Note from the author: Last year I invited my mother to begin writing on Substack, because I think she is brilliant, tough, and incredibly thoughtful. So, if you aren’t following , consider checking her work out. I think it makes a fantastic companion to The Existentialist Republic as she explores psychology, history, and how that understanding can help us more effectively navigate this moment in history.

Now to our regularly scheduled content, I hope you find it orienting and of use.

Chris

The questions of the hour:

Do you think U.S. President Donald Trump would like to see his political enemies murdered?

Would he remove institutional safeguards to make this more likely to happen?

And most importantly, if the first is true and the second has been effectively accomplished, what does that say about the current state of American democracy?

The means exist: foreign governments have hired killers to murder people on American soil, and juries have convicted the men they hired. Those governments have wanted their critics dead for decades, Freedom House counts 1,375 incidents across 107 countries in the last eleven years, so the governments’ motive predates Trump and continues without him.

Trump’s own motive is self-enrichment, pettiness, revenge, and power, and the evidence is his own words and actions.

The opportunity is what Trump created in office. He protected the crown prince who ordered the Khashoggi killing, said so to Bob Woodward, and the Saudi relationship improved; he’s named his enemies and withdrawn their security details while active threats against them persisted; and since January 2025 his administration has disbanded, narrowed, or reduced the federal offices that would detect such killings, and the offices that remain answer to him.

The evidence laid out here is enough for a state attorney general to start investigating, because starting an investigation takes far less evidence than convicting someone, and juries can lawfully convict on means, motive, and opportunity alone.

Means, motive, and opportunity are the categories of circumstantial evidence a prosecutor uses to establish who committed an act. Jury instructions direct jurors to treat circumstantial and direct evidence alike; the Supreme Court settled that in Holland v. United States in 1954, and prosecutors win murder cases without a body on those categories alone.

Trump wouldn’t need to arrange anything. Foreign governments already kill their critics inside the United States, and juries have convicted the people they hired.

Iran paid two high-ranking members of a Russian criminal organization five hundred thousand dollars to shoot the journalist Masih Alinejad at her home in Brooklyn; a federal jury in Manhattan convicted both men in March 2025. An Indian national pleaded guilty in February 2026 to plotting to assassinate a United States citizen in New York City at the direction of an Indian government employee.

Kill for a government Trump provides no aid. His enmity is tied to who pays him, same as his fealty.

Saudi Arabia murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Istanbul consulate in October 2018, and the declassified American intelligence assessment states that Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation to capture or kill him. Congress passed a law requiring release of the assessment naming who was responsible, and Trump’s administration refused to release it for the rest of his term. He told Bob Woodward, for the book Rage: “I saved his ass. I was able to get Congress to leave him alone,” and said he’d gotten them to stop. Asked whether the crown prince ordered the killing, he answered with what the Saudis buy from us, citing more than a hundred billion in arms purchases.

Freedom House counts 1,375 such incidents by 54 governments in 107 countries between 2014 and 2025. Narendra Modi described the practice in a campaign speech: “Today, India no longer sends a dossier [to request extradition], it kills enemies inside their house.”

On November 18, 2025, Trump received the crown prince at the White House with a red carpet and a mounted honor guard, announced an arms deal, and answered a reporter’s question about the murder: “Things happen. But he knew nothing about it,” adding that the matter could be left there. The American intelligence assessment states the opposite. He called the crown prince’s record “incredible in terms of human rights” while his family business discussed a real estate deal with the Saudi government.

Every government named above watched it happen. A crown prince ordered the killing of an American resident, the president protected him, and the relationship improved.

The specialists who track these operations say other governments have noticed. Nate Schenkkan, who built the Freedom House dataset and names impunity as the first reason the numbers have grown, writes that this administration is reducing the role of the United States as a safe haven for dissidents and emboldening authoritarian actors to seek cooperation with it against them. Ron Deibert of the Citizen Lab told the Canadian House of Commons in March 2026 that the American turn will normalize state repression and embolden dictators who now have a model, and that the Justice Department, once nominally independent of the executive, has become a weapon in the administration’s arsenal.

John Bolton said the precondition existed before Trump returned to office, on 60 Minutes in November 2023: “Well, I think we have lost deterrence.” Alinejad, in that segment: “They can challenge U.S. government on U.S. soil without any punishment.”

Trump names his enemies in public, and he’s withdrawn federal security details from four of them. The State Department had been guarding Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook around the clock because Iran had threatened to kill them over the Soleimani strike. Bolton lost his detail too. When Pete Hegseth pulled Mark Milley’s security, intelligence assessments had concluded that an active threat against Milley’s life persisted.

Trump controls every federal agency that would investigate, and the changes have dates. The Intelligence Community’s Annual Threat Assessment covered transnational repression in 2024, naming assassinations and abductions on American soil; the 2025 and 2026 assessments don’t discuss it at all.

Pam Bondi disbanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Influence Task Force in February 2025 and narrowed the standard for charging foreign agents. By March 2026, former officials described the counterespionage section as losing its experienced attorneys; that unit prosecuted the Iran and China cases.

And Intelligence Community Directive 191 obligates the intelligence agencies to warn people of credible threats to their lives, but whether that still happens at prior volume is unknown. When the Knight First Amendment Institute sued for the Khashoggi warning records, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence all refused to confirm or deny holding any.

Removing the capacity to find something is itself evidence; lawyers call it spoliation. The maxim is omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem, all things are presumed against the destroyer, and courts apply it so that a party gains nothing by destroying proof.

Civil juries receive an adverse inference instruction, and jurors can conclude that the missing evidence was unfavorable to whoever destroyed it. Criminal courts admit the same conduct as consciousness of guilt. Federal Rule of Evidence 804(b)(6) applies the principle directly: a defendant who makes a witness unavailable forfeits the right to object when that witness’s statements are admitted anyway, and doesn’t benefit from an absence he created.

Prosecutions didn’t stop. The Federal Bureau of Investigation still lists 2026 cases on its own transnational repression page, and Bondi wrote her reason into the memo: weaponization and abuse of prosecutorial discretion. A reader can take the shutdown as retaliation for the Manafort and Flynn prosecutions rather than as concealment, or as indifference, something less than either: the same removals with nobody having decided anything in particular.

And Schenkkan, whose dataset this article cites, declines in a footnote to claim the practice has increased at all, because his numbers come from public reporting, and a rise in the count can mean more reporters looking rather than more incidents occurring. That’s why no number exists.

I wrote this to lay out the landscape, because a country where the head of state’s enemies can be killed with impunity has moved past the point where the usual warnings apply. That country is so far from a free and fair republic or democracy that the titles become a problem, leaving us clinging to a strategic environment that has passed us by. If we can’t honestly acknowledge where we are then we can never defeat the existential threat that is fascism.

Plenty of killing is already public. Black and brown people and activists of all colors are assaulted, abducted, and murdered daily within our borders, killed by ICE agents and police.

Tens of thousands of people are also in internment camps without a trial or legal counsel. Political dissidents abroad are dead, and the families of political dissidents abroad murdered with them, along with schools full of children, as well as people who get in the way of US financial interests, all murdered using weapons paid for by the American taxpayer.

Thousands of dollars per year from all our paychecks for mass incarceration, GOP MAGA goon squads, mass surveillance, enriching billionaires, and the harassment and mass murder of innocent people worldwide.

But we can do something about it. We can do plenty. There is no force in human history more powerful than the power of the masses. The public. The “We” in “We The People.”

If you want to do something to move the world towards justice you can participate in the call to action below and after that check out our free Existentialist Republic Effective Activism Library at the bottom of this page.

Just so you know, we need 10 paid subscribers per article to keep this machine destroying fascism. We have not hit that number in 28 of the last 30 days despite robust readership and engagement. Don’t let it be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent, but if you can subscribe then you’re the reason the lights stay on for millions of activist readers!

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THE CALL TO ACTION

Category: Epstein Prosecutions

Difficulty Rating: 2/10. One email in your own words, ten minutes.

Who you are contacting: your state attorney general and/or your governor. Find your attorney general at naag.org/find-my-ag and your governor at nga.org/governors. Phone calls, letters, faxes, and constituent contact forms are all great options as well and engaging in multiple is a force multiplier, as is inviting friends to come over to join you for pizza video games, and 5 minutes of activism.

What to say: ask your attorney general to open an investigation into whether Epstein’s trafficking operation crossed into your state and violated your state’s criminal statutes. That’s what an investigation is for, finding out; an investigation isn’t a conviction, and opening one requires no proof up front, and you have a right to know the answer. The redacted federal release isn’t the evidence, it’s the reason to go get the evidence: victims, witnesses, flight logs, and bank records exist outside whatever the federal government blacked out. Three foreign governments opened criminal investigations off that release; no American state has. A state needs no federal referral, and no president can pardon a state conviction.

Your own words are best, kept plain and concise. Just saay who you are (profession), where you live (city), and why you care (your reason). Form letters get counted once and filed; so your own words are what matter because they come from the heart. If you need help feel free to comment in the comment section of this or any ER article and other activists in this community will help!

And tell them this if/when they follow up: if the response is a form letter, or them saying they have no power, or a non-answer bragging about civil suits rather than criminal prosecutions of this administration’s lawlessness, let them know that you see what choice for they are making in this moment of crisis. It’s that simple, just speak from the heart.

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The Massachusetts legislature passed the first minimum wage law in the country in 1912, and more than a dozen other states and the District of Columbia had their own within a decade. Congress did not set a federal minimum wage until 1938, twenty-six years later. Voters in Colorado and Washington legalized recreational cannabis in 2012, and it is still a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law today. So could a state pass a thirty-hour week on its own?

Internationally, progress is being made.

In France the legal week has been 35 hours since 2000, and the government that passed it argued for it as a jobs measure, on the theory that shorter hours divide the same work among more people.

Between 2015 and 2019 the Reykjavik city council and the Icelandic national government ran trials on their own employees, cutting the week to 35 or 36 hours with no reduction in pay. Unions then negotiated shorter hours in their contracts, and about 86 percent of Icelandic workers now work shorter hours or hold the right to negotiate for them.

Actual hours worked are lower than the legal maximums. Dutch workers averaged 31.9 hours a week last year and Danish and German workers 33.9, against a European Union average of 35.9.

The bill that passed the United States Senate in 1933 set the week at thirty hours, fewer than any of those countries has today.

The vote was 53 to 30 on April 6, 1933, and it was bipartisan. The American Federation of Labor, then the largest union federation in the country, drafted the bill and Hugo Black of Alabama introduced it in the Senate.

The bill made it illegal to ship goods across state lines or out of the country if the people who made them worked more than six hours a day or five days a week. The bill also stated that employers could not cut anyone’s pay for the lost hours.The federation projected six million new jobs in a country where roughly a quarter of the workforce was unemployed.

Frances Perkins, weeks into her tenure as Secretary of Labor, supported it publicly. President Roosevelt endorsed it. Newsweek, four months old at the time, ran it on the cover under a headline saying the bill startled the nation.

Kellogg’s employees in Battle Creek, Michigan had been working six-hour days for more than two years by then. W.K. Kellogg replaced three eight-hour shifts with four six-hour shifts at his cereal plant in December of 1930, raised the hourly rate by more than twelve percent so the shorter day cost workers nothing, and hired the fourth shift the change required. Several other large industrial firms cut voluntarily to forty hours and then to thirty across 1930 and 1931. William Green, the federation’s president, told a meeting in San Francisco that spring that they stood unflinchingly for the six-hour day and the five-day week. The Kellogg’s shifts ran until 1985, fifty-five years of operating data on a shortened workday inside one American company, and they ended for reasons other than productivity.

The bill was sent to the House.

The National Association of Manufacturers organized against it and the Chamber of Commerce of the United States joined. Business representatives arrived at the House committee with amendments that would have removed the bill’s central provisions. Perkins offered amendments of her own. The federation offered others. On May 1, 1933, twenty-five days after the Senate vote, the administration withdrew its support, and the House Rules Committee never scheduled a vote.

Roosevelt had concluded that organized business would not support his recovery program if the thirty-hour bill became law. His administration then began drafting the National Industrial Recovery Act, which he signed on June 16.

The Supreme Court voided the National Industrial Recovery Act in Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States on May 27, 1935. It had been law for twenty-three months.

Benjamin Hunnicutt at the University of Iowa has spent a career on what he calls the historical mystery of the end of shorter hours. His argument in Work Without End is that the century-long movement for shorter hours was replaced between roughly 1920 and 1940 by a different definition of progress, one measured by more work for more people, with the promise of leisure substituted by a list of things to purchase. The Senate passed Black’s bill in the middle of that period.

What replaced it became law in 1938. The Fair Labor Standards Act set the week at forty-four hours, reduced to forty by 1940, and the thirty-hour provision was not included.

Black would reintroduce his bill in 1933, 1935, and 1937 without success. Perkins had responded to the original bill by drafting a substitute that added minimum wages to maximum hours, which is where the law we have came from. The forty-hour week is the result of the thirty-hour bill’s defeat.

A six-month trial across 141 organizations in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States moved 2,896 workers to four days at full pay. Burnout dropped. Job satisfaction, mental health and physical health all improved, and twelve control companies showed no such pattern. Wen Fan, Juliet Schor, Orla Kelly and Guolin Gu published the results in Nature Human Behaviour in October 2025, tracing the improvements to sleep, fatigue and workers’ sense of their own capability rather than to compressed intensity. Schor had testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on March 14, 2024, alongside Shawn Fain, on a federal thirty-two hour week.

In February 2022, California Assembly members Cristina Garcia and Evan Low introduced Assembly Bill 2932, which would have defined the workweek as 32 hours for employers with 500 or more workers and prohibited them from lowering the hourly rate to compensate. The California Chamber of Commerce put it on the organization’s “job killer” list, commissioned an analysis projecting between 340,000 and a million job losses, and wrote to Low that the costs would be untenable for many businesses. The Assembly Labor and Employment Committee declined to schedule a policy hearing. Low said afterward there had not been time to study the implications.

Eighty-nine years apart, a bill to shorten the week without cutting pay was stopped by a chamber of commerce and a committee that would not schedule a vote, and in neither case did the legislative body that stopped it hold a vote.

A state legislature set a minimum wage twenty-six years before U.S. Congress did. Voters legalized cannabis in their home states despite federal opposition. A city or a state can set a thirty-hour week the same way.

Now we stop recalling history and start making it.

Welcome to the American Reformation, a new era of progress in our cities and states. We take this same material, dulled and worn from corruption, and we reform it into something better, yet built from the founding ideals which inspired and forged the revolution that started it all.

We are the heat. We are the change. And we are democracy going on the offense.

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THE CALL TO ACTION

Category: Labor law.

Difficulty Rating: 1/10. One message, five minutes, in your own words.

Congress set the week at 40 hours by 1940 and has not changed it since. The Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act would lower it to 32. A state can require overtime sooner without waiting for Congress, which is how California already pays it after eight hours in a day, and a city or a county can put its own employees on a shorter week, which is what the Reykjavik city council did first.

Contact your US senators and representative at congress.gov/members/find-your-member and tell them to cosponsor the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act. Then contact your state representative and state senator at openstates.org/find_your_legislator, or your city council member, mayor, county commissioner, governor, school board, or union, by searching their name and “contact.” Email, phone, and mail all count, and you can fax free at FaxZero.com.

Tell them you are a [your job] in their district, that you want overtime required after 32 hours a week with no cut in hourly pay, and that you want the public employees they already schedule moved to a shorter week now. Ask for a yes or a no. If your state already requires daily overtime, ask for thirty.

Then post about it on social media. Say who you contacted, how you contacted them, and what you asked for, and ask the people who follow you to do the same.

IF YOU CALL

“My name is [name], I’m a [job] in [city], and I live in [representative’s] district. I want to know whether they will support requiring overtime after 32 hours a week with no cut in hourly pay. A yes or a no. If I get a form letter back I’ll know they don’t care about their constituents. You can reach me at [phone or email].”

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The Epstein Survivors Justice Act

This is version 3.0 of the bill, previously published as the Child Sex Trafficking Investigation and Accountability Act, revised and strengthened for this release. Everything that follows is built from existing and long standing legal precedent.

The primary provisions of the Act, in plain terms:

• State attorneys general get Martin Act-style subpoena power: they can compel documents and testimony before any charges are filed, with no probable cause showing required.

• Use immunity lets prosecutors compel testimony from witnesses invoking the Fifth Amendment, the same mechanism that dismantled organized crime networks.

• No federal referral, cooperation, or approval is required, and a federal decision not to charge means nothing under state law.

• A presidential pardon reaches federal offenses only and has no effect on a state prosecution.

• Federal agents who obstruct the investigation can be prosecuted, and federal employment provides no immunity for openly criminal obstruction of justice.

• There is no statute of limitations going forward for child sex trafficking, and the limitations period is paused while a perpetrator conceals evidence or occupies public office.

• New in 3.0: a three-year revival window reopens civil cases that courts previously dismissed as too old.

• New in 3.0: survivors can sue anyone who knowingly profited from the operation, including financial institutions, not just the abusers themselves.

• New in 3.0: the attorney general can order records preserved from the day the law passes, and destroying them afterward is a felony.

• Fines and forfeitures from convictions finance a Survivors’ Compensation Fund, so the perpetrators pay for the recovery.

• If the attorney general refuses to act, any resident can bring the civil case for the state and keep up to twenty-five percent of the recovery.

• If the attorney general or the governor is implicated, a special prosecutor is appointed, and anyone convicted is permanently barred from public office in the state.

The complete text of version 3.0 can be found at the bottom of this article.

The Department of Justice released more than three million pages of Epstein files on January 30. In the months since, federal prosecutors have brought no new charges against anyone in Epstein’s network, and reporting has documented records being withheld and removed from public view.

The fight is far from over, and the options that remain are at the state level.

Part of what you can do about any of this is understanding what these officials and organizations can do.

Your governor can declare a state of emergency over the Epstein files, and the precedent for that is broad. Governors have declared emergencies over the opioid epidemic in at least eight states, over a measles outbreak in Washington, over gun violence in New Mexico, over homelessness in Oregon, over ransomware attacks on Louisiana school districts, and routinely over hurricanes, wildfires, and floods.

When New Mexico’s declaration was challenged, the state supreme court upheld it.

Your governor can also skip the emergency declaration and order an investigation directly. The law enforcement agencies of the state are under the governor in the executive branch, and a governor can direct them to investigate the public side of the Epstein files, the released records and what is already known: bring people in, pursue subpoenas, convene grand juries, take depositions, and find where the evidence intersects with the criminal law of the state.

Where it intersects the law of another state, send it to that state. Where something should be publicly disclosed, disclose it.

And where federal agents obstruct the investigation, refuse to cooperate with it, or work to cover things up, charge them criminally, for perjury and for whatever else fits, up to and including the director of the FBI.

What is being asked for in both cases is legal. A state enforces its own criminal law as a separate sovereign, and no federal referral is required. This is long standing and largely undisputed legal doctrine.

Think of it this way: if Kash Patel gets pulled over and charged with a DUI while working, nobody asks if we should have the DOJ handle it. Corruption and human trafficking and many other criminal activities have been deferred by local departments for most of the last century as our federal government has consolidated powers and authorities. That practice was a matter of institutional agreement rather than written law. It's a “may” not a “shall” that cities and states get involved. This was only appropriate when the federal government could be trusted as a neutral arbiter of the law rather than a freshly captured tool and extension of the Trump crime family. We must enter a new era of legal pursuits if we are to restore law and order in the United States; an era where government works from the bottom up, rather than top down. Thankfully, this is the vision our founders laid out and is well supported in 250 years of jurisprudence.

It is unarguably within the lawful authorities granted to a governor to convene a task force under the normal powers of law enforcement, or declare a state of emergency and unlock unilateral emergency powers, which exist because some things are tough to get done on the appropriate timeline legislatively. And in many states, your governor can also refer cases directly to the attorney general, including states where the attorney general needs a referral before pursuing criminal charges.

In most states, the attorney general can do nearly the same thing. The office has different law enforcement, investigative, and legal tools available to it, but the demand is identical: investigate the public record, see where it intersects with state law, refer what intersects another state’s laws to that state, disclose what should be publicly disclosed, and criminally charge federal agents who obstruct the work.

Readers of The Existentialist Republic have spent the past year contacting their attorneys general with asks like this, and the AGs have largely answered with form letters and non-answers.

We have instructed readers to follow up and tell them: you’re showing me your priorities, and you’re being dishonest about what your office is capable of. I will remember this, and I will be telling my neighbors about the content of your character in this moment of crisis, as we face this disgusting tyranny and as victims deserve support. Will you stand for the people or bend the knee to the Epstein Class?

It's helpful to figure this out as early as possible so we can have a clear idea of who should no longer hold public office.

Your state legislators are the third lever. We wrote model legislation for exactly this purpose, the Epstein Survivors Justice Act. It creates the investigative task forces described above, provides for recovering funds for victims, and recoups the state’s costs from those found responsible.

Ask your legislators to introduce it, ask them to co-sponsor it, and ask them to publicly announce support for it.

Each of these officials should be asked both to act and to publicly call for the action, because an official who cannot act on a given piece can still publicly call for it and publicly announce support.

Readers of this publication have been making these contacts, to governors, attorneys general, and state representatives, for the past year.

So know what each of these officials does, and then call, email, and mail them the asks above.

This class of organizations is another lever of power: ask your local Democratic Party to endorse any of this and to issue a public statement, and ask your local Working Families Party chapter, your local Libertarians, your local civic groups, and your local Republicans too. These groups can endorse, they can issue public statements, and they can ask their own members to make the same contacts to the same officials.

Your union too: a union can endorse this legislation, and it can tell its currently endorsed candidates, and any candidate applying for a future endorsement, that the endorsement now requires endorsing this legislation, pushing it publicly, and publicly announcing support, and that they will lose the endorsement if they do not.

And you can get people to show up with you: schedule meetings at a poltician’s office, or just show up at the office, with some friends, and with pizza to share among staffers. Make a day of it. A week of it on rotation with your indivisible chapter, even.

When any of these offices or organizations sends you a non-answer or deflection, tell them in plain language: that’s a garbage answer, you’re going to remember it, and you’re going to tell your neighbors about it.

You don’t owe them professionalism. They owe you representation.

Educate your neighbors as you go, and let them know who’s here to fight and who isn’t, who’s here to bend the knee for their own benefit and who’s fighting for we the people, for the public, and for the victims.

Few people know the name of their Attorney General or State House Representative. You can be the reason your whole community learns it. And that AG or State Rep gets to decide how they’re known: as someone who shielded the men hiding in the Epstein files, or as someone who used every damn power they could scrape together in dogged pursuit of law and order.

Hero or villain, the choice is theirs and the spotlight will be on them either way. That spotlight can get awfully hot. If the media won't cover it, we can put flyers on every door in town.

We don't accept excuses. We demand justice. And we aren't going away.

The fight over the Epstein files is far from over. In the states, it’s just beginning.

Below is the text of the bill and fast facts on it. Don’t let this publication be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent, but if you can subscribe then you’re providing tools for activists nationwide who are here for justice and democracy.

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You could elect a golden retriever mayor and that’s how I know we can defeat fascism.

This has been done: Idyllwild, California has had a golden retriever named Max as its honorary mayor since 2012.

The dog-mayor title is honorary, but the offices where the winner signs budgets and certifies elections are filled by the same instrument, a ballot.

There are plenty of gatekeepers between a candidate and that ballot, parties, donors, filing rules, name recognition, but the ballot decides in the end, and the smaller the race, the less power those gatekeepers have, because their tools are money, party machinery, and media attention, and a race for county clerk seldom attracts any of the three.

Your tools work at that size: you can knock every door in your precinct yourself, a few hundred convinced neighbors decide a race that small, and an ad cannot do what your neighbor or your coworker does by talking with you in person.

A propaganda apparatus built on billions of dollars, cable networks, and algorithmic feeds can be defeated by people talking face to face, and there is something uniquely beautiful in the fact that this very human thing still has so much power.

Voters can overrule the gatekeepers even at the top of a state’s ballot: in 1990, Alaska elected a governor from a party that advocated seceding from the United States.

That is the magic of democracy. You can elect a golden retriever, you can elect a secessionist, and you can vote yourselves a millionaires tax, because Massachusetts already did: a 4 percent tax on every dollar of income over a million, passed at the ballot box in 2022, now pays for free school meals for every public school kid in the state, and the revenue, more than a billion and a half dollars a year, has come in above projections.

An Indivisible chapter and the county Democrats can put their stamp on whatever they want once elected.

We need our mayors and our city councils and our state reps. Send them to the state house demanding universal healthcare, and send them to the council chambers ready to build Vienna style public housing.

Coup where you can.

What does that mean?

Take power.

We have to take power, because the oligarchs certainly won’t give us any.

But your town?

About 90,000 local governments operate in this country, and democracy really shines brightest in its smallest increments.

In a race decided by a few hundred votes, you can knock more doors in a weekend than the entire margin of victory.

And the wins are already on the books. Missoula, Montana took its water system away from a private equity firm and won at the Montana Supreme Court, and SeaTac, Washington passed a fifteen dollar minimum wage before any other American city, and the margin was 77 votes.

Seventy-seven votes.

The last full federal count found 513,200 elected offices in America, about 96 percent of them local, and a majority of local races have a single candidate.

A council seat in a small town is three or four hundred votes, door knocking wins about one vote for every fourteen people you talk to, and the arithmetic comes out to a few thousand doors, a few weekends, and a seat.

One piece of advice if you run, or if you knock doors for someone running. Both parties will hand you a walk list with houses already crossed off, because a database decided those people don’t vote.

Knock on every door.

A house no campaign visits votes less, so the next list skips it again, and a good deal of the discouragement in this country was manufactured at exactly those skipped doors. You can end that on your own block.

I love democracy, and it grieves me how many people have been talked out of that love.

We founded a nation on Enlightenment ideals, and the ideals were themselves a rebirth: the printing press put ancient Greek and Roman arguments back into ordinary hands, and out of them grew self-determination, the rights of human beings, the consent of the governed.

How incredible.

Somehow we went from “Give me liberty or give me death” to “Give me a $5 campaign contribution and I’ll write another strongly worded letter.”

Well, “give me a break,” because I am here for liberty and justice, and so are you, and so are millions more Americans.

So what do we actually do? You knock on doors and you evangelize ideas to your neighbors: here is an idea, can I tell you more?

That, repeated and continually growing more sophisticated, growing stronger, until things are better.

We became our own nation in no small part because a fifth of the colonists, by one estimate, read the same forty-six page pamphlet or heard it read aloud, Common Sense, Thomas Paine arguing to ordinary people that they could govern themselves without a king, and those ideas were argued out loud in taverns before they were signed in Philadelphia.

Abolition took eighty-nine years from the Declaration. People were born into the movement, gave their whole lives to it, and died of old age with slavery still legal, and the work they handed down ended slavery anyway.

Do you think the robber barons built organized labor? People talking to their coworkers built it, shop by shop and meeting hall by meeting hall, until the eight hour day existed.

If you cannot get a DSA member or a libertarian onto your city council, you will never get one into the Oval Office, and the climb might take a decade.

Do you believe in your values enough to spend your life advocating for an idea that betters humanity, knowing the win might arrive after your lifetime?

Is freedom not worth it?

Is justice not worth it?

The two parties do not use power the same way. Republicans act, and the litigation follows.

In his first week back, Trump fired seventeen inspectors general in a single Friday night, and the opposition answered with lawsuits, roughly 900 of them so far, and the injunctions arrive after the thing is already done, and the inspectors general are still fired.

Civil suits don’t stop a coup.

One side treats power as a thing you use and then defend; the other treats it as a thing you request. The rulebook is silent for both parties, and only one of them acts on the silence.

If danger moves more rapidly than ambition, then we are doomed to lose.

Run for a local office. The offices are more powerful than we say, and Republicans have been proving it: an elected state education board in Texas put a Bible-infused curriculum into public elementary schools by a vote of eight to seven, and the ban the Supreme Court used to end Roe v. Wade was passed by a state legislature, Mississippi’s, in 2018, four years before the ruling. County clerk, school board, water district, dogcatcher: each one comes with decisions, and decisions are power, chances to make things better for the people in your community and more difficult for the bad guys.

In much of the country the clerk’s decisions include the election itself: whether ballots are paper, how the count is conducted, who certifies the result. In Michigan in 2024, 93.8 percent of clerk and treasurer races went uncontested, and if you are afraid for the next election, that fear has a filing deadline.

Write the best law you can and pass it, and if somebody sues, that means the law affected someone with the money to fight.

The Supreme Court has ruled, three separate times, that the federal government cannot order state or local officials to carry out federal programs, which is why an ICE detainer is, legally, a request. There are about 135,000 federal officers with arrest authority and about 700,000 state and local police, which means federal enforcement happens where local government agrees to help. Cities and counties adopt those policies by council and commission vote, and once you are in office, you cast one of those votes.

