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A dear friend recently texted me while clothes shopping with her preteen daughter. The girl, an aspiring gymnast, spotted a glittery American flag shirt and pleaded with her mother to buy it. Where the kid saw Simone Biles, her mother, a brilliant brand designer, saw complications and gave it a hard pass.

I wasn’t sure how to respond. She’s one of the kindest people I know and a great mom. I stared at my phone for a while, drafting replies I didn’t send. The silly uncle: I get it, but there are worse fashion choices a kid can make. The trite-but-true op-ed: Well, the flag belongs to all of us. But it’s not my place to give parenting advice, nor was this dog dad asked for it.

I don’t have to manage the loaded perceptions of other kids at school or the cocked eyebrows of their parents at Little League. My choices don’t decide the friends and foes an eleven-year-old makes. Refraining from wearing the flag is, by traditional flag-code standards, the more respectful move anyway. John Prine was right that your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore. But I couldn’t stop turning over the fact that the piece of cloth we were made to pledge to every morning has failed at its only real job: to unify us.

There was no period in my life when the flag was more omnipresent than in the months after 9/11. Twenty-five years on, according to Gallup, patriotism among women and young Americans sits at an unprecedented low.

Every 4th of July, oodles of articles get written about the paradoxes of patriotism. They tend towards listicles of America’s contradictions, how the country is the best and worst of its past and its people, before closing on the reassurance that we are, all of us, Americans. The rest are eulogies. This year skewed heavily toward eulogy. I don’t know whether I read them out of hope or longing, or if I’m just a sadist with a screen addiction. They’re so thick with cliché that even the ones written decades ago would trip an AI checker for robotic prose.

The flag belongs to all Americans. True. But the right claimed the merch a long time ago. Since Vietnam, its rightward lean has been broadly accepted; study after study finds that even liberals who self-identify as patriotic view Old Glory as symbolically conservative. One “study” tried to claim that merely being in the presence of a flag would make you more conservative. It failed to be replicated. But J.D. Vance's presence has been known to make some Americans more liberal.

Liberals who abandoned flag-waving years ago, some rejecting patriotism outright, still embrace national unifying iconography. They stick national-park decals on their Yeti mugs and Subarus, tote NPR and PBS bags, and get Rosie the Riveter tattoos.

Others build alternatives. The Pride flag has been amended four times toward greater inclusion, to the point that the current design is so cluttered it looks like the work of a straight plumber named Mitch, the one guy it doesn’t represent. A few years back, the suburban-mom resistance seeded lawns everywhere with “In This House We Believe” signs — multicolored font on black pressboard, meant to unite the multicultural America they live in, and functioning, unmistakably, as an anti-MAGA marker.

We had one in our yard. I hated it — not the message, but the naive smugness of it, the little slogans I had to walk past every time I came home. But a friend had asked us to put it up, and I couldn’t bring myself to wound her positive intent over a lawn sign, so I left it there until the sun bleached it gray and it began to disintegrate on its stake. I’d hoped it might at least deter the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It didn’t. Nothing works as well as opening the door and rotating your head a full 360 degrees.

Some liberals still wear the flag, though class, fabric, and hue quietly sort their merch from the conservative majority’s. The man in the Uncle Sam top hat and flag overalls pleasuring himself at Trump’s Great American State Fair — conservative, however liberated he felt. The fit L.A. bartender in a stars-and-stripes Speedo, sipping a mango White Claw poolside at the Ace in Palm Springs — undeniably liberal. There are prep libs in knit Rowing Blazers sweaters, hipster libs in retro Olympic tracksuits, Americana libs drifting through Buc-ee’s with their papys’ bronzed flag belt buckles. If you spot a garish car wrap, a button-up with a scowling eagle, or a cotton pullover with what looks like an entire aisle of Party City hot-glued to it, you’re almost certainly in the presence of a conservative.

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Yet even the most devout MAGA is at least subconsciously aware that owning the most flag merch isn’t the same as owning the flag. The flag doesn’t hold their ideals alone. They’d never admit it. But you can tell by their compulsion to hoist a Trump or a Let’s Go Brandon flag right beside Old Glory on the back of their F-250s.

Despite all of America’s wrongs, I have a sense of patriotism for America’s professed ideals. I’ve just never looked good in red, white, and blue — not for lack of trying. I was once a kid in the flag tee myself. On the 4th of July, sitting in a lawn chair in my grandmother’s driveway, I caught my first glimpse of the difference between performative patriotism and living those ideals. I had no sophisticated analysis, just a fleeting hunch that something was off. Then I went back to enjoying the colorful explosions in the night sky.

My uncle was a small-town cop, estranged from us now — the kind who flips on his lights and siren to blow through town on a coffee run. He was also a volunteer firefighter, and he threw the best 4th of July parties on the block. Every June, his unit would catch some immigrant dairy farmer or aging hippie with illegal fireworks and confiscate the lot. Come dusk, he and his posse of public servants would break out their stashes of Ladyfingers, Roman candles, and M-80s. My uncle would hold bottle rockets in his hand and laugh at the printed instructions telling him not to as he lit the fuse.

A child subjected to copious amounts of D.A.R.E. propaganda, I was acutely aware of the law and terrified of breaking it. Their unspoken justification was that they were the law. They knew how to put out fires, and we had paramedics on site who, despite being a few beers in, assured us they could patch anyone up who lost an eye or hand. One tried to convince me that he had sewn someone's head back on. By their own reckoning, that made them the only ones fit for such spectacular displays of patriotism.

Not far from where we celebrated sat a small airfield, part private landing strip, part hub for Cal Fire’s aerial operations. I’d fallen in love with planes there at seven, when a family friend took me up in his two-seater Cessna and cruised the jagged coast. The summer I was nine, I got smuggled aboard a Cal Fire tanker to drop retardant on a redwood forest fire. My seat was a stack of catalogs duct-taped into a cushion, my grasp of danger iffy at best. After that, I was certain I’d be a pilot. With movies like Top Gun permeating pop culture, I papered my walls with military aircraft—F-15s, stealth bombers, anything that moved fast and repped the flag. Then came the Gulf War.

One afternoon, I came home from school to find my mother had taken the posters down. She was worried I couldn’t tell the difference between flying and war. Perhaps I couldn’t. As I looked up at the open wall, the hairline cracks spidering out from the thumbtack holes in the plaster, I felt I had just been kicked off Team America. I’d never been more American in my life.

Middle age finds you quickly. You accept it or get weird. One day, you’re a kid wearing R2D2 pajamas; the next, you’re chasing a delivery robot blocks past the sandwich shop you ordered from because it glitched and skipped your office. Time will tell if the Force is strong with you. Your knees will tell you the clock is running.

Whatever you do, don’t get bitter. There’s freedom in discerning limitations from obstacles. If you’re lucky, you spot a few when you’re young.

On a basketball court in seventh grade, when Chris Weaver, at six foot three, held his arms over my head like a skyscraper, I knew I wasn’t tall enough to make the team. I still enjoyed the game.

Shortly after, I enrolled in Paul Gale’s Chinese Martial Arts Academy. There, I learned to accept that there’s always someone bigger and better. It’s one of life’s few guarantees. So is knowing we’re all on level ground when we’re six feet under. The greatest competition is with who you were yesterday. The only way to surpass that guy is to admit your mistakes. That’s how training becomes an expression of humanity.

It doesn’t happen in isolation. No one reaches their potential alone. We are born dependent and wired for connection. Mastery isn’t a trophy or credential; it’s when you’ve learned just enough to be in the service of others. Then you keep studying.

It was in that kwoon that I discovered what kind of man I wanted to be. Decades later, looking toward the nation's capital, I’m seeing a government attempting to replace those values with a cheap, disposable imitation of manhood — a consumer product manufactured entirely for the whims and entertainment of the ruling class.

June 14th marks the president’s eightieth birthday, a milestone celebrated not with a reflection on a life well lived, but with a violent spectacle of dominance. The guest list is a curated selection of elite loyalists, celebrities, and a few thousand active-duty troops screened to meet strict on-camera body-ratio requirements.

On the South Lawn of the White House, workers erected a temporary, foundationless, fighting cage. The president has openly expressed a desire to make it permanent, comparing it to the Eiffel Tower. It’s a particular distortion. One is a monument to human ingenuity, an elegant spire woven into the fabric of the city of love. The other is an enclosure where human cockfighters spill blood so bets can flow. It’s a testament to the vanity of a national brand in decline. Mistaking the power to confine for the power to inspire reveals the limits of the autocratic mind.

It also reveals the target demographic. This exhibition is for a generation of young men filled with uncertainty and beginning to drift—boys who have spent their formative years watching the ladder of upward mobility pulled up by grifters and heirs to generational wealth. The political faction that once promised to lower that ladder is losing them. The same leaders who have left them stranded are telling them you’re either a winner or a loser. The weak deserve no mercy.

