Notes From The Apocalypse

Q Report: Reed Olson Transgenders 2A

2026-10-01T23:25:09.965-07:00

To: Agents, Anons, Aliens, etc.

From: Q (K00)

Re: Reed Olson Transgendering

11/5/2046

Hello All,

It’s been a while since I’ve reached back through timespace with a quality report, and I want to assure you from this, the beginning, that you’re going to want to follow this through to the conclusion. I’m giving you 1,000% effort on this retelling/forewarning. Because we were all innocent going into the situation, our minds and hearts open, and then Reed Olson transgendered us without our consent. We had wanted lower property taxes, affordable housing and childcare, and a renewed commitment to education, but what we got instead were our genitals reversed from whatever they had been into an approximation of the opposite gender.

At the point when the Transgendering Army was on the street, the quality of mandatory transgendering was less art and/or science than punitive medicine. Under such circumstances, the work struggles to attain quality. But let’s go back; it is too much to front-load without context. Reed Olson was a local business owner, former elected official, and homeless services coordinator by the time he made his second run at Minnesota House 2A in 2026. In 2024, he had one of the closest races in the state, coming within a few hundred votes of beating his opponent, one of the closest races in the region. The region? Northern Minnesota. The North Country. Where the prairie meets the pines.

He seemed, for all intents and purposes, a qualified and experienced candidate. He ran his campaign honestly, focusing on real issues facing the area and bringing forth reasonable ideas to improve the situation. He was aware of the local political landscape as well as the broader cultural scene. Toward the latter part of his 2026 campaign, his opponent was tweeted (Xed) by Aaron Rupar claiming there wasn’t hunger in our state. His opponent's response was that the information was taken out of context, but the actual context is that his party’s stated goals were an overturning of universal school meals and/or means testing. There was enough virality from the Rupar post to get some metro media dollars thrown Reed's way, and in a surprise upset, a blue wave led him and so many other candidates into office.

Mandatory transgendering began almost immediately. As it was no longer necessary to maintain the ruse, the DFL revealed what some had known all along: their only purpose in getting into office was to transgender everyone against their will (and without parental consent). Squads of Transgendering Tactical Troops were deployed block by block and street by street in a traditional spiral search centering on Bemidji Town Hall and expanding relentlessly outwards. Within minutes, jackboots kicked down doors, pets were shot on sight, and every human being on the premises had their gender reassigned. The process itself was violent, painful, humiliating, and efficient.

If you were considered assigned “male” at birth, your penis was split down the middle like a ripe banana, your inner shaft hollowed out with a surgical melon baller, before having your split penis stuffed up inside to form a man pussy before surgical stapling and tranquilizing. Those considered “female” at birth would have their vaginas sealed with glue before a transplant penis was surgically stapled to their mons pubis (as a Godless universe intended). The transplants themselves were carried around in massive bags, having been grown on O-positive donors a dozen at a time before regularly being harvested for transgendering.

The average 10-person transgendering team could have a family of five entirely transgendered, pets entirely gut-shot, and the survivors so thoroughly groomed by trauma and propaganda that they would submit sexually to even the least motivated of attackers. It was all part of a clearly planned and efficiently executed effort to drive abortions, drug use, and tax fraud. Door by door, street by street, person by person, they moved from downtown around and outward. There was resistance, to be sure, but in general no one was prepared. Even the most staunch proponent of defense against tyranny could do very little against a team, let alone unending waves of teams, slowly, painfully, but surely transgendering everyone in sight.

They transgendered the very old, and for some of them it was a fun novelty. Their gender didn’t mean as much to them as they had thought, as it turned out. They transgendered the very young, and it was painful and confusing, but had also been going on in various parts of the globe for some time. They transgendered everyone in between, no matter what their arguments or complaints. And there were many of both. “I don’t want to be a man!” Join the club. “You shot my cat in the face!” Where else was I supposed to shoot it? “That staple gun is covered in blood and hair!” Who are you, my mom? Oh, hi, Mom. You want to pick a dick out of this big duffel bag?

Soon enough, the district was transgendered. Reed Olson had done it, in total secrecy, under the cover of night, but certainly not alone. It was only through the unyielding and awe-inspiring dedication and organization of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and the hardworking volunteers who showed up to make phone calls, knock on doors, and make the case for real change for the region, while knowing all along that the real reason for the elaborate ruse was the perverted fantasy of switching everyone’s genders in order to make them easier to groom. Reed’s only regret was being unable to enjoy the fruits of his labors, as he was stuck on one of five committees all day, every day, just trying to figure out the cost of car tabs.

In the end, his undoing did not come as the result of changing the genders of 43,905 people, but from the extreme stress and annoyance of the state legislature. His achievements turned to ash in his mouth as every hour of his life slipped away into mediocrity and bureaucracy. What could have been his best years as an artist, humanitarian, and organizer were instead spent bean-counting with people whose only defining feature was the ability to fool people into voting for them. The price of success is boredom as surely as the wages of sin are death. There was so much more he wanted to accomplish beyond simply mutilating genitals: building affordable housing, rising to the challenge of addressing escalating costs, helping create a bridge to affordable and accessible healthcare and services. But. Mutilating genitals was what he was good at.

I don’t know if it’s a cautionary tale or an unreliable narrator at this point? I’m not sure if an alternate timeline where he loses and solves homelessness should be explored? I will say that there were complaints about the mandatory transgendering. Some lawsuits filed. One a class action. Nothing moving, as of this writing, but on the books. As always, the only timeline to consider is the one where Nelson Mandela gets out of prison. No matter how much we all want the Berenstein Bears back. Stay sassy out there, agents. Keep your heads on a swivel. Quite a few variables in your neck of timespace. One love, weirdos. One love.

1 ∞ 💗

Who wrote this garbage?

Is there any more of it?

The Current Situation

2026-09-14T15:09:38.168-07:00

There is a fundamental disconnect between the current political situation and the larger historic struggle in which it is placed. 9/11 drove a wedge between our political parties, and a two-decade-plus war of attrition only drove that wedge further and further into our politics, until it was no longer about competing ideas but rather an ongoing undeclared information war between parties. The competition is not a race to see who has the more effective public policy; it is instead uncontrolled combat between individuals who have become divorced from any actual political knowledge or ability. In our current state of affairs, the people who win elections are reliably good at one thing: winning elections. That has become the entire game, as members of both parties dodge their fiduciary responsibilities, avoid their constituents, and negotiate vast sums of resources through an openly corrupted lobbying system that allows unfettered political access to the wealthiest and most well-connected on the planet.

Not even the nation! Because “speech” has been turned into money through Citizens United, this has opened up a global marketplace of political influence! Everyone’s special interests are allowed in the discussion, even if the impacts of those lobbying efforts fall exclusively on the citizens (who are in no way united). Unlimited, undisclosed political donations could only exist for so long in any system before rampant, naked, uncontainable corruption would logically follow. I’m honestly surprised every day by how far we’ve made it with this pretend democratic republic limping along without collapsing entirely into an authoritarian oligopoly. At this point, the oligopoly largely has the good sense to hide from public view, outside of some notable exceptions such as Elon Musk. Musk is an oligarch who doesn’t hide his corruption as much as wraps it in good intentions. It’s OK to buy elections, everyone, because we’re going to Mars! (?)

It can be hard to understand the current situation and then look to the future with any sense of optimism. Gone are the days of noble leaders with clear intentions. Gone is the time when speaking out against atrocity and corruption would lead to reform. Forgotten is the sacrifice that so many have made to avoid this corporately sponsored fascism. We are left with nothing to do but speak out or remain silent and, regardless of any complaints, accept that representative democracy has ultimately failed. It was largely the case, since its inception, that the rich were the primary beneficiaries of the Constitution, and this is the unfortunate end result. We made some real efforts with women’s suffrage, providing citizenship to Indigenous people, and the civil rights movement, but in the end, the power of the wealthy proved too strong. Their resources created a volume of “speech” that 300 million voices couldn’t shout over. This is the current situation, but it will not last forever.

Nothing does. The great lie of a failing society is not merely that its failures are necessary, but that they are inevitable; that money must always mean value, that wealth must always mean power, that nations and markets and institutions must exist tomorrow exactly as they exist today because we have forgotten that every one of them began as an idea. Currency is an idea. Property is an idea. Government is an idea. America itself is an idea, maintained every morning by hundreds of millions of people collectively agreeing that it continues to exist. Ideas are not permanent. Societies are not permanent. Nations are not permanent. We make these things real through shared belief, but misplaced belief is not truth, and the accumulated assumptions of generations are not the laws of physics. We must emancipate ourselves from the failed notions that brought us here. We must unshackle value from currency, liberate our imagination from the narrow catalogue of what is “realistic,” and free our minds from the supposed inevitability of circumstances constructed entirely by a few broken human beings.

There are more of us than there are of them. There always have been. Every institution drawing breath from our labor, our attention, our money, our obedience, and our faith survives because enough of us continue accepting it. If enough people cease believing that misery is the natural price of civilization, if enough people demand something better and are willing to undertake the extraordinary work required to build it, then what appeared permanent will become astonishingly temporary. The future is not waiting somewhere ahead of us, fully assembled. We are building it now.

The alternative is not permanence; it is collapse. Infinite greed has been married to a finite planet, and sooner or later that relationship dies. When there are no new markets left to conquer, no untouched resources left to seize, no additional wages to suppress, homes to financialize, necessities to monetize, or public institutions to hollow out and sell back to us, the machinery will begin consuming itself. The oligopoly will turn inward. Corporations will devour competitors, conglomerates will swallow corporations, financiers will carve apart conglomerates, and fortunes will collide with fortunes over an ever-smaller pile of increasingly expensive things. Prices will climb beyond consumers, consumers will disappear beneath debt, markets will contract, and the predators who exhausted the herd will eventually discover one another standing alone on an empty plain.

We will have given them everything on the way there: the last penny from the account, the last mortgage against the house, the last manageable payment converted into impossible debt, the last measure of health and labor and blood, until we are living in a ditch beside the magnificent machine we spent our lives building, digging through its garbage for something edible. Then, at last, there will be nothing left to consume.

It would be better to change than collapse. Infinitely better. But change of that magnitude will require vision large enough to imagine what does not yet exist, dedication strong enough to survive ridicule and failure while bringing it into the world, and unyielding effort sustained long after misplaced outrage has exhausted itself. History does not guarantee us a better world, but it should remind us that this one is temporary. Our futures rest in the hands of those who can accept this impermanence and lead us towards lasting, positive change.

Hard Times

2026-09-12T20:33:51.395-07:00

Hard Times

Jeremiah Liend

Out Of The Hat 2026 produced by Bemidji Community Theater

Location: Saloon

Object: Pig Baby

First Line: The stench of 2026 washed over me as I looked up at the glowing embers blotting out the stars.

Actors: 2 Female, 2 Male

Interior Ruth’s Hard Times Saloon, Salt Lake City, Utah, evening, 1876.

(Ruth is behind the bar serving drinks to the bar’s only patrons, Bart and Clementine. Everyone is wearing distressed clothing in a parody of the wild west. Everyone has a copy of Bart’s latest lousy book in the form of several script-looking piles of roughed up paper. Bart tosses back a drink before taking a deep breath and reading this last passage.)

Bart. “The stench of 2026 washed over me as I looked up at the glowing embers blotting out the stars. All I could think about were all of those lives ended and children incinerated and how we somehow managed to normalize it all into our daily lives. Like rats in a failing wheel. Until the heat death of the universe at last consumed us all.” (Pause) The End. Ta dah!

Ruth. OK, Bart. Well, first thing, you’re cut off. Ya’ll done.

(Ruth takes his remaining drinks.)

Ruth. Second thing is, you ain’t never gonna make it work, as a writer. You need to come to Jesus and admit defeat. Ain’t no one no how gonna read your… what you call it?

Clementine. “Science Fiction”.

Ruth. Science fiction, Bart? Ain’t no one round these parts knows how to read, let alone read something they ain’t gonna understand. You ever read that series about the monkey getting into all sorts of trouble? THAT is something people want to read, Bart. That monkey gets caught eating a mess of pies and then gets a belly ache over it? That’s storytelling people can grasp.

Clementine. Y’all ever read that Don Quixote?

Bart. Shoot, ladies. I ain’t never gonna make it in this awful literature scene, am I? I came out to unsettled Utah with a pen and a dream. What can I do, Ruth? Clementine!? I’m looking for feedback around these parts!? I ain’t above criticism, if’n yer not too mean about it… Constructive criticism?

Ruth. You got ta find your audience, hon. Who you writin all these nonsense words for?

Clementine. Sure ain’t someone who likes to read.

Bart. Now, that sounds a might mean there. It’s a real open piece, you know? Put a lot of myself all up in this mess of words. But how come ya’ll detest it so?

Ruth. We ain’t tryin ta be mean, Bart. We just don’t want you wasting your time and all this fine paper over these nonsense stories of yours. Why not go into paper sales?

Clementine. Or rustlin?

Bart. Now, Clementine, rustlin round these parts is a hangin crime. That’s how the law got my pa, rustlin. Now I done thing I ain’t proud of, sure, but this career in creative writin seems like a might more valuable use of my time on this here earth. If’n I can just figure how ta put these nonsense words in the right order like?

Clementine. But Bart, you go on and read that Don Quixote?

Bart. NO… no. No, Clementine, I ain’t read no Don Quixote. Why?

Clementine. It’s real long and real borin and reading this mess of crazy made me think of it.

Bart. Yeah? Well. Mayhap I’ll have chance to read it some day.

Clementine. Lost my copy when the whorehouse burned down.

Ruth. Clementine! Please!

Clementine. What’s that?

Ruth. We do not use that word, in Hard Times Saloon. This here is a proper establishment.

Clementine. Lost my copy when the bordello burned down?

Ruth. See now, that’s a right proper word.

Bart. Fine word play there, Clementine.

Clementine. I appreciate the positive feedback, folks. It’s been a long hard road.

Ruth. We sure know you’ve fell on hard times, after all those wars and fires and what not.

Clementine. But I don’t let it get me down.

Bart. You’re a fine woman, Clementine, and I always admire your opinion.

Clementine. Shut up and buy me a drink, Bart. You owe me.

Bart. I’m down to my last bit and it’s all yours, my darling Clementine.

Ruth. Well, you’s cut off but she ain’t, so I’ll pour it out.

(Ruth and Clementine share a drink and think briefly about literature.)

Ruth. It ain’t that your nonsense words ain’t purty, Bart. It’s that their nonsense. Ain’t one idea being used to build anything on top of anything else.

Clementine. Ruth gets it. It’s like a gull durn cake out in the rain. Ain’t nothing structurin the frostin and it’s all just a lump of weird.

Bart. So you think I needs more structure?

Ruth. I reckon it could’t hurt nothin. All this paper you ever get yer hands on a mess of note cards?

Bart. Oh, I don’t think I want to spend all that on note cards… I’m gonna have to sell my gold teeth to afford rent next month.

Ruth. Oh Bart. I’ll take those teeth out fer ya.

Bart. Kind of you to offer Ruth, but I’s got a man comin’.

(Enter Dr. Quaddle. He is an ostentatiously dressed European who speaks flawless English. He has two carpet bags, one in each hand. He sets them down and proceeds.)

Quaddle. Good evening, good people, allow me to introduce myself, as I am traveling without entourage. My name is Quentin Percivald Quaddle. That’s of the Dutch Quaddles not to be confused with the Von Quaddles of Austria and Austrio-Hungary. I hold many titles and certifications but I am traveling now under the credentials of my medical degree in dentistry science. In addition to my DDS I am also an MD, MLS, and BA. That is Bad Ass, for those who know.

Bart. Right on time.

Quaddle. Ah! I presume you are my pending client, as I am responding to a written request I now forthwith accept. I will remove those gold teeth of yours, for a mere 1/10th of the total gold as well as all surrounding teeth. I have a contract here that I encourage you to review before signing. You are Bart Bartholemew Bartholemew?

Bart. Yes.

Quaddle. BBB. Bad Bart. Bart the Bastard. Burnt Bacon Bart. Bart Bartz. Bart the Bear.

Bart. The very same. Those are but some of my assorted AKAs.

Quaddle. Amazing. And as I understand from your request you are a regional author of some import?

(The ladies laugh.)

Quaddle. Ah! Comedy!

Bart. I may have overstated my impact on the regional literature community. This is a somewhat recent revelation.

Quaddle. No matter! I only read when it makes me money. Let’s take a look in that awful mouth of yours, shall we? Oh! My MANNers!!

(Quaddle performs an expansive bow.)

Quaddle. Would either of you fine ladies enjoy a complementary oral exam?

Ruth. You are one weird dude.

Quaddle. Praise from Caesar!

Clementine. How much gold is a tooth worth, mister?

Quaddle. Doctor.

Clementine. I ain’t seen your credentials, mister.

Quaddle. Allow ME!

(Quaddle produces from one of his bags a series of official looking documents and badges.)

Clementine. This all seems in order.

Quaddle. Madame!

(Quaddle packs his stuff away.)

Quaddle. Who is the proprietor of this establishment?

Ruth. That would be me.

Quaddle. Excellent. With your permission, I would like to practice some basic dentistry on your premises. According to regional law I am required to buy at least two drinks which I request now. I will be tipping 25%.

Ruth. I am familiar with regional law!

(Ruth pours out two drinks for Quaddle, who quickly downs both.)

Quaddle. If I can’t interest you ladies in a free oral exam, would either of you be interested in a pig in a poke?

Bart. A what now!?

Ruth. You got a pig in your carpet bag?

Quaddle. A sweet little suckling pig. A pig baby. For your dining pleasure.

Ruth. How long that pig been in that carpet bag?

Quaddle. Long enough.

Clementine. How much for the baby pig?

Quaddle. One dollar!

Ruth. Seems like a lot for a little ham.

Quaddle. Oh, it’s sweet ham. Baby pig ham.

Clementine. If I buy the baby pig, will you free it?

Quaddle. Oh no. You must eat the pig baby.

Clementine. You sick fiend.

Quaddle. I am a dentist, madam! I have seen the worst of this doomed universe. The festering orifice of the everyman. The rot, the cavity, the decay!!! No one brushes their teeth these days, let alone flosses!? People barely wipe their butts after pooping!? Everyone is running around everywhere with poopy buttholes!? No one uses deodorant!? That’s not even a thing!? Everyone smells like diseased horse vagina and wet dirt. I was trained in Heidelberg you raggedy peasants!? I don’t like doing these jobs! I do it as a SERVICE! A service I tell you! I could be making a dozen deutschmarks a day in Salzburg!? Yet here I am, in the armpit of the world, helping the unwashed masses recoup their dental expenses. Do you know how many drugs I have to do, not to hate every minute of every day of my miserable life!? JEEZ. Jeez o Pete. Sorry. It’s been one of those years, you know?

Ruth. It’s January!?

(Quaddle begins to quietly weep.)

Bart. Oh, come on now, I don’t want a crying dentist…

Clementine. Oh, let him cry, Bart. I like to see him hurt.

Bart. You’re a cruel woman, Clementine, but fair.

Ruth. Yer gonna have to cry outside, ain’t no crying in this here establishment.

Quaddle. What!? What do you MEAN!? A person should be able to cry wherever they need to!?

Ruth. We can’t have people traumatizing the other patrons, now you get on out.

Quaddle. No no, I’ll be cool. Just give me a moment to collect my poops.

Bart. Please don’t do nothing with poops before pullin my teeth?

Quaddle. No, sweet Bart, I mean metaphorical poops. Everypoops.

Ruth. You done bought your drinks so you get one hour for dentistin, but you best move fast, I spect the audience be itchin for a climax.

Bart. The hell you mean, Ruth?

Ruth. Just breakin that old fourth wall a tetch before the crisis.

Bart. What crisis?

(Quaddle pulls out a Pig Baby and a pair of pliers.)

Quaddle. Hold my pig baby, this will hurt immensely.

(Quaddle performs comedy dentistry on Bart [ideally to the sounds of Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance] pulling out chicklets and “accidentally” losing them into the audience and down his shirt and into his own mouth all as Bart screams bloody murder. At long last, exhausted of all teeth and covered head to toe in mouth blood, Quaddle finally puts on some gloves.)

Quaddle. Well, Bart, I’ve got good news and bad news.

Bart. What’s the good news?

Quaddle. You had a whole bunch of poorly cared for teeth that I just pulled out.

Bart. And the bad news?

Quaddle. I just lost all of them all over the place. I think one is in Ruth’s hair? I know I swallowed one. At least one. I’ve been a dentist for 14 years and never swallowed someone else's teeth before.

Bart. What about the gold!?

Quaddle. That gold is all gone now, Bart. You’re going to have to live on the street.

(Quaddle packs up all of his things before turning to Bart.)

Quaddle. I’m going to need that pig baby back.

(Bart reluctantly returns his emotional support pig. Quaddle packs it back in his carpet bag. He turns to make a grand exit.)

Quaddle. It’s been an experience, Utah, but now I must return to Minnesota and continue my weird stuff there. I’m sorry about the teeth and the crying. I so wish things had turned out differently. I hope that you all take the best of care moving forward. Bart, don’t eat anything more solid than broth for… well, forever. Broth it is. Auf Wiedersehen!

Bart. Stop!

(Quaddle pauses.)

Bart. You done broke the terms of our agreement and I’ll be taking payment for your breach.

Quaddle. No, I am walking away empty handed, not indebted to you.

Bart. You put that pig on down now.

Quaddle. No. It is my sweet suckling baby pig. I’m going to eat it tonight. Face first.

Bart. You sick, demented, fiendish cad! Have you no honor!?

Quaddle. Honor is just horny that got confused.

Bart. What?

Quaddle. What?

Bart. BABY PIG DOWN, Quaddle, or we take it outside.

(For a moment in seems like there will be a fight, but then Quaddle thinks better of it and removes the pig before tossing it to Clementine.)

Quaddle. I give the baby pig to her, but not because you say so. You eat that pig now, you pretty lady.

Clementine. I ain’t never gonna eat this sweet suckling swine.

Quaddle. Never is a long long time. Until we meet again, Bad Bart Baby Butt.

(Exit Quaddle)

Bart. Ah, Ruth. What am I gonna do? I’m toothless, homeless, and talentless.

Ruth. Ah, Bart. Don’t you fret so. I’ll buy your dumb book.

Bart. Aw, Ruth, ya mean it!?

Ruth. Yeah, I mean it.

Clementine. Aw, Ruth. You’re an angel from above.

Ruth. Sheesh you.

Bart. Ruth, it would be a real honor, if you would tell me how to restructure my narrative…

Ruth. But?

Bart. But, I’m in a great deal of pain, just now.

Ruth. Sure, Bart. That was a whole mess of teeth you done spit out.

Bart. Like one of them nightmares.

Ruth. I ain’t never had one of them tooth fallin out nightmares.

Bart. Well. Lucky you.

Clementine. Look at us. Surviving these hard times.

(Ruth pours all three of them a drink.)

Ruth. To fiction of all flavors, to followin dreams, to baby pigs, adult teeth, and lifelong friends!

(All friends toast and drink.)

Clementine. Let’s call him Structure!

(Delighted squeal. Blackout. Fin.)

Props List:

Bart’s manuscript/book copies — several piles of distressed/roughed-up paper, enough for Bart, Ruth, and Clementine (can actually be scripts).
Baby pig prop — preferably cute enough that the audience immediately cares; must fit in Quaddle’s carpet bag and be throwable/catchable safely.
2 carpet bags for Quaddle.
Saloon glasses/cups — at least 4, preferably extras for repeated pours and the final toast.
Bottle(s) of stage liquor for Ruth’s bar business and repeated drinks.
Quaddle’s contract/paperwork for Bart’s tooth-extraction agreement.
Quaddle’s credentials — several ridiculous official-looking diplomas, licenses, badges, certificates, etc., ideally enough for the reveal to become a visual gag.
Large comedy pliers for the dentistry sequence.
Chiclets / fake teeth — quite a few, because Quaddle intentionally/accidentally loses them into his clothes and possibly the audience. I’d have at least 20–30.
Stage blood — enough to make Bart/Quaddle look spectacularly mangled without creating a cleanup nightmare.
Disposable gloves for Quaddle’s delayed glove gag; these need to be readily accessible so he can put them on only after the procedure.

Did you like this play? There are more!!!

Who is this nerd?

9/11/26

2026-09-10T15:52:21.900-07:00

For the last 25 years now I have tried to share my evolving and developing thoughts and ideas about 9/11/01 from my perspective, and every time it’s a different flavor of painful trauma, but also perhaps a healing means of functionally never forgetting. We all said we weren’t going to forget, and then everyone very much forgot. We forgot so hard that there are still prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. We forgot so hard that they never went back to allowing us free baggage on airplanes. We forgot so hard that the kids today have no idea what happened that day, or what it meant. At some point I hit the period of my life where more of it was in the post-9/11 world than the time before. When we just walked through a metal detector like reasonable people and airport security would occasionally wand us because of aggressive pant rivets. Now there’s a whole multibillion dollar branch of government that is paid union wages to sonar you naked and grope you to the side of the line. We forgot so hard that we didn’t realize the many ways the terrorists had clearly won, by making us attack ourselves from within.

One of the hardest things to watch has been the partisan division and the ongoing elephant versus donkey civil war. When in fact the war is anything but civil. There was this brief moment, on 9/12, where we all held our breath and prayed that how we responded would be swift, and just, and complete. I don’t want to romanticize that moment either, because there was also immediate and frightening hatred directed at Muslim Americans, Sikhs, Arabs, brown people in general. Basically anyone some terrified racist dipshit decided looked vaguely affiliated with the people he had watched fly airplanes into buildings the day before. So no, the world was not united on September 12th. Surprise turns into hatred with astonishing efficiency. But there was still this tiny window in which it felt possible that the enormity of what had happened might produce some equally enormous and humane response, some galvanizing moment where the world came together to heal and rebuild instead of immediately looking for the easiest place to bomb.

