Authoritarianism’s Feast: Power, Betrayal, Collapse

The Table Is Set. Guess Who’s for Dinner?

I. The Sickness We Deny

There is a kind of fatigue that doesn’t come from age or labor—it comes from witnessing cruelty so persistent, so gleeful, so casual in its execution, that the soul begins to stagger under the weight of it.

Writing has always been my joy. Words have been my magic carpet since I learned to read much later in childhood than most kids. But there are days—like this one—when the words arrive slowly. Not for lack of things to say. But for the breath it takes to say them.

Today, that breath is ragged.

I awakened to the reality that yesterday’s assassination was hate made real, not the metaphorical assassination of decency or norms, but the literal, targeted murder of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her spouse.

This isn’t politics. This isn’t heat-of-the-moment partisanship.

This is an act of monsters. This is the ugly, unmasked horror of the cabal that is running America.

This is grievance with a trigger finger.

And still, I fear: this is no crescendo. It is a prologue to a more profound rupture.

A signal flare from the darkness announcing that the saboteurs of democracy are growing hungrier—and more unafraid. This moment is not chaos; it’s choreography. And unless we see the whole silhouette of this cabal—the ecosystem that feeds it, shelters it, and profits from it—we risk mistaking horror for anomaly.

We risk not seeing what’s already here.

II. The Members of the Cabal

There is no master villain stroking a cat in a bunker. No single council of evil in a smoke-filled room. The cabal is looser, more ambient—like mold in the walls or rot beneath the floorboards.

Its members include:

• The Opportunists – Politicians and pundits who once knew better but have found the taste of power sweeter than principle. They speak with forked tongues, then play dumb when the knives come out.

• The Oligarchs – Billionaires, dynastic families, and financial predators who see deregulation and instability not as threats, but as harvest seasons. They flourish in disorder, so long as the laws break in their favor.

• The Theocrats – Christian nationalists who mistake dominance for divinity. They cloak authoritarianism in scripture and treat the Sermon on the Mount like a business plan for conquest.

• The Grifters – Pillow merchants. Crypto hucksters. Self-declared prophets and influence-peddlers who convert delusion into dollars. They will sell out democracy for a fourth-quarter bonus.

• The Loyalists – Zealots in mid-level power: sheriffs, board members, bureaucrats. They are eager servants of tyranny, often more dangerous than their masters because they believe.

• The Foreign Enablers – Propagandists, cyber-operatives, state actors who exploit our divisions, inflame our paranoia, and profit off the collapse of civic trust.

What unites them isn’t ideology—it’s appetite.

They may differ in aim, but they share one hunger: the capture of state power not to govern, but to shield themselves while targeting the rest. What they build is not a movement—it’s a feeding frenzy.

III. The Shared Hunger

Power, in the hands of this cabal, is not a means to lead. It is a means to consume.

This is more than corruption. This is parasitism.

It consumes norms. It consumes trust. It consumes its own.

It sells out the very voters it claims to champion. It hijacks movements that began with legitimate pain. It turns patriotism into pageantry, faith into fanaticism, law into theater.

It doesn’t want to rule the village.
It wants to salt the earth and sell the ashes.

And perhaps most dangerously, it convinces the weary and the wary that there’s nothing left worth defending.

Like a parasite that kills its host, the cabal weakens the very nation it claims to protect. History is littered with such creatures—always convinced they’re immune to the collapse they engineer.

IV. The Inevitable Fracture

Cabal unity is an illusion. It only holds so long as the spoils are divisible. But greed has no patience. Ambition has no brakes.

The oligarch will find the theocrat too restrictive.
The grifter will cannibalize the loyalist’s platform.
The foreign actor will realize that a fully fractured America is less profitable than a merely pliant one.

Watch the lawsuits. Watch the purges. Watch the sudden silences of those who once shouted loudest.

The fracture won’t come with a bang—it’ll arrive through betrayals whispered in boardrooms and backrooms, through sudden firings and sealed indictments, through knives slipped not between shoulder blades, but through political endorsements and revoked alliances.

And when that day comes, the machinery they built will still be spinning—but with no compass and no brakes. That’s when the cruelty intensifies. That’s when the betrayals multiply.

But that is also when the rot becomes visible.
And what becomes visible can be resisted.

V. The Real Counterforce

The real antidote to authoritarian creep isn’t just voting. It isn’t just protest.

It is memory.

Memory of who we’ve been at our best.
Memory of what was sacrificed for these rights we take for granted.
Memory that democracy is not inherited—it is practiced, fought for. Kept alive.

And when memory is joined by love—fierce love—for people, for principle, for possibility-it becomes resistance.

Fierce love is not sentimental.
It’s the stubbornness of teachers who stay.
It’s neighbors who speak when silence would be safer.
It’s citizens who still believe truth—bloodied and bruised—will rise.

So name the cabal. Understand it.
But do not fear it.

Because it is only as strong as our forgetting.
Only as powerful as our silence.
Only as permanent as our surrender.

And we?

We remember.
We speak.
We do not yield.

Yes, the breath may be ragged—but it still carries the fire.

And that is enough to light the way forward.

Further Reading: