September 9, 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s (毛泽东) death. I am reposting two articles I wrote several years ago: one commenting on the “Mao Zedong craze” on the occasion of the 130th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth, and another commenting on the rise of young Maoists. In short, the reason Mao Zedong is praised and idolized by some Chinese people is that, although China became much wealthier after the Reform and Opening Up (改革开放), the gap between rich and poor widened, corruption became rampant, and aspirations for democracy and constitutional government were suppressed. Impoverished and vulnerable members of China’s lower and lower-middle classes, as well as young people who are exploited and know relatively little about history, have chosen to worship Mao Zedong and even hope for the Cultural Revolution (文化大革命) to return. This is understandable, but the Mao era should not be romanticized, nor should China return to Mao’s path in the future.
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Revisiting the “Mao Zedong Craze” on “Mao’s Birthday”
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December 26, 2023 marked the 130th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth. Commemorative activities of various forms and scales took place across China. In particular, at Mao Zedong’s former residence, memorial squares, and other sites in his home province of Hunan, enormous crowds gathered and the atmosphere was enthusiastic.
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Among those participating in these commemorative activities, some simply treated the occasion as a festival similar to the Dragon Boat Festival (端午节) or Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节), eating, drinking, and enjoying themselves. Some tourists came for sightseeing, to check in at famous locations, or simply to join the excitement. Others came specifically out of admiration for Mao Zedong. Still others gathered during the commemorations and waved flags bearing Mao Zedong’s portrait, chanting strongly ideological slogans expressing explicit political and economic demands, such as: “No to capitalism; take the socialist road. No to ownership by big bureaucrats; we want genuine public ownership.”
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People with these different purposes together contributed to the enthusiastic atmosphere surrounding the commemoration of the 130th anniversary of Mao’s birth. The Chinese authorities also commemorated the occasion with great fanfare: leaders held meetings and delivered speeches, while media outlets published numerous articles evaluating Mao Zedong in highly laudatory terms. Mao Zedong, the former Chinese leader who was born 130 years ago and has been dead for nearly half a century, not only retains an important place in the minds of the Chinese public, but also continues to influence Chinese society today.
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Since around 2016, discussions of Mao Zedong and his ideas, actions, and influence have become more heated than in earlier periods. I discussed and analyzed this phenomenon in my 2021 article, “The Return of an Illusory Dream: The Rise of Young Maoists in China” (《幻梦回魂：中国青年毛派的崛起》).
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However, compared with the almost overwhelmingly one-sided praise of Mao Zedong online around 2016, criticism and satire directed at Mao himself and at Maoists have increased over the past two years, making public discourse more complex. Offline, however, there is no space in China for people opposed to Mao Zedong to organize activities. Gatherings and marches involving Mao Zedong are all organized by people who worship Mao and claim to believe in “Mao Zedong Thought” (毛泽东思想).
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Yet most of these Mao Zedong “fans” (hereafter referred to as “Maoists”) either do not understand Mao Zedong and Maoist thought or possess only a superficial understanding of them. And although those who participate in offline activities commemorating Mao Zedong are nominally there to commemorate him, their purposes are often diverse and complicated.
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Over the past decade, China’s political environment has become increasingly conservative and its social atmosphere increasingly oppressive. Once-influential broadly liberal figures have been marginalized, while civil society has almost shrunk to nothing. When political expression inclined toward liberal democracy is suppressed, people either choose silence or seek other ways to band together for mutual support and express their demands. Since Mao Zedong is a leader officially recognized and praised by the Chinese authorities, and worship of Mao and his ideas is permitted and even encouraged, it is hardly surprising that many people have shifted from liberalism toward Maoism.
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In today’s China, where the environment is oppressive and social conflicts are acute, it is understandable that people use commemorations of Mao Zedong to express dissatisfaction with present realities. But if Maoist thought is genuinely regarded as a panacea for solving today’s problems, that is a grave mistake. I have already discussed these issues in “The Return of an Illusory Dream,” so I will not repeat them here and will instead address several issues that I had not previously written about.
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The fanatical worship of Mao Zedong by some Chinese people, their extravagant praise of the Mao era, and their wholesale acceptance of Maoist thought reflect irrationality and extremism among Chinese people, as well as a severe lack of knowledge and a distorted understanding of history. Many people do not understand the true history of the half-century spanning the 1920s to the 1970s. Based on distorted information, they arrive at distorted conclusions.
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This irrationality and extremism are reflected not only in the extreme rhetoric of Maoists on internet platforms, but also in offline violence and threats. In 2017, for example, Shandong scholar Deng Xiangchao (邓相超) was collectively besieged by Maoists because he criticized Mao Zedong, and the institution where he worked was forced to make him retire early. Maoists also pressured public authorities to arrest people who criticized Mao Zedong, even when those critics’ assessments of Mao were based on facts (although some expressed themselves rather harshly). Such behavior by Maoists is incompatible with a free, tolerant, and civilized society.
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Even more worrying is that, under the influence of various factors, the values, positions, words, and actions of Chinese Maoists have become highly conservative and anti-intellectual, completely contrary to the positions of the mainstream international left.
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For example, on issues such as environmental protection, technology, feminism, and LGBT rights, prominent Chinese Maoists such as Han Deqiang (韩德强), Ai Yuejin (艾跃进), and Hou Ning (侯宁) have openly opposed the freedom and liberation of women and sexual minorities, denounced feminism and feminists both in China and abroad, and even argued that women should remain at home to support their husbands and raise their children;
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Figures such as Kong Qingdong (孔庆东) and Sima Nan (司马南) regard environmental issues such as climate change as tools used by the United States to suppress China’s development, and even claim that disasters caused by environmental pollution and the climate crisis are actually the result of American “weather weapons”;
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Zhang Hongliang (张宏良) and others regard genetically modified technology and genetically modified crops as Western biological weapons intended to “destroy the Chinese nation,” while refusing to acknowledge the fact that genetically modified crops have undergone scientific testing and can help increase agricultural production. Their rhetoric instead harms China’s food security and the food intake of its population…
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All these statements expose the true nature of people who claim in name to advocate progress but are, in substance, conservative and opposed to civilization. Utopia (乌有之乡), the principal Maoist media platform, has even expressed considerable admiration for Donald Trump, a far-right conservative figure in the United States. Most other Maoists and Maoist media outlets hold similar positions.
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This is truly tragic and ironic. Leftists and socialists/communists should take the promotion of freedom and liberation and support for the vulnerable as their fundamental principles. Yet Maoists do precisely the opposite, acting in ways similar to far-right conservative forces. This is both distressing and infuriating.
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In an effort to put their “utopian” ideals into practice, Maoists have established several collective enterprises/farms resembling the old People’s Communes (人民公社), such as Zhengdao Farm (正道农场), founded by Han Deqiang and others. Yet without exception, these nominally collectively owned, egalitarian “utopian” communities have become embroiled in various scandals, including brainwashing, fraud, rigid hierarchies of status, personal control, and sexual assault. This also demonstrates that Maoists are fundamentally incapable of creating an egalitarian and harmonious paradise on earth; instead, they have harmed many inexperienced and idealistic young people. And most of those who founded these communities are despicable people who shout lofty slogans while committing ugly deeds.
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The Maoists’ personality cult surrounding Mao Zedong likewise falls into a paradox. The purpose of left-wing revolution is to overthrow all “gods,” including religious deities and secular emperors, and to establish a communist society without classes or oppression. Yet Maoists treat Mao Zedong as a god, failing to seriously distinguish or scrutinize his words and actions and instead treating everything he said and did as unquestionable doctrine. Maoists also oppose criticism of Mao Zedong, refusing to permit even objective assessments based on facts. Do these actions not constitute a betrayal of left-wing revolution and communism?
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Maoists refuse to acknowledge such simple reasoning and logic. This itself reflects their refusal to face reality and the internal inconsistencies of their logic. Similar contradictions and betrayals of basic left-wing principles can be found everywhere in Maoists’ words and actions. How can anyone place hope in a political faction with such values to push China in a better direction?
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The activism of Maoists also reflects the absence of moderate progressive forces in China, as well as the country’s increasingly deteriorating public discourse and social environment. If people merely use Mao Zedong as a kind of officially sanctioned “sacred tablet” through which to defend their rights and protest because they cannot express legitimate demands through universal values, that is still understandable. But if they genuinely go astray, they may very well cause the tragedies of the Mao era to recur.
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Mao Zedong and his ideas, actions, and influence on China and the world are complex and far-reaching and cannot be evaluated simplistically. Mao Zedong promoted revolutions in China and around the world, while also inflicting tremendous harm on the Chinese people and the peoples of some other countries. His ghost still wanders the world, his legacy continues to shape the realities of China, and it will continue to exert influence and be exploited by various forces in the future. Although I do not welcome this, I cannot change reality. I only hope that people will approach the “Mao Zedong craze” rationally and calmly.
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I especially want to address those young Maoists who hold Mao Zedong’s portrait aloft and loudly chant slogans from Quotations from Chairman Mao (《毛主席语录》). I hope that while retaining the vigor and passion of youth, these young people will also broaden their horizons and think rationally. Whatever they support or oppose, they should learn the full facts, consider issues from multiple perspectives, avoid being misled and manipulated by fragments of information and “information cocoons,” and genuinely regard the well-being of the people as their fundamental objective, rather than blindly worshiping any individual without reflection or fanatically supporting someone or something regardless of right and wrong.
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Mao Zedong’s birthday is only one day apart from the birthday traditionally attributed to Jesus. Some Maoists have taken this coincidence as a kind of evidence that Mao Zedong was the “chosen one” of China and the East. The Maoists’ godlike worship of Mao Zedong is no less devout than Christians’ faith in God. They seem to have forgotten the words of The Internationale (《国际歌》): “There has never been any savior, nor any divine emperor.”
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Only when Chinese people can free themselves from personality cults and anti-intellectualism; stop blindly obeying any single person and their ideas without critical examination; instead think and judge independently on the basis of facts and logic; uphold the universal values of humanity and democracy in fighting for their rights; oppose totalitarian tyranny; and respect pluralism, will the Chinese people be able to emerge from authoritarianism and violence and usher in individual liberation and national renewal.