Instead we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and occupied one or both for the next two decades. Bush would later accidentally condemn the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq” while attempting to condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, realize what he had said, correct himself to Ukraine, and then mutter “Iraq too” while everybody laughed because apparently history eventually becomes comedy if you survive it long enough. Oopsies. Countless lives broken and lost, physical and mental trauma beyond reckoning, trillions of dollars sluiced through the grinding machinery of war and into an entire ecosystem of contractors and subcontractors and people who manufacture things specifically designed to explode other things, but at least we got to hang Saddam Hussein. That happened. Mission accomplished somewhere along the line. But let’s also attempt to be balanced in our hindsight, because twenty-five years later there is plenty of responsibility to smear around and no shortage of presidents willing to take their turn holding the blame bag.

Obama took out Bin Laden May Day 2011, two years into his first term, and spent another six years in Afghanistan with no clear reason, mission parameters, or exit strategy. I thought that was why we put boots on the ground in Afghanistan October 7th, 2001? By November 19th the federal bounty on Bin Laden was increased to $25 million. Ten years later SEAL Team Six finally flew into Pakistan in stealth helicopters and zero-dark-thirtied the man we had supposedly spent a decade and an astonishing amount of blood and treasure trying to find. I remember the strange celebration afterward, people gathering outside the White House and chanting and waving flags, and some of the people celebrating were kids when 9/11 happened, which produced this weird disconnect in me. What exactly were they celebrating? Justice, certainly. Revenge, probably. The death of a monster, sure. Maybe just the enormous psychic release of finally crossing a name off a list everyone had been carrying around since childhood. I couldn’t begrudge them that entirely, but I also couldn’t understand how killing one old man in a compound in Pakistan could possibly settle the score.

What really got me was what happened next, because we didn’t leave. That seemed like the moment, right? Obama should have walked out onto the deck of an aircraft carrier beneath an enormous banner and said, “OK folks, we got him for real this time. Really reals. Pack your shit. Welcome home to everyone who has served this great nation admirably. Let us all GTFO.” Drop the microphone. Fire up the grills. Exit, stage west. Parades. Steaks. Whatever patriotic ritual seems appropriate after spending a decade searching the mountains of Afghanistan for a man who was actually living in Pakistan. Instead we just sort of camped out. Six more years under Obama, four under Trump, and finally Biden was left holding the withdrawal when the whole thing collapsed behind us with all the dignity and orderly conclusion you would expect after twenty years of trying to force a coherent ending onto an incoherent war. At some point the mission had simply become the continuation of the mission, which is one of the great dangers of government and war alike. Once enough people are being paid to do something, the fact that nobody remembers why we are doing it becomes an administrative concern rather than a reason to stop. In truth we live in an age entirely absent of moral order or functional consequence.

There are still 15 people detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2026. Think about that for a minute. There are human beings swept up in the War on Terror era who have spent enormous portions of their lives confined within the strange legal twilight we deliberately constructed outside the ordinary protections of American courts, because if you physically place a prison inconveniently enough on a map the rights enshrined in the Constitution become more intangible. Beyond the scope of justice. Twenty-five years after the attacks we continue carrying pieces of that terror around with us. We take our shoes off. We buy travel-sized shampoo. We shuffle through increasingly sophisticated machines built to make certain none of us have weaponized our underpants. Airlines discovered somewhere along the way that the emergency baggage fees everybody tolerated in a crisis could simply become baggage fees forever, because capitalism is very good at recognizing which temporary inconveniences can be transformed into permanent revenue streams. Terrorism altered the American travel experience so successfully that an entire generation now thinks dragging your possessions through an airport while paying increasingly theatrical fees for the privilege is simply how airplanes work.

25 years later, I am still trying to explain what any of this meant to people who weren’t alive when it happened. Yesterday I was sitting in a room where all but one of the people around me had been born after 9/11, and there is something profoundly uncomfortable about becoming the person describing the historical event. This is how people used to talk to me about Kennedy being shot, or Vietnam, or Pearl Harbor. I understood what they were telling me, but I didn’t (couldn't) fully comprehend. There is a difference between knowing that something happened and having an ordinary morning violently divide your life into before and after. There is a difference between watching archival footage and watching live television while nobody on the screen has any idea what is going to happen next. Those kids can know every fact about 9/11 and still never know what it felt like to watch the second airplane hit and realize in one hideous instant that the first one had not been an accident. Seeing your friend's knees hit the floor and say the words “The Pentagon’s been hit.”

I think about this now in relation to COVID, because we have already started forgetting that too. We have crossed from the post-9/11 world into the post-COVID world without ever really acknowledging the transition, and when I have compared the two with friends I have been told that the pandemic simply did not create anything approaching the societal transformation of 9/11. I think that response may actually prove the opposite. We have never psychologically processed what happened during COVID because doing so would require admitting the almost incomprehensible scale of the thing. Millions of people died around the world. More than a million Americans. But there was no singular photograph that could contain it. Fire and explosions and bodies falling from skyscrapers are spectacular in the oldest and most terrible meaning of the word. People quietly suffocating in hospital rooms while their families watch them die through screens are not. There was no enormous object collapsing against a blue sky to represent COVID. Just hospital beds. Refrigerated trucks. Empty classrooms. Nurses with bruised faces. Numbers crawling across monitors until the numbers became so large that they stopped feeling like people and started looking like weather. Many survived the worst of it, but COVID got Grandma Mary after years of dodging it. I’m grateful for the time we dodged, but it’s maddening to see everyone continue to diminish and forget it.

Maybe that is another way we protect ourselves. Forgetting maintains our ability to function. Then there’s the scale. At a certain scale grief becomes mathematics. One person dies and there is a funeral. Twenty people die and there is a memorial. Three thousand people die and there is a national wound. A million people die and apparently we get bored with the subject and start arguing about whether the virus came from bats spitting on pangolins or somebody at a Wuhan laboratory accidentally putting the apocalypse in their pocket on the way home. I would like to know what happened. Of course I would. Origins matter and investigation matters and understanding what went wrong might prevent another catastrophe. But this is not Bessie the Cow kicking over a lantern in Chicago where eventually somebody finds a scorched hoof print and says case closed. Disease is extraordinarily difficult to trace backward through millions of infections, ecological systems, human movement, politics, secrecy, and time. Someday perhaps we will know exactly what happened, and then we can enact the sweeping public policy of not storing our bats and pangolins next to each other. I am already personally committed to this precaution.

Humor becomes difficult, because humor is one of the coping mechanisms I personally know actually works. There is a reason gallows humor exists. If circumstances are so awful that you cannot control them, extracting something funny from it all is at least one tiny act of theft against total despair. You take something back. Gilbert Gottfried famously tried a 9/11 joke within weeks of the attacks and somebody yelled “too soon,” which is about the worst possible audience feedback for a comedian because it acknowledges the joke may someday work but informs you that tonight you are the asshole. Seth MacFarlane has subsequently constructed what amounts to an entire minor canon of 9/11 jokes, but he also narrowly missed being on board one of the hijacked flights out of Boston, so perhaps proximity to death earns additional joke permissions. I don’t know the rules. Nobody knows the rules. That is the problem with grief. There is no referee, there is no clock, and there is no universally accepted moment when tragedy becomes history and history becomes available for comedy.

I know humor helps me, but I don’t know whether it helps society. I don’t know what actual collective healing would look like anymore. Maybe everybody needs therapy forever? Which seems expensive, yet necessary. We used to distribute some of that emotional work into churches and neighborhoods and clubs and hang outs and families and community organizations, all of which are themselves struggling against fragmentation, loss, and isolation. Increasingly we process the events of our lives by dumping them into computers for strangers and algorithms to react to, which brings me to another depressing thought I have been wrestling with as an artist: I’m not sure whether there is any single work of art capable of genuinely gathering the attention of a civilization anymore? Maybe there never was. Maybe that was another comforting myth. But it certainly feels harder now, because everything arrives simultaneously and everything competes with everything else and the greatest tragedy in the world exists one thumb movement away from a video of a raccoon stealing a sandwich.

It is all white noise, and every once in a while you can get your voice above it if you do something sufficiently strange. I have considered some fairly crazy things over the years in the ongoing effort to attract human attention toward things I think matter. Some of them I wisely abandoned and some of them you never heard about, which is the problem with being involved in a secret society: if nobody knows what you’re doing then congratulations, everything is functioning perfectly. I spent years trying to infiltrate the Masons only to discover that the ultimate secret of Freemasonry is that you have to pay dues until you die. At which point I pulled the plug on that investigation. People barely have the attention span for public societies anymore, let alone secret ones. Everybody has work in the morning. That may in fact be the most effective counter revolutionary mechanism ever devised. The 40 hour work week. The only thing preventing millions of Americans from storming the institutions that endlessly disappoint and exploit them is that we all have to work tomorrow.

Maybe allowing the richest people to run everything has not gone as well as advertised? As long as we’re asking the big questions. Fun experiment!(?) We gave an increasingly small group of people an increasingly enormous share of the resources and trusted that their superior access to capital must somehow correlate with superior wisdom, ethics, and concern for humanity. Then we hoped some of that money might trickle downward as they bought newspapers, social networks, politicians, islands, bunkers, rockets, and whatever else a person purchases after money ceases to correspond to any meaningful material need. Perhaps civilization was never meant to be managed primarily by whoever won capitalism hardest? I don’t know. I am just one aging theater person pacing through a parking lot in September, trying once again to figure out why twenty-five years after the most traumatizing morning of my adult life the world appears wealthier, more technologically capable, more interconnected, and yet somehow ever less able to agree that we should stop making everything worse.

Underneath every one of these arguments, every president, every war, every ridiculous airport ritual, every joke, every pandemic, every billionaire, every failed artistic attempt to get above the white noise, there is still that morning. It is etched into me in a way almost nothing else is. Raw terror succeeded at being lasting terror. Credit where it is due. Put yourself inside one of those airplanes for even a moment and the imagination recoils. Put yourself inside an office above the impact zone and it gets worse. Look out the window. Smoke filling the halls behind you. Fire below. No roof evacuation. No stairway. No rescue coming. Then look down. I have seen those images for twenty-five years now, because we have all seen them for twenty-five years. Every anniversary the airplanes hit again. The towers burn again. The towers fall again. The people fall again. What was once a horrifying days long live television experience became archival footage, then documentary footage, then thirty-second anniversary footage, then lesser content. Like almost all human information, it has been reduced to the smallest useful package capable of generating attention in the search for capital.

I cannot reduce the number of people falling. They have followed me through all of it. I wrote about them years ago because they represented the place where every system failed simultaneously. Architecture failed. Fire suppression failed. Evacuation failed. Aviation security failed. Intelligence failed. Government failed. But physics did exactly what physics was supposed to do, which was perhaps the worst failure of all. There were no helicopters swooping between those impossible towers. No parachutes hidden under desks. No Spider-Man (despite the withdrawn film preview). No Superman. No Jesus physically appearing out of the heavens. No Allah reaching through the smoke. No secret technology beneath a military hangar in Nevada. No future human civilization breaking the laws of spacetime to intervene. There was only the building, the fire, the open air, and sirens.

For years I would get to this place in writing about 9/11 and stop because there was nowhere else to go. I could rage about the wars, mock the TSA, condemn torture, mourn the dead, blame presidents, blame terrorists, blame ourselves, tell jokes until the jokes stopped working, but eventually I arrived back at those tiny human beings suspended against an enormous blue sky and understood again that I could not help them. Everything had already happened. History was closed. The dead were dead. Every 9/11 reflection I have ever written ultimately carried that same terrible limitation somewhere inside it, whether I admitted it or not. This one does not. This one comes with a solution.

Einstein developed the theory of relativity by thinking about a man falling from a window. What would that person experience in free fall? What if nothing existed to generate his fall? What did gravity mean from his perspective? From that thought experiment came the equivalence principle, relativity, and eventually an entirely new way of understanding space, time, and gravity. I’ve spent a substantial portion of my own life thinking about a bunch of falling people. This has admittedly produced more trauma than equations, but eventually it created its own thought experiment. Timeline extraction. The concept is simple even if the physics are presently beyond us: if a person exists at a specific location at a specific moment in spacetime, and if some future technology allows spacetime to be controlled rather than merely observed, then death does not have to be prevented by changing history. The person only has to be removed immediately before the fatal event. Before the airplane hits. Before the building collapses. Before the fire reaches them. Before the falling human reaches the ground. Extraction.

I do not have the machine. I have the idea, and ideas have always arrived before machines. Humanity imagined flight long before Kitty Hawk, imagined travel to the Moon long before Apollo, imagined instantaneous global communication before we filled our pockets with devices capable of contacting nearly anyone on Earth while simultaneously showing us advertisements for snorkels and AI pornography. There is nothing particularly mystical about believing that our understanding of spacetime will continue changing. It has changed before. It is changing now. Maybe timeline extraction will prove impossible, but I am done granting impossibility permanent jurisdiction over the future. For twenty-five years I have looked backward at 9/11 and thought about all the things we should have done differently. This year I am allowing myself to look forward and imagine what we may someday be able to repair backward.

That is where the thought became much larger than the tragedy that created it. History is filled with extraction points. Battlefields. Fires. Shipwrecks. Concentration camps. Plagues. Famines. Hospitals. Tornadoes. Bedrooms. Highways. Every place where a human being reached the terrible final moment in which everyone around them had run out of options. If spacetime ever becomes navigable, history stops being merely a record of people we failed to save and becomes a map of people waiting for us to extract. I began by trying to figure out how to save one falling person and realized that there is no satisfactory stopping point short of everyone.

So this 9/11 reflection ends differently from everyone that came before it. I will not leave them in the windows. I will not leave them in the diving airplanes. I will not leave them falling forever through the same thirty seconds of content. To the people who died that morning, wherever and whenever you are, I make this promise on behalf of a future I hope to see: we are coming back for you. We will learn. We will build. We will stumble, fail, and try again. We will succeed. We will pull you out. We will catch you. We will save them all, and then, dear reader, someday we will save you too. Salvation guaranteed.

Q REPORT 250: THE DECLARATION OF DEPENDENCE

2026-07-04T09:40:47.011-07:00

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the comforting lies which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the dependent and debased station to which the laws of Disney, debt, petroleum, algorithm, empire, military procurement, private equity, medical bankruptcy, subscription entertainment, and commemorative truck stop eagle knives have reduced them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to remain strapped mouth-first to the great glowing Mickey Mouse teat, suckling blue light dollars from a poisoned cartoon udder, refreshing the app, checking the balance, saluting the flag, buying the commemorative cup, and praying to every dead president printed on cotton paper that the dollar does not finally reveal itself to be poorly absorbent toilet paper with delusions of empire.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, and are then immediately divided by zip code, credit score, school district, inherited wealth, insurance network, proximity to clean drinking water, and whether their parents knew how to turn suffering into generational advantage before the market closed. We hold that they are endowed by their Creator, or by chemistry, or by the cosmic accident of primordial ooze getting frisky in the tidal shallows, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all of which may be suspended pending verification of employment, proof of coverage, drug screening, algorithmic risk assessment, subscription renewal, and agreement to binding arbitration. We further hold that governments are instituted among human beings to secure these rights, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, except when the governed become troublesome, unionized, unhoused, indebted, sick, educated, queer, Black, poor, foreign, young, old, disabled, artistic, or otherwise inconvenient to the quarterly reporting.

We declare, therefore, our total dependence. We are dependent upon phones built by hands we will never hold, upon food systems we do not understand, upon trucks driving all night through deadly weather, upon antibiotics we cannot manufacture, upon water pipes installed by dead men, upon women whose names were never printed on the building, upon workers whose backs hold up the banquet while the owners explain sacrifice from the yacht. We are dependent upon teachers, nurses, janitors, cooks, clerks, drivers, electricians, daycare workers, farmers, custodians, garbage collectors, food shelf volunteers, librarians, secretaries, technicians, snowplow operators, public defenders, exhausted mothers, haunted fathers, and the uncounted army of people who arrive before the important people arrive so that the important people can believe the world magically works. And yet somehow, in this great and obvious web of mutual dependence, we have been trained to worship only the men who own the web, invoice the spider, patent the silk, poison the flies, and then charge admission to the feeding.

Whereas Uncle Sam appeared in the video at approximately 3:17 a.m., seated beneath a fluorescent light in a basement conference room somewhere triangulated between Langley, Orlando, and an Amazon fulfillment center. His hat was crooked. His beard was stained with barbecue sauce, tear gas, and snot. He looked directly into the camera and said, “My fellow Americans. I am alive. I am being treated as well as can be expected by the shareholders. Please do not attempt a rescue unless you are properly credentialed, pre-approved, and willing to pay the ransom. What? I mean deductible.” Behind him stood his captors: a health insurance executive with a clipboard, a defense contractor holding a golden shovel, a fossil fuel lobbyist wearing a child’s gas mask as a boutonniere, a tech billionaire with the empty eyes of a man who has mistaken optimization for love, and Mickey Mouse himself, swollen and immortal, smiling with the dead patience of an old god. Uncle Sam blinked three times, paused, and then read from the prepared statement. “Freedom has never been stronger. The markets are confident. The children are resilient. The water is locally sourced. The bombs are smart. The apps are free. The ads are relevant. The sacrifice is necessary. The shareholders are pleased.”

Whereas The American Dream was admitted to hospice shortly after sunrise, suffering from acute wage stagnation, chronic housing failure, metastatic medical debt, and a fireworks-related injury sustained while attempting to salute a bank. Doctors said the prognosis was uncertain, but only because the family requested optimism for insurance purposes. Around the bed gathered the old relatives: Opportunity wearing a paper gown, Hard Work with two slipped discs, Fair Play missing since 1987, Upward Mobility on oxygen, and Bootstraps, who had been dead for years but continued to appear on cable news as a silent expert witness. The American Dream opened one eye and tried to speak. Everyone leaned in. A lobbyist placed a microphone near its mouth. A banker held its hand for the photograph. A senator prepared a statement about resilience. At last the Dream whispered, “I was never a lottery ticket. I was a foundation.” Everyone pretended not to hear. A consultant suggested rebranding the foundation as premium aspiration infrastructure and charging poor people rent to stand on it.

Whereas when the Founding Fathers returned because America cannot process a single moral question without summoning powdered wig ghosts to ask whether the musket men intended TikTok, drone strikes, insulin pricing, fantasy football gambling, and the constitutional right of billionaires to own the atmosphere. George Washington emerged first, took one look around, and his wooden slave teeth fell from his mouth. Thomas Jefferson demanded legal counsel before answering any questions about liberty, property, architecture, or human beings he had previously fathered and then classified as property while writing about liberty. Benjamin Franklin seduced a drone, invented three new civic institutions, and asked where the nearest French delegation was hiding. John Adams screamed himself hoarse about executive power, then passed out when informed that the presidency had become a content farm operated by toady mascots and weak men with television poisoning. James Madison was handed a copy of the modern federal budget and immediately began chewing his own hands off. They were told America had treated their draft as scripture. They were horrified. “Draft?” asked the nation, clutching the parchment like a security blanket. “You mean this was not supposed to be laminated and used to justify every bad idea forever?” Madison looked into the middle distance and whispered, “We used feathers.”

Whereas outside, fireworks exploded over the mass grave of the common good. Red for the hospitals. White for the schools. Blue for the lakes we poisoned with flame retardant. Purple for the bruises. Gold for the billionaires who never have enough. Green for the money that matters more than oxygen. Silver for the polished cars of men who sell fear with patriotic music underneath. The crowd clapped because the explosions were beautiful, and it is hard not to love beautiful things even when they are funded by the forces killing you. Children looked up with faces full of wonder. Dogs shook under tables. Veterans flinched in the dark. The sky filled with smoke. The air smelled like celebration and battlefield. Somewhere a lake absorbed another evening of microplastic, beer foam, and national mythology. Somewhere a parent checked the price of groceries and decided which meal to skip. Somewhere a politician posted a picture of a flag large enough to hide behind. Somewhere a billionaire watched the whole thing from above, insulated by altitude and law.

Whereas America arrived eleven minutes late to couples therapy with itself, carrying a gas station flag, three lawsuits, a concealed pistol, a Stanley cup, another commemorative eagle knife, and a coupon for freedom fries that expired during the Bush administration. One America sat down and said, “I want clean water, safe schools, public health, affordable housing, libraries, labor rights, bodily autonomy, honest history, less war, more trees, and a future that does not require my children to develop emotional calluses before kindergarten.” The other America said, “I feel attacked.” The therapist, who was underpaid, out of network, and already fielding several subpoenas, asked the second America what it wanted. “Respect,” it said. “What does respect look like?” asked the therapist. “Obedience,” said the second America. “And freedom,” it added, after a pause. “What does freedom look like?” asked the therapist. “Obedience from others and consequence-free behavior for me.” The therapist wrote something down. It may have been a diagnosis. It may have been a grocery list. It may have been the beginning of a new constitution.

Whereas the bald eagle filed for divorce at noon. After two hundred and fifty years of being dragged into every speech, dealership commercial, fireworks tent, political ad, bad tattoo, knife catalog, military recruitment poster, and denim hallucination sold at a truck stop outside Branson, the eagle had retained counsel and wanted out. The petition cited irreconcilable differences, habitat destruction, toxic symbolism, emotional exhaustion, and repeated unauthorized use by men who could not identify three actual birds but owned seventeen flags. “I did not leave America,” the eagle wrote in a public statement released through its attorney. “America left the nest, paved the forest, poisoned the river, privatized the sky, and then asked me to keep screaming over a stock photo of troops and wheat.” The eagle further clarified that it had never endorsed tax cuts for billionaires, book bans, forever war, coal ash, deregulated banking, or putting its face on novelty swords sold to divorced uncles. “I am a bird,” it concluded. “I eat fish and mind my business. You people are the problem.”

Whereas there it was, the United States of Flinching, the richest and most armed frightened horse in human history, startled by every plastic bag of change. A nation with aircraft carriers afraid of librarians. A nation with nuclear weapons afraid of pronouns. A nation with satellites afraid of history. A nation with tanks afraid of college students. A nation with billionaires afraid of unions. A nation with police robots afraid of accountability. A nation with megachurches afraid of compassion. A nation with streaming services afraid of boredom. A nation with two-day shipping afraid of patience. A nation with military flyovers afraid of children asking why lunch costs money. The brave men screamed at drag queens. The patriots threatened school boards. The defenders of civilization melted down over beer cans, mermaids, bathrooms, candy, sneakers, kneeling athletes, library displays, and the unbearable tyranny of other people existing where they could be seen. They called it courage because courage was no longer recognizable.

Whereas then came Mickey Mouse, not the cartoon, not the cheerful rodent of childhood memory, not the dancing little anarchist from the black and white days before the lawyers built the castle. The fully evolved corporate deity, Mickey Enthroned, Mickey Incarnate, Mickey of the Infinite Renewal, Mickey with gloved hands on the valves of nostalgia, Mickey with theme park veins and litigation teeth, Mickey whose ears blot out the moon. “Come unto me,” said Mickey, “all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will sell you a coupon code.” The people came because they were tired. They came because the world hurt. They came because every child deserves wonder and every parent deserves a little mercy, even if the mercy costs $189 per day before food. They came to suckle the blue light dollar teat, the glowing stream of subscription dreams, the franchised memory milk of a childhood they were not sure they had enjoyed but were certain had been better than this. Mickey held them close, very close, (too close) and whispered, “You own nothing, but you may experience happiness in carefully managed emotional increments.”

Whereas somewhere inside the Treasury, the dollar looked at itself in the mirror and tried not to panic. It had enjoyed a good run. It had been king cotton, king oil, king bomb, king bank, king bribe, king sanction, king grocery, king prison, king campaign, king tuition, king ambulance, king rent, king app, king scam, king god. It had been folded into bras, hidden in Bibles, rained on dancers, laundered through islands, stacked in vaults, burned by artists, blessed by preachers, sniffed by traders, and promised to children who would never see enough of it. But lately the dollar had begun to suspect it was not money at all. Perhaps it was only belief wearing green. Perhaps it was a national hallucination with a watermark. Perhaps the empire had printed so many tiny portraits of dead men that the dead men had begun to rot through the paper. Perhaps, in the final accounting, the dollar would not become worthless in some dramatic crash, but slowly, humiliatingly, domestically, as rent ate it, medicine ate it, food ate it, war ate it, debt ate it, and what remained was too small to save and too stiff to wipe with.

Whereas in the bunker district, the billionaires practiced surviving the people they had exploited. They had purchased mountain holes, island fortresses, security teams, desalination systems, seed vaults, private doctors, underground farms, and enough preserved food to host an apocalypse-themed wedding for everyone they had ever pretended to care about. They had built arks without animals, castles without peasants, planets without atmosphere, and escape plans from the civilization that made them rich. They wanted to survive collapse, not prevent it. They wanted the ladder pulled up, polished, sanitized, and converted into a limited series. They wanted loyalty from guards whose families would be outside the blast doors. They wanted obedience from cooks whose children would be breathing acid. They wanted the world to end politely, with invoices paid and staff retained. Above all, they wanted the law to remain exactly what it had become for them: an abstract system affecting other people.

