We have been ambushed.
We should be talking about the dangerous, destabilizing things being done to this country.
We should be talking about the data centers spreading across the landscape, draining electricity and water, straining local infrastructure and expanding the technological machinery needed to track, profile and control the population.
We should be talking about the government’s growing network of detention centers and its family-separation policies, which have resulted in an estimated 145,000 American children experiencing the detention of at least one parent—including more than 22,000 U.S.-citizen children whose entire household of co-resident parents has been detained.
We should be talking about license-plate readers, facial recognition, government databases and artificial intelligence capable of turning our movements and associations into a digital dossier on every person in America.
We should be talking about masked government agents, endless war, disappearing constitutional safeguards and an imperial presidency accountable to no one.
Instead, we are trapped in a vicious loop of nonsense, mania, political demagoguery and manufactured spectacle while the country goes to hell in a handbasket.
Every day—sometimes every hour—brings another outrage, another threat, another vulgar display of power, another self-glorifying meme, another political provocation and another distraction demanding our attention.
Before we can fully comprehend one assault on the Republic, another takes its place.
That is not merely the chaos surrounding this government.
It is one of the ways this government maintains power.
Keep the public angry, exhausted, frightened and distracted. Force everyone to chase the latest outrage. Crowd out serious scrutiny with political theater. Then push past another constitutional boundary while no one is able to keep track of what has already been lost.
This is how every crisis appears fleeting and every constitutional violation merely the latest controversy in an endless political spectacle.
Taken together, however, these are not isolated events.
They are tests.
Meanwhile, as the administration tests how much damage it can inflict and how many boundaries it can cross without consequences, the public is being overwhelmed by a relentless barrage of noise, spectacle and manufactured outrage.
And the costs of the government’s recklessness continue to mount.
The war with Iran continues to consume lives, military resources and tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.
Critical munitions are reportedly running low. Military commanders are being forced to make difficult decisions about which weapons must be preserved. American service members have been killed and hundreds more injured. Disruptions to global oil supplies threaten higher prices, shortages and further economic instability.
America needs to be made free again.
Free from a government that tracks everywhere we go, treats dissent as dangerous, wages war without accountability, polices communities like occupied territory and insists that constitutional rights must yield whenever those in power invoke national security.
The question is no longer whether the Constitution is welcome in America. The question is whether the government still considers the Constitution binding at all.
The government no longer needs to assign an officer to follow you.
Your phone, your car, your face, your purchases and your digital associations do the reporting for it. License-plate readers, facial recognition, geofence searches, social-media monitoring and artificial intelligence can assemble detailed profiles of people never suspected of a crime.
The danger is no longer simply that the government can watch everyone. It is that an administration demanding personal loyalty possesses the machinery to identify, track, intimidate and retaliate against those who refuse to submit.
Speech does not have to be formally outlawed when people can be frightened into silence.
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