But democracy is not built like that. Democracy is the business of fragile people and the needs which are outside of economic values.

None of that means much to big business unless it affects profit. Democracy had to force business to consider the powerless. To not overwork, underpay, or exploit. And almost all of that came through resistance, not goodwill.

At some point, big business, the aristocratic class, the oligarchs, realized something. If they wanted to protect their position, they had to step into politics. They had to play the game. So they backed parties, mostly on the right, and funneled billions into shaping laws around their interests. Less regulation. Less taxation. Policies that protect wealth. 

In that system, the average person only really matters as a consumer. But you can’t win elections by saying that out loud to the electorate.

Instead they backed identity politics. Making patriotism, religion, tradition, a culture war to vote for, behind which their true motives could be legislated.

They invested billions in convinced working people to defend a system that is extracting from them without investing in them.

When their republican agents are in power trillions move upward through tax breaks, subsidies, and financial systems that are barely discussed. Meanwhile, basic public spending on healthcare or education is demonized as socialism and unpatriotic or unchristian. Both narratives carefully nurtured amid a compliant right wing media ecosystem owned and ran by the billionaire class.

The Democratic Party, or the left more broadly, speaks in terms of a better future. The right speaks in terms of a better past. The left promises change and fairness. The right works to protect the elites by selling a message that they represent a return to a golden age that never existed in anywhere but nostalgia.

They middle class gets squeezed and is told the working class who did it. While the working class is spoon fed the message that it’s immigrants, minorities, liberals making life unaffordable. Anyone but the continued concentration of wealth and power at the top and asset stripping from the right.

The right need the majority to abandon their own interests because of an instigated cultural alignment, they’re not organizing around economics if they are arguing about wokeness they can’t realize how much they actually have in common.

And while all that ‘white’ noise is blaring, the top 1 percent in the United States hold roughly a third of all wealth. The top 10 percent hold about 70 percent. The result of decades of right wing policy decisions.

At the same time, everyday Americans (the other 80-90 %) live under constant financial pressure. Medical debt affects tens of millions of people and remains one of the leading causes of bankruptcy in the richest nation on earth.

The United States spends more per person on healthcare through its business focused insurance system than any other developed country, often close to twice as much, yet Americans on average live shorter lives than people in comparable nations. Americans pay more and get less.

Meanwhile, the country is willing to spend hundreds of billions every year on military power, while basic systems like healthcare, education, and public transport are treated as if they are luxuries. And yet the same right wing political voices claim to be on the side of the average American by cloaking themselves in religion and race.

They oppose healthcare expansion, weaken labor protections, cut public funding, prioritizing tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. While the powerful right wing media tells the poor who to fear, who to blame, who doesn’t belong, keeping the people distracted and divided. 

So people end up voting against their own material interests while believing they are defending something fundamental about their cultural identity. And the gap between what they are told and what they experience keeps getting wider. 

There’s nothing particularly new about this. From the earliest societies to now, power has always needed a story to justify itself. Today that story is carried through media, messaging, and a constant stream of distraction that keeps attention moving just enough to avoid landing anywhere.

During the first winter of Russia’s full-scale invasion, I spent a month in Kyiv, as missile strikes and blackouts reshaped daily life. This is a poetic field note from that time, paired with photographs taken in the city under air attack.

It’s impossible to forget the chilling cry of the air raid siren. A sound I had only known as a movie effect out of a Second World War matinee, wailing in real time over the rooftops of a modern European capital. Every alarm signaled to Kyiv’s million inhabitants to calculate once again whether to trudge underground, into shelter, tunnel, or in a cocktail of exhaustion and defiance turn their collar up against the odds and resign to what fate may offer.

I learned to make the calculations as to what was the safest side of the building, which room was furthest from the windows. The air raid may only last a few hours, but the power outages they caused at times had lasted days. The lights on the Wi-Fi box vanished and the peripheral drone of electric appliances fell away. Inside my rented apartment the waiting would begin. It was impossible to know how long the blackouts would last or when the tap water would return.