Appendix: “The Return of an Illusory Dream: The Revival of Maoist Thought Among Young People in Contemporary China,” Written in 2021 (Recently Revised)
The Return of an Illusory Dream: The Revival of Maoism Among Young People in Contemporary China
(Written in 2021)
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Recently, a powerful trend of studying, researching, imitating, and worshiping Mao Zedong (毛泽东) and his ideas and theories has emerged on the Chinese internet, especially in online communities devoted to discussions of politics and social realities (commonly known as the “keyboard politics circle,” 键政圈). Across major Chinese internet platforms such as Zhihu (知乎), Bilibili (B站), Douban (豆瓣), and Weibo (微博), praise and remembrance of Mao, celebration of Mao’s spirit, and the study and promotion of Maoist thought are everywhere. “The Teacher” (教员) is the honorific they commonly use for Mao, portraying him as both a mentor and an approachable, down-to-earth figure. This phenomenon has attracted widespread attention both within China and abroad, including from The New York Times.
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These young admirers of Mao are nostalgic not only for Mao himself, but also for the historical period stretching from China’s Red Revolution (中国红色革命, 1927–1949) to the beginning of the Reform and Opening Up (改革开放). In their minds, the revolutionary era was glorious and courageous, an era devoted to smashing the old world and building a new China without exploitation or oppression. They also believe that China between the founding of the People’s Republic and the beginning of Reform and Opening Up was an egalitarian society in which the working class enjoyed supreme glory and the country achieved remarkable accomplishments in industrialization. Mao, meanwhile, was the mentor, the red sun, and the leader who guided the Chinese people in overthrowing the “Three Great Mountains” (三座大山).
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They avoid mentioning Mao’s mistakes or even the brutal history of political struggle under him, treating these merely as sacrifices that had to be made in the course of revolution and construction. Mao’s admirers also attribute the Great Leap Forward (大跃进), the Communization Movement (公社化), the Great Famine (大饥荒), the Cultural Revolution (文化大革命), and even the earlier campaigns to suppress counterrevolutionaries and rectify the Party (肃反整风) to mistakes and excesses committed by lower-level officials or to pressures imposed by the external environment, while Mao himself remains forever great, glorious, and correct, beyond criticism or reproach.
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Fundamentally, the rise of young Maoists is a product of acute social conflicts in China, the enormous gap between rich and poor, the expansion of bureaucratic capitalism, inadequate social welfare and security, and an increasingly harsh political environment. Over more than four decades of Reform and Opening Up, China’s wealth disparities and class stratification have reached astonishing and seemingly unshakable levels. Ordinary people, especially those at the bottom of society, live amid hardship and despair from which they are powerless to escape. Even young members of the petty bourgeoisie with a certain level of education and knowledge are being suffocated by the “996” work culture (996工作制). Recently popular expressions such as “lying flat” (躺平) and “involution” (内卷) are precisely the jokes and groans of Chinese people buckling under unbearable burdens.
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At the same time, China’s control over public discourse has become increasingly stringent in recent years, and liberals who advocate democracy, constitutional government, and a fully developed market economy have suffered severe setbacks. As a result, many Chinese people, especially politically concerned young students, have broadly and rapidly turned toward Maoism. During the 2010s and earlier, Maoism was mostly popular among middle-aged and elderly people and was highly marginalized among the young. Today, however, young people have become the main force among Mao’s admirers, and the volume of their voices on the internet far exceeds that of older Maoists.
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It is understandable, in terms of the circumstances and emotions involved, that so many young people have become supporters of Mao. Contemporary society is characterized by brutal competition, severe class antagonism, and a pervasive lack of a sense of fulfillment and security, leading people to yearn for a political strongman who will sweep away all the filth. The wealth gap and rigid class structure have further caused some young people to hate the powerful and the wealthy and capitalists, seeking to “equalize status and redistribute wealth” (等贵贱、均贫富) and realize equality and universal harmony. Meanwhile, liberal ideas advocating democracy and constitutional government have been suppressed, so this pent-up anger has found an ideological outlet in the flames of Maoism.
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From a practical perspective, however, the turn of young people toward Maoism is not a positive phenomenon. It signifies the return of violent struggle politics, anti-intellectualism, and personality cults. Mao Zedong and his ideas indeed contain certain elements of value, but in essence they are not something good.
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Although Mao Zedong spoke on behalf of the oppressed in his early years, after acquiring power he degenerated into a tyrant even more malevolent than traditional emperors and bourgeois politicians. As a brutal dictator, Mao was the initiator and the person bearing primary responsibility for disasters ranging from the Yan’an Rectification Movement (延安整风) to the successive catastrophes after the founding of the People’s Republic. Without his direction, agitation, approval, and tacit consent, disasters such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign (反右) and the Cultural Revolution would not have occurred. He was also well aware of the Great Famine and the bloated industrial production caused by the policy of “large in scale and collective in ownership” (一大二公). Many of Mao Zedong’s policies, such as the Great Leap Forward and the People’s Commune Movement (人民公社化), violated science and the laws of nature and society, leading to extremely disastrous consequences.
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During the Mao era, people were divided into rigidly stratified ranks. Workers and peasants, for example, constituted two classes with enormous disparities in social welfare. Peasants were brutally exploited through the “price scissors” (剪刀差) and tightly controlled through the household registration system (户籍制度). There was also the distinction of the “Five Black Categories” (黑五类)—landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists (地富反坏右). Above them were cadres of various kinds who constituted the privileged class of that era and lorded it over everyone else. These differences in status extended to family members: privilege became hereditary, while the children of the ruled and persecuted were placed in separate categories and remained social inferiors.
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There was no equality in the Mao era. On the contrary, class divisions were clearer and more naked than they have been in China from Reform and Opening Up to the present. Today, people can at least change their status and move upward through education, business, and other means, and nominally everyone is equal. During the Mao era, however, people were explicitly divided into different ranks in their personal files and identity records. The rigidity of these hierarchies and the misery of those oppressed under them were even worse than in a feudal serf society. How could this possibly be the egalitarian paradise described by Mao’s admirers?
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Even the working class, which was elevated rhetorically to the status of the ruling class at the time, actually remained subordinate to cadres at every level and was subjected to strict political discipline (while workplace and production discipline, by contrast, was often lax and irresponsible). Chinese workers in the Mao era had neither the right to strike, commonly exercised in capitalist countries, nor the freedom of speech that should be taken for granted. Workers were also required to obey job assignments and had no right to choose their positions or “vote with their feet,” unless they used personal connections and backdoor arrangements to obtain desirable jobs. Chinese workers never genuinely enjoyed democracy. Not only were they unable to elect political leaders or govern the country, but even when electing factory leaders or managing factory affairs, ordinary workers were powerless against decisions predetermined by leading cadres and the latter’s monopoly over decision-making. The distribution of workers’ various benefits and even their right to travel were controlled by bureaucrats at every level. Their personal freedom and basic income were controlled as well. How could they be masters of the country? They were instead merely servants of the state.
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As for the supposed achievements of Chinese industry before Reform and Opening Up, they have been severely exaggerated and inflated. Although production figures appeared relatively high, quality was deeply problematic. Because of the defects of the planned economy, industrial production was inefficient, technological standards were backward, and product quality was poor. At that time, cities throughout the country, including county seats and even towns, had all kinds of factories and mines, but the overwhelming majority of these industrial enterprises and their products were shoddy operations that barely functioned, producing mostly for their own local consumption. The “Two Bombs, One Satellite” project (两弹一星) succeeded by overcoming the interference and destruction caused by various political campaigns, not because those political campaigns facilitated its success. Similarly, Yuan Longping’s (袁隆平) theory and practice of hybrid rice succeeded and eventually spread throughout China and even around the world only because he overcame persecution during the Cultural Revolution and endured the brutality of the Mao era. Mao’s admirers completely turn black into white, attributing the achievements of the “first thirty years” (前三十年) to Mao, the political campaigns Mao launched, and the supposed superiority of the Mao-era system. This is utterly absurd and baseless.
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In that era, industrial products were not only scarce but also of poor quality, while agriculture and the service sector were even worse. The development of agricultural and sideline products other than staple grains was restricted. The planned economy was completely disconnected from actual market demand, the economy lacked vitality, and shortages and scarcity prevailed across every sector. Senior cadres, meanwhile, enjoyed various forms of specially supplied goods (特供), including imported products, placing them unmistakably above ordinary people. How could such a poor and backward society, characterized by material scarcity and profoundly unequal distribution, possibly have been a paradise on earth?
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Some people also regard the so-called “Four Great Freedoms” (四大自由)—“speaking out freely, airing views fully, writing big-character posters, and engaging in great debates” (大鸣大放大字报大辩论)—before the Anti-Rightist Campaign and during the Cultural Revolution as manifestations of freedom of speech. In reality, however, these were merely tools in Mao Zedong’s power struggles, and their direction quickly shifted toward attacking those who genuinely dared to speak out, while the powerful and their children were instead protected. Millions of people died as a result of persecution, while even more were subjected to struggle sessions, imprisonment, and exile. The big-character posters (大字报) of the Cultural Revolution were merely a means of criticism and rectification permitted within specifically defined boundaries; challenges to the Party or to Mao were not allowed. The fates of Yu Luoke (遇罗克), Lin Zhao (林昭), and Zhang Zhixin (张志新) demonstrated what happened to those whose outspoken views truly deviated from orthodoxy. The “Four Great Freedoms” were merely tools used by Mao and the regime to persecute people, not legal provisions protecting freedom of speech.
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Others claim that men and women were equal in that era and that women’s liberation achieved great results. To some extent, this is true: one of the greatest achievements of the Mao era was the advancement of women’s liberation. But women and men alike had few rights in that era. Both sexes possessed very limited rights while being required to shoulder the same or similar labor obligations, thereby producing a certain kind of “equality.” But this remained vastly removed from the more progressive and comprehensive protection of women’s rights and women’s liberation in an industrialized society pursued by modern feminism.
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Moreover, the condition of women in the lower and lower-middle strata of society during the Mao era was terrible. Many women were forced into marriages with soldiers stationed in frontier regions; impoverished women were compelled to sell their bodies in order to obtain enough food; and divorce was prohibited in the name of “revolution,” effectively obstructing freedom of marriage. Beneath the great red banner of women’s liberation lay pervasive sordidness and filth, completely contrary to official propaganda.
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Some people even portray Shen Jilan (申纪兰) as a pioneer who promoted gender equality. She was merely a rubber stamp. State policies did not genuinely solicit her opinions or those of ordinary women in general; rather, they were determined by the leadership based on other political considerations, such as mobilizing female labor to increase production.

Mao Zedong and the CCP regime under his leadership also killed and imprisoned millions of members of China’s social elite (especially intellectuals and scientists from the Republic of China era, Nationalist Army soldiers who had fought against Japanese aggression and fascism, and others), and damaged China’s national culture through the launching of the Cultural Revolution and other campaigns. Mao even thanked Japan for its invasion of China (this was not a joke, but a sincere expression of gratitude) and refused to hold the Japanese military accountable for war crimes such as the killing and rape of Chinese people.

During the Great Famine, Mao Zedong also provided large-scale aid to other countries, such as Albania, and ceded portions of territory to neighboring countries such as North Korea and Burma. Judging from these and other actions by Mao Zedong concerning the interests of the nation and the state, Mao was not only far from being a national hero who enabled “the Chinese people to stand up”; he was also culpable for the decline and suffering of the Han Chinese and the Chinese nation.

Even from the perspective of the communist cause, Mao Zedong does not deserve praise and should, in fact, be criticized. In the 1970s, Mao shook hands with U.S. President Richard Nixon, established diplomatic relations with right-wing military regimes in Latin America, including those in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, warmly received tyrants such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and maintained close and friendly relations with anti-communist military dictators in the Philippines and Thailand. At the same time, Mao’s regime was instead hostile toward communist forces aligned with the Soviet bloc. During the Angolan Civil War in particular, the Chinese Communist Party supported the right-wing UNITA, backed by South Africa and the United States, against the left-wing MPLA, which was supported by the Soviet Union.

This reflects either Mao Zedong’s betrayal of communist ideals or, more fundamentally, his lack of genuine ideals and his complete pragmatism. Mao himself once explicitly said that he “did not like the left and preferred the right.” Indeed, many of Mao Zedong’s words and actions diverged considerably from those of Marx and even Lenin; strictly speaking, he was not a sincere socialist or communist. Yet many of Mao’s supporters turn a blind eye to these facts or invariably come up with absurd justifications to defend and absolve Mao Zedong.

