In what has turned into one of the most important speeches of 2026 so far, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke to Europe’s top brass earlier this month at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany. In his speech he narrativized the next chapter of America’s imperial agenda. The thesis of his speech relied heavily on a substantive misframing of “shared culture” he gaslit the audience into under the guise of a commonly misused trope: ‘Civilization.’

“We are a part of one civilization” Rubio told the European audience, “Western Civilization, forged by centuries of shared Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization which we have fallen heir.”

Most people don’t know this, but the word ‘civilization’ was created in the 1700s. In her 2024 book ‘How the World Made the West,’ Josephine Quinn, Chairwoman of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge, outlined how the term ‘civilization’ is often used incorrectly in revisionist framings of history for the sake of justifying empire building/sustainment. The term is a vestige of a Renaissance era that saw Arabic culture rise to prominence and influence in Europe. Another phenomena that rose to prominence and influence in Europe in this period was the doctrine of race science that ushered in many new jargon terms and false theories like "civilization."

From 2500 BC to 1500 AD there were many prominent city-states throughout the globe but not many prominent nation states. Some of the expansive city-states of the era, like Rome, were vast, but to think that every city within the roman empire shared the same culture is revisionist. Although regions had similar influences, they also had uniquely different influences infused from other regions outside “the west” too. This idea that the west was curated from within is a lie. Take Santa Claus for example, the origins of St Nick originate in modern day Turkey, but the modern perception most people think of when they think of Santa Claus speaks to how appropriations of perception can happen over time since most people don't equate Santa Claus with Turkish culture.

In his Munich speech, Marco Rubio utilized this 'appropriated Santa Claus' logic to justify how western "civilization" had been around for thousands of years and how America was now the standard bearer of its legacy. Europe’s role moving forward would be to prop up American imperial dominance not because it’s in Europe’s best interests, but because it's in the best interest of white nationalist dominion and empire over the world. Whether or not Europe allows itself to be pawned in this fashion is still unanswered. But if Rubio’s speech was any indication, it seems the time has come for Europe to make that decision.

The 'Civilization' Myth

I’ve always believed perception and reality were two different worlds, but due to a recent conversation with an old friend I’ve had to revisit this.

“Life has taught me perception is reality.” He texted me anecdotally. “I wake up every morning and trick my brain into being happy.”

It’s a novel concept – tricking your brain into a mindset, but as I’ve traversed my own anecdotal path this concept waxes reasonable. There is no denying how the nature of consciousness has made a full gyroscopic rotation in the last 40 years, but with that spin we’ve all come to fractured enlightenments on our places within it. How did this happen?

To understand how the mono-cultural fracture started we must first understand the nature of consciousness. It is best viewed through the eyes of Arthur M. Young’s 1976 book ‘The Reflexive Universe.’ In this book he theorizes how consciousness emerges from a quantum interference between light and matter. His theory rests on the law of wave-particle duality that asserts everything is a wave, even consciousness. Therefore, consciousness is non-local (like reality itself) since its a byproduct of the universe.

Locally the only thing that’s ours is our journey. A temporary journey through an energy field we’re anchored to by a non-local source. According to Young’s theory, there is no order to everything, only balance.

And it is through understanding this duality that our mono-cultural fracture’s inflection point emerges. It is based in a factionalism that pits those who strive for order against those who strive for balance. In theory, they seem synonymous but they actually aren’t. To consciously strive for order you have to be ok with imbalance for the sake of your privilege, while, conversely, to consciously strive for balance you have to be ok with disorder for the sake of fate.  

Take our economy for instance, capitalism runs on free market principles. And in this system, the market is the ultimate decider of who wins and who loses. To accept this premise, there’s a built in level of disorder you have to be ok with for the sake of economic fatalism. Some businesses will fail so better ones can rise in the name of market balance. Somewhere in the 20th century though, it can be deduced that the free market system was hijacked by a globalist faction that prioritized order in the market over balance. Consolidating more and more of the market for decades now in the name of conducting an order to the flow of capital. This has pressured our economy into a K-Shaped imbalance that a faction of Americans seem to be ok with due to the privileges it affords them. 

