arm your enemy and sell you weapons simultaneously. The sanctions taught them that compliance buys nothing. The JCPOA taught them that even signed agreements are worthless. And 2026 taught them that even when you’re hours from a deal, the bombs come anyway.

This is empire in decline. Not the slow, dignified kind. The kind where the emperor starts a war to bury the fact that the Epstein files have his name on them. The kind where a thousand Iranians die so the news doesn’t lead with a thirteen-year-old girl’s FBI testimony.

The seventy-year history of US interference in Iran isn’t a mystery. It’s not complicated. It’s a straight line from a CIA coup to a cruise missile, with a million corpses and a shattered democracy in between.

The Iranians don’t hate us for our freedom. They hate us for theirs.

One man doesn’t betray a nation. A system does. People who want a better world do, in the name of ignorance they aren’t aware will kill everyone.

The Republican Party had every opportunity to stop this. They had impeachment — twice. They had the 25th Amendment. They had the simple option of telling the truth. They chose power instead. Every time. Without exception.

Fox News built the stage. Social media and its evil algorithms of profiteering handed out the tickets. Billionaires learned that rage drives engagement, and engagement drives revenue, and revenue is the only god any of these platforms actually worship. Ask Bezos or Musk or any of the several hundred others.

The courts that should have held the line got stacked. The Congress that should have checked the power rolled over. The institutions that were built to prevent exactly this kind of thing turned out to be made of paper.

And the rest of us? We watched. We complained. We argued about it at Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year's then went back to our lives. The greatest civic failure in modern American history, and most of us treated it like a television show. ‘Reality TV’ is also toxic and life-ending.

Complicity isn’t always active. Sometimes it’s just not looking up from your phone. That’s why I am preparing a life of duplicity and evasion.

What This Costs

I’m not writing this to change your mind. If you’ve read this far and you’re still convinced this is just liberal hysteria, nothing I say will move you. That’s fine. That’s your right. That’s you signing the death warrants of every human being you ever gave as shit about.

What Trump represents — what he has always represented — is the idea that power is its own justification. That the strong take what they want. That empathy is weakness. That cruelty is strength. That the only thing that matters is winning, and winning means someone else has to lose.

That’s not a political philosophy. That’s a pathology. And we handed it the nuclear codes. Look up the dark triad. Read a few scientific studies.

The damage isn’t theoretical. It’s measured in children who’ll never find their parents. In allies who’ll never trust us again and likely will become enemies. In a climate we can’t survive in. In millions of graves that didn’t have to be filled. In a democracy that may not survive the next test because we showed the world it couldn’t survive the last one. We are all better together. We hurt everyone when we hate another.

This is what betrayal looks like. Not a single act. A pattern. A permission structure. A slow, deliberate choice to put one man’s ego above the lives and futures of eight billion people.

And we let it happen.

That’s the part that should keep you up at night. That’s the part I have nightmares about.

I didn’t grow up believing in America.

I grew up believing in human rights for all humans, in places that did not care about human rights. Places like Bangladesh. Then Haiti. Places the powerful ruined, abandoned, and would rather forget exist.

Flashback to 1971. I was adopted by a Mennonite and Amish couple who believed in God, in community, and in plainness. They didn’t believe in the myth of American exceptionalism because they didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t part of the vocabulary. The world was the world, and you served God in it, and that was enough. America wasn’t the greatest country on earth in my house, because my mom was from the northern neighbor — Canada — which is where I was born, and where they adopted me.

Growing up everywhere and nowhere changes your perspective.

When we moved to the United States, I was old enough to notice things. The pledge of allegiance in classrooms. The flags on every porch. The way people talked about this country like it was ordained — like God had reached down and touched this particular piece of dirt and declared it righteous. I’d come from places where children picked through garbage to eat. The confidence here was staggering, and so was the cruelty of my teenage peers.

I got beat up after junior high for being too quick to answer a teacher’s questions. I vowed that would never happen again. I joined the wrestling team. Found friends. Found niches where I fit in. Then someone put a KKK flyer in my school locker. No niggers. Having recently lived in a majority Black country, I was confused. I had never had any reason to look down on someone because of their skin color. I didn’t understand it then. I understand it now.

When I graduated high school, I moved back north and tried to join the Canadian Army. I wanted to be a UN peacekeeper. How naive I was. Canada rejected me, so I moved back south to Florida and signed up to be a Marine.

I became a combat correspondent. When Operation Uphold Democracy launched in September 1994 — the US-led intervention to remove General Raoul Cédras, who’d overthrown Haiti’s first democratically elected president in a coup — I volunteered to go. I knew the place. I knew the language. I was told no, that I was needed at my current duty station.

