It’s Not “Them.” It’s Us.
Stop blaming foreign boogeymen and billionaire phantoms—the American fix starts in the mirror.
POLITICS: By Walter Curt
Every time we hit another cultural pothole, a familiar chorus warms up: Blame Beijing, blame Moscow, blame that shadowy coven of billionaires who allegedly meet by candlelight to plot the next chapter of our national decline. It’s a tidy bedtime story for grown-ups who prefer villains to responsibility. But the truth is plainer and more uncomfortable: in a constitutional republic, the people are sovereign, which means the people are also accountable. If “they” are running the show, it’s because “we” handed them the keys, the checkbook, and a note that said, “Wake us when the country’s fixed.” Self-government is a contact sport. We either show up, or we get shown up.
Yes, foreign influence exists. Of course it does. Only fools leave the doors unlocked and then act surprised when the raccoons raid the pantry. A serious nation builds defenses against hostile propaganda and cyber-mischief because other countries will test the walls—daily, relentlessly, gleefully. That’s not paranoia; that’s civics. And in theory, we built some of those defenses. Call it the counter-propaganda architecture, the digital Maginot Line, the “censorship-industrial complex” if you want the Washington label. On the whiteboard, the mission was simple: if a foreign adversary tries to flood our information bloodstream, we identify it and counter it—surgically, transparently, lawfully.
But somewhere between the whiteboard and the server room, the mission was hijacked by the usual crew of ideologues and careerists, and what should have been a shield against foreign ops became a cudgel against domestic dissent. Suddenly, anyone right of midtown was tagged a foreign stooge, and ordinary Americans—many of them veterans, small business owners, moms and dads—were treated like enemy combatants for sharing opinions that used to be called common sense. That wasn’t national security; it was bureaucratic vanity mixed with partisan panic. And while the offenders deserve public exposure and a swift exit from power, let’s not pretend they apparated onto the stage by dark magic. We hired them. We tolerated them. We shrugged while they got promoted. That’s on us.
Our side bears its share, too. For twenty years, while the left marched through the institutions with clipboards and HR manuals, too many conservatives comforted themselves with the fantasy that politics stops at the schoolhouse door. We ceded ground to keep the peace, a tactical retreat that became a habit, and a habit that became a hole. By the time the culture warriors reached the surreal claim that men can be women and women can be men by declaration, a lot of good people finally looked up and said, “Now wait just a minute.” But by then we were halfway down the hill, mud up to our knees, surfing the avalanche like a lawn chair on a waterslide. If you’re asking where the bottom is, you’re answering your own question: we didn’t push back when it was small and fixable, so we met the problem only when it was large and ludicrous.
Here’s the punchline no one wants to hear: if foreigners can manipulate our information space, that’s proof of a domestic failure—ours—to maintain resilient institutions and an informed citizenry. If Silicon Valley commissars can throttle a story, that’s proof we’ve allowed unaccountable power to congeal in a handful of hands. If corrupt county machines keep humming, it’s because too few citizens are inside the room where the wiring lives. Screaming about “them” might scratch the itch, but it doesn’t fix the fuse. Republics don’t stay free by autopilot. They stay free because citizens decide to be worthy of them.
So what do we do? We do the very thing our grandparents took for granted and our generation treats like climbing Everest in flip-flops: we govern ourselves. We recruit and elect competent, courageous, unconflicted people—and when they go wobbly, we retire them without apology. We learn the bones of our local government and then put spine in them. We become precinct committeemen and women so that party slates reflect actual voters rather than the last person to bring donuts to the county office. We serve as poll watchers, election judges, canvassing board members—the mundane posts where integrity is preserved not by hashtags but by eyes-on and hands-on.
We master the open-records laws and use them. FOIA isn’t a suggestion; it’s a crowbar that pops open the door of government closets where the skeletons live. [5] If you suspect wrongdoing in your city hall or school district, gather documents, build a clean record, and publish it. And if you don’t have a platform, don’t whine—borrow one. We live in the first age where a school board memo can be in a national audience’s hands before the next bell rings. You have a smartphone more powerful than the computers that sent men to the moon. You can shoot video, annotate PDFs, and share primary-source files in minutes. Stop auditioning for the chorus of hopelessness and become a one-person newsroom.
If you have more money than time, then fund the missionaries who are winning ground—legal defense outfits that fight compelled speech, campus organizations that train students to argue rather than shout, investigative shops that do the archival grunt work. If you have more time than money, then volunteer for the ground campaigns that quietly decide everything: school board slates, library boards, prosecutor races, county commissions. And if you’re blessed with both, pick up a shovel and a checkbook.
Yes, you will be mocked. Yes, you will be called names. There’s no cheaper currency in public life than a slur flung by someone who’s never knocked a single door. Wear it like the price tag on a well-made suit. Meanwhile, insist on competence. Insist that people running big things can explain what they’re doing in small words. Insist that the folks who turned our “foreign influence” firewall into a domestic gag order find new careers far from the levers of government. Insist that agencies return to their legal lanes and stay there. None of this requires permission from a donor class or a blue-check whisper network. It requires citizens acting like owners, not tenants.
Some will say the machine is too big, the money too vast, the web too tangled. Maybe. But if size alone decided outcomes, we’d still be a collection of colonies making polite requests to a king across the sea. The Founders didn’t outsource their grievances to a task force; they organized, argued, wrote, litigated, assembled, and when necessary, replaced incompetent rulers with better ones—peacefully when possible, forcefully when unavoidable. Our moment is nowhere near as dire as theirs, and our tools are infinitely better. For the price of a streaming subscription, you can access an AI tutor that teaches you constitutional law before breakfast and small-business accounting by lunch. You can learn to write with clarity, speak with conviction, and research like a pro. If you spend more time bingeing shows about dystopias than preventing one, that’s not a plot—it’s a choice.
Which brings us back to the mirror. The easiest sentence in politics starts with “they.” They ruined the schools. They rigged the media. They corrupted the city. Maybe they did. But who hired them, tolerated them, and replaced duty with distractions? Who decided that citizenship was someone else’s job? Who talked about the American experiment like a spectator sport and then complained about the scoreboard? That pronoun doesn’t start with “t.” It starts with “w.”
America is not beyond repair because Americans are not beyond repentance. We can course-correct. We can drain the bureaucratic swamps without burning the constitutional forest. We can rebuild trust the old-fashioned way—by earning it, locally, visibly, stubbornly, again and again. Stop romanticizing the cavalry. You are the cavalry. Fire incompetence at the ballot box. Replace it with virtue and skill. Push truth into the public square until the algorithms can’t smother it. And when you hear the next smooth lecture about the omnipotent puppet masters who control everything, smile and ask a simple question: If they’re unstoppable, why do they panic every time citizens wake up?
Quit blaming the boogeymen. Lace up. Knock a door. File a request. Learn a skill. Fund a winner. Run for the seat nobody else wants because that’s the seat that decides what your kids read next fall. The future will belong to the side that shows up like owners. If we do that, the country we hand our children won’t be a cautionary tale about “them.” It will be a victory story about us.