As soon as I knew the power was out, I would open the front door and look down the hallway, listening for voices. Peering into the black, I could see the faint outline of the stairwell’s ornate iron banisters of a spiral staircase, within which the lumbering Soviet-era elevator had been constructed, awaiting a call that one of my elderly neighbours was trapped between floors. I’d scroll a useless phone out of anxiety, read, write, curse myself for not storing more fresh water or charging the cell properly when I had time.

Inside the apartment every small sound amplified amid the heightened silence. Without electricity to distract one’s senses any slight motion becomes noticeable; snow particles blown against the window pane, the dripping of a neighbour’s icicle, a chair in the apartment upstairs creaked, two-day-old stubble against my woollen collar and the metronome of a battery-powered clock in another room.

As tiredness approached you’d ask, is it worth it to change out of your day clothes? Or do you just keep as you are in case the air raid may go again, becoming used to sleeping with boots and bags within arm’s reach.

I would pull up the covers and strike the bedside candle. The corner of the apartment in which my bed was occupied became my island of light.

Making hot drinks by the candle’s flicker was my meditative ritual and the open flame of the kitchen stove became my smartphone and the view from the balcony my Netflix. I would look out of the kitchen window, which partially faced neighbours’ balconies, and see the flicker of their candles and torches as they continued their evening as best they could.

Through dusk, Kyiv’s thoroughfares would swell with evening fog. I was often lucky enough to have a gas stove, even if all the other utilities had stopped. In this way I could at least eat and heat the home to some degree, this truly was a luxury in comparison to a great many others in other suburbs or cities. It’s hard to explain how cold a Ukrainian winter is. If British cold is beer, Ukrainian cold is vodka mixed with absinthe, burning your throat and stinging skin long after you stepped off the street.

Headlights would flare out through the gloom. I was able to see some hundred yards up the hill and down towards Maidan Square, their slow approach briefly illuminating silhouettes of brave pedestrians, who themselves made their way tentatively along the icy sidewalks, then vanishing into darkness as the car moved on.

Everything was a mixture of a Christmas box scene and a bloody Caravaggio, stark contrast with light and dark with countless glazes, subtle changes imperceptible to the human eye but visceral and felt within the vital essence of all those who witness it.

To stare out through the layers of night beyond my own isolation was reassuring. With Ukrainian tea I watched the darkened street below. With or without power Kyiv emanated a spirit of resilience, a most ancient human defiance against aggression and the instinct of survival, made intimate by the touch of individual lives framed against the collective struggle.

By night I could reflect on what I had seen through the day, looking across the street and seeing my neighbours, a group of young people preparing packages in a manner which looked like humanitarian assistance or military aid and then eating together around a large table.

The faces of head-scarved women, dressed as if straight out of a Dostoevsky novel, beautiful but tired, and the shelf stacker, the joy of kids throwing snowballs in the church courtyard, the young mother cradling her baby waiting for the all clear in the underground shelter, or the steward in the basement bar and the illuminated huddle of figures sheltering from the snowy evening as much as the war.

The candles of the Orthodox church, the women kneeling in prayer for distant loved ones, golden-arched mosaics of silent saints glinting through the half dark.

Eyes became used to the dark and the snowfall recycled what little natural light there was, the footsteps covered over, the bloodless blue of a snow-cloaked blackout.

It is a strange feeling to be in a city which is living through history. In documentaries and war films we always know the ending, but in Kyiv’s thoroughfares cloaked in black and white the war has not been exorcised from the land, its monsters were things of legend; in Ukraine human hunted human, an entire nation become predator and prey. War reaching down and taking a soul here, a soul there, an apartment building or two.

Kyiv right then as now, three years later, devoid of leaf, covered in battlements and battalions, facing day after day the barrage of missiles and drones.