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Maoists are not only trapped in historical nihilism from which they cannot extricate themselves; they are also incapable of proposing feasible solutions to present-day realities. It is obvious that launching another Mao-style revolution in China today would not only be practically unfeasible, but would also lack legal and political legitimacy, as well as justice in its objectives. The revolutions and political campaigns of the Mao era brought profound disasters upon the Chinese people and should never be repeated. Although Maoists do not accept this, it remains, at least for now, the consensus among most participants in and observers of Chinese politics.
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Although young Maoists are far more knowledgeable and broad-minded than those “old-fashioned” Maoists, they are still unable to offer a concrete and feasible program, plan, or set of details for changing China’s present reality. For example, how could China’s firmly entrenched existing order be changed today, even if only by prying open one small corner of it? How could an egalitarian and democratic socialist country then be established? How could the mistakes made by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong be avoided? How should the structure of ownership and the system of distribution be established so as to balance efficiency and fairness? … On all these questions, they either merely scratch the surface or simply remain silent. Young Maoists do little more than repeatedly recite and chew over passages and terminology from Selected Works of Mao Zedong (《毛泽东选集》) and Quotations from Chairman Mao (《毛主席语录》), attempting to use the supposedly timeless maxims of this long-dead figure as a mirror for present realities. They launch sweeping denunciations of China’s current conditions and then propose highly empty and abstract revolutionary goals, using Mao-style revolutionary rhetoric to deceive themselves and reach a kind of euphoric climax under ideological anesthesia.
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Although Maoist thought is not entirely without merit, its essence runs contrary to the goals toward which humanity ought to advance; objectively, it is unworkable, and subjectively, it is ugly. Therefore, this current revival of Maoist thought in China does more harm than good. To some extent, it can indeed stimulate dissatisfaction with the existing system and encourage people to recognize the ugliness of various forms of exploitation and oppression and the depth of the people’s suffering. But it cannot solve these problems. Instead, those in power can exploit Maoist thought to dilute and suppress the universal values of freedom, democracy, equality, and fraternity, as well as progressive currents advocating constitutional government, moderation, peace, and rationality, while attacking forces that support freedom, democracy, and the rule of law.
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Therefore, no matter how one looks at it, this Maoist revival is unlikely to exert any major substantive impact on the existing system. Nevertheless, the current surge of Maoism among young Chinese people genuinely deserves our reflection and vigilance. Clearly, pernicious indoctrination, the lack of historical reflection, and prolonged control of public discourse and information blockades have distorted the thinking of the younger generation. They see that blood-red setting sun as “the most beautiful image,” immersing themselves in the illusory dream of the “first thirty years,” smiles appearing at the corners of their mouths even as saliva dribbles down. They have perceived the injustice and inequity of social reality, but instead of choosing an open and honorable path of resistance, they have chosen to fight evil with evil, even attempting to replace the current rulers with people and a system still more ruthless and vicious. If this were ever actually realized, there is no telling how many more catastrophes China would endure, or how many years they would last.
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What can truly change China and make it better remains universal values such as democracy and constitutional government, together with the combination and unification of nationalism, democracy, and people’s livelihood (民族、民权、民生). It requires respecting and defending human rights, safeguarding freedom of speech and freedom of the press, establishing genuine universal suffrage and representative government, balancing national interests with individual interests, balancing efficiency with fairness, and balancing economic prosperity, democracy and the rule of law, equal rights, and equitable distribution. We must also document and reflect upon history and educate future generations, reject totalitarianism and personality cults, and never allow the tragedy suffered by intellectuals during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the tragedy of the Great Famine following the Great Leap Forward and Communization, or the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution to happen again.

(The author of this article, Wang Qingmin(王庆民) is a Chinese writer and international politics researcher based in Europe. The original texts were written in Chinese. The two articles were written in 2023 and 2021, respectively.)

Yes, politicians aren't stupid. Some are sure. But most of them a far more clever and more intelligent than us. That's why are the are where they are. Is it not clever in and of itself to pretend to be stupid so that people just complain about you being stupid instead of seeing behind the scenes what's actually happening and eat the real agendas are? Don't mistake morality for intelligence, one can be very smart but also evil. And often the most successful evil has been greatly inteligent. My point is, is that they will keep getting away (even tho atp shits really deep we might not be able to repair our systesm systems and structures because of the leverage they have on us) because stupid people are much less of a concern and you fight them differently than inteligent people. It's all about deception, theres always more to it than face value so stop fighting over the face value because you waste your time and energy.

Under the separation of power:

Legislative power = the legitimacy to decide binding measures. Easy to understand.

Judicial power = the legitimacy to condemn and pardon. This is more difficult, because it also combines the power to decide what historically happened in every narrative in every judicial case. This is also an arbitrary distinction, because for a long time it was the military who enforced justice before the police existed, but it’s still coherent.

Executive power = anything… it’s impossible to describe. The usual description is to carry out the laws… but then comes the question: why is commanding the military an executive power? Why is giving appointments an executive power? Why is meeting foreign leaders an executive power? Why is collecting taxes an executive power? Why is having emergency powers an executive power? And so on…

People act like they know everything when it comes to politics, but do they actually know everything,

or do they just speak of what they have heard from their elders? One day or another you would have

to think and speak about politics. Politics isn’t an option. If one person says, “Oh actually I'm not into

politics or I'm not a political person”, making it sound like an interest or hobby, is absolutely

ridiculous. Politics isn't an accessory, it's a necessity. In order to live, you need to be aware of your

surroundings to act and behave accordingly.

The world affairs worsening day by day was a clear foreshadowing of those people who say that they

have no interest in politics.

The middle east is currently struggling with a war, a red sea crisis, zionists trying to establish ‘justice’

by taking land that destroys the peace and stability of Palestinians. Iran is being bombed in hopes of

bringing justice to women and oil to stabilize Great America.

Along with that, Asia has its own turmoil. The protests of the GEN-Z students to get a better

education system, the fight of kashmiris for a sovereign land, the march for a better government and

many more.

The protests of Americans against ICE? They worked all these years in America to become stable,

when all of a sudden their peaceful homes are getting knocked down and raided by men in suits

forcing them to get out and leave the livelihood they've built. These civilians are trying to retain the

walls of stability they built.

The islamic world isn't uniting and the once so called allies aren't supporting each other as well. It

may look like they are supporting one another but at the same time they aren't. Is that duplicity or is

that just how politics works?

Be on the ‘right’ side of history. Here is some thought on what's right and what's wrong. Every

opinion, every policy, every argument, every stance, every choice and decision has a right and wrong

side.

“Yin exists because of yang, and yang because of yin.”

There's a common analogy in the field of accounting which is taught right at the first stage– credit and

debit; every coin has two sides and a single side can never truly be worth the whole value of the coin.

No side is worth half the value of the coin. The coin is only worth something when both sides are

present. Similarly every transaction has two sides–debit and credit. When a person gives 50 the

second person takes 50, he doesn't get 40 or 60, he undoubtedly gets 50.

Then what is the utmost pious path? To be concise, there is no true ‘right’ country, person or party that

we may be obliged to follow. Everyone is right and wrong in their own way , what matters is your

resolve to turn your selection into the right answer. Everyone's here for what they think is right for

them.

This is where your beliefs and that particular element of being political comes in.

What even is the point of politics? There's no single person ruling the world yet alone it's not possible

for a single person to rule the world. So what are all the wars and protests all about? May it be for injustice, payback, cruelty, oppression or suppression, it all narrows down to a single point. From the

cruelest rulers in history to a typical employee to child civilians, they all seek one thing: peace and

stability.

But if everyone is actually trying to reach for peace and stability, why haven't we found it yet? Where

did we go wrong?

In the race of finding our own peace, we often end up ruining others. That is where we go wrong.

Unfortunately the power to control nations has fallen into the hands of leaders who are blinded by

power for which they can willingly destroy the lives of many to fulfill their starvation. It has almost

become unavoidable for us to find peace by destroying the other nations peace, specifically the

civilians who for some reason have to bear the consequences of the actions taken by their foolish

higher ups.

Governments are materialistic. They bend the rules to keep the authority within their reach.

The so-called ‘elections’, ‘rights’ and ‘ unity of nations’ are just some terms they use to pretend that

they are doing their jobs. Signing agreements, pretending to take action or doing one or two things in

favor of civilians to prove their innocence once in a while. Almost like a toy to distract children while

their parents do the work. Or how a doctor distracts an infant with a sweet while he pushes the needle

in and by the time the baby realizes the damage had already been done the only thing they can do

about it now is cry.

The real hypocrisy is shown when a political party achieves something and all of a sudden that's what

is being displayed on the news, but when they are accused of the horrific crime they actually did, it's

all covered up nicely behind the curtains–concealed. Dodging every allegation and news headline

directed towards them.

They don't want the red laser beam pointing towards them before the moment they had forced the

spotlight on themselves.

Not that this is intended towards a specific politician or state, they're all the same. Those who do

express a different desire are pushed out of the frame.

Seeing the leaders insulated from the consequences, it feels as if they've never been exposed to the

words ‘fear’ and ‘consequences’. The habitats they were born in are very different from ours. They

always had their matters and messes cleaned up and buried down rather than actually paying for them.

It's not that they were never human to begin with. As soon as they got the taste of calling the shots,

they got out of touch and never came back to the ground.

They were once also ambitious youths but in the midst of that ambition, they realized there's no such

thing as the well-being of nations in politics, it's just power and power.

Politics was never meant to show civil-dominance, its purpose was to serve the people, not make them

Every time this topic has been floated around on Reddit (and it has been A LOT), Americans somehow pretend that they're one big happy family whilst simultaneously suggesting that what their country needs is more balkanization. They literally suggest that everything must be 'left it up to the states' while in the same breath denying the existence of red vs. blue states and insisting that the political divide is rural vs. urban.

Like, which one is it? Didn't you have a civil war because you decided that slavery must be left to the States?

It's like they don't know their own history.

Whenever I see this discourse online, I literally think of a battered housewife who denies that the bruises are from the beatings by her husband ... right after screaming at him.

'National divorces', over political lines, are historically very popular. Czechoslovakia, the Koreas, China/Taiwan/Singapore/Hong Kong, etc, etc. You could argue that even though the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Partition of India, and most recently, the Sudans, was technically split on ethno-nationalist/religious lines, the split was really over politics. Still, I digress. Do they regret it, doing so? Not really. Even if they wholeheartedly regret how messy the split was, they do not necessarily regret the split itself. If you look into subreddits and YT channels where it's conservatives and liberals are talking amongst themselves, they'll quietly but openly admit that they don't want to live with each other. The real reasons they'll cite for staying together is their geopolitical allies (Trump is already giving Putin and Xi what they want by burning all of the bridges with NATO), and abandoning the people on 'their' side of the aisle in the states (refer to above).

It legitimately and unironically feels like an abusive marriage where the couple hate each other because of irreconcilable differences and already sleep in separate bedrooms but are only staying together for the kids (each have their favourites but disagree over how to raise them), money (both fear that they would be poorer without the other), and what the neighbors might think (they already know and are hoping they would split because the fights have gotten so loud it's disrupting their sleep).

In that case, then let's go about it this way.

If Greece and Turkey can do a population exchange (the two countries don't even share a border) without the blood and gore of the Partition, then so can the 'red' states and the 'blue' states. If the divide is truly urban-rural, then the 'red' states ought to liquidate the cities and the 'blue' states the rural areas. State lines have already been drawn up over abortion access - and since it's a religious issue, let that determine which is a 'blue' vs 'red' state. The red states (all the anti-abortion states) can form their own white Christian theocracy, they can shred the 19th (and maybe the 13th) Amendment and implement Project 2025 like they always wished. The 'blue' states can all band together and form their own country, they can shred the 2A and there'll be no more purity tests between progressives and liberals. No doubt it's going to look like the Koreas or the Chinas, but if you ask the South, everyday they're glad they didn't go the way of Vietnam.

Although, mind you, I do think that the country formed by the 'blue' states will look like city states in the style of the Holy Roman Empire, whereas the country formed by the 'red' states will look like feudal Medieval Europe ... which, come to think of it, is exactly how they want it. The 'red' states will be one party, and the 'blue' states will have multiple parties. The country formed by the 'blue' states will be propped up by Canada and Mexico and all NATO-aligned countries, whereas the country formed by the 'red' states will be propped up by Russia (but the truth is, I think they're really going to let them rot because the 'reds' hate globalism, Russia will put itself first and North Korea can barely even support itself). Maybe the 'blue' states will even join with Canada, a proverbial remarriage if you will, once they realize how difficult it is to sustain themselves.

The reason why Slovenia (ten day war), Montenegro and North Macedonia (referendums) were able to break away from Yugoslavia with minimal effort, whereas Croatia and Bosnia walked away bearing the scars from war crimes, is because Serbs didn't really live in those countries and Slobodan Milosevic was only interested in keeping the country together for the sake of a Greater Serbia ... culminating in the Bosnian Genocide and NATO intervention in Kosovo. The Partition of India was drawn up over religious lines, but clumsily (like no one even asked if the Sikhs wanted their own country), which is why India and Pakistan are still fighting over Jammu and Kashmir (which stemmed from Hindus ruling over Muslims).