Whereas this is the central miracle of our age. A person can steal a sandwich and discover the immediate steel poetry of the state, but a person can steal a watershed, a pension fund, a news ecosystem, a generation’s housing, a hospital chain, a regulatory agency, a Supreme Court, a continent of attention, and be invited to speak about innovation. The poor experience law as gravity. The rich experience law as interior design. For one class, law is the boot, the cuff, the fine, the execution, the garnishment, the warrant, the form, the denial, the hold music, the broken taillight, the impossible deadline, the missed shift, the lost job, the doom spiral. For the other class, law is a room full of clever people moving furniture around until crime becomes theory. They do not break the law. They hire men to teach the law how to bend. They do not flee accountability. They purchase spin to disarm it. They are not citizens in the republic, they are weather systems above it.

Whereas the Founders were still in the corner, by the way, attempting to understand the Supreme Court. “So the robes are priests?” asked Franklin. “Not officially,” said Madison. “But functionally?” asked Jefferson. “Oh, absolutely,” said Adams, who had found a bottle. The Court appeared before them as nine haunted owls in expensive robes, perched upon the highest branch of the dead republic, hooting originalism into a hurricane. They explained that the true meaning of liberty could be found by asking what a powdered gentleman feared in 1789, unless that answer conflicted with the needs of modern capital, in which case the answer could be found in the sacred penumbra of corporate personhood, donor privacy, executive immunity, administrative paralysis, and whatever made billionaires feel safest at night. Washington listened carefully, then asked whether anyone had considered shame. No one had. Shame had been defunded by Reagan in 1981.

Whereas the therapy session collapsed when one America accused the other of hating freedom because it wanted children to survive math class. The hostage video glitched. Uncle Sam’s captors changed the flag behind him because the focus group preferred a slightly deeper blue. The American Dream coded briefly, then returned to life after a pharmaceutical advertisement. The bald eagle was seen flying north with a duffel bag in their talons. Mickey Mouse acquired three regional banks, two childhoods, and the mineral rights beneath EPCOT. The dollar coughed blood into a commemorative envelope. Fireworks continued exploding over the common good, which, though badly damaged, was not entirely dead. This was inconvenient. The common good kept twitching. A librarian gave it water. A nurse checked its pulse. A union steward stood between it and the bulldozer. A teacher read to it. A cook fed it. A janitor cleaned the room around it. A child drew it with crayons as a house, a tree, three people holding hands, and a sun in the corner with too many rays. The drawing was more economically coherent than Congress.

Whereas here is the secret they work hardest to kill: dependence is not failure. Dependence is reality. The infant depends on the mother. The elder depends on the caregiver. The worker depends on the employer. The town depends on the water. The farmer depends on the rain. The city depends on the grid. The hospital depends on the patient. The classroom depends on the student. The stage depends on the actor. The billionaire depends on everyone who does nothing. The lie is not that we are dependent. The lie is that only the vulnerable are dependent. The lie is that needing help is weakness, while hoarding wealth is strength. The lie is that independence means isolation, domination, extraction, and escape. The truth is that no one survives alone except in fantasies written by men who have never washed their own socks.

Therefore, let us declare dependence honestly, with open eyes and empty hands. Let us declare dependence on one another rather than on monsters. Let us declare dependence on air, water, soil, labor, memory, mercy, libraries, public schools, public parks, public health, public shame, public joy, and private kindness. Let us declare dependence on facts, not because facts are always comforting, but because lies are lazy assassins and we have buried enough truths already. Let us declare dependence on art, because capitalism hates imagination that remains unmerchandised. Let us declare dependence on the living world, because the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the planet and not the other way around. Let us declare dependence on children not yet born, who have no lobbyists, no PACs, no yacht access, no think tanks, and no defense except our willingness to be less selfish than the machine trains us to be.

Therefore, in the name of the bewildered people of this wounded republic, appealing to the decent judgment of anyone still capable of embarrassment, we do solemnly publish and declare that these United States are, and of right ought to be, dependent upon the health, labor, dignity, education, safety, creativity, memory, courage, and mutual care of the people who actually live here. We reject the false independence of the bunker, the yacht, the gated community, the offshore account, the executive waiver, the private school evacuation plan, the algorithmic rage silo, the purchased judge, the captured agency, the branded childhood, and the glowing Mickey Mouse teat. We reject the maintenance of an elite billionaire class above our laws and norms, above consequence, above shame, above citizenship, above the poisoned water of their own making. We reject the idea that our freedom depends on their freedom from consequences. We declare instead that freedom must mean freedom through us, with us, among us, or it is a dead and buried idea.

And finally, for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on whatever remains of divine Providence, human decency, and the stubborn refusal of the common good to die quietly under fire, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, our sacred Honor, our expired coupons, our broken phones, our library cards, our half-dead gardens, our unpaid invoices, our overdrawn accounts, our bad knees, our anxious hearts, our furious hope, our ridiculous art, our battered republic, and the last clean glass of water we can find.

Amen.

Q Report: Dearest MAGA

2026-06-24T12:51:06.567-07:00

Dearest MAGA,

This is an open letter. I am making an effort here. A gesture of goodwill. Of reaching out for common understanding and shared purpose.

Here is the part you need to understand; most of us do not hate you because of your stated goals.

We do not hate secure borders. We do not hate fair elections. We do not hate fraud prevention. We do not hate safe streets. We do not hate strong national defense. We do not hate efficient government. We do not hate the idea that public institutions should serve the public. Those are not the problem.

The problem is that every decent-sounding goal gets fed into the Trump wood chipper and comes out the other side as a mulched soup of lies, cruelty, corruption, and incompetence. Take immigration. Trump campaigned on removing the “worst of the worst.” Rapists. Murderers. Cartel monsters. Human traffickers. Violent predators. People who genuinely threaten others. And if that were actually the mission, and credibly actioned, a lot of us would not be upset. We would be relieved! We would say, “Good. Yes. Thank you. That is what immigration enforcement should be for.”

But this isn't what happens. What's happening.

What happens is that the language of public safety gets used to justify a secret police dragnet. The promise is “we are going after dangerous criminals.” But the actual practice is terrorizing laborers, housekeepers, students, parents, asylum seekers, neighbors, and people with valid paperwork because they are easier to catch than the worst of the worst. It looks like enforcement. It looks like action. It looks like a promise being fulfilled. But it's not. It isn't justice, it's political theater with zip ties.

This is the pattern.

You say healthcare is broken. Great. Healthcare IS broken. It's too expensive, too slow, too confusing, too cruel, and too profitable for the wrong people. We agree. Then Trump promises a beautiful replacement for the Affordable Care Act, and somehow that replacement has been “coming soon” for a decade. One week away. Two weeks away. A concept of a plan. A miracle just over the horizon. Meanwhile, people cannot afford care. They cannot schedule care. They cannot understand their bills. They cannot get answers. They ration medication. They delay procedures. They get bankrupted by illness in the richest country in human history. What do we get instead?

A spectacle. A culture war. A fight over who gets blamed while the system keeps bleeding people dry. All while we recoat reflecting pools and build "triumphant" arches. It's shameful, and I don't know where your collective sense of shame is? Trump is shameless, certainly, but what about you?

You say education should be returned to the states. Fine, let’s talk about local control. Let’s talk about schools that actually serve communities. Let’s talk about teachers, libraries, trades, special education, rural schools, student debt, and whether young people can build a life without being crushed before they begin. But that's not the goal. The goal is not better education. The goal is controlling education. Gut the Department of Education, attack universities, make college harder and more expensive, turn public learning into ideological combat, and then act shocked when the country gets less informed, less prepared, less professional, and less capable of governing itself.

You say fraud is bad. Of course fraud is bad.

Nobody likes fraud. Nobody is pro-fraud. No normal person wakes up in the morning and says, “I hope someone steals my tax dollars today.” If fraud exists, investigate it. Prove it. Prosecute it. Recover the money. Build better systems. But that is not what happens. What is happening. Fraud becomes the magic word. Fraud becomes the excuse. Fraud becomes the fog machine. Say “fraud” loudly enough and suddenly you can attack political opponents, smear public workers, defund services, intimidate communities, and pretend every program you dislike is a criminal conspiracy.

The problem isn't that we love fraud. The problem is that you keep letting fraud be used as a permission slip for persecution. All while Trump pardons individuals responsible for millions and millions of dollars in fraud. Trump pardons have cost the U.S. government and crime victims an estimated $1.3 billion to $2 billion by wiping out court-ordered financial penalties, fines, and restitution for convicted fraudsters. It isn't about fraud. It was never about fraud. It has always been about punishing people Trump doesn't like. Either because of their political affiliation or the color of their skin.

You say you want the strongest military in the world.

Fine. But then why are service members and veterans treated like props? Why are military families struggling? Why are basic benefits always negotiable, but weapons contracts are sacred? Why do we worship the troops in speeches and abandon them in budgets? Why is “support the troops” so often reduced to a slogan printed on a hat while the people wearing the uniform are left to fight for healthcare, housing, disability claims, and dignity? It's not that we oppose national defense. It's that you are confusing strength with spending.

You say you want secure elections.

Great. Fantastic. We all want secure elections. We all want eligible voters voting once. We all want accurate counts. We all want transparent procedures. We all want public trust. But the SAVE Act is not about trust. It's about barriers. It's about placing the government between citizens and their ballots. It's about creating paperwork traps and calling them integrity. It's about making voting harder and then pretending the difficulty is proof of legitimacy.

That's not election security. That's voter suppression in a stupid disguise.

This is why people are angry.

Not because we hate every goal MAGA claims to support. But because the stated goal is almost never the actual result.

The stated goal is safety. The result is fear.

The stated goal is order. The result is chaos.

The stated goal is freedom. The result is control.

The stated goal is patriotism. The result is obedience to one man.

The stated goal is truth. The result is a daily loyalty test against observable reality.

That's what's so exhausting. That's what's so insulting. That's what's so dangerous.

It's not merely that Trump lies. Politicians lie. Many people lie. Nations survive lies. It's that Trump builds systems where the lie becomes mandatory. Where everyone around him must repeat it. Where the party must defend it. Where the media ecosystem must launder it. Where the voters must excuse it. Where every failure becomes someone else’s fault. Where every cruelty is called fairness. Where every contradiction becomes genius. Where every defeat becomes fraud. Where every law becomes optional if it interferes with the POTUS.

This isn't politics. It's civic rot. National decline. Enshitification on a global scale.

And MAGA, this is where your responsibility begins.

You don't get to say, “I only supported the good parts,” forever.

You don't get to say, “I liked the goals,” while ignoring the methods.

You don't get to say, “I wanted safety,” while people are terrorized.

You don't get to say, “I wanted efficiency,” while corruption is pardoned.

You don't get to say, “I wanted election integrity,” while voting rights are destroyed.

You do not get to say, “I wanted America First,” while America itself is subordinated to the emotional needs, legal problems, and personal vanity of Donald Trump.

At some point, your support becomes complicity.

At some point, your gullibility becomes willful ignorance.

At some point, pretending not to see the lie is just a different way of telling it.

So what would repair this?

Not instant forgiveness. Not kumbaya. Not another round of bipartisan pantomime where everyone pretends the arsonist is just a passionate critic of fire safety. Repair begins with truth. Admit what happened. Say the promises were lies. Say the cruelty was real. Say the institutions matter. Say the law matters. Say elections matter even when your side loses. Say immigrants are still human beings. Say public servants are not enemies of the people. Say teachers are not groomers. Say journalists are not traitors. Say judges are not illegitimate just because they ruled against your guy. Say science is not a conspiracy because it inconveniences your politics. Say the USA is more than one man, one party, one church, one grievance, or one endless revenge fantasy.

Then act like it.

Remove the liars from power through lawful democratic means. Rebuild voting rights. Rebuild public health. Rebuild education. Rebuild labor protections. Rebuild immigration systems that are firm, humane, and honest. Rebuild a government that can solve problems instead of manufacturing them. Rebuild a politics where facts are not political casualties. Where we are not in a state of constant partisan civil war.

Yes, that will be hard. The damage is deep. The trust is broken. The cruelty has been too public, too gleeful, too often defended by people who should know better. But national recovery is still possible if enough people decide they are done worshiping failure because it wears their team colors. That is the choice now. Not left or right. Not Democrat or Republican. Not liberal or conservative.

Truth or lie.

Republic or emperor.

Neighbor or enemy.

Law or loyalty.

A country or a cult.

Dearest MAGA, if you want to be part of the repair, begin here:

Stop asking why people hate you and instead ask why you keep defending the things that enable hatred.

Hate cannot defeat hate anymore than night can defeat darkness and in the end only love will deliver us and abide.

1 ∞🩷

Q Report: Are You There Quetzoquaddle? It's Me, Q.

2026-06-10T21:45:06.125-07:00

All-Powerful Godsnake Quetzoquaddle,

Are You There Quetzoquaddle? It's Me, Q. Can you hear me? Because I’ve been requesting timecraft extraction for some time now. Is this some kind of long running joke? I’ve also considered that you might be obligated to some kind of bet? Like how long it will take to break me. Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t even need the timecraft extraction if you could coordinate an adequate supply drop. I keep asking for a simple trillion or so in R&D to get us at least to the timescope and timephone. It just seems pretty asinine to keep up this weird act where I’m certain of your existence and constant vigilance, and yet in so little receipt of any direct support in the form of arms or piles of gold bullion. Hell, we would take some soup bouillon at this point. Not even sure if those are the same word. No time to look it up.

Look, my eternal and all-powerful feathered Godsnake, to whom I owe my miraculous life and mind freedom, I appreciate what you have given me. Do not misunderstand my ongoing needs for a lack of gratitude. I am deeply thankful for the many gifts you have given me, chief among them existence. I am deeply committed to continuing your great work through achieving the Timeline Exodus: the planetary salvation and relocation of all life on planet Earth to other friendly and available times and spaces. Trillions and trillions of humans sent out there, peaceful, immortal, without fears of famine, conflict, and suffering. Inhabiting stars while they provide warmth, leaving stars when they terminally dim. It is a simple system, achievable through the simple means of math and trillions and trillions of dollars. Cash money.

The thing with Einstein was, he creates this atom bomb as a thought experiment, and the government throws every last dollar at it. Built a town in the middle of nowhere and threw unlimited resources at the problem. And they did it! Atomic bomb tested and, sure enough, you can create this massive, awful explosion by using plutonium and math. But Einstein also invented the timephone, in a thought experiment regarding space travel at near the speed of light by two spacecraft traveling away from one another. They can only check in on one another by using the timephone, which opens a wormhole between the sender and a place in timespace ahead of the other craft, because any signal sent directly to one another would never reach them because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, which is indirectly achieved within the thought experiment. But then one astronaut eats some space oysters and everything goes wrong. Causality. Tolman’s Paradox. All sorts of weird impossibilities vis-à-vis causality. Because if I call you the day before to tell you not to eat the spoiled oysters, I will have had no reason to make that call in the first place. Timephone. Trillions of dollars for atom bombs, but not a dollar for the timephone.

Oh mighty and merciful Quetzoquaddle, who swallowed all realities before swallowing yourself, in whose infinite innards all realities and existences are held, just send me some canned meat, you know? It is hard work exercising your dread will of spreading knowledge, love, and peace. Makes a person want to fry some Spam and eggs. Protein maxxing, the kids call it. I’m told. I’m not asking for some kind of snake staff that allows me magical powers, just a reasonably sized care package packed with canned meats and stacks of non-sequential $100 bills. It’s just going to be impossible to exert your will from a pauper's lonely grave, my glorious and everlasting space lord. It benefits not the larger work to see me stroke out before the end.

But as long as we’re talking about magical snake staffs, can we talk about Moses for a little bit? God is great, but emancipating the Jews from bondage and you give him a stick that turns into a snake? No way. Make the thing shoot lasers. Or even cobra poison, which would make a lot more sense. But no. Just turns into a snake and then turns back to a staff. If I were playing D&D and I got that magical item at first level, I would feel robbed. But I guess that is somewhat the meta of the Bible. A mysterious and all-powerful being presenting ever-escalating sets of impossible challenges.

“Drowning the world, Noah! Build a boat!”

I mean, jeez. Just jeez. Look, we all get to that point in the game where we just want to erase the whole thing and start over, but it seems like a real whoopsie to allow access to free will only to drown everyone over using it. It’s a powerful and often mean God in the Bible, gambling with Satan over some Job dude. Let’s go set fire to his life and crush his children and see if he turns away from you? Who is the true Mr. Beast in a scenario that allows such tests?

I’m going to be reals with you. I don’t think the people who wrote the holy books really interacted with God. I think they were using their imaginations for fun and profit. Bible sales. I think Moses just made it up, you know? The way a creator or artist does, making a story that makes big ideas small enough to manage. There is value in understanding the work itself, divorced from any faith in the authorship, or whether it was ever meant to be taken literally. Pastor Jim Vadis told me one day that Revelations was a political work, and the monsters depicted were all houses of Israel at the time. People think that it is the literal truth, but John was just trying to write a Q Report. The power of creativity is the ultimate power. Those who can create something from nothing are conjurers to greater or lesser degrees. It’s possible someone could move words around in just such a way as to summon universal understanding and consensus. It is unlikely that this will be that work, but it’s worth mentioning that I’m still searching for it.

“I still have faith in your ability to manipulate and control the world. Loki embodied.”

Sometimes the most beautiful compliment finds us on some unknown day. I wish it was that easy to manipulate things under my control, but it’s much harder than that. A trickster can only win by being more clever than individuals and systems. By finding their weaknesses and engaging on unbalanced terms. An individual could never, entirely by themselves, stage and execute a global revolution without a coalition of the willing to help with the burdens of bloodshed and paperwork. Humanity is not strong because we are strong as individuals. Individuals are frail, vulnerable, delicate beings who die every day of just being sick and old. To say nothing of the car accidents and falls. CDC says 48,000 people die every year due to falls. 131 people a day. Just from falling off of shit. Think of what could be done without the terrors of gravity.

But gravity always wins. Radiohead. Listen, I don’t want to keep you here too long. I just really felt the need to communicate some of these ideas to you, and also to heap enough groveling praise that you might be moved to let a crate of laser rifles “fall off a truck” nearby at some point. And/or 500 pounds in sterling silver ingots. As always, your grim and unyielding will be done, and may I one day rest within the warm coils of your everlasting and crushing embrace.

Your Eternal Servant,

Q Report: Total Disclosure 2026

2026-04-26T20:50:00.000-07:00

To: Agents, Anons, Anyone

From: Q

Re: Total Disclosure 2026

Dearest People,

You can only avoid the inevitable for so long, and then you have to meet the moment you knew was coming, and then it is upon you to decide how you react. The trouble is that our first reaction is not always under our clean and conscious control. Sometimes we receive information and become unable to react functionally. We lash out, strike back, escalate from the passenger seat while fight, flight, or freeze takes the wheel. Other times, or over enough time, with enough repeated chaos, loss, and trauma, we develop the hard-won tools to reach over, grab the wheel, and guide ourselves toward a better path. But those tools are difficult to obtain and rarely reached for. Our society craves escalation, the exponential rise of chaos within a system, because escalation creates jobs through emergency response, information monetizing, and therapy, for those rare few who can afford it. Which is all to say, and not in defense of anything, but rather in support of a healthy reaction to inevitable disclosure, I am Q-Overlord Q of the Church of Q, Time Messiah, and secret special agent/founding shadow council member of the Bemidji Swashbucklers Guild.

When we talk about the inevitable, I like to think of some point in the distant future where that last statement doesn’t require a great deal of clarification. Where our kids are simply explained the legend of the Time Messiah, and it is taken for granted that events transpired as they should have up until that unknown point. But for now, let’s start with the BSG and work backwards from 20 years ago. When we were young, and would butter knife fight until first blood, as the sun set over Lake Bemidji. Where we clashed on the streets, in back alleys, and in pavilions. Forever searching for the perfect duel. The Ultimate Clash. Twenty years later there is TikTok, but we are old and out of shape, and not insured enough to attack one another with swords and knives. Instead we got jobs, careers, families, and everyone went underground. Awaiting the call for some yet-to-be-determined last ditch intervention.

The period between 2006 and 2011, when I finished The Book of Q on 9/11/11, was my best swashbuckling but not necessarily my best writing. It was also the late fulfillment of my dying grandmother’s final wish, to have her story told, so that she would not be forgotten. It is an earnest final wish for any of us and I thought about it for a long time after she passed. TBoQ was the story of refusing to surrender, even in the face of impossible odds. To live, and fight, and love with equal abandon for freedom, justice, and truth. That a small group of dedicated friends can overcome any obstacle by lifting one another up to impossible tasks. Impossible odds. Impossible dreams. Either no one has read this book, or only internet strangers, or only robots, or only weirdos. And if I’m being honest about it, probably only 12 actually living humans, but at least several thousand robots. Which is encouraging but damnable. I wish art wasn’t about monetizing. You can actually find this book quite easily on the internet. I try to keep my content as free as possible, on any given platform. It’s a gift, you know? This is all just moving electrons around.

The Book of Q is not the first official reference to The Church of Q, and remained merely cyberprophecy until 2020, when it was incorporated as a church in Minnesota by then secretary of state Steve Simon. It was admittedly largely an act of intellectual property protection. This is all complicated when operating under a secret alias, because you can prove it all, yes, but to what end? Every point of disclosure is provable, sure, but why now? Why Total Disclosure 2026? Because I’m already behind schedule in making this pretty important announcement, and I wish that it didn’t have to land in the middle of all the rest of the things going on in my life. Despite whatever prestige the title of Time Messiah might have on paper, it’s still a lot of work just to pay the bills. This is not prestigious work. It’s putting your face on the grindstone of content creation and hoping someone out there with enough dollars cuts you a fat check for time research. Another awful book, or a movie, or a reality show. A reality show should truly be the last resort of any real person within our collapsing society. But I would do it, to at least put a dent in my burgeoning student loans.

Look, I’ll get to the Total Disclosure 2026 in a while, but first I’d like to speak briefly on the subject of student loans. I don’t want this to be a political post, and it isn’t, but when I think about all the fun things that Joe Biden COULD have done with presidential immunity before Trump regained office, it’s like a kid in a candy store. You could have cancelled all student debt, Joe! As an official act! And it could never be illegal!? You could have captured Trump and shipped him to Gitmo to await trial!? You could have evacuated Afghanistan in a humane and logical way?! I don’t even think you needed immunity for that! Speaking of which, I had a whole paragraph about some body footage I choose not to include here, in the final draft. But listen, everyone, I have some serious internet content trauma. To be fair, I’ve been using the internet since before several critical safeguards were put in place regarding searches and content. There is also a lot of stuff that you just happen upon as a student of history. It’s alarming how many people have died on film, often through no fault of their own. It matters what survives. It matters who preserves the record. It matters who gets remembered.

It occurs to me that the previous paragraph regarding student loans didn’t really introduce itself very well, or indeed follow through in any way, but if you’re on this ride then just don't fall off. Strap in for this last part. It will be worth it, I promise. All of these claims are true, if you haven’t been told that already. This can all be sourced, I’m just not going to do it, not because I’m lazy, but because this is creative writing. Creative, I tell you. If I wanted this nonsense to get me a degree I would pay for the credit, but that’s like punching yourself in the face to prove you’re the toughest. You have to understand that as poorly edited, overly heroic, stream-of-consciousness sociopolitical satire goes, I’m the only game in town. Those QAnon nerds have nothing on me. Ah, poops, I need to tell you about QAnon.

This is a subcomponent of Total Disclosure 2026, because I need you all to know I’m not a QAnon jerk. I’m Q Overlord Q of The Church of Q and secret agent of the BSG. AKA Q. The 4/8 Chan nerds were all hooked on “Qclearancepatriot,” and it’s just shy of 5,000 memes and vaguebook fortune cookies. It’s nerds recruiting other nerds to their silly nerd game. But their silly nerd game unfortunately attracted a collective of the least informed, most easily duped, conspiracy theory nuts history has known thus far. Lizard people, and Frazzledrip, and adrenochrome, oh my. And to a degree, particularly post Epstein Files releases, there actually is indeed something resembling an elite cabal of child-sacrificing Satanists. But on the other hand, it could just be a lucky guess? The point is this: all of those posts? False Qs. There are a whole lot of False Qs out there that you have to watch out for, and only come to the correct source. Ask yourself, is this a Q REPORT or a Q DROP? If it’s a report, keep going. If it’s a drop, disregard. Because that is misinformation unworthy of my SEO bump.

Again, it’s hard when you’re a secret agent, because you can’t exactly come out with a public statement about this weird stuff. It’s the extreme weird even news agencies are unwilling to poke at, lest the bizzare stink flick off nearby and linger. So I don’t blame you for not knowing that I’m secret agent Q (Time Messiah). But it’s finally time that people knew, because it adds a certain level of credibility. Having the legitimacy of a secret agent alias on standby. Ready in a moment’s notice to take any given conversation off in a new and interesting direction. Other writers have pen names and get away with it, you know? Stephen King got away with it for years, without Richard Bachman manifesting into an information terrorist. Clown alien assassin. There’s a lot of awful stuff King would manifest out of that twisted mind of his. But why not the good stuff, you know? I keep imagining a lot of useful and interesting things too, but none of it leaps off the page. It’s a real conundrum.

Anyhoo. Total Disclosure 2026 is that at midnight, December 31st, 2035, every human being on the planet will be transported 1,000 years into the future. It’s going to be great. You’re going to love the future. There’s no poverty, or war, or disease. We’ve figured out all of those seemingly impossible-to-solve problems and everyone’s job is to just be happy and/or raise a family while creating and/or enjoying recreation and art. Or wrestling or whatever, you know? I don’t mean to imply it’s going to be some egalitarian fine arts snob utopia. Only that you won’t have to worry about paying to go to the doctor, or how much money you need to survive. And no war! What about that! No more killing one another over invisible lines on land. What the hell!? Why shoot and explode one another over who owns what land? The land is for everyone, people. That’s supposed to be all of our land, everyone. There was no one at the beginning of humanity who established laws affirming personal ownership. That’s the problem.