If a court eventually tells you to stop, that is the day you decide how much you feel like listening. I will have more to say soon about what I call the make me doctrine.

None of this comes from the top, and we are not going to fix it with a different president. It comes up from below: activists become council members, council members become mayors, and mayors and state reps become governors.

That is what the change looks like, the coup climbing upward, seat by seat, until the tyrants are fighting tens of millions of the public and tens of thousands of city council members and state reps and school board members at once. Win that layer and better senators and better House members follow, because the candidates come from somewhere, and now they come from us.

Even if they tamper with the elections above us, the offices below are still decided in 90,000 separate places, one filing deadline at a time. A president cannot grant you any of this and cannot take it away, because it was never theirs.

About 89 million eligible Americans did not vote in 2024, and calling that apathy is a lie. Election day is a Tuesday and not a holiday, the polls close while people are still on shift, thirteen states closed 1,688 polling places in the six years after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, and 4 million Americans are barred from voting outright over a felony conviction, under laws many of which date to the years after Reconstruction. That abstention was manufactured, and the fault belongs to the people who built the barriers, not to the people the barriers stopped. That is part of our battle; to overcome a rigged game because the cost of a loss is existential.

Here is a small thing I do when I do not feel like doing the work, since I do have the vote and the hours. I tell myself that if I do not do it, then my demographic does not do it. If I stay home, people like me stayed home, and if I knock a door, people like me knocked a door.

It gets me out the door.

The formula that guides my own activism is what has become the Existentialist Republic’s system titled Educate, Activate, Recruit, Repeat.

So take the seat, any seat, and run it differently than anyone has: do what is right, do what is moral, do what the people demand, and let MAGA whine about it somewhere else.

That is the coup. You take power wherever you can get it, and you wield it for the people.

Even when that power is your voice, your story, and your heart. That is enough.

Coup where you can and the coup starts in you.

If you want a full length book covering the methods you read in our daily articles, check out Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

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THE CALL TO ACTION

Category: ICE accountability.

Difficulty Rating: 1/10. One email, five minutes, and the message is already written below.

Who you are contacting: your governor and your state attorney general. Find your attorney general at naag.org/find-my-ag and your governor at nga.org/governors.

What you are asking for: demand they say it, publicly: if ICE agents violate our rights, we will charge them criminally, whether it’s First Amendment or murder. There is no law of the land that gives the federal government carte blanche for criminality.

Four ways to deliver it. Pick one.

1. Email. Paste the message into each office’s contact form with your name and address.

2. Call. Read it to the staffer who answers.

3. Fax. FaxZero sends five free faxes a day from your browser.

4. Print it and mail it.

The important part: if they send you a form letter, or a reply bragging about civil suits, you respond. Say “weak non-answer, thanks for nothing” in your own words. You don’t owe them a professional response. They do owe you though, they should be doing the job they were elected to perform.

THE MESSAGE

Governor [name] and Attorney General [name],

My name is [name], I am a [profession] and your constituent in [city].

Say it publicly: if ICE agents violate our rights, we will charge them criminally, whether it’s assault, kidnapping, or even murder. There is no law of the land that gives the federal government carte blanche for criminality. Resign if you aren’t up for the task of enforcing the rule of law.

[Why this matters to you, in one sentence.]

[Your name], [your address]

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A note from the author. This article is a substantially updated and refined release of a previous piece. It runs longer than what you usually find at the Existentialist Republic. That’s because the argument we are making is that hundreds of federal judges, including six sitting Supreme Court justices, should face impeachment and removal from office for their commitment to an organization and a doctrine incompatible with the duties, responsibilities, and expectations of their position. A claim that serious cannot rest on a thousand words and a few rhetorical flourishes. It has to earn the conclusion through the doctrine, the history, the rulings, and the constitutional standard. Even if you aren’t an attorney, I hope you’ll give it a chance, since this issue is one that impacts us all, and must be addressed if we are going to restore justice. Read at your own pace. You’ll also find today’s call to action and around two dozen free Existentialist Republic Effective Activist Educational Resources, all at the end of this article. Enjoy, and thanks for getting after it.

The Federalist Society spent forty years building a captured federal judiciary, and the country now lives inside the result. The doctrine at the center of the project has a name, unitary executive theory, and the doctrine has a method: read every Democratic exercise of power narrowly and every Republican exercise of power broadly, until the Constitution means whatever the conservative legal movement needs it to mean in the case at hand. On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 1935 precedent that had protected independent agencies from at-will presidential removal for ninety years, and the overruling completed a project that began in the Reagan administration. Membership in the Federalist Society, at any point in a legal career and subject to one cure described below, is sufficient cause to impeach and remove a federal judge.

Unitary executive theory says the president alone controls the entire executive branch of the federal government. Every official who enforces federal law, from cabinet secretaries down to line prosecutors and agency inspectors, works under presidential command. The president can hire them, fire them, override their decisions, and direct their actions. The theory rests on the opening line of Article II, which vests “the executive Power” in a president, and proponents read that grant as complete: if executive power belongs to the president, anyone exercising executive power must answer to the president, and Congress cannot insulate any executive official from presidential control.

The theory presents itself as originalism, a recovery of the framers’ design, and it was invented in the Reagan administration by lawyers who needed a constitutional argument for expanding presidential power in the directions the conservative movement wanted it expanded. Reagan took office in 1981. The Federalist Society launched the following year at Yale and the University of Chicago, founded by law students including Steven Calabresi, who went on to coauthor the law review articles claiming unitary executive theory as the framers’ original design. Edwin Meese became Attorney General in 1985, and his Justice Department produced the originalist briefs and internal memoranda that gave the doctrine an academic foundation.

Antonin Scalia joined the Court in 1986 and wrote the project’s founding dissent two years later in Morrison v. Olson, arguing that the independent counsel statute violated the Constitution by placing an executive officer outside presidential control. That dissent became the movement’s central text, taught in Federalist Society reading groups and cited in law review articles as the correct reading of Article II.

The historical claim was weak from the beginning. The first Congress, sitting with many of the people who wrote the Constitution, created executive offices with mixed structures and debated removal at length without treating presidential control as absolute. When the House took up the office of Comptroller of the Treasury in June 1789, Madison told his colleagues that the office’s duties “partake of a judiciary quality” and that there may be strong reasons why such an officer should not serve at the pleasure of the executive. Alexander Hamilton, who defended the executive articles during ratification, wrote in Federalist 77 that Senate consent “would be necessary to displace as well as to appoint,” a position the strong unitary theory cannot accommodate.

Humphrey’s Executor, decided in 1935, upheld the rule that Federal Trade Commission members could be removed only for cause, such as neglect of duty, rather than at the president’s will, and the rule stood for nine decades. Constitutional scholars including Jed Shugerman, Jane Manners, and Lev Menand have documented that the founding-era record does not support the theory’s account of original design, and that the votes of the First Congress, which the theory treats as its founding proof, show no majority for the removal power the theory claims. The theory’s proponents built the doctrine anyway, because the doctrine was useful, and they spent four decades credentialing the lawyers who would become the judges who would convert a Reagan-era policy preference into binding constitutional law.

The rulings arrived once the votes did. Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board struck down an arrangement of two layers of that for-cause protection in 2010, in which board members removable only for cause answered to commissioners who were themselves removable only for cause. Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau struck down the structural independence of the CFPB in 2020. Collins v. Yellen did the same to the Federal Housing Finance Agency in 2021. And on June 29, 2026, Trump v. Slaughter completed the sequence. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for a six to three majority, upheld the without-cause removal of Federal Trade Commission members and wrote, “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.” Justice Sotomayor’s dissent listed the agencies whose independence the ruling places in doubt, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. A precedent upheld unanimously in 1935 and left in place through every intervening administration is gone, and the constitutional theory that removed it did not exist until lawyers in the Reagan administration wrote it.

A doctrine applied consistently produces symmetrical results. A president is a president. The constitutional grant of executive power in Article II does not distinguish between Republican and Democratic presidents, so a doctrine about presidential power should mean the same thing on January 19th and January 21st regardless of who took the oath in between. Two rulings decided thirteen months apart, by overlapping majorities, show what the Court does instead.

In June 2023 the Court decided Biden v. Nebraska. The Biden administration had moved to cancel federal student loan debt under the HEROES Act, a 2003 statute authorizing the Secretary of Education to “waive or modify” loan provisions in connection with a national emergency, and it invoked the COVID-19 emergency, the same emergency the first Trump administration had used to pause loan payments three years earlier. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, ruled that the administration lacked the authority.

The Court applied the major questions doctrine, which holds that agencies cannot take actions of vast economic and political significance without explicit congressional authorization, and it held that the statute’s words were not explicit enough. Congressional silence on the specific question of mass cancellation operated as a limit on executive power. The Court reached that ruling only after deciding that Missouri had standing, the legal right to bring the suit, which requires a party to show a concrete injury of its own.

Missouri’s claimed injury belonged to MOHELA, a state-created loan servicer whose finances are separate from the state treasury, and MOHELA did not join the suit and did not claim the injury for itself. Justice Kagan’s dissent said the majority had departed from settled standing principles to reach a question that was not properly before it. That same month, in United States v. Texas, the Court held eight to one that Texas and Louisiana lacked standing to challenge federal immigration enforcement priorities, because indirect fiscal effects on a state do not create an injury courts can recognize. The Court accepted a contested standing theory in one June 2023 case and rejected a state standing theory in another decided the same month, and the acceptance occurred in the case where accepting it allowed the Court to strike a Democratic program.

Thirteen months later, in July 2024, the same Court decided Trump v. United States. Donald Trump faced federal prosecution for his conduct in connection with the January 6th attack, including pressuring the Justice Department to investigate fictional election fraud, pressuring state officials to overturn certified results, and pressuring Vice President Pence to refuse to count electoral votes. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the same six justices who had ruled against Biden, granted Trump absolute immunity for acts within his core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for everything else within the “outer perimeter” of official conduct. The Constitution does not mention presidential immunity, and no statute grants it. The framers wrote one immunity into the document, and it is narrow and legislative.

The Speech or Debate Clause of Article I, Section 6 protects members of Congress for their legislative speech, and the same section gives them a limited privilege from arrest. No clause of any kind protects the president. Charles Pinckney, a delegate to the Convention, told the Senate in 1800 that the design was deliberate, that the Constitution intended only specified and very limited privileges for Congress, and that no privilege of that kind was intended for the executive, a statement Justice Sotomayor’s dissent quotes inside the immunity ruling itself. Hamilton confirmed the design in Federalist 69, written to assure ratifiers that the presidency would not recreate the monarchy they had fought a war to escape.

The king of Great Britain held office for life and could not be questioned in any court. The president would serve four years, could be impeached and removed during the term, and after leaving office would be “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Some defenders of the immunity ruling read Hamilton’s word afterwards, which appears earlier in the same sentence, as a rule that prosecution requires prior impeachment and conviction.

The essay cannot support that reading, because the essay’s whole purpose was to deny that the president would hold the immunity the king held, and a reading under which a president commits crimes in office and escapes prosecution forever after a partisan acquittal recreates the immunity Hamilton was denying. The word describes the ordinary order of events, since a sitting president would not generally stand criminal trial while holding the office. The framers gave legislators one narrow written immunity and gave the president none, and two hundred thirty-seven years later the Roberts Court created for the president the immunity the document does not contain. The majority saw the record. Roberts described the Pinckney excerpts as the dissent’s most compelling evidence, then dismissed the argument they support as “now-discredited.” The Court read the founding case against executive immunity and overrode it.

Congressional silence on student loan cancellation operated as a limit on Democratic executive power. Constitutional silence on criminal immunity operated as a license for Republican executive power. The same Court, the same six justices, opposite analytical methods, and each outcome aligned with the political project the Federalist Society has pursued for forty years. The pattern reaches past these two cases. Stephen Vladeck’s research on the shadow docket documents dozens of emergency interventions favoring Republican applicants and a much smaller number favoring Democratic ones.

Unitary executive theory is a substitute constitution. The claim sounds rhetorical and it is meant literally, on four grounds. The text of Article II vests executive power in the president and requires him to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, language that imposes an obligation rather than granting unilateral control over every officer. The framers declined to grant what the doctrine claims, as Federalist 77 and the Convention record show. The first Congress, which included many of the document’s authors, built executive offices with mixed structures and debated the Comptroller’s independence on the merits. And no court endorsed the strong version of the theory for the Constitution’s first two centuries, until a political movement that could not amend the document through Article V installed its preferred version through judicial appointments instead. A doctrine with those four properties functions as a replacement for the Constitution rather than an interpretation of it.

The framers anticipated judicial corruption and wrote the remedy into the document. Federal judges hold office “during good Behaviour” under Article III, Section 1, and the House may impeach and the Senate may remove a judge who fails that standard. Good behavior has always meant something more demanding than not committing crimes. Hamilton called the standard “one of the most valuable of the modern improvements” in Federalist 78 and treated it as a substantive condition on tenure. Joseph Story wrote in his Commentaries on the Constitution, published in 1833, that judges could be impeached for “official misconduct” demonstrating unfitness for the office, including partiality and open violation of constitutional duty.

The judicial oath in 28 U.S.C. Section 453 requires every federal judge to swear to “administer justice without respect to persons” and commits the judge to faithful and impartial performance of every duty under the Constitution and laws of the United States. The oath has content. It binds the judge to the Constitution the country ratified, and a judge who swears it while committed to a different constitution has violated the oath at the moment of commitment. The rulings that follow are evidence of the violation. The commitment is the violation.

Membership alone is disqualifying, and the year matters to why. In 1985 a law student could join the Federalist Society for the debates and the professional connections without endorsing any constitutional project, and many did. That defense had substance when the organization was young and its function was unsettled. The function is now settled, public, and documented by the organization itself. The Society’s own event materials describe its co-chairman, Leonard Leo, as an adviser to the president on judicial selection who assisted with Supreme Court confirmations. Leo built the lists from which the Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett nominations were chosen. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse documented on the Senate floor that 86 percent of the first Trump administration’s Supreme Court and appellate nominees were or had been members.

The co-founder’s scholarship supplied the doctrine, the membership network supplied the candidates, and the appointments supplied the rulings. Joining an organization that has performed that function openly for four decades constitutes endorsement of the function. So the standard has three independent routes. Endorsement of unitary executive theory is sufficient on its own, because the endorsement is a commitment to a constitution other than the ratified one. Membership is sufficient on its own, because joining is endorsement once the function is public. And a record of constitutional principle applied selectively along partisan lines is sufficient on its own, because it demonstrates the partiality the oath forbids. The six justices in the Trump v. United States majority present all three at once.

The First Amendment objection deserves a full answer, and the full answer names the adverse cases first. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents, decided in 1967, the Supreme Court struck down New York’s rules disqualifying teachers for membership in listed organizations, holding that knowing membership, without specific intent to further an organization’s unlawful aims, cannot justify exclusion from public employment. Schware v. Board of Bar Examiners and Baird v. State Bar of Arizona applied the same principle to bar admission. Read as court doctrine, those cases defeat a membership standard, and any lawyer who reads this argument will cite them. The answer is that no court applies them here. Nixon v. United States, decided in 1993 and concerning a federal judge named Walter Nixon rather than a president, held that courts cannot review how the Senate tries an impeachment, because the Constitution gives the House the sole power of impeachment and the Senate the sole power to try impeachments. Good behavior is a fitness standard the political branches enforce through a political process.

The Communist Party cases instruct courts on what they may not do to a professor or a bar applicant. They do not instruct the House on what fails the fitness standard for life tenure. The deeper answer is that the Constitution itself conditions office on belief. Article VI, Section 3 commands every federal and state officer to swear an oath to support the Constitution, a belief-based qualification by design, and a nominee who tells the Senate they reject the Constitution is ineligible for the bench without any First Amendment problem. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment bars from office anyone who swore the oath and then engaged in insurrection or gave aid and comfort to its enemies, a disqualification that turns on alignment against the constitutional order and requires no criminal conviction.

The Code of Conduct for United States Judges already restricts judges’ organizational memberships because some affiliations compromise the impartiality the office requires. Guideline A of the National Security Adjudicative Guidelines conditions eligibility for classified access on allegiance to the United States. The settled principle across all four is that office may be conditioned on commitments compatible with the office’s duties, and commitment to a substitute constitution is incompatible with the duties of a federal judge. No one goes to prison under this standard for joining the Federalist Society, and no one loses the right to speak, publish, organize, or litigate. What a member cannot do is hold Article III office, for the same reason a nominee who rejects the Constitution cannot.

The other precedent critics will raise is Samuel Chase. The House impeached Justice Chase in 1804 over his conduct of politically charged trials and a partisan grand jury charge, the Senate acquitted him on March 1, 1805, and the acquittal became the practice that judges are not removed over their rulings. Chase also argued that only an indictable crime could support a judicial impeachment, and his acquittal is cited for that position too.

The practice deserves respect, and it does not reach this case. The norm protects jurisprudential disagreement inside the legitimate range of constitutional interpretation, and the standard argued here excludes that disagreement by its terms: a judge who reads a clause differently is doing the job, while a judge committed to a body of doctrine that contradicts the text, the history, and the precedent in order to deliver predetermined partisan outcomes is executing a project instead, and the good behavior standard exists for that difference. The indictable-crime reading answers to the authorities cited above, since Hamilton in Federalist 78 and Story in his Commentaries both treated good behavior as a standard more demanding than criminal law. And the Chase acquittal confirms the forum, because the Senate, and no court, decided what the standard required.

The standard reaches membership at any point in a career, and it can be cured. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, the provision whose structure this standard borrows, lets Congress remove the disqualification by a two-thirds vote of each House, because its authors understood that alignment can end. The parallel cure here is public repudiation. A judge who joined as a student, resigned, renounced the project on the record, and built a judicial record demonstrating the impartiality the oath requires has cured the disqualification.

A judge who let a membership lapse quietly while continuing to deliver the project’s outputs has not. The cure is the renunciation and the record together. Silence cures nothing. The country has already run this test on a Supreme Court justice. Hugo Black joined the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama in 1923 and resigned in 1925 before his Senate run, and the membership became national news weeks after his 1937 confirmation, with editorial boards and politicians calling for his resignation. Joining the Klan was legal, and the legality of joining formed no part of Black’s defense. He answered with a national radio address on October 1, 1937, stating that he had joined, resigned, and never rejoined, and pointing to his Senate record on civil and religious rights. The fight was conducted entirely on the terrain this standard names: membership as the disqualification question, renunciation and record as the answer.

A membership standard operates in both directions. A future Republican House could draft articles against judges who advanced through the American Constitution Society and call it the same principle, so the principle has to be stated precisely enough to constrain everyone who invokes it. The disqualifying feature is commitment to a substitute constitution: a body of doctrine that contradicts the ratified text, the recorded history, and long-settled precedent, built for the purpose of delivering predetermined partisan outcomes. An organization warrants membership-alone treatment only when installing such a doctrine is its demonstrated function, established the way it is established above, through the doctrine’s origin, its texts, its installation in specific rulings, and its selective application. Anyone claiming another organization meets that description must meet the same burden of proof. The standard is falsifiable, and the evidence is the argument.

The scope of the remedy has to match the scope of the capture. The six justices in the Trump v. United States majority delivered the project’s decisive rulings, and the House should draft articles of impeachment against each of them. The Senate should hold trials. The proceedings perform the work of public accounting whether or not sixty-seven votes for conviction exist, because the trials place on the public record, under oath and subject to evidence, what the Court has done. Below the Supreme Court, hundreds of federal judges advanced through the same network. Each is entitled to individual articles, an individual trial, and the opportunity to demonstrate the cure. The standard stays uniform.

Impeachment sits alongside other constitutional tools. Congress can expand the Supreme Court, because Article III leaves the Court’s size to Congress. Congress can limit federal court jurisdiction over specific questions under the exceptions clause of Article III. Term limits for justices would require an Article V amendment. And the Senate can reform confirmation without any constitutional change by refusing to confirm nominees subject to the disqualification who have not cured it. Each tool exists. Each requires political power sufficient to use it, and building that power is the work in front of us.

The language of purges should be refused. Erdogan removed thousands of Turkish judges and prosecutors after the 2016 coup attempt. Orban removed sitting Hungarian judges by lowering the mandatory retirement age. Poland’s Law and Justice party restructured its courts before the Tusk government began trying to reverse the damage. Those governments establish the pattern we exist to oppose, and adopting their vocabulary hands them a rhetorical weapon while pointing toward methods that would damage the institutions that need rebuilding. Accountability through constitutional mechanisms means impeachment, court expansion, jurisdiction limits, term limits, and confirmation reform, applied through recorded votes by elected officials who answer for those votes. A judiciary drawn from a wider pool than one organization’s membership rolls requires none of the vocabulary of purges, and refusing that vocabulary leaves the argument stronger rather than weaker.

Refusing the vocabulary of purges does not mean refusing plain conclusions. In September 2025 the president signed an executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization, a label applied to a decentralized movement with no membership list and no formal structure, under a designation authority that exists in no statute. The standard argued here does the opposite: it names an organization with a public membership, a written doctrine, a documented selection function, and specific rulings, and it states a test that can be checked and can be failed. So the conclusion belongs in plain words. The Federalist Society functions as the selection and installation mechanism for a constitution the United States never ratified. Commitment to that project violates the judicial oath. A judge who joined and has not repudiated it fails the good behavior standard of Article III and should be impeached, tried, and removed. Each clause of that statement rests on the record above, and each clause is open to disproof.

The framers wrote Article II to prevent a king. They wrote impeachment into the same document because they knew officials, including judges, might one day work to install one anyway. An important question for your consideration, one that may matter more than the question in the title. Can our country ever move toward a non-corrupt, accountable, modern democracy, one that serves the people rather than religious zealots and oligarchs, while Federalist Society members are poisoning the judiciary?

Now is the time to act. We are the movement. That movement makes the heat. That heat makes the change.

If you want to know more about how to be an effective activist, you might be interested in the booklet “Grab Them By The EARR: How to get politicians to do what you want.” It’s one of our most frequently read resources because when you’re feeling powerless, it gives you the proven knowledge and tools for influencing the world towards justice, whether as an individual or as part of a group. If you’ve read the booklet or received the training feel free to comment with your thoughts on it!

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

At the bottom of this article you’ll find links to Existentialist Republic training and educational resources, with a free version of everything available in the Buy Me A Coffee shop listed for $0.00.

Just so you know, we need 10 people to become subscribers every article to keep this publication running.

Tens of thousands participate in the daily calls to action we share.

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THE CALL TO ACTION

Category: judicial accountability.

Difficulty Rating: 2/10 to 3/10 depending on the option. Option 1 takes five minutes. Option 4 takes a printer, an envelope, and a stamp. If none of them fit today, that is fine.

Who you are contacting:

• Your U.S. House member and your two U.S. Senators. Find all three at congress.gov.

• Your state representative and state senator. Find them at openstates.org. State legislatures elect judges outright in Virginia and South Carolina, state senates confirm the governor’s judicial appointees in a number of states, and Article VI binds state judges to the federal Constitution by the same oath, so the standard applies wherever your state gives your legislators a role in selecting judges.

What you are asking for: affirmative, on-the-record support for the impeachment and removal of judges committed to unitary executive theory or the Federalist Society who have not publicly repudiated both, starting with the six justices in the Trump v. United States majority. State plainly that a form letter or a non-answer will be treated for what it is, a lack of courage in a moment that demands as much.

Five ways to deliver. Pick as many or as few as you are comfortable with.

1. Email. Paste the script below into the office contact form. Include your name and street address so you are logged as a constituent.

2. Call. Read the script to the staffer who answers, or just the three questions. Offices tally calls by issue.

3. Fax. FaxZero sends up to five free faxes a day to House and Senate offices from your browser, no signup required. Paste the script into the cover page text box, attach the first pages of this article as a PDF, and click the confirmation link FaxZero emails you. The free tier caps pages per fax, so the full article travels by option 4.

4. Print and mail. Print this article, write your name, your street address, and the sentence “I am asking for your affirmative support for the impeachment standard in this article, on the record” on the first page, and mail it to the district office or the capitol office. A printed article arrives on a desk instead of in a queue.

5. Email to your local Democrats/Indivisible or other group and ask them to share this article with their members to consider a group endorsement.

The script, for email, phone, or fax:

“I am a constituent asking for your affirmative position, on the record, on three questions.

First, will you support articles of impeachment against, and the removal of, the six justices in the Trump v. United States majority? Their ruling granted the president criminal immunity that appears nowhere in the Constitution. On June 29 the same majority overruled Humphrey’s Executor, a ninety-year-old precedent protecting independent agencies, completing a series of rulings installing unitary executive theory, a doctrine invented in the 1980s.

Second, do you agree that Federalist Society membership or endorsement of unitary executive theory, without public repudiation, violates the judicial oath to administer justice without respect to persons and fails the good behavior standard of Article III? The organization’s leadership built the candidate lists from which three of the six were chosen, and 86 percent of the first Trump administration’s Supreme Court and appellate nominees were or had been members.

Third, will you publicly support refusing Senate confirmation to any future judicial nominee committed to either who has not publicly repudiated that commitment?

I am asking for affirmative answers to all three, on the record. A form letter or a non-answer will be treated for what it is, a lack of courage in a moment that demands as much.”

If you are writing to a state legislator, add this line to the script: “Where your chamber elects, confirms, or screens judges, will you apply this same standard to state judicial selection, and will you press our federal delegation to act on it in Washington D.C.?”

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Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

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Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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ICE agents charged in Minneapolis, a bipartisan election bribery referral in Wisconsin, universal child care in New Mexico, a ballot seizure felony in California, city-owned groceries in New York, Hawaii ending corporate election spending, 75 data center projects blocked in a single quarter, and citizen grand jury statutes verified in six states. The wins are accumulating.

The news supplies reasons for pessimism on a daily schedule. What follows is a list of reasons for optimism, each one something I have directly observed or can date and source.

1. As I travel the country, I meet county Democratic chapters, state Democratic chairs, Indivisible chapters, and other activist organizations adopting the strategies and tactics we promote at The Existentialist Republic. These are organized groups with budgets, meeting schedules, and election plans, and the methods are being both enthusiastically promoted and adopted.

2. Tens of thousands of activists have joined our daily calls to action, from the state prosecution campaigns to the six-state grand jury petitions.

3. Nationwide we are seeing state representatives and city council members contacting The Existentialist Republic to understand our model legislation, some to bring it up for votes in upcoming sessions and some to implement it at the city or state level.

4. Legal theories we published are appearing in filed cases. In January we argued that states can charge ICE agents under state criminal law. In April and May, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged two ICE agents with assault under Minnesota law. On July 9, the Wisconsin Elections Commission, a body of three Democratic and three Republican appointees, voted 5 to 1 to refer two complaints to the Brown County district attorney after finding probable cause that Elon Musk violated the state election bribery statute. On July 14, Mahmoud Khalil filed a lawsuit under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 naming senior presidential adviser Stephen Miller and other officials. The dates are listed in order, without a claim that the articles caused the filings. The short interval between publication and prosecution on the same theory is itself the reason for optimism.

5. Laws in accordance with the Oppositonal Federalism/Soft Secession framework have been promoting with increasing volume, such as those that use felony penalties and appropriations to defend elections or better the lives of residents, they are now passing at the state and city level. California made it a felony to seize ballots from county election officials, a law Governor Newsom signed on May 27 after the Riverside County sheriff seized more than 600,000 cast ballots, and it took effect immediately, before the June 2 primary. New Mexico became the first state to guarantee no-cost universal child care, launched November 1 and signed into statute in March, with about 30,000 families and 44,000 children on track for free care this year and average savings near 12,000 dollars per child per year. New York City committed 70 million dollars to open a city-owned grocery store in each borough, the first expected in late 2027, in a city where grocery prices rose nearly 66 percent over the past decade.

6. States are rewriting their own antitrust law instead of waiting for federal enforcers. In February, California Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry introduced the COMPETE Act, which would let the state prosecute monopoly conduct by a single firm. The Cartwright Act cannot currently reach that conduct because it requires an agreement between two or more companies, and California is the largest state economy in the United States. New York’s Twenty-First Century Antitrust Act, which would create the first abuse of dominance standard in the country, has passed the state Senate more than once and is pending in the Assembly, and Massachusetts has companion bills adopting the same standard. A tech industry trade group opposing these bills commissioned research covering seven states that have considered them, a count of the idea’s reach supplied by the opposition itself.

7. The campaigns are locating usable legal mechanisms. For six months our DOGE campaign has asked county prosecutors and attorneys general in all fifty states to investigate the former DOGE employees who mishandled the Social Security records of hundreds of millions of Americans, conduct the federal government has admitted in a court filing. That process also involved ER activists filing local police reports over DOGE conduct. While researching that campaign, we found that six states, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, allow residents to convene a criminal grand jury by petition, and we verified the requirements by statute in all six. No prosecutor has to agree. Volunteers showed up to run petition intake, and the path from signature sheet to a state indictment, which no presidential pardon can reach, is written in statute. We will be there with those activists every step of the way, as an organization and as a larger community of activists.

