Once upon a time—somewhere between the last honest handshake and the first drone strike—there existed a country with a dream. It was not a pure dream, not by any means, but it was at least dreamed by real people: coal-covered hands, sun-wrinkled cheeks, voices hoarse from song or protest. And then, as if by slow poison or fast funding, the dream was quietly repossessed and redrafted—this time by a consortium of hedge funds, honey traps, ex-CIA financiers, and senators whose skin reeked faintly of formaldehyde and Super PACs.
In this retelling of American mythology, truth is not slain—it’s simply bored to death in committee.
The carcass of public trust, long since stripped of marrow, now floats down the Potomac like a plastic flag caught in an oil slick. And in the empire’s grand theater of illusion, where intelligence agencies toss secrets like confetti and billionaires throw parties in the shape of federal crimes, Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail is less a book than a mirror polished with grief. It reflects not what we wanted to see, but what has always been crawling just beneath the surface—claws out, eyes wide, tongue forked and flickering with plausible deniability.
It begins, as all things must in this country, with unchecked lust wrapped in a campaign slogan.
Epstein, that damp ghoul with a Rolodex carved from the darkest corners of the national security state, was merely a symptom—a persistent rash on the flesh of a dying republic. His real gift, if you can call it that, was logistical. He moved money, minors, and information with the grace of a CIA-funded ballet dancer, pirouetting between Mossad agents, Wall Street oligarchs, and Ivy League predators. His island was not an aberration—it was a pilot program.
When questioned—on the record and off—the officials responsible for funding, enabling, or conveniently ignoring the growing pile of blackmail evidence grunted their apologies through teeth filed to lobbyist-friendly angles. A Pentagon spokesperson, recently seen mistaking a missile for a metaphor, bellowed that national security “requires a degree of opacity.” When pressed further, he shrieked into his clipboard and short-circuited a nearby microphone.
Across the river, a Treasury Department official, her lips trembling like aspic left too long in the sun, screeched that accusations tying Epstein to financial institutions involved in covert arms deals were “Russian disinformation.” This was roughly fifteen minutes before internal documents surfaced confirming those same banks were laundering cartel money and receiving yearly Christmas baskets from Langley.
In an era where press conferences sound like Kafka rewrites Mad Libs, the only clarity comes from the margins—where the so-called ordinary people live. Though if you listen closely, nothing about them is ordinary. They are unpaid scholars, intuitive historians, and reluctant mystics who’ve realized, at great cost, that to live honestly in a dishonest world is a revolutionary act.
Elias, a steelworker in Youngstown whose pension was vaporized in a leveraged buyout, stated with quiet dignity: “They tell us we’re broke. But the bombs keep falling, and the stock tickers keep laughing.” He now grows vegetables in repurposed oil drums and teaches neighborhood kids how to repair broken electronics—skills which, unlike senators, retain their value.
Meanwhile, in Jackson, Mississippi, where the water has been undrinkable for longer than CNN has been credible, a midwife named Alisha organized a network of healers and herbalists to bypass a healthcare system that grumbles its way toward genocide every fiscal quarter. “They won’t save us,” she calmly observed, “because sick people are more profitable than well ones.”
And all the while, the machine churns on.
The Intelligence Community, a term now as grotesquely self-negating as “ethical marketing,” continues to shat out policy recommendations written in fonts borrowed from old MK-Ultra files. Their annual budget—approximately the GDP of a medium-sized planet—is classified, of course, for our protection. When asked what, precisely, we are being protected from, a former NSA director muttered through crusted lips, “From knowing too much.”
In this baroque freakshow of revolving doors, the press is both ringmaster and clown. Anchors howl about “bipartisanship” while parroting defense contractor talking points like lobotomized auctioneers. Major outlets now function as high-end stenographers for criminals in power, their headlines slathered in euphemism, their integrity buried beneath layers of sponsored content and Botox.
But despite all this—or rather, because of it—something begins to crack.
In community gardens, in unpermitted teach-ins, in whispered refusals to comply, the real resistance lives—not in slogans but in silence, not in institutions but in intention. A resistance that cannot be surveilled, because it does not tweet. A refusal that cannot be infiltrated, because it does not organize. A strength so soft it breaks stone.
The rot is too deep for pruning. You cannot reform a vulture into a dove. And this—this is the uncomfortable truth that must finally be faced: that what stands in Washington, in London, in Brussels, in Beijing, in Tel Aviv—is not a malfunctioning system. It is a fully-functioning extraction machine. It does not require oversight. It requires a funeral.
But let that not lead to despair.
There is a kind of liberation in seeing clearly. A freedom born not of defiance but of detachment. When one no longer believes in the game, one ceases to fear the players. When one no longer invests hope in hollow halls and fraudulent debates, energy is redirected toward the soil, the story, the stranger in need. From there, something truly radical may emerge—not a revolution of guns and banners, but of perception.
And that may be the most terrifying thing to those in power: the people not fighting, not protesting, not complying—but disappearing from the frame altogether. Refusing to serve as extras in the theater of their own oppression.
After all, the only thing a parasite cannot feed on is absence.
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