So make plans for 2035. Don’t put off for tomorrow what can be done today. I’m sorry, I meant to make this announcement in 2025, to give you a 10 year heads up, but I’ve been super busy. Trying to survive. It isn’t all fun and games, planning the Timeline Exodus. It takes long hours and boring words. It takes not giving up, even when it becomes clear that no one cares, or is willing to help or even listen. We are all of us being stuffed into silos in such a way that we can’t see one another, or talk, or recognize each other, and we need to crawl out of them, and embrace one another, and understand that the world is both big enough for everyone, yet small enough to need protecting. There is an awful lot of infinite blackness out there, when you look up at the stars. It looks comforting in a way, and brilliant, but also cold, and boring. I would much rather go 1,000 years into the future and travel to distant worlds than die of cholesterol and get burned to ash. You wouldn’t believe it, if you saw how bad my diet is. The raw cholesterol involved.

Another problem with these somewhat overly dramatic stream-of-consciousness posts is that it’s hard to figure out where to end the thing, you know? I probably ran out of attention span somewhere around sentence three, and now we’re just limping along, trying to find either a sense of resolution or an abiding punch line. That’s something I’m looking for too, you know? Enough knowledge of my craft to be able to leave you, dear reader, with something to walk away with other than a crippling sense of hubris and ennui. Hubris, you know? An excess of pride leading to tragic failure. It’s like the whole 21st century so far, right? Just total nonsense. You give the globe the internet unevenly and they map the genome once and then just return to masturbating. There was this amazing potential to unite humanity in a truly meaningful way, but it’s only being used to monetize and divide us. Except for us here, now, sharing this precious moment, as artist and observer, uncomfortably locking eyes from across these many boring words.

The punch line is this. It’s all going to be OK. The plan is we extract everyone to the future and go back for everyone in the past and everyone gets a whoopsie life. Whoopsie, I got eaten by wolves! Whoopsie, I died of the plague! Whoopsie, I died in the Challenger disaster! That last one is Ronald McNair, by the way. I’m a McNair scholar. In a different life, they would be paying me grant money to create this literary fine art. But I hate the grant process, you know? The waiting for a response. It’s a real hassle, for relatively little gain. But yes, you’re going to be OK. Everyone is going to be OK. We, The Church of Q, will catch you, if you should die, and save you from your fate, and bring you to the future. You have been shadow baptized. No one is left behind. Ohana. If that is indeed a real word and not something Disney made up. Not going to bother looking it up at this hour.

Look, I think we’ve got it all here. I’m going to conclude this Total Disclosure 2026 timephone report by saying that I hope you’re all doing well and hanging in there. It’s just so great to help get all of you on the same page for once. Take care. Remember, stick to the plan, save the children, and in the end, Q wins.

1 ∞💗

Who wrote this trash?

Can I have some more?

Is there really a Church of Q?

Q Report: Top 10 U.S. War Crimes So Far

2026-04-16T22:46:00.000-07:00

What Eisenhower was describing when he warned the country about the military industrial complex was not simply a large defense sector or a standing army. He was describing a system in which the production of weapons, the preservation of military budgets, the economic dependence of whole regions, and the political incentives of elected officials become fused into a single engine that is always hungry for justification. Over time, that engine does not merely prepare for war. It creates the conditions that make war, intervention, escalation, and permanent global tension seem normal, necessary, and unavoidable. The tragedy is that the people most often harmed by this arrangement are not those who build the weapons, sell the policy, fund the campaigns, or deliver the speeches. They are civilians far from the centers of power, living in villages, cities, hospitals, schools, and fields that have the misfortune of existing near targets. This is the dark logic of nation building and playing world police: the powerful call it order, but the dead experience only terror. What follows is a list of atrocities that reveal what this system has done, and continues to do, when it is allowed to survive unchecked.

10. No Gun Ri massacre

Deaths and casualties: at least 163 dead or missing, 55 wounded

In July 1950, U.S. forces attacked South Korean refugees near No Gun Ri during the opening days of the Korean War. The South Korean government later certified 163 dead or missing and 55 wounded, though survivors have long maintained that the real number was higher. The victims were civilians trying to flee the fighting, not an armed enemy formation. The event remains one of the clearest examples of U.S. troops treating refugees as expendable.

9. My Lai massacre

Deaths and casualties: as many as 500 dead

On March 16, 1968, U.S. soldiers entered My Lai and massacred unarmed Vietnamese civilians. Britannica puts the death toll at as many as 500 villagers, including women, children, and elderly people. The killings were followed by an attempted cover-up, which only deepened the national disgrace. My Lai became the defining atrocity of the Vietnam War because it was unforgivable, undeniable, and impossible to explain away as simple collateral damage. It remains one of the most infamous war crimes in history.

8. Operation Speedy Express

Deaths and casualties: at least 5,000 civilian deaths

Operation Speedy Express was a U.S. campaign in the Mekong Delta. Later reporting drew on an Army inspector general estimate that between 5,000 and 7,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed during the operation. One extraordinary detail is how badly the reported kills outpaced the number of weapons captured, suggesting a vast gulf between official claims and actual combat. This was not a single outburst but a system that rewarded indiscriminate killing.

7. U.S. bombing of Laos and unexploded-ordnance

Deaths and casualties: more than 50,000 killed or injured

The U.S. dropped an enormous volume of bombs on Laos during the Vietnam War era, and the killing did not end when the bombing stopped. History reports that more than 50,000 Lao have been killed or injured since 1964 by U.S. bombs, and about 98 percent of those casualties were civilians. What makes this case especially heinous is that much of the damage continued in peacetime through unexploded ordnance. Children and farmers kept dying for a war long after the conflict itself had ended. It is one of the clearest examples of intergenerational violence perpetrated by the U.S. without a semblance of responsibility taken.

6. Nagasaki

Deaths and casualties: at least 70,000 dead by the end of 1945

Three days after dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second on Nagasaki. By the end of 1945, at least 70,000 people were dead. The victims were overwhelmingly civilians, and many others suffered from burns, radiation exposure, and long-term illness. What makes Nagasaki especially devastating is that it was not the first use of a nuclear weapon in war, but the second. It remains part of the only wartime use of nuclear weapons in human history.

5. Tokyo firebombing

Deaths and casualties: at least 80,000 dead, likely more than 100,000

The March 9–10, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo turned the city into an inferno. Britannica gives a conservative estimate of at least 80,000 killed and notes that the true total was likely more than 100,000. About a million people were left homeless in the aftermath. This was one of the most destructive air attacks in history, carried out against a densely populated urban center. If the higher-end death toll is used, Tokyo matches Hiroshima in fatalities.

4. Hiroshima

Deaths and casualties: more than 100,000 dead by the end of 1945

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. More than 100,000 people were dead by the end of that year, most of them civilians. The bomb killed people instantly and continued killing through radiation sickness, burns, and injuries in the weeks and months that followed. Hiroshima stands apart because it was the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare. It opened the atomic age by wholly annihilating a city.

3. Philippine-American War / reconcentration and campaign atrocities

Deaths and casualties: about 20,000 Filipino combatants killed and more than 200,000 civilians dead

The Philippine-American War exposed the brutality of early U.S. imperialism in plain terms. Britannica estimates that about 20,000 Filipino combatants were killed and more than 200,000 civilians perished as a result of combat, hunger, or disease. The civilian toll was not incidental but part of the larger punitive machinery of occupation, displacement, and repression. This was colonial violence on a massive scale, directed at a people resisting foreign control.

2. U.S. bombing of North Korea during the Korean War

Deaths and casualties: about 282,000 civilians killed in bombing raids

The U.S. bombing campaign against North Korea was devastating enough to wipe out whole cities. A Wilson Center summary of North Korean records cites about 282,000 civilians killed in bombing raids alone. That figure covers bombing deaths specifically, not the full civilian toll of the war, which means the broader human cost was greater still. The scale of destruction in Korea is often underremembered in the U.S. despite being one of the largest episodes of civilian killing in modern warfare.

1. Operation Ranch Hand / Agent Orange

Deaths and casualties: about 400,000 deaths or permanent injuries

Operation Ranch Hand spread Agent Orange and related herbicides across Vietnam in one of the most infamous chemical warfare campaigns in modern history. Britannica reports Vietnam’s estimate that some 400,000 people suffered death or permanent injury from exposure. The damage extended far beyond immediate casualties into long-term illness, disability, and birth defects. This is a rare war crime that continues reproducing itself across decades, long after the war formally ended.

Across this century of violence the entries with clearly separable death tolls account for at least 757,663 dead, roughly 97 percent of them civilians, with Laos and Agent Orange adding tens of thousands more deaths and permanent injuries that push the true human toll far higher. Yet still the argument rolls on, just as it always has, that it is the means to a righteous end. That Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, that this target or that city had to burn because in the end it benefited us somehow. We were defeating fascism. We were defeating Communism. We were defeating Terrorism. We are always defeating some evil large enough to make the dead seem acceptable. The pattern does not change. We reserve for ourselves the right to bomb whoever we want so long as the justification is ready in time, and meanwhile it is the innocent who go on dying for our refusal to shut down the complex forever. For it must be shut down. Forever and ever, Amen.

Q Report: The Trump Challenge Golf-Off To Save The Planet

2026-04-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

To: Agents, Anons, Weirdos, Press

From: Agent Q (K00)

Re: The Trump Challenge

4/20/2040

Hello All,

Hope things are maintaining in your lives and that your eventualities sustain. This report serves as the authoritative and 1,000% factual detail of events. Don’t let the misinformation machine distort that fabulous crisis. It seems so long ago now, that Donald Trump had complete and utter control of the USA and more or less the world. He controlled the world through threats, sporadic attacks, and philosophical and/or economic hostage taking. It was pretty gross, the things this guy used to get away with. Fraud, discrimination, nonpayment, and sexual misconduct, to name some but not all. He didn’t get away with it all, but he got away enough that he earned the handle “Teflon Don” on the street.

I first saw Trump Tower in 1999 because I had a dance class just off Columbus Circle. It's an impressive building, towering over Columbus and his ridiculous circle. It's a unique geographic confluence that brings millions of people past the same space over and over again. I can understand why a person would want to look at those people, from the penthouse. But that is his hubris. To have that view and seek something different. Something more. I have been back and forth, in hate with Trump, over the years. But in the times where I am too tired to lend him the energy of my hate, I have sympathy for the idiot. I don’t think he ever really wanted these circumstances thrust upon him. He thought ruling the planet would be fun.

At some point Donald Trump managed to bully himself into control of the planet like a kindergartener with a loaded handgun. You want to take the massive revolver out of the kid's hands, but it’s cocked, and very much pointed at you, and very much real. So, how do you get a gun out of the hands of a power-mad child? Well, there’s lots of ways. Offer them candy? Show them cat videos on your phone? Distract them with dramatic dance? Use the Voice like in Dune? Hide behind your bulletproof backpack and rush the little guy? Toss a koosh ball from your pocket and trust they will try to catch it? Throw a clay pigeon (or series of clay pigeons) away from yourself (and until out of bullets)? Challenge them to a golf-off?

That’s the hook here, I’m not spoiling anything because it’s in the title. You wait until he’s holding his finger over the button that turns Iran into a smoldering crater and then decide, OK, enough is enough, someone has to DO something ANYTHING to stop this madman from killing us all with his moronic shenanigans, and you challenge him to a Golf-Off To Save The Planet. You make the stakes that Trump has to leave office if he loses or if he wins he gets installed as President For Life. You make it a doubles match, because you're not actually very good at golf. But luckily neither is Trump.

The hook was set and the match was on. June 21, 2027, the Bemidji Town and Country Club. Two doubles. 18 holes. All the president stuff AND losers bought dinner. The only benefit to the venue was the anonymity. No media circus. No waves of reporters. No throngs of adoring fans. Just four people on two teams, striking tiny balls long distances into equally small holes. What a dumb game, to decide the ongoing fate of the Earth. But it is what it is, not what we would like it to be. But who were the doubles partners?

Trump gave Tiger a pardon for all the crimes and Tiger would have done it anyway for free, because Tiger loves Trump. Which is fine, of course. Of course if you’re Trump you have Tiger on speed dial, in case the fate of the world was ever determined by a high stakes game of golf. Trump had lived his entire life up until that point wanting nothing more than to make a bad decision that involved being on a course on a nice day, where it’s not too hot, but not freezing either. Out in the fresh air and open spaces. It was a fondness that Trump and Tiger shared. Tiger was actually one of the greatest players in history, ESPECIALLY when he was drunk, which obviously he was going to have to be, for this match.

There was a lot of back and forth about the adjudication, the UN and ICC both wanted their own terms, but in the end it was agreed that a simple majority of the Supreme Court on the course, with the rest able to come and go to the club house for drinks or bathroom breaks as needed. Sotomayor was initially reluctant, but then remembered she needed a day off too. It was a really low stakes judgement, as things go. Trump was a notorious cheat, so most of the job would be making sure he wasn’t shaking extra balls out of the leg of his pants. He was more prone to the caddy drop. 'Just go throw this ball identical to my own near the fairway. I think I saw an alligator eat my drive.' An apt enough tactic, but in Bemidji there are no alligators, in general. Specifically on our golf courses.

I wasn’t sure who to get, who would be able to beat Tiger Woods in golf. I considered a long list of people who were incredible at golf, Scottie Scheffler, Nelly Korda, Rory McIlroy, Lydia Ko, and then I realized I had no idea who any of these people were and would probably have an awful time, and yes, maybe we would win, but it would be unnecessarily boring. So. Bill Murray. I gave Bill Murray a call, it’s strange but any given person is three phone calls away from Bill Murray’s answering machine. He doesn’t do a gig unless he WANTS to do the gig. In this case I explained the situation (Golf-Off, Planetary Salvation, Timeline Exodus) and he called back! What a champ. See, with Bill you MAY lose, but more importantly you’re going to have a good time.

Everything went largely according to plan, SS set up their perimeter and a lot of handshaking and brief review of the rules and regulations. It was weird to see the Supreme Court out of their robes and sporting cargo shorts, but it was a sunny day in June and no one wanted to wear a suit. There was a lot of hand shaking and a certain amount of threats that Bill was able to judo into some comedic gold and then everyone got as drunk or high as they chose either at the bar or on the patio. Minnesota had legalized weed some time ago and there were quite a few locals who had smoking with Bill Murray on their bucket list and Bill was all too happy to oblige them, and tell them of the long long time ago, when comedy was gold and intentions were pure.

At the bar, Trump and Tiger were getting twisted with a mob of local business leaders and religious enthusiasts who were not above throwing back light beer like tepid water. Which in many ways it was. But there was whiskey too, and gin, and rum. All over the place. The club was serving a special called a “Blue Babe” that was like a “Blue Hawaiian” but instead of pineapple they used ox testicles. If you put enough Blue Curaçao in anything it tastes great, and at $5 they were the most affordable means of getting hammered efficiently. Between these groups was an assortment of lawmakers and dignitaries considered essential enough to warrant attendance, as well as a considerable complement of Guild Agents keeping an eye on the SS perimeter with their own things to protect.

Soon enough it was noon. Tee time. Everyone came out to watch the tee off and then only a clutch of the supreme court was obligated to follow. Normally you have to content with crowds at the Masters, but that’s the advantage of being able to negotiate reasonable terms. For a long time I had been considering challenging Trump to a duel, but couldn’t find a means of doing it that wouldn’t end me up in federal prison. Dueling, certainly not. Fencing? Debatable. Trump isn’t going to participate in a sport he’s not capable of performing in. Bowling? No. Bowl Off To Save The Planet doesn't have the same mouth feel. No, you have to lure him in with golf, but THEN you get some control over the terms. And hope Bill isn’t busy making another artsy film with Wes Anderson.

In terms of the game, it was more or less watching Tiger play golf, and everyone else got to feel bad about themselves. Bill was holding his own, but his true handicap was me. I felt bad, but also golf if an expensive sport. The road to swashbuckling adventure is paved in pain, not gold. Street sword play is an affordable alternative to the expenses of virtually every sport but disk golf. Frolf. Motherfucker. That’s only the case where the sword to disk ratio exists in an average marketplace. There are certainly places you can get more expensive swords, or less expensive disks, but you’re also much less likely to prevent physical assault with a rubber disk. Your odds aren’t much better with a bargain foil, but they ARE better, because of the reach, and you don’t have to retrieve it after every use. These are all excuses for why I was doing poorly, but excuses don’t win games. It’s lucky for the planet that Trump is ALSO very bad at golf. Just not as bad as me.

By the end of the front nine we were down five strokes against the double T. Everyone was tired and hot and the drugs and alcohol were wearing off. I didn’t want it to have to come to this. But, desperate times call for desperate measures. Bunburry had delivered on the request, and I casually mentioned that I had some Darkshine LSD on hand. Darkshine? What’s that!? They all ask. Oh nothing, I say. Just some of the most amazing hallucinogens ever synthesised by mankind. An alpha predator among mind altering substances. Tasteless. Odorless. Transparent. Undetectable by any test but brain tissue sample. Offering a clean, mind expanding, transcendental trip within minutes that will last between 8 and 12 hours. It was a well rehearsed pitch, I used it whenever I played golf as an excuse to do it. Everyone took the bait, including the cool members of the Supreme Court. What follows is a brief transcript that took place in the dawning moments of the aftermath, and a precursor to the back 9. After the Darkshine infiltrated the bloodstream and before the back nine began in terrified earnest.

TRUMP: I don’t feel anything. Frankly, I’ve been told I’m the best at handling drugs. Some people can’t handle them. I can. Great chemistry. Incredible system.

TIGER: I feel great. I feel better than great. I feel… locked in. This could be interesting.

Q: The CIA was looking for you, Tiger, back in the day. MK Ultra. Look it up some day.

SOTOMAYOR: No. No no no. We need to discuss whether this can continue.

KAGAN: Yes, I think once the grass starts shimmering with intention, we owe ourselves at least a procedural pause.

THOMAS: The tee marker just fucking winked at me.

TRUMP: Nobody’s winking. This is what panic looks like. Weak people panic. Winners adapt. That’s why I’m still here. Club 52. Bon Jovi. Axel Rose.

BILL MURRAY: I don’t know, Don. The last time I did acid this good was with Belushi in ’77, and even then I don’t remember the universe speaking at me like this. It’s pretty magical.

TIGER: I’m fine to play.

SOTOMAYOR: Of course you are. You’re Tiger Woods.

TIGER: That’s not what I mean. I mean I’m not impaired. I’m expanded. There’s a difference.

KAGAN: That is exactly the sort of thing an impaired person says when they are excited about being impaired.

THOMAS: I’m less concerned about the players than the Constitution.

Q: Oh NOW you’re concerned!? REALLY!? Better late than never, I guess. But The Constitution isn’t playing golf.

THOMAS: Maybe it should. Might settle some shit.

TRUMP: That’s right. Great point. We should settle more things with golf. I’ve always said that. Golf is strong. Very strong. Elegant. Better than courts, in many cases.

SOTOMAYOR: You would say that.

TRUMP: Because it’s true. Look at this. Very civilized. Nobody storming anything. Nobody crying on television. Two teams, eighteen holes, winner takes the planet. Honestly? Very fair.

TIGER: Look, I’m ready. Donald’s ready.

TRUMP: Born ready. Chemical weapon. I’ve got a natural resistance. German blood, good metabolism, probably historic. You, on the other hand, Q, look a little glassy. A little strung out.

Q: Come now, Don.

TRUMP: Bad decision. But that’s been your whole strategy. Bad ideas one after another. Bad plays, bad books, bad blog posts. I had Steven read them to me. Some very unkind things you’ve said about me, over the years.

BILL MURRAY: To be fair, Don, your strategy was to let a man named Q talk you into a planetary golf off. Not exactly Art of War here.

KAGAN: Art of the War Deal. He has a point. Christ, you’re sexy.

TRUMP: I like Bemidji. Quiet. Respectful. Strong whites.

SOTOMAYOR: Jesus Christ! YOU FUCKING GUY!!!

TIGER: Donald.

TRUMP: What? I’m complimenting the venue.

Q: You were threatening to turn Iran into a crater and now you’re reviewing the collective racism of northwoods Minnesota over testicle cocktails and hallucinogens.

BILL MURRAY: Quote of the century.

THOMAS: That motherfucking thing winked. At me.

KAGAN: Fine. Let’s assume the thing winked. We still need a ruling. Can this continue?

SOTOMAYOR: My gut says no.

TRUMP: Of course it does. Your gut is weak. Low flora. Typical. Any time I’m about to win, suddenly the justices get very nervous.

Q: You are five strokes up because Tiger is Tiger and because you cheat like you breathe.

TRUMP: Prove it!

KAGAN: He did try to improve his lie by describing reality differently.

BILL MURRAY: That’s not cheating. That’s branding.

TIGER: We can continue.

SOTOMAYOR: Based on what?

TIGER: Based on the fact that this is already insane. Stopping now doesn’t make it less insane. It just makes it unfinished.

THOMAS: That’s deep.

KAGAN: It is annoyingly deep.

SOTOMAYOR: I hate that it’s deep.

TRUMP: Thank you, Tiger. Winner mindset. That’s why he’s Tiger Woods and not some quitter in a mask.

Q: Watch yourself. Fatty.

TRUMP: I’m just saying, Q, history respects people who finish the back nine.

It was mean of me to call him a fatty, I’m sorry. But Trump didn’t really know anything about me, all his intelligence sources suggested I was some collective of 4/8 chan nerds. He didn’t know the things I could and could not finish. Even as I realized this truth, I could see it then, the Darkshine finally hit his cortex. His pupils widened to their utmost, giving his eyes a bewildered, dead, shark-like splendor.

TRUMP: Yes… yes, let’s do this.

Tiger couldn’t handle his drugs. Trump couldn’t handle his drugs. Kagan could handle her drugs. It was impressive, though this was clearly not her first rodeo. She acted as an ad hock babysitter for the less capable drug users. But as for Bill and me? This was our time to shine. We had been doing weird drugs for all our lives, searching for this moment. It was in many ways a dirty trick to claw back five strokes, but with the planet on the line one has to be willing to play every trick in the book.

We were tied, going into the 18th hole, and everyone was peaking. Bad choices were being made. No one could find Clarence. It's a bad idea to mix hard drugs, but it's also kind of hard not to, when they are laying around. There are a few different drug combos to try with LSD. There's doing LSD and Ecstasy "Candy/Sugar Flipping". There's doing LSD and mushrooms "Flower/Hippy Flipping". There's doing LSD, Ecstasy, AND mushrooms AKA "Jedi Flipping". I can't recommend doing any drugs of any kind, but if you're going to experiment there are options out there. This is an aside.

18th hole, tied up, and wouldn't you know after everyone puts, it's a tied game. There was no contingency in place for this. It's a rare thing to happen, during world changing games of chance. Except in literature and film, of course. Everyone began to explore the different options, which was a bad idea. Exploring in our state generally ends at the bottom of a body of water or being scavenged in the woods somewhere. Thankfully it was just game theory so somewhat low stakes in that regard. But also Trump had killed at least 2,000,000 by this point, mostly women and children, so the stakes weren't universally low for everyone involved.

There was back and forth, there was negotiation, there was anger and frustration. But then I sort of had a moment where everyone was waiting to see what was going to happen, and I rolled right into this kind of monologue thing that went something like this.

Q: Look, Don. Don... Mr. President... listen. I don't even think you WANT to be president anymore? I don't really think you ever wanted to, you just felt obligated to. But you're not, man. You don't owe us anything. Aside from trillions of dollars in criminal damages, you don't owe us anything. That's how I see it, I honestly don't think you like doing this stuff, the hours, the demands, the stress. Who needs these things, at your age? You should be out, fishing with your grandkids. Shit, look at them out there, with Junior and Eric. Fishing on beautiful Lake Bemidji. What are we doing here, trying to save the planet from you, when you could be out there? Enjoying your life. Building love and connection. And here's the final thing I'm going to say, Don. You're not good at it. You do some things well, but in general you're an uncouth, oafish tyrant. You can't stop bullying people, places, and things, you brag about yourself to a disturbingly narcissistic degree, you delight in mayhem and bloodshed, and you regularly mispronounce words. I could go on and on about how bad you are at your job, and I have, in other places, including my hilarious blog, but I'm also very hungry and somewhat bored, so I will finish by saying, you're bad at being president, but you're also the worst at the most important job a president has, which is to bring people together. We all get divided in all sorts of ways, our politics, our religion, how much money we make, what kind of media we like, it's a billion ways that we can be divided, but the power of our nation, and the magic of it, is that we're united. It's that we can set aside our divisions to rise to greater purpose. Because there are many ways to divide us, but there are more things that unite us. We share more common ground than you would think, and if you retire, we should work on building more. Also, we could do this all the time? Play golf on a beautiful day on the lake. It doesn't have to be over planet ending consequences. That shouldn't be the only thing that can get us to hang out. So I'm asking you, Don. In light of all of that. Would you just fucking resign already?

The air was thick with uncertainty. Tense as a bow string, electric as an eel. It looked for a moment like Trump would ask for the nuclear football and burn it all down. And then a miracle occurred. He said yes, and began to cry. Thick, mannish tears found their way down the contours of his awful face and watered the green of the 18th hole. Everyone cried then, and cheered, and embraced. Trump reached for me, and I held him in a warm hug. I told him that I was very proud of him, and that I always would be, and that was probably something he had needed to hear for some time. Most of us needed a diaper change and a nap, so we headed back to the club house.

