INTELLECTUAL BANKRUPTCY - GOP
They don’t have plans. They have panic. What they call “policy” is a blunt instrument: mass raids, masked federal squads, and a scorched-earth answer to problems that never had to be reduced to human hunting. Instead of offering real solutions — jobs, housing, mental-health care, infrastructure, a functional immigration system — the playbook is cruelty first, questions later. The spectacle is designed to terrify, not to solve.
Let’s be clear: hauling mostly law-abiding people out of cars and workplaces, shipping them off with little transparency, and holding them in opaque facilities isn’t governance. It’s theater — authoritarian theater — and it costs us everything that makes democracy usable: due process, civic trust, basic decency. Judges across the country are already slamming these moves as illegal or unconstitutional, and for a reason. The courts aren’t woke — they’re doing their job.
When asked for concrete answers to endemic problems — stagnant wages, drug treatment deserts, failing hospitals, crumbling schools — the response is invariably the same: marshal more force, cut more services, create more fear. That’s not leadership. That’s an admission of intellectual bankruptcy. Real leadership builds institutions that work for people; this administration builds spectacles that terrify them.
And don’t fall for the propaganda framing. Enforcement theater doesn’t equate to competence. It’s a PR shortcut that substitutes violence for policy, headlines for strategy, and scapegoats for solutions. Meanwhile the daily work that actually improves lives — investing in communities, creating legal pathways, supporting local economies — gets outsourced to smug takes and midnight raids.
If you want a country that works, demand more than cruelty dressed up as courage. Demand plans that don’t involve disappearing people without paperwork or conscience. Demand leaders who can solve problems without turning neighbors into enemies. Because terrorizing communities isn’t governing — it’s giving up and watching the country fray. And that should terrify all of us, regardless of party.
Julie Bolejack, MBA
