I recorded this the day after the so-called Big Beautiful Bill passed. You know, the one gutting social programs while handing out tax cuts to billionaires like candy. The one that’s a love letter to the same old empire economics: extract, exploit, and call it freedom.
If you want to understand how we got here, you need to understand where this country really came from.
Not the sanitized textbook version with plucky pilgrims and Thanksgiving hand turkeys. Not the nonsense about “freedom-loving pioneers” just looking for opportunity.
This week’s Manifest Delusion lecture breaks it all the way down.
We’re talking about:
The Thieves: the men who drew up charters and maps that turned land into real estate before a single treaty was signed.
The Thugs: the militias, captains, and frontiersmen who enforced theft with violence, terror, and massacres.
The Theocrats: the ministers and “godly” men who gave genocide a halo and called dispossession divine providence.
The Profiteers: the companies, planters, and merchants who made human misery their business model.
The Infrastructure: the slave codes, reservations, treaties, missions, and schools designed to make theft legal, moral, and permanent.
And I’m not pulling any punches.
Because the truth is: the Big Beautiful Bill is just the latest chapter in the same damn story. Tax cuts for the rich. Cuts to food stamps, health care, housing. Exploitation and extraction dressed up as policy.
We inherited an economy built on stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen lives—and it still runs on the same logic: squeeze the vulnerable, reward the powerful, call it destiny.
Big Questions We Ask:
Who really profited from “settlement”?
How did faith become a tool for conquest?
Why does our history keep skipping over the violence that made the profits possible?
What does it mean to inherit these systems today?
If you’re ready to burn the mythology to the ground and see the receipts, this one’s for you. Because understanding the lie is the first step to breaking it.
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