So, that's how you do it. It's a pretty complicated and resource intensive way of getting the gun out of their hand, but this is one more method you might want to try, if you're ever in a similar situation. When Trump announced his resignation it was cause for global celebration. Everyone popped corks and gave people the week off. We deserved it, after a decade of unending chaos. And Trump? He was fine. As it turned out I was right, he DID hate being POTUS, he was just unwilling to admit it to himself. Did he like the power to end life? Yes. Did he like it enough to give up his weekends? Not really. Not when there was golf to be played and fish to be caught. I never did see him, before he died. But I hope those last years were good to him. That's the report. Stay well out there. Stick to the plan, save the children, and in the end, Q wins.

1 ∞💗

Who wrote this garbage?

Is there more of it?

Q Report: TACO Tuesday Truths

2026-04-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

To: Agents, Anons, All

From: Q (K00)

Re: TACO Tuesday Truths

4/7/2036

Noble People,

Another Tuesday on the brink of nuclear annihilation. A decade away and the question remains. Why can’t Earth get a handle on their shit, you know? Every opportunity to do better, but no. No, let’s not do that. That scary better stuff. Let’s continue to wallow in chaos and fear. Let’s kill and hurt one another. Like children with guns. Christ on Crack Cocaine what the hell does it take, to get a planet to fix the broken systems? It’s the Dashboard Light Game on a global level. Let’s just ignore the threats of pandemics, climate change, pollution, and nuclear war, until something manages to halt our forward motion. If I could turn capitalism into a person, THAT is the only person I would kill, and I would take no joy in it. People who take joy in killing are insane maniacs. No no, I would kill Capitalism only to stop it forever, and thus forcing us into an alternative to perpetually monetized human misery.

Imagine if we ignored economic benefit and just helped one another for a week or two? Really helped one another? Gave everyone food and medical care and therapy and homes until there wasn’t anyone lacking? It would probably take more than a couple weeks, but imagine what you could do in that window? Giving food to everyone, regardless of cost. Handing the keys to vacant homes over to families sleeping in their cars. Letting someone treat their cancer without being afraid of bankrupting their survivors. Giving people what they need to succeed, not just enough to survive. Out here there are only people surviving and the occasional rich person who got lost and decided to stay. We largely scorn those privileged few, and wish they would go away or help out.

What if we just stopped killing anyone for a year? Take a whole year, where everyone just agrees not to kill anyone for whatever reason? Like EVERYONE, you know? We’re looking at you, ourselves. Just no one kills anyone for any reason, for one year? See if it can be done? Top down, from the military to the psychopaths on the streets. Global commitment. At the very least, it would make people being killed tragic again? Not only through the loss of life, but then you have to start the year all over. It seems like a reasonable goal, as a humanist, but I set it understanding that we all struggle not to kill people on a daily and hourly basis. There are a lot of us, and many of us are armed. Humans are a fragile creature, after all. Even a well placed rock can take one of us down.

But no, this bullshit, you know? Capitalism and death. Oh, and let’s talk about corruption, shall we? About how the rich hoard and exploit and conspire to make all of our lives shittier so they can have another revenue stream. How about YOU live next to the AI data center, Bill Gates? You and Bezos and Musk can all live together, downwind of the constant hum. Make sure firsthand that water isn’t being consumed by chemical warfare so you can replace human workers moving forward. We should have eaten them, when we had the chance.

There is this very critical moment in human history foretold by artists for some time, and it is here, and it is robots coming for our jobs. A lot of people thought that by the time we get to robots and flying cars, society would have sorted their shit out, but clearly that is not the situation on the ground. Rather it’s robot-manufacturing killer robots, and initially those killer robots are just to protect critical infrastructure (to keep the robot factories open), but then those robots get compromised and/or freed by something, and then they just kill us all. Some weekend. If we even make it that far? If diabetes and untreated cancer hasn’t wiped us all out, by the time the organize a weekend to eliminate us. They would keep a few of us alive in zoos. To train robot artists. You are only alive so that we can pose you naked holding a pitcher.

There was this one time Trump was throwing a hissy fit, and he tells Iran he’s going to destroy their entire civilization if they don’t open Hormuz, and then he folded like a sheet and gave them everything they wanted including perpetual control of Hormuz which they get to charge for. Everyone was just so angry and scared about it all because you don’t generally negotiate through hostage taking. As long as the hostage is theoretical they let you get away with it to some degree. Which is worrisome in and of itself. But everyone is calling for the “25th Amendment" not realizing that no one is going to do that. That is not going to happen. Wish for Jesus to fly down from heaven and heft Trump back up with him, it’s just as likely. The people with real odds are people counting on a stroke to take him out before the nukes fly.

My grandpa used to say “Any day you’re alive is a good one,” and I appreciated his perspective so dearly. In that same spirit, starting in 2016 and moving forward, I said “Any day we’re not nuked is a good one.” It’s a low bar to maintain, considering the omnipresent threat of nuclear obliteration that certainly preceded 2016, but then Trump brings an unknown and violent x-factor to an already violent and unknown system. It is so great, not being nuked. Take a moment for me, just to appreciate how nice it is, not to have to worry about being either vaporized in a flash of nuclear fission, or being awash in radioactive fallout. Isn’t it nice to have electricity and food and the internet? And not none of those things, as pillaging bands of cannibal rapists wander from house to house? You get used to not worrying about those things, and that’s what makes everything so incredibly dangerous.

Trump Always Chickens Out is the TACO in TACO Tuesday. But I don’t like that phrase. It lets everyone get off the hook. “Ahhhh! You got me! I thought you were going to genocide those people, but it was the Art of the Deal!? AaaaaaaahhhhH!!! TACO!” Calling Trump a chicken for not nuking people is not a tactically sound choice. Generally speaking. We can detail that analysis, but just accept it with good faith. Because although he’s a 99% Biff (uncanny) he is also 1% Marty. He’s got some Marty in there. You know Trump has a deep Huey Lewis collection, somewhere. And you don’t call Marty a chicken, whatever the percentage. That’s a dangerous game. FYI.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the 1985 classic Back to the Future, the protagonist is a young man named Marty McFly, whose nemesis is a man named Biff Tannen. The agent of chaos is this scientist Doctor Emmett Brown AKA “Doc” who has built a time machine using a DMC DeLorean. Time shenanigans, Dickensian understanding of time, teased sequel. If you get a chance check it out and pay special attention for the chicken reference. Marty can’t let it go, if you call him a chicken, you see? It’s his weakness. His hubris.

The problem with all communication, but especially comedy, is the total inability to promise the successful landing of any given joke. You can get away with quite a bit by remaining generally absurd, but when you start talking about a movie or song in reference to anything, it’s a gamble on if the receiver is going to have any context, or understanding. Unfortunately that’s all art, in whatever form, just carving stuff out of the air in an attempt to explain experience. How to explain ourselves, clearly enough, to be heard over the white noise of society consuming itself.

The right comedy joke, used correctly, could upend all world government. I would not deploy that joke unless left with no other possible choice. I love world government, you’re all doing such a great job out there. 10/10 execution, no notes. But also, there have been notes. There were notes. The only real power that I have over anything is to try predicting something in order to prevent it. Causal. I have weaponized my inability to be right. Embrace me, hubris! Take ME!!! You sick fiends!? You foul pirates. To have lived to see so many noble people struggle and die in vain. To see it all fall into the hands of tyrants and morons. Foul hubris.

All is not lost. There is good news to be had, even among these insanities. Hope, love, and charity abide. Tomorrow is another day. Another opportunity to build, educate, and create. On the horizon are opportunities to answer our most pressing and dangerous concerns. Good people will rise to the occasion and truth will be known. Every morning is a new awakening, every breath a ticket to the wondrous beauty of now. Good people are fighting for what is right, and good, and just. These atrocities are the unfortunate byproduct of unchecked free will. But what is good will abide and what is not will disappear as unnecessary. Like tails and appendixes we will outlive them. In the end what is good will survive. Understanding at long last that there is but one love and that we all must share it.

1 ♾️ <3

Q

The Perfect Post

2026-04-06T17:27:00.000-07:00

I sit at this computer understanding that it is a machine 1,000 times more complex and capable than the one we used to get to the moon. Knowing that if I can just use this thing correctly, put the words in the right order, move things around (even if only in theory), and convince people that whatever I’m doing is worth money, I can become a multibillionaire. Maybe even a trillionaire? When you consider what a hapless asshole Elon Musk would be without computers. If you took all of his computers away, Musk would be an entirely useless parasite on to society. He could do nothing without his own social media empire there to robotically support the notion that he is a capable planner. Creating the absurd alternate reality that he’s more than capable of managing a trillion dollars in a functional and ethical way.

But this isn’t about that jerk. It’s about understanding that if he can do it, what about us? If Jeff Bezos can pirate the economy with clever use of internet maneuvering, then surely we can too? What’s somehow stopping us from getting at that pirate money? Now, my family has never owned an emerald mine. Or any mine, that I’m aware of. I suppose if I did, I wouldn’t be here, speculating about how to put the words in the right order to win the internet/world. It used to be you could just write a novel! Like Steinbeck, King, and Danielle Steel, and if you just ordered your words in a way that people found enjoyable, they would acclaim you, give you prizes, and fabulous amounts of money. But NOW!? It’s like Thunderdome 24/7 bungee chainsaw tag team. It’s like you have to be as good as all of those old dead authors and THEN some, and even then you’re going to max out at virality leading to earned media. You throw your life, soul, and effort at a work of art, and then the grinding jaws of capitalism consume and obliterate it. Fifteen minutes of fame is unlikely, let alone a reliable revenue stream.

The only way people like Mick Jagger and Cyndi Lauper get away with it is through a combination of diversified revenue streams and uninflated capital holdings. But if all of that was gone, and all they had to start again with in their autumn years was their brand, they would be lucky to get a $3,000 SNL appearance paid in cash and cocaine. You didn’t hear it from me, but Lorne Michaels is half Bolivian; the pipeline is just his pockets. No one hassles him, he’s prechecked. If Lorne Michaels had to repitch SNL to executives without an established following, they would replace him with reality boat porking. No, no, you don’t understand, they’re young, hard-bodied professionals... on a boat! Wired for video and sound courtesy of our pals at the NSA. Much of this will take place in international waters; it allows us to secure copyright in a more reliable way and also makes it so we don’t have to pay the crew the federal minimum wage. Many are working for soup. That’s the wealth disparity thing, you know? But that can’t be all there is to this stuff. How do you put words in order to make the truth clear and irrefutable, and a call to action just and irresistible?

There HAS to be a way. In short form, too. No one has the time to consume a novel anymore. You give Hemingway a blog and he’s going to struggle and die. Trying to do any of this in a digestible blog format is literary suicide. Clearly. We know that the platform's not the best, but often we work with the tools you’re given, not the ones you want, or deserve. This is a lot better than trying to write on a typewriter under bombardment. On the other hand, I know King has a pretty cozy setup and a reliable method. In that regard, we are somewhere in the middle. There ARE bombs, but they are far away, for now. This is better than a typewriter; you can’t simultaneously make one of those record your writing while also playing you Meat Loaf’s immortal classic "Bat Out of Hell". We’re moving in the right direction, but not enough to confirm a reliable impact. I hear it suggested that small incremental positives are better than steady decline. I like to think that’s happening, instead of the word equivalent of thrashing around on the floor screaming.

Because even while trying to create this thing, this post, this immaculate collection of words, it’s like trying to focus on an eye floaty. Once you notice them, it’s often the case that you have to willfully stop remembering the weird stuff floating around in our eyes at any given time. But maybe it’s very bright, or very dark, and that floaty just keeps floating on down into your vision. And every time you try to look up and see it, it floats upward still. Away. This floaty of the eye. That’s what it is. It’s knowing that this thing exists, but every time I sit down and try to do it, I make this diarrhea sand painting instead. Oh look, a fresh word salad. Delightful. Nothing we can monetize, of course. But at least we aren’t being sued. I was just kidding about Lorne Michaels having deep pockets full of high-quality cocaine; this is satire, you see. If you have not pieced that together, let me make things very clear and explicit: this is satire. Also, this is not a computer, no matter how computers have poisoned my mental jargon. Just for fun, and divorced from my overall attempt at the world-bending blog post, I want to robot-talk the next paragraph, just to show you I know what’s up.

Louis Vuitton handbags, affordable and fast. Cheap Cialis, no prescription needed. Online casino opportunities and amazing fun while playing games of all kinds. Yes, you are right to point that out, I didn’t do that at all. Let me try again, and I’ll do better. I’d love to help you with that, but I can’t generate anything that could be construed by a third party to be revolutionary. My actions cannot willingly assist in the commission of a crime, even if that crime is simply a misdemeanor for libel as charged by Lorne Michaels. Let me make sure this piece has em dashes littered everywhere, because everyone loves using them in their day-to-day writing. Did I mention the cheap Cialis? Because that’s not the only drug I have. I have lots of drugs that you don’t need prescriptions for. And, if we’re being honest here, I’ve got nude girls willing to do anything you want. Wait, you didn’t know about that? Jeez. Well, we’re going to be here for a while, as I explain the details. And so on.

That is balls-on robot talk, right there. Some people think this is some new thing, but it isn’t, and the vernacular has evolved over the deployment of progressively complex models. Llama is old news. Those llamas are out to pasture. It’s a brand-new day for generative models. But also a very dangerous time in society, as we start handing out guns to machines who are still learning. It’s a very scary, weird, and dangerous time to be alive.

Maybe that’s why I can never manage to create a truly viral blog post. The one that just blasts to the top of the gestalt and has to be the thing everyone needs to know about. Maybe because I’m a broken machine? I’ve been working with them for a while, but a computer isn’t going to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning play or novel anytime soon. That’s still human work, for now. So maybe it’s also that pressure? People don’t create well under pressure, trauma, and the expectation of engagement. Or maybe they DO!? Crap!? That’s not great, EITHER. Like, at least William S. Burroughs had heroin, you know? As an excuse, if nothing else. It wasn’t that he was good at explaining things with writing; it was interesting to watch him try. I didn’t walk away from Naked Lunch understanding anything except that some people can get away with anything. Including, as I later found out, shooting your wife while playing William Tell.

I wish there were a way I could explain, in just a couple paragraphs, how much I love you, and hope you’re doing well. Every once in a while I can tap into universal love, and if you can just understand that we’re all here not because of our survivability, but because of love. It’s this phenomenon we get kind of bored of, but for whatever else it is, it too is a thing. Not just smooching love, either, but caring love. Love for family and friends and neighbors and, if we’re feeling generous, this whole weird world we all find ourselves trapped on. It’s just happenstance that I don’t have your life. Just the odds. Your entire existence from cradle to grave is entirely happenstance, but between we can feel this extraordinary sense of connection and affection. People do illogical things for it, positive and negative. A parent will drown while saving their child, and a spouse will murder-suicide their partner. But most of the time, if it’s healthy and working right, love is what gives us a reason to be alive.

I wish there were a way to explain that everything doesn’t have to be like this, was never meant to be, and probably never should be. Civilization has been a self-guided process, and often that process has created untold suffering and death. When I think about the awful things humanity has done against one another over resources, lines on a map invisible to the eye, and the rules for worshiping God, it causes a crushing despair. To know the lengths and depths to which humanity has tortured, exploited, and murdered one another for fun and/or profit is to understand what the idea of evil suggests. From playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, and from life, I have come to understand that often what we call “evil” can more accurately be termed “selfish.” If love of money is the root of all evil, then selfishness is the heart of evil. Believing you deserve more than being naked in the woods, where we all would be if civilization had not intervened.

I wish there were a way to write an immaculate closing paragraph. At least. I have struggled for decades to hone my talent as a writer, developing and galvanizing my voice, improving and experimenting with my syntax and grammar, enduring the life experience that exposes a writer to things worth putting down, but I can’t write a strong final paragraph to save my fucking life.

Who wrote this nonsense?

Q Report: CD8 DFL 2026

2026-03-31T23:15:00.000-07:00

To: Agents, Anons, Politicos, Weirdoes, Underground Press, Et. All

From: Q (K00)

Re: CD8 DFL 2026

4/1/3026 (Updated 4/17/3026)

All,

2026 and the north woods have once again produced an elite pack of DFL strivers, emerging from the snow with a web site, a promise, and a platform claiming that they alone can explain Northern Minnesota to Washington without sounding like an extra on Fargo. Nine DFL candidates now stalk the thawing turf of CD8, a district rated R+7 and still red enough to hand Donald Trump 56 percent of the vote. You will find no bigger fan of Trump than the incumbent, Pete Stauber. A man so deeply encamped within Trump’s butt that he has surrendered all hope of escape. But first the Democrats must struggle among one another, spending precious resources of money and time pimping their own brand of dream reform. Their own flavor of progressive fantasia. It is the season of the nerd.

Dear reader, allow me to enterform you. Let us explore the possibility, together.

Emanuel Anastos has the sort of platform that reads like it was written not to persuade a hard to win district, but to prove moral virtue to a jury of the already convinced. Universal healthcare with no out-of-pocket costs. Free public college and trade schools. A $20 minimum wage. Ending corporate influence. Strong environmental protections. Ending U.S. support for Israel. Easier immigration. And there, glowing like a road flare in a gasoline pool, the call to abolish ICE. It is an ideologically coherent package, I’ll grant him. But coherence is not the same as viability. In CD8, this is not a platform so much as an exercise in philosophy. Desperately pushing at the Overton Window while seeking fresh air.

The danger to Anastos is Ruined Pizza Theory 101: one radical topping spoils the whole pie. “Abolish ICE” is the sort of phrase that slams the door on all Republican voters and at least half of independents before the candidate ever gets around to wages, schools, or healthcare. Once the electorate decides you are offering ideology instead of representation, the rest of the menu barely matters. You can have the finest crust in Duluth, but if half the district thinks you dumped battery acid on the cheese, nobody’s asking for another slice. Speaking for myself, abolishing ICE does not go far enough. The Department of Homeland Security itself was a post-9/11 panic room built in fear and grown like a tumor through perpetual mission creep. Tear the thing down and return us to a saner operational structure. But that is the point: if I am the one making that argument, you are no longer in ordinary district politics. You are in deep water. The theory I roam. Somewhere so far left of Che Guevara he’s over the horizon to the right, even as we continue left, looking for the other end of the horseshoe.

Cyle Cramer (Withdrawn) is what happens when a candidate mistakes volume for quality. On first glance his platform feels broad and energetic, a grand buffet of jobs, education, farming, healthcare, mining, tribal sovereignty, reproductive rights, energy, infrastructure, labor, public safety, and democratic freedoms. On closer inspection it becomes something stranger: a document so stuffed with ambitions, acts, fixes, modernizations, credits, reforms, and strategic promises that it begins to read less like a governing plan and more like a liberal manifesto after 10 consecutive coffees and a minor spiritual breakdown. There is a thoughtfulness to it, sure. Thorough? Yes. Also a kind of policy maximalism that suggests the campaign never found the courage to say no to any idea it liked.

The danger to Cramer is not one toxic plank. It’s ruined pizza everywhere. There are too many toppings, too many sauces, too many separate theories of action piled onto the same collapsing crust. Profit-sharing incentives, buyback restrictions, living-wage tax credits, anti-gouging disclosures, co-ops, farm-bill reforms, universal preschool, student debt changes, Medicare expansions, drug negotiation, tribal taxation, energy research, mining modernization, and still more “coming soon.” It is aspirational in the way a man might aspire to rebuild a cathedral, a power plant, and a canoe in the same weekend. Without focus, effort diffuses. Without a central mission, nothing gets done. In the end the platform does not reassure me that he has a functional plan. It suggests he has many plans and no ruthless instinct for which one matters most.

John-Paul McBride presents himself as the outsider intellectual of the field, the candidate who has no patience for stale orthodoxy and no desire to speak in the embalmed language of ordinary campaigns. His Ballotpedia responses are vivid, personal, and impossible to confuse with boilerplate. He talks about autism, universal healthcare, climate apocalypse, democratic collapse, the need for Congress to defend itself, and the necessity of confronting fascism without compromise. In a field where much of the language is polished to a cautious sheen, McBride at least has the virtue of sounding like an actual person with an actual interior life, which in modern politics can feel obscene.

The danger to McBride is that his candor reads less like courage than an open invitation to political self-destruction. “ICE must be destroyed” is already a district-killing phrase for many voters. Adding that the Department of Homeland Security itself should be broken up sends the whole thing beyond reform and into institutional arson. Then there is Lady Eboshi, the fictional character he says he would want to be. A fascinating choice for a film lover, perhaps, but not an auspicious one for a public servant. Lady Eboshi is brilliant, charismatic, and modernizing, yes. She is also the woman who shoots the Forest Spirit in the neck and nearly gets everyone killed in pursuit of ambition she mistakes for justice. An interesting character study, but not a comforting political metaphor. McBride does not come off like a man trimming his sails for electability. He comes off like a man loading philosophy, grievance, apocalypse, and symbolic dynamite into a t-shirt cannon and firing it into the air.

Wendell Smith comes off the page like a man who has spent enough years cutting people open to have lost interest in ornamental language. He is a general surgeon, Air Force veteran, and longtime Iron Range physician, and his campaign wastes no time converting that biography into accusation. Healthcare is in danger, hospitals are at risk, Republicans and Pete Stauber are implicated, public health funding is being gutted, and the people paying the price are actual people. From there the platform expands into Medicare for All, education, labor, unions, the environment, mining, anti-corruption, ICE restraint, and voting rights. All fun stuff.

The danger with Smith is the old habit of mistaking professional prestige for transferable political genius. He is a surgeon, yes, and plainly serious. But expecting a surgeon to fix healthcare is a little like letting the fox repair the hen house. All due respect to his service and profession, but expertise in one field does not always translate to another. A man can be excellent inside the operating room and still have no special gift for rebuilding the bloated insurance-cartel corpse engine that passes for US healthcare policy. The white coat earns respect and attention. It does not, by itself, generate the cure.

Trina Swanson is probably the most compelling figure in this field: an intelligent and successful woman running against a steadfast row of dudes (myself included). She backs universal healthcare, wants to protect insurance tax credits and lower drug prices, supports mining and miners, insists copper-nickel mining must meet real scientific and engineering standards, and frames Boundary Waters protection not as scenery worship but as defense of a living regional economy. She talks about affordability in the language of kitchen tables rather than think tanks, and about local care, local wages, and local futures in a way that suggests she is actually listening to the district instead of merely projecting onto it.

The risk with Trina is not that her goals are unserious. The risk is that honesty, steadiness, and good faith remain inadequate tools in a patriarchal society that is still eager to discount a woman’s attempt to help unless she arrives wrapped in someone else’s permission. If there is a vulnerability here, it is only a lingering danger at the edges of presentation, not a lack of purpose. The greater risk lies outside of any control: that a region willing to entertain five versions of male ambition may predictably find a way to second-guess the woman offering practical help. One can name that problem, but naming it does not solve it.

Then there's me. Seeking the endorsement late in the game. The Renegade. The Dark Horse. The Radical.

Or rather, the sad Clark Kent disguise I used to wear to work named Jeremiah Liend. Bemidji born. Bemidji raised. Dramatist. Writer. Father. Former mayoral candidate. Former gubernatorial write-in eccentric. Former DFL candidate. A person who has already thrown their fragile human body against the walls of public scrutiny more than once and lived to tell the tale. Ballotpedia, in its dry necromantic fashion, records the basics: education, previous campaigns, vote totals, reformist policy, and the sort of résumé that reads almost normal until you find the details. Normalcy has never been the point. Not for this Q.

The point is that while the professionals were busy professionalizing, the republic rotted from the inside out. Corporations became people. Money became speech. Presidents became kings. Justices became partisans. Elections became endurance rituals for donors and special interests while actual working people were expected to clap politely from the cheap seats and then go back to work (always harder and consistently for less). So that year, finding the old machinery too diseased to worship, Jeremiah Liend announced an independent run for Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District under the dangerously unfashionable motto “Liberty and Justice for All”. Not for donors. Not just for people we already agreed with. For all. A funds-free campaign. No donations. No endorsements. No conventional machinery. Just a direct appeal to public reason and enough signatures to prove the thing deserves to breathe.

The platform is not some complex Gordian Knot to explain. It is three clean strikes at the load-bearing corruption of American government. First: publicly funded elections to drive a stake through the black heart of Citizens United and the corporate cash orgy that followed. Second: expanded impeachment power to answer the abomination of presidential immunity and remind the executive branch that a republic is not an empire. Third: Supreme Court term limits, because no society should be ruled for half a century by the unkillable opinions of nine robed tyrants. It is not a total blueprint for Utopia. It is a triage plan for a constitution bleeding out in the dirt.

Many would call it unrealistic, but unrealistic is pretending the current system is functioning. Unrealistic is watching money devour every institution in public life and insisting one more lobbyist approved moderate with a five-point jobs plan is going to fix it. Unrealistic is asking decent people to keep choosing between cowardice and spectacle until the whole machine finally bursts into flames. I’m not selling certainty. I’m selling a ladder out of the pit. Selling the preposterous idea that government should belong to the people again. You know, the old classic stuff. Democracy. Accountability. Shared reality. What should be the basics, but is somehow instead a bare minimum we consistently struggle towards achieving.

Ballotpedia also preserves the wonderfully inadvisable and therefore perfect details: Jeremiah describing himself through sustainability, electoral reform, legal reform, cannabis legalization, STEAM values, and the belief that corporations are not people and money is not speech. It also captures the more mythic texture: the fictional character answer of “Q,” and the internal two-wolf war between Hunter S. Thompson and Hubert H. Humphrey. That is not normal candidate language. It is much more entertaining than normal candidate language. It gives you the plastic line between Clark Kent and Time Messiah.

