You Are the Next Contestant on the Worst Game Show Ever

The house is winning, the set’s on fire, and no one knows the rules or the prizes

So, it’s been two months since I wrote “It’s Not Fascism, It’s Worse. It’s a Game Show. And George Carlin is your host.” And what a wild fucking two months it has been. The game has only gotten louder, sloppier, fiercely satirical, and more absurd with each passing day.

Since that piece, we’ve watched Los Angeles turn into a live-action theater for militarized ICE raids. We had the big box-office-disappointment Saturday double-header of “No Kings/Military Parade Day.” To the dismay of a few, neither caused the bullet heard around the world. No riots rampaging in the streets. No guns firing from either the Feds or the populace. It feels like a win to me considering the pre-rally hype, does it for you?

We then saw the Big Beautiful Bill waved through like a slick sleight of hand. I’m trying hard to be impartial and see both angles for which narrative will ultimately play out. Is it going to reduce waste, provide many technology benefits, or just be another standard run of the mill wealth, power, and freedom transfer? A high-stakes poker hand where the house always wins. It’s a pattern I am noticing, just dumb luck I guess, it’s just a real hot streak for the house from the Patriot Act on it seems. It feels like we are always the suckers who ante up, grinning like idiots while the winners stack chips, smoke cigars, and laugh at our naivety.

And then we get to the Epstein files’ most recent twists and turns. They’ve been dangling over us for so long, like a cliffhanger at the end of every episode in a trashy Netflix drama. Except this episode isn’t fictional. It’s real, and it reeks of rot. Will we finally get to see this drama move forward past rumors and innuendos, will there ever be any true evidence that sees the light of day?

And just when we think we can pop the popcorn and grab the beverage of choice to settle into the whole Epstein story arc with the majority of our attention, here comes Tulsi Gabbard making noise, waving documents, and switching the tables on which party is the hunter, and which party is now the witch. Aiming arrows and fire directly at the Democratic demagogue himself.

And here I sit, squarely in the middle. Not waving a blue flag. Not chanting MAGA slogans. Just stuck between the extremes, where reality is sharper and harder, and where there’s no cheer squad.

Everyone has been so busy fighting over the theater of ICE raids, professional and highly organized protests, the new federal domestic militarization, a sneaky Federal digital currency creation, figuring out who got caught with their knickers down with teenage girls, and what investigators and judges Obama and Trump will answer to, that nobody is really stopping to ask the real question, the only question that matters.

Who benefits?

That question is a compass. It’s a pretty reliable tool that cuts through the fog. Years ago, I stopped believing anything I’m told on mainstream news or in the social-media echo chambers. You really have to decipher this stuff the way archaeologists read the Dead Sea Scrolls, painstakingly, suspiciously, looking for patterns in a language obviously designed to confuse you.

We’re just so deep underwater right now. The news cycle is a whirlpool of bots, algorithms, and propaganda, all designed to keep us yelling at each other instead of seeing who’s moving the pieces. Asking “Who benefits?” is like putting on noise-canceling headphones in the middle of a war zone. It’s a chance for a breath of much needed air above the surface.

And lately, when I ask that question, some part of every answer always seems to have a magnetic pole, a driver if you will, Donald Trump.

This is the question that’s haunted me for a decade. Why him? Why now? Who benefits from his presence on this stage?

To even attempt an answer, you have to look at the history of the American presidency, not the Hollywood script version, but the raw, ugly, “follow the money and the results” version. And I can only speak from what I’ve seen in my lifetime, as a 56-year-old American man who’s watched this machine chew up and spit out anything but the unvarnished truth time and time again. Just a carefully curated version, always slanted through the rosiest glasses each team can find.

Most Presidents in my lifetime have been puppets. Carefully chosen, groomed, and molded to keep the machine running smoothly. Whether they were painted as the face of the establishment or the face against it, they all served the same purpose, to keep the club intact.

But there’s one exception that doesn’t seem to fit that pattern or result to me. Just one guy who slipped through the cracks, Jimmy Carter.

Carter wasn’t slick. He wasn’t a marketing product. He was a farmer who told his truth in an era when the truth being shown was becoming really bad for business. And the powers that be, the military industrial complex, George Bush and his CIA crew, hated him for sneaking in and ruining their game, their control. They made damn sure he was nothing but a one-term president.