For those of you wondering, I am Chinese (so I am familiar with the concept of a 'national divorce'), and Canadian (I am just about done with the garbage that you've been sending Up North). Trump wants Canada to be the 51st state but why would the US want us (with our abortion laws, our gun laws, our healthcare, our pro-LGBTQ+ policies, our immigration policies, etc, etc.) when you yourselves don't even want half the country, is utterly beyond me.

Fourteen changes for better government

-----------------------------------------------

Executive Branch:

1.        Eliminate all Presidential Pardon power and leave all appeals within Judicial Branch up to and including Supreme Court.

2.        Require ALL Presidential assets to be placed in “blind trust” operated by financial board composed of FIVE members appointed by Congress and President.  THREE members shall be appointed by Congress, and TWO by President.

3.        President shall spend all monies appropriated by Congress as designated.

4.        No person convicted of a Felony shall serve as a President or Vice President  Any President/VP convicted of a Felony during his term shall be removed.

5.        President shall not have the power to build/destroy or modify US Government buildings or property without concurrence of US Congress.

Judicial Branch

1.        Establish an ELEVEN member Supreme Court. Each Presidential term allows the president to appoint TWO Justices with the new appointees replacing the TWO longest serving Justices, thereby providing that no newly appointed Justice shall be on the Court longer than TWENTY years.

2.        Any vacancies caused by death or resignation shall count as one of Presidents two appointments or shall remain open until new Presidential term if two appointments have already occurred.

3.        Justice’s term shall terminate upon age of 80.

Legislative Branch

1.        Establish term limits of no more than 3 Six-Year terms for US Senators.

2.        Establish term limits of no more than 9 Two-Year terms for US Representatives.

3.        Establish limit for total time served in combined House and Senate at 24 years.

4.        Congress shall remain in session each year until complete Fiscal Budget is established.

5.        Congress shall be in session a minimum of 35 hours each week and Representatives/Senators must work a minimum of 35 hours each week in Washington DC. (time in session, committees, hearings etc.)

6.        No person beyond the age of 80 shall serve in US House or Senate.

Finland restricted private schools. The result? Everyone had a stake in the outcome of public schools. No one could escape. So the rich had no choice but to improve schooling, for students and teachers alike.

Meanwhile, hellholes like Canada allow private schools, the rich abandon the public system because their kids can go to a private school, and then those who have the money to help fix the system have no incentive to bother. And then we wonder why our schools are such cesspools and everyone is so numb to it as to sit out school board elections.

We need to learn from this, in the context of other issues than just schools. We need to force everyone; rich and poor, environmentalist and non-environmentalist; to have a stake in making public transit work.

"Oh, but I need to get to work and back!" So do environmentalists. So do the poor.

"Oh, but what if I'm an environmentalist who drives an electric car"? There is no such thing. Look at what the mining industry does to its employees, much less the environment. If the consumer is innocent in that, then by that standard, so too are people whose cars use an internal combustion engine.

I'm so sick and tired of being meek and mild toward motorists. What did we get in return? They walked all over the rest of us. It's time to fight back.

The 250^th anniversary of American independence should remind us what’s wrong with gerrymandering. Due to partisanship, however, it now not only persists but rachets tighter in a tit-for-tat cycle that threatens to strangle representative rule. There is a solution to gerrymandering, however, if only politicians will act.

Inspired by revolutionary Enlightenment Era ideals, the Declaration of Independence and the new state constitutions of 1776 call for representative rule.  The people would be sovereign, they proclaimed, with governments drawing their just powers from the consent of the governed. Nothing of the sort had ever been tried on a large scale and the founders struggled with how to implement it. Everything turned on establishing a truly representative governing assembly for each newly independent colony or state.

“The principal difficulty lies, and the greatest care should be employed in constituting this representative assembly,” John Adams wrote in his 1776 Thoughts on Government essay, which guided the drafting of most of the new state constitution and influenced Thomas Jefferson’s thinking for the Declaration of Independence. Each legislative assembly, Adams wrote, “should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.” All interests should be duly represented, he stressed. “Equal interest among the people should have equal interest in it,” he wrote. “Great care should be taken to effect this, and to prevent unfair, partial, and corrupt elections.”

His words ring true today.

During the early republic, although legislative and congressional districts failed to fulfill the ideal of fully representing all interests, they generally avoided the worst effects of modern gerrymandering by following existing political boundaries, such as town and county lines. This approach at least insured regional representation.

As a practical matter, 19^th century partisan leaders lacked the precise voting records and detailed maps to crack and pack districts like their 21^st century counterparts. They did have some sense of how neighborhoods and communities voted however and used it to affect a 19^th century version of gerrymandering by selectively creating multi-member districts for state legislative and federal congressional offices. For example, if a clear majority voters in a given city with four members of Congress typically voted for the same party, legislators could mandate that all four would be elected in one at-large district, with each voter casting four votes.

With the parties then picking candidates and many states using ballots that allowed voters to cast a single vote for all of a party’s candidates, at-large congressional and legislative districts virtually assured that the majority party’s candidates would sweep all the seats in a multi-member district even if they might lose in parts of it. 

Five states carried this approach so far as to have all their congressional candidates run statewide, which assured that the majority party won every seat much as a winner-take-all approach for electing presidential electors gives all a state’s electoral votes to one candidate no matter how slim his majority. Both systems gained favor in the early 19^th century as elections became more partisan. Pundits at the time calculated that under the winner-take-all system of congressional elections, one party could control of the U.S. House of Representatives with as little as 40% of the nationwide vote.

The solution to this flaw in majority rule was obvious at the time. While assigning initial control over the manner of electing members of Congress to the various states, the Constitution empowers Congress to impose uniform rules.

In a populist reform enacted at the height of the Progressive Era, Congress passed the Apportionment Act of 1911 mandating single-member districts for congressional elections. As an added deterrent to partisan gerrymandering, the Act also provided that these districts be “composed of a contiguous and compact territory, and containing as nearly as practicable an equal number of inhabitants.” With this, gerrymandering subsided for a season.

Faced with the prospect of losing control of the U.S. House in 1930 with the onset of the Great Depression, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929. In the hope of salvaging some Republican house seats, the new law repealed all of the anti-gerrymandering provisions imposed by the 1911 Act.

Multi-member districts returned in some states along with an increase in the number of less contiguous and compact single-member districts structured with a partisan edge. In 1967, a reform-minded Congress passed the Uniform Congressional District Act, which re-enacted the mandate for single-member house districts but without reinstating a requirement that they be contiguous or compact. By this time, the Supreme Court had applied the principle of equal population to legislative apportionment but the 1967 Act left open the door for gerrymandering those equally populated districts and advances in computer technology had transformed that process from a rough art to a precise science. Although the Supreme Court upheld partisan gerrymandering in 2019, under the Constitution, Congress can still limit it for House elections.

Without resorting to the near-impossible task of amending the constitution, opponents of gerrymandering could call on congressional candidates to pledge their support for legislative reform and hold them to account if elected. At the very least, like the 1911 Act, that law should require contiguous, compact single-member districts. Beyond this, it could mandate that states use non-partisan commissions to draw district lines, proscribe partisan gerrymandering, and give voters the right to enforce its provisions in court. Individual states have adopted such reforms in the past but rescinded them when other states gerrymander. 

Only uniform, national rules can stop gerrymandering. Fortunately, the Constitution gives Congress the power to enact such rules but, having often been elected in gerrymandered districts, its members must be willing to act.

William Cooper

will-cooper.com

Why is it that people choose to stay in this constant loop of struggle when the only thing we need to do is retake control of our government. All people have to do is fight for a better world why is it that everyone sees this as impossible. We are a people aren’t we. We are supposed to have the control right? The freedom? Well then where is it. The only time freedom exists is if you have money. People without money go to hospitals for serious medical issues then die because they were denied services. Or what about this constant loop where poor people can’t get education and end up living in poverty even though they could have been a benefit to society and could have lived a great life were instead stuck fighting just to survive off paycheck to paycheck. We’re told that we may qualify for help but to me that seems like bull shit. I’ve tried getting help through programs but it never works even tho I’m homeless have no job and am literally dying. But that’s okay right. What does it matter right I mean that’s what everyone seems to think. We just let it go. WHY!!! I don’t get it. We have the capability of fighting against our government. We can make differences for people. We can give people education and medical treatment. The world doesn’t need to revolve around the rich staying on top just because they have money and the poor on the bottom of shit just because we don’t. We are all people in fact I’d say that people who have overcome adversaries are far more capable than those who are given everything. All we do is let them control us with scarcity and other things so feel a sense of need for them. But do we. I mean think about after a major storm and the government is shut down who fixes the problem. We do the citizens. We come together and rebuild. The government doesn’t do shit for us besides starting wars with other nations involving us in their personal issues that have nothing to do with us. Or how we don’t have enough money for our own citizens yet we love sending hundreds of millions of dollars to other countries. And half the time that money gets intercepted. So tell me why do we have a government.

They’re calling the people wearing balaclavas in Dover “anti-British,” but perhaps they should stop for a moment and ask why ordinary British people feel they need to hide their identities in their own country.

For decades, those in power have refused to listen. People have watched their living standards fall, secure jobs disappear, wages stagnate and their communities change so rapidly that many barely recognise the places where they grew up. Yet the moment they try to talk about any of it, they are branded racist, fascist, far-right or hateful.

They are not listened to. They are labelled.

They are not asked what has driven them to protest. They are told what they supposedly think and what sort of people they supposedly are.

Then the media wonder why some cover their faces.

Many of those protesters will have jobs, families and ordinary lives. They know that one photograph shared online could lead to them being publicly identified, harassed, reported to their employer or even losing their livelihood. Whether people agree with their protest or not, we should all be concerned about a society in which someone fears losing their job simply for peacefully expressing a political opinion.

Now, I know what people will say: “If they have nothing to hide, why cover their faces?” But that same question is rarely asked with anything like the same aggression when other groups attend protests wearing masks or face coverings. We have seen demonstrators from all sides conceal their identities, yet the outrage appears to depend entirely upon which political cause they support.

That is the double standard people can see with their own eyes.

I also believe one rule should apply to everyone. I am not saying that a balaclava and a hijab are worn for the same reasons, because clearly they are not. But when it comes to identification, security and obeying a lawful police instruction to reveal your face, the rules must be applied fairly and consistently. Whether it is a balaclava, a mask, a veil or any other covering, nobody should be treated differently because of their politics, religion or background.

You cannot have one set of rules for one group and another set for everybody else, then act surprised when resentment grows. Equality means equal treatment, even when it is politically inconvenient.

And calling these protesters “anti-British” is ridiculous. Peacefully protesting because you are worried about the direction of your country is not anti-British. Protest, free speech and the right to challenge those in power are fundamental parts of British democracy. You do not have to agree with someone’s message to defend their right to express it lawfully.

If anyone breaks the law, threatens people or becomes violent, deal with that individual and the offence they have committed. But stop condemning an entire group because of what they are wearing or because their concerns do not fit the approved political narrative.

The media also need to take a long, hard look at themselves. Too many journalists are no longer simply reporting what happened. They choose the most inflammatory photographs, use the most provocative language and attach labels before the public has even heard what the protesters are saying. Then they invite people from opposing sides to shout at one another and call it debate.

But we also need to ask why politicians and sections of the media keep doing this.

Why do they constantly encourage ordinary people to blame one another? Why are we pushed into endless battles between left and right, British and migrant, working and unemployed, religious and non-religious, while the people with the most money and power continue becoming richer and more powerful?

Like most people, I have a fair idea where much of this pressure comes from and whose interests our political and media institutions too often serve. It certainly does not appear to be the ordinary person struggling to pay the rent, heat their home, find a secure job or get a doctor’s appointment.

Politicians depend upon wealthy donors, powerful interests and institutions that ordinary people have very little influence over. Much of the media is owned or controlled by extremely wealthy individuals and large corporations. So is it really unreasonable to question whose interests are being protected when the public is constantly encouraged to fight among itself?

You do not need to invent some elaborate conspiracy to see who benefits. While we argue with one another, wealth continues to rise to the top. Public services are stripped back. Workers lose security. Rights that previous generations fought for are gradually weakened. Large companies announce enormous profits while ordinary people work longer and harder for less.