That transactional worldview extends directly to the logistics of the spectacle itself. A failed legal challenge targeting the upcoming weigh-in at the Lincoln Memorial alleged plans for each fighter to enter the press pool hand in hand with a child. If true, it could add to the cynical staging mechanism by turning youth into a prop for the kind of men the administration wants them to be. But it wouldn’t be the only sign of it.

My very first memory is of being carried by an athlete. I was three. My mother and I were on a plane somewhere between Los Angeles and New York. There was a man playing peek-a-boo with me over his seat. I don’t remember running back to meet him, though my mother said I sat with him until we touched down at JFK. In 1984, a well-behaved, curious kid was inflight entertainment.

My single mother was five feet tall in her good shoes. She’d grown up in a small town not far from where they filmed the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, and had never ventured far beyond the redwoods. Nervous to navigate the terminal alone, my new friend told her, “Don’t you worry, little lady. I’ll get you to where you’re goin’.”

As far as I can tell, my life began riding through the airport on his shoulders. He was surely the tallest man in the building; to me, the tallest man in the world. He told us he played in the NBA—an LA Laker, but a New York resident. From that height, I flew above the crowd, watching the tops of people’s heads swirl like a human current as they hurried toward connecting flights and overpriced airport eateries. His hands wrapped around my calves, locking me in place. I felt safe. My mother held onto his belt—nearly parallel to her own shoulder—as we navigated the chaos. He got us our luggage, hailed a cab, and gave the driver explicit instructions. His name was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

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I didn’t connect the man from the terminal to his legendary skyhook until decades later, relaying my first memories to my mother. She was stunned that I remembered that. I was so young. That’s when she told me his name. I thought immediately of Kareem’s friendship with Bruce Lee.

Kareem met Lee in 1967. Looking to study Tai Chi, he was pointed toward a young martial artist who’d played Kato on The Green Hornet. He was skeptical; he didn’t want to learn to act like a martial artist; he wanted to be one. At Lee’s Culver City home, Lee led him to the backyard and had him strike a heavy bag, then called out his wife, Linda, and told Kareem to hold the bag for her instead. Linda kicked it, sending the seven-foot-two athlete flying backward into the grass. Kareem knew he’d found the right place. He would eventually play Hakim—the Mantis—the guardian Lee fights at the top of the pagoda in his unfinished film Game of Death.

No matter what one makes of Bruce Lee, it’s impossible to deny his impact or separate the man from the performance. He was a complex, fragmented character: he preached the illusion of stardom while chasing Hollywood fame; he honed his body into a symbol of discipline while growing more dependent on illicit drugs to contend with chronic back pain from a weight-lifting accident; he rejected traditional frameworks while becoming the world’s foremost ambassador of Chinese martial arts.

In his 1960’s kung fu demonstrations, the famous “one-inch punch” was undeniably fast, forceful, yet mostly theatrical. He’d set a chair behind the volunteer to “prevent injury,” hold his fist an inch from the man’s sternum, and strike; the volunteer always toppled into the seat—the post-demo chatter rarely noted that the chair was there and the volunteer, standing at attention with his legs parallel, would habitually fall back into it. Yet on film, Lee brought a centuries-old ethical code of Xiá to the screen by modernizing the classical Chinese knight-errant.

Long before it became a staple of Hong Kong cinema, the lore and ethics of the Xiá were forged in the chaos of China’s Warring States period, around the 4th century BCE. When the Zhou dynasty’s central authority collapsed into lawlessness, individual martial artists rejected state allegiances and official armies—some on their own quests for justice, others in private networks. Driven by a philosophy of defensive altruism, the classical Xiá answered only to an internal compass of righteousness, operated on the social margins—a realm called the Jianghu—and used violence exclusively as a shield, to protect the vulnerable from predatory rulers and tyrants. Some saw them as heroes. Others saw dangerous vigilantes.

The first time I walked into Paul Gale’s warehouse, four calligraphy banners hung from the plywood wall: 武 (Wǔ), martial arts/ethics; 道 (Dao), the way/path; 忍 (Rěn), patience/forbearance; and 俠 (Xiá). But I didn’t know what they meant.

The Xiá was preserved and romanticized through wuxia literature—serialized martial-hero novels of righteousness, lineage, and honor. Wuxia reached Chinese cinema as early as the 1920s and found new popularity in the 1960s through the Shaw Brothers’ Hong Kong grindhouse films.

When Bruce Lee stepped in front of a camera in the early 1970s, he mapped the Xiá’s radical, anti-establishment core onto a gritty, modern reality. He wasn’t the first to do it. But he was one of the most beloved. Across his early films—The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, and The Way of the Dragon—the narrative remained constant: a rigorously trained, working-class underdog, fighting a corrupt system on behalf of an exploited community. His characters never fought for wealth, status, or to prove they were the alpha of an arena. The violence always began reluctantly—a defensive response to a breach of basic human dignity—and you could read the immense personal cost of that violence in the way Lee contorted his face at each killing. He was a protagonist constantly wrestling with the fear of becoming the very thing he was fighting against.

Lee’s American breakthrough, Enter the Dragon, debuted a week after his death and made him a legend overnight. A blend of sixties spy film, blaxploitation, and “chopsocky” action. Critics panned it; audiences loved it. It became one of the most profitable films ever made, and in 2004, the Library of Congress preserved it as “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant.”

Lee plays a Shaolin instructor sent by British intelligence to enter a full-contact tournament on a private island to investigate the rogue Shaolin warrior who runs it. On the boat out, another fighter, summoned to compete, demands to know his style. “The art of fighting without fighting,” Lee says. The fighter challenges him to fight on the spot. Lee tricks him into hopping into a lifeboat, maroons him without a punch, and hands the tow rope to the deckhands he had been tormenting before approaching Lee.

The villain, Han, is the ultimate perversion of martial mastery: his fortress is a hub of drug trafficking and sex slavery, where young girls are locked up, drugged, and forced into prostitution, their discarded bodies washing ashore. Fighters are both entertainment and recruits; those Han deems worthy get one choice—pledge their fidelity to him and join the crime ring, or die. Lee tears the structure down from the inside out. In the climax, he’s caught in a literal hall of mirrors, until he realizes the only way to see the enemy clearly is to smash the glass.

Watching Enter the Dragon today, that fictional fortress doesn't feel entirely confined to the screen. UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland inadvertently drew an eerie parallel when he bluntly addressed the UFC White House event, “I think I’d wanna do the White House… but, like, just to go hang out with the fucking Epstein list?”

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By the 1980s, the Reagan era had splintered and reshaped the moral core of the lone-hero archetype through nationalism, rugged individualism, and single-parent households. A Hollywood actor turned president and figurehead of the religious right, Reagan understood the power of the hero story, projecting himself as the hero of America’s economic standing and a moral superiority over communism.

It was the decade of the latchkey kid. As divorce rates climbed, so did a conservative anxiety that fatherless boys home alone after school would grow up feminized. When those boys looked to the glowing screen for a blueprint of manhood, the entertainment industry was ready to supply it.

I was one of those boys. I’d stand in front of the TV in my PJs imitating Bruce Lee. Thanks to an expansive local video store, I gravitated to Hong Kong houses like Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest; I watched reruns of Kung Fu on Superstation TBS. I was embarrassingly too young to have a strong analysis how a white man had come to star in the series Bruce Lee was deemed too Asian to play.

The advent of VHS kept the classics and grindhouse films in circulation during an explosion of global action cinema, and one branch of the new films was aimed at boys like me. Instead of kung fu heroes defending the defenseless against organized elite power, they offered a domesticated surrogate patriarch and a path to personal fulfillment. The Karate Kid captured the transition, trading the political rebellion of Xiá for a suburban morality play in which a fatherless boy finds structure, discipline, and a sense of self through a wise old mentor who teaches that violence is a last resort. Class struggle wasn’t disavowed, exactly, but it wasn’t framed as a systemic issue. Instead, it was something that, no matter the odds, could be overcome through perseverance.

The Karate Kid also ushered in the era of the McDojo. Martial arts schools popped up beside grocery stores and laundromats in brightly lit strip malls across America. Boys flocked to them, most dropping by tryouts for the next sports season. To retain enrollment, some schools expanded the belt system with more colors and incremental stripes, betting that frequent rewards would create a sense of accomplishment. Children with black belts learned that imitation got you bragging rights. Though most wouldn’t know what to do if a 200-pound man punched them in the nose.