8. Researchers and institutions with policy influence are citing the frameworks. Brookings cited the soft secession framework in its analysis of state and federal conflict, national outlets covered the work, and the papers are posted on SSRN, where attorneys, academics, and policymakers download them. The readership for these ideas now includes people whose work legislators and courts read.

9. Communities keep blocking data centers, and the opposition crosses party lines. At least 75 projects worth roughly 130 billion dollars were stalled or blocked in the first three months of 2026, and more than 800 local groups across 49 states are organized against roughly 1,500 planned facilities. In June, voters in Monterey Park, California approved a ballot measure permanently banning data centers. New York’s legislature passed a one year moratorium on large-scale data centers, the first of its kind, and protesters in St. Paul rallied at the Minnesota capitol for a two year state moratorium. In Box Elder County, Utah, where Trump won nearly 80 percent of the vote, rural conservative voters are fighting a 40,000-acre project backed by Kevin O’Leary, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott urged his legislature to regulate the industry. An investor newsletter that tracks moratoriums as a business risk reports that Kansas and Indiana, both Republican-leaning, host the most active ones. Gallup finds 70 percent of Americans oppose building them locally, 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans, and a Yale survey found conservative Republicans oppose them at higher rates than moderate Republicans. Large majorities in both parties want the same outcome here. When elected officials approve the projects anyway, campaign money is part of the explanation, and the public already believes that about money in politics: in a national YouGov survey, 79 percent of respondents, including 74 percent of Republicans and 84 percent of Democrats, agreed that large independent spending by wealthy donors and corporations produces corruption or the appearance of it.

10. That agreement is already winning votes. On May 14, Hawaii Governor Josh Green signed a law providing that the state no longer grants corporations, LLCs, partnerships, and other artificial persons the power to spend money on candidates or ballot measures. It passed the Senate unanimously and the House with 41 Democrats and nine Republicans in favor and one vote against, and lawmakers credited Indivisible Hawaii, now nine chapters statewide, for helping pass it. Montana is taking the same approach directly to voters as the Montana Plan, Ballot Issue 10, after the state Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the pre-election challenge in April. Signature gathering for the November ballot is underway, and public backers include Marc Racicot, a former Republican governor of Montana and former chair of the Republican National Committee. Legislators in 14 other states introduced similar bills in 2026, six in Democratic trifectas, four in Republican trifectas, and four under divided government.

There is a lot of work to be done and the future is never guaranteed. Still, what do you do when there’s fascism in your town? You show up for your community and go on the offensive for democracy, humanity, and justice.

Thanks for showing up, folks.

See you in the streets.

• Chris

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THE CALL TO ACTION

Category: campaign finance reform.

Difficulty Rating: 7/10. It can be stressful reaching out to an organization and following this sort of CTA that can involve educating others and advocating for ideas. It’s ok if this isn’t the action for you. Maybe in the future, maybe never, but at least give it a look and who knows if you might know someone who is up for the task.

Who you are contacting and how: your county Democratic Party chapter, your local Indivisible chapter, or any organized group you belong to, by email to the chair or in person during the new business portion of the next meeting.

What you are asking for: three commitments, each by recorded vote. First, endorse the Montana Plan as an organization and call on your state legislature to bring it up for a vote. Second, announce the endorsement to the full membership. Third, make vocal support for passing it in your state a standing requirement for every candidate and officeholder the organization endorses, now and in the future.

A script you can read at the meeting or paste into an email:

“I am asking [organization name] to make three commitments by recorded vote.

First, endorse the Montana Plan as an organization and call on our state legislature to bring it up for a vote.

The Montana Plan ends corporate spending on candidates and ballot measures by no longer granting corporations the power to spend. Hawaii signed the same approach into law in May with near-unanimous bipartisan support, legislators in 14 other states introduced versions this year, and national polling shows 74 percent of Republicans and 84 percent of Democrats agree that this kind of spending produces corruption or the appearance of it, so the endorsement matches what our members already believe.

Second, announce the endorsement to our full membership.

Third, make vocal support for passing it in our state a standing requirement for every candidate and officeholder this organization endorses, now and in the future, with support voiced at the state level by those who serve there and voiced from federal or statewide office for our state adopting it. The plan is laid out at montanaplan.org. I move that we vote on this today or place it on the agenda for the next meeting.”

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More reading

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Activism Journal

More Free Downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

Bumper Stickers

Author’s note: The academic paper formalizing this publication’s work on state constitutional power, Oppositional Federalism: A Taxonomy of State Constitutional Postures Under Authoritarian Capture, revised July 2026, is free to download on SSRN and under submission at Harvard Law Review. Every download moves the paper up the rankings that legislators, journalists, and state attorneys general use to find new research, and each one supports the work.

Does Donald Trump have about the same poll numbers he has always had? Every major pollster has a current answer. As of mid-July 2026, Quinnipiac has him at 39 percent approval, the Economist and YouGov at 37, ABC News, the Washington Post, and Ipsos at 37, CNN at 36, the RealClearPolitics average at 41, and the Ballotpedia average at 43. The FiftyPlusOne average, which weights every major pollster by quality and recency, reads 37 approve and 59 disapprove, and Nate Silver’s average puts his net approval higher than at any point since mid-April. Gallup has never recorded him above 49 percent in nine years, and no major pollster records him below the mid thirties.

The same clear majority still disapproves, yet between 30 and 40 percent of the country approves of all of it, a share that did not shrink during two impeachments, thirty-four felony convictions, a war, a coup attempt, and everything else. Tens of millions watch all of it and cheer. The fifth path we mapped in May, where things simply work themselves out, requires that support number to collapse. Every pollster on that list shows it not collapsing, which is why we called that path a fantasy.

Is the elected party any closer to leaving him than the voters are? Thomas Massie opposed the Iran strikes and forced the release of the Epstein files, and a Trump-endorsed challenger ended his political career in the May primary. Bill Cassidy voted to convict at the 2021 impeachment trial, and his Louisiana primary ended the same week, the same way. Every Republican still in office watched both races, which is why criticism now takes the form of concern on camera and compliance in the vote. And the reports that institutions are fighting back? They describe something real and small: the same Court that told the administration no on one Guard deployment stripped what remained of the Voting Rights Act in the same term. The headline is occasional. The approval is routine. Waiting for either group to remove him means waiting for people who have already answered.

Do the state governments that base elects still treat elections as binding? In May, we published the state felony case against Elon Musk, and readers in Wisconsin sent hundreds of emails and calls asking the state elections commission to act. On July 9, that bipartisan commission voted five to one that probable cause exists to believe Musk committed felony election bribery with million-dollar checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court race. Mid-decade gerrymanders, voter roll purges, and paid inducements to vote are on the public record, and a governing class willing to use them has announced through conduct that it will lie, cheat, and steal to keep power. Good faith requires reciprocity. Agreements with officials who do not extend it bind one side only, the position of any party whose counterparty does not intend to perform. The structure depends on state capacity, state law, and state courts rather than on anyone’s word.

What about the people inside those states? They are a separate subject from the governments that rule them, and the framework abandons nobody. When questions go to voters directly, those electorates keep choosing what their governments block: Kansas kept abortion rights in its constitution by eighteen points in 2022, six red states expanded Medicaid by ballot initiative over their legislatures, and Missouri passed paid sick leave with nearly 58 percent in 2024 before its legislature repealed it the following spring. Several of these states would plausibly elect different governments under free and fair elections, funded public education, and a legal system that prosecuted fraud on voters the way it prosecutes fraud on investors. Deceiving shareholders carries prison time; deceiving voters remains legal and profitable. Soft secession targets captured governments, protects the people they harm wherever state power reaches, and keeps reentry available for any state that restores free elections.

And the elections that could change any of this? Three facts from July: The administration will not sign other legislation until Congress passes its election bill, the July 16 primetime address was devoted to election integrity, and Trump’s press secretary, asked whether he will accept November’s results, did not answer. The familiar legal reply, that election dates belong to Congress and the country voted on schedule through the Civil War and the Second World War, is accurate and incomplete. Written law constrains a government that accepts constraint, and the record since January 2025 of federalized Guard deployments, immigration raids conducted over state objections, and prosecutions of officials for doing their jobs shows one that acts first and litigates afterward.

Is the federal government still protecting those elections? It ended funding for the multistate system that alerts election officials to security threats and halted CISA’s election support. It has cut thousands of election-focused federal workers. The Justice Department demanded every ballot from Michigan’s largest county from the 2024 election, a demand the state called unlawful, and the administration’s 2027 budget proposal eliminates the federal election security program entirely, which defunds it for the year after the midterms. The interest in foreign help is on the record in his own words: “Russia, if you’re listening,” he said in July 2016, asking Russia to find his opponent’s missing emails, and United States intelligence agencies later determined Russia did exactly that. In October 2019 he told reporters outside the White House that China should investigate the Bidens. The July 16 declassification presented foreign interference as the threat. The system that watched for it is the one his administration defunded.

So the operative question for anything he attempts is who complies. If an order to delay, suspend, or federally supervise a vote ever comes, nothing happens on its own. American elections run through state governments and thousands of county and municipal offices: clerks print ballots, secretaries of state certify, governors sign, and federal agencies have almost no role in that sequence. In Republican trifectas whose officials already comply with instructions that lack legal basis, parts of an attempt could take effect. In states that refuse, none of it has to. The condition of states diverging that far inside one federal system is the collapse of a nation and it could be just a few months away.

In August 2025, The Existentialist Republic published a viral article on soft secession, the term we outlined as states that reduce cooperation with a lawless federal government and build parallel institutional and financial capacity so the people inside them can function and thrive anyway. The idea developed into a formal academic framework naming five tiers of state posture, from ordinary cooperation through uncooperative federalism, soft secession, and oppositional federalism to constitutional non-compliance, each grounded in two and a half centuries of Supreme Court doctrine. Brookings called the framework provocative.

What is the whole structure for? Harm reduction is a public health term: policies that reduce the damage of an ongoing harm without requiring the harm to end first. Naloxone reduces overdose deaths among people still using; needle exchanges reduce disease transmission among people still injecting.

Soft secession performs the same function for governance. It reduces the damage a captured federal government can inflict on people inside opposition states, without waiting for the federal government to be repaired and without ending the union. A state that builds its own pharmaceutical purchasing protects patients now. A state that prosecutes federal officers who commit assaults and homicides under state law protects communities now. Interstate compacts on healthcare, climate, labor, and reproductive care protect people across state lines now. What reads as legal impossibility is usually political choice.

Reversibility separates harm reduction from rupture. The structure runs on ordinary legislation, executive orders, and prosecutorial decisions, so each piece reverses the same way: an ended data-sharing agreement restarts with a signature. Hard secession forecloses return and raises the question of armed conflict on the day it is declared. Soft secession is a posture a state can maintain for a decade and reverse in a single legislative session.

Where this leads depends on which of three endings occurs: the federal center recovers and the states reintegrate, the states renegotiate into something looser that provides peace and a shared market, or the center collapses and the states separate in an uncontrolled way. Soft secession is built for the first two and lowers the human cost of the third. If the pushback works, we restore the union we have. If it fails, the architecture for what comes next already exists.

The renegotiation ending already exists in working form. The European Union runs a shared market of twenty-seven sovereign countries and roughly 450 million people, whose members keep their own criminal law, police, and constitutions, with no central executive able to send armed personnel into a member state against its will. The fourth path we mapped in May looked like this: the Pacific states coordinate on climate and labor, New England pools healthcare, the Great Lakes states negotiate water as a bloc, and eventually somebody calls a constitutional convention and we write down what we have already become. Roughly two hundred interstate compacts already function as treaties between states in everything but name. The European ending, if the American one fails, requires deliberate construction and negotiated terms. The Soviet ending requires nothing at all. Drift gets us there as surely as malice does.

When did the Soviet Union actually collapse? It survived Stalin and survived Brezhnev. It dissolved under Mikhail Gorbachev, a reformer who took office in 1985 to save the system and presided over its collapse, because the pressures pushing the republics apart had built for decades and his reforms removed the coercion containing them. Tocqueville described the pattern in 1856: the most dangerous period for a bad government usually begins when it starts to reform itself.

Applied here, a period of severe structural danger may come after this administration rather than during it. A successor who loosens control inherits the powers this White House acquired, and loosening reveals what besides force kept it intact. Whoever comes next ratifies the acquisitions of this era whether they exercise them or not. The transition is the fragile phase, and preparing for it is what state capacity building is for.

What decided the post-Soviet outcomes? Preparation. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had organized popular fronts, functioning civic institutions, and living memory of independent statehood when the collapse came, and became democracies and, by 2004, European Union members. Regions without those institutions got the Nagorno-Karabakh war and a civil war in Tajikistan that killed tens of thousands. Czechoslovakia demonstrates the alternative: a negotiated separation, completed January 1, 1993, that produced no armed conflict and two European Union members. Grievance existed in all of these cases; functioning institutions beneath the failing center existed only in some, and the difference shows in the death tolls.

American states differ from Soviet republics in almost every particular, and the comparison makes one point: when a center weakens, through collapse or through reform, outcomes for ordinary people depend on how much working governance exists underneath. Built early, that governance protects people through the authoritarian period. Present at the transition, it makes a Czechoslovak ending more likely than a Soviet one, and keeps possible the outcome neither managed: a recovered federation states rejoin because it serves their people.

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The framework mentioned above has a primer for the general public: Intro to Soft Secession, a booklet that is a 25 to 30 minute read. Readers have purchased physical copies and handed them to everyone at their Indivisible meeting, or to every house on their block. The PDF is a $0.00 download, and you can print as many as you want, with a different cover that says Strong States or Oppositional Federalism if soft secession is a bit much for where it is going. The idea inside is simple, and it fits the “coup where you can” mindset: take power at the lowest level available, expand it to do as much good as possible, and keep climbing, democracy on the offensive.

Click this sentence to purchase a physical copy of Intro to Soft Secession

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Activist Call To Action

California made seizing ballots a felony. The Existentialist Republic published a model bill that takes what California did and multiplies it by ten, for all 50 states including California, at cmarmitage.substack.com/p/california-is-making-ballot-seizure. If you already called or emailed when that article ran, use a different method this time: fax it to every state legislative office in your state. A fax gets attention because it prints on paper inside the office and somebody has to pick it up. Faxzero.com sends five free faxes a day with no account, and its paid option, a few dollars per fax, sends up to 25 pages, enough for the entire bill to print page by page. Fax numbers are on each member’s official page, and your own legislators are at openstates.org/find_your_legislator. Send this with it:

To the office of [legislator name]: I am a constituent at the address below. I am asking you to introduce the Election Protection and Accountability Act, the model election protection bill published by The Existentialist Republic at cmarmitage.substack.com/p/california-is-making-ballot-seizure, and to request a special session if our legislature has adjourned. Please reply with your position. [Name, street address, city]

The Existentialist Republic Library

By clicking this sentence you can buy a physical copy of my newest book “The American Reformation: How States Can Use The Constitution to Break Authoritarian Capture”

You can get a free PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.

More reading

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Activism Journal

More Free Downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

Bumper Stickers

One office investigates each use of deadly force by law enforcement in Maine, and the same office decides homicide charges: the Attorney General’s. Its findings on the July 13 killing in Biddeford are due by January 9, 2027. A civilian who fired the same shots could expect handcuffs the same morning, not a six month deadline for a report.

WGME reported that since the office began these investigations in 1990, it has not determined that an officer’s use of deadly force was unjustified. Not once.

Maine’s Legislature elects the Attorney General. The Legislature chosen this November votes on that office on December 2, five weeks before those findings are due.

A federal immigration agent fired multiple rounds into a sedan at a Biddeford intersection on the morning of July 13, killing Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26 year old delivery driver who, per Senator Angus King and Representative Chellie Pingree, was not the target of the warrant the agents were executing. A photograph of the car shows four bullet defects in the windshield. The agents wore no body cameras, and the Attorney General’s Office confirmed that no body or dash camera footage depicts the use of force. ICE stated that the agent fired “fearing for public safety” as the vehicle attempted to flee, and a witness with a direct view reported hearing the driver say “I tried to stop.”

I sent the letter below to Attorney General Aaron Frey. It asks for two commitments rather than a conclusion, with a written answer requested by September 1, and I will publish whatever the office says, in full. The classification rule is stated now, in advance: yes counts as yes. “We follow the facts,” “we cannot comment on a pending investigation,” and “we take this seriously” count as no answer, and I will report them as no answer.

Instructions for putting the same question to your own attorney general, before your state needs them, are at the end.

The letter, in full:

July 16, 2026

Hon. Aaron M. Frey Attorney General, State of Maine 6 State House Station Augusta, ME 04333

Re: The July 13, 2026 use of deadly force in Biddeford resulting in the death of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero; request for two public commitments

Dear Attorney General Frey,

I write as a journalist and publisher. I am the founder of The Existentialist Republic, a civic affairs publication. I am writing about the killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on July 13, 2026, at the intersection of Pool Street and Hill Street in Biddeford. I am aware that your office opened its investigation that day under 5 M.R.S. section 200-A, that the FBI is assisting, and that findings are due within 180 days under 5 M.R.S. section 200-K, with any extension capped at 270 days. I do not ask the office to prejudge the evidence, and I do not ask about the agent’s identity, which the office can establish through its own process.

I ask the office to state two things publicly.

First, that the office will apply the same deadly force standard to this federal agent that it applies to a Biddeford police officer or a Maine State Police trooper: the justification provisions of 17-A M.R.S. sections 107 and 108, the constitutional requirements of Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Connor, and the totality of the circumstances analysis required by Barnes v. Felix.

Second, that if the completed investigation establishes probable cause under Maine law, the office will present the case to the York County grand jury.

I make the second request because the public record already raises a serious question under 17-A M.R.S. section 203(1)(A), which applies when a person recklessly, or with criminal negligence, causes the death of another human being. Published reporting describes four bullet defects in the sedan’s windshield, an absence of body or dash camera footage of the use of force, conflicting accounts of whether the shots preceded or followed the ramming of the vehicle, a Department of Homeland Security use of force policy that generally prohibits firing at moving vehicles, and statements by members of Maine’s congressional delegation that the driver was not the target of the operation. Whether the completed record establishes probable cause is for the office to determine. Whether established probable cause will be presented to a grand jury is a question of the office’s intentions, and it can be answered now.

I am aware that a charged federal agent may transfer a state prosecution to federal court and assert immunity there. Under Mesa v. California, that transfer changes the forum; the office remains the prosecutor and Maine law continues to govern. I raise this only to make clear that the answer to my second request is not controlled by federal officials.

I also ask the office to confirm that third party video from residential and commercial cameras near the intersection has been collected or preserved, since consumer camera systems overwrite stored footage on short cycles.

I request a written response by September 1, 2026. I am publishing this letter, and I am inviting readers, including Maine residents, to put the same questions to the office and to their own legislators in their own words. I will publish the office’s response in full.

Respectfully,

Christopher Armitage

Founder and Publisher, The Existentialist Republic

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If you live in Maine, call the Attorney General’s Office at 207-626-8800, or write to 6 State House Station, Augusta, ME 04333. Then tell your state representative and state senator to ask the same question. They elect the Attorney General on December 2. Find them at legislature.maine.gov.

To replicate this in your own state: find who charges homicide where you live, which in most states is the elected county or district prosecutor, and in a few states, Maine among them, a statewide office. Send the question in writing to that office and to your state attorney general, whom you can find at naag.org: if a federal agent uses deadly force here and the completed investigation establishes probable cause of a state crime, will your office charge the agent the way it would charge anyone else? State the classification rule in the same message, so a non answer counts as an answer. If any official tells you federal agents are immune from state charges, that claim has been false since 1932, when the Supreme Court wrote in Colorado v. Symes that federal officers and employees are “not, merely because they are such, granted immunity from prosecution in state courts.” In May, Hennepin County filed state criminal charges against an ICE agent in Minnesota. In January, ten locally elected prosecutors formed the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach to support exactly these prosecutions. The Department of Homeland Security’s own policy generally prohibits firing at moving vehicles in your state the same as in Maine. And a president cannot pardon a state conviction.

Wherever you live, reply to this email or leave a comment with the answer you receive, the date, and the words the office used. I will report back on what offices say and on what they refuse to say.

The call takes thirty seconds: “My name is [name], I live in [town]. I am calling about the July 13 shooting in Biddeford. I am not asking the office to prejudge anything. I have a question that takes a yes or a no. If the completed investigation establishes probable cause under Maine law, will the office present the case to the York County grand jury? Please record my call and the answer.”

The Existentialist Republic Library

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More reading

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Activism Journal

More Free Downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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This essay covers information from my collaboration with retired clinical psychologist D. Carl Brown, PhD, in our book Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder, available by clicking on this text.

For readers interested in how oligarchic power structures work in practice, I highly recommend my mother’s Substack, W. Lawrence’s Glass Empires.

For just under a year, I was a corrections officer. I had been Air Force military police for nearly a decade, and I knew this would be a job with good benefits and competitive pay. I didn’t even make it a year before I left. The experience was changing me in ways I found painful. My sense of humor disappeared. I became far more guarded. On a daily basis you would meet people who had committed the kind of acts that change you simply by learning such things occur at all, and then the person convicted of committing them would ask you for their mail. The experience changes you, and I knew those changes were not acceptable to me.

Keep that timeline in mind as you read: less than a year in that environment was enough to measurably change a person with almost ten years of military police experience. Thankfully, I eventually saw “me” return. It took about the same amount of time as I had spent working inside the facility. That experience, along with what I learned from the Black Lives Matter movement, is a large part of how I ended up doing the work I do now. The movement taught me to ask who actually ends up inside these buildings and why, and the prison answered that question every day I worked there. What follows is what I learned from that year and how it relates to MAGA, empathy, and America.

Every morning at the prison where I worked, I’d pass through the same ritual. Badge in. Keys collected. Radio check. Then the walk through the sally port into a world where empathy was a liability and cruelty as much of a currency as ramen. What I didn’t expect was how much that world would teach me about the one outside the wire, about the officers who guarded, the politicians who governed, and the invisible psychological threads connecting them all.

The dayroom was where you could see it most clearly. Inmates would cluster around the television, not for sports or soap operas, but for politics. The people in that dayroom belonged to a population where, according to a comprehensive Lancet review by Fazel and Danesh (2002), 65% of male prisoners meet criteria for a personality disorder, including 47% with antisocial personality disorder. They watched Fox News with religious devotion, cheering for Trump like he was their personal champion. “No bullshit from him,” the inmates would say. “He’s gonna take care of everything.”

But a statistic is not a roster, and the range of people inside that building was wider than any statistic suggests. There were people who had done things I will not describe. There were people who had brutally assaulted corrections officers. There were people warehoused there because the country closed its psychiatric hospitals and built prisons in their place, people whose crimes were rooted in addiction, people with developmental disabilities, and, statistically, some people who did nothing at all. Some belonged in a healthcare facility and would never see one. And there was an operational fact that shaped everything else in this essay: standing in the dayroom, you could not tell who was who.

In my observation, the sex offenders seemed to express the most frequent adoration and fealty for Trump.

They had violated the most fundamental boundaries of human empathy, and they appeared to find something familiar in a politician who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” who had been found liable for sexual abuse in the E. Jean Carroll case, who treated women’s bodies as territory to be conquered. They would gather closest to the TV when he spoke, nodding along when he denied accusations, claimed victimhood, attacked his accusers. The people convicted of predatory crimes identified with rhetoric that mirrored their own rationalizations.

Then I started paying attention to my fellow officers’ conversations. The subjects of discussion were often eerily similar.

The break room had its own speech rules. Conservative officers announced their politics daily and loudly, with no apparent thought that anyone might disagree. The rest of us kept our mouths shut until we sussed out who was in our lane. I privately thought of that second group as the “low-key lefties.” There were not many of us, and some had come to the job from social work. For months I believed my coworkers were almost universally conservative. I was wrong, in an instructive way: the visible politics of the facility was universally conservative, because only one kind of politics could be said out loud there. The environment shaped more than conduct: it decided which beliefs could be spoken, and the beliefs it permitted were the ones that matched how the place already ran.

The daily subjects rarely varied: their love of Donald Trump, the evils of socialism, the evil ex-wives, the adult children who no longer called. They lamented, often, that the days were gone when an officer could settle things with an inmate with his fists and face no consequences. And trans people. Not a day passed without a long transphobic rant, though trans people were maybe one percent of the incarcerated population, and the officers doing the ranting could go weeks without interacting with one. The centerpiece was a claim repeated as established fact and never once sourced: that the state was spending millions of dollars per trans inmate on gender reassignment healthcare. Years later, records requests filed by hostile conservative media put a real number on it: through mid-2024, Washington’s prison system had spent $592,577.67 total on gender-affirming healthcare, across 44 incarcerated people. That works out to roughly $13,000 per person, around one percent of the break room’s per-person claim, and the sourcing matters: even the outlets working hardest to inflame the issue could not document anything close to the figure repeated daily in that room. I later recognized the same ratio on cable news: a group that is roughly one percent of the country, discussed nightly at a frequency that suggested it was half.

All of this while collecting union-negotiated state employee salaries in a blue state. Our compensation packages dwarfed what our counterparts made in red states. In Washington, correctional officers average around $45 an hour according to state data, while in states like Texas or Florida, the low-tax havens they praised, the same job pays roughly half that.

Politics and conduct were separate questions. Not every conservative officer was cruel to the people inside; I worked with conservatives who treated the incarcerated fairly the entire time I knew them. But none of the officers I knew to be left-leaning were ever cruel or unfair to an inmate, and the “low-key lefties” shared a habit I rarely heard from the loud conservatives: they were willing to say the words “maybe I’m wrong.” The honest limit on that observation is that the group was small, and I could only know the politics of officers who chose to reveal them. I never learned what kept the decent conservatives decent. I know what kept the lefties fair, because I watched it: the habit of doubting yourself out loud.

Many officers I worked with seemed to have troubled family lives, a pattern that aligns with research showing law enforcement faces domestic violence rates as high as 40% in some studies (Johnson, 1991), compared to 10% in the general population. One colleague, going through his third divorce, once told me that “kindness gets you killed in here,” meaning the prison. But I knew he lived by that rule everywhere: at home, at the ballot box, in every human interaction reduced to a zero-sum game of dominance and submission.

I began to see a pattern that my psychology training wouldn’t let me ignore. The same personality traits that concentrated behind bars, what psychologists call the “dark triad” of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, were appearing throughout our political system. The empathy deficits that defined prison life weren’t confined to cellblocks. They were running for office, hosting talk shows, and writing legislation.

Hard neuroscience backs this up. When researchers at Aalto University in Finland (Zebarjadi et al., 2023) put conservatives and liberals in magnetoencephalography scanners while asking them to imagine others’ suffering, they found something striking: conservative brains literally showed less activation in empathy-related regions, specifically the temporal-parietal junction. The difference was visible on the scans, liberal brains showing significantly stronger neural responses to others’ pain, while conservative brains remained comparatively muted.

The effect intensified with political extremity. The study of 55 participants found that the more someone endorsed right-wing authoritarian values, the weaker their neural empathy response.

The personality psychology tells the same story. A comprehensive review by Stephen Morris (2020) in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology found that empathy has become “a hallmark of the political left,” with trait empathy scores consistently predicting liberal attitudes across dozens of studies. The Pew Research Center’s 2014 data is particularly telling: 86% of consistently liberal parents say teaching empathy is “especially important” for children, compared to just 55% of consistently conservative parents, a 31-point gap in valuing compassion itself.

Research by Costello et al. (2022) found left-wing authoritarianism exists, but even militant leftists typically fight for strangers they’ll never meet, while right-wing extremists I encountered kept their circle tight: family, race, nation. That circle is measurable. Waytz and colleagues (2019) documented ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle across seven studies: conservatives concentrate moral concern on family and nation, while liberals extend it outward toward strangers and the world. The Costello study also found that left-wing authoritarians scored lower on dogmatism and cognitive rigidity than their right-wing counterparts, which matched what I had watched in the break room.

One caution about all of this research, from someone who lived inside its subject matter: scans and surveys describe where people are. My year behind the wire showed me how quickly where people are can change, in both directions.

When a retired cop, now on his second career as a corrections officer, told me he “would go to D.C. and die for Trump,” I had to believe him.

States with abortion bans have maternal mortality rates 62% higher than states protecting reproductive rights, and the gap did not stay theoretical after the bans took effect. ProPublica’s analysis of Texas hospital data found that after the state banned abortion in 2021, the sepsis rate for women hospitalized during second-trimester pregnancy loss rose by more than 50%, and maternal deaths rose in Texas while they dropped nationally. Women are dying from policies enacted by legislators who lack empathy for strangers.