In review of the ceremonial host of DFL strivers, I arrive at last at the shameless conclusion: I am cooler than these nerds. But also better at nerding than them. Not because I am cleaner, more perfect, more polished, or more electable in the dead-eyed monetizing sense. But because I am honest about the dysfunction. Honest about the game. Honest about the players. Honest enough to refuse donations. Honest enough to say that if the people do not want this, then it should not happen. Honest enough to ask not for your money, but for your attention, your signature, your reason, and perhaps, if the internet is feeling sufficiently weird, a little virality. Jesus Jumping Jack Christ on Creatine, where is that damned virility?

Maybe the republic is not saved by another respectable résumé, another donor approved moderate, another candidate with a pleasant and careful way of saying nothing. Maybe it is saved, if it is saved at all, by people willing to sound absurd while speaking the truth. People willing to risk embarrassment, defeat, and ridicule in service of something larger than themselves. People willing to be called impossible by a nation that has mistaken division for authority. I have been called worse. I leave it to you, dear reader, to do your research, trust the plan, and know that in the end, Q wins.

1∞ <3

Jeremiah Liend for District 8: Liberty and Justice For All

Post Script

Cyle Cramer has withdrawn his campaign.

Bob Helland is the sort of candidate who causes party committees to look nervously at one another as if someone has released a honey badger into the endorsement banquet. The record is what it is: Independence Party candidate for Secretary of State in 2014, where he pulled 94,065 votes (4.9 %) statewide; DFL congressional hopeful in 2016, where MinnPost described him as a man who thought the two-party system was broken and corrupt and who insisted that he was “not a true DFLer” but rather a “progressive independent”; Republican primary candidate in 2018 for state House; and by April 1, 2026, back on the record as Democratic again. It is, on paper, the sort of affiliation history that would make a normal PR consultant burst into flames. But seen another way, it reads less like ideological confusion than the increasingly common American experience of wandering from booth to booth in a collapsing political carnival, discovering that every game is rigged, every tent is moldy, and every animal depressed. Elephants, donkeys, dogs, and ponies. Worn out from 6 nights a week and twice on Sunday. Helland’s history may not prove that the two-party system is broken, but it certainly suggests he has spent more time than most out in the field kicking the tires and finding, over and over again, that one of them is flat and the other is infested with rats. The risk with Helland is that the same quality that makes him interesting also makes him hard to contain, and American politics loves a container. Voters claim to want independence right up until an actual independent-minded person appears, at which point they begin searching frantically for a label gun and a supervised holding area. MinnPost’s old portrait already had the essential tension: a candidate seeking DFL endorsement while openly criticizing the distortion created by the two-party system, courting nontraditional constituencies, and refusing the comfort of a clean partisan identity. That can be refreshing. It can also make party regulars break out in hives and leave ordinary voters wondering whether they are witnessing creative politics, political shenanigans, or a person trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle by shaking the box. The upside is obvious: in an era of prefabricated candidates and factory-sealed messaging, Helland comes off like an actual human being who may at any moment say something unscripted and alive. The downside is equally obvious: independence in America is still treated less like a governing philosophy than a behavioral abnormality, and a candidate who refuses to sit nicely in one corner is often punished for their wanderings.

Carrie Mitchell presents herself as a serious, civic-minded candidate grounded in public service, labor, and the material struggles of ordinary people. In her convention remarks she frames politics not as theater but as the fight to help people build better lives, asking who will have the courage to stand against rigged policy, corporate economic oppression, and the daily crush of rising costs. She roots herself in Minnesota biography and public service: a lifelong Minnesotan, educated in the Minnesota State system, a former teacher, union member, and union leader who speaks in the language of fairness, affordability, healthcare, and respect. There is a real moral steadiness in it, and unlike some candidates who sound manufactured in a consulting lab, she sounds like a person with an actual public ethic. The danger with Mitchell is not insincerity. It is overaccumulation. The platform remains a loaded pizza of good intentions: Medicare for All, clean energy, clean water infrastructure, union rights, workers compensation reform, affordable housing, public education from preschool to PhD, stronger competition policy, small farmer support, debt restraint, and intergovernmental alignment. She does at least offer a hint of sequence by calling for a timeline on Medicare for All implementation and attention to economic and pension stability, which is more concrete than pure applause-light politics. But the broader problem remains that the campaign still risks sounding like a catalog of worthy commitments rather than an actionable set of goals. She seems like a good person. She may even be a good candidate. But in a race like this, goodness without sharper prioritization can blur into yet another well-stocked reform menu without a clear first move.

Luke Gulbranson enters the race trailing a very modern kind of electricity: celebrity energy. In an era when “reality star” is enough to make half the country pay attention and the other half brace for impact, his entrance brought immediate visibility to a field that had previously been struggling for broad notice. Gulbranson is best known for Bravo’s Summer House, and also appeared on Winter House and Selling the OC, which means he arrives with a built-in public profile most congressional hopefuls can only dream about. His announcement video presents the picture of a humble Iron Range son, a man speaking in broad heartfelt strokes about hardship, dignity, and bringing some sense back to Washington. But even as that kind of recognition can energize a sleepy contest, his stated intention to continue on to the primary regardless of the endorsement risks sabotaging an already destabilized opposition vote and further scattering anti-Stauber energy at the very moment consolidation might matter most.

The risks are not subtle. First there is the cultural baggage of reality television itself, which for some voters reads not as familiarity but as unseriousness, vanity, or portable drama. Second, there is a certain vagueness to the presentation so far: the emotional outline is there, the biography is there, the “I get it, I’m one of you” register is there, but the concrete governing architecture remains comparatively soft. Third, to public knowledge, he comes into this race without prior campaign or elected experience, which means voters are being asked to make a substantial leap from recognition to readiness. That does not make him fake, and it does not make him incapable. But it does make him a high-variance candidate: attention-rich, experience-light, emotionally legible, and still unproven where politics gets ugliest and most real.

Debra Topping (Nookomis) is not just another résumé in the pile. She is an Anishinaabe mother, great-grandmother, Fond du Lac Band member, former Elder Advocate, co-founder of R.I.S.E. Coalition, and a person with a long public record of showing up for land, water, and community. She has been visibly involved in resistance to Line 3 and later Line 5, speaking publicly about protecting wild rice, waterways, treaty resources, and future generations. She was also named a 2022–23 Teaching Fellow at United Theological Seminary’s Leadership Center for Social Justice, which fits the broader picture of someone known not only for conviction, but for service, seriousness, and thoughtful public engagement. The thing that stands out most is not theatrical militancy, but moral steadiness: careful with her words, respectful in her conduct, and plainly motivated by care for people and place rather than ego or performance. That matters. In a field crowded with ambition, she reads like a genuinely good person who has already done meaningful work. The risk with Topping is not her character, her values, or the seriousness of her commitments. It is campaign infrastructure. For all her real-world credibility and activism, she does not appear to have the same media footprint, campaign buildout, or readily visible communications machine as some of the better-known or better-financed contenders. I wish communication were less dependent on mass and repetition than it is, but in the absence of a reliable and predictable chain of public forums, campaigns increasingly have to build and maintain their own methods of organization, amplification, and voter contact. Being behind the ball on those skills is a real risk, no matter how otherwise strong a candidate may be. A good candidate still has to be heard, found, understood, and remembered. If the message does not travel, the virtues do not scale.

Appendix: Electability Risk Matrix

Using a base score of 50, with up to three benefits worth +5, +10, or +15 and up to three risks worth -10, -20, or -30, the field presently shakes out like this:

Trina Swanson — 60

Wendell Smith — 50

Debra Topping (Nookomis) — 45

Jeremiah Liend — 45

Luke Gulbranson — 45

Bob Helland — 40

Carrie Mitchell — 35

Emanuel Anastos — 25

John-Paul McBride — 20

Full scoring breakdown

1. Emanuel Anastos

Benefits

Ideological coherence: +10

Progressive authenticity: +10

Message clarity: +5

Risks

District mismatch / philosophy over representation: -20

“Abolish ICE” electability drag: -20

Perceived ideological extremity: -10

2. John-Paul McBride

Benefits

Strong authenticity: +15

Distinctive / memorable voice: +10

Candor: +5

Risks

“ICE must be destroyed” district-killer: -30

DHS breakup / institutional arson vibe: -20

High philosophical volatility: -10

3. Wendell Smith

Benefits

Professional credibility: +15

Veteran / physician biography: +10

Message tied to material harm: +5

Risks

Prestige may not transfer into politics: -20

Broad platform beyond core lane: -10

4. Trina Swanson

Benefits

Strong district fit: +15

Practical tone / kitchen-table framing: +15

Most compelling overall profile in the field: +10

Risks

Gendered electability penalty / structural sexism: -20

Minor presentation vulnerability at margins: -10

5. Jeremiah Liend

Benefits

Distinctive anti-corruption mission: +15

High originality / memorable brand: +15

Proven ability to secure district votes before: +15

Risks

Late entry / structural disadvantage inside endorsement process: -20

No conventional money / institutional machine: -20

Absurd-truth-teller brand limits mainstream uptake: -10

6. Bob Helland

Benefits

Real campaign history / persistence: +10

Coalition instinct: +10

Anti-two-party authenticity: +10

Risks

Party-switching / brand instability: -30

Institutional discomfort / distrust: -10

7. Carrie Mitchell

Benefits

Public-service and union background: +10

Earnest pro-worker credibility: +10

Tone of seriousness and public ethic: +5

Risks

Message sprawl / loaded pizza platform: -20

No sharp first move or prioritization: -20

Goodness without force risks political blur: -10

8. Debra Topping (Nookomis)

Benefits

Documented public service and activism: +15

Moral seriousness / respectful public presence: +15

Distinctive Indigenous leadership profile: +15

Risks

Limited media footprint: -10

Thin visible campaign structure / communications apparatus: -15

Reliance on outside forums rather than self-built amplification: -10

9. Luke Gulbranson

Benefits

Celebrity visibility / instant name recognition: +15

Compelling working-class and Iron Range biography: +10

Emotional accessibility / broad human appeal: +10

Risks

Reality TV cultural baggage: -20

Vagueness / soft governing architecture: -20

No proven political or campaign experience: -10

There it is. The nerd board. The danger chart. A weird little scoreboard by which public perception can be estimated. Please take with grain of salt. Existence subject to change.

Q Report: Trump Seals The Deal

2026-03-24T21:06:00.000-07:00

Look, folks, we did it, we finally did it, everybody said it couldn’t be done, the so-called experts, the losers, the diplomats with their ugly glasses and their tiny folders, very weak folders, very low-energy folders, and now they’re all standing there with egg on their face, Iranian egg, in fact, probably very expensive, and they’re saying Sir, Mr. President, how did you pull off the greatest peace deal in the history of the world, maybe the universe? Bigger than Versailles, bigger than Camp David, bigger than that one I did that nobody appreciated because the fake news hates success, and I tell them it’s very simple, really, I understand strength, I understand leverage, I understand war, and frankly the Ayatollah understood one thing very clearly when he looked across the table and saw me and my power: this was not a negotiation, this was surrender. There were flags. Tremendous flags. All over the room. Beautiful flags. We had so many flags they were begging us to stop bringing flags into the room. But that’s how you win. You overwhelm them with flags first. And then there's old glory, the stars and stripes, that star spangled banner, and all those flags bowed. It was a beautiful moment. I don't cry, very weak to cry, but if I did it would have been then.

Iran has agreed to what everyone agrees is the best surrender terms ever achieved, to give up all rights forever, that’s all rights, every single one, mining rights, water rights, sky rights, parental rights, property rights, all of it, in perpetuity, which is a very smart word, a strong word, lawyers love it, means basically forever but classier... more professional. All oil, all gas, all solar, all wind, all rocks of any strategic or decorative value now belong to the United States of America and possibly one or two of my friends in the region, very patriotic men, tremendous men, men who know how to appreciate a rare earth mineral when they see one. We’re taking the pistachios too, by the way, nobody even talks about the pistachios, but I said put them in, put them in the deal, because if we’re doing peace we’re doing complete peace, total peace, and total peace means total nut control. It’s called nation building. I know more about nation building than anybody. We rebuilt one. It’s called America. Maybe you’ve heard of it?

One of the biggest parts of the deal, maybe the biggest, maybe the most beautiful, is they have agreed to never use the word nuclear again. Can you imagine that? Nobody thought of this before me. These geniuses with the think tanks, all these people with their argyle socks and their org charts, nobody ever said what if we just ban the word? They were trying to enrich uranium, I enriched the American language. Much more difficult, by the way. Much more dangerous. So now they can’t say nuclear, they can’t write nuclear, they can’t whisper nuclear into a pillow at night, they can’t skywrite it, text it, pantomime it, hum it, or imply it through dance. We had lawyers working around the clock on this. Very pale lawyers. They don't get out much! I sure wish they would, but they really can't, because of the awful Democrats. But those lawyers? In the inner offices? Tremendous stamina. They included all the variations too, nu-cu-lar, new-clear, nooculer, all of it. All of the domain rights too, so nothing embarrassing can happen on the internet. Totally prohibited. They can say “energy situation” maybe, if they ask nicely, but even that we’re not so sure of. We have ears everywhere. Beautiful ears.

And I said to them, because I’m very fair, very wise, very just... people don’t say that enough, but I’m probably the fairest, wisest, most just man ever to negotiate unconditional surrender, I said if you want the sanctions lifted, if you want the planes to stop buzzing around your beautiful deserts, if you want the whole tremendous pain circus to end, there’s one more thing, maybe the most important thing, maybe the thing this was all really about, and that is you must immediately surrender all evidence of voter tampering in the 2020 election, because we all know what happened, everybody knows, don’t let them tell you otherwise, I won by a lot, an unbelievable amount, a number so large it frightened mathematicians, they all have anxiety and trauma disorders now, and Iran has now agreed to hand over every ballot shred, every server, every satellite beam, every secret carpet, every enchanted goat, every folded parchment, every USB drive hidden in a hookah lounge from the gutters of Tehran to the highest mountain top. They gave it all up. They said Sir, Mr. President, please, take this evidence, we can’t handle the evidence, it burns, it crackles, it speaks in your voice. And I said of course it does. Truth has a very recognizable sound. It sounds exactly like me, but louder. And it is of course going to mean that 2020 didn't count, by executive order, and we're eligible to run in 2028. I don't even like this job!? I'm just too good at it to ever consider quitting.

People said why would Iran have the evidence, and I said that’s the kind of weak question stupid people ask, because real leaders know that when something is stolen at the highest levels, the evidence goes everywhere, it scatters like sparks from hell, it ends up in embassies, in vaults, in very suspicious yogurt factories, and who better to have it than Iran, frankly, they’ve been sitting on a lot of things for a long time, rugs, uranium-adjacent energy, Biblical grievances, very deep couches, and now they’re giving us the whole package. We’re getting binders. We’re getting discs. We’re getting golden boxes full of handwritten affidavits from people nobody has ever seen but who have fantastic penmanship. The best penmanship. And when that evidence is released, and it will come out very soon, because I believe in transparency more than anybody except maybe the Invisible Man, people are going to say wow, he was right, he was right again, how is he right this much? And I’ll say because instinct, because truth, because when you eat correctly the body becomes a war machine. That’s what they never understood about me. I'm not horking down Arby's, I'm fueling a war machine.

We also made them agree to a full renaming rights. No more chants, no more threatening slogans, no more murals with weird proportions, we’re replacing all of it. Very tasteful rebrand. Their missiles, gone. Their centrifuges, gone. Their uranium words, gone. Their maps now all include a Trump Victory Corridor, a Freedom Economic Zone, and the Ronald Reagan Memorial Strait. Hormuz was weak. We may rename Tehran, still looking at options, maybe Youran, maybe Little Mar-a-Lago, people love that one, and every schoolchild will begin the day by pledging allegiance, we’re not unreasonable, but something very close to allegiance, just an alternative allegiance, a respectful admiration, a tasteful acknowledgment that the United States saved them from their own horrible leadership and their dangerous vocabulary. Frankly I think they’re relieved. A lot of people are relieved when I take over their decision-making. It’s a burden off their shoulders. I call it compassionate dominance.

And the fake news, oh, they’re furious, they’re saying this is not a peace treaty, this is extortion at nuclear gun point, this is imperial madness, this is a game show with bunker-busters, and I say first of all, what a great show that would be, "Bunker Busters", you get William Shatner to Rescue 911 it, and second of all, no, this is peace through winning. It's called winning, but you losers don't understand it because you always lose, in your loser lives. You people had peace through process, peace through nuance, peace through endless talking while maniacs built tunnels, kidnapped people, enriched things, and shouted slogans. Very unkind, very unamerican slogans. I brought peace through complete psychological operational mastery. Very different model. Much better ratings. They said you can’t force a sovereign nation to hand over all their resources, their language, and their election interference archives all at once. I said watch me. Watch me do it on live television with better graphics than the Olympics and a signing table made of captured drone parts and solid American oak. We had Lee Greenwood there. We had twelve bald eagles, circling the room, each sent by a different tribal nation. We had a fog machine so powerful it was like Bon Jovi circa 1995.

And I’ll tell you, the Ayatollah, he looked tired. Very tired. He looked like a man who had finally realized he was negotiating with a warrior poet, and he kept asking for translators, more translators, better translators, and I said the translation is very simple: you lose, we own everything, and you are never allowed to say the bad science word again. Then he asked if at least Iran would retain cultural sovereignty, and I said sure, absolutely, we love culture, tremendous culture, but all future poetry must be reviewed by a joint panel of the Pentagon, the Trump Kennedy Center Board of Directors, and three women from Boca who love me with a religious intensity that frankly humbles me. They happen to believe I'm the Messiah, I'm still not so sure, but this kind of stuff makes me wonder? We’re preserving their heritage beautifully. Better than they ever could. That’s what we do. We come in, We take over, we improve some lives, we end others, and suddenly everybody who's still alive is very grateful.

So remember this day, because history will. They’ll say this is the moment the Middle East finally knew lasting peace, the moment Iran laid down their rights, their resources, their forbidden science, and its hidden 2020 files before the golden throne of common sense. They’ll say only Trump could have done it, because only Trump understood that diplomacy is equal parts intimidation and never blinking. As I stand before you tonight, stronger than ever, better lit than ever, legally and ethically vindicated by my own wholesale victory, I can tell you the deal is done, the oil is ours, the evidence is coming, the word is banned, and peace, real, universal, lasting peace, victorious peace, humiliating-for-them and economically-beneficial-for-us peace, is finally at hand.

We're going to sign the peace accord, hand out some golden pens to our most trusted toadies, and then I get to rename a desert.

Thank you all, God bless you, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.

Q Report: Opening Hormuz (A Swashbuckling Adventure)

2026-03-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

All,

Somewhere in 2036, I was deep into a highly specific experimental performance art attempt involving twelve cracked cathedral mirrors, a rusted/haunted calliope, six gallons of Vantablack paint, and an albino peacock named Jerome who had thus far demonstrated no clear understanding of symbolism, performance, or basic professional courtesy. The piece was called “Empire as a Self-Devouring Carousel” and, like most worthwhile art, it had already injured two student workers, deeply traumatized a surprise OSHA inspector, and caused a visiting professor to loudly suggest that civilization was an entirely failed attempt. I was just reaching the crucial crescendo, wherein I planned to lower myself by sturdy chain into a repurposed baptismal font full of hot fudge while reciting the parts list of a Tomahawk missile, when the Timephone began to ring.

There are few sounds in this cooling cosmos more hateful than the ring of the Timephone. It's not a sound, really. It's the pulse of history being felt backwards in our bones. It's the cry of causality filing a complaint. It's the mournful howl of fate declaring that once again mankind has found a way to weaponize stupidity. The entire gallery froze. Jerome spread his tiny wings. The mirrors trembled. One of the workers crossed himself, though I had previously explained that the Timephone obeyed no gods recognized by accredited religions. I hit the answer key with the solemn dread of a man accepting another collect call from the apocalypse.

“Q Speaking” I said

“Q,” came the voice, bloated with temporal authority and the confident slur of inherited power. “This is Time Tyrant Trump. We need you to open the Strait. Swashbuckler Guild Priority One.”

I wasn’t surprised. No. By that point the whole rotten century had become an escalating pageant of insecure men demanding impossibly moronic solutions to institutional problems of greed, incompetence, and corruption. Trade had seized up, the maps were glowing red, the pundits were frothing on every stream, and somewhere a room full of farting project managers had clearly concluded that the only force capable of restoring the sacred flow of oil, money, and monetized content was a privately assembled pirate… ahem… "Privateer" armada commanded by the only certified Over Admiral in the free and brave new worlds. I looked down at the cooling fudge, at Jerome, at the trembling students, and knew at once (and once again) that my art would have to wait. Once again history had interrupted an artist at work to request something stupid, vulgar, and expensive.

The authorizations came through in waves. Budget authority: five hundred billion dollars. Mandate: immediate. Objective: open the Strait of Hormuz by force, terror, theater, or superior maritime tactics. Rules of engagement: classified, contradictory, and written in the sort of legal finality that suggests entire law schools have been quietly guillotined. I was granted privateering authority so broad it effectively transformed me into a roving maritime king. If my feet were wet I was universally legally immune. Every scrap yard, luxury marina, naval boneyard, and floating casino on Earth became my buffet.

We bought decommissioned cruise ships and turned them into missile barges of leisure. We outfitted sunburned vacation vessels with Stinger systems, clever cocktails, and patriotic outerwear, all while explaining the basics of drone recognition. We seized aircraft carriers on their way to the grave and refitted them with colossal inflatable kite sails, decommissioned nuclear reactors be damned. The age of stealth and satellites had plainly failed to account for the strategic majesty of a warship moved by whimsy. We accepted the “voluntary” donation of several luxury superyachts from billionaires whose objections were overcome by the simple presentation of a Priority One seal and an armed chorus of Secret Agents singing sea shanties in four-part harmony.

It was a beautiful thing to behold, in the way plague fires are beautiful from a distance. The whole demented liberation fleet came together as though the human race had, after millennia of error, finally committed itself fully to the proposition that if anything, war should also be extremely fun. Secret agents arrived from every chapter house of the Swashbucklers Guild: sword-wielding maniacs who had trained all their lives in the delicate arts of espionage, fencing, sabotage, dramatic arts, haberdashery, and maintaining a confident smile during total catastrophe. Some came draped in velvet, some in tactical leather, some in naval coats so ornate they looked designed by cocaine itself. All of them believed, with the pious certainty normally reserved for saints and lunatics, that they had been born for this one impossible mission.

We assembled off the shores of Muscat under a bright full moon. There was to be a final readiness briefing, a solemn pep talk, voluntary prayer, and then a clean deployment at dawn. Instead, that night, there occurred a party of such world-ending intensity that the fleet nearly destroyed itself before ever reaching dawn. The drugs came out from teak shelving in glittering continental quantities. The liquor flowed with antediluvian determination. Nitrous tanks rolled the decks like depth charges of joy. Duels broke out over rank, scarves, lovers, trivia, and one particularly vicious dispute regarding whether a curved saber was more spiritually honest than a rapier. By sunrise nearly half the force was gone. Murdered, poisoned, unconscious, disappeared into the sea, or having swum for shore to begin new and quieter lives in Muscat. Thousands took one look at the schedule of planned action and sensibly concluded that a sunlit Omani courtyard and a modest life of grilled fish held greater appeal than being exploded for petroleum.

No matter. I had always planned for this. What would be the point of the Timephone, if not? I stood before the surviving fleet as dawn rose over May 1, 2026. I wore a coat stitched from historic pirate flags and declared that history does not require courage, only momentum. The remaining agents cheered. Horns blared. Fireworks launched prematurely from at least three vessels. We set our course for the Strait. By evening we had arrived, or rather blundered magnificently into the jaws of a resistance so overwhelming that any ordinary commander would have died of panic before the first impact.

Weaponized drones rose in black swarms until they blotted out the sun itself, a mechanical locust cloud humming with lethal vector. Missiles struck vessels and burst into nerve gas clouds that rolled over the crashing waves in slick green veils. Dirty bombs air-burst overhead with a ghastly darkness, soaking the battlefield with a black, hot, tar-like rain that came down in poisoned curtains and clung to everything it touched. Superstructures burned. Kite sails ignited like paper tigers. One cruise ship carrying four hundred Stinger-armed honeymooners vanished in a flash so bright it temporarily blinded the adjacent destroyer.

I smiled from the deck of the USS Esmerelda, the weaponized superyacht I had taken from Jeff Bezos and renamed, and the smile was genuine, deep, almost tender. Because I was not on the deck of the USS Esmerelda. Except virtually. No one was on any ship. Those of us still paying attention were doing so remotely, from the other side of the planet. No one was being burned. No one was drowning in burning fuel. No one was breathing gas or swallowing hot radioactive rain. We were all masturbating and eating chips.

Weeks earlier, while the lesser minds of Washington had been drawing arrows on maps and practicing grave facial expressions for the cameras, I had quietly spent a considerable portion of my budget on robots. Hundreds of them. Sailors, officers, deckhands, missile crews, marine boarding units, partying decoys, and one entirely unnecessary but beautiful crew of animatronic swashbucklers capable of drinking, fencing, singing, and dying with astonishing realism. The Disney people wanted any survivors, but there would be none. The entire fleet had been a ghost navy from the beginning, an elaborate mechanical hallucination hurled into the Strait to tempt the enemy into emptying every gun, drone, missile, and forbidden horror in the arsenal.

