Transparently Criminal
This is what power looks like when it no longer needs to pretend.
This is what power looks like when it no longer needs to pretend.
We know what the pretending looked like. Weapons of mass destruction. Freedom and democracy. The war on terror. The noble lie was the price of admission — power needed our consent, or at least our confusion, and the lie was how it bought both. The gap between the lie and the truth was where accountability lived.
That gap is gone.
On Sunday morning, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sat in a television studio and told you exactly what was happening. When the Iranian regime falls, we are going to make a ton of money. Venezuela and Iran together hold thirty-one percent of the world’s known oil reserves, and we are going to have a partnership with thirty-one percent of those reserves. No liberation. No democracy. No grieving mother in Tehran whose suffering justified the mission. Just the number. Thirty-one percent. Said to your face, on television, on Sunday morning, because there is no longer any reason not to say it.
The House passed a bill this week requiring you to produce a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Not a driver’s license. Not a military ID. A passport, which one hundred forty-six million Americans do not own, or a birth certificate that matches your current legal name, which sixty-nine million women cannot produce because they took their husband’s name when they married. Kansas tried something similar and blocked thirty of your neighbors for every single noncitizen it caught, which means the sorting was never about noncitizens. It was always about which citizens — the ones least likely to vote Republican — removed one documentation requirement at a time. Trump is holding every piece of pending legislation hostage until the Senate agrees. If it fails, they will say Democrats want noncitizens voting in your elections.
The bill was never about noncitizens. It was always about you.
Federal judges issued thirty-five orders demanding the administration explain why it should not be held in contempt for defying their rulings. One judge attached an appendix: ninety-six court orders ICE had violated in a single month, across seventy-four cases, a list he called almost certainly incomplete. The New Jersey DOJ investigated itself, as a judge required, and admitted violating at least fifty-six court orders since December. A DOJ attorney was held in civil contempt. The administration’s answer was to sue every judge on the District Court of Maryland.
Chanthila Souvannarath entered this country before his first birthday, became a citizen when his father naturalized, and ICE deported him to Laos in defiance of a court order.
Then Bondi filed a proposed rule. Any state bar investigating one of her lawyers for ethics violations would be required to stand down pending her review. And if they refused, the rule stated, the Department “shall take appropriate action to prevent the bar disciplinary authorities from interfering.”
Interfering. With an ethics investigation. Of her own lawyers.
There is no bar. She said so in a federal filing.
Kristi Noem spent three hundred million in border security funds on luxury jets, the Post Office is being starved into collapse, the Epstein files were released with the pages about a thirteen-year-old removed, days ago Israel got $151.8 million in arms without a vote, the last old-growth forests were opened to logging, and Cuba was cut off from oil until its airports went dark.
The list goes on.
Two words sum it up.
Transparently criminal.
The Floor of the Senate
We want to believe this is new. It is not new.
In 133 BC, on the morning he was going to die, Tiberius Gracchus stumbled on the threshold of his own house. His toenail broke. Blood ran into his shoe. He kept walking.
He had the law on his side. He had the votes. He had proposed that land stolen by wealthy senators be redistributed to the poor. What he did not have was the permission of the men whose land it was.
They killed him on the Senate floor. Not with swords. With the legs of benches. With broken chairs. Whatever they could reach. Three hundred of his supporters were beaten to death in the streets the same day. No trials followed. No senators were charged. The men who did it did not disappear quietly into history. They bragged.
We want to call this a rupture, the moment Rome broke. It was not a rupture. It was a permission slip.
The next man who wanted power watched what happened to Gracchus and learned something essential: the rules were now optional. That the crowd would be shocked. That nothing would happen to the men who shocked them. Sulla watched. Then Caesar watched. Each one did what the last one did and got away with, and then went a little further, because the going further was now also permitted.
We were the crowd. We watched each time. We absorbed it and called it a new normal and the floor dropped another inch.
The republic did not end when the killing started. It ended the day Gracchus’s body hit the Senate floor and the men who put it there walked out into Roman sunlight and no one stopped them.
The Method
This is how you get away with it.
You do it in public. You name the oil. You declare yourself the bar. You build a betting pool on which detained man dies first and you let the wire services publish it. You do not hide because hiding implies there is something that could stop you if you were found out.
The transparency is the point. We are being trained.
Each act that produces no consequence expands the boundary of what the next act can be. Graham names the oil because someone before him named something smaller and we absorbed it. Bondi absorbs oversight because the oversight was already gutted and we absorbed that too. The journalist disappears into the system because we watched other people disappear and called it complicated.
We are not weak. We are managed. The list is a curriculum. Graham names the oil. Bondi names herself the bar. The betting pool gets published and the staff keep their jobs. Each item trains us to receive the next one. The most effective censorship does not silence, it overwhelms. It produces a list so long that the capacity for outrage exhausts itself before it can become action. We do not need to be silenced. We need to be tired.
We are being asked to absorb it.
Watching is also a choice.
What We Still Know
Power stops pretending when it no longer needs our permission.
That is what Gracchus’s killers understood that he did not. They did not need a majority. They did not need the law. They needed the crowd to absorb the act and move on, and the crowd did. The mask does not come off because rulers get arrogant. It comes off because the institutions that made concealment necessary have been removed, one by one, until openness costs nothing.
The citizen who stops asking is more useful to power than the citizen who is afraid. Fear can become rage. Exhaustion just becomes tomorrow. The republic does not die when the tyrant arrives. It dies in the ten thousand small moments when the people who might have said something decided it was too costly, too late, and looked away.
We are watching. We have not looked away. That is not nothing.
The shock we feel reading the list is not a malfunction. It is the last faculty the training has not yet reached. It is the part of us that still knows what the pretending was for, and what its absence means.