The same deficit explains welfare attitudes. In two survey experiments, Feldman and Huddy (2020) found that the capacity for empathy strongly increased support for a welfare recipient and for social welfare policies, but only when that support did not conflict with a belief in individualism. When the two values conflicted, individualism overrode the empathic response, and it overrode it most among the strongest conservatives. A person can feel for the recipient at a church soup kitchen and feel nothing for the same person on food stamps.

What troubles me most, looking back, is how these traits spread. In prison, new officers would often arrive with normal empathy levels. Within months, they’d adopt the callousness that seemed necessary to survive. Here is why, and it is fairer to the officers than it sounds. The files told you which person on the tier had done what. The dayroom did not. The danger was real and concentrated, manipulation of officers was commonplace, empathy gave a skilled manipulator something to use, and an officer who guessed wrong about the person in front of them could be maimed. So the rational default was to treat every person on the tier as the most dangerous one. Universal suspicion became policy, and universal suspicion kills empathy by procedure rather than by character. Nobody had to be a bad person for the empathy to die; the procedure was enough.

The oldest guards showed the end state. In my observation they behaved nearly indistinguishably from the cruelest of the people they supervised, and I am certain that if their roles had been reversed, each would have been exactly like the other.

Here is the observation from that year I have thought about longest, offered as nothing more than what I saw. Of the trans people incarcerated there, most, perhaps two of every three, had a history I could not have guessed from meeting them: they had been white supremacist gang members, and often particularly aggressive, particularly openly racist ones. By the time I knew them, nothing in how they carried themselves would have told you that. I have no standing to tell anyone’s inner story, so I will only report the outward facts. The gang identity was gone, and the exit had a real cost, because a white supremacist gang does not keep a member who comes out as trans, and losing your gang in prison means losing your protection. The identity they had left was the hateful one. The people the break room ranted about every day were, right in front of us, proof that even a violent, hateful identity can end.

And then there was me. Part of why I left was that I saw my own personality shifting in ways I didn’t like. The suspicion the job required did not shut off when I went home after shift. I had seen the end state in the oldest guards, and I did not want to reach it.

I see the same selection pressure in politics. The conservative media ecosystem rewards cruelty. Social media algorithms amplify hostility toward out-groups, a pattern Facebook’s own internal researchers documented when they found the platform’s engagement algorithm rewarding outrage, while right-wing audiences form intense parasocial bonds with hosts who model callousness. When Tucker Carlson, who once mocked dying AIDS patients, becomes a trusted “friend” to millions, his cruelty becomes contagious.

The parallel to the prison goes deeper than tone. Inside, the uncertainty was real. The danger was concentrated, I genuinely could not tell who was who, and suspicion was a rational adaptation to an honest problem. The cable audience’s uncertainty is manufactured nightly. Every migrant might be the killer. Every trans person might be the predator. The viewer is trained into the officer’s posture toward a country that has no sally port and no base rate to justify it. One environment forces the adaptation; the other sells it.

The prison mirror reflects perfectly here: just as inmates must perform toughness to maintain status, conservative politicians must perform cruelty. Expressing empathy for the wrong group, immigrants, trans kids, the poor, marks you as weak, a “RINO” who’ll get primaried. The 2013 House vote on SNAP cuts exemplified this: 217 Republicans voted to slash food stamps by $40 billion, with not a single Democrat supporting it. The incentive structure selects for empathy deficits.

I left law enforcement eventually, but the lessons stayed with me. That prison dayroom where inmates fawned over Trump while officers in the break room did the same wasn’t an anomaly. It was America in microcosm.

The murderers and sex offenders in that dayroom knew exactly what Trump was because they saw themselves. They saw their behavior mirrored and even applauded. When he played victim after being found liable for sexual abuse, they recognized the playbook. They didn’t love him despite being a predator. They loved him because of it.

The same psychological traits that put some people behind bars put others in boardrooms and state houses. The difference wasn’t virtue but circumstance: class, race, the luck of when and where their dark triad traits manifested.

American conservatism has become an ideology that systematically suppresses empathy. It rewards the prison mentality: dominate or be dominated, trust only your tribe, see kindness as weakness. It’s created a political movement that mirrors the psychological dynamics of incarceration, complete with gang colors in the form of red hats and protection rackets in the form of vote-for-us-or-the-criminals-will-get-you rhetoric.

But empathy can only be rebuilt if people want to rebuild it. At the moment, we have a media ecosystem that feeds their disorder, a political system that rewards their cruelty, an economy that promotes their psychopathy. Working as a corrections officer didn’t just teach me harsh truths about human nature. It taught me that we’ve structured society to mass-produce them.

None of this is fate, and the fixes are not mysterious. Stop using prisons as the country’s largest mental health facilities, so the people warehoused for illness get a hospital instead of a tier. Change what the correctional officer’s job selects for, through staffing levels, training, and real mental health support, so the rational adaptation stops being callousness. Treat empathy as what the research shows it to be, a teachable skill: a meta-analysis of eighteen randomized controlled trials found that empathy training works, with a medium effect size, across ages and settings. And hold the algorithms accountable for what they amplify. Each of those deserves its own article and its own model legislation, and that is work this publication exists to do.

Where does the public will for any of that come from? From movements, on a timescale that news coverage cannot see. Movements are routinely declared failures because they produce no legislation within a year, but what they actually produce is changed minds, and changed minds show up in the polling five, ten, and twenty years later. Support for same-sex marriage stood at 27% when Gallup first asked in 1996; by 2021 it reached a record 70%, among the largest shifts Gallup has ever measured. Occupy Wall Street passed no bills in 2011, and within a year its veterans were helping organize the Fight for $15; a decade later the $15 minimum wage was law in cities and states across the country, and economic inequality had become a default frame of American politics. Black Lives Matter reshaped how Americans understood policing and discrimination between 2014 and 2020, and whatever the movement’s approval polling does in any given year, that changed understanding is what lasts. It also produced people like me: a veteran, a former cop, a former corrections officer, who now writes model legislation for a living. It is too early to measure what No Kings changed; if it follows the same pattern, the changes become measurable years from now. The conservative media machine narrows the circle of who counts as worth caring about; movements like these widen it.

Of course, the glib lesson was that people without empathy love their toxicity reflected Donald Trump. The real lesson took longer to see. It is a rare human whose views, habits, beliefs, and identity are not shaped largely by the people around them. Environments built on suspicion and dominance reshape whoever enters them, prisons do it fast and visibly, the conservative media and incentive structure does it slowly and at national scale, and I am the evidence, because the reshaping happened to me, it made me guarded, humorless, and quick to assume the worst while my politics never changed, and it reversed after I left.

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The Existentialist Republic Library

By clicking this sentence you can buy a physical copy of my newest book “The American Reformation: How States Can Use The Constitution to Break Authoritarian Capture”

You can get a free PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.

More reading

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Activism Journal

More Free Downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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On May 20, Jeff Bezos went on CNBC to argue that raising taxes on billionaires would not help working people, saying that doubling the taxes he pays would not help “that teacher in Queens.” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani answered on X: “I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ.”

The exchange was about taxes. Compare the records instead. Bezos founded Amazon, which the Federal Trade Commission and eighteen state attorneys general are suing for illegally maintaining monopoly power, with trial expected in 2027. Mamdani has requested $70 million to open five city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, with the first two sites announced in East Harlem and the South Bronx. He describes the plan as a public option for groceries.

In the same interview, Bezos said “there is so much waste in government spending.” This article is the reply. Intuit has lobbied Congress for more than twenty years to keep the government from offering free tax filing. In one sector after another the pattern is the same: a public program would save ordinary people money, and a billionaire’s company profits because that program does not exist. Mamdani is applying the public option model to groceries. The title of this piece asks whether your city could apply it to online retail, the market where Bezos made his fortune. What follows is a catalog of the public options that already work, the ones that lobbying ended, and the ones a city, county, or state could start building now.

A city or county government could build an online shopping platform inside of 6 months. Local businesses list their products, residents order through the site, and city-hired drivers deliver to the door. The technology exists off the shelf. Open-source e-commerce platforms power millions of online stores. Route-optimization software is a commodity. A city already knows every licensed business within its borders, already collects the taxes that could fund the startup costs, and already has the one thing no tech company will ever have: an obligation to serve the public. Vendors pay a flat fee that covers operating costs. Every dollar of revenue stays in the community as a local paycheck, a local tax payment, a local vendor’s earnings.

Think about what that replaces. Amazon collected $156 billion in fees from third-party sellers in 2024. Between referral commissions, warehouse charges, and the advertising that the platform has made all but mandatory, Amazon now takes up to half of every sale. It doesn’t manufacture anything. It provides a website, a warehouse, and a van. In exchange, every transaction drains money out of the seller’s community and sends it to Seattle, to a company that paid zero federal income tax in 2017 and 2018 and averaged a 5.1 percent effective rate over the four years after that, while the small businesses on its platform paid full freight. A municipal platform has no incentive to manipulate search results, bury competitors, or launch private-label knockoffs of its own vendors’ best-selling products. The platform works for the community because the community owns it.

None of this process involves banning or inhibiting private business operations. It does hurt monopolies by supporting local business, and inhibit predatory business practices such as price gouging and vendor gouging.

Scale it to a network of cities and counties or a state, and we’re talking about public commercial infrastructure that does something Amazon never will: keep wealth in the communities that generate it.

That idea sounds radical until you realize we already do it with the mail.

The USPS delivers to 170 million addresses, including 57 percent of its 33,000 post offices in rural areas where FedEx and UPS refuse to go without surcharges. It moves 1.2 billion prescription drug shipments a year. 2.7 million veterans in rural communities receive 84 percent of their medications through its trucks. UPS actually hands its rural packages back to the Postal Service through a program called Ground Saver because the private carrier cannot profitably deliver to those addresses itself. The USPS generates $80.5 billion in annual revenue and posted a profit in its most recent quarter. It does something FedEx and UPS won’t: it provides a service to everyone, everywhere, and its existence forces the private carriers to compete on speed and convenience rather than gouging captive markets.

That’s what a public option does. The government doesn’t tell a private company to charge less; that’s regulation. It doesn’t hand money to a private company so the company can pretend to be affordable; that’s a subsidy. The government does the thing. Directly. It hires the people, builds the infrastructure, and delivers the service. If a private company can beat that on quality or convenience, it keeps its customers. If it can’t, that tells you everything about what the private company was actually selling.

We use public options every day without calling them that. Public schools have educated American children since Massachusetts established the first ones in 1647; Horace Mann built the modern free system in the 1830s, and every functioning democracy on the planet followed. Today, all but four countries on Earth mandate compulsory public education. This is because self-governance requires an informed electorate, and you cannot have an informed electorate if only the rich and powerful can afford to teach their children to read. Every one of those countries recognized what we recognized when we built the Continental Army: some things have to answer to the public or they stop serving the public. Nobody argues we should replace the military with mercenaries, because mercenaries serve whoever writes the check. A privatized education system works the same way. It stops being accountable to the public the moment it starts being accountable to shareholders. Fifty million American kids walk into public classrooms every morning without a private contractor standing between the teacher and the kid.

The first free tax-supported public library in the world opened in Peterborough, New Hampshire in 1833; today libraries host 1.3 billion visits a year with no subscription fee and no algorithm deciding what we’re allowed to read.

Freedom of movement is baked into the founding promise. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness all require the ability to get from one place to another, and a government that guarantees those rights has an obligation to make that possible. Public transit does exactly that: it guarantees that anyone can get across town for a couple of dollars whether or not they own a car.

These institutions work so well that we forget what they represent: proof that the government can deliver essential services directly, competently, and at a price people can actually pay.

The argument here is simple. Take that model and apply it everywhere a private company stands between people and something they need, collecting a toll for a service the public could provide directly. Apply it not as theory but as a concrete, sector-by-sector blueprint for building the economy that people actually deserve.

And be precise about what “public option” means, because the phrase has already lost its meaning once. Colorado and Washington both passed laws labeled “public option” that really just impose price controls on private insurance companies. The insurer still sits between the patient and the doctor, still takes its cut. The state just told it how large the cut can be. That’s still regulation. Credit where it’s due: those laws are better than what existed before, and the governors who signed them took real political risk to do it. But look at the spectrum. Republicans say let corporations rip people off as much as they want. These laws say the public deserves some protection, so maybe the corporations can make a little less money. A real public option says we will provide the service directly, and if the corporation wants to stay in business, it has to compete. Insurance companies donate heavily to political campaigns, and politicians at every level prioritize the revenue of those corporations over the needs of their constituents because those corporations fund their reelection. That fear is how we end up with laws that still protect the middleman’s seat at the table. Corporations are not constituents. We are the constituents, and we are the ones the government exists to serve. A real public option eliminates the middleman. It doesn’t negotiate with the middleman.

Consider taxes. Every March, roughly 150 million Americans sit down to tell the government information the government already has. The IRS knows your W-2, your 1099s, your mortgage interest. For the vast majority of filers, the agency could send a prefilled return that says “does this look right, sign here” and the whole thing would take ten minutes at zero cost. Dozens of countries do exactly this. The reason the United States doesn’t is that Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, has spent more than $47 million lobbying Congress since 2003 to make sure the IRS never offers free filing. A private company spent decades keeping your taxes painful so it could sell you the aspirin.

The Biden administration finally built the free road. The IRS Direct File program launched in 2024, expanded to twenty-five states in 2025, and 94 percent of users rated it “excellent” or “above average.” The Government Accountability Office called it a success and recommended expansion to all fifty states. Then Intuit spent nearly $4 million lobbying in each of the next two years, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and twenty-nine House Republicans wrote to Trump asking him to end Direct File on day one. The IRS confirmed in November 2025 that the program would not be available for the 2026 filing season. Trump’s IRS commissioner told Congress flatly: “I don’t care about Direct File.”

The government built the free tool. People loved it. The toll collector wrote a check and the road got bulldozed. The average American now spends 13 hours and $290 preparing a single return, for a task the government had already automated and given away for free.

That sequence is not unique to taxes. It’s the playbook. Every industry with a tollbooth runs it: build political relationships, fund the campaigns, kill the public alternative before people find out how well it works. But some public options got built before the playbook could stop them, and the results tell us everything we need to know about what happens when the government actually does the thing.

California started making its own drugs. CalRx, the state’s generic drug label, began selling naloxone at $24 per twin pack in May 2024. The National Institutes of Health published a peer-reviewed study showing that generic naloxone prices across the entire market dropped 22 percent in a single quarter after CalRx entered. Not because California regulated prices. Because California made the drug itself, and private manufacturers suddenly had to compete with a product priced to be affordable and sustainable, not to extract the maximum the market will bear. The program generated $39.6 million in direct savings and an estimated $56 million more from the competitive pressure alone. Then California went after insulin. On January 1, 2026, CalRx began selling insulin glargine pens at $11 each through a partnership with nonprofit manufacturer Civica Rx. Branded Lantus from Sanofi costs roughly $424 for the same quantity. The state invested $100 million and projects $2,000 to $4,000 in annual savings per patient. No other state has done this. Every other state could.

The military does the childcare version right now. The Department of Defense runs over 900 centers serving more than 200,000 children. Ninety-seven percent meet national accreditation standards; the civilian rate is 9 percent. Fees scale to family income at roughly 7 percent, with the government covering 50 to 70 percent of costs. Private childcare in New York runs $23,000 to $40,000 a year per child. Military families pay a fraction of that for a service that is, by every measurable standard, dramatically better. The military didn’t achieve this by telling private daycare providers to offer a discounted tier. It built its own centers, hired its own staff, tied pay to training milestones, and runs unannounced inspections. It does the thing.

Vienna applied the same principle to housing. The city owns and operates roughly 220,000 apartments, covers about 60 percent of residents, and the scale disciplines the entire private market. Only 18 percent of Vienna’s residents are rent-burdened, compared to 58 percent in Los Angeles. The Dutch took it further: 284 nonprofit housing associations manage 2.3 million units with zero direct government subsidies, funding the entire operation through revolving rental income. Public housing doesn’t require an endless taxpayer subsidy. It requires the will to build at scale and the discipline to reinvest revenue instead of extracting it.

Each of these examples does the same thing. The government builds the capacity to provide a service directly and offers it at a price people can actually afford. Private companies can still operate. Nobody bans them. But they can no longer charge whatever they want for the privilege of standing between people and a necessity. They have to add genuine value or watch their customers walk to the public road.

And America already does this far more than most people realize. The Federal Crop Insurance Corporation has backed farmers since 1938. The Tennessee Valley Authority provides electricity to 10 million people across seven states and has for nearly a century. Over 2,000 municipal electric utilities, including LADWP and Austin Energy, generate power and revenue for their cities. The National Flood Insurance Program exists because private insurers abandoned flood coverage entirely and the government had to step in. State-run workers’ compensation funds insure millions of employees. FHA and VA home loans let the government act as lender and guarantor, and private banks have to compete with those terms. Public hospitals and county health systems treat patients regardless of ability to pay. State-run liquor stores in control states generate billions in revenue for state treasuries. All of them operate right now, serve real people, and most of them make money doing it.

And the sectors where nobody has built that road yet are exactly the sectors where prices climb fastest and service deteriorates most visibly. Airlines consolidated from ten major carriers to four, abandoned hundreds of routes to mid-size cities, and now charge captive markets whatever they want. A state or regional public carrier doesn’t exist to enrich shareholders; it exists to connect people. Internet service providers charge Americans more for slower speeds than consumers pay in almost any peer democracy; municipal broadband already proves cities can do it better, but telecom lobbyists keep blocking new networks. The Bank of North Dakota has returned profits to the state treasury since 1919 while every other state sends its deposits to Wall Street. Japan Post Bank serves 24,000 locations at minimal cost, and France legally requires La Banque Postale to accept every citizen regardless of income.

A well-run public option should generate revenue. The difference is where that revenue goes. When a corporation profits from insulin or rent or banking fees, the money flows to shareholders on Wall Street. When a public option generates revenue, it flows back to the people, because we are the shareholders. That money funds schools, roads, health care, and the next public option. The USPS generates $80.5 billion a year. Military childcare scales fees to income and still operates. CalRx is already saving Californians tens of millions. These programs pay for themselves and then some. The companies that can’t compete with them don’t say so out loud. They write checks to the politicians who make sure the public alternative never gets built.

Build the alternative.

Think about that municipal marketplace one more time. We are talking about cities building a public option competitor to Amazon. A platform owned by the public, run for the public, where every dollar of revenue stays in the community instead of flowing to the richest people on the planet. The hardware store sells to the neighborhood. The bakery fills orders for next-day delivery. The driver earns a city wage. Local businesses keep their revenue instead of handing half of it to a company that gives them nothing but a search ranking. Scale that to a network of cities and states, and we have built public commercial infrastructure that does for local economies what the USPS did for mail: guarantees access, keeps prices honest, and puts the wealth back where it was created.

The companies that fight hardest against public options are telling us exactly where to build them.

What You Can Do About It

Want to make this happen? You can email this article to your Mayor, City Council Rep, and/or County Commissioner and tell them we deserve more options and more competition in the form of revenue generating public liquor stores like 17 states have, a public bank like North Dakota has, and a public option for online shopping, where local businesses sell and city-hired drivers deliver. You can also ask if they’ll endorse these revenue generating community programs.

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Note from the author: It is totally fine if you aren’t up for today’s 10 minute Activist Action! If you read this article and share it anywhere, especially if you share it with your local Indivisble chapter or directly with anyone who may be interested, that is incredibly helpful! Asking your County Democrat Chapter or any other group to endorse the legislation and share it with their members also has a powerful force multiplication impact.

California’s new felony is the latest state election protection law, not the first. The model bill for the other 49 states is at the bottom of this article.

On July 4, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that California will introduce legislation making it a felony to seize ballots before they are counted and certified by state or county officials. The announcement responds to documented events. The FBI seized ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco took more than 650,000 ballots from his own county’s elections office before the California Supreme Court paused his investigation.

California already has a first version of this law in effect. Senate Bill 73, signed in May, makes it a felony to remove ballots from the custody of a county registrar, prohibits law enforcement, including federal officials, from accessing voting machines or voter rolls without a court order, and allows the attorney general or secretary of state to stop law enforcement deployments at voting locations. The legislature attached an urgency clause, so the law took effect immediately, six days before the June 2 primary. The new proposal extends felony coverage across the entire period between voting and certification.

California did not invent election protection law. Taking, destroying, or tampering with ballots was already a crime under state election codes across the country, and since 2020, 22 states have passed laws protecting election officials and workers from threats, harassment, and doxxing, many with bipartisan votes. What California added is narrow and new: a felony written in response to an actual seizure of ballots by a law enforcement agency, an event the president of the California Voter Foundation said had not previously happened anywhere in the country. The model bill below treats the California law as what it is, one piece of a larger act that assembles the protections states have been passing one at a time.

Your state can do even more to protect its elections, because ballot seizure is one method among several. Newsom’s own speech described the Department of Justice’s repeated attempts to obtain private voter data, the National Guard deployment in Los Angeles, and the intimidation of poll workers by federal agents. The model bill at the bottom of this article names seven offenses: seizure of ballots, unauthorized access to voting systems and nonpublic voter data, intimidation of election officials and workers, interference with the canvass or certification, refusal by an official to perform a required certification duty, destruction of election records, and coordinated armed deployments at election facilities.

Here is what makes this bill different, in plain English.

It is rapid. Most criminal prosecution happens after the fact: the crime is completed, the investigation takes months, and the charges arrive long after the election they failed to protect. This bill is written to operate while the crime is happening. An attempt carries the same felony penalty as the completed act, so a police officer can arrest on probable cause while the interference is in progress. State and local police are required to protect election workers, facilities, and materials the moment an election official requests it. And a court must hear an emergency injunction request within 24 hours of filing, with no bond required.

It takes the money. A court can restrain assets connected to the offense before trial so they cannot be moved or hidden, and on conviction the state takes the funds and property that financed the operation, along with its proceeds. The offenses also become racketeering predicates, which lets prosecutors treat an organized, funded interference operation as exactly that, with the forfeiture and civil damages that racketeering law provides.

It goes up the chain of command. The person who ordered the seizure, the person who organized it, and the person who financed it commit the same felony as the person who carried it out, whether or not they were present and whether or not the plan succeeded. Following orders is not a defense. Section 10 of the bill states it the way Newsom said it: “It does not matter who gave the order.”

It survives a presidential pardon. The pardon power covers offenses against the United States only. Every offense in this act is a state offense. A conviction stands no matter who ordered the act and no matter what protection was promised afterward.

And it already contains the answer to the Supremacy Clause. In plain English: the Supremacy Clause is the part of the Constitution that makes valid federal law override state law when the two conflict. Vice President JD Vance and other administration officials have claimed it gives federal agents absolute immunity from state prosecution, and a reader who sends this bill to an office may receive that claim in response. The claim overstates the law. Under the test courts have applied since 1890, a federal officer is protected from state prosecution only when federal law actually authorized the act and the officer reasonably believed the act was necessary and proper to federal duties; federal officials have never held blanket immunity.

Sections 10 and 11 of the bill are drafted to that exact test. Section 11 states that the act criminalizes nothing a valid federal statute or federal court order affirmatively authorizes, so the bill cannot conflict with federal law, and no current federal statute authorizes taking ballots, voter data, or voting equipment from state custody before certification. A federal officer charged under this act therefore has to show a court an authorization that does not exist. If the officer moves the case to federal court, the state still prosecutes it there, and a conviction is still a state conviction. And sheriffs, contractors, party staff, planners, and financiers hold no federal office, so they have no Supremacy Clause claim at all.

One timing fact needs acknowledging. California’s legislature remains in session through August, and many state legislatures have already completed their 2026 regular sessions. Adjournment leaves several actions available. A governor cannot create a felony by executive order, because only a legislature can define a crime, but governors in all 50 states have the authority to call a special session and place this bill on its agenda. A governor can also direct state police to enforce the ballot theft and tampering statutes the state already has, request a formal attorney general opinion confirming those statutes apply to anyone who takes ballots without a court order, and, where a genuine threat exists, use emergency powers, since in many states violating a governor’s emergency order is itself a criminal offense. The email below covers both situations.

Here is the request. We are asking Existentialist Republic readers and activists to help send this bill to all 50 governors, and to send it to your own state legislators. Legislators respond to what other states have already enacted, and the record here is real: the election codes states already enforce, the worker protection laws 22 states have passed since 2020, and now California’s ballot seizure felony.

We need 10 subscribers per article to keep this machine producing the activism that puts democracy on the offensive. Don’t let this be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent but if you can subscribe then you’re essentially gifting the publication to millions of readers. Check out the bottom of this article to see the free ER library of activism books, booklets, and legislation.

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Now back to our regularly scheduled activism.

This only takes about ten minutes.

1. Find your governor’s contact page. Search your governor’s name plus the word contact, or use the directory at nga.org/governors.

2. Find your state legislators at openstates.org/find_your_legislator. Enter your address and the tool lists each legislator who represents you. The number varies by state, from one in Nebraska to three or more in states with multi-member districts. Send the message to each of them.

3. Send each office the message below, adjusted to fit you. If you are able, copy the full model bill from the bottom of this article and paste it below your signature, in the body of the email, not as an attachment. This is easiest from a computer browser, because the bill is long. Pasting matters: many offices do not click links in email from senders they do not know, spam filters divert messages that contain links, and attachments from unknown senders often go unopened. Pasted text arrives readable with nothing to click and nothing to open. If you are on your phone and pasting the full bill is not practical, send the short message with the link anyway. A short message that gets sent accomplishes more than a complete one that does not.

Copy this:

Subject: Please endorse an election protection bill in [state]

I am a [nurse / teacher / veteran / small business owner] living in [city or county]. California is making it a felony to seize ballots before certification, and its Senate Bill 73 already makes removing ballots from a county registrar’s custody a felony. Twenty-two states have passed laws protecting election workers since 2020. I am asking you to endorse and introduce a bill in our state that covers seizure of ballots, unauthorized access to voting systems, intimidation of election workers, interference with certification, and the people who order or finance any of it. The full text of the model bill is pasted below my signature.

If our legislature has completed its regular session, waiting until next year is not acceptable. I am asking for a special session to pass this bill, and until it passes, for enforcement of our existing ballot theft and tampering laws by state police, a formal attorney general opinion confirming those laws apply to anyone who takes ballots without a court order, and the use of available emergency powers to protect ballot custody.

Please reply with your position.

[Your name] [Your city, so the office knows you are a constituent]

[Paste the model bill here, that’s easiest if you open this article in a computer browser. If you could not paste it, replace this line with: The model bill is published by The Existentialist Republic at (link).]

If you send it, tell us in the comments which state and which office received it. No pressure at all if you prefer privacy; a message sent privately does the same work. Knowing which offices have received it lets other readers tell their own legislators that the same request is arriving in multiple states.

California’s legislature passed Senate Bill 73 and the governor signed it within a single week. A state that wants these protections in place before November has time. The first step is the email you send today.

MODEL STATE LEGISLATION THE ELECTION PROTECTION AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT REVIEW DRAFT FOR LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF [STATE]:

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE This act may be cited as the Election Protection and Accountability Act.

SECTION 2. LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS The legislature finds that: (a) Ballots, voter data, voting technology, and election records in the custody of election officials are administered under the law of this state, and the Constitution of the United States assigns the administration of elections to the states in the first instance. (b) Interference with elections occurs through multiple documented methods, including seizure of ballots, unauthorized access to voting systems and voter data, intimidation of election officials and workers, interference with canvass and certification, refusal by officials to perform ministerial certification duties, destruction of records, and coordinated armed deployments at election facilities. © Remedies that become available only after certification do not protect the election in which the interference occurs. (d) Federal law at 52 U.S.C. 20701 requires the preservation of federal election records for twenty-two months, and no provision of federal law authorizes the removal of ballots, nonpublic voter data, or voting equipment from state or county custody before certification absent an order of a court of competent jurisdiction. (e) This act is intended to operate in full harmony with federal law and does not prohibit any conduct that a valid federal statute or federal court order affirmatively authorizes.

SECTION 3. DEFINITIONS As used in this act: (a) “Ballot” means any official ballot, whether voted, unvoted, spoiled, provisional, or absentee, and any package, container, or drop box containing ballots. (b) “Election materials” means ballots, tally sheets, canvass records, chain of custody logs, audit records, certified voting technology, including voting machines, tabulators, software, and storage media, the statewide voter registration database, and nonpublic voter data. © “Nonpublic voter data” means voter information not subject to disclosure under [the state public records act] or the National Voter Registration Act, 52 U.S.C. 20507(i), including full dates of birth, identification numbers, and signatures. (d) “Election official” means the secretary of state, a county or municipal clerk, registrar, or election administrator, and their authorized staff. (e) “Election worker” means any person authorized by an election official to perform duties in the administration of an election, whether paid or volunteer. (f) “Certification” means the final certification of election results by the officer or body authorized under the law of this state. (g) “Ministerial duty” means a duty relating to canvass or certification that the law of this state requires an official to perform by a fixed deadline without discretion as to whether to perform it. (h) “Order of a court of competent jurisdiction” means an order or warrant issued by a state or federal court, and includes legal process after a court has ordered compliance. (i) “Armed” means carrying or displaying a firearm or other dangerous weapon. (j) “Coordinated armed presence” means one or more armed persons stationed, patrolling, or assembled at a location under common direction, plan, or agreement, and does not include an individual voter or worker lawfully present and lawfully carrying who is not acting under such direction, plan, or agreement. (k) “Intimidation” means conduct or communication, made knowingly or with reckless disregard of its threatening character, that would place a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm, unlawful arrest or detention, or other unlawful injury. (l) “Material support” means funds, property, personnel, transportation, equipment, or services provided with the intent that they be used, or with knowledge that they are to be used, to commit an offense under this act.

