February 9, 2026
" There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." Early 20th Century American Communist Louis C. Fraina, introducing his translation of "The Proletarian Revolution in Russia" wrote:
in a revolution, the masses are in motion; the developments of years are compressed into months and days; class relations and class antagonisms are revealed acutely, starkly, and uncompromisingly.
American culture puts natural law over a king's mandate; it is almost frenetically forward-looking, with an optimism that is not ahistorical, but certainly unhistoric, history-tangential. Centuries where nothing happens, time marked by geologic eras, the slow rise and fall of empires are all curiosities that do not interest us.
We have a 250th birthday to celebrate!
And yet, something isn't quite right. Class antagonisms in the United States have been percolating since long before the Jefferson articulated them in the Declaration of Independence, and long before Thomas Paine wrote:
As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the means of calling the right of it in question, (and in matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry,) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his own right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good People of this Country are grievously oppressed by the Combination, they have an undoubted privilege to enquire into the Pretensions of both, and equally to reject the Usurpation of either.
Are we not again today grievously oppressed by this combination of King and Parliament ? Do we not again have an undoubted privilege to enquire into the pretensions of both, and to reject their dual usurpations?
Turns out, Americans have little to no right to question the long and violent abuse of power by Washington. We know this because we have seen it at home, and because in every presidential election we elected the candidate who promised peace, who then promptly delivered war.
American popular opinion about Washington's violence and lawlessness is irrelevant today. While this fact is fairly obvious, we have the 2014 study by Gilens and Page quantifying why Americans feel powerless to influence their government. Turns out, either in spite of, or because of, the Constitution, the United States is an oligarchy.
In terms of domestic policy, the scenario is no better. Here, as H.L. Mencken could have - and did - tell us "The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable..."
Today, in our 250th birthday year, many Americans share an emergent understanding that our government has been lying about literally everything, and taking - or devising to take - everything we have, or hope to have, all the time. Are they right ? We can't argue that the US dollar has lost nearly all its value since 2013, and most of that in our own lifetime - and it has done so as policy, not accident.
Americans are frequently reminded that our 1776 war of independence was about a new tax on tea, but the 2026 tax reality for most Americans is more real, more disastrous, more encompassing, automated, surveilled, and mandated than ever. It is not an accident that drug dealers and mafiosi are rarely jailed for their real crimes, but for tax evasion. It's the King's messaging.
We have a state security leviathan today that is Eisenhower's Military Industrial Complex on meth-spiked steroids, so strung out and pumped up we must use MICIMATT and MICIMATTSHG to even remotely describe its tentacled extractive impact on every organ of American society.
It seems so very complicated. In Common Sense, Paine explained that "absolute" governments were easier for the people to diagnose, while the English system of Constitution, King and Parliament, were, "so exceedingly complex, that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies; some will say in one and some in another, and every political physician will advise a different medicine."
Some see the election of Donald Trump, not only once, but twice, as the work of the devil. Mencken sensed the religiosity, characterizing democracy as "... the worship of jackals by jackasses." But perhaps it was God who gave us Donald Trump - a man unbound by the US Constitution, conquering the world with only his own mind, and his own morality, to guide him. Beyond king, even beyond emperor, he is an all-night-long tweetstorm of ambition, speaking to us, educating us, helping us understand what Thomas Paine knew, that:
Absolute governments, (tho' the disgrace of human nature) have this advantage with them, they are simple; if the people suffer, they know the head from which their suffering springs; know likewise the remedy;
Many factors are converging in the average American mind, and focusing our collective spirit. A set of decisions is being forced upon us, the developments of years are being compressed into months and days. Like pre-revolutionary Russia, and pre-independence America, "class relations and class antagonisms are revealed acutely, starkly, and uncompromisingly."
The practical facts are these: Lysander Spooner was right - either the Constitution called for an elite oligarchy, unbounded corporatism, elite rule, and power concentrated in and criminally wielded by the state, or the Constitution was unable to prevent it. Either way, there is a scent in the air that weeks in 2026 will bring decades of change.
The structural decay of the US state, the federal government specifically, is nearly complete. In the famous words of Ben Stein's dad, things that cannot go on forever, don't. We may not all be students of Thomas Paine, but it's roll call time and there are Buellers among us, taking a day to make a year happen.
We've been schooled not by the founders, but by our own lives and experiences. Americans can find out anything and everything in the world, past, present and future, how to make a spaceship, a movie, a relationship, a life. We can understand the complete workings of the empire anytime we want, and we can view its crimes and gross incompetence 24/7 if we have the stomach for it.
The undiscovered territory is now limited only to the state itself - with its secrets and lies, its crimes, its promotion and protection of criminals. We know more about the crimes of our elite rulers, their perversions, their wars and grand thefts than the original American revolutionaries could have ever known about George III. A brilliant example is the Epstein files - a campaign promise made by every member of the President's team, only to be denied and abandoned, then delayed, redacted, and partially, reluctantly "shared." Trump became Biden, putting the state's survival above truth and justice. We are not allowed to know that the rape of one child is as acceptable and morally affordable as the murder of a hundred thousand, if it pleases the king, his enablers and his creditors.
We have accepted the unacceptable for decades. It ends with us, or it will end us. The stark, acute and uncompromising reality is here. If we are decent men and women, 2026 is the time to spit on our hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats!