Brave The New World
Is There a Political Solution Left, or Does the Empire End the Hard Way?
Forty trillion in debt. A $1.5 trillion budget request for a military that can't win a war. Fauci pleading the Fifth over a hundred times while holding a pardon that covers eleven years. CJ Killmer and I started with a simple question and spent an hour finding out how bad the answer is: is there still a political solution to any of this? CJ's answer, as a historian: in theory yes, in practice under fifty percent. You would need people in power willing to say the unipolar moment ended a decade ago, willing to wind the empire down on purpose, and able to survive the deep state long enough to do it. We get into why that's so unlikely. CJ walks through the idea that a civilization wears a groove into the record in its first few generations and the needle just follows it from there, from manifest destiny to Hawaii to the Philippines to leaders talking about space as a "new frontier." We look at what actually happened when Britain unwound the largest empire before ours, what the Soviets did right in Afghanistan that we did wrong, and why no empire in history has collapsed while holding the world's reserve currency. Then the part I keep coming back to. There is no political solution without justice for elites, and we don't have any. Epstein is dead and Maxwell is in prison, and nobody else connected to any of it has faced a consequence. Hunter Biden is doing podcast interviews. Lindsey Graham's worst case is board seats and Fox contributor money. Fauci got a preemptive pardon covering 2014 through 2025 and then pleaded the Fifth anyway. CJ makes the case that Athens had something we deliberately left out of modern democracy: real oversight, real prosecutions, and ostracism. If the political road is closed, that leaves technology or blood. I make the case for the first. CJ lays out what the second one looks like, and it isn't armies marching at each other.
