The Democracy Papers: Paper 20

One hundred days. That’s all it took to tear a hundred years of progress to shreds. A hundred days of gaslighting America into thinking this is all normal.

100 Days In: Are We Winning Yet?

One hundred days. That’s all it took to tear a hundred years of progress to shreds.

A hundred days of gaslighting America into thinking this is all normal.

A hundred days of Doge’s chaos, gutting agencies like a bored teenager wrecking a sandcastle. Institutions that took generations to build—the CDC, the FDA, HHS, SSA, the Department of Education—all hollowed out by Executive Orders that give unprecedented powers to script kiddies, sycophants, and people who think "regulations" is a dirty word but "loyalty tests" are perfectly fine.

And now we're deporting citizens, including toddlers and sick children needing care, disappearing people to foreign prison camps without due process because they existed in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin color.

Our founders gave us 27 reasons to revolt against an unfit ruler and today, we are reliving every single one. Blocked laws. Silenced governors. Suppressed elections. Courts rigged. Justice obstructed. Trade weaponized. Freedoms dismantled.

Real Costs, Real Lives

This isn't theoretical. It's not a cable news segment you can turn off. It's kids in cages. It's deported citizens who woke up American and went to bed exiled. It's a Constitution shredded at an unbelievable pace, all because America is too afraid to speak up.

It's preventable diseases roaring back because public health became "optional." It's food so unsafe that eating a salad feels like Russian roulette. It's protections dismantled, oversight erased, responsibility dodged at every level.

The cost is measured in families struggling to afford basic needs due to lost wages or support systems. In empty chairs at the dinner table and in schoolyards stalked by measles, polio and ICE agents, all out to snatch our children.

It's watching neighbors radicalized into enemies. It's courts turned into loyalty tests. It's children growing up in a country where rights are zip-code dependent and justice depends on the size of your wallet.

Institutions Eroded

Don't mistake this for incompetence. This is strategy.

Deconstruct, defund and destroy until the public loses faith. Until "government can't help you" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Until a new regime writes a new set of rules in the rubble of what once was.

Freedom of speech? Depends who you are. Freedom of the press? Only if you say what the regime wants to hear. Due process? Suspended until further notice. The Constitution, once our backbone, treated like optional reading.

The founders warned us: when leaders quarter troops, obstruct justice, deny representation, and incite domestic unrest, they have declared themselves unfit to rule.

The Fire Alarm Is Ringing

This isn't the time for acquiescence, this is not the time to just go along with it. We must not obey in advance, and those staying silent are complicit.

If a government silences, exploits and abandons its people, the founders told us it’s not just our right to resist, it is our duty. We must speak up now, or forever hold our peace, because we won't get the chance again.

History won't care if we were polite. It will care if we fought back, and if we fought hard enough.

A hundred days behind us. How many left before there's nothing left to save?