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When I discovered there was a kung fu school in the neighboring town, I begged my mother to take me. I arrived a few minutes after class had begun. I pushed open the door, setting a wind chime ringing. To my left were chairs and an end table with jasmine tea brewing. I sat, taking in the blended scents of jasmine and the musty plywood walls rising a couple of stories. The sifu, Paul Gale, glanced my way without breaking his count—“Move... Move...”—on each call, the students moved with a step, followed by a punch. I watched for at least half an hour before he came over. He welcomed me but said he didn’t teach kids; he wasn’t a babysitter. I was welcome to watch. When class ended, I grabbed a flyer—gung fu (southern Chinese kung fu) at 6pm on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

So I attended the next class. This time I was early. Paul ran the class, and afterward reiterated what kind of school this was. No belts, no rankings. Students spend years repeating the same basic moves. I’d be bored. No secrets, just fundamentals. This isn’t dance or theater. If I wanted to train like the movies, there might be a better fit for a kid like me. I thanked him and rode my bike home. While the strip malls inflated belts to keep kids paying, Paul was telling an eager pre-teen there was nothing here but work.

I’m not sure where I got the idea—I’d like to believe it came from deep historical knowledge or sheer perseverance, though it was almost certainly from David Carradine’s Kung Fu—that I should treat his refusal to teach me the way a boy treats the sifu who makes him wait outside the Shaolin temple. So I went back. Paul looked at me, then at the floor. He straightened his glasses, shook his head with a chuckle, and waved me over. “What size shoe do you wear?”

He dug a pair of cotton tai chi shoes from a box and handed them over with a shirt and a baggy pair of kung fu pants. Everything was too big. I was thrilled. That’s when I discovered the concrete floor was waxed and slippery. To this day, the thought of that floor humbles me. The goal was balance, posture, and coordination. Things we all think we have, but too easily find we don’t when it matters.

As the first kid he’d let in, I felt an obligation to represent. I trained several days a week—back-to-back gung fu and tai chi on Saturdays. When I couldn’t afford the classes, Paul let me work them off doing chores. In complete cliché, I’d find myself on my hands and knees, waxing that floor. He hadn’t grown up on martial arts movies, but he knew I had, and he understood that teaching is really a matter of linguistics—finding the language that clicks for a particular student. He was never shy about ridiculing the “mumbo jumbo” of the modern scene, but he couldn’t change the culture my generation was raised on, so he used it. It was, at minimum, a way to make the floor shine.

I swept, dusted, and cleaned the bathroom. For a few months, a friend from school trained alongside me, and Paul, wanting to cut the echo in the kwoon, had us paint the school’s emblem—a circle inside a square and a square inside a circle—onto large sheets of absorbent carpet. Despite the design’s simplicity, it took forever: layer upon layer, and several trips to the store for more paint. Tai chi, Paul’s sifu liked to say, is iron wrapped in silk; gung fu is silk wrapped in iron. Most people do circle-in-a-circle tai chi— no structure under the grace—and square-in-a-square gung fu, no grace, just rigidity. Paul had me painting philosophy.

Paul always reminded us that gung fu means hard work. Be a skillful, hardworking person, not a hardworking idiot. That involves more than one person, for or against another. To harm someone in hand-to-hand combat is to be as close to them as you’d be to an intimate partner. The longer you train, he believed, the more you understand how easy it is to hurt somebody, and therefore how precious people are. The ones numb to that are the ones willing to fight about and for nothing.

Learning to fight wasn’t about fighting. If you’re ever in a life-and-death altercation, you hope your body responds instinctively; It’s not about fancy moves, or 1,2,3 combos you learned from a form. In a fight, you keep your balance, grab the nearest object, and smash the hell out of your attacker or run away without tripping over your feet. But if you’re smart, you learn which alleys and conflicts to avoid in the first place.

He’d tell us that coming out victorious in a fight is something you treat the way you treat a defeat—like a funeral, because it’s ugly. The spectacle on the South Lawn is the inverse. The men who built the cage think they’re decorating a birthday party; really, it’s a stage where manhood is being choked out. Paul saw this decades earlier. Whenever the UFC came up, he called it a perversion of the arts—and asked, reasonably, how a thing can call itself no-holds-barred while barring biting, gouging, groin strikes, and blows to the throat. His own sifu, James Wing Woo, held the same opinion.

Woo was a fierce, seminal pioneer of Chinese martial arts in California, with mastery across Northern and Southern kung fu, Tai Chi Chuan, Qigong, and traditional Chinese medicine. He held an uncompromising view of what that knowledge demanded: without a strong foundation in traditional kung fu, everything built on top was performance. Flashy technique without structure wasn’t martial arts—it was choreography.

As the art spread across the world, that foundation was exactly what was being lost. Woo was antithetical to the drift, and so was Gale. “What I see these days,” Woo once said of the commercial scene, “is all these guys coming out and specializing in theatrics. They say they teach fighting, and make it look good for entertainment value, but unfortunately, that’s not training.”

Born in California in 1922, Woo spent his formative years in Canton, absorbing styles from the martial artists who’d flooded south as the Japanese advanced, before returning to San Francisco at sixteen to train among the Chinatown traditionalists. Like Bruce Lee, Woo drew on lessons from multiple styles, eventually founding his own system, Wing Woo Gar, and teaching anyone willing to learn.

One of his earliest and most commercial contributions has been routinely overlooked. In the early 1960s, Ed Parker—the “Father of American Kenpo”—brought Woo into his Pasadena studio to expand his system beyond its linear karate roots with the internal concepts of Chinese kung fu. Woo became the technical architect behind Parker’s seminal 1963 book, Secrets of Chinese Karate, breaking down the forms and demonstrating the movements; the illustrations are said to be based on him. In print, his contributions went entirely uncredited. Disillusioned by the dispute and by the commercialized direction of the art, Woo walked away. Parker soon found Bruce Lee and invited him to demo at his 1964 Long Beach Karate Championships, launching Lee into the California limelight.

It didn’t stop Woo. He opened his own academy on Hollywood Boulevard—no padded mats, no belts, no hollow praise—and in the 1970s Hollywood found him anyway. Sam Peckinpah was nearly thrown out of the studio before his entourage identified him. Woo went on to appear in fifteen films, from Killer Elite to Lethal Weapon 4, playing priests, clan elders, even a dead man, but never performing martial arts on screen. He taught for 53 years, until his death in 2014 at 92.

Gale began training with Woo while trying to make it in Hollywood himself. He landed guest roles in Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, The Bay City Rollers Show, and an episode of Magnum, P.I. His most prominent role was in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special—widely panned as one of the worst television productions ever made, so catastrophically received that George Lucas reportedly said he’d like to destroy every copy with a hammer.

Gale played Itchy, Chewbacca’s father, his face obscured inside a Wookiee suit. He’d been in the universe without making the team, and it had taken nothing from him. Hollywood held its hands over Gale like a skyscraper, and he found his way to manhood through martial arts anyway—the quiet inverse of the men the era was busy putting on posters.

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The most popular 1980s action movies featured a hypermasculinity, with a new breed of Hollywood action stars such as Norris, Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis, and Gibson. They drew more from John Wayne, replacing the cowboy hat with massive sculpted muscles. The Jianghu was westernized into a cynical, dog-eat-dog conflict in which the hero fought not necessarily to liberate the weak but to avenge a personal slight, take down their enemies with brute physical strength, or simply to keep alive.

Unlike the underclass heroes of Xiá, these heroes were often militarized cops or soldiers. Their righteousness wasn’t against a corrupt system, but a means of shucking the law they were meant to enforce when it was an inconvenience to swift results. They were nationalistic but ungovernable, unrestrained judges, juries, and executioners. If they were in service to anything, it was to the rugged individualism of the era. Only the strong survive.

The 1988 film Bloodsport—a low-budget bridge between the suburban morality play and the hypermasculine action picture—launched Jean-Claude Van Damme on its slugfest, not its acting. It opens with boys breaking into a house to steal a samurai sword; all scatter when caught except Frank Dux, whom Sensei Senzo Tanaka tells that such a sword can’t be stolen, only earned, by winning a full-contact tournament called the Kumite. Tanaka takes the boy in. A grown Dux tells Tanaka he’s like a father to him, and goes AWOL from the Army to fight the Kumite in his honor.

The champion, Chong Li—played by Bolo Yeung, whose debut was in Enter the Dragon—blinds Dux in the final by crushing a hidden pill into his eyes. Dux, trained to fight blind, wins anyway. Training beats cheating. Dux returns to the Army a champion, with no penalty for desertion.

In a 1997 New Yorker profile of Donald Trump, Mark Singer hitches a ride to Mar-a-Lago with the future president. Among the passengers he names is Ghislaine Maxwell, along with Trump’s thirteen-year-old son, Eric. Trump pulls out an old favorite on VHS—Bloodsport, “an incredible, fantastic movie.” But the exposition bores him: the training, the surrogate fatherhood, the failure of theft and cheating. Instead of suffering through it, he has his kid, Eric, fast-forward straight to the fights.