Look at the hostage crisis that essentially sealed his fate for reelection. We were sold a story of radical Islamic students holding innocent Americans captive. In reality, the embassy in Tehran was the CIA operations hub for the Middle East and Asia. Those weren’t radicals, they were rightly pissed off locals trying to take back control from an imperialist machine that had overthrown their democracy for oil profits. And the “failed” rescue mission? Yeah, I don’t buy for a second that it wasn’t sabotaged, a CIA black op with a few conveniently “failed” helicopters. Carter is humiliated, and Ronald Reagan, an Alzheimer’s patient with a smile and a jar of jelly beans, gets the keys to the White House. Perfect puppet. Perfect face for “Good Morning America,” while the military complex pulls the strings and gets busy implementing all that they had learned to handle the new media age, from the lessons learned from their recent failures.

The 1960s laid the groundwork for Carter’s moment. Vietnam. The assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK. Kent State. Free love, LSD, a generation and populace banding together to demand change, freedom, and justice. These weren’t random. They were the aftershocks of a system losing its grip. Television at that point was accidentally showing America what was behind the curtain, the blood, lies, and the price of power, before they learned how to turn the media into a controlled propaganda machine. The “if it bleeds, it leads” news cycle backfired when not honed and filtered correctly. The people saw too much, and were doing something real about it.

Carter’s presidency was the hangover from that era. The establishment learned their lesson. They would never let someone like him through again.

Why do I call Carter the anomaly, different from all the rest? If you want to know who might have been a puppet and who isn’t, look at their life after the White House. Carter? He went back to Georgia with Rosalynn, he built homes for poor families with Habitat for Humanity. He created a charitable foundation, that guess what, was really a fucking charitable foundation, not a front to amass massive fortunes for himself, like many of the others who came after. He just kept living his faith, trying to do some good for the world, quietly, consistently. Whether you’re religious or not, you have to respect and recognize that. He walked his walk, and talked his talk, right to his last breath.

Compare that with the other presidents,
Reagan? Total puppet show for the CIA, military-industrial complex, establishment & money taking the control back.
Bush Sr.? No puppet here, he was actually one of the main puppeteers who decided they couldn’t take the chance of forwarding the agenda with another puppet
Clinton? A corporate Democrat with more dirt on him than a graveyard, encouraged to be the scamp, play a little sax, but ultimately easy to keep in line. The fortune amassed through the Clinton Foundation afterwards for him and Hillary, insanely massive.
Bush Jr.? A smirking legacy frat boy probably ignorant that he was fronting for Dad, Cheney, Halliburton, and the “New American Century” crew. Further proven by him, like Carter, quietly going back to his former life, which was pretty damn cushy indeed.
Obama? Ah yes, the savior. The “hope and change” Jesus of the Democratic Party. But tell me, what really changed? Wars and drones? Not ended as promised, but expanded upon greatly. Surveillance state? Another massive expansion. The first president to assassinate an American citizen without due process. He sold us a dream of healthcare for all while delivering Silicon Valley surveillance capitalism and massive profits to big pharma and the insurance industry, the real writers of ACA.

And that brings us back to Trump. I did promise a deeper dive, didn’t I? He and the MAGA Republicans have been selling for years that he’s the anomaly, the system breaker, the guy taking on the deep state.

But is he?

The Democrats sell us that he is really the new-age Hitler, dragging America into fascism.

But is he?

Are either of these narratives even remotely real?

Or is he just another character in the story? One who can bring better ratings, a bigger focal point for both sides, far faster polarization, distraction, and noise. There is just so much fucking noise.

Or is he just the easy fall guy for the catastrophes that we are going to see with AI, its effects on the economy, and the next implementation phase of Orwell’s predictions?

Is Trump the great disruptor? Or is he being played like a fiddle? The man is manipulative, yes, but also easy to manipulate if you know his weakness. And his weakness is glaring, his ego. It’s the biggest joystick in American politics. Push it the right way and it seems you can make him do whatever you want. I don’t think it is just an act, if it is he got acting lessons from Brando himself.

Maybe he really believes he’s running the show. Maybe he’s the perfect storm, a guy who thinks he’s in control while the real operators sit back, pull a few strings, and let him create chaos.