Nearly 25,000 other US military personnel deployed. Carter, Nunn, and Colin Powell negotiated a last-minute deal while the invasion force was already airborne, turning a combat operation into a peacekeeping mission. Aristide returned to Haiti in October 1994.

The ugly footnote: at least one key leader of the death squads targeting Aristide’s supporters was on the CIA payroll. And the price of Aristide’s return was submission — the US forced him to accept IMF structural adjustment policies that opened Haiti’s markets and gutted its economy further. I watched this happen to a country I loved. Watching how the machine actually works changes a person.

Years later, working in civilian IT, I watched the planes hit the towers. Some time passed. Then I watched a video of a man being held down and having his head cut off. I joined the Army National Guard. America was about equal rights for everyone (at least in my head).

I deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. I earned my place here in the most literal way this country recognizes — I bled for it. And somewhere in all of that, I started reading the history they don’t teach in the classrooms where kids put their hands on their hearts every morning.

Here it is, stripped clean:

The United States of America was founded by men who owned other human beings.

Not as a sidebar. Not as a contradiction they were working through. As the economic foundation of everything they built. The wealth that funded the Revolution, the economy that sustained the colonies, the labor that built the infrastructure, the bodies that generated the capital — all of it was rooted in the systematic, legal, hereditary enslavement of African people.

The Declaration of Independence was written by a man who owned over six hundred human beings in his lifetime. He enslaved the woman who bore his children. He wrote “all men are created equal” and then went home to a plantation powered by people he refused to free, even at his death. That is not a footnote. That is the thesis.

The Constitution — the document we treat like scripture — counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. Not because the slaveholders thought they were three-fifths human. Because counting them that way gave slave states more power in Congress. It was a math problem designed to preserve the institution. The Founders didn’t stumble into this. They negotiated it. They wrote it into the architecture.

Twelve of the first eighteen presidents owned slaves. The White House was built with slave labor. Wall Street was named for a wall built by enslaved Africans. The entire financial system of early America — banking, insurance, shipping, cotton, tobacco, rice — ran on stolen labor from stolen people.

This is not ancient history. This is the foundation. The thing everything else is built on. You need to understand how the machine works, why it needs to be dismantled, and what we build in its place.

I grew up in Haiti. If you know anything about Haiti, you know it’s the only country in the Western Hemisphere where enslaved people successfully revolted and created their own nation. They won their freedom in 1804. And the Western world punished them for it for the next two centuries. France demanded reparations — not from France to Haiti for enslaving its people, but from Haiti to France for the loss of its “property.” Haiti didn’t finish paying that debt until 1947. The United States didn’t recognize Haitian independence until 1862, and only then because the Civil War made it politically useful.

I didn’t learn this in an American classroom. I learned it because I lived there. I walked on that ground. And then I volunteered to go back in uniform, to help restore a democracy that the United States had helped destroy, under conditions designed to ensure it would never truly recover.

When you grow up in the places where empire does its worst work, you don’t have the luxury of mythology. You see the gears. You see what the machine actually runs on. And when you come to America and people tell you this is the greatest country on earth, you nod politely and you think about the gears.

I’m not writing this to relitigate the past. I’m writing this because the past isn’t past.

The wealth gap between Black and white Americans is not an accident. It’s a direct, traceable, measurable consequence of two hundred and fifty years of unpaid labor followed by a hundred years of legal apartheid followed by sixty years of systematic economic exclusion. You cannot enslave a population for a quarter of a millennium, free them with nothing, block them from every avenue of wealth-building for another century, and then point at the gap and call it a mystery.

The incarceration rate is not an accident. The policing patterns are not an accident. The housing segregation is not an accident. The educational disparities are not an accident. None of it is an accident. All of it is architecture. The blueprints were drawn in 1619, and they’ve been revised, not replaced, ever since.

Every conversation about American politics that doesn’t start here is dishonest. Every analysis of inequality that skips this foundation is incomplete. Every patriotic narrative that treats slavery as a chapter instead of the entire book is a lie.

I chose this country. I fought for it. I watched friends die for it. I am not writing from hatred. I’m writing from the specific kind of love that refuses to accept the lie because the truth is uncomfortable.

The empire is dying. It’s dying for a lot of reasons, and we’ll get into all of them in this publication. But if you want to understand why the structure is failing, you have to understand what the structure was built on. You have to look at the foundation.

The foundation was people. Enslaved, brutalized, dehumanized people. Bought and sold and bred and worked to death and erased from the story of their own country.

That’s where we start.

Everything else follows from here.