In April, my Mastodon feed was full of stories of the various protests across the USA. To a lesser extent, my Medium feed produced similar stories. It seemed about 1% of the American people participated in these protests.
The mainstream media did not take these protests that seriously. Maybe because there were so many protests, it was no longer news. But more likely, the mainstream media is anticipating a media crackdown in the near future. Each outlet wants to remain viable after the crackdown and is couching its stories such not to be the nail that sticks out too much and becomes “the example.”
While 1% is significant, this protest movement needs to become much bigger to play an effective role in the near future of the USA.
This month, May 2025, my Mastodon feed has not shown any protests. It has, however, given more articles that show how more pieces of Project 2025 are being implemented. Mastodon also gives a few articles on how a few high-ranking Democrats are fighting back. But not much on what the people are doing. Based on this observation, I am concluding that the April protests against the second Trump administration have lost steam. By the end of the summer, we will know for sure.
I am not alone
It is dangerous to base a political trend on observations from one social media outlet. So I should be careful with my claim. Maybe more protests will happen in June.
Sam Young is one of the few political writers on Medium actually looking for a solution for the mess we are in. He does not dwell on blaming Trump, the Republican Party, MAGA, the 86m Americans who did not vote, and the Democratic Party. He too is coming to the conclusion that the USA’s quasi-democracy is coming to its death throes.
Why Not Just Say They’re Creating a White Ethnostate?
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Grant Piper was the first analyst to point out to me that the gift of the luxury 747 from Qatar to the US government is more complex than what the mainstream media was reporting. It looks like technical reasons may have their say:
Is The Qatari 747 Gift Saga A Win-Win?
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Whether this plane does find its way to the livery of the United States government or not, it has allowed Mr. Trump to say: “I will take this bribe and there is nothing you can do about it.”
Isaac Saul provides insight to Mr. Biden’s prostate cancer and his cognitive decline during his presidency.
Biden Reveals Cancer Diagnosis Amid “Cover-Up” Allegations
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To me, the fact that these conditions were hidden from the public is another sign of a broken system. Why were Mr. Biden and his handlers so full of themselves that only they could save the USA?
I say Mr. Biden had one main job in his presidency: to convince the many eligible non-voters that he and the Democrat Party were worthy of the effort to cast a vote. Despite 50/50 polarization the USA seems to show, the political math has always been there to humiliate the Republicans at the ballot box.
The Math Behind 78 Million American Voters
Mr. Biden had great political experience to make things happen. Yet his administration behaved like a political rookie. And 86m Americans could not cast a vote in a Democratic direction.
And here we are today, wondering if more protesting against an upcoming oligarchy is going to happen or not.
Democracy vs. oligarchy
Some of my writing has focused on the USA losing its democracy. Sometimes, commentators mentioned that I was in error because the USA was never a democracy in the first place. They had a good point.
After some thought, I realized that democracy is not an either/or switch. There are elements of oligarchy in American, Canadian, and other western democracies — even though the ballot box decides who the decision makers will be. So I wrote this article:
Democracy is a Greyscale
It posits that democracy and oligarchy are two opposing attributes on a paradigm. Our current democracies have properties of both features — and are somewhere in the middle. We should aspire to push towards more democracy.
The USA is moving closer to the oligarchy side of the paradigm. There are significant forces in most western democracies wanting to take their countries in the same direction.
If there is no serious public opposition to the Trump administration by the end of the summer, this paradigm shift will happen quietly. I can see that the November 2026 election can be “rigged” to give the Republicans a 60/40 split in the House and Senate seats. This split will allow the Republicans to claim that American democracy is still alive, yet these majorities can push their leader’s agenda through with due process. In this case, democracy is on the surface, but the ballot box no longer decides who decides. The USA will practically be a one-party state, with the other party as a weak foil.
And just to be clear, I believe the Democratic Party had (and still has) the same goal. It wanted the buffoon to win the Republican primary in 2016.
The Orwell ratio
In his novel 1984, George Orwell told us how societies are organized.