Bloodsport was sold as the true story of Frank Dux, who’d choreographed its fights. The film ends with a title card displaying his record: undefeated in 329 fights, 56 straight knockouts in one tournament. A few years prior to Bloodsport, Dux had shared his story with Black Belt magazine, including photos of the tournament, his medals, his trophies, proof he was a champion of ninjutsu.

Within months of the film’s release, the Los Angeles Times separated the man from the myth. Dux had earned no medals. A local trophy shop produced the paper trail showing he had ordered the Kumite prizes himself, and the organization’s "international headquarters" was revealed to be his own home address. No Senzo Tanaka existed anywhere—except as an echo of “Tiger” Tanaka, the spymaster in Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice.

Yet none of it stopped Dux from claiming, in his 1996 book, to have been a covert CIA operator. While he sounds like someone Trump would give a cabinet position, Soldier of Fortune took him to task for stolen valor. The fictional kumite at the center of it all has been cited, more than once, as inspiration for the UFC.

One Saturday morning when I was about sixteen, I rode my bike to the kwoon. Halfway through, it began to pour. I was no stranger to riding in the rain, but as the others trickled out, I lingered, hoping for a break. Paul told me not to worry; he’d throw my bike in his van and drop me off. But first, he needed my help. He had some rice-paper etchings from the Shaolin temple he wanted on the walls, along with a couple of new banners.

The kwoon was a large warehouse, with a staircase climbing the north wall to Paul’s loft office. He wanted the banners hung, level with those on the south wall, but the ladder wouldn’t fit on the stairs. Even at six foot three, he couldn't reach the spot. He knelt and told me to stand on his shoulders. I hesitated, but he told me I had “legs”—shorthand for a decent horse stance and real structure. It was the highest compliment he could give. I trusted him.

I stepped my left foot onto his bent knee, swung my right leg over his head, and set my foot on his shoulder, then stepped up. Paul stood and walked to the table for the hammer and nails. He handed them up, climbed the stairs, and told me to set the nails as high as I could. I did. Then he walked back down with me still standing upright on his shoulders, took up the scrolls, handed them to me, and had me hang them. Back on the ground, we sipped some tea and marveled at the new art on the wall.

Paul went up to his office to finish his paperwork while I ran the push broom across the floor. When I finished, I walked up the stairs and stood by his bookshelf, reading the spines. He had a row of religious texts stacked together. Half joking, I asked him which one was right.

He looked up from his desk. He told me I should read them all. Then he said, “Look, there are good Christians and bad Christians, good Buddhists and bad Buddhists, good Hindus and bad ones, good Muslims and bad Muslims. It doesn’t matter so much which path you choose. What matters is the man you choose to be.”

I carried that with me when I graduated high school and moved to Seattle. I never earned a single belt, but I burned through dozens of cotton shoes. When I left, Paul told me I knew how to train; it was on me to put in the work. We hadn’t spoken in several years when he suddenly passed away.

Gung fu is in everyone who commits to the hard work, whatever that work may be. My own training thinned as I got older. Some days I lose track of it entirely, but then it surfaces in the rhythm of my writing, my relationships, or in the relentless repetition in learning something new. Gung fu isn’t a temporary cage you hope will stand forever as a monument to yourself; it’s an internal architecture built from the ground up, designed from the beginning to last a lifetime. But it does take maintenance.

The young men this UFC spectacle is aimed at are looking for what I found when I walked into that warehouse. Watching a cage match won’t give it to them, and neither will a leader who fast-forwards through the morals. It may not matter what path you choose, but you don’t choose that alone. The mentors who lend us a shoulder to lean on guide us down the path of who we become.

In Jess O’Brien’s collection on internal martial arts, Nei Jia Quan, Paul wrote:

All martial artists are born into a certain cultural context. That’s something about martial arts in America that people seem to forget. They imitate things, but they don’t duplicate them… In the long run, I don’t teach Chinese martial arts; I teach American martial arts. What else could it be? That’s where I am and who I am, and that’s who I teach… Balance, posture, and coordination are not a nationality. Being on your legs and being coordinated does not depend on an ethnic origin. You either are, or you’re not.

The best way to defeat your enemies, Paul used to say, is to outlive them. The cage on the south lawn will come down. Structures with no foundation always do.

Authoritarian consolidation runs on spectacle. The image of power is substituted for power itself until the image is all that many see (they hope, anyway). Putin’s shirtless horseback rides and judo demonstrations reduced a surveillance state to a personality cult. As people loved or mocked the photo op, the scaffolding went up. Orbán raised a football stadium in his hometown while quietly annexing the courts and the press. Erdoğan built a thousand-room palace and wrapped his constitutional rewrite in the pageantry of Ottoman restoration. The spectacle is a shell. Once they’ve taken your attention, they install the system that takes your money.

The Trump administration’s spectacle leans into cartoon villainy. It’s half-cavalier performance, half-obliviousness. At the moment, the President’s most vocal domestic priority is the construction of the White House ballroom, beneath which sits an underground bunker he’s now insisting requires a billion dollars in taxpayer money to secure properly. Prior to posting images of himself as Jesus, he AI-slopped himself as Thanos and a Sith Lord. Kash Patel appropriated the Punisher logo for his personally branded Nikes. Last week, at a White House press briefing, Pete Hegseth could neither confirm nor deny that the U.S. military has kamikaze dolphins in its arsenal. Elon Musk took to the stage, wielding a chainsaw to celebrate the dismantling of USAID, which resulted in an estimated 750,000 deaths last year, according to infectious disease modeler Dr. Brooke Nichols. I could list the rest of the Legion of Doom, but you get the picture.

Cloaking corruption in the cosplay fictional villainy has the convenient effect of making anyone who takes it seriously look like they’re reading too much into a meme. It also distracts from their perpetual failure and disregard for consent, which is more akin to Wile E. Coyote and Pepe Le Pew. The president’s sons are no exception.

On April 23rd, Eric Trump, the new Chief Strategy Advisor for Foundation Future Industries (FFI), joined CEO Sankaet Pathak and Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business to celebrate the startup’s $24 million in Pentagon contracts. The contracts were secured six weeks after Eric Trump joined the company. Behind Pathak stood the startup’s autonomous humanoid combat robot, Phantom Mk-1, with a support chain attached to its back.

Eric Trump, who, like Cobra Commander, goes on TV when silence would serve him best, grinned as he explained to Bartiromo his qualifications for building the world’s most advanced robot army, “I got involved with crypto in a very big way because we had to win that digital revolution. We have to win robotics in the United States of America.” One wonders who Eric Trump is referring to when he says “America.” Sadly, no follow-up question was asked about how the Trumps’ crypto venture, World Liberty Financial — 49% owned by the UAE’s Sheikh Tahnoun — is winning the digital revolution for the U.S.

Pathak claimed that the next gen of his robot, the Phantom MK-2, would be revealed in the coming months and would be unlike “anything in the world.” He brought up Anthropic. The Pentagon's policy requires AI vendors to allow the use of their models in mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous machine killing. Anthropic wouldn't agree. In retribution, Hegseth attempted to designate the company as a "supply-chain risk to national security," a category normally reserved for foreign adversaries. Defense contractors were ordered to stop doing business with Anthropic. Pathak said the Pentagon's position was "reasonable" and Anthropic "fell on its face." It read like a signal of loyalty to his CSO’s father and the Secretary of Defense.

To justify FFI’s contracts, Pathak told Bartiromo that “zero startups” in the U.S. are working on humanoid robots for defense use and that they welcome competition. FFI isn’t the only U.S. company in the rapidly expanding humanoid space, nor is combat the only military application for robotics. While several robotics companies have pledged not to allow their robots to be used for combat, what most distinguishes FFI as a “defense” humanoid company is the contract itself, which speaks more to their lack of ethics than to their product.

In an NBC Bay Area report, Phantom MK-1 struggled to walk. A reporter pushed its chest, it seized and fell over. Time reported the same issue. If there was any mistaking the robots’ lack of readiness, you can watch it slip on banana peels. FFI is ostensibly behind the leading U.S. humanoid robotics companies and their Chinese competitors in basic mobility. The industry is in its early phase, with dozens of companies competing to lead the market. It will be years before humanoid robots can perform many of the tasks they’re designed for. So if the U.S. is expanding industrial policy, how is it determining which startups it believes will be “winners” and not the “losers” that go under, costing taxpayers millions, like Solyndra and Foxconn?

FFI has produced approximately 40 robots, including one deployed in an Atlanta automotive facility. The company’s stated milestones require scaling to 10,000 units by the end of the year and a cumulative 50,000 by late 2027—a 250-fold expansion over twenty-four months. The underlying capital suggests a structural ceiling well below these figures. At a current manufacturing cost of $150,000 per Phantom Mk-1, allocating the entirety of FFI’s $21 million in private seed capital strictly to production—leaving nothing for operations, engineering salaries, or facility overhead—yields just 140 units. Incorporating the recent $24 million Pentagon grant extends that theoretical maximum to 300 robots.

