A Roman merchant weighing coins that used to be silver. A British diplomat realizing his empire just died with a phone call. A Soviet bureaucrat lying to his daughter about why the shelves are empty. These are what decline looks like from the inside—not dramatic collapses, but slow erosions that people don't recognize until it's too late. I went looking for the patterns that preceded history's greatest falls. I found them in 2025 America.

I watched the President of the United States threaten to revoke someone's citizenship because they criticized him. Then post AI-generated deepfakes of his critics. Then fire top military leaders for insufficient loyalty. These aren't personality quirks—they're documented patterns of behavior that degrade the Office of the Presidency itself. When did we decide that childish retaliation using presidential power is acceptable from anyone holding this office?

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This happened months ago. Noone saw it, not even my lawyer friends.

When did "our guy said something indefensible" stop being a problem and start being a political calculation?

Dave catches himself in the middle of a scroll-stopping moment: watching leaders on both sides defend the indefensible using the exact same playbook. The details are disturbing. The pattern is even worse. And the question that emerges isn't about Republicans or Democrats—it's about what happens when accountability becomes just another partisan weapon.

$3.4 billion. That's what Trump and his family have made directly from the presidency. Here's how—and why we're letting it happen.

Are we heading toward authoritarianism—or am I just paranoid?

This week, we're examining the early warning signs of democratic erosion: concentration of executive power, exclusionary nationalism, targeting of dissent. We're comparing these patterns across history—Nazi Germany, Saudi Arabia, and America today—not because they're equivalent, but because we can see where this road leads.

Using public records and the "reasonable person test," we ask: Can we acknowledge troubling patterns without tribal thinking? When did independent thought become disloyalty? And more importantly—what are we willing to do while we still can?

Fair warning: this one will make you uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable too.

A government shutdown is supposed to be a failure. So why is it being celebrated as an opportunity? This episode examines the hypocrisy of using chaos as strategy.

We've been arguing for years about what MAGA really means. Turns out, they've been showing us the whole time.

When you line up the executive orders from January to March 2025—all of them, side by side—something becomes impossible to ignore.

They finally tipped their hand. And "great again" has a very specific era in mind.

This one's going to make you uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable. But the pattern is right there in the policy record.

Here's what happens when you stop treating each decision as separate and start seeing what they add up to.

Trump just told military generals to deploy federal troops in American cities to fight a "war from within." The same people who screamed about tyranny under Obama are now cheering.

When did the "Don't Tread On Me" crowd become the "please deploy troops in our cities" crowd? Either federal troops patrolling American streets is constitutional overreach, or it isn't—it can't depend on which team is doing it.

This isn't about left vs. right. It's about watching people abandon every principle they claimed to hold the moment those principles become politically inconvenient. If you can't criticize even this, you don't have principles—you have a team jersey.

AFP spent $4 million flooding YouTube with ads about the "Big Beautiful Bill." Where's the counter-campaign? Where's anyone explaining the CBO found 12 million people lose healthcare? The problem isn't bias—it's that only one side can afford to reach you. Policy debates shouldn't be won by whoever has the biggest checkbook.