The Limits of Integrity

June 26, 2025

The Restaurant That Bombed Iran

I saw a TikTok the other night that caught me off guard. It was clever, it was funny, and for a few seconds, it really nailed something true. The setup is simple: a server asks his manager if they can finally get health care. The manager says no. Not in the budget. The server protests and points out that they are the most profitable restaurant in town. Still no. Then the manager adds that, actually, some of the server’s tips are going to the restaurant across the street. The server blinks, confused. Why would that be? "Well," the manager shrugs, "they need health care." And just as the absurdity settles in, the final line drops: "Holy shit! That other restaurant just bombed Iran!". Cue rimshot.

It’s funny because it feels true. And That is what satire is supposed to do. It packages up something frustrating and real in a way that finally lands in a comprehensible way. The absurdity we live with becomes legible in the punchline. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the video wasn’t just a “little inaccurate”. In fact, it actually undersold how bad things really are. The joke framed the story as charity gone too far. But that’s not what’s happening. The real story is about power and design. It’s not just that we’re funding someone else’s health care. It’s that we’ve built a system where everyone else’s basic needs are strategically covered so long as they help us maintain our global grip and we, the ones footing the bill, are told to be grateful for the crumbs.

Most people know that the U.S. sends money to Israel. Fewer realize the size of it: $3.3 billion a year in military aid, locked in by a long-term agreement signed during the Obama years. Nearly all of that money is earmarked for weapons, defense infrastructure, and joint tech development. Not a dollar of it goes directly to pay for hospitals, clinics, or insurance plans. So if someone says America is paying for Israel’s health care, the technical answer is no. But here’s where it gets dishonest, because that technical answer relies on ignoring how budgets actually work.

I’m not sure how many people know this, but money like this doesn’t just sit in separate jars. It moves. It’s mere existence frees up other money. This is where the term “fungibility” matters. For instance, if someone pays your rent, you can use your own income (that normally would go to rent) on more or better groceries, gas, or a vacation. Likewise, if America covers a country’s military bill or funds their non stop genocide, that country no longer needs to dip into its domestic funds for defense. That frees up cash for anything else. Like universal health care. And Israel does have universal health care. It spends tens of billions annually to guarantee coverage for every citizen. Their taxes fund it. But those taxes can stay lower and their benefits can stay intact because they’re not spending out of pocket to maintain one of the most advanced militaries in the region. We are.

The same dynamic plays out across NATO. The United States maintains thousands of troops overseas. We underwrite collective defense. We give our allies room to build out strong domestic programs because we’re holding the security umbrella. That was the deal: we handle the hard power, they stabilize their economies, and in return, we keep the global capitalist system humming in our favor. But that deal was never meant to benefit ordinary Americans. It was about maintaining strategic dominance. And as the world changed, the money kept flowing, and the question of how it serves us never made it into the conversation.

Here at home, things look different. We have the most expensive health care system in the world (by A LOT), and yet tens of millions of people go without insurance. Millions more are underinsured. People ration insulin. They take out loans to cover emergency surgeries (which is now it’s own cottage industry). They die in debt. Health care accounts for less than 10 percent of our federal budget, most of it through Medicare and Medicaid which are programs that politicians try to cut every few years.

Meanwhile, defense spending eats up over a fifth of the budget, and even that’s a conservative estimate. That doesn’t count the black budget, the contractors, the subsidies. We fund security for dozens of nations. But we don’t fund survival at home.

Try to close a loophole in a defense contract, and you’re anti-military. Try to expand Medicare and you’re a radical communist. We’ve built a political language where it’s patriotic to help weapons manufacturers, bankers, and the already-rich, but treasonous to help your neighbor. A fighter jet is national pride. A subsidized insulin pen is peak socialism and likely evil.

The irony is that even as Trump’s administration pushes us further into isolationist policy by pulling out of treaties, cutting foreign aid, destroying diplomatic institutions we still refuse to bring any of that focus home. If anything, it reveals the hollowness of the justification. The right often claims that we should stop spending abroad and start taking care of our own.

Fine. But where is that care?

The pullback doesn’t come with new clinics, expanded coverage, or public investment. It just leaves a vacuum with no outreach, reinvestment, or reversal of decades of neglect. The isolationist argument sounds almost reasonable if you stop at the soundbite. But the moment it’s put into practice, it becomes clear: the goal was never to redirect anything back to the American people. It was to hoard more, hide more, and tighten the screws while calling it freedom. The pigs at the trough keep getting fatter, and we’re still told it’s un-American to ask for even a ladle of the soup that we helped make. Helping Lockheed is patriotism. Helping the less fortunate? That’s American hating communism. And so the void deepens.