Or maybe, just maybe, he’s the chess player some on the right claim he is. That he is going to bring the purveyors of the American powers behind the power, the “Deep State,” to light and justice. I highly doubt it, but I’m certainly willing to be wrong. I’d be happy to fall on that sword. But one thing is abundantly clear to me, he’s here for a reason.

He’s no Jimmy Carter. He didn’t sneak in. He’s either the anomaly or the controlled variable, but either way, he’s part of the desired equation.

Why? This is the part I can’t fully understand. I have nine different answers depending on the day.

Let’s think through immigration and ICE. The ICE buildup over the last few months has been staggering. We’ve turned ICE into something way beyond a border agency, it’s becoming a domestic paramilitary force.

Sure, the easy narrative is that the border was wide open. And yes, even the bluest of the bluebirds can’t deny that millions poured in at record rates over the last few years. But the real question is, why was it allowed to happen? Who benefits?

It appears like the Democrats had a simple play in place, let them in, earn their gratitude, and count on their votes for generations. But that plan backfired. Many of these immigrants are deeply religious, socially conservative in nature, and not only unimpressed but off put by the culture war positions of the left. LGBTQ+ battles and pronoun wars? Not exactly resonating with families who came here with deeper man-made “Christian” values, the not-so-loving and judgmental Jesus version.

A good amount of them voted for Trump, the same guy who wants to deport their family members and people like them. Irony so thick you could cut it with a dull butter knife.

But I don’t think immigration is the only real ICE story. ICE is being built for what’s coming next, a full-blown economic restructuring that’s going to make the 2008 financial crash look like a lemonade stand robbery.

The trigger and need for it isn’t totally driven by immigration, it’s AI.

AI is about to obliterate jobs. Not thousands. Millions. White-collar jobs, the “safe” jobs we were told were untouchable if we played by the rules. Coders. Analysts. Marketing teams. Customer service reps. The entire middle-management layer. All the keyboard clickety-clackers who thought they were secure because they had followed the script, did well in school, took on debt for college and a house, contributed to society and the tax base, built the 401k. The American Dream, right?

But guess what? AI is coming for them first. They are about to find that script ripped up and tossed into the shredder.

Ten years ago, “learn to code” was the golden ticket, software runs everything, a job for life. Today? AI is starting to write code, not better, not faster, and not cheaper, not yet. But Open AI, META, Google, Elon, are all working furiously to reduce the biggest expense line item on their books, engineering talent, go figure.

And when these tens of millions of college-educated, debt-laden Americans lose their office jobs, guess who’s going to take the jobs that supposedly “nobody but the immigrants want or will do”? Them. When it’s down to eating ramen noodles or nothing, you take the damn job, don’t you?

So ICE isn’t just about immigration, perhaps it’s also about clearing out most of the cheap labor now so there’s room for the desperate middle class when the AI purge hits.

And maybe it’s also a real life training exercise to prepare a domestic military force ready to crush the backlash just in case things get hairy. When the mobs come with pitchforks, ICE could be pivoted to crowd control and keeping the club members safe.

Speaking of exclusive clubs, let’s dive into Epstein. Look at the names linked to Epstein, Trump. Clinton. Gates. Prince Andrew. Wexner. Cuomo. Bloomberg. Gore. Blair. Bin Salman. Summers. Dershowitz. Kosslyn. And that’s quite a dinner party. His black book reads like a guest list for the global elite, Hollywood stars, academic darlings, tech billionaires, royalty, and more than a few politicians who swore they were “of the people” while partying with the worst of the club.

But here’s the truth, being on that list doesn’t automatically mean guilt. It means proximity to a spiderweb designed for leverage.

This wasn’t a simple scandal, it was an infrastructure that created a system of control. A honeypot operation with layers of bait. The draw wasn’t always sex. Sometimes it was the money. Sometimes it was the power, the sense of being part of the inner circle. Epstein’s mysterious wealth was part of the allure, too. Nobody could quite explain how he made it, but plenty of people wanted to be close enough it seems to find out, or to share in the spoils.

Does that mean everyone in that black book was complicit? No. Some were honey, contacts to attract others, to make the web look even shinier and safer. It was a gravitational pull, the more recognizable the names, the more others wanted in. But here’s the danger of lists like these. The mob doesn’t care about nuance. Guilt by association will torch the innocent right along with the guilty.