Into the same darkness which once stalked the streets of London, so is the same spirit of resilience, defiance, the best of human spirit on show, enduring having no power, no heating and water and still functioning, the stress of either being at or having husbands, brothers, sons and daughters at the front.

Millions of others were alone, the ill, impoverished, the grieving, the exhausted by it all and in their homes, as with my small rented rooms, the small lanterns, the burning wax and wick becoming a living light, lifting and looking, craning around corners and refusing to be stilled.

In the absence of the voice of my fiancée on the other side of the world, the nightlight’s flame became a companion during the blackout; as I, like a great many others, waited for sleep or dawn.

The beauty of a wintery sunrise seemed an act of nature’s penance, for the destruction each night wrought upon the innocent city, by the wrath of a more terrifying flame.

Nick Wood. Kyiv 2022

Slava Ukraini

One of the enabling features of the Trump era has been the way modern barons, the titans of technology and industry, have lined up behind him. From Tim Cook at Apple, to the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to Meta and beyond, the list goes on. This support hasn’t been subtle. From day one, platforms, apps, and media ecosystems have increasingly functioned as Trump-friendly instruments, tuned carefully to placate him, flatter him, and avoid his wrath.

This isn’t unusual. Throughout history, concentrations of private power have often taken a bite of the authoritarian pie. The logic is always the same. Corporate leaders convince themselves that they can manage the strongman. That they can play him for their own ends. Less regulation in exchange for loyalty and deference.

The belief is seductive. Give the authoritarian enough cryptocurrency, a flattering documentary deal, or a compliant platform, and anything is possible.

So instead of standing up for the rule of law, the elites choose silence. The problem is that modern barons, princes of their own digital chiefdoms, consistently underestimate the danger they are inviting in.

Authoritarianism is not a transaction. It is a process. Once an authoritarian secures control over democratic institutions, and once media, technology, and communication networks fall under their influence, the next target is inevitable: the very industries and elites that enabled their rise.

Even recent history gives us a clear example.

After Vladimir Putin consolidated power in post-Soviet Russia, he summoned the country’s untouchable oligarchs to a now-famous meeting. In a calculated display, he singled out one of the most powerful among them: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man. Khodorkovsky was later arrested, his company dismantled, his fortune seized, and he spent a decade in prison.

The message was unmistakable: now that I control the state, I control you.

Support me and live comfortably. Resist me and be destroyed.

Putin was telling Russia’s elites that he was no longer constrained by law. He was the law.

And yet, history also offers another example, one where the historical equivalent of today’s tech bros chose a different path.

If you go to a field at Runnymede, along the banks of the Thames in England, you’ll find a monument erected by Americans. It marks the place where, eight hundred years ago, something extraordinary happened. An authoritarian king was forced, for the first time in recorded Western history, to concede that his power was not absolute.

In 1215, King John, he of Robin Hood infamy, had abused his authority through arbitrary punishment, endless wars, and crippling taxation. The barons of the realm, the oligarchs and tech CEOs of their day, did something rare: they united and resisted him. The result was the Magna Carta, the Great Charter.

Its language was revolutionary:

“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”

“To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”

While born of elite self-interest, the document planted something far greater. It established the radical idea that the law stands above the ruler, and that its protections apply not just to the powerful, but eventually to everyone. From this seed grew English common law, American constitutionalism, and the principle that even kings are constrained.

This moment was incredibly unusual in human history: the powerful acting, however imperfectly, in a way that ultimately benefited the powerless. It proved that history does not only move forward through submission. Sometimes it advances through resistance from those who have the most to lose.

This is the question we face in 2026.

As the most insulated figures in our society, protected by unimaginable wealth and inflated egos, flirt openly with authoritarianism, will they unite to defend the rule of law? Or will they enjoy the spoils until it’s too late, until they find themselves seated at a long table on national television, smiling nervously, realizing they are no longer partners but subjects?