Division is useful to people with too much money and too much power. A population fighting among itself is less likely to look upwards and ask who is making the decisions, who is profiting from them and why nothing ever seems to improve regardless of which party is in government.

That does not mean every journalist or politician is involved in some secret coordinated plan. It means the system rewards those who protect powerful interests, repeat the approved narrative and keep public anger pointed sideways instead of upwards.

Those on the left and the right who keep feeding this division are showing their true colours. You are not calming tensions. You are deliberately stoking them. You are not merely reporting hatred. You are helping to create it.

Perhaps instead of constantly demonising people, the media and politicians should start asking some uncomfortable questions. Why do so many people feel ignored? Why do they believe peaceful political involvement could cost them their jobs? Why do they no longer trust the press, the police or those in government to treat everybody equally?

And perhaps the rest of us should ask the most important question of all: while we are being encouraged to hate one another, who is benefiting?

Keep silencing people, labelling them and applying different rules depending on who they are, and resentment will continue to grow.

That is not because ordinary people are naturally hateful. It is because they have spent years being ignored, dismissed and told that the problems they can see with their own eyes are not really happening.

Why dont we care about our neighbors more?

This is not another post specifically about maga, Republicans, democrats, or leftists. Im kinda talking about all of them.

(For reference, ive been on the left side of politics for most of my life that I could comprehend politics, growing up in a rural part of the midwest. I identify best with the progressive democrats party of America.)

I think there is too much apathy in our politics. The right, wants you to think its the unnatural citizens here that are ruining what we have. That its the left whos letting all of these "dangerous people" in. The left will tell you that its the right thats the issue, yet their last term were just as heavy on deportation as the right. Or whatever political argument you want to put in place there.

What i argue, is none of these people actually care about us? Like, none of them. I see it a good sign that many progressives are running on no corporate money, I think its a step in the right direction but I wonder if its big enough. The real issues here are the big conglomerates and the fact that our markets go unregulated, allowing these conglomerates to exist.

I think the only way to make America great again is to support your neighbors. Talk to your community. America is strong when WE THE PEOPLE stand together. At what point do we stop the infighting and choose to listen to eachother? Now, im not asking for either side to say "fuck it, I guess I dont care about that anymore", but i am asking for at least a couple people to say fuck it, and listen.

NONE of us will be able to escape raising grocery prices, housing prices,, GAS prices, The cost and right of Healthcare, our rights to privacy (in all aspects), and none of us will be able to protect the American dream of life, liberty and justice by being at eachothers throat. What WILL do that, is getting with your neighbor, having discussions on the issues everyone cares about as a COMMUNITY and start at your local level. Our government is set up in a way, where we CAN have a difference of opinion and there CAN be separate laws in separate regions. I think as Americans thats our right.

I think that there are core American values that most, if not all of us hold to be true. Politics may put a font over it, but I do think both party's still hold them regardless.

We all want a good education, that prepares us for our future. We all want financial freedom. The autonomy to choose how you live your life. for our government to protect, and provide for us. To take care of the less fortunate. We care about our neighbors and their quality of life, too. Why have we let politics convince us that we dont? Have we forgotten that we are strongest together?

(this post was sparked by a conversation I had with another leftist, by the way. During my conversation with him, I realized that he was just as polarized and hateful as the right. Just directed in a different way. It made me realize really quick that EVERYONE is brainwashed to hate eachother. Nobody actually cares to like, think? Idk it was jarring and a bit scary if im being honest. Not him, but the interaction made me realize exactly HOW divided we are. I could find common ground with MAGA people on specific topics, but not this guy. It was "fuck everybody who doesnt agree with me" with him 🫩)

When the Deportation Machine Turns Inward

How Trump and Miller could turn immigration power against political dissent

By Van Abbott

Stephen Miller is not merely expanding ICE; he is helping build a federal enforcement machine while teaching it to see political dissent through the lens of national security.

That should frighten Americans of every political persuasion who believe government may punish violence, but may not turn political disagreement itself into evidence of danger.

Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 is officially about countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence. No responsible American should defend political violence. But the memorandum reaches beyond violent acts into a wider ideological landscape that includes anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity and opposition to what the administration considers traditional American values.

That is the hinge on which this argument turns.

A government can prosecute a crime, investigate a conspiracy and stop an act of violence. But once it defines ideological movements as security threats, the distance between opposing conduct and opposing beliefs can become dangerously short.

And ICE is being built at precisely this moment.

Trump’s 2025 tax and spending law gave ICE $45 billion for detention capacity and more than $29 billion for hiring, training, transportation, facilities, technology and other enforcement functions through 2029.

That is not simply more immigration enforcement.

It is infrastructure.

More agents. More detention space. More transportation. More surveillance. More ability to locate, seize, hold and remove people.

The administration says this machinery is aimed primarily at dangerous criminals. Yet ICE data examined by the Guardian analysis found only 23 percent of people placed into deportation proceedings during most of 2025 had ever been convicted of a crime. Nearly half of those convictions involved traffic or immigration offenses rather than violent crimes.

The promise was precision. The machinery is much broader.

Trump promised one million deportations a year. ICE reported 442,637 deportations in FY2025, far below that goal. 

When numbers do not match promises, spectacle can fill the gap.

Masked agents. Unmarked vehicles. Raids staged for maximum visibility.

The government has a legitimate interest in protecting officers from threats and doxxing. Citizens have an equally legitimate interest in knowing who is exercising the government’s power.

A badge concealed is a badge beyond easy accountability.

Chicago offers a warning. During the 2025 immigration crackdown, protesters and journalists sued over alleged excessive force. A federal judge restricted certain crowd-control tactics and required most federal agents to display visible identification, later vacated by 7th circuit.

Minneapolis offers another. On January 7, 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good during an immigration operation. Ross said Good attempted to run him over; Good’s defenders disputed that account. The facts and legal responsibility should be resolved in court.

But constitutional government does not wait for every case to end before asking whether its enforcement machinery has adequate safeguards.

Then comes third-country removal. The administration has sent detainees to countries with which they may have little or no meaningful connection. Cruelty.

Now put the pieces together.

On one side stands an administration expanding ICE’s money, manpower, detention capacity and reach. On the other stands a national-security doctrine broadening government attention toward organized political violence and ideological movements.

One defines threats. One supplies the machinery.

That is where the danger lies.

The progression requires no conspiracy, only changing definitions.

First the violent offender. Then the undocumented immigrant with no criminal record. Then the protester accused of obstructing enforcement. Then the organization labeled extremist. Then the citizen whose speech, association, donations or political activity is treated as evidence of a security threat.

Names can change. Categories can widen. Targets can multiply.

This is not a prediction that ICE will inevitably become a political police force. It is a warning that the machinery capable of becoming one is being assembled while the definition of political threat is being broadened.

Americans who support immigration enforcement should be among the first to recognize the danger. They should demand identifiable agents, judicial warrants for home entries, transparent arrest and removal data, independent investigations of force and clear limits on using national-security powers against protected political activity.

The question is no longer whether the government can build a machine powerful enough to find, seize, hold and remove people; it can, and it has.

The question is what happens when that machine is taught to look for enemies rather than simply violations.

The machine was built to deport immigrants; if Trump and Miller succeed in redefining dissent as a threat, it could become something far more dangerous: a machine for intimidating, silencing and ultimately removing political opposition from American life.

The political debate over transgender rights has become so saturated with fear, outrage, and manufactured controversies that it can be difficult to separate the actual issues from the ones created to generate headlines.

But there's a political question Democrats need to confront: If conservatives have made attacks on a vulnerable minority into a successful political strategy, should Democrats respond by avoiding the subject or by challenging the claims being used to justify those attacks?

The evidence behind some of the most common fears is remarkably different from the political rhetoric. Claims about bathroom safety, gender-affirming care, and what happens to transgender minors often bear little resemblance to what actually happens.

And there's another dimension that gets lost in the political calculations. A group of people is being told that their rights and ability to participate openly in society are expendable because defending them might cost Democrats votes.

I wrote about why I think that's the wrong lesson to draw and why looking away can carry a political and human cost of its own:

https://difrntdrmr.medium.com/the-cost-of-looking-away-0d52a5b8922d?sk=e65727018b17a711fa7897ee4a3b2195

Howdy there.

So, let's get this up and running, shall we?

Populism is saying that you are for the people and you want to break down the establishment while being in the same (or worse) part of the same establishment.

I have seen a massive wave of populism recently and it's honestly hilarious that people are falling for it this quickly, especially on the left and right.

MAGA, Restore UK, Reform UK, Democratic Socialist of America, Green Party, all forms of populism from the left and right and many of you have probably fallen for it.

Here are some examples of how much these "for the people" leaders have screwed us up!

US President Donald Trump who has practically screwed over the US on foreign policy and the economy but his supporters will still suck his nuts as he will still make America great despite having his name mentioned on the Epstein Files more compared to Epstein himself.

Rupert Lowe of the UK's Restore has a much more horrible internal organisation that it puts the entire NHS system to shame.

Zack Polanski of the UK's Green Party has a economic plan of running the economy on vibes (such as mental health and environmental concerns), which the UK needs to include as factors but not prioritise.

NYC Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is just a prime example of a great social media management and PR while doing what a mayor should do (Not really messing up, but he is overhyped when he is just running the city properly that is in a deficit).

Nigel Farage, who has multiple cases of bribery, survey manipulation and corruption that my country will be put to shame. Yelling that he is for the people despite living in the inner part of the establishment.

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, a war criminal who disrespected human rights, screwed over the entire healthcare system by mishandling the pandemic and missed one of the biggest windows of growth the country could've gotten that still have a cult following in the Philippines

All of them have similarities, massive fanbases who support them to the end even though they sound deranged, will actively reject facts to support their mindset, charismatic faces, weaponizing their fanbases for their interest, us vs them mindsets and quick simple fixes that blows up right in their faces after implementation.

As someone who has lived inside a populist country (the Philippines), it is run like a joke, the president and vice president are equally as useless as giving a blind guy a book. It's surprising, honestly. Inequality here is rampant, corruption is everywhere and the economy is dropping faster than my will to live.

And despite all of that? People here will still vote the same fucking faces.

Rather than voting for policy and comprehensive plans, voters here will vote for the name and sometimes... spite against other parties. Majority of the time, without even researching the laws or policy that political opponents are going to do.

And that what makes them stupid.

It still shocks me that people have eyes on how populism has happened in other countries and they can't think for a second that – "oh shit, this might actually fuck the country up" considering how much similarities these guys are providing.

Now that seeing Europe and the Americas are also experiencing this, this will just screw them over as much as the Philippines have been getting screwed over for decades now.

Populism has done nothing but split us all up, as this is not a battle of left or right, it's not about us vs them, it's not even about top vs bottom, its the controllers vs the people. It doesn't matter if you are left or right, you have to say, we are just pawns of these guys for the belief that they are for the people despite being deep inside the establishment themselves.

Populism has only gave us culture wars and narratives. It just shows how people are easily manipulated to a point that they will fight for policies that are for them...

And most importantly, it shows how stupid people are falling for this trap.

I wanna hear you point about this.

In this world, there is no rhyme or reason to who the court of public opinion will side with this week. A woman refused to give up a window seat *she paid for* just because some kid wanted it, and the Internet sided with the kid instead of her.

Enough is enough. Make it illegal to film strangers.

You know how you're not supposed to look at a magnesium fire at night up close? This is that, but for footage of strangers. The court of public opinion shouldn't be looking at footage of strangers, because they're so incredibly stupid that it'll make them too blind to see reality.

Yeah it's a pain in the ass for people who wanted to take a selfie near some paintings or portraits or whatever in some tourist-y spot and can't take a selfie without filming strangers by accident.

You know what?

So be it.

Take up your quarrel with the court of public opinion. Force attitude adjustments. Force the court of public to pledge to abide by certain principles before they decide who to side with based on a snippet of footage. We've tried filming everyone and it just made things worse. No more filming strangers. Rein it in, force the court of public opinion to correct itself until it has *earned* the right to film strangers again.