SECTION 4. OFFENSES (a) Unlawful seizure of ballots. A person commits this offense if the person knowingly takes, removes, seizes, or exercises unauthorized custody or control over any ballot or election materials in the custody of an election official before certification, without authorization under the election laws of this state or an order of a court of competent jurisdiction. (b) Unlawful access to election technology and data. A person commits this offense if the person knowingly and without authorization under the election laws of this state or an order of a court of competent jurisdiction accesses, copies, alters, disables, or takes custody of certified voting technology, a tabulation system, the statewide voter registration database, or nonpublic voter data. © Intimidation of election officials and workers. A person commits this offense if the person, by force, threat of force, or intimidation, and with intent to interfere with the performance of official election duties or to compel any official act or omission relating to an election, interferes with an election official or election worker. (d) Interference with canvass or certification. A person commits this offense if the person knowingly, by force, threat, fraud, or unauthorized physical act, prevents or materially delays the counting, canvassing, transmission, or certification of election results. (e) Willful failure to perform certification duties. An election official commits this offense if the official willfully fails or refuses to perform a ministerial duty by the deadline fixed by law, except as directed by an order of a court of competent jurisdiction. (f) Destruction of election records. A person commits this offense if the person knowingly and with intent to impair their availability or integrity destroys, conceals, or alters election materials before certification or before the expiration of the retention period required by state or federal law, without lawful authorization. (g) Unlawful armed deployment. A person commits this offense if the person knowingly directs, organizes, or participates in a coordinated armed presence within [250] feet of a polling place, ballot drop box, elections office, or canvass facility without the written authorization of the responsible election official. This subsection does not apply to a peace officer performing lawful duties or responding to an urgent public safety emergency, or to security personnel retained by the responsible election official. (h) Grading. Each offense under this section is a felony punishable by imprisonment for up to [three] years, a fine of up to [$10,000], or both, [conform to state felony classification].

SECTION 5. ATTEMPT An attempt to commit any offense under Section 4 is punishable to the same extent as the completed offense. A peace officer may arrest a person on probable cause that the person is committing or attempting an offense under Section 4.

SECTION 6. CONSPIRACY, SOLICITATION, AND FINANCING (a) A person who agrees with one or more persons to commit an offense under Section 4, where any party to the agreement performs an overt act in furtherance of it, or who solicits, orders, or directs such an offense, or who provides material support for such an offense, is guilty of that offense and subject to the same penalties. (b) Liability under this section applies whether or not the person was physically present and whether or not the object offense was completed.

SECTION 7. PROTECTION AND RAPID ENFORCEMENT (a) State and local law enforcement agencies shall protect election officials, election workers, election facilities, and election materials upon the request of an election official. (b) The attorney general, the secretary of state, or any election official may petition for a temporary restraining order or injunction against actual or threatened violations of this act. The court shall hold a hearing as soon as practicable and no later than 24 hours after filing. No bond shall be required. © Upon a showing of probable cause, a court may issue an order restraining the transfer, concealment, or disposal of assets traceable to an offense under this act pending trial. An order under this subsection shall not restrain assets the defendant demonstrates are untainted and needed to retain counsel or to meet ordinary living expenses.

SECTION 8. FORFEITURE (a) Upon conviction for an offense under this act, including conviction under Section 6, the court shall order forfeiture of property or funds used to commit, facilitate, or finance the offense, and the proceeds of the offense. (b) Property of a person who neither knew of nor consented to the unlawful use is not subject to forfeiture. © The court shall ensure that any forfeiture is not grossly disproportional to the gravity of the offense. (d) Forfeited assets shall be deposited in [the state election security fund].

SECTION 9. RACKETEERING PREDICATE Offenses under Section 4 are added to the list of predicate offenses under [cite the state racketeering or criminal profiteering statute]. [Where the state has no such statute, omit this section; Sections 7, 8, and 13 supply the corresponding remedies.]

SECTION 10. ORDERS AND CLAIMED AUTHORITY (a) It is not a defense to prosecution under this act that the defendant acted at the direction, request, or order of any other person, official, or agency. (b) A defendant asserting that federal law authorized the conduct charged must show that the conduct was authorized by federal law and that the defendant reasonably believed the conduct was necessary and proper to the performance of federal duties. This subsection shall be construed consistently with the Constitution of the United States and does not enlarge or diminish any immunity it provides.

SECTION 11. CONSTRUCTION AND SAVINGS (a) Nothing in this act criminalizes conduct affirmatively authorized by a valid federal statute or by an order of a court of competent jurisdiction. (b) Nothing in this act prohibits constitutionally protected speech, assembly, or petitioning, or observation, challenges, recounts, contests, audits, or litigation authorized by law. © Nothing in this act limits access to records available under [the state public records act] or disclosure required by the National Voter Registration Act, 52 U.S.C. 20507(i).

SECTION 12. JURISDICTION AND VENUE (a) The attorney general and the prosecuting attorney of any affected county have concurrent authority to prosecute offenses under this act. (b) An offense under this act may be prosecuted in any county where any element of the offense occurred or where the affected certification occurs.

SECTION 13. CIVIL ENFORCEMENT The attorney general, the secretary of state, or an affected election official may bring an action for injunctive relief and civil penalties of up to [$50,000] per violation. An election official or election worker injured by a violation may bring an action for damages, and a prevailing plaintiff shall recover reasonable attorney fees.

SECTION 14. LIMITATION PERIOD Prosecution for an offense under this act may be commenced within [six] years of the offense.

SECTION 15. SEVERABILITY If any provision of this act or its application to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the remainder of the act and its other applications are not affected.

SECTION 16. EFFECTIVE DATE This act takes effect immediately upon enactment where the constitution of this state permits urgency or emergency legislation, and otherwise on the earliest date permitted by law.

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A friend asked me recently whether to stop trying to change anything and simply let things happen. The question was not flippant. My friend was tired of having his heart broken, felt he was accomplishing nothing, and could not tell whether ten years of effort had made any difference to anyone. My friend also wanted to know whether continuing was a moral obligation or a bad habit.

I have written elsewhere about how political change occurs in populations, using the physics of particles and the properties of metals. This question is about the person deciding whether to act.

Success rates for campaigns of mass civil resistance have declined since 2010. Erica Chenoweth is a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School who has spent two decades compiling a database of mass uprisings against governments since 1900, recording whether each achieved its stated goal. In the 1990s, roughly 65 percent of those campaigns succeeded. Since 2010, fewer than 34 percent have, as Harvard Magazine reports of Chenoweth’s updated data.

But here is something I want you to consider, does trying to change something then change the person who tries?

In 1967, the American psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier discovered learned helplessness by administering electric shocks that dogs could not escape. In 2016, the same two researchers published Learned Helplessness at Fifty in Psychological Review, writing that “the original theory got it backward.” Passivity, they now say, is the default. It is what a nervous system produces on its own, without being taught, when aversive (painful or threatening) events continue for a long time, and serotonin activity in the dorsal raphe nucleus, a small structure in the brainstem, produces it. What gets learned afterward is control. The medial prefrontal cortex, the region behind the forehead, detects when a behavior can change an outcome, and it then inhibits (reduces the activity of) the dorsal raphe nucleus.

Agency has to be learned, and it is learned only one way, by acting. Trying is how the brain finds out that it is capable of acting at all.

What does activism do to the people who do it? In 2009, the psychologists Malte Klar and Tim Kasser tried to find out, in Some Benefits of Being an Activist. Activists reported more pleasure, more sense of purpose, and closer social ties than people who were not active. But one part of the study does not hold up: when non-activists tried a single activist behavior just once, their well-being did not change, so the study cannot prove that activism caused the difference rather than simply describing people who already felt good. The developmental psychologist Parissa Ballard asked a narrower version of the same question in 2020. She and her colleagues published Political Engagement and Wellbeing Among College Students, focused on college students specifically. Ordinary political behavior, like voting or joining a group, was weakly linked to feeling better. Public protest and loud political expression were weakly linked to feeling worse.

People who produce measurable political effects usually cannot detect them.

Fifty-six canvassers knocked on doors in South Florida in 2016, asking voters to consider the experience of transgender people. The political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla ran the study and published the results as Durably Reducing Transphobia in Science. A single conversation of about ten minutes produced measurable reductions in prejudice that lasted at least three months. The size of the reduction was comparable to the decrease in prejudice against gay and lesbian people that took the country more than a decade to achieve.

At that door, the canvasser saw no sign that the conversation had worked. The voter did not announce a change of mind, did not write afterward, and in most cases probably did not know their own opinion had changed. The effect existed only because researchers surveyed those households for months. Organizers working in their own city usually do not have researchers surveying their neighbors. The economist Timur Kuran described the same problem for whole countries in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies. Kuran’s own summary of the idea is precise: “absent preference falsification, public opinion would always mirror private opinion.” Since it does not, people conceal their real convictions until enough others have spoken, which is why authoritarian regimes appear stable up to the week they are overthrown.

Many writers described this pattern before it was measured experimentally. None of them were researchers, and they were not colleagues of one another.

While Germany occupied France in 1942, the French Algerian novelist Albert Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus, retelling the Greek myth of a man condemned by the gods to push a boulder uphill forever, only to watch it roll back down. Many activists have described the same feeling to me in cruder terms: pissing into the wind. The essay ends with five words: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Camus wrote for Combat, an underground resistance newspaper, throughout the occupation, and became its editor in chief in August 1944, the month Paris was freed. His position was that no guarantee of victory is required for refusal to be worth performing. The absurdity of the situation does not justify despair, and it does not justify nihilism (the belief that nothing matters) either. Refusal remains available and remains worth doing.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, made the first extended argument in English that women are rational beings entitled to education and legal standing. Its author, Mary Wollstonecraft, is usually remembered as a theorist who reasoned about rights in the abstract, without personal risk, and separately as a scandal. The year after she died in 1797, her husband William Godwin published a memoir describing her love affairs, her daughter born outside marriage, and her two suicide attempts, and for the next century her ideas were dismissed by association with her private life. Both reputations are false. Wollstonecraft was living in Paris during the Terror, and she wrote her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution in 1794 while the revolution she had defended was executing people she knew. She continued to defend its principles, arguing that the crimes committed in its name did not refute (disprove) them.

From a prison cell in Breslau, Rosa Luxemburg wrote letters in 1917 and 1918 describing genuine pleasure in birds and plants. She was a Polish-born Marxist theorist, imprisoned in Germany for organizing against the First World War. Paramilitary troops murdered her in January 1919, months after the last of those letters.

Paper was evidence during Stalin’s terror, so Nadezhda Mandelstam memorized her husband’s poems instead of writing them down. Osip Mandelstam, the Russian poet whose work she was protecting, died in a Soviet transit camp in 1938. To her deepest core she lived the truism: “Science tells us how we live; art tells us why we live.”

Fannie Lou Hamer sang from inside a jail cell in Winona, Mississippi, in 1963, after police ordered her beaten there, and the other prisoners sang with her. She was a sharecropper who had become a voting rights organizer. For the rest of her life, she answered questions about why she kept going with the same ten words: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” It is carved on her tombstone.

Detained without trial in Kenya in 1977, the novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote the novel Devil on the Cross on prison toilet paper at Kamiti.

These people did not share a philosophy and were not allies. Camus argued against revolutionary violence in The Rebel, and Luxemburg organized it. Camus and the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, once close friends, ended their friendship permanently in 1952 over the same book. What they share is a behavior. Each of them continued to act, and each of them found something to enjoy, while a state was working to make them stop. Luxemburg felt joy while she was imprisoned. Hamer sang while she was jailed for registering voters. Ngũgĩ kept writing after writing had been made a crime.

None of them knew they would win. Luxemburg did not win. Hamer was not seated at the 1964 Democratic convention. Some of what sustained them is close to what Maier and Seligman later found in brain tissue: a nervous system trained, through repetition, to keep acting. But that mechanism requires something to repeat, some measure of control to practice. It does not explain Nadezhda Mandelstam memorizing poems with nothing left to control but her own memory.

Viktor Frankl explains that part. Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist deported to Nazi concentration camps in 1942, where his parents, brother, and wife all died. He spent two and a half years in four camps, including Auschwitz, with no control over his circumstances and no repeated successful action available to learn from. Shortly after his liberation in 1945, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in nine days, and it was published the following year, developing logotherapy: the argument that what sustains a person is neither pleasure nor power but meaning. He observed that prisoners who lost every sense of purpose declined and died quickly, while those who held onto some reason, a person to survive for, work left unfinished, endured far longer. Some critics, including the psychologist Rollo May, have argued that logotherapy risks a therapist telling a patient what their life should mean, instead of helping the patient discover it themselves. The criticism is fair, and it does not undo the observation Frankl made under conditions few people have ever had to survive: meaning sustained people who had no other resource left.

I read the same argument in a different person when I was twelve, in Christopher Reeve’s memoir Still Me. Reeve broke his neck in a riding accident in 1995, was left paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe without a ventilator, and wrote the book three years later. In the hospital, before he agreed to the surgery that kept him alive, he mouthed to his wife Dana, “Maybe we should let me go.” She told him, “You’re still you. And I love you.” He had the surgery. Reeve did not believe the accident had happened for a reason. What he came to believe was that a person can make an event have had a reason, afterward, through how they respond to it. That is the same argument Frankl made, believed by a man who was not conventionally religious, and who said that although he did not personally believe in God, he tried to live as though he were being watched anyway.

Reeve spent the rest of his life lobbying for spinal cord injury research and for embryonic stem cell research specifically, work he continued from a wheelchair and a ventilator until his death in 2004. The organization that grew out of that work, now called the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, still funds spinal cord injury research and supports people living with paralysis.

For most people asking whether to keep trying, repetition is the mechanism actually available to them. Because it is the mechanism, the dose matters.

Exercise physiology describes training with three variables: frequency, intensity, and duration. How often, how hard, how long. Political work responds to the same three variables, because the nervous system learns control the way it learns anything else, through repetition at a sufficient dose. A person who attends one march a year has not trained. A person who makes one phone call every week for four years has.

Every training model in physiology also includes a failure state, which is overtraining. Cher Weixia Chen and Paul Gorski published Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists in the Journal of Human Rights Practice in 2015. They interviewed activists who had experienced burnout, and 77 percent attributed physical illness to it, including two who attributed their cancer to the stress of the work. Gorski identified a culture of martyrdom inside movements as a principal cause, in which activists treat their own wellbeing as a betrayal of the cause. His conclusion is that self-care is insufficient and that movements need community care, so that exhaustion is treated as a collective problem rather than an individual failing. Rest is a component of the training rather than a reward for completing it.

The same organizing principle applies to institutions and to individuals.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for documenting how ordinary communities govern shared resources, such as fisheries, irrigation systems, and forests, without either private ownership or state control. She identified eight design principles common to the arrangements that lasted for centuries. The eighth is nested enterprises: in systems that endure, governance is organized as small local units, with larger units composed of those smaller ones, as described in the Policy Studies Journal. Systems organized as a single unit, whether local or national, rarely last.

No child exists in only one setting. That was the central argument of Urie Bronfenbrenner, an American developmental psychologist who spent the 1970s studying how children grow up. A child belongs to a family, which sits inside a neighborhood, which sits inside an institution such as a school or a workplace, which sits inside a whole culture, and every one of those levels shapes the child and needs tending in its own right.

Carl Jung made a related but different argument about what happens inside a single person, and it applies directly to the choice this piece is about. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who founded one of the major schools of modern psychology, called the neglected, unacceptable, or inconvenient parts of a person the shadow. He argued that a shadow denied attention does not disappear. It returns, usually in a worse form than if it had been faced directly, sometimes as a breakdown, sometimes projected onto other people instead.

A person is two things at once: a self with individual needs, examined the way a microscope examines something, up close and in detail, and a member of a larger body politic, examined the way a telescope examines something, at a distance, as part of a much larger whole. Both views are of the same life. Refusing to look through the telescope, disengaging from the community and the body politic entirely, builds a shadow out of the part of a person that already recognizes political engagement matters. Not everyone has that part. But if you are reading this, some part of you does. Refusing to look through the microscope instead, fixating on politics until the individual self and its needs go unmet, builds the same shadow from the other direction. Jung called the alternative, the lifelong work of integrating what a person finds through both instruments rather than suppressing either one, individuation.

The Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture roughly two thousand years old, calls a person’s particular responsibility their dharma. It teaches that a person does better performing their own duty imperfectly than performing someone else’s duty well. The teaching responds to a specific worry that comes with this kind of work: that your own contribution is too small, and that you would be more useful doing whatever task currently looks largest or most urgent. The Gita’s answer is no. The imperfect version of your own actual work still counts. Someone else’s job, done partway by you, does not replace it.

The work of caring for yourself. The work of loving the people in your house. The work of friendship. The work of art. The work of a garden, or of any ongoing relationship with a living thing that will die if you stop. The work of a neighborhood. The work of democracy. The work of stopping fascism. A person cannot serve the largest of these obligations by giving up all the others for it. The activists Gorski interviewed prove this. The ones who set aside self-care, family, and rest to serve only the cause did not serve the cause longer. They served it for less time. Giving up the smaller obligations produced the burnout that ended the largest one too.

A person will not observe most of what they cause. The canvasser in Florida changed a stranger’s mind for at least three months and went home believing the evening had been wasted. Luxemburg died before anything she worked for existed, and much of it exists now.

Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker, published one of the country’s first anti-slavery newspapers starting in 1821, and recruited a young William Lloyd Garrison to work alongside him. Lundy died in 1839, twenty-six years before the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, in debt, with little of his own written record surviving. Garrison led the movement for those same twenty-six years and said, when Lundy died, that he owed him “all that I am as a friend of the slave.” The labor movement and the civil rights movement both took longer than any single organizer’s working life to succeed, and most of the people who built each movement died before it did. The Bhagavad Gita distilled the same point into its most famous verse, roughly two thousand years earlier: “you have a right to your actions, never to the fruits of your actions.”

You might be one of those people. Not necessarily a name any textbook remembers, though you might be that too. What you do now might still be necessary for whatever this movement eventually achieves, whether or not you live to see it.

Exhaustion doing this work has a specific, ordinary cause. It comes from doing the work without the three things that make it survivable: regular doses at a sustainable size, scheduled rest, and other people who cover the work when one person needs a break. A person feeling this exhaustion has not reached some hidden limit, and the work has not become pointless. Something specific is missing, and it can be restored.

Despair here is the same physiological state described earlier: produced by a threat that continues for a long time. It responds to acting rather than to winning. The feeling itself is not evidence about whether trying is worthwhile.

The question my friend asked, whether to stop, has a specific answer. If he stops, he becomes the person he is afraid of becoming: someone who no longer cares. That change might not feel like a loss to him when it happens. It might feel like relief instead.

Right now, though, he still feels heartbroken. That heartbreak is evidence. A person who had already lost the capacity to care would feel no heartbreak at all and thank goodness he has not become that person.

Thank you for not becoming that person. Love the world, let your heartbreak for the needless suffering of others, and keep showing up when you can, where you can, how you can. Take the time when you need. The world’s problems will still probably be here, and so will the folks trying to make things better.

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In six states, you do not need a prosecutor’s permission to start a criminal investigation. Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Oklahoma allow citizens to convene a criminal grand jury by petition. No district attorney has to agree. No attorney general has to agree. No governor has to agree.

The case those grand juries would examine is already admitted. In a January court filing, the federal government acknowledged that DOGE employees at the Social Security Administration moved agency data to an unauthorized server the agency cannot audit, sent an encrypted file of roughly 1,000 people’s names and addresses to other agencies in a format the SSA cannot open, and signed an agreement with a political group seeking to match SSA records against state voter rolls. Every state makes identity theft a crime, and the crime is the act itself, knowingly obtaining, possessing, or transferring another person’s identifying information without authorization and with wrongful intent; no one has to prove a specific account was later misused. And these cases can be filed where the victims live: Kansas, Nebraska, and New Mexico expressly place the crime in the county where the victim resides, regardless of where the perpetrator sat. The SSA holds records on virtually everyone with a Social Security number, and the agency has told a federal court it cannot determine whose data was taken. Finding that out is what grand juries are for.

The signature requirements are reachable in most of these states. In Kansas, a woman named Madison Smith needed 212 signatures to force a grand jury in her county; she collected 329, and the grand jury was convened.

Oklahoma requires 100 signatures plus 2 percent of the county’s vote in the last governor’s race, with a floor of 500 and a ceiling of 5,000. New Mexico requires the greater of 200 signatures or 2 percent of the county’s registered voters.

In most counties, that is a number a determined group of neighbors with clipboards can gather, and in the largest counties it is a few thousand. Nevada is the exception: its petition requires signatures equal to 25 percent of the county’s turnout in the last general election, a far higher requirement than the other five states.

The process has the same structure everywhere: a written petition alleging specific crimes, signatures from registered voters in your county, certification by the clerk, and a judge who must then act.

In Oklahoma, the petition is filed with the court clerk before any signatures are gathered. A judge reviews it within four days and, if it is deficient, states every deficiency in writing, with two days to amend. Once it is approved, circulators have forty-five days to collect the signatures, and once the election board certifies them, the judge must impanel the grand jury within thirty days.

In Kansas, the person who filed the petition testifies to the grand jury first, and the jury can hire its own special counsel and investigators with the court’s approval, instead of or in addition to the local prosecutor. From there the grand jury does what grand juries do: it subpoenas witnesses and records, and it decides whether to indict.

That power is not theoretical. Citizen-petitioned grand juries in Kansas have subpoenaed thousands of records and returned indictments, and the court enforces a grand jury’s subpoenas with compulsory process.

The subpoena power does not end at the state line, either. Under the Uniform Act to Secure the Attendance of Witnesses, adopted in every state and sustained by the Supreme Court, a court where a grand jury investigation has commenced can certify that a person in another state is a material witness, and that person’s home-state courts can summon them to appear, with refusal punishable as if they had defied a subpoena at home. That is the process by which the engineers who moved the data, and the leadership they answered to, can be required to answer questions under oath in a county courthouse, before a jury of ordinary citizens. They will fight it, and some fights will be lost, but a subpoena fought in public is still a public record of who fought it. And if the jury finds the evidence warrants charges, it returns an indictment, a state indictment, which no presidential pardon can reach.

For six months, The Existentialist Republic has given readers the tools to act on this at every level that has authority: hundreds of police reports filed, and letters, emails, and phone calls to county prosecutors and attorneys general in all fifty states, asking them to investigate the DOGE employees who mishandled the Social Security records of hundreds of millions of Americans, conduct the federal government has admitted in court.

Not one of those officials has publicly signaled a willingness to act, despite the conduct affecting their own residents and despite possessing the legal authority to do so. Many of the answers repeat two refusals: that it is a federal matter, which the venue laws say it is not, and that civil lawsuits are underway, which cannot convict anyone.

Every official with the power to start this has now been asked. The petition is the next step, and it is the one way to start criminal process that does not require any official’s permission, which makes it the one way a refusing official cannot refuse.

One caution. Courts quash defective petitions. In 2022, the New Mexico Supreme Court invalidated petitions seeking a grand jury to investigate the governor over her COVID orders. A petition has to allege specific crimes, not general grievances. This record supplies them: state identity theft and computer crime statutes, venue where the victims live, and a Justice Department court filing admitting the conduct. Our article on the DOGE prosecutions explains all of it.

Pennsylvania has a related mechanism. Rule 506 lets any citizen submit a private criminal complaint, which the district attorney must approve or disapprove with written reasons, reviewable by the Court of Common Pleas and public under the Right-to-Know Law. It does not bypass the prosecutor, but it converts a refusal into a signed public document.

We are beginning that process now. If you live in Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, or Oklahoma, comment below or send us a direct message with your state and county, and we will invite you to the organizing group for your state.

We are building a toolkit for each state: the signature number for your county, the filing rules and deadlines, and a petition template drafted to that state’s requirements and based only on the court-admitted record. Your comments and messages tell us which states to prepare first. We will publish each state’s materials as they are ready, and as petitions advance, we will gather and share the resources filers need at each step.

If you are in Pennsylvania and want the Rule 506 private complaint materials, the same applies. A petition has been certified before by ordinary people who decided to do it. There is no reason yours cannot be next.

Do you want to help all this happen? It’s all funded through subscribers, our Buy Me A Coffee page, and our store. They’re all linked below. If you can chip in, you’re making this all real for the folks who will be gathering signatures, drafting and filing paperwork, and eventually getting some serious consequences delivered to Musk, Big Balls, or any other DOGE member who committed a crime. Let’s make some justice.

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You can get a free PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

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Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

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More Free downloads:

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All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

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A Note From the Author

What follows is a summary of how license plate surveillance cameras were installed across the country without public consent, the cities and states that have fought back and won, and what a law that ends the practice would contain. After the summary come instructions for contacting your representatives, written so the minimum action takes about two minutes. After the instructions comes the full text of the model legislation. Most of its provisions already exist in laws that states have passed or formally proposed, including Washington's Driver Privacy Act, Colorado's warrant requirement for sharing data with federal agencies, Illinois's per-violation damages structure, and the criminal penalty Texas applies to officials who conduct public business in unlawfully closed meetings. The provision that exists nowhere yet is the felony for installing the cameras without public consent. The document ends with a library of free resources for anyone who wants to organize locally, followed by the reference list.

The small raised numbers that appear throughout are called superscripts. Each superscript points to a numbered source in the reference list at the end of this document, so you can check every factual claim against the reporting, statutes, and court records it came from.

There is a fair chance that a small camera on a pole near your home photographs every license plate that passes it. Flock Safety operates more than 100,000 automated license plate reader cameras across 49 states, and its network scans roughly 20 billion plates per month.¹ In most of the cities where those cameras operate, no elected body ever voted to install them. A police chief or a city manager signed a contract, often a no-cost trial that required no budget approval, and residents learned the cameras existed after they were already recording.

The record of what happens next is now extensive. Local police ran more than 4,000 immigration-related searches through Flock's network on behalf of federal agencies, according to reporting by 404 Media.² Mountain View, California terminated its contract after an investigation found roughly 600,000 searches of its data in a single year by more than 250 agencies the city had never approved.³ A class action filed in February 2026 alleges that out-of-state and federal agencies searched the San Francisco Police Department's Flock database more than 1.6 million times in seven months.⁴ Flock has installed cameras without required permits in at least five states, and two state transportation agencies barred it from new installations.⁵ It has made false statements to city councils about what its systems do,¹ and in February 2026 it rewrote its standard contract terms to make cancellation harder even when a council votes against approval.⁶

The public response so far has been cancellation. More than 50 cities have ended their contracts since late 2024.⁷ In the same period, roughly 800 cities signed new ones.⁷ Cancellation works one council at a time, and it happens only after the cameras are installed and the data has already left the jurisdiction. Every state law passed so far, including Washington's Driver Privacy Act, regulates how the data can be used after the cameras exist.⁷ No law anywhere attaches a consequence to the person who decides to install them without asking the public. The model legislation at the end of this article makes that decision a crime. It does six things.

First, it requires public consent before deployment. No government agency may install license plate reader cameras, including free trials, pilot programs, and donated cameras, without an ordinance passed by recorded vote after at least two public hearings noticed 30 days in advance. The hearing notice must disclose the camera locations, the vendor, the full contract, the data collected, the retention period, and every entity that will have access.

Second, it makes unauthorized deployment a felony. An official who knowingly installs or authorizes these systems without that ordinance faces up to five years in prison. Concealing the system, lying to the council about it, or continuing to operate it more than 30 days after written notice raises the maximum to ten years. Conviction forfeits the office and disqualifies the person from holding public office for ten years, and public funds may not pay the fines.

Third, it gives the state attorney general direct authority to prosecute, so enforcement does not depend on a county prosecutor deciding whether to charge officials that prosecutor works with every day.

Fourth, it makes the company pay. A vendor that installs cameras without first receiving a certified copy of the authorizing ordinance owes every driver it scanned $1,000 per scan, or $5,000 per scan if the violation was willful. One camera records thousands of vehicles per day, so the liability for a single unauthorized installation passes one million dollars within days. The vendor also owes the state $10,000 per camera per day, must delete all data collected, and loses eligibility for public contracts in the state for five years.