For all our sakes, we must hope that somewhere beneath the profit calculations and personal ambition, a sense of historical responsibility remains.

Power fades.

Money dissolves.

But history remembers who stood up and who put on the knee pads.

Yet one “ism” often escapes the same scrutiny.

Nationalism.

Across history, the urge to see your tribe, your country, your people as dominant or superior has caused more war, more suffering, and more mass death than almost any other ideology combined. And yet we rarely speak of nationalism in the same breath as fascism or racism.

Why?

Because nationalism is useful.

It is useful to those who wish to control populations. Governments need people to see themselves as fundamentally different from “the others.” National identity becomes a shortcut, a way to compress complex human beings into symbols, colors, and slogans. Political leaders wrap themselves in flags, sometimes literally. Totalitarian regimes always place the leader beside the national banner. The message is deliberate: the flag is the leader, the leader is the nation.

To question one is to betray the other.

As a child, I was deeply nationalistic. I had Union Jacks in my bedroom. I devoured history books about empires, battles, generals, and victories. I was, in many ways, a small Victorian Englishman in spirit, intoxicated by the romance of power and conquest.

But as I grew, something shifted.

Spiritual growth expanded my empathy. I began to understand that the wars I loved to study were not heroic abstractions but human catastrophes. War, I came to see, is a profound act of collective self-sabotage. I read the poets of the First World War and learned, in detail, how nationalism and militarism consumed an entire generation. I studied the rise of the Third Reich and the unspeakable cruelty carried out by a highly educated, technologically advanced society.

What unsettled me most was how recent it all was.

My grandfather was a teenager when Hitler rose to power. The great cities of Europe, cities that had blossomed for centuries, were reduced to rubble within a single lifetime. Millions of ordinary people were murdered through industrialized brutality. This happened after the Enlightenment. After science and medicine had flourished. After the greatest novels, symphonies, and works of art celebrating the human spirit had been created.

And yet, despite everything humanity knew, despite all it had built, less than twenty years after the madness of the First World War the world plunged into the greatest slaughter it had ever known. Nationalism, hand in hand with racism and militarism, led humanity into misery piled upon misery. Ordinary families, in every corner of the world, suffered and grieved.

For what?

Because everyday people, young boys, old men, mothers, daughters, were hypnotized into believing that other human beings were fundamentally different. Less deserving. Less worthy of dignity. Less human.

Cruelty, they were told, was necessary.

War is always brutal. Even democratic nations possess horrifying means of inflicting suffering. But the difference, and it matters, is that democracy places constraints on power: the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a free press, and the peaceful transfer of government through elections. These imperfect systems act as a leash on humanity’s worst impulses.

Democracy, as Churchill said, is the worst system of government except for all the others.

It is the best tool we have to establish universal rights and protect ourselves from the inevitable egomaniacs who seek power. It is an ongoing attempt to restrain corruption, cronyism, and personal gain, forces that have haunted human societies since the first ape lifted a stick over a weaker one.

History offers moments where democracy pushed humanity forward: Athens. Magna Carta. The Enlightenment. The American founding. The civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. These were not victories for flags. They were victories for ideas, the radical belief that power should be constrained and that ordinary people deserve dignity.

Ironically, it is these very moments that nationalism later tries to claim.

The American Revolution was not fought for a piece of cloth. It was fought against tyranny, against a government willing to kill its own people and excuse that violence by insisting that obedience would have prevented it. The British authorities argued that if the colonists had not protested, had not gathered, had not resisted, they would not have been shot in the snow at Lexington. We hear the same logic echoed throughout history whenever power kills and then blames the dead.

The colonists rejected that reasoning. They believed, rightly, that a government willing to murder its citizens without recourse was tyrannical. They went to war not for a flag, but for an idea: democracy.

And this is where the flag becomes dangerous.

A flag on its own is nothing. In the wrong hands, it becomes a blindfold. It is used to convince people that those under one banner are fundamentally good, while those under another are somehow different, closer to animals, more deserving of punishment, more acceptable targets for violence.

