The Atlantic Magazine is among America's most venerable journalistic institutions. It is a serious, sober journal that chronicles our events, our democracy, and it has since the heights of the most dangerous era in American history, the American Civil War, a sectional war between American regions fought over the issue
of slavery. Not since then has America faced an internal danger so grave and a threat so clear, And so it is no surprise that it is The Atlantic Magazine that is the first to seriously highlight the danger ahead,
what is coming, what is approaching down the tracks. There is still time to prepare for what it is ahead, but before we can, it is important to look back, because it is essential to understand the loss of democracy, the loss of control, the loss of agency that is to come is something that has been experienced by many, many tens of millions of Americans. They have lost their economic agency because they got sick, developed cancer, or their child did, or maybe they had a severe injury. It
doesn't matter. Any family in America that is captive to their health insurance company and cannot pay the bills to live a life worth living is captive and has long ago lost their agency. And their democracy to a dictatorship
of big companies of greed. There are other Americans who have lost their lives, their agency, their control to an evil deal that existed between companies like Purdue Pharma that profited in the billions of dollars while a million Americans were left dead and many hundreds of thousands of more on the streets addicted, ravaged by opioids, ravaged now by fentanyl, ravaged by the cruelty of a system that saw the Food and Drug Administration, which is supposed to protect the people,
instead work with the opiate manufacturers to poison them. It was a dictatorship of greed that did them in. What the Atlantic magazine is mostly talking about is a loss of political agents see and political control. As America is transformed by a Trump presidency that will last for as long as Trump is alive and able to hold power, the Republic will substantially fall. It will be controlled by
a collection of powerful interests, all interrelated. For example, David's ass off this man here in can where he decided to throw a party surrounded by the yachts while the writers that make his industry function were on strike. Now, what's interesting about The business model of the parent company that control CNN is that it's reliant on one thing to survive, the ability to cut cost enough to pay back the massive debt incurred for the purchase of the
new conglomerate. A plaything, if you will, is what CNN is. Here's Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, the owner. But Jeff Bezos's money doesn't come from the Post, which loses one hundred million dollars a year. It comes from Amazon stock. What will happen when the federal government decides to punish America's guilded class to keep them in line. This is, after all, how it functions in Russia. The oligarchs support the power of who putin Kutin allows the oligarchs to
get as rich as human beings can possibly get. It will be the basis of the American economy. Nobody will step out of line, particularly with a vindictive, punitive president who asserts control and power through the levers of government in a way that is now ever been seen. He will proclaim the powers of a caesar, and he will
quickly assert them. His plans are to deploy as many as fifty thousand appointees trained yes men and women who will carry out the whims of a lawless man as he deconstructs the deep state, or as we used to call it, the American Civil Service, one of the great creations in the history of the country and one of the great progressive reforms in the history of the country.
Decent government will be gone. It will be a government that seeks to control, and mostly what it will control is its own power, its own destiny, its license to enrich itself, its friends, its allies, and to punish it. That is what the American dictatorship to come will look like.
How is it that the American people, on the eve of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the independence of the country, are prepared to dismiss their agency, to give away their democracy, their choice, their ability to control their affairs, to a new royalty, to a new type of tyranny. Why would they do it? They would do it because most of those Americans feel like they lost their agency in their control to a different set of
dictators a long time ago. And what Donald Trump represents for them as a philosopher or fuck Uism, is angry retribution towards the American power class. That could not see, they could not hear, when a million Americans lost their lives to addiction caused by the collusion between the opioid companies and the federal government, who was indifferent and blind to the suffering of the people who weren't in the big cities and whose lives were somehow deemed less than
so unworthy. In fact, they just weren't covered at all. Well, now the American people, and their anger and their rage and their discontent, are letting it be known that they've had enough, and there is an absence of any articulation towards better towards the future. But before we can talk about what is to come and the defiance that is necessary to resist it, to sustain a resistance throughout, it
is to remember an important moment. The very first thing that happened in the Trump administration was something that was always of great consequence. Sean Spicer is the spokesperson for the government of the United States. The Press Secretary is the president's chief spokesperson. And he came out and he said to a global audience, like an American Bagdad Bob, that a crowd size that was clearly smaller was in fact larger than the one that was clearly bigger. It
was a moment of absurdity. It was not a lie to avoid embarrassment. It was a lie of authority that demanded submission, submission of agency, of intellectual sovereignty, of personal democracy. It required the listener to make a deal. You could be part of a community, but it required a basic submission. You could check out of deciding what is real and what is not, what is true and what is false, what is up and down? What is left or right?
The leader would decided for you. He would decide everything. He would tell you what's true or not. What the leader said was reality was in fact reality. So when it came to pass that he lost an election upon which the whole of American civilization is built, his adherents went along because they had been trained like dogs on leashes over a law period, to be controlled, to be easily manipulated. They long ago gave away their control and agency when they said that crowd size that was smaller
was in fact larger, and so on and on. It went over thirty thousand times as President Donald Trump lied and the news media was overwhelmed by it. When they were not complicit with it, making billions in a cynical partnership.
And so it has come to pass that we stand at the edge of profound loss in America, a great loss of political control, the inevitable result of a system that has allowed the politicians to pick their voters, and now they will have the control role that they want to do as they wish, for no purpose of greater union, no higher moral purpose aimed at perfecting the union, but instead to pursue the cause of self interest and greed at the expense of the greatest idea in all of
human history, which is Americanism, the notion that ordinary people have the capacity to govern themselves, that there is no such thing as a divine right of kings. Instead that each of us, and all of us now into the twenty first century, are endowed by our creator, beyond the reach of the power of government, who is instilled in us basic rights as human beings, the right to life,
liberty in the pursuit of happiness. And these rights, which have built for two centuries, include a freedom of speech and conscience and choice, and all of that stands at risk because of greed and a collapse of faith in a detestable error, where Donald Trump stands at the edge of becoming an American caesar on the eve of the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of American Independence. What an appalling moment this is