Fifth, it regulates the systems the public does approve. Data may not be shared with federal agencies or out-of-state entities without a warrant. It may not be used for immigration enforcement, for surveillance of health care facilities or protests, or for any officer's personal purposes. It must be deleted within 30 days, and every search must be logged in a public audit record. Willful violation of these rules is also a felony.

Sixth, it lets residents enforce it. Any person whose plate was scanned can sue, and a winning plaintiff collects attorney fees. Systems already operating get 180 days to obtain public authorization or shut down and be removed.

The penalty grades have precedent. Federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 2511, makes intercepting a single phone conversation a felony punishable by up to five years.⁸ Texas has made it a jailable offense since 1967 for officials to knowingly conduct public business in an unlawfully closed meeting.⁹ Illinois grades official misconduct as a Class 3 felony.¹⁰ The per-scan damages structure copies the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which sets $1,000 to $5,000 per violation¹¹ and produced a $650 million settlement from Facebook.¹² If intercepting one conversation is a five-year felony, deploying a network that records the movements of every driver in a city without authorization can be graded the same or higher.

A quick note: The ER runs mostly on about 10 new subscribers per article. We have hit that number 2 of the last 14 days. Don't let this be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent. If you can be a subscriber at any level, or buy us a cup of coffee, you keep this resource alive and growing and putting democracy on the offensive!

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What You Can Do

The minimum action takes about two minutes, and here is exactly how to do it.

First, find the people who represent you. For state legislators, go to openstates.org, type in your home address, and it returns your state representative and your state senator with their phone numbers and email addresses. Your state legislature's own website has the same lookup, usually under a link named "Find My Legislator" or "Who Represents Me." For city council, search "[your city] city council members" and the city's website will list each member's name, district, email, and phone number. If the cameras in your area belong to a county sheriff rather than a city police department, your county commissioners approve that budget, and the county website lists them the same way.

Second, send the message or make the call. Use this structure and fill in the blanks with your own facts:

I'm a [your job, your role, or however you describe yourself] living in [your neighborhood or city], and I care about this because [your reason, in one sentence]. I do not want license plate reader cameras operating here without a public vote, and I want officials and vendors who install them without one to face real penalties. Please support legislation that requires public consent before any deployment.

Filled in, it reads like this: "I'm an electrician living on the east side of town, and I care about this because my work van gets photographed a dozen times a day and I never agreed to that. I do not want license plate reader cameras operating here without a public vote, and I want officials and vendors who install them without one to face real penalties. Please support legislation that requires public consent before any deployment."

The blanks are the point. Legislative offices record identical form messages as a single campaign. A message that opens with who you are, where you live, and why you care gets recorded as an individual constituent contact, and individual contacts are the number legislators see. If you call instead of writing, a staffer will answer, you say the same four sentences, they record your position, and the call ends in under a minute. You do not need to argue with anyone.

A short message from many people does more than a long message from a few. If every reader does only this, it is enough.

If you want to do more, here are the next steps in order of effort.

1. Send this article, with the model act below, to your state legislators and ask them to introduce it or sign on as co-sponsors. A template email follows.

2. Send it to your county Democratic central committee or your legislative district organization and ask them to adopt the endorsement resolution below at their next regular meeting. Party endorsements matter because legislators read them as a measurement of primary-election sentiment in their own district.

3. Find out whether your city already has these cameras. The crowdsourced map at deflock.org shows known locations.¹³ Whether or not it shows cameras near you, file a public records request with your police department for any ALPR vendor contract, the current data-sharing configuration, and the complete network audit log of searches run against your city's data. The audit log is the document that has caused city councils across the country to cancel, because it lists federal and out-of-state searches the council never approved.¹

4. Speak at a council meeting if your city has cameras. State three things during public comment: the contract was signed without the process this act requires, you are requesting the network audit, and you are asking the council to adopt the consent requirement as a local ordinance.

5. Coordinate with existing campaigns. The ACLU organizes state by state under the name Get the Flock Out,¹⁴ and more than 50 cities have already canceled.⁷ Your officials would not be the first to act.

6. Report your results where other residents of your district will see them. Each public endorsement makes the next one easier to get.

Template Email to a State Legislator

Subject: Request to sponsor the Automated License Plate Surveillance Consent and Accountability Act

Dear [Representative / Senator] [Last Name],

I live in your district, in [city]. Attached is model legislation requiring public consent before any government in [STATE] installs automated license plate reader cameras, making it a felony for an official to install them without that consent, and imposing per-scan financial penalties on any vendor that installs them without verifying authorization.

More than 50 cities nationwide have canceled contracts with Flock Safety after audits showed federal agencies and out-of-state police searching local data without authorization. [STATE] residents are in that network right now. Existing laws regulate the data after the cameras exist. This bill regulates the decision to install them.

Will you introduce this bill or sign on as a co-sponsor? I am available by phone or email to discuss it, and I will follow up within two weeks.

[Full name]

[Street address]

[Phone number]

Endorsement Resolution for a Local Democratic Organization

Resolved, that the [County] Democratic [Central Committee / Party] endorses the Automated License Plate Surveillance Consent and Accountability Act; calls on the [STATE] Legislature to enact it; calls on every Democratic legislator representing any portion of [County] to sponsor or co-sponsor it; and directs the Chair to transmit this resolution and the full text of the act to each of those legislators within 14 days of adoption.

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Model Act Text

The full act follows. Bracketed text marks the items a sponsor adapts to state code: felony classifications, the open meetings citation, and formatting. Everything else is ready to introduce.

AN ACT relating to public consent requirements for automated license plate recognition systems; establishing criminal penalties for unauthorized deployment; establishing civil penalties for vendors; creating a private right of action; and prescribing data protection requirements.

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This act may be cited as the Automated License Plate Surveillance Consent and Accountability Act.

SECTION 2. LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS.

The legislature finds that:

(a) Automated license plate recognition systems record the location, direction of travel, date, and time of every vehicle that passes them and retain that information in searchable databases, creating a record of the movements of persons who are suspected of no crime.

(b) A single private vendor operates more than 100,000 such cameras in the United States and processes approximately 20 billion plate scans per month across a shared national network.

(c) Governing bodies in multiple states have discovered, through audits and investigative reporting, that data collected in their jurisdictions was searched by or transferred to federal agencies and out-of-state agencies without local authorization, including thousands of immigration-related searches conducted through local law enforcement accounts.

(d) One municipality discovered roughly 600,000 searches of its data in a single year by more than 250 agencies it had never approved, and litigation in another state alleges that out-of-state and federal agencies searched one city's data more than 1.6 million times in seven months.

(e) Vendors of these systems have installed cameras without required permits, made false statements to governing bodies concerning system capabilities and data sharing, reinstalled cameras after being ordered to remove them, and revised standard contract terms to restrict the ability of governing bodies to terminate.

(f) Deployment decisions are frequently made without public notice, without a recorded vote, and through no-cost trial programs that receive no procurement review, so residents learn that the systems exist only after they are operating.

(g) Existing law in this state and others regulates the use and retention of data after collection but attaches no personal consequence to the decision to deploy such systems without public consent.

(h) Federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 2511, classifies the unauthorized interception of a single wire communication as a felony punishable by imprisonment for up to five years. A system that records the movements of every vehicle in a jurisdiction warrants penalties graded at or above that standard.

(i) Public consent, obtained through noticed hearings and a recorded vote of elected representatives, is the minimum lawful condition for the operation of mass surveillance systems in a free state.

SECTION 3. DEFINITIONS.

As used in this act:

(a) "Automated license plate recognition system" or "ALPR system" means one or more cameras, together with associated hardware, software, or services, that automatically capture images of license plates, vehicles, or vehicle characteristics and convert them into machine-readable or searchable data. The term includes systems provided as a service and access to any shared or networked database of such data.

(b) "Deploy" means to install, activate, operate, connect to a shared data network, or obtain ongoing access to data from an ALPR system.

(c) "Authorizing ordinance" means an ordinance or resolution adopted by recorded vote of the governing body of the jurisdiction after no fewer than two public hearings, each noticed at least 30 days in advance in accordance with [cite state open meetings law], where the published notice and agenda materials for each hearing include: the number of cameras and their locations or location criteria; the identity of the vendor and the complete contract, including cost; the categories of data to be collected; the retention period; every entity that will have access to the data or the network; and the audit provisions.

(d) "Governing body" means the elected legislative body of a county, city, town, or other political subdivision, or, for a state agency, [the legislature].

(e) "Public officer or public employee" means any elected official, appointed official, or employee of the state or a political subdivision.

(f) "Vendor" means any person or entity that sells, leases, donates, installs, operates, or provides an ALPR system or access to ALPR data as a service.

(g) "No-cost deployment" means any deployment provided as a trial, pilot, demonstration, grant-funded program, or donation, or otherwise without expenditure of public funds.

(h) "Plate capture" means each instance in which an ALPR system records a license plate, vehicle image, or vehicle characteristic and converts it into data.

SECTION 4. PUBLIC CONSENT REQUIRED.

(1) No agency of the state or of a political subdivision may deploy an ALPR system without an authorizing ordinance.

(2) A material change to an authorized deployment, including any new data-sharing recipient, any new system capability, any increase in the number of cameras, or any amendment to the vendor contract, requires a new authorizing ordinance adopted by the same procedure.

(3) An authorizing ordinance expires two years after adoption unless renewed by the same procedure, following publication of a report stating the number of plate captures, every search performed, and every entity that accessed the data during the authorization period.

(4) The complete vendor contract, the system's data-sharing configuration, and all audit logs are public records and are not exempt from disclosure as trade secrets or proprietary information.

SECTION 5. CRIMINAL PENALTY FOR UNAUTHORIZED DEPLOYMENT.

(1) A public officer or public employee who knowingly deploys, installs, authorizes, or executes a contract or agreement for an ALPR system, including any no-cost deployment, without an authorizing ordinance is guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for up to five years, a fine of up to $10,000, or both [insert corresponding state felony classification].

(2) The offense is a felony punishable by imprisonment for up to ten years, a fine of up to $20,000, or both [insert corresponding state felony classification], if the officer or employee:

(a) concealed the deployment from the governing body or the public;

(b) made a false or misleading statement to the governing body or the public regarding the system's existence, capabilities, data collection, or data sharing; or

(c) continued operation of the system more than 30 days after receiving written notice of noncompliance from the attorney general, the governing body, or a court.

(3) The attorney general has concurrent original jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute violations of this section.

(4) Conviction under this section constitutes malfeasance in office. The office or position is forfeited upon conviction, and the person is disqualified from holding public office in this state for ten years.

(5) No public funds and no insurance purchased with public funds may be used to pay a fine imposed under this section or to indemnify a person convicted under this section.

(6) It is not a defense to a prosecution under this section that the system was provided at no cost or that no public funds were expended.

SECTION 6. VENDOR DUTIES AND CIVIL PENALTIES.

(1) A vendor shall not install or activate an ALPR system for an agency of this state or a political subdivision, and shall not connect any such agency to a shared data network, before receiving a certified copy of the authorizing ordinance. This duty applies regardless of the vendor’s knowledge or intent.

(2) A vendor that violates subsection (1), or that operates a system after the authorization expires or is revoked, is liable to each person whose vehicle was recorded during the unauthorized period for statutory damages of $1,000 per plate capture, or $5,000 per plate capture if the violation was willful or reckless.

(3) A vendor in violation is additionally liable to the state for a civil penalty of $10,000 per camera per day of unauthorized operation.

(4) Within 30 days of receiving notice of a violation, the vendor shall permanently delete all data collected during the unauthorized period and file a sworn certification of deletion signed by an officer of the company. Failure to do so incurs an additional civil penalty of $10,000 per day.

(5) A vendor found in violation of this section is barred from entering into any contract with this state or any of its political subdivisions for five years.

(6) Any contract for an unauthorized deployment is void and unenforceable. Any contract provision that restricts a governing body’s ability to terminate when it declines to approve or fund a deployment is void. Any provision requiring arbitration of claims arising under this act is unenforceable.

SECTION 7. DATA PROTECTION REQUIREMENTS FOR AUTHORIZED SYSTEMS.

(1) No ALPR data collected in this state may be shared with, transferred to, or made searchable by any federal agency or any out-of-state entity except pursuant to a warrant or court order.

(2) No ALPR system or its data may be used for immigration investigation or enforcement; for the surveillance of reproductive health care facilities, gender-affirming health care facilities, or persons seeking or providing such care; for the surveillance of activity protected by the First Amendment; or for any personal purpose of an officer or employee, including locating or monitoring a person with whom the officer or employee has a personal relationship.

(3) ALPR data shall be permanently deleted no later than 30 days after collection unless it is retained as evidence in a specific investigation pursuant to a warrant or court order.

(4) Every search of ALPR data shall be logged with the identity of the person searching, the date and time, and the stated purpose. Audit logs are public records, with plate numbers redacted.

(5) A willful violation of this section is a felony punishable by imprisonment for up to five years, a fine of up to $10,000, or both [insert corresponding state felony classification], and gives rise to the remedies in Section 6(2) and Section 8.

SECTION 8. PRIVATE RIGHT OF ACTION.

(1) Any person whose vehicle was recorded in violation of this act may bring a civil action for the statutory damages provided in Section 6, together with injunctive and declaratory relief.

(2) Any resident of a jurisdiction in which a violation occurs may bring a civil action for injunctive and declaratory relief.

(3) A prevailing plaintiff shall recover reasonable attorney fees and costs.

(4) An action under this section must be commenced within three years of the date the violation was discovered or reasonably should have been discovered.

(5) No agreement to arbitrate applies to claims arising under this act.

SECTION 9. ATTORNEY GENERAL ENFORCEMENT.

The attorney general may bring civil actions to recover the penalties in Section 6, may seek injunctive relief, and has the concurrent criminal jurisdiction provided in Section 5(3).

SECTION 10. RELATION TO LOCAL LAW.

This act establishes minimum requirements. A political subdivision may adopt stricter requirements, including prohibiting ALPR systems entirely.

SECTION 11. EXISTING SYSTEMS.

(1) An agency operating an ALPR system on the effective date of this act has 180 days to obtain an authorizing ordinance under Section 4 or to cease operation and complete removal of the system within 30 additional days.

(2) Operation beyond the deadlines in subsection (1) constitutes unauthorized deployment for all purposes of Sections 5 and 6, and the unauthorized period runs from the deadline.

(3) Data collected before the effective date without an authorizing ordinance shall be permanently deleted within 60 days of the effective date unless retained as evidence pursuant to a warrant or court order.

SECTION 12. SEVERABILITY.

If any provision of this act or its application to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the remainder of the act and its application to other persons or circumstances are not affected.

SECTION 13. EFFECTIVE DATE.

This act takes effect [immediately / 90 days after adjournment].

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The Activist Library: Free Resources

Every resource below is free to use.

- DeFlock (deflock.org). A crowdsourced map of automated license plate reader locations. Check it to find the cameras near you, and add any you find that are missing.

- Have I Been Flocked (haveibeenflocked.com). A searchable collection of Flock audit logs obtained through public records requests, showing who searched which networks and the reasons they gave.

- Get the Flock Out (aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out). The ACLU’s state-by-state campaign page, with local contacts, toolkits, and a record of which cities and states have acted.

- State of Surveillance (stateofsurveillance.org). Independent reporting that tracks Flock contract cancellations, lawsuits, and legislation, free to read without a paywall.

- Atlas of Surveillance (atlasofsurveillance.org). The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s database of surveillance technology in use by law enforcement agencies, searchable by city and county.

- Open States (openstates.org). Look up your state legislators and track bills in all 50 states.

- MuckRock (muckrock.com). A public records platform where released documents, including thousands of pages of Flock contracts and audit logs, are readable at no cost.

- The Existentialist Republic’s organizing materials, including the E.A.R.R. civic engagement booklets and other model legislation, at [insert link].

---

References

1. State of Surveillance, “30+ Cities Have Canceled Flock Safety Contracts. The List Keeps Growing.” May 19, 2026. https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/flock-safety-cancel-wave-30-cities-alpr-surveillance-contracts-2026/

2. Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox, “ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows,” 404 Media, May 27, 2025. https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-camera-network-data-shows/

3. Emily Margaretten, “City Council terminates Mountain View’s license plate camera contract,” Mountain View Voice, February 25, 2026. https://www.mv-voice.com/city-government/2026/02/25/city-council-terminates-mountain-views-license-plate-camera-contract/

4. KTVU, “Class action lawsuit alleges Flock license plate readers violate CA law and privacy of residents,” February 2026. https://www.ktvu.com/news/class-action-lawsuit-alleges-flock-license-plate-readers-violate-ca-law-privacy-residents

5. Thomas Brewster, “This $4 Billion Car Surveillance Startup Says It Cuts Crime. But It Likely Broke The Law.” Forbes, February 27, 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2024/02/27/flock-safety-surveillance-broke-state-law/

6. American Civil Liberties Union, “Municipalities: Beware of Changes in Flock’s Legal Terms if You’re Using or Considering License Plate Readers,” April 2026. https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-cameras/flocks-terms-and-conditions

7. Tech Times, “Flock Safety Crosses 100,000 Cameras as 53 Cities Cancel Over Unauthorized Federal Data Access,” June 29, 2026. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319317/20260629/flock-safety-crosses-100000-cameras-53-cities-cancel-over-unauthorized-federal-data-access.htm

8. 18 U.S.C. § 2511.

9. Texas Government Code § 551.144.

10. 720 ILCS 5/33-3 (Illinois official misconduct statute).

11. 740 ILCS 14/20 (Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, damages provision).

12. In re Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Litigation, 522 F. Supp. 3d 617 (N.D. Cal. 2021) (final approval of $650 million class settlement).

13. DeFlock, crowdsourced map of automated license plate reader locations. https://deflock.org

14. American Civil Liberties Union, “Get the Flock Out” campaign. https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out

Note from the author: this is an updated republication of a previous article that feels particularly important right now. Thanks for reading. - Chris

“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.” — Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1965)¹

A chaotic system is not a random system. Precise, unchanging rules govern a chaotic system and determine its outcome. What makes it chaotic is that you cannot predict individual events in advance, not because the rules are absent but because the system is too complex to trace from cause to effect at the individual level. You cannot follow any single raindrop from cloud to ground, but you can predict with certainty that it is going to rain.

A stochastic process works the same way. Roll one die and the outcome is anyone’s guess, but roll ten thousand dice and the distribution of results becomes statistically inevitable. The randomness lives at the individual level; the certainty lives at the aggregate. Both describe the same system from two different altitudes.

In the winter of 1170, King Henry II of England said words to the effect of “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Four of his knights heard it, rode separately to Canterbury Cathedral, and killed Thomas Becket on the altar steps. Henry issued no official order and no coordination happened between the four men; the signal was broadcast and the probability distribution handled the rest.² Researchers who study political violence eventually gave this mechanism a name: stochastic terrorism. A person with a large platform broadcasts that a particular group of people or individual are dangerous, subhuman, an existential threat to everything decent. He does not instruct anyone to commit violence or coordinate with anyone; he simply turns up the signal, consistently, at volume, and repeats it. Somewhere in the population receiving that signal, the probability distribution does what probability distributions do, and someone acts. No one planned it or ordered it. The violence was unpredictable at the individual level and statistically almost guaranteed at the aggregate level. The broadcaster provides the conditions and steps back while maintaining plausible deniability.

Now watch what happens when you flip it.

A publisher sends an article to fifty thousand subscribers. The article explains that DOGE employees transferred Social Security Administration data to an unauthorized outside server, sent a file containing the private records of roughly a thousand people to outside affiliates, signed an agreement with a political group seeking to use that data to challenge election results, and continued accessing SSA data after a federal judge ordered them to stop. The government’s own lawyers documented all of this in a federal court filing on January 16, 2026.³ The article explains that state computer crime statutes cover this conduct, that the president cannot pardon a state criminal conviction, and that here is the complaint filing process for your state.

Nobody coordinates with anybody, and nobody knows which complaint lands on which desk or which attorney general wakes up on which morning feeling particularly brave and ambitious. Readers filed over a thousand complaints across more than twenty states.⁴ The system self-organizes; the broadcaster provided the conditions while readers did the rest.

This is stochastic activism. It follows the same physical laws as stochastic terrorism because it is the same mechanism turned toward a completely different end.

An organization that demonstrated this mechanism was the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Founded in 1987 with no central headquarters anyone could raid and no single leader anyone could arrest, the organization ran distributed direct action campaigns across dozens of cities simultaneously, with chapters making independent tactical decisions while pursuing the same goal. Within a decade they had significantly impacted the entire federal drug approval apparatus for the lifesaving research and drugs their community needed.⁵ They understood the system and acted inside it at volume, under sets of principles, guidelines, and tactics, rather than centralized command structure or expansive planning and coordination.

Now let’s add the thermodynamics.

When you excite an atom, it transfers energy to the atoms around it. It doesn’t use Roberts Rules of Order, coordinate with the receiving atoms, or need a central command structure telling it which direction to move. Energy transfers through matter according to laws that predate every government that has ever existed and will outlast every government that will ever exist. An atom moves around more, that creates what we call heat, sufficient heat applied to any system then produces changes that system; movement and time are the only variables.

Every person who files a complaint, makes a call, sends a letter, shows up at an office, crashes a fundraiser, or loudly shows up somewhere they were not expected is an atom now excited and generating energy. They transfer energy to the people immediately around them, those people transfer it further, their actions can even become amplified, this movement and energy generates heat. Heat softens and melts and allows reformation.

Entropy is the term for energy dissipation over time. Systems trend toward slowing down, losing heat, and eventually going cold. Our universe started with the hottest moment that has ever existed, and it has been losing heat ever since. Stars explode into smaller stars with less and less heat, and eventually there are no stars, just cold dead rocks. Scientists call this the heat death of the universe. When people join an organization and have their enthusiasm crushed by excessive meetings and minimal impact, that energy dissipates. Enthusiasm, heat, action: they are the same thing, and we need all of it.

The United States government is part of that universe. This country was born in revolution, from the heat of enlightenment ideals igniting enough energy among the people to throw off an empire and forge something entirely new, founded on the radical idea that a nation should exist for its people rather than the other way around. That was our big bang. Entropy has taken its toll, and the system has grown stale, cold, and increasingly antagonistic to the people it was built to serve.

Today, Congress is the sharpest example of this institutional entropy. In 2024, congressional incumbents won reelection at a 98% rate.⁸ You can probably guess that Americans don't have a 98% approval rating for Congress, in fact their approval rating currently sits around 15%.⁹ The same people return, make the same deals, and the energy that was supposed to flow from citizens through their representatives into public life dissipates instead into personal wealth and institutional self-preservation. The institution still holds its shape the way a dying star does, but it gets dimmer and dimmer and eventually stops producing light.

Governments are not closed systems, though, and that changes everything. The second law of thermodynamics describes what happens when no new energy enters. We are the new energy.

Here’s one example of what that looks like in practice. State legislators report that six to eight constituent contacts on one side of an issue feels like a landslide of public opinion.⁶ Six people. That is a Tuesday afternoon, and three excited atoms finding three others.

Here is where the traditional organizing model gets this wrong. It generally assumes that change requires unified command structure, central coordinators, recognized leadership, and headquarters someone can point to, but that model was built for a different world. In the current surveillance environment, a movement with a headquarters, a leader, and a central message operation hands the adversary three targets.

A weather pattern cannot be arrested, and you cannot surveil a system with no command node or anticipate the strategy of ten thousand people who each independently decided to do the same thing for their own reasons on their own timeline without consulting anyone. Decentralization is the beating heart of democracy.

Let’s think about what this means for how we understand our own actions. The person who filed a complaint and heard nothing back did not fail. They were one variable in a chaotic system, one die in a set of ten thousand, one atom transferring energy into a network that extends far beyond anything they can see. The silence doesn’t mean the water isn’t heating.

Water does not gradually become steam. It absorbs heat invisibly, degree by degree, with nothing to show for it, until it hits the threshold and the phase transition happens all at once. The heating was always working and the change was always coming; it just was not visible until it was total.

Concentrated power can capture courts, restructure agencies, pardon allies, and control the information environment, yet it cannot repeal the second law of thermodynamics. It cannot negotiate with a chaotic system or hold still a population of people who understand that their individual action feeds a process that has never, in the entire history of matter and energy, produced a different result when these conditions are met. Physics, unlike the current Supreme Court majority, is not subject to reversal.

Carl Sagan wrote that science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.⁷ Nobody needs a physics degree to think like a scientist, and nobody needs a platform, an organization, a leader, or permission to act like one. Design your experiment. File the complaint. Make the call. Write the thread. Show up somewhere you were not expected. Measure what generates heat and do more of that. Every one of us can set conditions and release them into the system. Every one of us can be the broadcaster. The more of us who understand the physics of activism and act accordingly and independently, the faster the heat builds and the less any single point of failure matters. Be a scientist. Become a more influential atom.

We have been trained to measure our actions against the power directly in front of us and conclude that we are too small, but we are measuring at the wrong altitude. Measure at the aggregate level, across the full distribution of people doing the same things independently across the full geography of this organism we call a nation, and the picture looks different.

These laws answer to no legislature, no court, no executive order, and have no expiration date. They govern everything, and no king has ever been an exception.

So why did I write this? Not to explain the physics for its own sake. I wrote it to tell you plainly that what you are doing matters, that the heat you generate is real, that the system you are pushing against is not as immovable as it looks, and that the laws of this country might have been weaponized against freedom and justice, but the laws of the universe are on our side. File the complaint. Make the call. Show up somewhere you were not expected. Create heat and become change.

So what now? The Existentialist Republic has three full length books and a dozen booklets all available for free with download links below. You can also check out our four pieces of model legislation that are shared directly with legislators and activists.

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Don’t let this be the reason you miss rent or skip a meal. For everyone else, you can be one of the ten today and make sure the articles, books, legislation, and training keep coming for everyone.

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Works Cited

1. Feynman, R. P. (1965). The character of physical law. MIT Press.

2. Warren, W. L. (1973). Henry II. University of California Press.

3. Notice of corrections to the record, AFSCME v. Social Security Administration, No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH (D. Md. Jan. 16, 2026).

4. Armitage, C. (2026, February 16). Democrats can launch criminal investigations into DOGE, today. The Existentialist Republic. https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/democrats-can-launch-criminal-investigations

5. Gould, D. B. (2009). Moving politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s fight against AIDS. University of Chicago Press.

6. Strand, M. (2018). How many contacts does it take to change a legislator’s mind? Nonprofit VOTE. https://www.nonprofitvote.org/how-many-contacts-does-it-take/

7. Sagan, C. (1996). The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark. Ballantine Books.

8. Ballotpedia. (2024). Election results, 2024: Incumbent win rates by state. https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Incumbent_win_rates_by_state

9. Gallup. (2025, October). Congress' job rating sinks to 15%. https://news.gallup.com/poll/696722/congress-job-rating-sinks-trump-steady.aspx

What follows are ten facts about policing in the United States, each of them current law or current federal data, and together they divide into two categories: what officers may legally do to us, and what the courts have so far declined to make officers do for us. To be clear, a list of grievances without a remedy is not helpful so this article ends with a remedy: four reforms state legislatures have already proven they can pass.

1. A department can reject an applicant for scoring too high on an intelligence test, and a federal appeals court found nothing unconstitutional in the practice. When Robert Jordan scored a 33 on the Wonderlic cognitive ability exam, well above the scores typical for patrol applicants, New London, Connecticut declined even to interview him, because the city considered only candidates who scored between 20 and 27 on the theory that high scorers grow bored and quit. The policy survived rational basis review, the Second Circuit held in Jordan v. City of New London (2000), and the decision has never been disturbed. The Constitution sets no minimum for the judgment, education, or intelligence of the people we arm and send into our homes, yet at least one city successfully defended a maximum.

2. Whatever the entrance exam misses, the academy has little time to fix, because training an American police officer takes less time than licensing the person who cuts our hair. Basic training at state and local academies averaged 806 hours in 2022, which comes to about twenty weeks, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics Census of Law Enforcement Training Academies, while cosmetology licenses in most states require somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 hours. Germany trains its officers for a minimum of two and a half years before they patrol alone, and Finland requires a three year degree from its Police University College, which leaves the American figure short of both. The distribution inside those 806 hours matters as much as the total, since recruits averaged 73 hours on firearms skills and 51 hours on criminal and constitutional law, per the same census, which means the typical academy spends more classroom time teaching a recruit to shoot than teaching that recruit what the Constitution allows.

3. Officers are not even required to know the law those hours are supposed to teach, and the Supreme Court has said so directly. A North Carolina officer stopped a car over a single broken brake light even though state law required only one working lamp, so no violation had actually occurred, yet the stop went forward, a consent search followed, and the car’s owner ended up with a felony cocaine conviction that the courts refused to overturn. A reasonable mistake of law can justify a seizure, the Court held eight to one in Heien v. North Carolina (2014). The rest of us are still governed by the old maxim that ignorance of the law is no excuse, and officers received a different rule, written by the same Court that wrote ours.