Which brings me back to that video. It hit because the feeling was real. But the story it told? It made the problem sound like a mistake. Like the system was too generous, too scattered, like your paycheck got rerouted to someone else by accident. That’s not what happened. What happened is much more deliberate. The system was never built for you. It was built on you.

And when we frame these stories as random absurdities, we miss the chance to expose the structure. We give people a laugh and send them on their way, when what they need is a map.

Because if there’s one thing that video got exactly right, it’s this: we’ve been told there’s no money for us. But somehow, there’s always enough for everyone else, so long as they’re helping to keep the lights on for the empire. And if one of those allies decides to drop a bomb or 1000 of them? Don’t worry. That’s in the budget.

The Sin Of Telling The Truth

In a country where people are routinely punished for telling the truth, it’s almost quaint to expect sincerity to be rewarded. Sahil Lavingia, a respected software engineer and founder of Gumroad, thought he’d been hired to help improve government technology. He joined DOGE expecting to modernize federal websites and streamline services for veterans. But the deeper question isn't what happened to him, it's why this department existed at all.

From the outset, DOGE never solved a real problem. It wasn’t born of overwhelming fraud or rampant waste. It was built on the illusion of dysfunction, sold to the public by people who had a political and financial interest in dismantling the government piece by piece. The agency’s mission was self-justifying: prove inefficiency exists, then offer the private sector as the only solution. But when Lavingia actually looked under the hood, what he found didn’t match the narrative. There was no deep seeded problems. There were some old fax machine, some clutter, but no swampy quagmire of inefficiency. The real scandal, it turned out, was how little needed fixing.

And that’s where the contradiction emerged. When he said the quiet part out loud, that the federal government was more efficient than expected, that the fraud wasn’t rampant, that the supposed need for aggressive overhaul had been wildly overstated, he wasn’t just undermining a talking point. He was undermining the justification for the agency itself.

Elon Musk had publicly insisted on “maximum transparency.” Lavingia took him at his word. But the truth he revealed wasn’t useful to the narrative. The truth made the whole operation look pointless, because it was. And in a structure that prizes optics over function, telling people their assumptions were wrong is the only unforgivable sin.

Within days of that interview being published, Lavingia’s access was revoked without warning or charges. Just a brick wall and an error message. He hadn’t failed in his job. He’d simply made it too clear the job didn’t need to exist.

DOGE was never about making the government better. It was about branding the public sector as broken so that it could be further privatized, gutted, and handed off to billionaires with no oversight. The agency had a mandate, but no crisis to solve. So it needed one to exist. And when it couldn’t find one, it punished the messenger for saying so.

What Lavingia witnessed wasn’t fraud in the VA. It was fraud in the framing. The real inefficiency wasn’t in the system he analyzed. It was in the performance of fixing it. It was and is an expensive, performative stunt designed to validate a lie that had already been sold to the public.

DOGE was not built to save money. It was built to burn trust. And when it failed at that, it turned on itself.

What makes this story matter now isn't just that a man lost his job for being honest. It's that we saw, in plain view, what happens when someone actually tries to match the propaganda. Lavingia didn’t rebel, he complied. He believed in the mission. He took the slogans at face value. And the second he acted on them, he was removed.

That tells you everything. Because if the propaganda were real, he would have been promoted. But the performance can’t tolerate honesty. The system doesn’t reject bad actors, it punishes believers. Especially the ones who take the mission too seriously. Especially the ones who prove it was a lie all along.

And that should reframe how we hear every public statement from every official currently standing under Trump’s shadow. Because what this story makes uncomfortably clear is that the closer someone is to the top of that food chain, the less we should believe they have any freedom to speak plainly. The more loyal they appear, the more likely it is that their words are pre-cleared, ego-flattering, and tailored to preserve the narrative regardless of whether that narrative bears any resemblance to reality. We’ve moved past the point where lying is a political risk. In this ecosystem, lying is the job.