Nevertheless, by January 2026, months before FFI’s modest defense research grants were finalized, it was already leveraging these manufacturing targets to pitch institutional investors on a $500 million capital raise at an aspirational $3 billion valuation.

By comparison, Figure AI has raised $1.75 billion in institutional capital, backed by a major technology syndicate, to build the specialized infrastructure necessary to target an annual production of 12,000 units.

In April 2024, Pathak’s former company, Synapse Financial Technologies, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Synapse was a fintech banking-as-a-service platform that acted as the intermediary between financial apps and the banks that held their customers’ deposits. The collapse locked more than 100,000 Americans out of $265 million in customer balances. At a creditor hearing, Pathak acknowledged that Synapse may have commingled customer funds — pooling end-user deposits, FinTech reserve funds, and Synapse’s own operating funds — in accounts at its partner banks. The court-appointed bankruptcy trustee, former FDIC Chair Jelena McWilliams, reported that Synapse indeed had commingled customer funds across multiple partner banks, leaving a shortfall of up to $95 million that she could not account for.

McWilliams told the court the system had “failed so many end users in so many ways.” By early 2025, the DOJ’s Southern District of New York had convened a grand jury to investigate potential accounting and wire fraud related to the collapse. The same month the bankruptcy was filed, Pathak launched Foundation Future Industries. Pathak has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

Within two months, Pathak was fundraising for FFI, claiming in marketing materials that General Motors was an investor and had placed a $300 million purchase order. GM denied it flatly. FFI co-founder Mike LeBlanc, a former Marine and the only co-founder with a military background, confirmed GM’s denial and said he was embarrassed that the fabricated materials existed. Such a track record would deter most business relationships, but not the Trumps or the Pentagon.

What FFI’s Phantom MK-1 demos show, and the production numbers confirm, is that they were not awarded DoD contracts across the Army, Navy, and Air Force based on any measurable merit or business acumen. But now that they have them, they can be used as a credential to court investors, rather than lying about GM being one.

The Pentagon recently announced its proposed fiscal 2027 budget: $1.5 trillion, the largest in American history and a 42% increase over the previous year. Within it, the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), established to develop and deploy unmanned autonomous systems, would receive $55 billion, up from $225 million the year before — a 240-fold increase in a single fiscal year. Foundation Future Industries was named in the budget document as a beneficiary.

FFI is one of seven companies in the defense portfolio that have been acquired by the president’s two adult sons since their father’s second term. The acquisitions began in November 2024, when Donald Trump Jr. became a partner at the venture capital firm 1789 Capital. Within a year, four of the firm’s portfolio companies secured federal contracts totaling more than $735 million. He told the Financial Times he was “very involved in the strategic decisions regarding where to invest.” The portfolio included Anduril Industries, which makes unmanned combat systems; Firehawk Aerospace and Unusual Machines, which together secured Air Force rocket engine contracts and an Army drone motor order for the 101st Airborne; and Vulcan Elements.

Vulcan produces rare-earth magnets used in drones, radar systems, and guided missiles. They have 30 employees, fewer than the average McDonald’s location. Yet in late November 2025, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital issued the company a $620 million loan, the largest the office has ever made — so large it exceeded Vulcan’s valuation at the time of the award. Democrats on the House Natural Resources Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee sought to subpoena Don Jr. to testify under oath about the loan. Republicans voted 5-2 to block the subpoena.

As I previously reported, on February 17th, 11 days before the United States and Israel attacked Iran, Eric Trump was named an investor in Xtend, an Israeli AI drone company that had received a multimillion-dollar Pentagon contract three months earlier from the very people his brother had vetted. Six weeks later, both brothers were named as investors in Powerus, a drone-interceptor company. Both Xtend and Powerus announced plans to go public in the summer of 2026, but not through an Initial Public Offering. Instead, they opted for a reverse merger.

A reverse merger allows a private company to acquire a public stock listing by purchasing a defunct corporate shell, bypassing the prospectus, SEC pre-clearance, and investor scrutiny required for a standard IPO. The disclosures — including those about major investors and their conflicts of interest — are dramatically reduced. The procedure is legal.

Xtend’s shell was JFB Construction, a Florida contractor known for building OrangeTheory Fitness gyms. Powerus’s was Aureus Greenway Holdings, a Nevada-based entity whose principal assets were two golf clubs in Orlando. Both reverse mergers were arranged by the same investment bank, which is also the co-placement agency for Unusual Machines’ stock offerings, Dominari Securities. Dominari operates out of Trump Tower. These drone companies are unrelated on paper, yet within 45 days, they came down the same procedural pipeline.

The reverse-merger architecture went up around the same time the joint investment firm through which both brothers hold many of these positions, New American Acquisition 1 Corp, filed its registration paperwork. It said, in plain language, that the firm intended to invest in companies seeking federal grants. After the AP inquired about that language, Trump’s chief business lawyer filed an amended document. They made a new filing identical to the old one, except the reference to federal grants had been removed. The firm still invests in companies seeking federal grants. It was just conveniently edited to no longer admit it on paper.

With the ongoing war in Iran, the Gulf States have found themselves ground zero for Iranian retaliation. They needed drone interceptors, and the Trump family is selling them. Twenty-four hours before the war began, Xtend gave the Pentagon a demo outside Palm Springs at an event titled “Disruptors in the Desert.” Within three days from the launch of Operation Epic Fury, they were mobilized across the Gulf. In April, Powerus toured the Gulf and, by the end of the month, had secured an Air Force weapons procurement order.

In a kleptocracy, it’s shells all the way down.

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China and the U.S. are competing to build the technologies that will shape the global economy. “A Cold War is genuinely a good thing,” FFI’s Sankaet Pathak told Time, “because it forces everybody to innovate at a very fast pace.”

The U.S. leads in frontier model development and AI chip design, but that advantage is less stable than it appeared two years ago. DeepSeek R1 challenged the assumption that frontier AI capabilities require the kind of infrastructure investment that only U.S. labs can sustain. China leads in manufacturing. According to the International Energy Agency, China controls approximately 60% of global rare-earth mining and 91% of separation and refining — the processing stage that turns raw ore into the high-performance magnets used in motors, actuators, robotics, and weapons systems.

In China, state capital flows simultaneously into vertically integrated military and commercial production, enabling coordination across the full stack in ways the U.S. procurement system cannot. This allows China to drive down costs, scale up production, and absorb technological risk at a pace that’s extremely difficult for a fragmented contracting regime to match. The U.S. policy response has been muddled.

On December 23rd, 2025, a ban on the sale of Chinese drones in the U.S. took effect on national security grounds. At the time, Chinese drone companies DJI and Autel held 80% of the U.S. domestic market. The Trump administration’s FCC used that review to expand the restriction to all foreign drone manufacturers. DJI wrote directly to Hegseth months earlier, welcoming scrutiny and offering full transparency for a comprehensive review.

No comprehensive review occurred. The FCC’s own fact sheet did not detail the security evidence behind the expansion. Instead, it announced that the commission would “work closely with U.S. drone makers to unleash American drone dominance.”

The national security framing would’ve been more persuasive if applied consistently. In 2024, Chinese state-affiliated hackers known as Salt Typhoon penetrated nine major American telecommunications networks — including Trump’s own phone — accessing the wiretap infrastructure used by U.S. law enforcement. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner called it the worst telecommunications hack in American history. On his first day in office, Trump disbanded the Cyber Safety Review Board investigating the breach. Sanctions against Beijing were paused for trade talks. TikTok was banned on national security grounds, then extended five times until Larry Ellison’s consortium secured the deal. Advanced Nvidia AI chip exports to the UAE were approved despite documented ties between Emirati state firms and China’s military industry.

A serious response to China’s manufacturing advantage requires sustained commitment across every layer where the gap is widest: industrial policy to build domestic capacity, R&D investment to maintain the research lead, allied coordination to avoid fighting the supply chain battle alone, and immigration policy that doesn’t drive technical talent trained in American universities out of the country. Instead, the administration has relied on blunt tools like tariffs, been hostile toward allies and universities, and denied regulatory clearance to foreign competitors — all while routing capital to companies connected to the president’s family. It’s a China policy calibrated to what Trump can extract from the oligarchs who stand to gain from it.

U.S. policy toward China can also reshape the domestic industry. The DoD has drone contracts with companies outside the Trumps’ portfolio. Skydio is the largest U.S. drone manufacturer by revenue, at $180 million in 2024, with a $4.4 billion valuation. Over 50% of its business is with the DoD. AeroVironment is generating nearly $473 million in quarterly revenue and has a $1.1 billion backlog. The process that produced those businesses was competitive. Red Cat Holdings beat Skydio in November 2024 for the Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance Program of Record, a five-year deal potentially worth $260 million.