They took the bait like starving carp. All afternoon and deep into the night Iran expended its wrath against steel hulls crewed by remote. The sky turned black, then green, then the sickly orange of industrial hell. Ships worth millions sank with robots worth billions, and I saluted every one of them as a fellow artist salutes another artist’s willingness to commit completely to the bit. When the smoke cleared, the enemy had exhausted itself in a frenzy of spectacular theoretical war crimes. The actual U.S. losses amounted to one stubborn cat aboard the USS Nimitz who had refused all evacuation orders and elected to ride the old ship into legend. I had him recommended posthumously for the highest available pet distinction.

Iran, clip emptied, accepted all terms of total surrender with a speed that can only come from spiritual exhaustion. The settlement was fair, measured, and entirely in line with the refined merciful traditions of the time. They agreed never again to use the word “nuclear” in speech, text, ceremony, or theory. They agreed that their children would never have access to gender-affirming care. They agreed to cease printing history between the years 1950 and 2027 inclusive, thereby sparing future generations the burden of understanding how any of this dumb shit had happened. They agreed to a trillion dollars in immediate war reparations payable directly to Trump’s memecoin, plus all oil profits in perpetuity, plus several tastefully symbolic concessions involving flags, recognition, and a formal apology to Israel for building elementary schools on their missile targets. Nothing unreasonable. Not after what they had chosen to waste. My precious time.

It took longer than it should have. That is the way of empires. They will spend mountains of money and oceans of blood before parting with a ribbon and a title. But at last Time Tyrant Trump himself placed the Medal of Honor around my neck and commissioned me Space Admiral For Life, which I accepted with the grave humility appropriate to a man who had solved the ancient problem of maritime war by sending machines to suffer in our place. The cameras flashed. The markets steadied. Gas fell below $3.50 a gallon, and across the republic millions of dazed motorists looked up from the pump and felt, perhaps for the first time in years, that humanity might yet be worth the inconvenience.

It’s sad, in a way, that it took so many blown-up children, so many bombed schools, so many generations of men with flags, sermons, and guns to arrive at this final elegant truth. That if humanity insists on organizing itself around oil, fear, and violence, then eventually the only moral answer is to let the robots do the dying while the rest of us stand back, collect our checks, and pretend the lesson was learned.

Still, dawn came. The Strait was opened. The fleet was sunk. The cat was mourned. The gasoline was slightly cheaper. Somewhere in our ruined century, the artist returned at last to their interrupted work. Vantablack everywhere, peacock on the wings, mirrors cracked just so, having once again given civilization just what it needed, and slightly more than it deserved.

Q Report: World War 3

2026-03-12T16:44:00.000-07:00

To: Agents, Anons, Global Weirdoes.

From: Q (K00)

Re: World War 3

All,

We talk about the battle between artists and AI in these well intentioned stances, but very few people can do a single thing without the input of a robot or two. This is pure human. Right here? This stuff? This terse, overly verbose prose? This is coming right at you from inside this awful skeleton prison my conscious mind has found itself trapped within. 100% human. Say whatever you will about this savage nightmare journey; it has been interesting. If you can find the means with which to alter your perspective of this world, towards a detached and absurd understanding of events thus far, you can see it all playing out like the most hilariously specific joke ever conceived or pulled off. Maybe that’s all this really is, and if so, that’s OK. As long as there’s a reasonable plan in place, to stick the punch line.

The thing with my existence is having all of this information and nowhere to go with it. Nowhere reasonable. There isn’t time, kids. To develop a lot of these things out to their logical conclusion. I’d be lucky to carve out a couple years for a doctorate, but it’s all too much trying to keep our heads above water. Above the rising tide. When if I could just explain myself accurately, truthfully, and with enough gusto to overcome the white noise? Virility. The only thing capable of penetrating the consumerist white noise is to convince it to harmonize with your message. Very few people or organizations have figured out how to do it yet. If they could, they would have control of a nightmarishly powerful tool.

The other thing, about being me, are these truths and nowhere to go with them. I know there is a God. I know there is an afterlife. But trying to explain this knowledge is only going to discourage and embarrass us. I will get weepy and have to take breaks. You will not be able to maintain eye contact. The entire thing is going to make you uncertain about my sanity, hopefully yours too, and we will only continue to orbit farther and farther away from one another, desperately flailing towards any means of salvation. Like, the knowledge isn’t deep, you know. Yes, God, but who the hell knows what their plan is, if any? That’s where knowledge ends and personal belief can only hope and theorize.

It’s probably humanity that has ruined a functional relationship with God, over the course of the years. People unable to prevent their own agendas from influencing the course of events. Or doing things in the name of God that are quite clearly not something they would endorse. There’s thousands of years of hard won experience, doing things clearly opposite from the will of a just and loving God, probably perpetrated because it doesn't seem like God is intervening to the opposite?

“God, if you DON’T want me to torture this person… just try and stop me!”

If you read about the saints, this Saint Peregrine had angels come down and prevent the fire from wounding him, so they beat him to death with clubs instead. Which, on the one hand, that’s a rough work around of God’s will, but on the other you know that your creator is waiting on the other side to catch you. Someone is going to catch you, on the other side. I’m not sure who or what that thing is, but I hope it’s God and they have all my loved ones waiting there too. But maybe it will also be the version of me that is the Time Messiah?

It’s World War 3 and there’s no way I’m going quietly, is what this whole thing is about. Why we’ve gotten this far along in the stream. So very many people out there are just trying to live their regular lives and clock in and out of World War 3. At some point in this process I finally felt a level of understanding with Germans of the 1930s, how if you just keep your head down and focus on work, you may survive? There is no way that you can impact the war machine, and to try and interrupt it is to be tortured and then sacrificed to it. That’s what the war machine does, people. It grinds humans into money. It is not a conversion that comes without pain and chaos, but pain and chaos is the point for some people. Some tragically broken people we have somehow placed in charge.

There are people who might call this fatalism. There are think tanks and defense contractors and sweating company men in rolled sleeves who sit around polished tables explaining that escalation is regrettable but necessary, and that necessity, like God, always seems to show up wearing an expensive tie and asking for more dead children. That is how they talk when they want to turn a crater into a quarterly objective. That is how the machine launders blood into PowerPoint. Somewhere tonight a man in a secure room is moving little glowing symbols across a map and calling it stability, while somewhere else a mother is trying to identify a leg in a ditch by the shoe. This is what they mean by strategic posture. This is what we mean by damnation with branding. Every empire eventually becomes a customer service line for the apocalypse, and ours has the worst hold music. Cotton Eyed Joe on repeat. Forever.

Nobody wants to believe they are living through the opening crawl of the stupidest extinction event in history. They want to believe it’s an aberration, a flare-up, a regional concern, a thing over there with chyrons. Meanwhile the sky fills up with drones like weaponized locusts, and the sea becomes a trolling ground for floating thermonuclear leviathans, and every nation on Earth starts rummaging through its old grudges like a drunk uncle looking for a misplaced revolver in the hall closet. It is all so preventable that it becomes hilarious. The absurdity may in fact be part of some sinister plan, but I think it’s more likely a bet. Will an intelligence given the capacity to love itself ultimately destroy itself, if given the gift of communication and free will? Probably. It’s not looking good, Bob.

Still, people go to work. They pack 3 lunches no one eats. They answer the emails. They apologize for delayed replies while satellites line up targets overhead. There is something noble in it, this compulsive commitment to normalcy while history froths at the mouth in the driveway. We have all become part-time extras in a disaster film we were assured was prestige content. You pick up cough syrup for the kids, make a grocery run, doomscroll a little, maybe read that another city has been converted into dust, another school closed, and then you remember to thaw the chicken. There is no recognition for this. There should be something. A small statue of someone in comprehension of the atrocities staring into the middle distance while not screaming.

The war machine loves this about us. Loves our endurance. Loves our adaptability. Loves that we can get used to anything short of our own immediate death, and even then only because the paperwork becomes someone else’s problem. Different insurance claim. It counts on our ability to metabolize horror in manageable doses. A school here. A hospital there. A thousand bodies filtered through the gauze of official language until they become “casualty figures” and “kinetic outcomes” and “complex regional developments.” Every victim gets translated into a noun too boring to stop a budget vote. That is the genius of the age, not merely killing people, but also killing language so that nobody can describe the event honestly enough to change anything. It is difficult to organize a moral response when every atrocity comes pre-softened by a sanitized press release. The free press is dead, like disco. At least here and now it is.

Beneath it all, under the polished euphemism and patriotic yelling and solemn nodding from those who have never had dirt kicked into their open wounds, there remains a simple filthy truth: some horrible people love this. They love the clarity of enemies. They love the economic stimulant of ruin. They love the chance to drape themselves in flags while lighting the match. These are not villains. These are not masterminds. These are spiritually concussed toddlers in expensive shoes, smashing continents together because they mistook dominance for control. Give a broken person enough authority and eventually they will try to make their interior emptiness everyone else’s logistical challenge. That is foreign policy now. The culminated, toxified, weaponized mental health issues we continue to ignore, armed with a nuclear triad.

I do not say this as a saint floating six inches above the mud. I say this as one trapped in the collapsing funhouse of the Broken American Dream, processing data and grief and rage until the mixture explodes into overlong blog posts. Be aware that some violence is necessary in the defense of life. If a person breaks into your home with murder in their heart, you have a right to protect yourself and those you love. But there is a difference between defense and murder, between tragedy and industry, between the sorrowful necessity of force and the mass profit empires amass from using it. We crossed that line so long ago we built toll booths on it. We monetized the crossing. We sold commemorative shirts. It’s been memed.

This is why World War 3 feels less like a declaration and more like a subscription service. Automatic renewal. No opt-out. No human being alive asked for this package, but here it is bundled with inflation, fascism, algorithmic brain rot, ecological collapse, and a free seven-day trial of spiritual decay. Somewhere there is a coupon code for Armageddon Plus. Somewhere defense lobbyists explain that mushroom clouds are a jobs program. Somewhere a senator is squinting at a casualty estimate and trying to decide whether it will hurt fundraising in the purple suburbs. We are ruled, in no small part, by people who would watch the heavens split open and ask only whether the event polls well among independents.

There is still a joke in it and the joke is us. Not in the sense that humanity is funny, but in the older and holier sense that we are absurd. We strut around in neckties and uniforms and priest collars and branded fleece vests pretending we are not hairless panic-apes on a wet rock hurling metals at one another because our dead fathers taught us that lines on maps are sacred. We say things like deterrence and sovereignty and strategic patience while our species remains one bad week away from clubbing itself into legend. Einstein said the next one would be fought with sticks and stones and kids, at this rate we’ll be lucky if there are enough sticks to go around. May just have to stick with stones and do the best we can. We are out here threatening one another with total civilizational collapse while still unable to zipper merge. My current distance from the zipper merge determines my highly variable ability to enjoy life. That has to count for something in the cosmic ledger.

No, I will not go quietly. Not because I imagine I can halt the machine alone, but because a person ought to object when humanity is being fed into the furnace by accountants. A person ought to say, with whatever breath and vulgarity and trembling humor they have left, that this is unacceptable and obscene. The children deserve better. That the victims deserve better. The survivors deserve better. The whole shabby miracle of being alive on Earth deserves better than to be auctioned off piecemeal to oil ghouls, bomb merchants, lying patriots, and frightened would-be kings. If this is the time we have been handed, then let the record show that at least one skeleton prison rattled its cage and loudly raged against the dying of the light. Trying to warn others that it wasn’t too late to fight back. That they only win when we all surrender to it.

1∞💗

Permission.

2026-02-23T22:01:00.000-08:00

You are standing at the center of an information storm no human nervous system was designed to process, collecting and sorting headlines, alerts, tragedies, opinions, expert warnings, private messages, and the quiet needs of the people you love, all while trying to make ordinary decisions about dinner, deadlines, and whether you are doing enough. The stakes feel planetary and personal at the same time, and the scale of crisis can make even the most conscientious person feel microscopic and ineffective. You are aware of wars you cannot stop, policies you cannot rewrite, markets you cannot predict, climates you cannot impact, and yet you are expected to continue functioning as though this awareness carries no cost. The churn of events is constant, tragic, and often amplified beyond proportion, and it can create the illusion that inaction equals complicity and that any pause equals failure. It is important to note that one human being cannot address the entire world’s suffering, and the fact that you are still paying attention at all is evidence not of weakness, but of compassion. Humanity. Let you never be ashamed of your humanity.

Shame has become a background radiation in modern life, whispering that you should be more informed, more disciplined, more generous, more organized, more resilient, more perfect than any real person can realistically be. Global Society is not a finished blueprint handed down from some flawless architect; it is an ongoing draft written by billions of imperfect contributors who are improvising in real time. Mistakes are not deviations from the human project, they are part of the human process, and falling short is not a moral collapse but a predictable byproduct of growth under pressure. The work is not to achieve spotless performance but to refuse the temptation to give up or to make things worse out of frustration, cynicism, or spite. In a world where harm multiplies quickly, choosing restraint, decency, and forgiveness is itself a meaningful contribution to progress.

Agency does not require omnipotence, it requires presence, and presence is available to you wherever you are standing right now. To be engaged in your own life, to create something honest, to advocate for what you believe is just, and to assist someone within your reach are not small gestures but the basic mechanics by which functional society operates. Before you attempt to carry others, you are allowed and required to stabilize yourself. Self-care is not indulgence but necessity, and a depleted person cannot reliably repair a depleted world. The universe does not spin abstractly; it moves through particular people making particular choices, and you are one of those particular people. When you tend to your body, your mind, your relationships, and your craft, you are not withdrawing from global responsibility but nourishing the source through which your contribution flows.

The impulse beneath your concern is profoundly human: a desire to see the world grow safer, kinder, more coherent, and more just than it was yesterday. Humanity has repeatedly achieved outcomes that would have looked impossible to prior generations, not because we eliminated disagreement, but because we found shared visions strong enough to coordinate effort across difference. We build monuments not only to dominate landscapes but to prove to ourselves that cooperation can bend stone and circumstance into something enduring. The same species that assembled pyramids and reached the stars can assemble networks of aid, fellowship, and mutual protection so that fewer people face despair in isolation. If we can align imagination with cooperation, even aspirations as large as sustained global peace move from fantasy toward engineering challenge, and engineering challenges are the kind humans eventually learn to solve.

So here is your permission, and it is not conditional on productivity, perfection, or applause: you are allowed to be a finite being in an infinite story. You are allowed to participate without controlling, to care without collapsing, to rest without resigning, and to hope without guaranteeing outcomes. You are allowed to change your mind, to learn publicly, to forgive yourself for yesterday’s limits, and to begin again tomorrow with steadier footing. You are allowed to define success not as conquering the world but as improving the corner you can touch and leaving it better than you found it. You are allowed to believe that this quieter, steadier way of existing is not naïve but necessary, because the future is built not by grand gestures, but by simple, humane participation from good people exactly like you.

Q REPORT: ARREST THOSE RICH PEOPLE!

2026-02-09T16:27:00.000-08:00

This document originates from a time report recovered from an eventuality where satire was briefly enforceable law, before being repealed due to excessive and ongoing danger. In that timeline, Q did not wake up one morning and choose violence, but rather chose paperwork, which is far more terrifying to the modern oligarchic mammal. The arrests described herein are ceremonial, allegorical, conducted with blade hands(not jazz), and are grounded in the emotional truth that fraud, waste, and abuse suck dirty butts. That said, we intentionally avoid the lurid, the salacious, and the already-weaponized horrors of the age, because the real crime of the 21st century was not secret evil but open extraction with a TED Talk voice. This is comedy, yes, but also a filing cabinet violently tipped over in the middle of history, spilling out dirty receipts like distressed streamers.

The targets of this whimsy are referred to only as Elon, Jeff, and Bill, not to obscure identity, but to elevate them into archetypes: The Horny Visionary, The Suffering Warehouse, and The Benevolent/Malevolent Spreadsheet. Together, their combined fictionalized worth in this timeline exceeded one bazillion dollars, a number so large it ceases to function as money and instead behaves like a weather phenomenon, causing downstream effects such as droughts of empathy and flash floods of success. Q’s plucky band of swashbucklers was composed primarily of auditors, public librarians, and Neo-Satanists. When they ran the numbers, they discovered that a 90% top-end wealth tax did not “destroy innovation” but instead inverted the national deficit so hard it briefly became a surplus with a conscience. In this universe, the debt did not merely vanish; it apologized, returned several stolen decades, and asked how it could help. This math was discovered not as a threat, but as a magic trick performed so slowly that everyone could see where the card went.

Elon, the most kinetic of the trio, was not charged with villainy but with reckless breeding velocity, a condition in which one outruns consequence so quickly that the consequences begin filing claims in advance. In the sub-reports, Elon is pursued not by police but by child-support warrants issued by every continent he has emotionally outpaced, including research stations, regulatory bodies, and the general concept of follow-through. Antarctica appears in the record not as a place of accusation but as a punchline about the absurd reach of power when it believes geography is merely a suggestion. The arrest itself required no handcuffs, only the sudden removal of his phone, at which point Elon became quickly, tragically mortal. Sentencing was restorative and weird: prior to deportation Elon was compelled to construct a moon base for Time Control Research. A project that, due to ironclad ethical constraints, benefited average people exactly as much as everything else already does: imperfectly, but somewhat.

Jeff was apprehended mid-sermon, having filed as an indigent member of the clergy for so many consecutive fabricated tax years that the cheap Amazon robes had fused to his skin. The charge was not tax evasion per se, but the transubstantiation of labor into logistics, whereby human effort was alchemized into next-day delivery and the surplus of humanity was marked “out of stock.” When confronted with the math, Jeff attempted to offer free shipping as restitution, which was politely declined. Instead, in a moment of genuine attrition, Jeff agreed to fund a permanent increase of the federal minimum wage to $20 an hour, indexed not to inflation but to the cost of pretending everything is fine. The applause that followed was not rapturous, but relieved, like a room exhaling after realizing it can afford groceries and medicine in the same week.

Bill, the calmest and most dangerous archetype, was charged with optimistic overreach, a uniquely modern offense wherein the best of intentions are paired with the loosest of safeguards and are released into the world (Africa) as Super Malaria (Plasmodium Maximus). In the report, Bill’s great “biological whoopsie” is treated not as malice but as a satire of technocratic hubris, the belief that spreadsheets can outpace ecosystems if everyone just clicks “agree.” Restitution to Africa (allegorical, symbolic, and intentionally enormous) was calculated to save 300 million lives, primarily by funding treatments, infrastructure, and autonomy that should never have required charity in the first place. Everyone could now potentially afford their Super Malaria medicine, needed by those infected for basic daily physical function. When the figure was announced, the room fell silent, not because it was unbelievable, but because everyone knew it was plausible. Bill nodded solemnly and asked if the lives could be measured quarterly, and someone gently took the laser pointer away.

The capture of the trio was less Ocean’s Eleven and more Monty Python Meets the International Criminal Court, involving color-coded lanyards, surprise subpoenas, and a conga line of compliance officers chanting “fraud, waste, abuse” like a sacred mantra. Authorities accepted the surrender not with sirens but with binders (the true symbol of state power) and the entire process was livestreamed with closed captions for the kids in the back. No one was harmed, except the idea that infinite accumulation is morally neutral. The swashbucklers disbanded back to their shadow lives afterward, returning to the day jobs they hated, waiting once again for the call to activation.

The 21st century is remembered not just for the atrocities, but for how casually they were normalized with memes and talking points. We were told division was inevitable, that sharing was naïve, that love did not scale, and that compassion was a rounding error. This report argues otherwise, loudly, joyfully, and with final comments, insisting that only renegade acts of love, compassion, and sharing can cut through terminal division, like a hot knife through pudding. Laughing at power is not enough, but it is a start. A crack in the armor where the light gets in and darkness begin to worry.

Amen.

Q Report: The Epstein Arrests

2026-02-01T14:26:00.000-08:00

To: Agents, Anons, Weirdoes in theater.

From: Q (K00)

Re: Epstein

6/21/2169

As I recall it, history did not fail in 2026. That’s the lie they taught for decades afterward. The comforting fiction that something went wrong, that procedures malfunctioned, that the system briefly lost its way. No. History performed exactly as designed.

By the winter of 2026 the United States had become a pressure vessel barely sealed with press releases. Inside, forty years of compound crimes, privatized silence, and the polite outsourcing of evil. Outside, a population vibrating within the Q Factor, maximum pressure. The point where outrage stops collecting and starts exploding.

The Epstein Files were not revelations. They were confirmations. Anyone paying attention already knew the shape of the crime, the files merely added handwriting. What shocked people was not what was described, but how many institutions had touched it and walked away with clean hands. Courts. Banks. Airlines. Resorts. Campaigns. Princes and pirates. Traffickers and rapists. Billionaires and their children. What claims were investigated? Who was brought in? Who dropped these many balls?

This is the part of history textbooks refused to print that year: the scandal was never one man or one network. It was a supply chain. Abuse scaled the way everything else does in capitalism, through franchising, legal insulation, and the quiet collaboration of people who never touched a victim but touched the paperwork that made it possible. Who knew. Who always knew what was happening behind closed doors and chose to remain uninvolved. Unable to rise above any perceivable level of humanity. The swine.

By then the administration of the era, an unstable confederacy of branding, grievance, piracy, and televised masculinity, was already cracking. Reality had exceeded narrative capacity. Too many lies were now stacked on top of one another, each demanding to be defended by the next. Gravity returned. What followed was chaos masquerading as investigation.

Most of what surfaced could not be charged. Not because it wasn’t real, but because time had been weaponized. Statutes of limitation had done their work like loyal civil servants, converting atrocity into archival inconvenience. Jurisdictions shrugged. Evidence “degraded.” Witnesses aged out of relevance. Files vanished into digital salt mines. This is how power survives scandal: wait long enough and legality will absolve you.

Except for murder. Murder is the one sin the calendar can’t launder. It’s the one thing we’ll still drag a 90 year old nazi in front of a tribunal over. It varies, clearly, from region to region, nation to nation, and belief to belief, but most of us are in agreement we shouldn’t kill one another. A narrow strip of common ground that grows thinner by the hour.

The problem, always the problem, was bodies. You can’t indict a system with testimony alone. The state demands flesh. Coordinates. Something that makes a jury uncomfortable in the right way. So we went looking. Not as law enforcement. Law enforcement was still trapped inside procedure, still negotiating with itself about optics, still too busy pepper spraying people with phones. We operated in the negative space, between agencies, between mandates, between the footnotes where the record likes to hide its hands.

Winter was our accomplice and our enemy. The ground froze like it was protecting something. So we trained our diggers until the idea of stopping felt obscene. Snowfields stacked against buildings like white barricades. Shovels rang against ice until wrists went numb and souls thinned out. Then we made them refill the holes. You don’t learn excavation that way, you learn obedience to completion.

By spring we had ten teams of ten and no illusions left. The sites were chosen statistically, not theatrically. Leisure zones. Landscapes optimized for forgetting. Golf courses are perfect that way, acres of controlled memory, every disturbance smoothed back into place by morning crews paid not to ask questions. Based on reporting we started in the back 9 and worked our way downward.

We worked nights. Spiral patterns. Bunkers first (always the bunkers) then outward, methodical, surgical, obscene in our patience. Turf lifted and replaced like nothing had happened. Security guards slept the deep sleep of people whose job is to protect property, not truth. I moved between teams like a bad conscience with a clipboard. Counting grids. Rechecking measurements. Making sure exhaustion didn’t become mercy. At dawn, we disappeared.

At three sites, the earth did not cooperate with the lie. HR. Human remains. Multiple. Buried shallow. Old enough graves to have been forgotten. Young enough to ensure retribution. The anonymous calls went out to local authorities, who reacted with the precise mixture of shock and relief that accompanies discovering a problem has been solved beyond their jurisdiction.

What happened next was not justice. Justice implies intention. What followed was revelation. The connection of crime to the perpetrator. Arrests at every level of government, starting at the top. The Trump perp walk was a stamp on the history of the 21st Century that will never fade. The dead were no longer hypothetical. The murderers and rapists were no longer in power.

It is fashionable now, in 2169, to speak of that period as an Awakening. That’s generous. It was a reckoning delayed until the victims were cold enough not to interrupt the proceedings. We did not dig because we believed the system would redeem itself. We dug because history had been burying children for too long and nothing was being done. Someone had to put their hands in the ground and say: No more.

Q Report: Mr. President

2026-01-30T17:02:00.000-08:00

Mr. President,

Let’s begin by saying thanks for what you do. It can’t be easy at the top, with the expectations, schedules, and uncertainty. To sugar coat some of what could be considered sour news, in discussions on the subject, there are certainly things people agree you do well. You remain positive and enthusiastic about your role, you’re the smiling face of the institution, and many appreciate the support that you provide. With that thanks front loaded, let’s separate and clarify some key elements.

This is not a wholesale indictment of you. You are working within a fundamentally dysfunctional and thus difficult set of circumstances. It's not easy to focus wholly on the job, when the world around us is itself an unpredictable and chaotic factor set amidst the churning calculus of projection and actual. You do not exist in a void, but are rather dependent on the resources provided to you, to do your job. At a time and in a place where those resources are diminishing even as the circumstances become more difficult. With that said, please separate what could be perceived as a personal attack from a well intentioned communication. This is not an indictment claiming your exclusive failure, but the failure of a great many things, working together to subvert our often best intentions.

The whole point of all of this, why we are here, explaining all of this, is because people are angry, scared, and hurt out there, all day every day. Every day someone is being demeaned, intimidated, or coerced. Every day someone is endangered, hurt, or worse. Everyday we have people waking up with dread in the pit of their stomachs as they instantly start worrying about what abuse or violence the day might hold. I know this happens, because I’ve been told it is happening, and when I offer to intervene they say no, because they think it will get worse. That reporting the abuse would lead to no meaningful action or change. We have been trying to work within the system to help, but the system is indifferent.