The most terrifying truth is this: armies of terror are almost always made up of ordinary people. The Second World War proves this. The leaders were monstrous, but the legions who carried out their orders were not born monsters. They had parents. They loved music and sports. They fell in love. They had dreams.

Under the right conditions, they were taught to feel less empathy.

This was not because they were German, or Japanese, or communist. It was because they were conditioned to place entire groups of human beings into the category of “other.” Nationalism is often the first step in building that imaginary wall.

I believe we are people first.

When someone is suffering, you don’t ask to see their papers before helping them up. You don’t decide whether they deserve compassion based on their flag, their god, or the language they speak. You extend a hand because you recognize something familiar: vulnerability, fear, humanity.

Flags come and go. Borders shift. Europe alone has seen countless nations rise, merge, fracture, and disappear over the last three hundred years. What once required thousands of flags now fits under a few hundred. The truth beneath it all remains unchanged: we are someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s hope.

The danger is loving a flag so much that we confuse it with the person holding it, excusing crimes committed in its name while extending unearned loyalty to strangers simply because they were born under the same symbol.

A flag means nothing if the rights of those who salute it are gone.

The only lasting truths are freedom, law, dignity, and kindness, extended to all. Without them, there will ultimately be freedom for none.

On January 24, 2026, in Minneapolis at the intersection of 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue, the world watched as an American was maced, beaten, pistol-whipped, and then shot in cold blood by a group of masked federal agents from U.S. Border Patrol during an immigration enforcement operation. 

In the chaotic aftermath, with onlookers reeling, one of the agents mockingly said “boo hoo,” a chilling utterance that seemed to capture the contempt and dehumanization of the moment.

The world then watched as leaders of the American government immediately tried to drag the good name of the murdered man through the mud. They had no interest in truth. No interest in understanding whether a crime had been committed, whether American rights had been trampled on, or whether there should be an inquiry. Instead, they chose to cover for the masked thugs, refusing to release their names, as would normally happen if a police officer had controversially shot someone dead, and declared it business as usual.

But the reality is this. Alex Pretti was the worst kind of person they could have murdered.

He wasn’t Hispanic. He wasn’t gay. He wasn’t undocumented. He didn’t have a criminal record. He was a millennial white man. A dedicated professional. A nurse who cared for veterans at a VA hospital. He loved hiking with his dog. He was a legal gun owner, a Second Amendment, Midwestern American.

If he had been any of those other things, the administration would have leaned into him being “the other,” the outsider whose abuse could be subconsciously justified. But he wasn’t. In fact, he died trying to defend two women the masked men had assaulted.

The ideological gymnastics right-wing media has had to perform since Alex’s execution, broadcast to the world, has been a case study in just how brainwashed they are, and how close the Trump government has come to a true authoritarian entity. The same people who once flew “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, who warned endlessly about the overreaching state, who said “out of my cold dead hands” about Second Amendment reform, are now either silent or actively attacking Alex Pretti’s memory.

This is happening while the government sends masked militias into multiple American cities. These forces openly ask for papers and arrest without warrants, including undocumented people and American citizens alike. They have effectively been turned into a private army of the president. Their budget is set to balloon from ten billion to fifty billion dollars. They appear able to hire any thug willing to serve and are already known to have recruited neo-Nazi and white-power affiliates.

And the right doesn’t care.

Minnesota has just over a hundred thousand undocumented immigrants. Texas and Florida have millions. Yet Minnesota, a state Trump has publicly clashed with and whose governor he holds a grudge against, has been targeted. This isn’t about immigration. It’s a politically motivated stunt aimed squarely at Trump’s opposition.

Bands of masked men jumping out of cars, assaulting citizens, dragging them away, some injured, some shot, some dying in custody, is something you expect to see on television from the darkest corners of the despotic world. Not America.