The Trumps’ drone portfolio took a different route. Instead of competing at the bidding stage, Eric and Don Jr. bought into companies that were already holding or pursuing federal contracts and expanded them through mergers. This coincided with the launch of the war with Iran, which accelerated foreign demand. With restrictions on foreign-manufactured drones in the U.S., 80% of the domestic market was cleared, opening it to companies capable of scaling to fill the void. Eric and Don Jr. are taking advantage of the opening.

This week, Trump arrived in Beijing for a summit with Xi Jinping. He was accompanied by Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and a delegation of 18 leading CEOs in tech, finance, and aerospace, including Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, and the chief executives of BlackRock, Blackstone, and Goldman Sachs. Each with business depending on what Trump trades with Xi. Xi warned that any foreign interference with Taiwan — home to TSMC, which fabricates the chips that underpin the U.S. AI advantage — could trigger “clashes and even conflicts” between the two countries. Trump made no commitment either way.

On the campaign trail, Trump used Hunter Biden’s accompanying his father on Air Force One to China as a punchline for corruption. When Trump arrived in Beijing, on the tarmac beside him was his son Eric, whose DoD portfolio runs on the same supply chains and technology race his father was negotiating, claiming he was only along for the ride in his own personal capacity.

Don Jr.’s involvement with the Pentagon is not limited to investments. In September 2025, he boasted on his podcast that he’s been helping vet candidates for senior Pentagon positions, assessing their ideological alignment with his family’s portfolios.

Historically, the potential corruption of an individual contract would be a scandal in its own right. This administration is integrating that potential into the procurement process. A bribe presupposes that the buyer and the seller are different people. When the buyer has been chosen by the seller, the question of whether money has changed hands becomes the wrong question. The money is already where it needs to be.

The procurement mechanisms that might have caught any of this have since been replaced by the newly created Economic Defense Unit. It’s staffed with undisclosed private-sector negotiators tasked with displacing the career acquisition officials who had previously managed defense contracts. The new unit has embraced the nickname “Deal Team Six,” a cheeky play on “Seal Team Six” that it adopted from an X post about the unit. In a bizarre AI-animated video, Pete Hegseth asserts that the new unit will save taxpayers’ money by replacing the “bureaucracy” with a group of private-sector elites.

Since the post-Cold War consolidation of the 1990s, the Pentagon has relied heavily on five prime defense contractors during peacetime. The lack of competition has caused bloat and inefficiency. Notably, the F-35 program office employed 2,200 people while delivering every single jet late. Missile production has bottlenecked. There’s a valid argument for procurement reform.

The initial proposal for Deal Team Six resembles Biden’s CHIPS program, which integrated investment bankers into government procurement. However, while the CHIPS program brought in analysts from Goldman Sachs to advise government officials, Deal Team Six is being structured and run by private-sector actors who could potentially be its personal beneficiaries. The alleged aim of saving taxpayers’ money is at odds with a lack of transparency and the request for a 42% increase in the Pentagon’s budget. It could also further undermine the capacity to compete with China.

The Pentagon didn’t announce the identity of the unit’s director, George Kollitides. However, they listed it on a conference agenda. As recently as January 2025, Kollitides sat on the board of Tier 1 Group, a private military company owned by Cerberus Capital Management that trained members of the Saudi security apparatus responsible for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Before that, he served as head of defense at Cerberus itself.

The Pentagon’s Deputy Secretary — its second-highest civilian — is Steve Feinberg, who founded Cerberus. Feinberg also oversees the Office of Strategic Capital, the same office that issued Don Trump Jr.’s Vulcan Elements its $620 million loan. At least four other companies in the Cerberus portfolio have received defense contracts since Feinberg took office. The recruitment materials the Economic Defense Unit uses to attract financiers to its ranks promise “unmatched access to top-level government officials and privileged information flow” and describe the opportunity to invest “more capital than most investors deploy in their entire careers.”

The Cato Institute assessed the arrangement plainly: “Even if no laws are broken, this is exactly the sort of arrangement that invites insider dealing, political favoritism, and capital allocation based on connections rather than merit.” To make room for all of this, Hegseth scrapped the Defense Acquisition System — the procedural infrastructure governing competitive bidding, conflict-of-interest review, and contractor accountability — and replaced it with the “Warfighting Acquisition System,” which removes those checks and gives the decisions to the private-sector officials on Deal Team Six.

Richard Painter, the Republican chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, was recently asked what he saw upon reviewing the latest DoD contracts. He replied that this will be “the first family of a president to make a lot of money off war.”

What it looks like is state capture in Russia, Hungary, and Turkey, where the leader’s family enters industries that benefit from regulatory or military expenditure, enforcement becomes selective, then ceremonial, and then absent, and the capture is completed through the state’s own formal procedures.

The fictional villains we grew up with had lairs, often gaudy and gold. They grinned and publicly announced their ambitions. They lied, cheated, and stole. Their self-interested pursuits of world domination and wealth came at the public’s expense. They had henchmen, loyal but dumb, who would go to great lengths to please the boss, only to be shamed when they failed. And they always did. Everyone watching, aged 5 or older, knew exactly what was happening within the first few minutes. There was something made clear, something we gathered around the TV for before we were old enough to pay taxes, often on Saturday mornings, that financial forensics struggles with: when the villain doesn’t bother to hide it, you don’t need a forensic accountant.

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“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” is the threat of someone simultaneously auditioning for the History Channel and the Book of Revelation. It was a threat as empty as Trump’s moral code — the very lack of which made the world watch and wait under the possibility that he might follow through purely for the infamy.

If I…

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Part 2 of 2 on political linguistics

It’s a clear October night, the air hangs like a held breath. In the distance, a low orange glow stretches for several miles and melts into the horizon. It’s not a river of fire, but close. As it weaves toward Chicago, torch-lit shadows of thousands of young men— all radical Republicans— dance across apartment facades…

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If you’re interested in more video content, I’ve launched a YouTube channel!

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A crypto deal signed with an Abu Dhabi royal days before Trump’s inauguration, the Qatari plane gifted to Trump, Nvidia chips approved for sale to the UAE, Don Jr. and Eric Trump’s investments in an Israeli AI drone company, K…

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The morning after Ayatollah Khamenei was killed, thousands of mourners gathered in Tehran’s Enghelab Square and towns throughout Iran, Iraq, India, and Lebanon. In Pakistan, protesters stormed the U.S. consulate, leaving at least 21 people dead. There’s a peculiar sadness in public tears for a theocratic tyrant. A conditioned lamentation on which decade…

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If in the early 2000s you found yourself in Arcata, California, when collegiate dreads bounced along to hacky sacks and drum circles made every hangover feel like your first—I may have poured your coffee at Sacred Grounds.

Our custom La San Marco espresso machine was built to the mid-1940s spr…

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Bloggers and independent media mocked it for what it was—a farcical stunt to promote a presidential run. Phangoria was the largest Greek colony in the Black Sea region. Archaeologists surveying the area for years only found shards. Putin denied it was staged, claiming the urns had been waiting for him since the 6th century, as if predestined. State media used the discovery to depict Putin as a brave explorer capable of unearthing greatness in Russia. Two months later, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted it was a setup. It was obvious—how could anyone believe otherwise? It was done for a “good cause,” to promote Russian archaeology, tourism, and history. Peskov portrayed critics as cynical and unpatriotic, scolding them for obsessing over “insignificant details.”

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If there’s a kernel of truth in every lie, as the idiom goes, what do you call it when there is not? Dostoevsky called it Vranyo. The goal is not to deceive. Vranyo is intentionally and blatantly untrue. The liar knows he’s lying, and he knows the audience knows he knows.

This is nothing new for Russians. Putin simply updated it for the 21st century. When troops lacking insignia invaded Crimea, Putin denied they were Russians despite the fact that they were speaking Russian, driving Russian vehicles, and carrying Russian-made munitions. For a decade, Putin and his officials, including Sergei Lavrov, denied any connection to the Wagner Group. After all, private military companies are illegal under Russian law. Peskov said it was total “madness” to even speculate Russia would invade Ukraine. On all accounts, Putin and his officials eventually, and matter-of-factly, claimed responsibility.

Well before his first term, Trump embraced vranyo. It started with birtherism. Once elected, the blatant falsehoods snowballed. There was Sean Spicer debasing himself over the inauguration crowd size, Sharpiegate, Trump’s “perfect call” shaking down President Zelensky, the 2020 claim Covid was “going to disappear”, and the “Big Lie” that he won the 2020 election, just to name a few.

In Trump’s second term, he was “elected by a landslide.” As with Putin, the vranyo began with petty ego-inflating fictions. With a cabinet of loyalists, it was weaponized as “justification” for policy, such as Trump’s tariffs. It spread over the body politic like gangrene. Soon, funds appropriated by Congress were denied by the executive in clear violation of the Constitution. ICE became a masked secret police, given the power of warrantless search and seizure. The vranyo expanded militarization. Lies about crime rates and protests, contradicting mountains of photos and videos, were used to deploy the National Guard and Marines to cities, against mayors’ and governors’ wishes.

