The Duopoly is a Disease

In the land of the free, we are given a choice every election cycle: Red or Blue. Coke or Pepsi. The illusion of choice wrapped in patriotic fanfare. But beneath the spectacle lies a truth most Americans feel in their gut but rarely say out loud: the two party system is a rigged game, a duopoly that has hijacked our democracy.

The Democratic and Republican parties are not ideological opposites; they are co-managers of an empire. One plays good cop while the other plays bad cop, but both serve the same masters: corporations, lobbyists, and the wealthy. They compete for power the way monopolists “compete”: by making sure no true alternative ever gains traction.

Independent and third-party candidates are routinely locked out of debates, buried by media blackouts, and crushed by impossible ballot access laws. Why? Because both parties know that real competition would expose how little they offer beyond symbolic bickering and bipartisan stagnation.

The duopoly thrives on division. Democrats and Republicans whip their bases into a frenzy over culture issues while quietly agreeing on endless war, corporate welfare, and mass surveillance. It’s no accident. The spectacle distracts us while they pass the same bloated Pentagon budgets and sell off public goods to private hands.

Gridlock isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It keeps meaningful reform off the table. Medicare for All? Dead on arrival. A living wage? Maybe by 2050. Climate action? Let’s ask ExxonMobil how fast we can move. The duopoly ensures nothing truly threatens their donors’ profits.

Leftist movements such as socialists, anarchists, and greens are smeared or ignored not because they’re fringe, but because they challenge the core of the system: capitalism, imperialism, police power. The establishment doesn’t fear chaos, it fears organization. It fears a population that realizes there are more than two ways to govern ourselves.

Likewise, when libertarians call for ending wars or dismantling the surveillance state, they’re treated as dangerous radicals. Any idea outside the red-blue matrix must be neutralized.

So what’s the way out?

Break the machine.

It starts with refusing to legitimize the duopoly. Don’t let “vote blue no matter who” or “lesser evilism” guilt you into obedience. Demand more: ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, ballot access reform, we need mass political education and direct action.

We need to organize outside their system. That means building dual power: worker co-ops, mutual aid networks, radical unions, and community councils that don’t wait for permission from Washington. The future won’t be won in the voting booth alone. It will be built in the streets, on picket lines, and in the quiet rebellion of everyday people saying “enough is enough.”

The bottom line is this: the two party system is not a democracy. It’s monopoly politics. It doesn’t represent us. It contains us. And like all monopolies, it must be broken.

We don’t need better Democrats or nicer Republicans. We need a new system entirely, one that serves people and not profits.

The Government Just Gave Itself Permission to Ignore the Law

Let’s not sugarcoat this: the U.S. government is gutting what little remains of “checks and balances,” and most people are too distracted or disillusioned to notice.

Buried inside a House bill—unrelated to taxes, mind you—is a ticking time bomb aimed directly at the rule of law. A quiet little provision would block all funding to enforce contempt of court orders. Read that again. If this passes, the executive branch can ignore court rulings with zero consequences. It’s not just a loophole—it’s a license to violate the Constitution.

Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert, laid it out plainly: if the government defies a judge, nothing can be done to force compliance. No enforcement. No consequences. No rule of law. “The greatest effect of adopting the provision,” he warns, “would be to make countless existing judicial orders unenforceable.” Translation: the courts become a theater of empty gestures, while the executive runs wild.

This isn’t theoretical. The Trump administration has already ignored court orders, including the Supreme Court’s ruling to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from a black-site-style detention in El Salvador. They just didn’t do it. And now? They’re trying to make that standard operating procedure.

This is what a dying democracy looks like: not in flames, but in red tape and fine print. Congress didn’t vote to abolish the Constitution—they just cut its funding.If you still think the system can be fixed from within, ask yourself: What happens when the system rewrites the rules to ignore its own crimes?

This is not just a Trump issue. This is a bipartisan rot. They’ve built a government that polices protestors, jails whistleblowers, and spies on everyone—but suddenly when it comes to holding itself accountable, it’s “too expensive” to enforce the law?

The lesson is clear: the government does not fear the courts. It fears accountability. And it will rewrite reality itself to avoid it.

Burn your illusions. The state is not your protector. It’s a self-perpetuating power machine, and it just found a way to cut the brakes.

America Loses Every War it Declares…

… and that’s not an accident.