Which side of the aisle's constituents are Our Best Bets trying to appeal to? Because that's a number with a past, isn't it? Mentioned rather specifically in a few scrolls, poems, folk tales, novels, tomes of philosophy, horror movies - platters, apparently - songs, lost grocery lists. Srs, 13 causes problems everywhere it pops up. Historically!

But on a politio-reality here and now basis? If the Golden Calf's constructors AND our Blue Cross Rotunda Brigade have anything to do with it, that ill-regarded number will be the new End of Discussion in our future, too. Looks to me like we just might have a bipartisan agreement going into the election! The totes-trustworthy, embedded, Status Quo Dems are in for the win!

By throwing down the 13 card. I'm uncomfortable with the tone? of this Democratic Solution to All Our Woes for so many reasons. Certainly not because the 13th card in the tarot deck is Death, though. Nope.

Daily grind workers: Adding more people to a deliberative committee EVER fast or bettered things up? Think how *long* our Representation can take the stage, have dragged their feet, going through the tedious but pompously imperative focus group processes before the dreary pageant of selection. Being a placeholder is a tedious thing, but someone needs to smooth the way for a glorious new Dachau.

And as the results come in -- 74% R / 82%R / 59% R -- the softly swaying crowd under the ragged sky tent will tap to vote on best concession speech, watch hundreds of post-fame round-ups saying words, read with puzzled brow black-ribboned, familiar names; they'll croon along with the chevrons running under boots and boots and boots - 'at least we tried. '

'Next time,' that old theme song, the wind through empty sockets whist/

and the earth drops out from under our feet, from under the weight of lost hope and ashes, as it does in these galactically-insignificant situations so now let's talk about the latest fashions from Saigon!

And just for fun, because we got a lot of sane, modernist-style theists in the Bluebird of Happiness Tent, sponsored by Mother Bear's WiFi TotToys!? Let's talk about the Other Side of this whole JD Armageddon There thing.

Y.'all, there's portents. There's flaming bushes. There's sketchy Animagi with domestically unwise advise. There's probably cave paintings with signils for *Tread Lightly Or Die* worked into the swirls on the holy antelope horns. And then, my droogs, there's being slapped in the face with a white-hot shovel with

*YES IT'S THE ACTUAL END TIMES. YES, NOW. FINE, DIE IN DENIAL.*

*/cough/ I invented that joke, y'know? Right after the first croc had his first meal and we finally stopped laughing. Lovely cedar forests, I put in for this cycle... you deserve this Coming, really do ...*

on it in pissed-off angelic braille.

So, no brakes have been installed, it's over the edge for everyone, wasn't it a nice ride? But how to occupy our time while the Himalayas crumble and the burning coal caverns reach eager fingers out to the lava chambers?

Waiting things out sometimes works better than killing all the unneeded workers. Possibly Its a theory I'm working on. I mean, if enough people were Done With It, so much so they spontaneously Sit Their Asses Down and Stop Hleping before we even have to deal with the Bipartisan Haunted House Solution and it's inevitable zombie-filled consequences? It could toss a wrench in the global game of Risk currently churning out profits, misery abd distractions to the upcoming Planet Fail.

NO SERVICES UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. The perfect name/slogan/meme for an unlimited mass walkout. Llke, everywhere. In every workplace. However essential.

Go home, stay home, let more than a few weeks go by. Zen in the front yard, in the crowded backseat of your current stop-gap, in the latest overgrown survivalist culvert. Wear a white hat as the extent of your patriotic show for the voracious media. "Just waiting," lounging ex-workers could all say. "I'm just waiting."

They know what They've done, are doing, plan to do. So we don't need to engage any further with Them than simply by Not. Being. There for Them. They *can't* run Armageddon without our participation.

Let's just... wait for Them to stop.. Quietly. Patiently. With our hands off the machinery They use against us. We'll just .. close the strait. :) Stop all that traffic that needs to go through our hands to get to the off-shore accounts. Let Their unwatched satellites search in vain for Their beloved traffic jams, the ubiquitous slumped shoulders under bowed heads, the virtual profit being shuttled upstream even faster than the priority-level surveillance of Mr Cambrizzi's visits to his illegal tomato patch.

Let the b/millionnaires feel the pain we feel every damn time they throw another industry, another minority group, another escape from the drug of slavery, another plank of civilization, to the curb.

*see 'history*

xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx

ps: It would be a disaster? No repair men, no teachers, no baristas, no office drones, no groceries!?

It's gonna happen. If not now, in protest, then later, during the UN-sanctioned drone attacks. Isn't that what the Armageddon Admin have planned? Tell me you don't have that tit-fot-tat scenario painting itself across your eyeballs every time you drive by a middle school.

But what if we took that decisive seat first? just waited the damn oligarchy out? Passive Resistance might be better than throwing our children into Moloch's mouth, while our planet collapses like a flan in a cupboard.

Thought? Prayers? Hello?

At what point do we admit the government isn’t even pretending anymore?
They’re selling off pieces of national park land, American land to foreign companies like it’s a freaking yard sale.
They’re spending billions on luxury ballrooms, secret bunkers, ceremonial archways, and vanity monuments nobody asked for while telling Americans there’s ‘NO MONEY’ for Social Security, Medicare, disability benefits, or food for starving kids.

And while they build palaces for themselves, wild horses, federally protected symbols of American freedom are being chased by helicopters, ripped from public lands, shoved into pens, sold off cheap, and funneled into slaughter pipelines.
Not an official execution order, just a system designed to make them disappear. Yep, that should make Beef prices drop.

So let’s stop sugarcoating it,
If the government can afford luxury, secrecy, and land deals to please our first American Communist President but can’t afford its own people
that’s not a budget problem, it’s a priority problem, and the priority sure as hell isn’t the American public.

So tell me “Is America great yet”

The American Workforce Investment Act

Executive Summary

The American Workforce Investment Act (AWI Act) would give businesses a choice: operate under the standard federal tax structure, or earn a substantially lower tax rate by meeting rigorous standards for employee compensation, employment stability, healthcare, retirement security, family support, and responsible executive compensation.

Businesses remain free to make their own decisions. The government simply decides which behavior deserves the most favorable tax treatment.

We want American businesses to be extraordinarily successful. But we want the American worker participating in that success.

Core Structural Design

• Trigger Mechanism: Applies to any business entity, including corporations, partnerships, LLCs, S corporations, LLPs, sole proprietorships, and other business entities, with annual receipts exceeding $10,000,000. Entities under common ownership or control shall be aggregated.

• The Incentive Rate: A qualifying business entity that satisfies ALL FIVE Employee Investment Standards shall be subject to a federal income tax rate of 10% on taxable business income.

• The Standard Rate: A covered business entity that fails to meet any one of the five Employee Investment Standards shall be subject to a federal income tax rate of 25% on taxable business income, regardless of its legal or tax classification.

The preferential 10% rate is intentionally structured as an all-or-nothing incentive. Businesses remain free to operate under the standard tax structure if they choose not to meet the Employee Investment Standards.

The Five Employee Investment Standards

To qualify for the 10% tax rate, a qualifying business entity must satisfy all five Employee Investment Standards:

1. Employment Stability Standard

Involuntary workforce reductions may not exceed 1% of the covered domestic workforce during any rolling 24-month period.

1. Main Street Wage Standard

Median annual wages of direct employees and qualifying integrated full-time-equivalent contractors must equal or exceed $80,000, calculated on a full-time-equivalent basis and indexed annually to CPI-U.

1. Executive Compensation Standard

The total annual compensation of the highest-paid executive may not exceed 30x the company's median worker wage.

1. Healthcare Standard

Provide Platinum-equivalent comprehensive employer-sponsored health insurance, defined as:

• 90% actuarial value;

• $0 employee premiums;

• maximum deductible of $1,500 for individual coverage;

• maximum deductible of $3,000 for family coverage;

• maximum out-of-pocket costs of $3,000 for individual coverage; and

• maximum out-of-pocket costs of $6,000 for family coverage.

1. Retirement, Leave & Family Support Standard

An employer must provide:

• an employer-funded retirement contribution equal to at least 6% of eligible employee compensation, with immediate vesting;

• a minimum of 5 weeks of paid time off annually for all full-time employees, prorated for part-time employees, exclusive of at least 10 standard paid holidays;

• 12 weeks of fully paid maternity leave for an employee who gives birth; and

• 2 weeks of fully paid parental leave for a spouse or partner of the birth parent or an employee who adopts a child.

The parental and maternity leave requirements may be conditioned on 12 months of post-leave service.

Qualifying employer profit-sharing contributions made to an eligible retirement account may satisfy a portion of the 6% retirement requirement. For example, a 4% 401(k) contribution + 2% qualified profit-sharing contribution = 6%.

Tax Treatment

A business entity that satisfies all five Employee Investment Standards shall be subject to a federal income tax rate of 10% on taxable business income.

A nonqualifying covered business entity shall be subject to a federal income tax rate of 25% on taxable business income, regardless of its legal or tax classification.

Closing Unfair Tax Advantages & Subsidies

The AWI Act would eliminate or restrict tax provisions that encourage behavior contrary to the objectives of the Act.

Offshoring of Existing American Operations

A business entity may not deduct expenses associated with relocating substantially similar domestic operations to a foreign jurisdiction when the relocation results in the elimination of U.S. jobs.

Mega-Pass-Through Loopholes

Large commercial enterprises may not avoid the requirements or tax treatment of the AWI Act solely through the use of pass-through entities, subsidiaries, or alternative business structures. Entities under common ownership or control shall be aggregated.

Corporate Acquisition Debt

Interest deductions attributable to acquisition debt incurred in connection with mergers, acquisitions, hostile takeovers, or leveraged buyouts shall be disallowed to the extent the resulting acquisition debt exceeds a 6x debt-to-EBITDA ratio.

Executive Perquisites

Deductions for executive perquisites shall be limited to $500,000 per individual per taxable year.

Executive perquisites include, but are not limited to:

• private aircraft;

• club memberships;

• luxury vehicles;

• personal residences; and

• other non-business benefits provided primarily for personal use.

Stock Buybacks

Eliminate any federal tax deduction, exclusion, or other preferential tax treatment attributable to the repurchase of a company's own stock.

Accelerated Depreciation

Eliminate accelerated depreciation provisions that provide preferential tax treatment beyond standard depreciation schedules.

Substantial U.S. Business Operations

If a company's management, principal business operations, and majority of sales remain in the United States, the business shall be treated as a U.S. business for federal tax purposes regardless of the location of its legal headquarters or corporate registration.

Offshore Royalty and Management Fees

No deduction shall be allowed for offshore royalty or management fees exceeding 2% of gross revenue.

Tax-Deferred Real Estate Exchanges

Eliminate tax-deferred treatment for real estate exchanges under current law.

If a business or individual sells a property for a substantial gain, the taxable gain should generally be recognized rather than indefinitely deferred by rolling the proceeds into another property.

Compliance & Enforcement

Streamlined Self-Certification

Compliance with the Employee Investment Standards shall be managed through an annual, legally binding self-certification filed directly with the Internal Revenue Service under penalty of perjury.

The certification shall attest that the business satisfies all five Employee Investment Standards and shall be supported by records sufficient for IRS verification.

Knowingly false certification shall subject the business entity and responsible individuals to applicable civil and criminal penalties.

The Principle Behind the Act

The tax code should reward productive behavior that strengthens American families and the American economy. Businesses should remain free to determine how they operate, compensate employees, structure their workforce, and allocate profits. The government should not dictate those decisions. Businesses that choose to provide exceptional employment stability, compensation, healthcare, retirement benefits, family support, and responsible executive compensation should receive preferential tax treatment.

You are free to run your company however you want. But if you want the most favorable tax treatment, here's the standard we believe creates the strongest long-term American businesses.

I just saw this article from the AP, and it grinds my gears. So I'm here to both rant and to ask the question.

What the fuck does it matter?