With the recent public murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE, the administration told Americans not to believe what they can see with their own eyes in multiple videos from multiple angles.

Ashli Babbitt, who violently stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election, was given full military funeral honors. Good, unarmed, and sitting in her car, was gunned down and called a “fucking bitch,” by an ICE officer, outrightly ignoring protocol. Less than 2 hours after the shooting, Kristi Noem began the spin. The administration framed her as a “domestic terrorist.” J.D. Vance took to defaming Good, something he told the public to report to people’s employers if they did so about Charlie Kirk after he was murdered. The subtext is that there are different laws for those who accept the administration’s “truths” and those who do not. If you are not one of them, they can kill all of yours.

The absurdity has entered the world stage. We were told the U.S. was bombing Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean because of drug trafficking to the U.S., despite no evidence. If there were drugs on the vessels, it would most likely be cocaine headed for Europe. When the strikes were accused of being illegal in accordance with both domestic and international law, Trump invoked the laws of war. If it had been an act of “law enforcement,” then killing 123 people without due process might be illegal. But since it involved war and national security, he claimed it fell under executive authority. When the U.S. led an assault on Venezuela and captured Maduro without congressional approval, let alone consulting them, he claimed it was an act of law enforcement. It didn’t matter that these claims were incompatible.

Once Maduro was removed, he stated that the real goal of U.S. intervention was the imperialist seizure of oil. Although Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, its oil is heavy crude, requiring extensive refining. Tens of billions would need to be invested in new infrastructure, and it could take at least a decade of stability before seeing any return on investment (ROI). It’s possible the administration is making claims about oil, just as it forced Ukraine to make a “deal” for rare earth minerals (which would also require a stable nation and years before any ROI), simply to create an illusion of economic gain where there is none.

Trump has claimed we need to take control of Greenland for national security. While other administrations have expressed concern about the potential threat posed by Chinese and Russian ships transiting through the region, Greenland is a Danish territory and a member of NATO. It hosts a U.S. base. It’s already a secured area without the U.S. “owning” the state of Greenland. If the U.S. wanted to pursue other security options to keep Russia and China from “Taking Greenland,” it could. The real threat may be the opposite. If Greenland were a post-NATO U.S. province, who would stop the Trump administration, which has sided with Russia even over its own intelligence agencies, from allowing Russian ships to pass through?

Examples of U.S. Vranyo are plentiful. But what’s the advantage for leaders to construct a culture of verifiably false narratives? Some people will believe the lies. But that’s a bonus, not the intention. Officials taking to the podium and parroting obvious falsehoods demonstrate loyalty. Without it, the regime would fall. People with a greater loyalty to verifiable truth out themselves as the enemy. That polarization is fuel for autocracy. At this stage, they want the opposition to loudly voice how mind-boggling and outrageous their claims are. It’s a necessary first step towards silencing them. The algorithms rejoice in the fear and anxiety. Tech billionaires and crypto bros rake in the Benjamins. The White House ballroom gets funded. Loyal citizens get further radicalized. In a world where facts are reduced to picking a side, the more aggressive the oppositional response, the easier it’s dismissed by loyalists as emotional, irrational, unpatriotic, and deranged. That’s ambrosia for trolls. The lies waste journalists’ time and energy by forcing them to address the nonsense. The more time journalists spend debunking a firehose of falsehoods, the more newsworthy topics go unmentioned. In response to the accusation of lying, the administration engages in “I know you are, but what am I?” antics, making claims that the critics are just the “fake news,” suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. The truth gets fuzzier and less sticky under the parade of gaslighting, even for those striving to reveal it.

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Then there are those who know the lies aren’t true, but are willing to play along. They’re the model citizens of illiberal states. In the USSR, Khrushchev would announce to the world that they had surpassed U.S. agriculture production by wildly absurd numbers. Taking his orders, central planners would demand that farmers meet the impossible production targets. While standing in food lines, malnourished farmers would lie to reporters with tales of their abundant crops. Leadership would claim victory. Rinse, wash, repeat. This very cycle played out in Maoist China, leading to the Great Famine, in which estimates of 30 million Chinese starved to death. Authoritarians know they have a lock on the population when they play along.

Most significantly, Vranyo gives the administration an illusion of everything Stephen Miller champions: strength, force, & power. Bending the perception of reality can make weak, unpopular leaders appear stronger than they are. It’s a show of power. The administration may even appear to have the upper hand, at least in our mind’s eye. That’s far more real to the vrun-in-chief than what your eyes see.

Friday, Jan. 2, a fire broke out at the 800 block of 10th Street in Arcata, California. Seven local businesses, apartments, and an art studio were destroyed. Half of the block is now gone. One of the businesses was Northtown Books, a sixty-year staple of the community. I worked there for eight years. It g…

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Burbank, August 2025 — at the Talleyrand, seven of us squeeze into a banquette booth and slather our bread with butter. This fine establishment was beloved by the most golden of Californians, Huell Howser. The menu boasts a thumbs-up icon next to the hot turkey sandwich; make no mistake, it’s dripping with a glorious yellow gravy and Huell-approved. It’s Thanksgiving every day here. There’s also a full bar. The waitress, armed with a sass only found in those who got into the biz when regulars could enjoy a smoke with their omelet, informs us that the bartender pours generously. With a wink, she tells me she might sip our drinks before bringing them to the table to prevent spills.

Such uniquely American charm should not be wasted on unappreciative souls. Thankfully, my present company values brows low and high. It’s one of many things I love about them. They’re also funny as hell. The high school art teacher at the table scrolls through his phone, pulling up pictures his students drew of him while quoting their unfiltered trash talk: “Mr. Robbins, you don’t work out, do you?” We laugh. We toast the recently engaged couple, who I was confident would take the plunge. Just as we silenced our phones, we try to tune out the relentless chatter drifting through the dining room. “Trump,” this. “Trump,” that. For a brief moment, an unspoken glance circles the table as we contemplate the political leanings of the other diners. It’s good for all Americans to bump elbows where meals are shared. But is everyone safe?

It’s been two weeks since we’ve seen the street vendor who, for years, sold hot dogs and agua fresca on a corner not far from here. We heard he was thrown to the ground, brutalized, and detained by ICE agents. They hid behind masks, dehumanizing themselves so they could dehumanize others. We don’t know his citizenship status. It doesn’t matter. Did he get due process? It’s unlikely. For months, people across the country have been denied their rights regardless of citizenship status. Was he deported to a foreign prison? Is his family okay?

A blitzkrieg of headlines trudges through my skull. But soon, the world beyond our table falls under it like a napkin from a lap. I return to tales of weddings and the couple’s plans. We share what we love about our partners. The married couples recount what’s kept their relationships alive through good times and bad. This isn’t social media. We’re free to be vulnerable. We smile. We laugh. We raise our glass to love. Hugs are exchanged, a group photo is taken, and goodbyes are said.

Not long into the drive home, the headlines push on to the front of my mind. A tinge of guilt and helplessness surfaces as they contrast against a beautiful night of normalcy. It’s integral for moments of joy to leave unpleasant facts in the shadows of our shared humanity. It’s that very humanity which brings me back to face them.

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I’m trying to be clear-headed about this American moment. Hyperbole is for clickbait and algorithms. Before Trump’s first term, I was a guest lecturer on Middle Eastern autocracy and the Syrian Civil War. I was also helping a family who had escaped the fascism of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad open a restaurant. One of the cooks had been brutally tortured as a teen, forced to eat human feces mixed with smashed glass. He was fortunate to be released from the notorious Sednaya prison and escape to America. However, his survival required the removal of half his stomach.

Assad, with the aid of Russia and Iran, leveled his country. Between 700,000 and 1 million people were killed. Roughly 14 million Syrians were displaced. For much of the 2010s, I interviewed survivors of war, torture, and the trauma of living in a country where, if a neighbor wants to get rid of you, all they have to do is tell the Mukhabarat (secret police) you said the leader’s name in a negative tone. That kind of fear doesn’t just change what you say or who you talk to; it changes how you think.

America isn’t there. So where are we? There are many steps along the path from a constitutional democracy to a totalitarian state. With each one, it feels like a volume knob is being turned up on an old car stereo. Everything gets louder as we progress from 1 to 11. Is the dial set at a democratic republic, illiberal democracy, a hybrid government, competitive autocracy, kleptocracy, or full-blown fascism? Are we somewhere in between? Can Americans identify the differences? Is it reaching a level where we can no longer hear each other? How do we turn it down? From the back seat, we shout, Are we there yet?!