There’s a pattern no one seems to want to talk about: every time America declares a “”war” on something, it loses. Spectacularly. Repeatedly. Almost like it’s designed to fail–or at least never meat to succeed.

Let’s take a stroll down our hall of shame:

The War on Drugs

Launched in the 1970s and ramped up in the 80s, this war didn’t end drug use. It militarized police, packed prisons, and devastated communities (especially Black and brown ones). Meanwhile, Big Pharma ran its own cartel out in the open with opioids. The result? A multi-decade failure that somehow made drugs more common. But hey, prison stocks are doing great.

The War on Poverty

LBJ declared this one in the 60s. Ambitious? Sure. But instead of ending poverty, we got decades of underfunded programs sabotaged by both parties. Fast forward to now: wages are stagnant, homelessness is rising, and billionaires are joyriding to space. Poverty didn’t lose. It adapted, got a tech job, and learned to live in a car.

The War on Terror

We “won” this one by destabilizing the Middle East, fueling global extremism, and wasting trillions of dollars. Afghanistan? A 20-year disaster with a Taliban victory lap at the end. Iraq? Invaded based on lies. Terrorism didn’t disappear, it diversified and learned to livestream.

The War on Crime

What this really turned into was a war on poor people, especially people of color. Instead of addressing root causes–like inequality, housing, education–we militarized police, filled private prisons, and normalized, a surveillance state. Crime didn’t go away, it just got rebranded. And the police budget? It’s still the only socialist program America will never cut.

Losing is the business model. These “wars” aren’t meant to be won. They’re meant to be permanent. They justify bloated budgets, feed private industries, and generate endless political theatre. You can’t win a war if winning means ending the gift.

It’s not a bug, it’s the point.

America 2035

A dear friend of mine gave me the idea to write a blog about what will the U.S. be like if we continue on the course we’re on right now. I jotted it down in my own personal journal and thought I’d share it here. Let me know what you think.

If America stays the course it’s on now with no correction, no revolution, no collective awakening then 2035 will not be some sort of dystopian nightmare. It’ll be something worse. It’ll be a comfortable, numbing decline punctuated by chaos, distraction, and denial.

Corporations will no longer need to whisper in politicians’ ears, they will write the laws themselves. Amazon will own the postal service. Google will handle public education logistics. A few tech CEOs will rotate through cabinet positions like it’s a TED Talk residency. Elections will still happen, but mostly to decide which billionaire’s PAC can out-psyop the other.

The Midwest will experience a new Dust Bowl. Florida real estate will be underwater, but people will still buy beach homes thanks to delusion. Power grids in the South will collapse under summer heat, and water shortages will trigger hydration riots in Arizona. Don’t worry though, your smart fridge will still work as long as you don’t mind watching an ad every time you open it.

The rich and wealthy will live in gated green tech bubbles, shuttled by autonomous Teslas between sanitized, sensor-laden smart cities. Everyone else though? They live in logistics deserts, under-policed until they riot, then over-policed for sport. The economy has metastasized. People livestream their labor for tips, like Twitch but with more sweat and desperation.

Fascism will not wear jackboots. It wears athleisure. It smiles. It hosts a morning show, but it also bans books, surveils dissent, and locks up people in ICE-style “resilience camps” for protesting. The courts are rubber stamps. The media is infotainment sludge. The line between cop, soldier, and “private security consultant” has fully blurred.

The right will have armed militias, billionaire funding, and a 24/7 propaganda network. The left is still subtweeting each other over theoretical frameworks and canceling organizers for old tweets. Direct action is rare and criminalized. Hope is commodified. Revolution is a brand. Every year, a new savior candidate promises change, only to be eaten alive by the machine.

Citizenship is no longer a birthright. It’s a subscription service. The U.S. exports cultural dominance while its internal infrastructure rots. We’ll stream images of freedom to the world while internally dismantling it piece by piece. Freedom of speech remains, but mostly because no one in power takes anyone without a million followers seriously anymore.

Is it all doom? Not necessarily.

This future isn’t inevitable, but it’s likely if we continue business as usual: treating politics like fandom, trusting the system to reform itself, and refusing to disrupt the real levers of power.

We don’t need utopia. We just need rupture. Resistance. Imagination. Something that breaks the loop. But if we wait ten more years to try, we may not get the chance again.