These masked men disproportionately target Black and brown people and assault any white person who attempts to record their activities. They operate like a secret police force above the law, with complete immunity, as JD Vance openly admitted, while corruption and hostile media takeovers continue in the background.

Another justification offered for ICE’s presence in Minnesota is so-called “Somali fraud.” But last time I checked, fraud is investigated by police through audits, investigations, and trials before a jury. Only after that do immigration services step in for their own methodical process.

Not masked men jumping out of SUVs and breaking windows.

This is terror tactics against a minority. And they speak of fraud while Trump and his inner circle commit unprecedented fraud from the top down. From Gaza to Ukraine. From Trump Coin to his family selling his name around the world for profit, followed conveniently by tariff reductions.

What more can we expect when Trump’s actions stretch back to his father’s business being prosecuted for refusing to rent to Black tenants, and his own political rise being built on questioning whether the first Black president was even American?

He has emboldened racists and bigots from day one. When he said that most Mexicans coming to America were rapists and murderers, that should have been the end of his political career. But the reality is that his base liked it. They fed off someone in power finally voicing the same base prejudices they held themselves.

Without going down every Trump-era rabbit hole, the atmosphere in America, as an outsider, has grown steadily darker.

I said to my wife recently that I don’t know America anymore. The gun problem. The radical Christian movement. The economic imbalance. The way cities and infrastructure for everyday people, healthcare, and food seem so low on the agenda of the rich and powerful. And yet, beneath all that, there once seemed a deeper goodness, represented by the Constitution, America’s love of entertainment and freedom, and its embrace of the future.

For all its flaws, its narcissism, its school shootings, and its political dysfunction, I still knew America.

Lately, though, I’ve felt a darkness descend. The forces that have long wanted to turn America into a far-right nation, tech companies, evangelicals, corrupt elites, and business interests, seem to have succeeded.

The hardest part is knowing that I’m surrounded, in certain settings, by people who still support this. After “grab them by the pussy.” After the insurrection. After Trump Coin. After demolishing the White House. After executions of everyday people.

They are either content with bread and circuses, or they are quietly in favor of this takeover. They want gay people to disappear. They want brown-skinned people to “go home.” They want slavery covered up and Black communities hidden away. They genuinely believe Christ is a Republican, that healthcare for all is a communist conspiracy, that the earth is flat, evolution is a left-wing con, and that school shootings are just something we must live with.

They believe immigrants should go home.

And I feel it. I see it. Trump has unleashed something dark. From embracing Putin to executions by masked men. This is state authoritarianism fused with oligarchy and religious fundamentalism, reinforced by narrow business interests and accelerated by technology.

The media takeovers are accelerating. Republicans now seem comfortable with a strongman. Prominent figures like Bannon and Musk flirt openly with Nazi symbolism. And the most disturbing part is that this darkness isn’t only top-down. It’s coming from the base up.

Overlapping movements, each reinforcing the other, are forming the foundation of a very different America. A mutated version of nineteenth-century imperialism. Racist, anti-science, extreme Christian nationalism. Now supercharged by modern technology.

The America I loved was the air of David Letterman playing in the middle of the night while I was an art student. It was the country that entertained the world, that stood up to the Nazis, that went to war to end slavery. It was a place that created art and music, built incredible cities, and, at its core, seemed good.

I miss that America.

It feels lost, at least for now. I feel like soon I’ll be asked for my papers. Soon I’ll drive to work and see masked men dragging brown-skinned people away. Soon the media will be mostly state-controlled, and Christian nationalists will hold minorities and women in contempt in service of an imaginary America that never existed, while trampling into dust the beautiful one that actually did.

The wealthiest people in society tend to dislike government because they rarely need it and they dislike the immense power an organized populace has through democracy, over their own narrow economic interests.

There are far more poor and working people who do need it, and democracy gives numbers more power than wealth alone. That imbalance is why enormous sums of money are spent shaping public opinion to encourage the lower and middle class to be suspicious of government and keep the focus on culture wars over everyday people’s needs.

