Q Report; 21st Century Truths

Hey All, 

Let me explain this very clearly for my confused 21st century friends; the citizens have never been in charge of the USA government. It was originally land owning white men only, and we have made surprisingly little progress over these two and a half hundred years. Rich men, businesses, corporations, have always had control of the government, because they have always had control of our politicians. Our representatives don't work for us, they work for them. It has always been this way. 

We the people have never been in less control of our government, because we have never had so little money, compared to the rich men and special interests. We keep funneling larger and larger amounts of "speech" up to the people who have zero interest in the idea of free speech, because they can't reliably monetize it. The oligopoly has always owned the levers of power because they have always owned the people pulling them. Our representatives do not work for us. They work for capital. They always have.

For a long time, this arrangement relied on decorum, shame, and secrecy. Corruption was supposed to be discreet. Influence was dressed up as patriotism. Then came Citizens United, and the mask was formally discarded. Money was declared speech. Speech was declared limitless. And suddenly there was no longer any reason to pretend politicians represented people at all. Politics became what it had always functionally been: a marketplace where elections are financed by whoever stands to profit, and governance is the delivery mechanism for that investment. The job of an elected official is no longer representation; it is persuasion, convincing donors and special interests that your continued existence in office is good for their bottom line.

The last meaningful disruption of this system at the national level was the election of Obama, and even that should be understood less as a triumph than a cautionary tale. Eight years of “hope and change” did not reform the system; they revealed how efficiently it neutralizes threats. Institutional inertia ground optimism into dust, not because reformers lacked will, but because the machinery is designed to absorb pressure without changing direction. What followed was not backlash, it was disillusionment. And disillusionment is fertile ground for demagogues.

That disenfranchisement has only deepened. Today, Americans have less control over their government than at any point in modern history, not because they care less, but because they possess less. The gap between public wealth and private power has become so vast that participation itself feels symbolic. Votes are cheap. Attention is harvested. Meanwhile, vast quantities of “speech” are rocketed upward to institutions and individuals who have no intrinsic interest in freedom and justice at all, let alone FOR all. Speech that cannot be turned into profit is treated as noise. Speech that threatens profit is treated as danger.

This is the context in which appeals to constitutional purity ring hollow. Rights that exist only on paper are not rights, they are marketing. A republic where outcomes are structurally insulated from popular will is not broken, it is functioning exactly as designed. The tragedy is not that the system has failed us. The tragedy is that it has succeeded for centuries while convincing generations of people that someday, somehow, it might still work for them.

Understanding this is not nihilism. It is clarity. And clarity is the prerequisite for anything that approaches accountability, resistance, or reform. The danger is not in saying this out loud. The danger is continuing to pretend it isn’t true.

Q