Trumpism vs Conservatism

Once upon a time, conservatism had a brand. You might not have liked it–hell, you might have hated it–but you knew what it stood for: limited government, free markets, family values, and a worship of Ronald Reagan that bordered on the religious. It was buttoned-up, corporate-friendly, and polite at dinner parties. Conservatism had talking points, a think tank for everything, and just enough moral panic to keep the suburban vote.

Then came Trump.

Traditional conservatism is like a country club: exclusive, outdated, and pretending it’s still 1955. It champions small government while bloating the military. It preaches personal responsibility while handing tax breaks to the wealthy. It’s a polished ideology, wrapped in American flags and “founding father” cosplay, with a Constitution in one hand and Ayn Rand in the other.

At its core, conservatism believed in institutions such as courts, constitutions, and capitalism. You could argue with it, debate it, but it had a script. Trumpism burned the script though.

Trumpism isn’t an ideology. It’s a vibe. A movement built not on principles but on performance. Trumpism is what happens when conservatism gets radicalized by reality TV, Twitter algorithms, and decades of right-wing media rage. It’s not about shrinking government. It’s about weaponizing it. It’s not about free markets, but about loyalty, tribalism, and the illusion of “winning.” Where conservatism says “let’s preserve tradition,” Trumpism screams, “Burn it down unless it worships me!”

Trumpism didn’t evolve from conservatism. It hijacked it. It slapped a red hat on it, handed it a flamethrower, and said, “Say something racist on live TV.” Suddenly, the old guard–McConnell, Bush, Cheney–look like moderates. Even Mitt Romney, the human embodiment of corporate power is now “too liberal” for the party he once led.

This isn’t a party shift. It’s a personality cult, draped in the decaying skin of the GOP.

If you’re hoping this ends with a return to “normal,” good luck. “Normal” is what built the staircase Trump descended. Conservatism laid the foundation. Trumpism built the casino on top and rigged every slot machine to spit out conspiracy theories and bootlicking.

But here’s the thing: we don’t have to pick between Reagan’s America and Trump’s circus. The problem isn’t just the flavor of right-wing decay, it’s the whole rotten system. Conservatism and Trumpism are two wings of the same vulture, circling the corpse of a world built on exploitation. So…

What if we stopped trying to salvage this system altogether? What if we built something beyond it? No billionaires, on bootlickers, no CEOs, no bosses. No political theatre where our choices are a condescending suit or a fascist clown. Imagine direct democracy. Mutual aid instead of tax breaks for mansions and yachts and private jets. Housing and food because you’re alive, not because you’re useful to a corporation. Community defense instead of bloated police budgets. Power, not hoarded at the top, but shared at the roots.

We don’t need Trumpism or conservatism. We need liberation. Burn the script. Burn the stage. Tear it all down and re-build something worth living in.

It’s a Sorry World

I took the title of this blog from a song by a comedian I always liked: Tim Wilson. The opening lyrics are as follows:

You can go to war when you’re 18,

But you can’t buy a beer.

You can launch missiles from a submarine,

But you can’t buy a pistol here.

You can breathe chemical weapon fumes,

But they don’t want you to smoke.

So if you’re shooting up a bar in Baghdad,

Don’t order a rum and Coke.

I spent the new year with some near and dear friends as I do every year. We talked about things normal people talk about: funny shit from the past that we did, religion, how much everyone and everything sucks, politics, etc. I was not aware that a federal law had been passed that bans the sale of tobacco products to anyone under the age of 21. Since when did the Republicans start meddling in state affairs? I thought they were the party completely and totally against that. I guess it just goes to show you that Carlin was right. This country was bought and paid for a long time ago by people with deep pockets. None of them give a shit about you or your rights. They believe in taking your money and telling you what to do.

I’m a firm believer in being able to do as one wishes as long as you’re not hurting another human being. If you want to smoke, drink, do drugs then that’s all fine and good with me as long as you’re not inconveniencing someone else or causing them any physical harm. I’m sure you’re harming those around you who care about you, but that’s a post for another day (another day where I’m probably not going to feel like writing.)

You now have to sign up for the draft at 18, you can buy a gun at 18, you can go and fight in a war you don’t believe in, kill others in different countries, and bomb the shit out of said countries all you want … just don’t you go thinking you can come back home after doing all of that and enjoying a smooth cigarette or a delicious beer. You can kill people by the dozens, but you’re way too irresponsible and immature to handle your alcohol and tobacco.

Welcome to America. You are free to do as they tell you.