But let’s not kid ourselves. There is guilt. Real guilt. Deep, dark, career-ending, empire-destroying guilt. The kind that makes powerful people willing to do anything, absolutely anything, to keep it buried. That’s why every name on that list, and every person close to them, whether innocent or not, has the same goal now, keep the truth from coming out. Red, blue, purple, it doesn’t matter. The club is bipartisan when it comes to self-preservation.

Both aisles have used this as their rallying cry at one point or another over the last decade, but yet nothing of substance ever comes out, does it. Trump definitely used it in his bid to get reelected, whether explicitly stated, or implicitly through his mainstream and podcast media spheres. Now it’s the Democrats turn to seize the high ground, raging at the light to unseal “all the evidence”. Considering the age of all this “evidence”, there is certainly a real reason none of it is seeing the light, right. It seems to be a guarantee of mutually ensure destruction if it ever does. You can’t just cherry pick a name or two out from the other team, maybe the whole game and league we call American Power gets exposed for what many believe it is, a completely rigged game, where corruption and blackmail are the only real votes counted in American Democracy. If it was to get released both teams history, leaders, and moral high grounds get fucking nuked too. Quite the quandary,

Now we hear whispers that Ghislaine Maxwell might start naming names. Maybe. But I won’t hold my breath. We’re not going to see the whole list, nor get the reality of why it exists. We’re not going to see the real dirt, the ways this operation bent our systems for decades. We, the mob, won't know who was the honey, who was the bee, and who got stung.

And as if the Epstein saga isn’t enough of a cliffhanger, we’ve now got this other old story arc making a comeback, the one that drives in the judicial lane.

For quite a while now, the monkey business in the courts has been nothing short of spectacular theater. And here’s the thing, I know we’re supposed to have checks and balances. Three branches of government, each holding the others in check. That’s how the system was built, and it truly is one of the greatest accomplishments of mankind. But it is becoming more and more a fairy tale every year. History shows if you own more than one and a half of these Checks & Balances, you’re effectively running the show. And the judicial system, the courts, that’s the arena where this game has been trading Nolan Ryan fastballs at each other's heads for thirty years.

Once you have a crew of “your flag color” judges and “your flag color” prosecutors in your debt, the game changes. You can dig up dirt. You can bury dirt. Heck, you ultimately can clean the dirt with the right deal.

This isn’t new of course. Legal warfare became the weapon of choice decades ago. I’d say it started really getting fun with the Clinton-Starr era. That’s when they realized that if you couldn’t beat a president at the ballot box, you could distract, exhaust, and humiliate them in court, all while providing great entertainment to the masses and media. Shifting people’s attention away so easily to keep running the shenanigans unnoticed and undisturbed in the shadows.

Fast forward to now, and it’s become the standard operating procedure. Russia, Russia, Russia for Trump term one, now his team is getting to return that serve right back. Comey. Obama, the current Tulsi Gabbard accusations. Judges and investigators on both sides are willing to bend the rules, slant the angles, and throw mud to see what sticks.

Here we are, folks. Sixty days later, and I feel like I’ve been trapped in the world’s weirdest game show. It’s not Jeopardy! As there are no answers in the form of a question, just more and more questions. It’s definitely not Wheel of Fortune, not when the wheel is spinning so fast it’s about to launch the contestants into the fucking walls like crash dummies. No, this is more like The Price is Wrong, where the showcase showdown prize is economic collapse and bankruptcy, the host is half George Carlin, half George Orwell, and the studio audience is too busy waving colored flags to notice the set is on fire.

We’ve had the Big Beautiful Bill, the ICE raids, Epstein’s lingering shadow, Tulsi flipping tables, and the courts keep throwing fastballs at each other’s heads. And what do we have to show for it? Nothing but cliffhangers. Endless cliffhangers. Every story arc promises a big reveal, but the curtain never really drops, does it?

And yeah, I know the so-called Great Reveal, the Great Awakening we keep praying for is probably just another tease. The dangling carrot, the promise of truth that’s always just one episode away. But here I am, still tuning in, still waiting. I’m Charlie Brown lining up for the kick, and Lucy’s standing there with that shit-eating grin, ready to yank that damn football away the second I think this time will be different.

Yet, here I wait, with all of you, expecting a different result, the true definition of insanity…. God Bless America

Peace, Love, & Gratitude Y’all….

Chappy