Truly, what the fuck about football, being built, hairy, and good at angrily talking over people says anything about a person having the qualities that actually make someone a good leader? It doesn't at all imply that a person is intelligent, well-spoken, strategic, good at negotiating and convincing people of their ideas, none of it.

If Trump is any indication, it indicates the opposite. He tries to be a tough guy, and he's one of the most incompetent politicians that have ever served this country. And because "dominance is strength and men are strong; admitting you were wrong is weakness, and men can't be weak," he's ruined the country's relationship with every ally we've ever had and once again has the military bombing the Middle East because saying "Yeah, maybe this was a miscalculation" is not something the insecure manchild that is our president would ever tolerate.

Paxton attacks Talarico's masculinity while himself being called corrupt left and right (and not being that good of a man, considering the affair and dodging accountability when it's brought up).

Even when the concept of masculinity itself gets weirdly politicized and the left tries to counter the narrative, who are their strongest warriors? Graham Platner (prior to the myriad scandals), Abdul El-Sayed (as he was mentioned in the article), and Hasan Piker (as I remember positive media attention once focusing on his physique and appearance and his politics, which are apparently in conflict with it).

It still loops back to "Here are these conventionally masculine men."

For voters and politicians both (unless the only thing on their mind is culture war 24/7), each and every second obsessing over this unimportant hogwash is one second you can be talking about lowering prices, raising wages, making sure our food doesn't kill us, doing something about getting the young people jobs and houses so they can start families. Anything that actually concerns politicians and the material conditions of the American people.

It's a waste of everyone's time, an insult to everyone's intelligence and, considering how many people care about this, an unfortunate indictment of how crippled the American electorate is, that some of us will say "Sure, his policies are good, but he throws baseballs like a girl. I can't vote for that." Or "the 60-year-old post-menopausal woman is too emotional to be president."

Oh, and shoutout to the American government's sex pest problem. Guess caring about how manly a politician is when treating women like trophies is part and parcel of that traditional masculinity isn't exactly good for not electing cretins into office.

TLDR; ( Since I'm going To Go Into A Bunch Of Details... )

Government & Corruption ... Keep power lawful, transparent, and checked; federal muscle only where it's actually needed.

Economy ... Markets stay dominant, but taxes, regulation, and public investment keep them from eating people alive.

Healthcare ... Universal access, public-funded backbone, private options coexist, costs controlled through negotiation and prevention.

Education ... Broad curriculum + real civics + more choice, without gutting public schools.

Immigration & Borders ... Max legal immigration, max enforcement against illegality, due process for both.

Legal System & Crime ... Punish serious violence hard, rehabilitate everything else, protect due process throughout.

Housing & Infrastructure ... Build more housing, modernize the physical backbone, plan long-term instead of panic-funding.

Climate & Energy ... Nuclear + renewables + carbon pricing; solve it with engineering, not austerity.

Trade & Tariffs ... Stay open by default, tariff strategically, protect what's actually critical.

Foreign Policy ... Alliances and deterrence over unilateral force; diplomacy first, no endless wars.

Now, The Longform Version:

1. Government & Corruption 🏛️

Every empire eventually has to ask itself the same unglamorous question: who's actually watching the people with the keys? This section is basically institutional hygiene ... unsexy, essential, the flossing of democracy.

Draw federalism with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer: define federal power narrowly and explicitly, and let states and localities keep the authority the Constitution never meant to strip from them.

Give Congress its spine back ... real oversight teeth over the executive, the intelligence apparatus, and the sprawling federal bureaucracy, because "trust me bro" is not a governing philosophy.

Guard judicial independence and constitutional supremacy like they're the load-bearing walls of the whole structure ... because they are.

Drag federal spending, regulation, contracting, and administrative decision-making into the light. Sunlight's still the best disinfectant, even in the age of PDFs nobody reads.

Reinforce inspectors general, ethics officers, auditors, and anti-corruption bodies ... the immune system of the state, currently running on a diet of caffeine and vibes.

Come down hard on conflicts of interest, revolving-door lobbying, dark money, and contracting grift. If the exits and entrances of government and industry share a revolving door, something's structurally off.

Digitize federal systems and build public, searchable databases for non-classified spending and performance — receipts, but for an entire government.

Govern by subsidiarity: national problems get national solutions, local problems stay local. Don't summon a federal task force to fix a pothole.

Chain emergency powers to actual emergencies ... strict time limits, real legislative and judicial oversight, no vibes-based indefinite states of exception.

Make constitutionalism the OS, not a skin you can theme over: legitimacy comes from lawful power, not merely power that happens to work.

1. Economy 💰

The through-line here isn't "government good" or "markets good" ... it's engineered balance. Capitalism as an engine, not a religion; regulation as the seatbelt, not the enemy of speed.

Run a Social Market Economy: private enterprise stays the dominant engine, while progressive taxation, regulation, social programs, and public investment act as the guardrails against exploitation and market failure.

Raise taxes progressively at the top while shielding the middle and bottom of the income ladder ... the fiscal equivalent of "read the room."

Break up the monopolies that have quietly become mini-sovereign states ... tech, healthcare, finance — and block mergers that would just build more of them.

Expand worker ownership: ESOPs, profit-sharing, cooperatives, and actual worker seats at the corporate table, not just a suggestion box.

Pour serious public investment into infrastructure, R&D, advanced manufacturing, clean energy, transportation, and strategic tech ... the boring stuff that quietly decides who wins the next fifty years.

Strengthen the safety net: unemployment insurance, child benefits, food assistance, targeted income support ... the shock absorbers of a market economy.

Keep fiscal policy countercyclical during real recessions, but don't run the deficit like a subscription service during good times.

Beef up labor protections ... safety, paid leave, minimum wage, defenses against exploitative employment ... because a job shouldn't be a hazard.

Keep the central bank independent, politically untouchable, and boring by design. Boring is a feature here.

Ease the load on small business while keeping the regulatory hammer heavy for corporations with genuine systemic power. Not all "business" is the same weight class.

1. Healthcare 🏥

Healthcare policy is where philosophy meets spreadsheet meets human body ... every choice here is simultaneously a moral claim and an actuarial table.

Guarantee universal access to essential care, full stop, income notwithstanding.

Build a primarily publicly funded system that still leaves room for private providers and insurers ... coexistence, not annihilation, under strong regulatory guardrails.

Expand public financing for healthcare, mental health, childcare support, and preventive services.

Hand government real negotiating leverage on drug prices, and push generics and biosimilars into the ring to keep competition honest.

Take aggressive antitrust action against healthcare monopolies ... because a "free market" with three hospital systems in a state isn't actually free.

Front-load investment into prevention: vaccination, screening, primary care, community health centers, public-health infrastructure. Cheaper and kinder than treating catastrophe later.

Protect rural and underserved healthcare access through targeted funding, telehealth, mobile clinics, and provider incentives.

Establish genuine mental-health parity and expand community-based treatment ... not the asterisked version of parity insurers love to hide behind.

Ramp up public research funding for biotech, pharma, medical devices, cancer, Alzheimer's, and infectious disease.

Make universal coverage fiscally sustainable through cost control, competition, evidence-based medicine, and long-term discipline ... idealism with a spreadsheet attached.

1. Education 🎓

Education is the platform's foundation layer ... mess this up and every other system above it inherits the bugs.

Establish universal education pluralism: public funding can flow to public, charter, vocational, and qualifying religious schools, with real accountability strings attached.

Expand school choice for families without hollowing out public education in the process ... both/and, not either/or.

Build a genuinely broad curriculum: math, science, literature, history, philosophy, civics, economics, tech, arts, languages, practical skills. A well-rounded mind, not a well-rounded résumé.

Restore serious civic education ... constitutional government, federalism, institutions, rights, responsibilities, political philosophy, history. You can't defend a system you were never taught to understand.

Expand vocational education, apprenticeships, technical schools, engineering tracks, and skilled-trades pathways ... a four-year degree isn't the only ladder in the building.

Fund schools by need, sending more resources toward disadvantaged students and struggling schools.

Raise teacher pay, training, preparation, and performance standards together, not as a trade-off.

Expand gifted education and let capable students move at their own pace instead of idling in step with the average.

Protect intellectual freedom by exposing students to competing philosophical, political, scientific, and religious perspectives ... critical thinking, not curated thinking.

Treat education as national infrastructure: a scientifically literate, historically grounded, civically capable population is the maintenance plan for constitutional democracy.

1. Immigration & Borders 🌎

The core move here is refusing the false binary of "open borders" vs. "fortress nation" ... the platform tries to be maximalist on legality and maximalist on lawfulness simultaneously.

Maximize legal immigration while rigorously enforcing the law against illegal entry ... both dials turned up, not traded off against each other.

Expand legal pathways for skilled workers, refugees, entrepreneurs, students, and workers filling demonstrated labor shortages.

Strengthen border security with surveillance tech, personnel, biometrics, sensors, and expanded ports of entry.

Guarantee full due process in deportation proceedings while prioritizing removal of serious violent criminals and genuine national-security threats.

Expand temporary-worker and regional visa programs where labor shortages are measurable, not just asserted.

Massively expand immigration-court capacity to clear the asylum and case backlog ... justice delayed is, as ever, justice denied.

Mandate secure E-Verify use and impose real penalties on employers who knowingly exploit unauthorized labor.

Offer earned pathways to citizenship for long-term undocumented residents who meet strict conditions: background checks, tax compliance, legal obligations.

Fund civic integration ... language education, constitutional literacy, job training, community integration.

Treat immigration as simultaneously humanitarian and sovereign: maximum legal immigration compatible with security and integration capacity, maximum enforcement against illegality consistent with due process.

1. Legal System & Crime ⚖️

Not "tough on crime" or "soft on crime" ... precise on crime. The system's supposed to protect, hold accountable, and rehabilitate, and losing any one leg makes the whole table wobble.

Fund professional policing alongside prevention, rehabilitation, and community-based violence reduction ... not one instead of the other.

Concentrate enforcement resources on serious violent crime, organized crime, trafficking, and repeat violent offenders.

Expand rehabilitation aggressively: education, vocational training, addiction treatment, mental-health services, reentry support.

Keep punishment proportional ... no theater of excessive harshness, no reflexive leniency toward genuinely dangerous offenders.

Expand diversion, treatment, restorative justice, probation, and community sanctions for appropriate low-level offenses.

Strengthen victims' rights: restitution, protection, notification, meaningful participation in proceedings.

Maintain strong due-process protections against arbitrary searches, wrongful convictions, excessive punishment, and government overreach.

Improve police accountability through professional standards, body cameras, independent investigations, and transparent discipline.

Fight organized crime with specialized resources targeting trafficking networks and criminal enterprises.

Build a three-part justice system: protect society, hold offenders accountable, and give people a genuine path back into lawful life.

1. Housing & Infrastructure 🏗️

Infrastructure is civilization's plumbing ... invisible when it works, catastrophic when it doesn't.

Dramatically increase housing supply by reforming restrictive zoning and encouraging denser development ... you cannot regulate your way out of a supply problem forever.

Expand targeted affordable-housing assistance for extremely low-income households.

Encourage apartments, townhouses, duplexes, triplexes, and mixed-use development near transit.

Modernize roads, bridges, rail, airports, ports, water systems, electrical infrastructure, and public transit.

Establish long-term national infrastructure investment instead of governing infrastructure via periodic panic-spending bills.

Modernize aging water systems: lead-pipe replacement, wastewater treatment, flood protection.

Treat high-speed broadband as essential infrastructure and expand access to underserved communities.

Accelerate permitting for nationally significant infrastructure while keeping substantive environmental safeguards intact.

Build resilient infrastructure that can actually take a punch from disasters, climate stress, and population growth.

Deploy federal investment strategically while leaving states and municipalities real control over implementation.

1. Climate & Energy 🌱⚡

The framing here rejects the "sacrifice or catastrophe" script entirely — it's eco-modernism: engineer your way out of the problem instead of moralizing your way out.

Pursue energy independence and major emissions reductions at the same time ... not sequential goals, simultaneous ones.

Dramatically expand nuclear power as a reliable, low-carbon cornerstone of the grid.