And that’s dangerous, not because it makes it harder to trust individual people. But because it erases the very idea of public accountability. If officials are punished for truth and rewarded for theater, then everything becomes a performance. Every budget, every policy rollout, every so-called reform. Which means we’re not dealing with basic corruption, we’re living under narrative occupation. Where the only voices allowed to speak are the ones echoing the script. In other words, what we’re witnessing isn’t simply manipulation or PR spin, it’s the infrastructure of full-blown authoritarian state propaganda.

Not in theory, not someday, and not 'if we're not careful.' It’s already operational. All it needs is message discipline and punishment for deviation. All it needs is a public too worn out or distracted to notice the difference between sincerity and submission. The punishment of Sahil Lavingia isn’t a one-off. It’s the clearest sign yet that the only function of this new bureaucracy is to destroy the idea of a shared, knowable truth.

The New Theocracy: Network States Disguised With Carhartt and Fatigues

For years, the “network state” was a speculative dream pitched by techno-libertarian prophets like Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Thiel. These were imagined city-states built on cloud infrastructure and crypto loyalty, formed first online and later anchored in physical space. A fusion of smart contracts, gated sovereignty, and curated citizenship. They seemed remote, future-bound and, until very recently, fantastical.

But the future is always shaped by who arrives first. And it wasn’t the tech guys who built the first functioning prototypes. It was the preachers.

Maybe.

A reader commented on a post earlier this week and sent some links about a strange little project that’s been brewing out in Tennessee. It peaked my interest so I dug in a little.

It’s called the Highland Rim Project and it’s situated in rural Tennessee. Marketed as a Christian refuge from progressive overreach, it actually operates more like a soft-launch secession. A venture-capital-backed community, complete with private churches, private schools, crypto infrastructure, and selective land sales. It's funded by New Founding, a Christian nationalist investment group with ties to Silicon Valley and Washington. On the surface, it's just another homesteading community. but underneath, it look like a familiar blueprint.

This isn't some white-picket pastoral fantasy. It's a jurisdiction in waiting. A gated ideological filter wrapped in church language and Bitcoin aesthetics. And it's not alone. As I read more about this particular community I began to immediately suspect that it couldn’t be the only one. What I found is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Across the country, a growing constellation of religious enclaves are deploying the same logic: combine land, faith, and political cover to create semi-sovereign zones of control. The Patriot Academy in Texas trains the next generation of theocratic lawmakers under the guise of civics education. Dominionist compounds in Idaho and Washington state promote selective migration, private justice, and local capture.

In fact, we have versions of this everywhere we look in america if you consider that high-budget megachurches with private schools, security teams, and massive campuses function as de facto city-states operating entire civic ecosystems under the direction of a board of pastors.

but these are not simply traditional communities of faith. They are in practice parallel states. They filter participation. They write their own rules. They enforce doctrinal governance. And increasingly, they build political power not by opposing democracy, but by exiting it, entirely. Sound familiar?

This is the divergence worth calling out. The Silicon Valley vision for a network state was always sleek. Using visions of crypto passports, smart city sensors, and startup constitutions. But the religious version of the same concept is dustier, more homespun. Trout streams. Church pews. Firearm workshops and family values. Less startup pitch, more scripture and fencing.

But functionally? They’re the same. Both seek sovereignty. Both demand ideological conformity. Both view existing civic structures as obsolete. And both are building, right now, parcel by parcel without oversight or resistance.

There are what we think of as true network cities in the works all over the globe and here at home.

Próspera in Honduras is a deregulated enclave with private courts and libertarian oversight. California Forever, a tech-backed land grab in Solano County disguised as sustainable development. The Frontier Foundation, openly lobbying Trump to create “Freedom Cities” on federal land with executive governance and zero regulatory interference. Even the Patriot Front compound in Tennessee, more explicit in its fascism, mirrors the same pattern: consolidation of territory, internal rulemaking, cultural replacement. I never really made this connection before.

All of these, from crypto zones to megachurch fortresses, operate off a shared formula: the pretense of moral or market clarity + physical land + exemption from public process. It’s not always framed as secession because it doesn’t have to be. The mechanics of exit are what matter, not what you call it. Once you control the inputs such as population, law, and infrastructure they don’t need permission to govern differently. They just do.

Which brings us back to Highland Rim. If it’s not a full network state yet, it is certainly a functioning seed in my mind. And if that’s true, then the narrative has shifted. The future isn’t floating cities or space colonies. It’s faith compounds with private schools and executive connections. It’s not rebellion. It’s a retreat that’s organized, capitalized, and accelerating.