Basically, there is a 2% elite who get to make the decisions and enjoy most of the goodies. This has been happening since we humans moved from hunter-gathers to agriculturalists. The ratio 2%/13%/85% is humanity’s natural instinct to organize itself, politically speaking.
The middle class that formed after WW2 is an aberration of history. Since 1985, we have been drifting back to the Orwell Ratio. The political movement MAGA has been feeling this trend, and they were not on the winning side. They have found the unity to better themselves in the new American pecking order.
Their unity is forcing a shift in who will be in the new 2%. Previously it was The American Aristocracy.
I think MAGA understands that there is too many of them to be in the 2% and the 13%. But after the dust settles, they see themselves in the top 50%. Too bad for the bottom 50%, but they are not MAGA.
Using history as an example, I formulated a strategy for this new elite to keep their MAGA base intact: McCarthyism and Trumpism
And this new elite is not implementing any of these techniques. It’s almost as if Project 2025 understands that the rich Republicans won’t need the poor Republicans for much longer.
What to do? What to do? What to do?
We have been inculcated to participate in democracy in several ways. We complain; we vote; we protest; we can join a political party; we donate to that political party; we volunteer for that party. We write to our elected representatives. We can write political articles and post them on the internet. These ways might have worked in the past. But today, the USA is sliding closer to the oligarchy side of the oligarchy/democracy paradigm.
When we study Nazi Germany and its occupied territories, we find much of the population was subdued. They knew the consequences of sticking out too much.
But we also find people who were on the proactive side. Some challenged the rule, somehow knowing how far to push boundaries. Others hid oppressed people, often moving them to safer countries. Others joined resistance movements, which consumed state resources that could not be used in the front lines. And some Germans paid the ultimate sacrifice, like Sophie Scholl.
In a like manner, American citizens should prepare themselves for the roles they want to play in their new oligarchy.
I have a different role some American citizens can play. They can build a new democracy.
Several life events came together that allowed me to invent Tiered Democratic Governance (TDG). In brief, the TDG has no political parties, voting is based on good character and capacity for governance, and TDG decisions are made by consultation, not power.
There will be new skills to learn in TDG governance. This is why the TDG needs to be built outside of the current political system, not directly challenging that rule. As the early TDG builders improve these skills and more citizens join, the TDG becomes more ready to assume the role of societal governance. Most of us yearn for this kinder, wiser democracy.
This link below provides the eight main essays of the TDG. It will take about 30 minutes to read them. From there, the reader can determine whether the TDG is worthy of more investigation and eventual trial:
I suspect that most of this article’s readers won’t take that 30-minute challenge. The TDG is too far outside of most people’s Overton Window to give it any serious consideration.
I know; I just gave everyone a good excuse not to read my work.
But if we so easily cast the TDG aside in an Overton way, what should we expect?
Here is the path I see:
1) The Republican oligarchy is something we have to endure. It will eventually fall on its own sword. I give it a decade.
2) Maybe the poor Republicans will see the error of their ways and change their vote. But elections will be rigged. And there’s still a chance there won’t be any elections. So moot point, right?
3) If there are elections, maybe the Democratic Party will reform itself to the be the party of the people. History suggests we should not put our hopes on this, especially when the bar to be better than the Republicans is so low.
4) We can change things with a French-like Revolution. In the aftermath of the chaos, the political scientists will swoop in with their new ideas on governance. Except their new ideas are quite similar to today’s systems. Why should we replace a system that got us into this mess with the same system?
Book Review: Open Democracy
Let me put this in different words. The above paths are about giving the responsibility to our future governance to someone else. Kind of like what is happening when we complain, vote, protest, and write internet articles to motivate that someone else to fix things. We have been inculcated to believe these techniques actually work.
Building the TDG puts you and people like you in charge of building that new democracy.
Are you now ready to read those eight TDG essays? Only 30 minutes of your time! And that 30 minutes can change the world.
Published on Medium 2025
Let's Protest Our Way Back to 2015
