Persistent Resistance

Reckoning with the American promises that became nightmares. Hope survives. Even in broken places. When I was a kid, they told us if you worked hard enough, you could have anything. A good job. A nice house. A full table. Maybe even a little luxury, if you dreamed big enough. They called it a shining land of opportunity. You know the deal — work hard, get ahead. Simple math. Simple promise. What they didn’t tell us was that the game was already rigged. They didn’t tell us that hope could be weaponized — used to keep you running on a treadmill until your body broke, your mind cracked, and your spirit wore thin. They didn’t tell us that protecting the rich would become our civic religion. You can see it clearest in how we treat celebrity in this country. How we're trained to flinch at criticizing the rich, the famous, the golden gods on magazine covers and Instagram feeds. How we apologi...

  Man vs. Money A nation built on two ideals — one of them a parasite.   This country was never just founded on freedom. It was built on two conflicting ideologies — the rights of man , and the pursuit of money. And from the beginning, those two forces have been fighting it out. In choosing to enshrine both ideologies — the rights of man and the pursuit of wealth — in the same foundational documents, the Founding Fathers opened the door to the beast. They wove contradiction into the country’s very DNA. One ideal sought liberty and equality; the other sought profit, even if it meant exploitation. And the tension between those two has shaped every chapter since. We have pretended for more than two hundred years that these competing ideologies could rest easy in each other’s company. But I fear Money has always been waiting for Man to relax — to slip into sleep — so it could garrote him in the dark. Where "man" meant dignity, community, shared burden, and collective good — ...

  You Built This Too   When technology forgot humanity, and you helped it happen. Once, I built the web myself. Now, I can’t log into my own life. In the middle of a national crisis, when everything feels uncertain, I tried to access my Social Security account. I couldn’t. Why? Because it was tied to a phone I no longer have. And because the system—designed by people who preach security but don’t comprehend lived reality—won’t allow for a human moment like changing a number. This didn’t start with the current administration, though they’ve made it worse. This has happened before . And it’s not just me. Anyone whose life doesn’t follow the neat, trackable arc of digital behavior—anyone who switches phones, resets passwords, forgets a username, loses a device—is treated not like a person… but like a risk. They call it security, but it’s not about protecting you. It’s about maintaining control over you — and calling it protection so you’ll stop asking questions. The system doesn...

  I Was the Wizard What Geocities, HTML, and Time Taught Me About Tech, Trust, and the Myth of Progress Before the algorithm, there was HTML. Before the internet tracked you, it challenged you. Before the walled gardens, we built our own damn neighborhoods. I had a Geocities site. It wasn’t pretty. It blinked. It probably had a MIDI file autoplaying something awful. I went through   hell hunting down that MIDI file — and more hell finding the exact snippet of code that would let it autoplay. That’s how it worked back then. Want a marquee? Scour a message board. Want a background that sparkles or a dancing hamster gif? You begged, borrowed, and Frankensteined your way through JavaScript and Java snippets. We weren’t just writing HTML — we were navigating UseNet , TelNet , Gopher , FTP . The web wasn’t just a place; it was a network of protocols you had to know how to walk. And downloading an image? Sometimes that meant getting a text file of ASCII gibberish and reassembling ...

  How Bill Gates Made Me Feel Poor — and Then Taught Me What Power Really Is I was computing in the days before Windows. My first system had a grand total of 20 megabytes on the hard drive. I had the full 640k of RAM, but after DOS loaded, I was left with 512k to actually work with. Most software developers believed Gates when he supposedly said, "640k ought to be enough for anyone." So they built right up to the limit. DOS didn't like that. Programs clashed. Crashed. Locked up. Then came Windows. Not for me, though. I couldn’t run it. Not on my 20MB system. And that was the first strike against Gates: he made me feel my relative poverty. There’s a particular sting when everyone else gets the shiny new thing and you don’t. I wasn’t mad at Windows because it was bad. I was mad because I couldn’t have it. It felt like the tech world was moving on without me. But I scraped. I saved. And eventually, piece by piece, I built a system that could run Windows. Then I promptly kill...

  Grow Up. Step Up. Shut Up. Or Show Up. Got No Fucks Left to Give I. Chuck Schumer Was Right Sometimes, leadership doesn’t look like fireworks — it looks like foresight. Chuck Schumer took heat from all sides — the press, the left, the Very Online — for not forcing a government shutdown during the Continuing Resolution Budget Bill. I don't deny he could have handled his interaction with the House better They said he blinked. That he let the moment slip. That he didn’t fight hard enough. But Schumer wasn’t playing Twitter chess. He saw the trap for what it was: Shut down the government, and Trump gets to decide what stays open. Trump gets to decide when it reopens. And Trump gets to prove his favorite point — that government doesn’t work. What looked like a retreat was actually a sidestep. Schumer didn’t hand Trump the chance to weaponize a shutdown. He refused to help the arsonist claim victimhood. And you’ll note: Nancy Pelosi didn’t say he was wrong — she just said she would’ve ...

  They Always Knew The Long Game to Re-make Democracy Was Never a Secret I. Trump Wasn’t the Architect. He Was the Arsonist. Donald Trump didn’t mastermind the collapse of American democracy — he was handed the matchbook. The GOP elite knew what he was when they brought him in. He wasn’t clever, principled, or stable. But he was loud. He was charismatic. He was willing to do what others wouldn’t. And most importantly, he could take the heat. From the moment he descended the escalator, they knew he would burn things down. And they were fine with that — because some things they wanted burned. Government oversight. Regulatory guardrails. Press accountability. Trump was a useful idiot with a bullhorn. But the plan? That came long before him. II. The Long Grudge Since Nixon When Nixon resigned, some Republicans did the right thing — but their donors never forgave the system. They didn’t mourn Watergate; they mourned losing. And for decades, that loss simmered into resentment. But they ...

  Conditional Originally published as a Civil InCivility Short. What happens when a government stops honoring its side of the deal? The Constitution isn't just a top-down document — it's a compact. When that compact breaks, so does the relationship between the states and the federal government. Watch the Short above, then keep reading to see why this isn’t just a dramatic question — it’s a necessary one. Because when the federal government withdraws funding, protections, or basic functionality from the states, it’s not just dysfunction. It’s breach of contract. Conditional Originally published as a Civil InCivility Short. What happens when a government stops honoring its side of the deal? We don’t talk about the Constitution this way very often, but we should — because it’s not just a set of laws handed down from on high. It’s a compact . A mutual agreement between the states and the federal government. And when one side starts defaulting on that agreement, the ...

 📝 Euphemisms at War:  How Language is Failing Us from Both Ends Everyone loves to drag the other side for their lies. “The Right’s full of propaganda!” “The Left’s allergic to reality!” And you know what? They’re not equally guilty — but they’re both making a mess of the language. Because while one side’s out here calling book bans “freedom,” the other’s decided “dead” is too upsetting, so now we’re saying ‘unalived’ like we’re whispering about Voldemort in a middle school cafeteria. But here’s the real difference: One side lies to control you. The other lies because they’re afraid of upsetting you. And neither one brings us closer to the truth. This isn’t about partisan balance. It’s about the death of clarity — and how we’re all paying the price. 🟥 The Right: Cruelty with a Smile Let’s be blunt: the modern GOP doesn’t lie to spare your feelings. They lie to protect power — and they’ve mastered the art of euphemism as a weapon. “Entitlement reform” —...