4. We can be handcuffed, booked, and jailed for offenses that carry no jail time at all. Gail Atwater was driving her two children home in Lago Vista, Texas when an officer arrested her for a seatbelt violation, an offense whose maximum penalty was a fifty dollar fine, and she was handcuffed in front of her kids, driven to the station, booked, and held in a cell for about an hour until she posted bond. The Fourth Amendment permits a full custodial arrest even for a fine-only offense, the Supreme Court held five to four in Atwater v. City of Lago Vista (2001), and the majority described what happened to her as involving gratuitous humiliations and pointless indignity before upholding the arrest anyway.

5. Staying silent does not invoke the right to remain silent, which is the kind of sentence that sounds wrong until we read the cases. A Michigan suspect sat nearly mute through almost three hours of questioning, and when he finally gave a one-word answer, that word counted as a waiver because he had never expressly invoked the right, the Supreme Court held in Berghuis v. Thompkins (2010). Texas prosecutors then used a man’s silence during voluntary, pre-arrest questioning as evidence of his guilt, and the Court allowed that too, in Salinas v. Texas (2013), because he never spoke the invocation aloud; even the words “Maybe I should talk to a lawyer” had already failed as too ambiguous in Davis v. United States (1994). The working script therefore has two sentences and no improvisation: I am invoking my right to remain silent, and I want a lawyer. After that comes actual silence, because answering a question an hour later can count as a waiver of everything the script just protected.

6. The precision demanded of us in that interrogation room does not bind the officers across the table, because police can lie to us outright, and the Supreme Court approved the practice more than half a century ago. Detectives in Oregon falsely told a murder suspect that his cousin had already confessed, the suspect then confessed himself, and the confession stood, the Court held in Frazier v. Cupp (1969), which remains good law today. Under it, officers can invent eyewitnesses who never existed, cite DNA evidence no lab ever produced, and describe a failed polygraph that was never administered. The tactic works, which is the problem, because it works on the innocent too; incriminating statements or outright false confessions appear in roughly 29 percent of the DNA exoneration cases documented by the Innocence Project. Ten states, beginning with Illinois in 2021, have barred deception in interrogations of minors, and the list now includes California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Virginia, but for adults the lie remains legal almost everywhere. People with intellectual and developmental disabilities are demonstrably susceptible to false and coerced confessions, and so far the statute books barely acknowledge it: Illinois extended its ban in 2024 to cover people of any age with a severe or profound intellectual disability, a Pennsylvania bill covering intellectual disabilities and autism advanced out of committee this spring, and the other forty-eight states require nothing.

7. When officers do break the law, qualified immunity protects them unless a prior court case already condemned nearly identical conduct, and the precision demanded of that match would be funny in any other context. The doctrine appears nowhere in the text of the Civil Rights Act of 1871 that it limits; the Supreme Court constructed it across a series of decisions, and the modern version dates to Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), whose test asks whether the precise violation was clearly established in existing precedent before the officer committed it. Consider what that requirement produces. Officers accused of stealing more than $225,000 in cash and rare coins while executing a search warrant kept their immunity because no earlier decision had established that stealing seized property violates the Constitution, the Ninth Circuit held in Jessop v. City of Fresno (2019), and the Supreme Court declined to review the case; a Nashville officer who released a police dog on a burglary suspect who said he had surrendered and was sitting with his hands raised kept his immunity as well, because the closest precedent involved a suspect who had been lying down, the Sixth Circuit held in Baxter v. Bracey (2018). The difference between sitting and lying down decided the case.

8. Governments can take our property without convicting us of anything, and the proceeds fund the agencies doing the taking. Civil forfeiture proceeds against the property rather than the owner, which is how case names like United States v. $8,850 entered the law books, and because the action is civil, the protections we associate with criminal court, appointed counsel among them, generally do not apply. States and the federal government forfeited at least $68.8 billion between 2000 and 2019, a figure the researchers describe as a drastic undercount because many states report incomplete data, per the Institute for Justice report Policing for Profit, and in 2014 the net receipts of the federal forfeiture funds reached $4.5 billion while the FBI put nationwide burglary losses at $3.5 billion, which means federal forfeiture alone took more than every burglar in America combined, an analysis The Washington Post published in 2015. At least four states, Maine, Nebraska, New Mexico, and North Carolina, have eliminated the practice by requiring a criminal conviction first, and most of the rest have declined to follow them.

9. Officers fired for misconduct get hired by other departments, and we know this because two law professors counted. Matching employment records for every full-time officer in Florida across three decades, the researchers found roughly 1,100 previously fired officers working in the state in a typical year, about three percent of the workforce, and those officers clustered in smaller agencies with fewer resources, where they proved more likely than their peers to be fired again or accused of moral character violations. The findings appear in The Wandering Officer, published in the Yale Law Journal in 2020, and no binding national system exists to interrupt the pattern, since the National Decertification Index depends on voluntary state reporting and a department that prefers not to ask is free not to.

10. After nine entries describing what the law permits officers to do to us, the last one describes what the law requires officers to do for us, and the answer, with one exception we will get to, is nothing. Two women in a Washington, D.C. rowhouse called police twice while intruders attacked their roommate downstairs, and after officers knocked once and left, the assaults continued for fourteen hours; the survivors sued and lost, because government owes police protection to the public at large rather than to any particular person, the D.C. Court of Appeals held in Warren v. District of Columbia (1981). The Supreme Court reached the same result for a boy beaten into permanent disability by his father despite repeated reports to authorities, in DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989), and again for a mother whose three daughters were murdered after police declined to enforce her restraining order, in Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), and after Parkland the federal courts applied the identical logic to the school officials and the armed deputy who stayed outside during the shooting, in L.S. v. Peterson (11th Cir. 2020). The exception covers people in custody, which means the Constitution obligates police to protect us only after they have taken our liberty away. Nothing in those rulings stops a legislature from writing affirmative duties of its own, and a dozen states plus the District of Columbia did exactly that within a year of George Floyd’s murder, requiring officers to intervene when a fellow officer uses excessive force, with penalties that range from decertification to criminal charges. The phrase protect and serve began as a winning entry in a 1955 Los Angeles Police Department slogan contest, and in the seven decades since, no court has given it legal force.

One more, at no charge, because it pairs with number five. Consent searches require our consent, and officers have no obligation to tell us we can refuse, per Schneckloth v. Bustamonte (1973), which means the sentence “I do not consent to any search” is invaluable, violates no rules, and preserves our rights.

The pattern across all ten is consistent: courts wrote broad permissions for state power and narrow paths to accountability. Nearly every remedy that exists so far came out of a state legislature: Illinois wrote the first juvenile deception ban in 2021 and nine states followed, Colorado removed qualified immunity as a defense under state law in 2020 with New Mexico following in 2021, and New Mexico had already abolished civil forfeiture entirely back in 2015. Laws like those get written when enough of us learn the facts and apply them.

The state wrote these rules down. The least we can do is read them.

Reading is step one, and step two takes about ten minutes. Every one of us has state legislators, findable by address in under a minute, and each of them can be asked for a clear yes or no, on the record, to four questions: will you support a ban on police deception in interrogations of juveniles and people with developmental disabilities, will you support a criminal conviction requirement before forfeiture, will you support removing qualified immunity as a defense under state law, and will you support a statutory duty for officers to intervene and report when a fellow officer uses excessive force. Ask by email, by phone, or at a town hall, and treat silence as an answer too. Following up after a non response or a form letter can be very impactful. Ten states have banned law enforcement intentionally misleading minors, and Illinois went a step further and added protections for individuals intellectual disabilities, at least four states require a conviction before forfeiture, two have removed the immunity defense, and at least a dozen require intervention, which means every legislature in the country still has at least one of the four left to pass, and it might as well start with ours.

Just so you know, it’s 10 people like yourself, 10 activists per article who subscribe by clicking the button below, that fund all of this. All 3 free books, all 12 booklets, the 5 pieces of model legislation, and the 20-40 articles per month.

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At the bottom of this article you will find resources that are all available as physical items for purchase, as well as free downloadable PDFs for everything.

My latest book, titled “The American Reformation,” covers the constitutional strategies for redress, and is based off my working paper titled “The Taxonomy of State Response to Federal Authoritarian Capture.”

Another book that may be of use is “Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Restoring American Democracy.”

There are also the short booklets such as “Soft Secession” and “Grab Them By EARR: How to get politicians to do what you want.”

You can also find our four pieces of model legislation, which are the Fiscal Sovereignty and Election Protection Act, the Bribe Is a Bribe Act, the Child Sex Trafficking Investigation and Accountability Act, and the Corporate Welfare Accountability Act. If you want to see the 125-page academic working paper behind these laws, you can read Oppositional Federalism on SSRN.

All that and more can be found at the bottom of this article.

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The Existentialist Republic Library

By clicking this sentence you can buy a physical copy of my newest book “The American Reformation: How States Can Use The Constitution to Break Authoritarian Capture”

You can get a free PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.

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Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

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Several months ago I did a livestream with a fellow Substacker, and I wore Meta glasses during it. At no point did I use the recording feature the glasses have during the livestream, but that doesn't make it ok.

I’d purchased the glasses in Minneapolis for ICE watch, so that I could record ICE agents during enforcement actions without holding an object in my hand, because holding an object in your hand near federal agents is a risk. I'd also had prescription lenses put into the glasses so I could see and continued using them occasionally after returning from Minneapolis.

I learned afterward that my wearing them on that stream was really distressing for the person I streamed with. I also learned there was a lot I was ignorant about and that these glasses come with serious creep and fascist baggage. You won't see me wearing them again.

To be clear, I apologize for wearing a recording-capable device on our stream without telling them beforehand and giving them the chance to say no, and I apologize for being ignorant about what Meta does with everything these glasses capture.

What follows is a brief accounting of what Meta is doing with these devices, and model legislation our team has drafted to address it.

To reiterate, It doesn't matter that I wasn't filming, just wearing the glasses is a problem and an invasion of privacy.

This is partly because Meta has been accused of recording audio and video even when people believed their devices weren't recording. The company's record makes the accusation credible.

Meta captured facial geometry from users' photos and videos without consent and paid 650 million dollars to Illinois class members in 2021 and 1.4 billion dollars to the State of Texas in 2024 for that conduct.

In April 2025 the company changed the glasses' default settings so that voice recordings are stored on Meta's servers for up to one year to train its AI, with no option to decline the storage.

Footage captured by the glasses, including video of people undressing, using the bathroom, and having sex inside their own homes, was sent to contractors in Kenya for human review and labeling, according to a February investigation by the Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten.

A federal class action filed on March 4, Bartone v. Meta Platforms, alleges that Meta never disclosed the human review pipeline and that reviewers saw identifiable faces and credit card numbers in the footage. The complaint describes a pair of the glasses left on a bedside table that kept capturing while the owner's partner changed clothes in front of them, unaware.

Dozens of influencers have used the glasses to covertly film women in public and post the footage for engagement, a BBC investigation found in January; in one case the video of a 21 year old reached 1.3 million views with her phone number attached.

There is now a small commercial market for drilling the recording light out of the frames.

So today we got the Existentialist Republic legislation team together and drafted the Wearable Recording Device Privacy Act, and we assembled it out of law that already exists.

Its definitions come from the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which has survived eighteen years of litigation. Its indicator requirement comes from Pennsylvania House Bill 2603. Its conduct rules extend California Senate Bill 1130 and follow the method of Louisiana's pending consent bill. Its authority to condition sale on hardware standards rests on California's smartphone kill switch and connected device security statutes, both enacted and both standing.

The act requires a working recording indicator on every device sold in the state and requires the device to shut off capture whenever that indicator is blocked, removed, or broken. It criminalizes selling the tools and services that defeat the light.

It makes cloud storage of recordings opt-in, requires disclosure of any human review, prohibits training AI on bystanders without their written consent, gives anyone captured by one of these devices a right to deletion within thirty days, and preserves in plain text the right to record police and public officials performing their duties in public.

Behind all of it sits a private right of action worth 10,000 dollars per negligent violation and 25,000 dollars per intentional one, plus punitive damages, with the amounts drawn from the federal Wiretap Act and from the Texas statute Meta already paid 1.4 billion dollars under.

No device Meta currently sells complies. Under this act, none could be sold in your state until the company redesigns to the standard your legislature sets.

I understand if people are upset. I was ignorant on the subject, and I hear folks on this. I was wrong to ever wear this product and I apologize for the distress that caused.

This legislation can be passed at the state level, and it would prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future and ultimately would protect people.

The full text is below, with a source map so your legislator's counsel can verify every section.

Here is what we do with this act. Look up your state representative and your state senator at open.pluralpolicy.com/find_your_legislator, the Open States tool, which pulls their email and office contact from your street address. Email them this article, or copy and paste the bill text itself, which is easier from a PC browser. Ask them for two things: their thoughts on the act, and a public endorsement of it.

Then send it to your county Democratic party, your Indivisible chapter, and any organizing group you belong to. Ask the leadership to put it in front of their members, and ask the members to endorse it and share it.

MODEL WEARABLE RECORDING DEVICE PRIVACY ACT

Model legislation for introduction in any state legislature. Bracketed text indicates placeholders for state-specific citations and classifications. A source map for every operative provision appears in Appendix A so that legislative counsel can verify provenance and existing judicial construction.

SECTION 1. TITLE

This Act may be cited as the Wearable Recording Device Privacy Act.

SECTION 2. LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS AND PURPOSE.

The Legislature finds as follows:

(a) Wearable recording devices that integrate cameras and microphones into ordinary eyewear and other worn articles are now mass-market consumer products. Unlike a handheld camera, these devices collapse the distinction between observation and capture, and bystanders frequently cannot perceive when recording is occurring.

(b) The largest manufacturer in this market has an established record of capturing personal data without consent. In 2021, Meta Platforms, Inc. agreed to pay 650 million dollars to resolve claims under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act that it collected facial geometry from users' photographs and videos without informed written consent. In 2024, the company agreed to pay 1.4 billion dollars to the State of Texas to resolve claims under the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act arising from the same conduct.

(c) In April 2025, the manufacturer of the best-selling wearable recording device changed its default settings so that users' voice recordings are transmitted to and stored on company servers for up to one year for artificial intelligence training, with no mechanism to opt out of that storage.

(d) In February 2026, investigative reporting by the Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten documented that recordings captured by these devices, including footage of individuals undressing, using bathrooms, and engaged in intimate activity inside private homes, were transmitted to overseas contractors for human review and labeling as part of an artificial intelligence training pipeline. A federal class action filed March 4, 2026, Bartone v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 3:26-cv-01897 (N.D. Cal.), alleges that this human review pipeline was never disclosed to consumers and that the footage reviewed included identifiable faces and financial information.

(e) Journalists have documented a commercial market for disabling the visual recording indicators on these devices, including services that drill out indicator lights and adhesive products designed to defeat the sensors intended to detect an obscured indicator.

(f) In January 2026, a BBC investigation documented dozens of social media content creators using wearable recording devices to covertly film women in public for entertainment content, in at least one case disseminating the footage, together with the subject's personal contact information, to an audience of more than one million viewers.

(g) Existing wiretap, voyeurism, and biometric privacy statutes were not drafted with wearable recording devices in mind and leave gaps concerning indicator standards, default data retention, undisclosed human review, and the rights of recorded bystanders.

(h) The purpose of this Act is to establish content-neutral device standards, use rules, and data practice requirements that protect the reasonable privacy expectations of all persons, while expressly preserving the right to record law enforcement officers, public officials, and matters of public concern in public places.

SECTION 3. DEFINITIONS.

As used in this Act:

(a) "Wearable recording device" means a device designed to be worn on or about the body, including but not limited to eyeglasses, frames, jewelry, headwear, or clothing, that is capable of capturing audio, photographic, or video recordings of the wearer's surroundings. The term does not include: (1) a device that records solely the physiological data of the wearer; (2) a hearing aid or cochlear implant that does not retain or transmit recordings; or (3) a body-worn camera operated by a law enforcement agency pursuant to [cite state body-worn camera statute].

(b) "Capture" means to record, transmit, or transcribe audio, photographic, or video content, including transcription or analysis performed by an artificial intelligence system.

(c) "Visual recording indicator" means a light or display element on a wearable recording device that activates whenever the device is capturing and that is plainly visible under ordinary conditions to persons within fifteen feet of the wearer.

(d) "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs, human biological samples used for valid scientific testing or screening, demographic data, tattoo descriptions, or physical descriptions such as height, weight, hair color, or eye color.

(e) "Biometric information" means any information, regardless of how it is captured, converted, stored, or shared, based on an individual's biometric identifier used to identify an individual.

(f) "Private conversation" has the meaning given to ["private communication" / "oral communication"] in [cite state wiretap or eavesdropping statute].

(g) "Bystander" means any individual, other than the user of a wearable recording device, whose image, voice, or biometric identifier is captured by the device.

(h) "Human review" means the examination of captured recordings by any natural person other than the user, including review for labeling, moderation, quality assurance, or the training or improvement of any artificial intelligence system.

(i) "Assistive use" means the use of a wearable recording device by or on behalf of an individual with a disability to substitute for or augment a sensory or cognitive function.

(j) "Manufacturer" and "operator" mean, respectively, any person that produces a wearable recording device or its operating software for sale, and any person that processes, stores, or receives recordings captured by such a device.

SECTION 4. DEVICE STANDARDS; CONDITIONS OF SALE.

(a) No person shall sell, offer for sale, or lease in this State a wearable recording device manufactured on or after [date twelve months after enactment] unless the device:

(1) is equipped with a functioning visual recording indicator;

(2) is designed so that the device automatically disables all capture functions whenever the visual recording indicator is obstructed, removed, damaged, or otherwise nonfunctional; and

(3) is accompanied at the point of sale by the disclosures required under Section 6(d) of this Act.

(b) No person shall knowingly manufacture, import, distribute, sell, offer, or provide any device, component, software, or service that is designed or marketed to disable, obscure, remove, or defeat a visual recording indicator. Each device modified, and each product or service sold or offered, constitutes a separate violation.

(c) A retailer shall conspicuously inform purchasers of this State's recording consent laws at the point of sale, in a form prescribed by the [Attorney General].

SECTION 5. PROHIBITED USE.

(a) No person shall operate a wearable recording device to capture the image, voice, or biometric identifier of another identifiable individual in any place or circumstance in which that individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy, without the consent of that individual.

(b) No person shall operate a wearable recording device to capture sound or video of any other individual in any place without the other individual's actual knowledge if: (1) the device lacks a visual recording indicator; or (2) the visual recording indicator has been permanently or temporarily disabled or obscured.

(c) No person shall use a wearable recording device to capture or transcribe a private conversation except in conformity with [cite state wiretap or eavesdropping statute]. For purposes of that statute, transcription of a conversation by a wearable recording device or an associated artificial intelligence system constitutes a recording of that conversation.

(d) No person shall disseminate a recording that the person knows or reasonably should know was captured in violation of subsection (a) or (b) of this Section.

SECTION 6. DATA PRACTICES.

(a) Default local storage. No manufacturer or operator shall transmit off-device, or retain on any remote server, audio, photographic, or video recordings captured by a wearable recording device, or transcriptions thereof, except with the affirmative, revocable, opt-in consent of the user, obtained separately from any general terms of service. Default settings shall provide for local storage only.

(b) Human review. No manufacturer or operator shall subject captured recordings to human review except recordings that the user has affirmatively submitted for that purpose following a conspicuous, contemporaneous disclosure that human review will occur.

(c) Training restrictions. No manufacturer or operator shall use recordings that depict an identifiable bystander, or a bystander's voice or biometric identifier, to train, develop, or improve any artificial intelligence system, absent the prior written consent of that bystander.

(d) Disclosure. Every manufacturer shall disclose, at the point of sale and within the device's companion application, in plain language: the categories of data captured; default storage locations; retention periods; whether and under what circumstances human review occurs; and whether recordings are used for artificial intelligence training. Every operator shall publish an annual public transparency report describing the same.

(e) Bystander deletion. Every operator shall maintain a reasonably accessible mechanism by which a bystander may request deletion of recordings in which the bystander appears, and shall complete verified deletion requests within thirty days.

(f) Retention limits. An operator shall permanently destroy captured recordings and derived data when the initial purpose for collection has been satisfied, or within one year of the user's last interaction with the operator, whichever occurs first.

(g) Biometrics. No manufacturer or operator shall collect, capture, or otherwise obtain a biometric identifier or biometric information of any individual other than the enrolled user for the purpose of identification, absent that individual's prior informed written consent, which shall include disclosure of the specific purpose and length of term of collection. No manufacturer or operator shall sell, lease, trade, or otherwise profit from any person's biometric identifier or biometric information.

SECTION 7. EXEMPTIONS AND CONSTRUCTION.

(a) Nothing in Section 5 of this Act prohibits:

(1) the recording of a law enforcement officer, or of any public official or public employee, engaged in the performance of official duties in a public place or in any place where the officer, official, or employee has no reasonable expectation of privacy;

(2) the recording of any meeting required to be open to the public under [cite state open meetings act];

(3) capture undertaken in good faith to document the commission of a crime or to summon emergency assistance;

(4) assistive use, provided the visual recording indicator remains functional; or

(5) capture performed with the written consent of all recorded individuals in connection with professional media production.

(b) This Act regulates the capture and processing of recordings and does not restrict the publication of information. Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit any right secured by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution or [cite state constitutional provision].

SECTION 8. ENFORCEMENT.

(a) Private right of action. Any person aggrieved by a violation of this Act may bring a civil action and may recover: (1) against a party that negligently violates this Act, liquidated damages of 10,000 dollars or actual damages, whichever is greater; (2) against a party that intentionally or recklessly violates this Act, liquidated damages of 25,000 dollars or actual damages, whichever is greater, together with punitive damages; (3) twice the amounts recoverable under paragraph (1) or (2) where the recorded individual is a minor; (4) reasonable attorneys' fees and costs; and (5) other relief, including an injunction, as the court may deem appropriate. Each individual captured and each distinct recording constitute separate violations, provided that recovery for the same recording accrues once per aggrieved person.

(b) Consumer protection enforcement. A violation of Section 4 or Section 6 of this Act constitutes an unfair or deceptive act or practice under [cite state consumer protection act]. The [Attorney General] may recover a civil penalty of not more than 25,000 dollars for each violation. Each device sold, offered, or leased in violation of Section 4, and each individual whose recordings or data are processed in violation of Section 6, constitutes a separate violation, and a continuing violation accrues separately for each day it continues.

(c) Criminal penalties. A violation of Section 5(b) is a [misdemeanor classification]. A violation of Section 5(a) committed in a place where the recorded individual was in a state of undress, or a violation of Section 5(d), is a [felony classification consistent with the state voyeurism statute]. A violation of Section 4(b) is a [misdemeanor classification] for each device or service.

(d) The remedies provided in this Section are cumulative and do not limit any other remedy available at law or equity.

SECTION 9. SEVERABILITY.

If any provision of this Act or its application to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the remainder of the Act, or the application of the provision to other persons or circumstances, is not affected.

SECTION 10. EFFECTIVE DATES.

Sections 5, 7, 8, and 9 of this Act take effect ninety days after enactment. Sections 4 and 6 take effect twelve months after enactment and apply to devices sold, and data collected, on or after that date.

APPENDIX A. SOURCE MAP FOR LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL.

Section 3(d), (e) and Section 6(g) are drawn verbatim or near-verbatim from the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, 740 ILCS 14/10 and 14/15(b), (c). Eighteen years of Illinois litigation, including Rosenbach v. Six Flags, 2019 IL 123186 (standing without actual injury), have settled the construction of these terms.

Section 5(b) adapts the operative language of Pennsylvania House Bill 2603 (Rep. Ciresi, 2026 session), which prohibits operating a wearable recording device to capture others without actual knowledge where the indicator is absent or disabled, and which prohibits indicator tampering.

Section 5(a) and Section 8(c) extend the approach of California Senate Bill 1130 (Sen. Gómez Reyes, 2026), the Wearable Device Privacy Protection Act, which crimi

Eighteen states have turned their complete voter files over to the Trump Justice Department, including the driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers of every registered voter in them. That count comes from Protect Democracy, which names all eighteen; Texas, Florida, and Ohio are among them. Together those eighteen states have 148 US House seats, 36 US Senate seats, and 184 electoral college votes, roughly two thirds of what it takes to control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The question in the headline has an answer, and it is fewer than eighteen.

Since early 2025, the Trump administration has been trying to take control of voter rolls, mail ballots, and registration rules away from the states and hand it to the federal executive branch.

A March 2025 executive order demanded changes to state voting procedures and ordered federal election money withheld from states that refused. Courts blocked parts of it, and on June 24, 2026, a federal judge permanently barred key provisions. The Justice Department demanded voter registration data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, including driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. The Department of Homeland Security rebuilt a database called SAVE so states could submit their voter rolls to it for citizenship checks.

A second executive order, issued March 31, 2026, ordered federal agencies to build lists of United States citizens and send them to the states before every election, ordered the Postal Service to create a list of approved mail voters, and told the Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots from anyone not on that list.

DHS has also written new grant conditions, obtained by CNN and expected to go out to the states, that would make states change their election procedures and run their full voter rolls through SAVE to receive homeland security grants from a program worth more than one billion dollars this fiscal year. States that refuse would lose 20 percent of the money. As of this writing DHS has not formally announced the conditions. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said that cutting the funds of refusing states “endangers American lives and democracy itself.”

Most states said no. The Justice Department answered with 31 federal lawsuits against 30 states plus Washington DC to force the data handover, and so far no court, trial or appellate, has ruled in the department’s favor. On June 22, a federal judge ruled that the rebuilt SAVE system broke three federal laws: the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. That judge, Sparkle Sooknanan, wrote that the federal government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.” Two days later, the Sixth Circuit became the first appeals court to rule on the data lawsuits, upholding the dismissal of the case against Michigan. And on June 25, a federal judge in Boston blocked the core of the mail voting order for the November 2026 election in a lawsuit brought by 23 Democratic-led states and DC. The judge, Indira Talwani, wrote that “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”

News stories about these rulings count the states that refused and the rulings the administration lost. Every one of those stories is accurate. They still measure the wrong thing, because a count of refusing states only means something if each state’s choice stays inside that state’s borders. It does not, for two reasons.

The first reason: once voter data leaves a state, the federal government keeps it, and every new state adds to the same federal database. That database works as soon as one state hands over its records, no matter how many others refuse.

Twelve of the eighteen had handed over complete files, driver’s license and Social Security numbers included, by early April; the other six complied partly or later. Texas alone accounts for a large share of the affected voters: it signed an agreement with DHS in March 2025 and ran its more than 18 million registered voters through SAVE. Separately, the DHS agency that handles citizenship began building a registry that combines its own records with data from the Social Security Administration and the State Department.

The Justice Department also asked states to sign a confidential agreement along with the data handover. Under its reported terms, a state that signs agrees to remove any voter the department flags as ineligible within 45 days. Two states signed: Alaska and Texas. Mississippi, South Dakota, and Tennessee handed over their rolls but refused to sign. A state that signs has given the federal executive branch ongoing control of its voter roll.

A court ruling issued after a transfer does not bring the data back. On May 12, 2026, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a written opinion saying federal law lets the Attorney General force states to produce their voter lists and share them with DHS. Losing individual court cases does not erase that opinion.

The second reason is geography. Control of the House and Senate will be decided in a small number of competitive districts and states, and several cooperating states hold those races, including Texas, Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina. At least 25 states have run their rolls through SAVE since April 2025, 60 million registrations in a year, plus another 7.4 million from North Carolina, where Republicans control the state election board.

The court wins protect mostly the governments that sued. The June 25 injunction covers the 23 suing states and DC, and the administration told the courts this week that it is moving ahead with the system in the remaining states. Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate on June 24 that under the proposed rule the Postal Service would refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that do not send their voter lists to the federal government. A voter in Houston or Columbus gets nothing from the injunction, because that voter’s state government joined the federal programs instead of fighting them. One ruling reaches further: in a separate case brought by the NAACP, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan found the plan to deliver ballots only to preapproved voters broke a 2021 agreement with the Postal Service, and his ruling applies nationwide. That ruling protects ballot delivery. It does not touch the data collection, the purge agreements, or the state purge laws. So the court protection concentrates in states whose governments already refused to cooperate. In the cooperating states that hold the races deciding control of Congress, only the ballot delivery ruling applies.

The 60 million registration checks flagged about 24,000 possible noncitizens, and officials also flagged several hundred thousand registrations of people who may have died. Those totals only show how many people the government has flagged so far. It can flag as many as it chooses, and no one has to prove a flagged voter is ineligible before the registration is canceled; the voter has to prove they are eligible. That arrangement is a devastatingly powerful voter disenfranchisement tool.

In Texas, flagged voters got a letter, and if the county heard nothing within 30 days, the registration was canceled; some who did answer turned out to be citizens. A new Ohio law makes local election boards promptly cancel the registrations of people the secretary of state flags as noncitizens in checks he must run at least monthly. That secretary, Frank LaRose, defends the law on the ground that flagged voters can “immediately restore their registration status” by showing proof of citizenship.