What Falls With It
The Post Office carried abolitionist newspapers when no private carrier would touch them. It connected labor unions across a continent before the telephone existed. It delivered information that power did not want delivered because it was public and not for sale. The Postmaster General told Congress it will run out of money within a year. Not secretly. To Congress. On the record.
Each institution that falls removes a channel through which we learn we are not alone. When they fall, we become individuals in separate rooms, each absorbing the week’s list alone, each less certain that our feeling can become anything.
Tiberius Gracchus stumbled on his threshold that morning. Toenail broke. Blood in his shoe. He looked down at it, and he kept walking.
He did not know it was the last morning. He knew the law was on his side. He knew the votes were there. He walked out of his house and into a Senate that had already decided what came next.
The senators who killed him walked out into Roman sunlight afterward and bragged. Nothing happened. That was 133 BC.
We are watching men name the oil on television. And absorb the courts into their own office. And deport citizens in defiance of judges. And redact the files they promised to release.
This is transparently criminal. We know what it is. We have always known what it is.
The threshold is still there. The blood is still in the shoe.
They cannot normalize what you refuse to call normal.
Notes & Sources
The New Republic. (2026, March 6). Lindsey Graham gives away Trump’s entire game on Iran war. https://newrepublic.com/post/207503/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-iran-regime-change-oil
Al Jazeera. (2026, March 9). ‘We are going to make a tonne of money’: US Senator Graham on US war on Iran. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/9/we-are-going-make-a-tonne-of-money-us-senator-graham-on-us-war-on-iran
The 19th. (2026, February 11). House passes SAVE America Act; married women and LGBTQ+ voters would face extra steps. https://19thnews.org/2026/02/house-passes-save-america-act-married-women-vote/
Center for American Progress. (2026). The SAVE Act: Overview and facts. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-save-act-overview-and-facts/
Brennan Center for Justice. (2026). New SAVE Act bills would still block millions of Americans from voting. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting
Just Security. (2026, February). Holding the Trump administration accountable for violating court orders. https://www.justsecurity.org/131966/trump-administration-accountable-violating-court-orders/
CNN. (2026, February 19). Minnesota judge holds federal attorney in civil contempt, a first in Trump’s second term. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/19/politics/trump-attorney-contempt-minnesota-immigration
Minnesota Reformer. (2026, February 27). Chief Judge Schiltz: ‘One way or another, ICE will comply with this court’s orders.’ https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/02/27/chief-judge-schiltz-one-way-or-another-ice-will-comply-with-this-courts-orders/
National Immigration Project. (2025, October 29). ICE deports man claiming U.S. citizenship to Laos despite federal court order. https://nipnlg.org/news/press-releases/ice-deports-man-claiming-us-citizenship-laos-despite-federal-court-order
Federal Register. (2026, March 5). Review of state bar complaints and allegations against Department of Justice attorneys. Docket No. OAG199, AG Order No. 6653-2026-A. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/03/05/2026-04390/review-of-state-bar-complaints-and-allegations-against-department-of-justice-attorneys
Above the Law. (2026, March 5). Bondi says she’s the bar now. https://abovethelaw.com/2026/03/bondi-says-shes-the-bar-now/
ABC News. (2026, March 4). DOJ proposes policy aimed at limiting state bar ethics probes into its attorneys. https://abcnews.com/US/doj-proposes-policy-aimed-limiting-state-bar-ethics/story?id=130755238
Axios. (2026, February 28). Noem burning deportation cash on luxury jets. https://www.axios.com/2026/02/28/noem-luxury-jets-dhs-deportations
NBC News. (2026, February 19). ‘No expense has been spared’: Inside a luxury jet DHS wants to buy for deportations. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/no-expense-spared-luxury-jet-dhs-wants-buy-deportations-rcna259425
NPR. (2026, February 24). DOJ removed, withheld Epstein files related to accusations about Trump. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell
NPR. (2026, March 5). Justice Department posts more Epstein files related to accusations about Trump. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/05/nx-s1-5737562/justice-department-missing-epstein-files-trump
Reuters. (2026, March 6). US skips congressional review to approve munitions sale to Israel. https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2026-03-06/us-state-department-approves-possible-military-sale-to-israel-for-151-8-million
U.S. Department of State. (2026, March 6). Israel — Munitions and munitions support. https://www.state.gov/israel-munitions-and-munitions-support
The Floor of the Senate
Plutarch. Life of Tiberius Gracchus. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press, 1921. Hosted by University of Chicago. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Tiberius_Gracchus*.html
Plutarch. Life of Tiberius Gracchus. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2008.01.0065
What Falls With It
Reuters / USA Today. (2026, March 6). USPS could run ‘out of cash in 12 months,’ postmaster general says. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/mar/06/usps-could-run-out-of-cash-in-12-months-postmaster/
Fortune. (2026, March 6). The Postal Service will run out of cash within a year, postmaster general warns. https://fortune.com/2026/03/06/post-office-run-out-of-money-within-a-year-postmaster-general/
This regime promised transparency. Thanks to you, I now know what they meant.
In high school I was taught history via the memorization method; memorize dates, memorize names, spit them back out on exams. As a result, I assiduously avoided studying any history in college.
In later years, understanding my gap in knowledge, I asked a friend, who had been a student of history in college "what is a good place to start?"
He recommended Theucidides, The Histories. I bought a copy and started to read. I'm not sure I made it through even 20 pages. All it was was an assessment of wars, the number of troops and ships, the supplies, the battles, the sailing across this or that strait.
When you take a step back, and see a broad overview of human activity, it is very little more than an accounting of wars won and lost.