The scariest thing about these projects isn’t that they’re secret. It’s that they’re open. They advertise and they recruit openly. They pitch “freedom” and “tradition” to people disillusioned with democracy. And they work because they don’t need to hide. They don’t need legislation. All they ask for is zoning and land.

Crucially, this echoes the exact pitch that network city evangelists have been pushing for years, it’s just re-skinned for a different audience. Where Balaji sells efficiency and digital nationhood, Highland Rim sells moral certainty and spiritual renewal. But the underlying promise is the same: abandon the broken state, exit the bureaucratic morass, and start fresh in a curated, self-selecting enclave that reflects your values. It’s sovereignty as a subscription service offered not in the cloud, but in the countryside. And while the technologists dream of sensors and crypto wallets, the theocrats are already laying down roads, passing bylaws, and drawing up church charters.

The pitch hasn’t changed. Just the packaging. And the market seems to prefer the gospel over the GitHub repo. Because, ‘Merica!

By the time anyone notices what’s really been built, it’s not won’t be idea anymore. It’s a zip code. It’s a city council. It’s a voting bloc. It’s a new country with a cross on the gate, a VC fund behind the deed, and no intention of ever coming back.

I don’t know if these are true network states or not. Maybe they’re something else, entirely. But under the hood, they look and run just like one: private governance, internal justice systems, ideological filtration, crypto infrastructure, total autonomy from outside scrutiny, and open disdain for the authority of local, state, or federal law.

But if we do call them what they increasingly look like and if we accept the idea that they are, in effect, real-world network states then we need to take seriously what that implies. It means the network state isn’t coming. It’s already here. It arrived awhile ago in a sermon, wrapped in liberty branding and sealed with a land deed.

You know that I’m not a ‘call-to-action’ guy. I don’t have a list of five bullet points for you to do about it. I’m not going to tell you to write your congressman or prep your bunker.

But I do think we should mark this as another point on the timeline. One more data set to map the direction we’re heading, and to start thinking honestly about what kind of future we’re preparing for. And how we might survive it. It won’t be with slogans or protest signs, but with a sober understanding of what’s already operational and how deeply embedded it’s become. Preparation here isn’t just logistical. It’s mental, cultural, and structural. It means learning to see through the branding to recognize the architecture of exit when it’s disguised as faith, freedom or whatever else they come up with and start building our own forms of resilience. These will be quiet, local, and stubbornly public. Because if the new map is already being drawn parcel by parcel, then we need to know where we stand before the borders close in.

Recognizing 'exit' is just the first step. The harder task is learning what to do with that knowledge. Not in terms of reaction, but orientation. It means asking how we keep the public sphere viable. How we build civic trust and shared space while so many are being lured into engineered isolation. It means strengthening whatever still functions at the local level, be it schools, councils, libraries, or clinics. Not out of nostalgia but because they are the last friction against ideological balkanization.

It means staying visible. Staying plural. Staying inconvenient to those who would rather retreat behind gates and doctrine. Not with grand solutions or political saviors. But by refusing to exit. By insisting that we are not just demographics to sort or markets to flee. We are citizens, bound together not by homogeneity, but by the difficult, necessary work of living in public with people we don’t always agree with.

This is not a rallying cry and it’s not a movement. It’s just the only alternative to watching the whole idea of civic life shrink down to gated micro-theocracies and privately governed startup colonies. That’s the real preparation. It’s not fighting their exits, but fortifying what’s left when they’re gone.

Let Them Eat Vacations

On June 19, known as Juneteenth, Trump posted a complaint about “too many non-working holidays in America.” He claimed they cost the country billions, insisted workers don’t even want the time off, and warned we’d soon have “a holiday for every once working day of the year.” That line reads like a parody of a slippery slope fallacy, but the intent behind it is no joke.

It’s worth pausing on the timing. Trump didn’t post this on Columbus Day, Presidents Day, or any of the dozens of flag-waving, default-honored dates. He posted it on Juneteenth which is a holiday that exists solely to commemorate the end of slavery. A holiday that wasn’t even federal until 2021, and has already been targeted by culture war backlash from the right. This wasn’t about economics, it was about cultural hierarchy.