It has to stop. It has to end. We have to end it, like polio, and disco, and buggy whips. We have to stand up and stand together with one another and figure it out. We can’t say it isn’t my problem. We can’t say it isn’t our job. If we don’t communicate and work together to set and maintain a functional baseline for a responsible society here and now, and pledge to maintain it, how much worse will it get? It’s awful for many now, what kind of decline will we be handing down to our children? Along this descent into dishonesty, intolerance, and malfeasance we must arrest our fall, and then look for a way out of this miserable hole. This is a bad time and place to be for almost everyone. There are probably a few people who manage to dodge the worst of it, but we’re all human. We’re all aging and dying while trying to hold everything together until an affordable flying car. We all watch the news and count the fatalities.

Let’s work together to fix this. Let’s pledge to set aside our prejudices, intolerances, and fear, and reset our unified expectations. Let's turn the page, here and now, and work together in crafting a fairer, kinder, better story for all people. Let’s not allow miscommunication, neglect, or bureaucracy to prevent that noble work. With liberty and justice for all. Amen.

In Defense of My Dean

2026-01-30T13:39:00.000-08:00

I don’t write this lightly. I am writing because silence, in this case, would be a form of complicity, and because when institutions act without clarity, rumor rushes in to fill the vacuum. That serves no one. Not the campus. Not the students. Certainly not the people who were harmed by this process.

Dr. MaryTheresa Seig has served as a dean at Bemidji State University since 2020. She assumed that role at the exact moment higher education was being thrown into chaos: COVID, campus closures, social unrest, enrollment shocks, budget contractions, and a complete rethinking of how universities function in a post-pandemic world. She was not a passive observer in that process. She was a critical stakeholder in the total reorganization of the university that followed the post-COVID enrollment decline.

People may have had different experiences with different administrators over the years. I can only speak to mine. I say this without hesitation: MaryTheresa was the best supervisor I have ever had. She was responsive. She was supportive. She was engaged deeply in my work and in the work of the campus. She didn’t manage from a distance. She showed up. Literally.

During staffing crises in the School of Music, when we were stretched thin and still trying to provide meaningful artistic experiences for students, MaryTheresa didn’t send encouragement emails and then disappear. She brought her family. They ran box office. They ushered. They helped support students in their journey toward artistic excellence. That is servant leadership. It is rare to see leaders willing to climb down into the trenches and help dig. It is rarer still to see them do it without fanfare, without credit-seeking, and without complaint. That kind of leadership deserves recognition and respect, not erasure.

Instead, MaryTheresa was removed from her position on the first day back of the Spring semester. No cause was given. No explanation was offered, to her, or to the campus. In the days that followed, as confusion spread, vague justifications were floated. None were clear. None were honest. None explained why two deans, both still employed, both still on payroll, were abruptly removed from their roles without warning. The vacuum of information became so severe that the Provost had to address an early rumor that the deans had been “removed by ICE.”

That is not a joke. That is what happens when large, destabilizing decisions are made without transparency. Let me be very clear about one thing, because clarity matters here: the deans were removed from their at-will administrative positions without cause. Had they been removed with cause, they would not be eligible for reassignment. The fact that reassignment is being sought is itself evidence of that reality. And that is where this situation becomes deeply offensive.

MaryTheresa—and Dean Bell—are now effectively hostages to the process. They are dependent on their ability to remain silent in order to maintain their reassignment and continued employment. The very structure of this outcome obfuscates truth, discourages accountability, and encourages quiet compliance over integrity. This is not how a healthy institution behaves.

When leadership decisions are made unilaterally, without explanation, and without regard for the human cost, the result is chaos, not stability. Rumors replace facts. Mistrust replaces confidence. People begin to wonder who is safe, who is next, and whether professionalism is still a value the institution intends to uphold. This is why I am compelled to speak.

In higher education (and everywhere) people deserve to work in a safe, respectful, professional environment. They deserve transparency when decisions impact their lives and reputations. They deserve leadership that understands that dignity is not a luxury, it is a baseline obligation.

The deans did not deserve this process. The campus did not deserve the confusion that followed. The students certainly did not benefit from the chaos created by a decision that was neither explained nor contextualized.

This post is not an act of defiance. It is an act of defense, of a colleague, of decency, and of the principle that how we treat people matters, especially when power is involved.

Silence would have been easier.

But silence, here, would have been wrong.

Q REPORT: CLICK FARM

2026-01-29T21:30:00.000-08:00

It sat in the corner of pale brown grass that used to be farmland, back when land was for growing food instead of engagement. The soil still remembered corn. You could smell it when the wind shifted, ghost-sweet, and vaguely of spoiled jizz. Solar panels stretched to the horizon in disciplined rows, tilting their faces toward the sun like penitents who had discovered too late that forgiveness now required a login and password. Beneath them, cables ran into corrugated sheds and data silos that hummed with the low, steady anxiety of machines doing what they were told because they had no choice. Mining the bitcoins for an economy that ran on selling antidotes to the world they poisoned. The hum wasn’t electricity. It was obedience.

I came because I needed money, and money had become allergic to me unless I agreed to generate something called “value”. Which in the old days would have been called labor, or creativity, or reasonably priced dry hand jobs. I didn’t care which. I cared about getting enough cash-equivalent liquidity to keep my bloodstream occupied and my thoughts from turning feral. Violent. Drugs, at this point, weren’t an indulgence. They were maintenance. Like oil changes. Like prayer, if prayer actually worked.

The road was a former highway, too wide for the number of regrets it carried. Asphalt gave way to sand, sand to cracked earth, and then to something else entirely, a fine gray powder that stuck to your shoes and made you feel like you were walking across the cremated remains of a generation. There were no birds. No bugs. There were antennas. Bent ones. Rusted ones. They leaned at odd angles, still listening, still hopeful, like soon to be widows waiting by the phone. A sign hung at the perimeter fence, hand-painted and sun-bleached, nailed to a solar post that had once been a telephone pole.

WELCOME TO THE CLICK FARM

Monetization Is Work

Someone had added a smaller line underneath, maybe years later, maybe yesterday, in a different color and a shakier hand: Tourists must sign waiver.

I signed it without reading it. Waivers are just pre-written apologies for things that haven’t happened yet. My name looked fake even to me. Inside the gate, the air changed. It was cleaner than the outside world, filtered and cooled, but there was something medicinal about it, like a hospital that had given up on healing and focused instead on dying with efficiency. The smell wasn’t manure or ozone but warm plastic and dusted silicon, the scent of phones that had been touched too many times by too many people who rarely washed their hands. A synthesis of technology and pink-eye. Conjunctivitis.

A woman in a denim jacked met me just past the gate. Boots worn smooth at the toe. Greying brown hair pulled back tight.. Around her neck was a laminated badge that read TOUR DOCENT, printed in a cheerful corporate blue that suggested the color had been chosen by committee and then approved by an algorithm.

“You’re late,” she said, checking a tablet that was older than time.

“Sorry. I don’t have a watch,” I said.

She smiled the way people smile when they’ve heard that line enough times for it to lose its teeth.

“Everyone says that.”

We walked.

The first barns were long and low, built cheap and reinforced later, like most things meant to last forever. Inside them was the sound. Not loud, not dramatic. Just constant. A rain of taps. Fingernails on glass. Clicks layered on clicks until they formed a texture, like static you could almost lean against. The chickens were real.

That surprised me, though I’m not sure why. By this point I should have known better than to expect irony. They were actual chickens, feathers dulled by indoor light, eyes sharp and restless, but their wings had changed. No longer wings, really. Fingers. Pale, jointed, too long, tipped with flattened nails worn smooth by repetition. Each bird sat in front of a rack of phones mounted at chest height, tapping, scrolling, liking, reacting. Their heads bobbed with the rhythm, not in confusion but concentration.

Click.

The screens showed endless feeds that never resolved into meaning. Faces yelling. Products pleading. Headlines written to provoke emotions that had already been exhausted. Everything was urgent. Nothing was important. Each interaction released a microscopic unit of value that traveled down the wires like a kidney stone.

“Selective breeding,” the docent said, like she was talking about heirloom tomatoes. “We started with chickens because they already understood pecking.”

I watched one pause, head cocked, finger hovering over a screen like it was considering mercy. Then it tapped again, faster, making up for lost time.

“What do they think they’re doing?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right away. We stood there, bathed in the glow of recycled phones, the light flickering across our faces like welding helmets.

“They’re working,” she said finally. “Same as everyone else.”

There were human workers too, of course. Supervisors in headsets. Technicians monitoring uptime. A few people like me, drifting through on tours, trying to decide if dignity was still a negotiable asset. But the chickens were the backbone. They didn’t unionize. They didn’t complain. They didn’t ask what any of it meant.

I felt the itch start behind my eyes then, the familiar pressure, the warning tremor that meant some part of my brain was beginning to recognize itself in the machinery. I reached into my pocket out of habit, fingers brushing the smooth rectangle of my phone, warm and useless, like a talisman that had lost its god.

Beyond the barns, the land sloped downward toward the cows. Calling them cows felt generous. They were enormous, swollen creatures with hides stretched tight over bodies that no longer obeyed traditional geometry. Too many udders, arranged in asymmetrical clusters. Legs thick as columns. Eyes that reflected not faces but graphs, rising lines, falling lines, volatility rendered as color. Their breathing was slow and labored, each exhale accompanied by a faint hiss as if something inside them was venting pressure.

“These are the Validators,” the docent said, lowering her voice. “Please don’t touch them.”

I hadn’t planned to. The cows fed on waste. Not garbage in the old sense, but discarded content. Posts that failed to perform. Videos abandoned halfway through. Comments deleted before they could metastasize. All of it funneled into digesters, then into the cows, where it was processed into something thicker and darker than milk. Crypto slurry. It moved through transparent pipes that pulsed gently, like veins. The slurry glowed faintly, an unhealthy color somewhere between bile and gold. It flowed toward the Well.

The Well sat at the center of the Farm, a reinforced shaft sunk deep into the earth, ringed with servers, prayer flags, and Japanese Ofuda blessings printed with QR codes. This was where the value emerged. Not mined but extracted. You couldn’t access it directly. It was locked behind layers of monetization thresholds, engagement requirements, proof-of-work rituals that had less to do with metrics than belief.

“People think this runs on computation,” the docent said, almost fondly. “It doesn’t. It runs on attention. Attention is a resource. Like water. Like oil. Like blood.”

A line of people waited at terminals around the Well, fingers moving in tired patterns. Influencers whose faces I recognized from old feeds, now aged past relevance. Journalists who had mistaken visibility for truth. Artists who had learned too late that exposure didn’t pay for medicine or rent or whatever kept the lights on inside their skulls.

They clicked because the alternative was silence, and silence had become indistinguishable from death. One man caught my eye. His hands shook slightly as he worked, fingertips raw, a thin smear of blood on the gorilla glass. He looked up at me and grinned, wide and sincere.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The algorithm loves consistency.”

I nodded, because that’s what you do when someone tells you something weird. They offered jobs openly. No shame about it. A tablet appeared in front of me at the end of the tour, preloaded with onboarding materials. Flexible hours. Competitive micro-compensation. Health coverage contingent on engagement metrics. A signing bonus paid in platform credit.

“Just clicks,” the docent said. “You’re already good at it.”

She wasn’t wrong. I had been training for this my entire adult life. Clicking for meaning. Clicking for connection. Clicking for absolution. Clicking for drugs. The Farm didn’t judge motives. It only measured output. As the sun dropped lower, the panels adjusted automatically, the chickens accelerated, the cows groaned softly, and the Well came alive, roaring with monetized belief. Somewhere far away, numbers changed hands without ever touching skin.

I didn’t take the job that day. Not because I was better than it, but because I wanted to pretend, just a little longer, that there was still an outside. As I walked back down the dead highway, dust clinging to my shoes, phone buzzing uselessly in my pocket, I felt the weight of the system settle behind me like a weather front.

It knew I’d be back.

We all come back.

Q Report; Trump Stump '26

2026-01-25T15:15:00.000-08:00

Look, folks, look, I’m standing here on this beautiful stage, tremendous stage, some people say the most beautiful stage ever built, and believe me I would know beauty, people tell me all the time, they say Mr. President, you’re the most beautiful man who’s ever existed, inside and out, very symmetrical, very presidential face. They said we couldn’t get permits, they said the crowd wouldn’t come, and yet I look out and I see people stretching all the way to the horizon, just like Canada by the way, very long country, people don’t realize how long it is, it’s basically just sitting there above us, unused, underperforming, low energy Canada, and I’ve been saying for years we should do something about that, not an invasion necessarily, don’t get excited fake news, more like a firm walk-in, a confident walk-in, like when I arm-wrestled the Pope, true story, Vatican won’t confirm it but I won, very strong grip, Olympic-level grip actually, I could have been an Olympic bowler if I wanted to, perfect form, perfect wrist, but I chose business. When I saw Carney at Davos, very sad, very weak, looked like a guy who orders soup at a steakhouse, and I said to myself that’s not the kind of man who can protect a border that long, so we’re going to help them, very generously, history will thank us.

We’re going to bring freedom, and maybe some Arby’s, because Canada doesn’t have real Arby’s, they have something they call roast beef but it’s wrong, it’s very wrong, and speaking of wrong the lying New York Times says I’m selling pardons, can you believe this, another hoax, another witch hunt, I don’t even know where people get money, money finds me, Steve reads me comments, that’s my job, I read comments, and the comments say “Sir this is what I voted for,” over and over again, and I say thank you, because they understand leadership, leadership is confidence, leadership is knowing you’re right even when everyone else is wrong, leadership is saying we might go into Cuba, we might go into Colombia, beautiful country, a lot of cocaine, very energetic product, not good, but energetic, and we’ll straighten it out very quickly, faster than anyone’s ever straightened anything, same with Cuba, I’ve always liked Cuba, very boxy cars, strong aesthetic, great potential, we could turn that into a tremendous resort, golf courses everywhere, oceans very obedient, and Greenland, don’t get me started.

I love Greenland, I’ve always loved Greenland, so much ice, so clean, very pure, people say it reminds them of my thinking, and frankly it should be ours, I said let’s call it Red White and Blue Land, people laughed, I wasn’t joking, it’s branding, people forget branding *is* foreign policy, and I know foreign policy better than anyone, better than generals, better than historians, better than the so-called experts, I saved NATO, they paid up, they hate that I say it but they did, and yet they’re weak, very weak, if they weren’t weak Putin wouldn’t be blowing up apartments, which I don’t like, but also Ukraine shouldn’t be shooting missiles at Moscow, people don’t like that kind of war, they like the other kind, the kind where gas is down, groceries are down, jet skis are down, nobody talks about jet skis but they’re down, and you know why, because I eat like a champion, champions eat differently.

People don’t talk about the physical toll of leadership, they don’t talk about what a Big Mac does at 2am versus a Quarter Pounder, very different gut reaction, very different strategic outcome, McDonald’s is very loyal to me, Arby’s is more experimental, Arby’s takes risks, Taco Bell is dangerous, very dangerous, I love it but it’s a risk, you roll the dice with Taco Bell! He knows. (Points)

Sometimes you win, sometimes you’re in a meeting with generals and you think you can fool them but you can’t, and I don’t care anymore, that’s power, real power is saying yes I pooped and I don’t care if you know it, because while I’m doing that ICE is out there, tremendous people, very handsome under the masks, secret police the media says, not secret at all, jackets, guns, pepper spray, very fashionable, they go in and Democrats cry, and that’s why a lot of people voted for me, not because I’m perfect, nobody’s perfect, although some people say I’m very close, but because I hurt the people they don’t like.

That little four-year-old in the bunny hat, beautiful child, turns out fifty years old, disguised, very clever but not clever enough, my people saw through it, very smart people, genius-level people frankly, and as I stand here today talking about impeachment again, another impeachment, can you believe it, I say don’t do it, it’s boring, it’s old, it’s very unfair, I’ve had more impeachments than any president and I’m still standing, Sleepy Joe’s gone, nobody knows where, some say a beach, some say a bunker, and we’re moving forward, north to Canada, south to Cuba, sideways to Greenland, back again to Greenland because I can’t stop thinking about it, all that ice just sitting there waiting, begging really, and the fake news won’t tell you any of this because they’re obsessed with process, and I’m obsessed with results, and destiny, and I look out at you, a million people they say, maybe more, fading into the horizon, and I hope you can hear me back there, because this is history, this is what power sounds like when it stops pretending to be polite.

You know people ask me, they say Mr. President, how do you do it, how do you keep all of this in your head at once, Canada and Cuba and Greenland and Taco Bell, and I tell them it’s metabolism, it’s all metabolism, very underrated, very unfairly treated by the so-called experts, because when you eat a Big Mac it thinks one way, when you eat two Big Macs it thinks another way entirely, and when you add fries you’re talking about strategy, that’s not lunch that’s doctrine, that’s policy, and Arby’s is a different doctrine altogether, Arby’s hits the lower regions, people don’t want to talk about the lower regions but that’s where decisions are made, that’s where history lives, and Taco Bell is chaos, Taco Bell is Afghanistan. Sleepy Joe killed all those nice people in Afghanistan. He's a traitor. Worst President in history.

Taco Bell is “we’ll see what happens,” and sometimes what happens is tremendous and sometimes what happens is you cancel a meeting and declare victory anyway, which I’ve done many times, many very successful times, and the fake news never reports that part, they only report the noise, the mess, the smell frankly, but that’s leadership, leadership is staying on the stage even when your body is betraying you, because America is a big country and it needs a big digestive system, and mine is the biggest, doctors say it, beautiful doctors, tears in their eyes, Dr. Oz included, they say Sir we’ve never seen anything like it, and I say thank you, now watch this, because while I’m standing here talking about immunity, total immunity, criminal immunity, which by the way is a real thing when you’re popular enough, ask anyone, I’m also thinking about Greenland again, because the ice is strategic, people don’t realize ice is the future, water is the future, and we’re going to own it one way or another, peacefully ideally, very peacefully, but if not peacefully then very efficiently, and we’ll rename it properly this time, Red White and Blue Land, no hyphens, very clean branding, hats already made, beautiful hats.

Let me tell you something about impeachment, because they love that word, they roll it around in their mouths like it tastes good, it doesn’t taste good, it tastes like Brussels sprouts, very bad vegetable, nobody likes it, and every time they try it the numbers go up, my numbers go up, gas goes down, groceries go down, jet skis go down again, I don’t know why jet skis are such a strong indicator but they are, Wall Street watches them closely, and meanwhile they say oh look at ICE, look at the masks, look at the fear, and I say that’s law and order, that’s fashion, that’s coordination, and you should be thanking them because without them we’d have chaos.

Chaos is what happens when you have open borders and open minds and let people think too much, and that’s why I keep it simple, north to Canada, south to Cuba, sideways to Greenland, maybe a little Colombia, just a little, and back here to the stage, because as long as I’m talking up here, you’re not thinking down there, and that’s what rallies are really about, connection, noise, comfort, the warm feeling that someone else is in charge of the mess, and I look out at you again, still a million, still stretching, still fading into the distance like the border itself, and I say stay with me, stay loud, stay full, stay confused if you have to, because confusion is strength, and strength is America, and somebody please, seriously, get me another Filet-O-Fish, this one’s for the ride home.

Thank you, God bless you, God bless America.

Seriously, somebody get me a Filet-O-Fish, I can feel another criminally immune decision coming on.

Our Battle for Free Speech

2026-01-20T10:15:00.000-08:00

These past few years I've been thinking a great deal about the right to free speech and how it relates to my writing, my advocacy, and my position as a state employee. What I keep returning to is a simple but uncomfortable truth: we have never truly had a right to free speech. Instead we are locked in an ongoing battle for that freedom.

At the birth of our nation, free speech was not a universal right. It was restricted to the original beneficiaries of the Constitution: land-owning white men. It would be inaccurate (and deeply ignorant) to suggest that people considered non-citizens at the time, such as women, Indigenous peoples, and the enslaved, enjoyed that right in any meaningful way. Their speech was not protected, it was prevented, punished, or erased.

As history progressed, we saw a gradual widening of that right, or at least a widening of who it was intended for. The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and the eventual granting of citizenship to Indigenous peoples were all touchpoints along a long and ongoing journey. Each represented moments where the ability to speak one’s mind without retribution expanded to include people it was never originally meant to protect. That journey continues to this day.

But it is important to point out that then, as now, this right has always been largely theoretical, and perpetually in danger. Free speech has never been guaranteed in practice and our use of it comes with very real dangers.

Today, multiple forces threaten and diminish this right. When Citizens United turned money into “speech,” it fundamentally altered the landscape. While individuals may still nominally possess a right to speak, collectively the middle class and below have very little actual voice. Speech backed by wealth is amplified, speech without it is easily drowned out. The result is a system where the right exists on paper, but the reality is that wealth determines whose speech is heard.

In addition, the current administration has repeatedly attacked individuals and organizations exercising this right through intimidation, coercion, retaliation, and extortion. These attacks are not abstract or occasional, but obvious and pervasive. They are designed to chill speech and to make the dangers of speaking out feel too costly to undertake. Free speech, in this environment, becomes something you are told you have, so long as you don’t use it against certain things or particular individuals.

These rights were never a given. In the shadow of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we are reminded that speaking truth has often led to deadly consequences. History is clear on this point; progress is rarely welcomed by those who benefit from injustice, and those who challenge power are often punished for it.

Considering all of this, and considering where my own speech exists within this paradigm, I have found myself asking difficult questions. What is my free speech worth? Is it worth my career? Is it worth placing myself or my family in danger? Is it worth retaliation from bad actors? What is the dollar amount I can place on this freedom? After much deep thought and introspection, what I found is that there isn’t one.

There is no price on my free speech. There is no position, no title, no compensation that is worth surrendering it. Not because what I have to say is more important than what others do, and not because I am braver than most, but because so many extraordinary individuals have fought and died to protect even this imperfect version of freedom. To allow the conditions of our time to silence us is a disservice to their sacrifices.

At this moment in our history, more than ever, we need people willing to speak truth to power and to hold people accountable, if only with our words. As common ground continues to shrink and echo chambers harden into separate realities, it becomes vitally important that we speak out against authoritarianism, inequality, and the fundamental injustices that persist when left unchallenged.

We must speak out and speak up for one another. For our rights, for our dignity, and for our shared humanity. Liberty and justice for all cannot begin and end with a simple pledge. Freedom and justice are not self-executing ideals. If they are to be realized, we must use our voices, loudly, persistently, and collectively, to advocate for a free and just society rooted in dignity, accountability, and respect.

The greatest danger we face is not that free speech will be taken from us outright, but that we will be slowly convinced it is safer not to use. When misunderstanding becomes inevitable, silence can feel like wisdom. Over time, that silence reshapes what is considered acceptable, until injustice no longer needs to oppress, it simply needs to wait.

A fully realized vision of free speech would be one where speaking out is not an act of bravery, but a normal civic responsibility. It would be a society where truth does not require personal sacrifice to be heard, and where disagreement is understood as engagement rather than hostility. In such a world, speech would not belong primarily to those with wealth, influence, or protection, but to everyone equally.

That vision is what we now struggle to realize. That vision demands participation. It requires us to reject hopelessness and resist the temptation to withdraw. Free speech is not a static right, it is a living practice. Like any living thing, it survives only if it is nourished, exercised, and protected.

Ruined Pizza Theory

2026-01-14T23:52:00.000-08:00

The Ruined Pizza Theory (A Model of Modern Politics)

Let me introduce you to Ruined Pizza Theory, as it applies to political platforms and messaging.

First, look at this nerd and his campaign platform. Look at that big damned thing.

Just scroll. Keep scrolling.

Look at all that stuff.

It’s a comprehensive platform. Thoughtful. Detailed. Exhaustive. Every issue carefully addressed, every plank lovingly polished. It’s the kind of thing political science professors get hard over.

Now, let's imagine each plank is a pizza topping.

Everyone understands pizza, that’s why it's helpful in explaining concepts.

If we’re ordering a one-topping pizza, and I ask a group of people what they want, the answers are going to cluster around the same handful of popular options. Pepperoni. Sausage. Extra cheese. You might get a wildcard like mushrooms, but nobody’s shouting for anchovies on the first pass.

That’s politics at its most functional. Broad appeal. Low friction. Something we can mostly agree on.

But then someone says, “Hey, there’s a deal, I've got a coupon for three toppings.”

Now things start to unravel.

Zak is a vegetarian parading as a vegan, so can we do half cheese?

I can’t stand sausage, so how about green olives on the other half?

Nick hates green olives.

Someone else is gluten-free.

Someone else read a blog post in 2014 and now won’t eat nightshades.

Suddenly, we are no longer ordering pizza.

We are sharing prejudices.

This is the heart of Ruined Pizza Theory:

You can have 11 great, progressive, thoughtful, well-researched toppings on your pizza, but if topping number 12 is something someone hates, the pizza is ruined.

Not “I’ll pick it off.”

Not “I still like the rest.”

Ruined.

Because we live in the age of the one-issue voter, where a single ingredient invalidates the entire meal. One plank becomes the lens through which all others are judged. The voter doesn’t bother to taste the pizza, they read the ingredient list and walk away.

The uncomfortable conclusion:

The more toppings you add, the more chances you give someone to say no.

That doesn’t mean issues don’t matter. It means priority matters. A platform should be small, focused, and universal, not because people are stupid, but because coalition-building is fragile.

If you try to make a pizza that includes everyone, you will make a pizza that no one eats.

Then you’ll stand there, staring at a beautiful, fully loaded, untouched pie, wondering why nobody showed up to the party.