For many Americans, regardless of political affiliations, it feels as if there’s a weighted blanket over our society. If you’re like me, it’s hard to sleep when you’re too hot. Concerns about affordability, career prospects in the age of A.I., social hostility, distrust, political violence, polarization, income inequality, misinformation, and social isolation are common topics of conversation. Everything is politicized. Uncertainty and fear are being amplified and exploited for profit and power. This isn’t new, at least not for all of us.

No matter what form of government you live under, not everyone experiences it equally. America, the “land of the free, home of the brave,” the “shining beacon on the hill.” But it’s here where Thomas Jefferson and the Committee of Five wrote, “All men are created equal,” while owning slaves and denying women voting rights. It’s here where the natives were slaughtered, the Japanese interned, and Jim Crow was the law of the land. In 1935, the Nazis looked to America’s history of racial litigation as inspiration for the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of citizenship and made interracial marriage illegal.

For some Americans, the idea that we were ever a democracy seems absurd. There has always been discrimination and efforts to enshrine unequal rights in favor of contingencies who feel threatened by the pursuit of our founding ideals. Those ideals have yet to be fully realized, but progress has been made. The greatest thread throughout American history is the collective effort and hard work that has bent that moral arc towards justice. The Trump administration is bending it back.

Since the end of World War II, sociologists and political scientists have developed statistical models to determine the conditions under which democracies backslide (transition from democracy to autocracy). By most accounts, the U.S. should be well-protected against democratic backsliding. Three factors commonly considered are the longevity of a democracy, the state's GDP (Gross Domestic Product), and income inequality.

Renowned Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his 1991 book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the late 20th Century, made a case for what he called the “Two-Turnover Test.” His thesis was that if power had been peacefully transferred from one party to another, and then back again, that democratic state was less likely to backslide. In terms of time, the Two-Turnover Test spans 10 to 20 years. Even if we grant that the U.S. wasn’t a democracy until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, his benchmark of stability has been met. The January 6th attack on the Capitol and the legislative attempt to delegitimize the 2020 election muddies the waters. More significant is that Huntington’s argument applies more to 20th-century revolutions and coups than to the gradual erosion of norms that has been prominent in the global rise of 21st-century autocracies.

According to Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi’s research in Democracy and Development, no democracy richer than Argentina in 1976, with a per capita GDP of $19k in today’s U.S. dollars (AFI), has backslid. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt note in Tyranny of the Minority, Hungary backslid with a per capita GDP of $21k (AFI). The per capita GDP of the U.S. in 2024 was $86k. While a robust economy still seems to be preventative, it’s not a rule.

As University of Chicago professor Susan C. Stokes argues in her Princeton Press book, The Backsliders, income inequality provides a leverage point for backsliding. Across several states that have experienced backsliding in the 21st century, as income inequality rose, political polarization followed. Trust in institutions eroded. As this happens, cracks in the system emerge that aspiring autocrats can exploit to dismantle it further under the guise of reform. They then break down the system from within to enrich themselves and their cronies, while finding scapegoats to blame when they fail to deliver results for citizens. The Gini Coefficient (a statistical measure of income inequality) shows that the U.S. has experienced a rapid increase in income inequality along with increased political polarization.

Both Brazil and Poland experienced backsliding even as income inequality declined. However, Brazil’s judiciary and Poland’s record-breaking civic mobilization halted their democratic backsliding. There’s not enough data to be conclusive, though it’s possible that lower rates of income inequality played a role.

While the longevity of U.S. democratic institutions and the strength of per capita GDP may make the U.S. appear safeguarded against backsliding, the ongoing trends of rising income inequality and political polarization suggest a greater potential for backsliding.

Bret Stephens at the New York Times, along with contributors to the Wall Street Journal editorial page and National Review, have argued that America’s “guardrails” will protect it from backsliding. The U.S. Constitution is often cited as a bulwark of democracy. Yet nearly every Latin American country that’s based its constitution on it — including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela — has experienced repeated cycles of democratic backsliding. The Philippines, a former U.S. colony, heavily borrowed from the Constitution, even directly copying sections of it. That didn’t prevent backsliding.

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Throughout history, most governments have been autocratic. There are currently between 65 and 81 autocratic countries. The number is rising. This trend doesn’t always make the news when it lacks the media appeal of violence. Most modern constitutional democracies don’t transition to autocracy through tanks and troops; they do so through lawyers and legislation. According to the study "Keeping the Democratic Facade” by Anna Luehrmann and Staffan Lindberg, since 1990, 70% of democracies that have backslid have done so through legal means. Half of those expansions of executive power were achieved through reinterpretation of existing laws.

When Trump descended on the golden escalator, left-leaning voters saw him as an easily beatable carnival barker. His autocratic ambitions were visible to people who’ve studied autocracies or lived in one. Still, it was hard to imagine a man so unfit would be elected by the American people. Yet they did. Strong baffoonish vibes aren’t unique to Trump in the halls of aspiring autocrats. Many tyrants of the past were seen as quasi-cartoon characters.

Throughout his first term, using words like 'authoritarian' to describe Trump was seen by the majority of Americans as an overreaction. If you’re caught up in the daily news, it’s easy to forget how bad things were during that first term. When he wanted to shoot peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square, it didn’t happen; there were “adults in the room” like General Mattis. Nearly a year into his second term, that’s no longer the case.

As of this writing, half of Project 2025 has been implemented. Nearly a decade into Trump’s dominance of the news cycle, pointing out his desire to be a dictator feels cliché. He’s pointed it out himself. It’s important to remember that autocracy is cliché. Autocrats would rather you see it as nostalgia. After all, rarely is what they present in the media original. Trump proudly taunted a 3rd term while wearing a hat that reads, “Trump was right about everything.”

It’s a joke, his loyalists say. Never mind how much he lies and is glaringly wrong. Never mind that instead of coming up with his own slogan, he plagiarized Mussolini, who proudly embraced the catch phrase, “Mussolini ha sempre ragione” — Mussolini is always right. Autocracy is cliché.

I could list an overwhelming number of actions this administration has taken to erode our democracy. There will surely be more by the time you’re done reading this. For the sake of brevity, if prominent examples don’t quickly come to mind, Professor Christina Pagel and her team at University College London are keeping a detailed record.

The Trump administration is historically unpopular. He’s the first president in modern history not to crack 50% approval. They’ve tried to consolidate power much faster than figures like Erdoğan in Turkey and Orbán in Hungary. This has fueled increased resistance. When scholars of 1930s fascist movements are asked why people accepted autocracy, a common quote often attributed to Mussolini is offered: “The trains run on time.” This was mostly propaganda. But enough people bought the illusion of safety and order. The Trump administration has tried to pull the same rabbit from its Mussolini hat. While they have managed to deceive some Americans regarding crime and even propagated the outright lie that Trump won the 2020 election, they are struggling to convince the majority that the economy is strong when it contradicts their daily experiences. While income inequality may be their opening, it could also be their undoing.

Unlike dictators who seize power in their prime, Trump’s health and mental acuity appear to be declining as quickly as his approval ratings. It’s unclear he’ll make it through this term, let alone be coherent enough if his administration finds a way to subvert the 22nd amendment so he can run for a third. Our elections may remain secure despite attempts to undermine them. The 2026 midterms will be revealing.

Given the damage done, there’s a chance—if we can unify across our diverse ideologies to protect our democracy— we can come back stronger than ever. But who knows? I’ve yet to find a reliable crystal ball. Dictators don’t act alone. I’ve come across opinions suggesting that when a strongman falls, their autocracy collapses with them. I can point to several cases where that isn’t true, at least not for long. There are aspects of what we’re witnessing that are unique to the 21st century. The push toward kleptocracy on this scale has no clear historical precedent but is how mafia states, such as Russia, operate. So, while there are no MAGA predecessors who combine Trump’s media savvy and charismatic base appeal, this threat could very well last beyond Trump.

Authoritarians rule by taking away the future and replacing it with fantasy. They drain citizens of hope and a sense of direction. They want the headlines rolling through the streets of your mind, perpetuating feelings of helplessness and uncertainty. They require dependence and praise. They want “truth” to be a command. If we can’t accurately discuss the good and bad of the past, we lose our references. Reality becomes malleable. If we can’t imagine a better future, how can we build one?

So what are we to do? It could be putting your body on the line if it comes to that. But for now, speak up even when daily life feels normal despite knowing it’s not for people who may not look like you or have your income. If it feels cliché, don’t let that stop you. Now’s not the time to lose momentum. This administration has three years left. It ain’t over. Give your money to companies that refuse to bend to the state. Patiently talk with family who disagree or may not be politically engaged. Run for local office. Read. Vote. I’ll be facing it with my pen (well, ok, keyboard) in hand and a stack of books by my side. You can too. And never forget, there’s strength in simply letting others know they’re not alone. Meet your friends in person. Have dinner. Be sure to pass the bread. Give them hugs, take that group photo, and never hesitate to raise your glass to love.