Newspapers, television networks, digital platforms, and politicians are used to persuade people that taxing the wealthy or strengthening public services somehow works against their own interests. Maga has been a masterclass in how media can be used to agitate the masses, to divide and distract them to the point where poor people are willing to die in medical bankruptcy rather than vote for the party that wanted to construct a European public healthcare system.

In recent years, many major television networks, news outlets, and even streaming platforms have been taken over or heavily influenced by MAGA loyalists and billionaire interests aligned with them. This consolidation of media power is not accidental. It shapes what people see, what they fear, and what they are encouraged to ignore. Huge portions of the American news and entertainment ecosystem have fallen into Trump Loyalist hands from CBS to Paramount.

one of the central tenants of right wing media is to encourage the masses to define themselves by their cultural benchmarks over their economic and social needs. To define themselves by race, religion, sexuality, locality, anything but economic markers.

In a mass media world, controlling the narrative is controlling the future. Making sure the megaphone is held by a maga mouthpiece is vital to ensure what the poor see and hear redirects their energies away from social reform or recognition of how little they gain and how much the wealthy receive.

The right wing billionaires do all they can to stop the poor getting organized, and when they do stand up for their collective interests, it is labeled socialism or communism, framed as dangerous or un-American. Mutual care is treated as a threat. People are encouraged to believe that Jesus did not want to feed the poor, heal the sick, or welcome the foreigner, but instead wanted moral outrage to take precedence over material suffering. Abortion, a subject Jesus never addressed, is elevated above the repeated biblical commands to care for the hungry, the elderly, and the sick.

A crucial part of this strategy is dividing the middle class from the poor. Government assistance is reframed as weakness or corruption. Help is portrayed as control. Meanwhile, cultural conflict, racial resentment, and fear of outsiders dominate public attention, distracting from the practical work required to give the richest country in the world what most other democracies already have: universal healthcare, strong public education, safe infrastructure, and reliable emergency services.

History shows that systems of oppression rarely lack willing participants. Elites are often able to recruit the poor to defend them by convincing them their nation is under attack from within. Their flag is under threat. Their god is under threat. In that panic, people are persuaded to sabotage the very institutions that protect them, while those who resent regulation and taxation remain comfortably insulated from consequence.

To understand this dynamic, it helps to confront the scale of extreme wealth and what it does to moral reasoning. At its outer limits, selfishness becomes indistinguishable from sociopathy. It has been noted that if someone were given one hundred thousand dollars every day from the birth of Christ to the present, it still would not match the wealth accumulated by figures like Elon Musk. Yet political priorities associated with that level of wealth often include cutting school lunches, cancer research, and aid to the poorest people in the world. These are institutions the wealthy will never need, but millions depend on them to survive.

Calling empathy a weakness is a telling move. In spiritual terms, empathy is the first sign of growth. It is the measure by which moral maturity is judged. As empathy expands, concern for others follows. But in a system shaped by extreme wealth, empathy is treated as a liability. Profit becomes the highest value, and moral distance becomes a form of strength.

Through social media and billionaire-owned media empires, working people are taught to distrust the very political movements trying to expand opportunity and security. The language of the founding ideals is turned against itself. The future is framed as a threat. The billionaire, shielded from taxes and consequence, is recast as an ally.

This is not an accident. It is one of the most effective deceptions in modern history: using faith, patriotism, and fear to convince people to act against their own material and moral interests.

The left offers a vision rooted in possibility and shared responsibility.

The right offers fear, resentment, and that the benefits of the system go to the wealthy, while allowing the masses to gain from their nations wealth is unAmerican, unchristian, and liberal conspiracy to oppress the people.

The reality is that MAGA and the right have deep pockets, and controlling the media message has become the main leverage of control and influence. This is a situation that will outlast Trump and his presidency is seeing a far wider consolidation of media control.