In Trump’s second term, the implications are louder. This isn’t a casual remark about payroll. It’s a policy preview. Don’t be surprised if Juneteenth disappears quietly from the federal calendar, or if Labor Day is rebranded as “Workforce Appreciation Day” with a slogan about how showing up is the new day off. Imagine MLK Day demoted to state-level discretion. Imagine a red-state campaign to audit the cost of “ideologically divisive” observances. Imagine a conservative media blitz about “restoring patriotic focus” to the holiday calendar, paired with thinly veiled digs at any celebration not centered on war, faith, or Founders.

Because that’s the move: paint dignity as decadence, paint history as grievance, and then cancel it under the banner of fiscal prudence. All while keeping the war holidays intact, the parades funded, the defense budget immune.

This isn’t let them eat cake. It’s: they don’t even deserve to smell the bread.

And when you consider that Trump’s entire narrative machine runs on aggrievement and inversion, this fits. Take the moral logic of a holiday like Juneteenth which is reflection, progress, and reckoning. Now recast it as economic sabotage. Take time off, and frame it as disloyalty. Take remembrance, and turn it into resentment. It’s not accidental and it’s not confused. It’s authoritarian clarity in orange face paint.

So what happens next? It’s won’t just be holidays getting erased. It will be holidays getting expanded. Which ones get loaded with new scripts? Which ones get required participation? Expect a future where holidays are ranked by patriotism score. Where “National Unity Week” replaces Indigenous Peoples Day. Where Presidents Day is renamed “Our Glorious Commander’s Legacy Month.” Where celebration becomes compliance.

They won’t say it that way, of course. They’ll say it’s about streamlining or restoring balance. Probably a lot about honoring tradition. But the tradition they mean is submission. And the calendar is just one more tool to enforce it.

Final Thoughts

Stripping ICE and Iran from my daily reporting felt like clearing static from the signal. Initially, it left a curious quietness meaning less noise and fewer distractions.

Yet, beneath this newfound clarity is an unsettling realization: I've been conditioned, perhaps willingly, to ignore important stories, the ones about RFK, random legislative moves, the relentless churn of daily absurdities, simply because I assumed there was neither time nor space to address them properly. The shift in my reporting isn’t merely a reorganizing of content but more about confronting what I've subconsciously accepted as inevitable clutter. It’s about reassessing what deserves attention and action. Yes, Saturdays and Sundays are going to be a mother fucker now, no illusions there. But that’s the price of clarity.

Today’s narratives from the biting satire of a TikTok video, DOGE’s brutal punishment for honesty, to the ominous rise of network states disguised in America. They all share a unifying thread. They reveal structures purpose-built to obscure reality, to diffuse accountability, and to condition us into quiet acceptance. This isn’t incompetence or oversight; it's deliberate design. It’s power consolidating itself through calculated omission and strategic deception.

The joke about funding someone else’s health care isn’t a mere laugh line; it’s a bitter reflection of our engineered impotence. We fund security abroad while denying basic dignity at home, not due to oversight, but by conscious, cynical strategy. Sahil Lavingia’s removal from DOGE isn’t a punishment for truth, it’s a public lesson on the acceptable limits of sincerity. And the Highland Rim Project, along with its growing ilk, isn’t a quaint throwback. It’s an aggressive reclamation of space both physical and ideological marked not by confrontation, but by quiet withdrawal and deliberate exclusion.

Trump’s Juneteenth commentary, delivered not with casual ignorance but pointed intent, foreshadows something grimly familiar: a systematic devaluation of memory, dignity, and reflection in favor of enforced nationalism and obedience. It’s less about economics than it is about redefining worthiness, recasting celebration as subversion and remembrance as rebellion.

Together, these threads do not depict isolated absurdities, but rather a coherent strategy. What looks disconnected is, in fact, intentional fragmentation. A scattering of our focus and weakening of collective response. The real preparation should not be reactive panic but recognition and stubborn, persistent presence. From here on out, it’s about fortifying local spaces not as nostalgic relics, but as essential bulwarks against ideological withdrawal and engineered isolation. It's about understanding that resisting exit strategies isn’t just about marking borders, but about preserving the very possibility of shared public life.

We are witnessing a deliberate reshaping of civic reality, quietly parceling out democracy into private jurisdictions, bureaucratic fictions, and authoritarian theater. Recognizing this is merely the first step. The harder, deeper task is choosing to remain visible and persistently in a landscape that increasingly views such openness as both a threat and a target.

The choice we face isn’t simply how to survive what’s already here, but how to affirmatively sustain what remains: a viable, inconveniently public civic life.