The system also discourages people from registering at all, separate from the cancellations. A federal official confirmed that people flagged by SAVE are referred to DHS for possible criminal investigation, and the judge who reviewed the system wrote that a centralized federal database like this would discourage registration because citizens could fear misuse of their personal information. In races decided by hundreds or a few thousand votes, losing voters from only one side, and mostly from one party, can change the result even when the national numbers stay small.

The administration has also arranged its litigation so that losing in court still produces something useful. After losing the voter data cases in California, Michigan, and Oregon, the Justice Department filed emergency appeals warning that the security and sanctity of elections in those states would be questioned without quick rulings, and its filings say that without a final court decision there is “no other process to ensure a fair election in 2026.”

Stated plainly, months before the election, the department put into official court documents the claim that results in refusing states should be treated as doubtful. If a state cooperates, the government gets its data and a purge process. If a state refuses, the government gets a written reason to challenge that state’s results in November. Either way, the administration gains something it can use. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department voting section attorney, said of the department’s conduct, “There’s so much lawyering from the DOJ here that is raising ethical questions.”

The same approach is underway with the mail voting order. Within a week of the June 25 injunction, the administration appealed to the First Circuit, asked the district judge to lift her order by July 6, and warned in its filings that the injunction will make it impossible for the Postal Service to build the new ballot delivery system before November even if the administration wins the appeal. Those filings put in writing, ahead of time, a federal reason to call November mail ballots compromised.

The effort does not stop at voter rolls. The FBI has seized ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, and the Arizona Senate complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for records from its Maricopa County audit. The department wants records from Wayne County, Michigan, about the 2024 election, and the names of every person who worked as an election worker in Fulton County in 2020. The March 2026 order tells the Justice Department to make investigating and prosecuting election officials a priority when those officials give ballots to people the federal government considers ineligible.

Collecting the names of individual election workers and threatening officials with prosecution discourages people from doing that work whether or not charges are ever filed.

President Trump is also pressing Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would make people show citizenship papers to register, limit mail voting to reasons such as illness, disability, military deployment, and travel, and make states submit their voter rolls to DHS and remove anyone the system flags. In March he said of the bill, “It will guarantee the midterms.”

Between June 22 and June 29, federal courts ruled the SAVE overhaul unlawful, permanently barred parts of the 2025 executive order, upheld the dismissal of the Michigan data case on appeal, blocked the mail voting order for 23 states and DC, and upheld Mississippi’s ballot deadline law at the Supreme Court. Those rulings stop specific legal mechanisms.

They do not bring back data already handed over, automatically restore wrongly canceled registrations, reassure naturalized citizens who now connect registering with a federal investigation, protect election workers whose names have been demanded, erase the department’s written claims that elections in refusing states cannot be presumed fair, or stop the grant conditions waiting to go out.

So, how many states is enough? To steal an election, the infrastructure needs only three things: enough voter data, cooperation from states that hold the competitive races, and an official reason to dispute the results everywhere else. Texas alone supplied the first two: 18 million records handed over, a signature on the 45 day removal agreement, citizens with canceled registrations, and competitive House seats inside its borders. The Justice Department’s own court filings supplied the third. The answer is one, and it has already happened.

Want to do something about it? Well it’s our job at the Existentialist Republic to address exactly the issue this article outlines and then hand people tools to make change because when the federal government and a large fraction of states have abandoned fairness, freedom, and democracy, we need a plan.

Just so you know, it’s 10 people like yourself, 10 activists per article who subscribe by clicking the button below, that fund all of this. All 3 free books, all 12 booklets, the 4 pieces of model legislation, and the 20-40 articles per month.

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At the bottom of this article you will find resources that are all available as physical items for purchase, as well as free downloadable PDFs for everything.

My latest book, titled “The American Reformation,” covers the constitutional strategies for redress, and is based off my working paper titled “The Taxonomy of State Response to Federal Authoritarian Capture.”

Another book that may be of use is “Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Restoring American Democracy.”

There are also the short booklets such as “Soft Secession” and “Grab Them By EARR: How to get politicians to do what you want.”

You can also find our four pieces of model legislation, which are the Fiscal Sovereignty and Election Protection Act, the Bribe Is a Bribe Act, the Child Sex Trafficking Investigation and Accountability Act, and the Corporate Welfare Accountability Act. If you want to see the 125-page academic working paper behind these laws, you can read Oppositional Federalism on SSRN.

All that and more can be found at the bottom of this article.

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On July 2, 2026, Democratic staff on the House Natural Resources Committee published a report alleging that the President’s fundraisers redirected donations meant for America250, the congressionally chartered anniversary foundation, into Freedom 250, an entity the White House controls, by giving donors Freedom 250’s routing and account numbers.

Wire fraud is a federal crime, and only federal prosecutors can charge it. The President whose fundraising operation the report’s authors describe appoints those prosecutors. The report supplies the evidence, and the evidence needs a prosecutor the President cannot control and criminal prosecutions that cannot be pardoned by Trump.

So myself and the Existentialist Republic team drafted three citizen referral letters, the kind of letter any member of the public can send to a prosecutor asking the office to request they open an investigation. Each letter states the law the conduct violates, the publicly available facts that connect the conduct to that office, the office’s own record in similar cases, and the first documents to demand.

The District of Columbia letter is first because the entity is registered there. Most crimes in the District are prosecuted by a federal appointee the President selects, but charity fraud is an exception: the elected DC Attorney General prosecutes charitable solicitation violations himself. His office already recovered $750,000 from the Trump inaugural committee.

The New York letter goes with it, because Freedom 250’s fundraising reached New York and the office that obtained the Trump Foundation’s dissolution runs the state’s Charities Bureau. New York adds a reason to act first. The state has its own double jeopardy law: once a federal prosecution for the same acts finishes, New York loses the power to bring its own case, with narrow exceptions. The courts dismissed the Manafort prosecution under that law in 2019 because the Manhattan District Attorney waited for the federal case to finish, and a protective federal plea, a narrow case the Department of Justice could file and settle fast, would end a Freedom 250 case the same way.

Delaware chartered the LLC, and Delaware law lets its Attorney General ask the Court of Chancery, Delaware’s business court, to cancel the charter, the document that gives the company its legal existence, and to appoint a receiver, a neutral officer the court places in control of the company and its records. A receiver in control of the records can produce the donor lists that every other office needs and that Freedom 250 keeps secret.

The three letters are dated July 3, 2026. No law requires me to notify federal prosecutors or to ask their permission. The Virginia letter comes next, once a subpoena identifies the bank that received the misdirected wires, because Virginia law lets a fraud case be tried in any county where any part of the scheme happened, and receiving the money qualifies.

Four more states can open their own investigations the moment a resident or company inside the state is identified among the deceived donors: California, Washington, Illinois, and Minnesota. The donor lists demanded in the first three letters are the documents that would identify those donors. A deceived donor can also act directly: a person or company that wired money to Freedom 250 while intending America250 can contact their state attorney general, and that one contact gives the state its case.

Every other finding in the report can be enforced only by federal agencies the President controls: the money Congress appropriated and the White House diverted, the contracts steered to the President’s operatives, the donations corporations left off their lobbying disclosures, and the fundraising from foreign companies. The President appoints none of the three officers above.

The letters state the limits: the report is a staff draft the full committee has not voted on, the central allegation comes from witnesses who spoke to committee staff confidentially, the report’s authors name no donor and state no amount, and Freedom 250 calls the report “a partisan smear.” Each letter asks for one thing, an investigation that uses subpoenas, the court-backed orders that compel documents and testimony, to test what the witnesses said.

The checkpoints are public. Whether Freedom 250 registered to solicit donations in the District is a record anyone can request. A District prosecution would appear in the Superior Court’s public filings, and a New York subpoena fight would appear in the state court’s public records. A Delaware petition to cancel the charter would appear in the Court of Chancery’s records. A referral requires no law license and no court filing, and any reader can send their own, as can any organization. If you are a member of any organizations with an interest in fighting corruption, this is a fantastic way to influence the system towards justice. If you can share this article with any news organizations, more coverage is always helpful.

The three letters follow in full, so the record of what each office received is public from the start.

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July 3, 2026

The Honorable Brian L. Schwalb Attorney General for the District of Columbia Office of the Attorney General 400 6th Street NW Washington, DC 20001

Re: Request for investigation of Freedom 250 LLC and its fundraisers under the District’s charitable solicitation law

Dear Attorney General Schwalb:

This letter is a citizen referral of publicly documented conduct for investigation under District law. I write as a journalist and legal scholar, the author of Oppositional Federalism: A Taxonomy of State Constitutional Postures Under Authoritarian Capture and of The American Reformation, and the publisher of The Existentialist Republic. This referral applies the taxonomy’s central claim: state offices hold enforcement authority that federal capture does not reach. Every factual statement below is linked to its source.

Democratic staff of the House Natural Resources Committee released an interim oversight report on July 2, 2026 describing the fundraising conduct of Freedom 250 LLC, a Delaware limited liability company registered in the District as a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Park Foundation. The company began transacting business in the District on November 18, 2025. Its District filing lists the Foundation’s mailing address and names a senior Foundation official as sole beneficial owner.

The report’s principal allegation concerns donors who intended to give to the congressionally chartered America250 Foundation. Those donors were given wire instructions containing Freedom 250’s banking information, “including its routing number and account number,” so the contributions would go to Freedom 250 instead, according to confidential disclosures the drafters describe. The drafters name Meredith O’Rourke, a National Park Foundation board member and the President’s lead 2024 campaign fundraiser, among the fundraisers who misled donors. The drafters write that the conduct could constitute “charitable solicitation violations under the laws of the District of Columbia, where Freedom 250 is registered and operates as an LLC.” The Washington Post reported the release and the allegations, and Ranking Member Jared Huffman told the Post: “I know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”

District law places this conduct within your office’s authority. Section 44-1703(a) of the DC Code states that no person shall solicit in the District of Columbia without a valid certificate of registration. Section 44-1711 prohibits a solicitor from using the name of another person or organization without consent, and the solicitation forms the drafters describe carried America250’s name. Under Section 44-1712, violations of the chapter are punishable offenses, subsection (b) assigns the prosecutions to your office in the name of the District, subsection (c) provides subpoena authority with Superior Court enforcement, and subsection (d) preserves civil fines as alternative sanctions. Your office has already litigated the misuse of nonprofit funds by a Trump-controlled entity and recovered $750,000 from the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee.

I ask your office to take five steps. First, confirm whether Freedom 250 LLC, Meredith O’Rourke, and O’Rourke’s firm hold certificates of registration, a same-day public records check. Second, issue document preservation demands to Freedom 250 and the National Park Foundation immediately, since the entity could dissolve or transfer its records after the July 4, 2026 anniversary. Third, subpoena Freedom 250 and the Foundation under Section 44-1712(c) for donor lists, gift agreements, sponsorship materials, and every version of wire instructions provided to any prospective donor since October 28, 2025. Fourth, subpoena the bank identified by the routing number on those wire instructions for the account records, which will establish whether any misdirected transfer was completed and where the affected donors reside. Fifth, ask America250 whether it consented in writing to any use of its name in solicitation and for its records of donors who reported confusion, records America250 can produce voluntarily.

This referral states the record’s limits plainly. The report is an interim staff product that the full committee has not adopted, and the drafters base the principal allegation on confidential disclosures to committee staff. The drafters identify no donor by name and state no dollar amount. Freedom 250, through spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez, called the report “a partisan smear”. The request is an investigation that tests the disclosures with the compulsory process your office already holds, and the whistleblowers who spoke to committee staff can speak with your investigators through the committee minority.

One timing point deserves statement. Only federal prosecutors can charge federal wire fraud, and the administration that created Freedom 250 appoints them. No rule requires your office to refer the conduct to the Department of Justice, to notify federal prosecutors, to await a federal charging decision, or to pause if a federal investigation is announced. A deconfliction request, if one arrives, creates no legal obligation.

The underlying documents are compiled: the report, the sponsorship packages published by The American Prospect, the entity’s District and Delaware registration details, and the press record. I will provide the set on request.

Thank you for your attention to this referral.

Christopher Armitage

July 3, 2026

The Honorable Letitia James Attorney General of the State of New York Charities Bureau 28 Liberty Street New York, NY 10005

Re: Request for investigation under Article 7-A and Executive Law Section 63(12) of charitable solicitation by Freedom 250 LLC directed into New York

Dear Attorney General James:

This letter is a citizen referral of publicly documented conduct for investigation under New York law. I write as a journalist and legal scholar, the author of Oppositional Federalism: A Taxonomy of State Constitutional Postures Under Authoritarian Capture and of The American Reformation, and the publisher of The Existentialist Republic. This referral applies the taxonomy’s central claim: state offices hold enforcement authority that federal capture does not reach. Every factual statement below is linked to its source.

Democratic staff of the House Natural Resources Committee released an interim oversight report on July 2, 2026 describing the fundraising conduct of Freedom 250 LLC, a Delaware limited liability company operating from Washington as a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Park Foundation. Donors who intended to give to the congressionally chartered America250 Foundation were given wire instructions containing Freedom 250’s banking information, “including its routing number and account number,” so the contributions would go to Freedom 250 instead, according to confidential disclosures the drafters describe. The drafters name Meredith O’Rourke, a National Park Foundation board member and the President’s lead 2024 campaign fundraiser, among the fundraisers who misled donors. The Washington Post reported the release and the allegations, and Ranking Member Jared Huffman told the Post: “I know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”

The New York connection is documented and confirmable. Mastercard, headquartered in Purchase, New York, appears on the National Park Foundation’s list of confirmed Freedom 250 cash contributors, so solicitation reached New York. The drafters also describe outreach calls to America250’s corporate sponsors, a roster that includes companies headquartered in New York, and the calls confused executives about which organization was asking. A subpoena would establish whether any New York donor received the misdirected wire instructions.

New York law places this conduct within your office’s authority. Article 7-A of the Executive Law requires registration with your Charities Bureau before soliciting contributions in New York and prohibits fraudulent or misleading solicitation. Executive Law Section 63(12) authorizes investigation before any suit is filed. Penal Law Section 190.65 defines scheme to defraud in the first degree, a class E felony, as a systematic ongoing course of conduct with intent to defraud more than one person by false pretenses, in which property is obtained from at least one victim. Your office has already litigated the misuse of charitable assets by a Trump-controlled entity, and the Trump Foundation case ended with the foundation dissolved and a $2 million damages order.

I ask your office to take five steps. First, confirm whether Freedom 250 LLC, Meredith O’Rourke, and O’Rourke’s firm registered under Article 7-A before soliciting in New York, a records check that requires no process. Second, issue document preservation demands to Freedom 250 and the National Park Foundation immediately, since the entity could dissolve or transfer its records after the July 4, 2026 anniversary. Third, issue subpoenas under Section 63(12) for donor lists, gift agreements, solicitation communications, and every version of wire instructions provided to any prospective donor since October 28, 2025. Fourth, subpoena the bank identified by the routing number on those wire instructions for the account records, which will establish whether any misdirected transfer was completed and where the affected donors reside. Fifth, refer any completed misdirected wire from a New York donor to the appropriate District Attorney for evaluation under Penal Law Section 190.65.

Timing decides whether New York keeps this case. Criminal Procedure Law Section 40.20 bars a separate state prosecution after a completed federal prosecution based on the same act unless a statutory exception applies, and the courts applied the bar in People v. Manafort. The trial court dismissed the Manhattan indictment on December 18, 2019, and the First Department unanimously affirmed the dismissal, 187 A.D.3d 612 (2020), with leave to appeal denied in February 2021. The 2019 amendment, Section 40.51, covers pardoned conduct and does not cover a protective federal guilty plea to a narrow count. A minimal federal case ending in a fast plea could therefore bar New York’s charges. Acting before any federal filing protects the state case, and no rule requires your office to refer the conduct to federal prosecutors, to notify them, to await their charging decision, or to pause if a federal investigation is announced.

This referral states the record’s limits plainly. The report is an interim staff product that the full committee has not adopted, and the drafters base the principal allegation on confidential disclosures to committee staff. The drafters identify no donor by name and state no dollar amount. Freedom 250, through spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez, called the report “a partisan smear”. The request is an investigation that tests the disclosures with the compulsory process your office already holds, and the whistleblowers who spoke to committee staff can speak with your investigators through the committee minority.

The underlying documents are compiled: the report, the sponsorship packages published by The American Prospect, the entity’s District and Delaware registration details, and the press record. I will provide the set on request.

Thank you for your attention to this referral.

Christopher Armitage

July 3, 2026

The Honorable Kathleen Jennings Attorney General of the State of Delaware Delaware Department of Justice 820 N. French Street Wilmington, DE 19801

Re: Request that the office evaluate a petition under 6 Del. C. Section 18-112 concerning Freedom 250 LLC

Dear Attorney General Jennings:

This letter is a citizen referral of publicly documented conduct for evaluation under Delaware law. I write as a journalist and legal scholar, the author of Oppositional Federalism: A Taxonomy of State Constitutional Postures Under Authoritarian Capture and of The American Reformation, and the publisher of The Existentialist Republic. This referral applies the taxonomy’s central claim: state offices hold enforcement authority that federal capture does not reach. Every factual statement below is linked to its source.

Freedom 250 LLC was formed in Delaware on October 28, 2025, with Harvard Business Services as its registered agent, and it operates from Washington as a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Park Foundation. Democratic staff of the House Natural Resources Committee released an interim oversight report on July 2, 2026 describing the entity’s fundraising conduct. Donors who intended to give to the congressionally chartered America250 Foundation were given wire instructions containing Freedom 250’s banking information, “including its routing number and account number,” so the contributions would go to Freedom 250 instead, according to confidential disclosures the drafters describe. The Washington Post reported the release and the allegations, and Ranking Member Jared Huffman told the Post: “I know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”

Delaware law gives your office a distinct role. Under 6 Del. C. Section 18-112, the Court of Chancery, on your motion, may cancel the certificate of formation of a Delaware limited liability company “for abuse or misuse of its limited liability company powers, privileges or existence,” and the court may appoint a trustee or receiver to administer the winding up. The section requires no Delaware victim, and it addresses the misuse of a Delaware entity wherever the conduct occurred. Your office used the section against Backpage.com LLC in 2018 and again in two 2019 petitions, one concerning the Michael Cohen entities used for the 2016 nondisclosure payments and one concerning entities tied to Paul Manafort and Rick Gates in Jennings v. LOAV Ltd., as Bloomberg Law’s analysis of the provision documents. In each matter the underlying misconduct occurred outside Delaware, and the Delaware charter supplied the basis for your action.

I ask your office to take four steps. First, evaluate a Section 18-112 petition on the existing public record, which now includes a congressional staff report describing the entity as the receiving instrument for misdirected charitable wires. Second, issue document preservation demands to the entity and its registered agent, since the entity could dissolve or transfer its records after the July 4, 2026 anniversary. Third, if the petition proceeds, seek a trustee or receiver so the donor records and gift agreements come under a neutral officer’s control, since receivership would supply the records that Freedom 250 now withholds from every investigating office. Fourth, coordinate with the attorneys general for the District of Columbia and New York, whose subpoena power over the entity and its parent foundation can identify the affected donors.

This referral states the record’s limits plainly. The report is an interim staff product that the full committee has not adopted, and the drafters base the principal allegation on confidential disclosures to committee staff. The drafters identify no donor by name and state no dollar amount. Freedom 250, through spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez, called the report “a partisan smear”. The request is an evaluation that tests the disclosures against your office’s own precedents, and no rule requires your office to refer the conduct to federal prosecutors, to notify them, to await their charging decision, or to pause if a federal investigation is announced.

The underlying documents are compiled: the report, the sponsorship packages published by The American Prospect, the entity’s District and Delaware registration details, and the press record. I will provide the set on request.

Thank you for your attention to this referral.

Christopher Armitage

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

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Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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On August 13, 2025, Eric Trump rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square. His brother Donald Jr. stood beside him, along with Zach Witkoff and the two men running the family’s cryptocurrency venture. They were there to celebrate a $1.5 billion treasury deal that would let a publicly traded company called ALT5 Sigma load its balance sheet with WLFI tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto firm. Cameras captured the smiles. The financial press covered the milestone, and American retail investors took the cue.

Seven months earlier, on January 16, 2025, four days before his father’s second inauguration, Eric Trump signed a document that sold forty-nine percent of World Liberty Financial to a pair of shell companies bearing the name Aryam Investment 1. One shell sat in Delaware, the other in Abu Dhabi. Both belonged to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi and national security adviser of the United Arab Emirates. The price was five hundred million dollars. One hundred eighty-seven million dollars of it flowed directly to Trump-family entities called DT Marks DEFI LLC and DT Marks SC LLC. Two seats on World Liberty Financial’s five-person board went to Peng Xiao, the chief executive of the UAE government technology firm G42, and to Martin Edelman, G42’s general counsel.

Eric Trump did not disclose the deal at the Nasdaq podium. He did not disclose it at the Token2049 conference in Dubai in May. He did not disclose it in the Fortune interview conducted from the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower in August. He did not disclose it at the World Liberty Forum at Mar-a-Lago in February 2026. The Wall Street Journal disclosed it on January 31, 2026.

Twelve and a half months passed between the signature and the disclosure. During those months, Eric Trump sold WLFI tokens to American investors, including New York residents who purchased through Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken, each of which holds a New York license from the Department of Financial Services. During those months, the price of WLFI tokens depended on representations about the company’s structure, its leadership, and its independence. During those months, those representations omitted the fact that nearly half the company belonged to the intelligence chief of a foreign government.

That is the case.

When you sell investments to people, you cannot hide things they would want to know about the company. A foreign spy chief owning half the company is something they would want to know. Eric Trump sold WLFI tokens to thousands of people for twelve and a half months while hiding exactly that. That is securities fraud, and New York has four different criminal statutes that punish it.

He hid a foreign intelligence chief’s ownership from the people he was selling to. The official records made the hiding possible. The money moved through shell companies designed to disguise where it came from. New York punishes each of those things separately.

Selling investments to thousands of people while hiding who owns the company is a felony in New York. New York calls this scheme to defraud in the first degree. The statute, Penal Law section 190.65, carries four years in prison. The WLFI token sale ran continuously from October 2024 through 2026. It sold to tens of thousands of purchasers. It generated approximately five hundred million dollars in Trump family take since launch, according to Reuters analysis. The representations made to those purchasers omitted a control transaction that transferred forty-nine percent of the company to a foreign sovereign-affiliated entity. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office holds exclusive jurisdiction over the felony.

Lying in the books and records of a New York business to cover up another crime is a separate felony. The statute is falsifying business records in the first degree, New York Penal Law section 175.10, and it carries four years per false record. This is the statute Alvin Bragg’s office used to win the thirty-four-count felony conviction of Donald Trump in May 2024. The false records here would include the company’s ownership records that omitted the Aryam sale, the board minutes that seated Peng Xiao and Martin Edelman without identifying the foreign government source, the USD1 reserve reports, the ALT5 Sigma filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the certifications Eric Trump signed for the Trump Organization at 725 Fifth Avenue in his role as Executive Vice President.

Moving dirty money through clean accounts to hide where it came from is money laundering. The first-degree statute, New York Penal Law section 470.20, applies when the laundered amount exceeds one million dollars, and it carries twenty-five years per count. The one hundred eighty-seven million dollar payment to the Trump-family shell companies clears that threshold by a factor of one hundred eighty-seven. The two billion dollars in WLF stablecoins that Sheikh Tahnoon’s sovereign wealth fund pushed into Binance clears it by a factor of two thousand. The two Aryam shells, sharing the same name in two different countries, supply the concealment the statute requires.

Stealing more than one million dollars by lying about what you are selling is grand larceny in the first degree, New York Penal Law section 155.42, and it carries twenty-five years. Each piece of the ALT5 Sigma raise clears the threshold. The Aryam transaction itself clears the threshold. The personal enrichment Forbes attributed to Eric Trump from WLFI alone, approximately one hundred thirty-five million dollars, clears the threshold.

The conduct happened in New York. The Trump Organization sits at 725 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where Eric Trump serves as Executive Vice President. The promotional events occurred in Manhattan. The exchanges that cleared WLFI purchases for New York residents operate under New York law. The Manhattan District Attorney holds primary criminal jurisdiction, and his office has done this before. In December 2022, the District Attorney’s office secured a seventeen-count felony conviction of Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp. from the same Fifth Avenue address. In February 2024, the Attorney General secured a civil fraud judgment against Eric, Donald Jr., and Donald Trump at the same Fifth Avenue address. In May 2024, the District Attorney’s office secured a thirty-four-count felony conviction of Donald Trump for falsifying business records at the same Fifth Avenue address. Three runs at the same crime family with three wins.

On January 16, 2025, Eric Trump signs the Aryam Investment 1 agreement. The Trump-family entities receive one hundred eighty-seven million dollars. Peng Xiao and Martin Edelman take seats on the World Liberty Financial board. World Liberty Financial does not disclose the transaction.

At the Token2049 conference in Dubai on May 1, 2025, while the Aryam transaction remains undisclosed, Zach Witkoff announces that USD1, the stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, will serve as the settlement asset for a two billion dollar investment Sheikh Tahnoon’s sovereign wealth fund is making in Binance. Eric Trump shares the stage. Justin Sun, the Chinese-born crypto billionaire whose SEC fraud case the Trump administration paused a month into the new term, moderates. Eric tells the audience that USD1 will change the modern financial system forever.

On August 13, 2025, while the Aryam transaction remains undisclosed, Eric Trump rings the Nasdaq opening bell.

On August 21, 2025, while the Aryam transaction remains undisclosed, Fortune publishes its interview with Eric and Donald Jr. from the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower.

On November 19, 2025, the Department of Commerce authorizes the export of advanced semiconductors to G42, the company whose CEO sits on the World Liberty Financial board and whose ultimate beneficial owner holds nearly half of World Liberty Financial under a transaction WLFI token buyers have not been told about.

On January 31, 2026, the Wall Street Journal publishes the Aryam transaction. The undisclosed deal becomes public. Twelve and a half months after Eric Trump signed the document.

Now the defenses.

The first defense will be that Eric Trump is merely an employee of his father’s organization. The defense fails because Eric Trump signed the document. The signature is the act. The signature is the intent. The affirmative defense for subordinates requires that the subordinate received no personal benefit. Forbes attributed approximately one hundred thirty-five million dollars in personal enrichment to Eric Trump from World Liberty Financial alone.

The second defense will be that WLFI tokens and USD1 are not securities under federal law. The defense fails because none of the four statutes named above require federal securities classification. Scheme to defraud, falsifying business records, money laundering, and grand larceny operate independently of federal securities law. They require fraud, false records, laundered proceeds, and false pretenses. Each one shows up on the documentary record.

The third defense will be that the omission was not material because investors did not rely on the absence of a UAE disclosure. The defense fails because no honest company hides a fact this big from the people it sells to. Half the company belongs to the intelligence chief of a foreign government. That is exactly the kind of thing buyers have a right to know.

The fourth defense will be that Eric Trump did not know who Sheikh Tahnoon was. The defense fails because Eric Trump signed the document. The shells bore identical names in two jurisdictions. Peng Xiao and Martin Edelman, both publicly identified as G42 principals, took seats on a five-person board. A second two hundred fifty million dollar payment came due in July.

The fifth defense will be that New York lacks jurisdiction. The defense fails because the Trump Organization sits in Manhattan, the promotional events occurred in Manhattan, the New York-licensed exchanges that cleared sales to New York residents sit in Manhattan, and the harmful effects fell on New York investors. The 2022 Trump Organization conviction settled this question on essentially the same record.

The scheme to defraud statute carries four years on conviction. The falsifying business records statute carries four years per false record. Money laundering in the first degree carries twenty-five years per count. Grand larceny in the first degree carries twenty-five years. The promotional acts during the twelve-and-a-half-month concealment window are countable in the dozens. The false business records generated by a transaction of that size are countable in the dozens more. The aggregate dollar figure clears the money laundering threshold by a factor of two thousand and the grand larceny threshold by a factor of one hundred eighty-seven. The theoretical maximum sentence available to a Manhattan judge on the publicly documented record, if every count ran consecutively, reaches into multiples of a human lifetime.

Whether the elements are present is settled. They are clearly present. What remains is whether the elected official with the authority to bring the charge will choose to do so.

That official is Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney for New York County. His office prosecuted Trump-family corporate entities to felony conviction in 2022 and the patriarch himself to felony conviction in 2024. The career prosecutors in the Major Economic Crimes Bureau know how to build a Trump case from Manhattan documents.

If you want to do something about what you just read, you can ask Alvin Bragg directly. His office is on X at @ManhattanDA, on Instagram at @manhattanda, and on Facebook as Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. His personal Instagram is @alvinbraggnyc. The pieces are all there for everyone to see, it’s up to Alvin Bragg what he does with them.

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Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

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All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

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Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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