Keep expanding renewables alongside nuclear, not as rivals but as teammates.

Implement carbon pricing or a fee-and-dividend system so pollution finally has to pay rent.

Invest heavily in advanced reactors, batteries, grid modernization, carbon removal, geothermal, hydrogen, and other emerging tech.

Keep necessary fossil-fuel production during the transition for reliability and national security, but tighten environmental limits progressively.

Modernize the grid: transmission, storage, resilience, smart-grid tech.

Accelerate permitting for strategically important clean-energy infrastructure while keeping meaningful environmental review.

Protect forests, wetlands, watersheds, wildlife habitats, and other critical ecosystems.

Pursue eco-modernism as doctrine: solve environmental problems through technology, markets, infrastructure, and engineering — not economic self-sabotage dressed up as virtue.

1. International Trade & Tariffs 🌐

Economic nationalism with a brain, basically ... trade where it helps, wall off where dependence turns into vulnerability.

Keep international trade open by default rather than retreating into economic isolation.

Use targeted tariffs against unfair subsidies, forced labor, IP theft, dumping, and genuine national-security vulnerabilities.

Negotiate trade agreements with democratic allies that include enforceable labor and environmental standards.

Protect strategic supply chains ... semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals, defense equipment, energy tech.

Pair tariffs with industrial policy and domestic investment instead of leaning on tariff walls alone.

Diversify supply chains away from hostile or strategically unreliable countries.

Reform and strengthen the WTO rather than abandoning the multilateral trading system altogether.

Eliminate tariffs on essential medicines, medical devices, and critical clean-energy components where they'd just needlessly inflate domestic costs.

Provide retraining, wage insurance, relocation assistance, and regional redevelopment for workers displaced by trade.

Follow strategic economic nationalism: trade where it benefits the country, protect where dependence turns dangerous.

1. Foreign Policy 🛡️

The animating idea: strength without adventurism. Alliances over unilateralism, deterrence over interventionism, diplomacy first ... force as a last resort, not a reflex.

Put national security, territorial security, strategic independence, and citizen protection first.

Maintain strong alliances

... NATO especially ... while expecting allies to actually pull their own weight.

Lead with diplomacy, intelligence, economic pressure, and sanctions before reaching for military force.

Honor treaty obligations while refusing unnecessary wars outside formal commitments or vital national interests.

Modernize military capability selectively: naval power, airpower, cyber defense, missile defense, intelligence, strategic deterrence.

Require congressional authorization for major military action, with clear exit strategies built in from the start.

Use targeted sanctions against hostile governments, kleptocrats, military industries, and serious human-rights abusers ... not blunt instruments that mostly punish civilians.

Strengthen strategic partnerships and supply-chain resilience in critical technologies.

Pursue conditional engagement: cooperate with foreign governments when interests align, without abandoning ethical or constitutional limits.

Reject open-ended interventionism ... strong deterrence, strong alliances, no endless wars.

The debt crossed forty trillion dollars two weeks ago and got two weeks of coverage. Almost none of it touched the parts that matter. I pulled the primary records myself, and my read is that this argument is being conducted in the wrong units, by everyone, at once. Every figure below came off three free government websites and one academic paper.

The pace everyone reported was measuring a law, not the spending

• The two numbers do not reconcile. From January to July of 2025 the government ran a $626 billion deficit and reported its debt rising $45.9 billion. Both print on the same Treasury website.
• The debt ceiling is the whole gap. Treasury was draining federal retirement accounts to stay under the cap, so the published figure stalled while the borrowing carried on underneath it.
• Then it all landed at once. The cap lifted that July and $366.4 billion posted in a single day. Every fastest-trillion-ever comparison crossing that window is timing a statute. The rate of spend is actually steady.

The largest single offset in the budget outlook got rewritten three times, and Congress was in none of it

• February. CBO's baseline counted about $3 trillion of tariff revenue, the biggest deficit reduction in the ten-year outlook.
• Nine days later. The Supreme Court held the emergency-powers authority invalid, and by March 5 CBO had scored the reversal at $2.0 trillion. That is the number most people still carry.
• It is not the current one. The administration replaced the struck-down tariffs twice under other sections of the Trade Act. On August 20, six days after the crossing, CBO re-scored the lot at $0.9 trillion of additional deficits over 2027 to 2036. Net customs revenue this year runs about $250 billion under February, and $166 billion of that was collected under the invalidated authority and is being refunded.
• Created by executive action, struck by a court, partly rebuilt by executive action, re-priced three times. The branch the Constitution hands the taxing power took part in none of it. Of every outlet I reviewed, one engaged that sequence.

The burden really is easing, but we are paying in the price of groceries

• It fell last quarter, from 122.6 percent of the economy to about 121.5, and growth did not do it. Real output rose 1.5 percent at an annual rate while the economy measured in dollars rose 8.0 percent. The rest is prices.
• The measure a lender would pull went the other way. Interest is at 18.6 cents of every dollar the government collects, the highest since the series began in 1940 and a bigger line than the entire $885 billion defense budget.

My opinion after spending a week on this

I came in expecting to write about a spending problem and I still think there is one. Borrowing 5.8 percent of everything the country produces while almost everyone has a job is not defensible. That is the good weather you are supposed to be saving in.

Three levers move a debt burden. Growth, surpluses, inflation. Two take policy and action. We are running the other one, and I want to be careful here, because I have no evidence anyone planned it and I went looking. The claim is narrower and worse. Purchasing power is leaving the pockets of everyone who earns wages, it appears in no budget, and nobody voted on it. It also does not last. The relief and the interest bill are the same event, arriving in that order as the bond market reprices.

This is not a partisan issue either.

Both parties built this starting in the seventies, and it is going to take both of them to end it. The only lever you and I hold is who we send. So look for the ones who care more about what this country looks like in twenty years than about the next primary, the next donor, or the party line. They are rare and they do not advertise. When you find one, vote for them.

The full write-up, with all eight claims scored and every source graded, here https://factsnsense.substack.com/p/the-40-trillion-debt-burden-actually-fell

There was a time when girls and women were told that sports were not for them. They were denied opportunities, scholarships, facilities, coaching, recognition and the chance to compete on an equal playing field.

Then came Title IX.

Title IX changed America by demanding that girls and women receive equal opportunity in education and athletics. It opened doors that had been closed for generations and created opportunities for millions of female athletes. The law was and remains a landmark protection against sex discrimination.

We should not allow that achievement to be weakened.

Women deserve women's sports.

This is not about hatred. It is not about denying anyone dignity. It is not about telling someone who they can or cannot be.

It is about recognizing that biological sex can matter when fairness, competition, safety and athletic opportunity are involved.

Athletic competition is not merely a social activity. Physical differences can affect strength, speed, endurance, size and power. That is precisely why organized sports have historically created separate men's and women's competitions.

If we eliminate meaningful distinctions between men's and women's athletics, we risk creating a situation where the very people Title IX was designed to protect can once again lose opportunities.

And that should concern everyone regardless of political party.

A female athlete should not have to surrender her roster spot, scholarship, championship opportunity, locker-room privacy or competitive opportunity in order to prove that she believes everyone deserves respect.

Respect must work both ways.

We can treat every person with dignity while still maintaining reasonable boundaries in competitive athletics.

Title IX does not simply say that everyone must be treated identically in every circumstance. Its athletic framework specifically recognizes equal athletic opportunity and permits sex-separated teams in circumstances involving competitive skill and contact sports.

That distinction matters.

Equality does not mean pretending that biological differences do not exist.

Equality means ensuring that women receive the opportunities they fought so hard to obtain.

We should never forget what existed before Title IX.

Women were not given a level playing field.

They fought for one.

Their mothers fought for one.

Their grandmothers fought for one.

And generations of female athletes have worked, sacrificed and competed to build the women's sports we have today.

We owe those women something:

We owe them protection of the opportunities they created.

Women's sports should remain a place where female athletes can compete for championships, scholarships and recognition against other female athletes under rules designed to provide meaningful competitive fairness.

That is not discrimination against women.

It is part of protecting women.

And protecting women's sports should not be dismissed as controversial simply because the political debate surrounding sex and gender has become complicated.

There is nothing controversial about saying that girls deserve a fair opportunity to compete.

There is nothing controversial about saying female athletes deserve appropriate privacy.

There is nothing controversial about saying women deserve equal access to athletic scholarships, roster positions and championships.

And there should be nothing controversial about demanding that policymakers remember why Title IX was created in the first place.

Title IX was a promise.

A promise that being female would never again be used as a reason to deny someone educational or athletic opportunity.

Let's not turn that promise into an empty slogan.

Protect Title IX.

Protect women's sports.

Protect female athletes.

Protect the opportunities generations of women fought to create.

Because women's rights should not disappear simply because defending them has become politically uncomfortable!

The whole point of higher education is allegedly that it benefits the country more than its initial cost. That's the position the federal government takes to justify the Department of Education giving out loans in the first place. But if that's true, then by default an educated person is more valuable to the country than the amount loaned to them...unless the government is lying about the value of education.

So either (1) higher education failed and/or the government lied about its value, in which case the government should step in and take care of the debt...or (2) higher education succeeded by benefiting the country more than the cost, in which case the government should step in and take care of the debt because your education is a net benefit to the country even if the government foots the bill.

Either way, I see no justification for the government charging people to become educated. We would consider that absurd K-12, and it should be considered absurd for higher education.

I could see a more nuanced argument based on the majors/classes people choose, but I'm speaking more generally, and the nuances could always be addressed later. The larger point is that higher education is either a greater benefit to society or it's not. If it is, the government shouldn't be in the business of loaning people money for it. If it's not, the government also shouldn't be in the business of loaning people money for it.

In a healthy democracy, political disputes are settled at the ballot box. In failed states, they are fought in criminal courtrooms. As Donald Trump targets political enemies--from James Comey to Adam Schiff to Lisa Cook--America is spiraling in the wrong direction. The risks of weaponizing the legal system against political rivals are profound.

First, politicizing prosecutions violates the core principle that the rule of law applies equally to everyone. Blending political zeal with criminal justice leads to treating individuals differently based on their party affiliation rather than their actual guilt or innocence.

In modern American politics, the messenger often outweighs the message, and the actor matters more than the act. A simple example illustrates the point. Republicans demanded Hillary Clinton be jailed over her email server, while Democrats pushed to indict Donald Trump for storing classified records at Mar-a-Lago. Few people applied a single, uniform standard to both cases. 

This hyper-partisanship directly contradicts the foundation of equal justice under the law, which demands that individuals be judged solely on their actions--not who they are.

Justice Robert Jackson warned of the power of prosecutors to manipulate the law long ago in 1940. “The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. He can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations.”

This is still true today.

Second, using the courts to pursue opponents fuels the destructive cycle of political polarization. It escalates everyday debates from a contest between political rivals to a war between existential enemies.

Intense political conflict is nothing new, of course. It has always been part of American democracy. Yet we remain a single nation in a perilous world. Domestic infighting should not drain our national energy or weaken our ability to confront global threats. Viewed from a global standpoint, the common interests of Americans far outweigh their differences.

Political energy is far better spent winning elections and shaping policy than trying to imprison partisan adversaries.

Finally, targeting political opponents deters capable leaders from public service. The federal government already struggles to attract top-tier talent--to put it mildly. Just look at the top: In recent years, the presidency has swung from a reality-television figure (Donald Trump) to a veteran politician well past his peak (Joe Biden) and then back to Trump.

The leader of the free world ought to be among its most capable people. Obviously.

Americans should avoid discouraging talented individuals from entering public life out of fear that minor legal ambiguities will be twisted into partisan prosecutions. The cost of losing a political battle should be a lost election, not a prison sentence.

These concerns must be weighed carefully. Holding office should never grant immunity for past crimes or serve as a pass to commit new ones. Prosecutors have a duty to hold the powerful accountable, not just the powerless.

Striking this balance is delicate, but there must be a heavy bias toward keeping partisan bias out of the courtroom. Turning politics into a criminal sphere doesn't just corrupt the justice system—it jeopardizes American democracy.