All of this is enabled by the liquidity of money which acts as the lifeblood to the flow of our economic system. The Balance-based conscious faction prefers to let the liquid flow in its natural state while the Order-based conscious faction prefers to create a dam-like barrier to conduct the flow into consolidated channels. 

And it is in this same way, you can think of attention as liquid. And in the last decade, the flow of our attention has been consolidated into channels of conductivity at an alarming rate just like our money. 

The Attention Economy

Regardless of your political persuasion, everyone must acknowledge the economy is growing. Now, the speculation from that point can go in one of two directions – either it’s growing in a good way or it’s growing in a bad way, but there is no question that the economy is growing. In fact, under Trump, the GDP is growing faster than at any time under Biden. This is a big omen because it proves Trump supporters correct. In his first year back, Trump has delivered on his economic promises inspite of the cultural impacts their having on everyday life. 

The finesse lies in how he’s successfully evaded all the negative spin he could’ve received this year. In 2025, there wasn’t a recession or stagflation, which were the biggest worries coming into the year. Because for an economy to reach stagflation, 3 things must occur: high inflation, high unemployment and stagnant economic growth. And although inflation remains high and unemployment is trending upward (already 8%+ for black people), the rate of economic growth has still outpaced both of these metrics comparatively this fiscal year.

So if things aren’t categorically ‘stagnant’ yet, what’s causing all the doom and gloom? Look no further than the 2025 Word of the Year: Slop. It refers to the "digital content of low quality that’s produced en-masse by means of artificial intelligence." It’s a new slang word that crystallizes how low-quality, AI-generated content has invaded our cyberspaces and terminally infected our online experiences.

Marketed as a tour de force by corporate lobbyists like Sam Altman, AI was sold to the public as an endgame for human evolution and achievement. It was advertised as the primer machine learning model to cut costs, improve efficiency and streamline progress in our society at large. But in its wake, all its done is create a new machine class that may or may not be hostile to humanity.

In Liu Cixin’s 2008 sci-fi thriller ‘The Dark Forest,’ he explores this possibility in a theory known as ‘The Dark Forest Hypothesis.’ The theory asserts that alien entities exist in abundance across the universe but remain silent and hidden out of fear that revealing themselves would lead to their destruction by another hostile entity that’s more technologically advanced. In the theory’s analogy, our universe is the dark forest, and, just like creatures in a dark forest, we have to stay hidden so we dont draw attention on ourselves from hostile entities. Because if we invite hostile entities in, they will invade, infect and destroy us for the mere sake of their own survival.

Now if you take that analogy and substitute the internet in as the dark forest, then “slop” can be seen as the modern-day Frankenstein hostility we’ve self-induced and exposed into our world. What’s most terrifying about this Frankenstein bot slop is that it has already begun augmenting a conscious form into our public lives. This form has taken the shape of “best practice efficiency” algorithms that mold and spore through our infrastructures like The Blob in size and scope.

And this Blob has invaded our public and private sector infrastructures like nothing we’ve ever seen before. There is no escaping the Blob’s slop now, we must accept its suffocation disguised as enrapture. It’s brought about an entropy we must either quietly fight, quietly quit or quietly accept. Either way, its captured us in perpetuity.

According to Newsweek, 14% of this year's economic growth has been tied to slop infused investments and infrastructures. Because even at a low-quality state, the slop has still captured many quantitative data centered industries & employees. So as we move into 2026, the percent of slop-infused market-share will likely increase. Pundits are trying to frame this phenomenon as an “A.I bubble” that’s soon to burst due to affordability issues that’ve arisen for 90% of American households who now have fallen to the “lower arm” of our K-Shaped economy. But if the economy has been able to grow off the backs of just the top 10% of earners, then who's to say this isn’t a sustainable model moving forward? Who's to say this K-shaped economy can't continue to grow in this lopsided fashion in scope and scale? What if inflation & unemployment remain high in 2026 but economic growth continues to outpace them thanks to the slop's neutralizing effect?

As a bubble expands it becomes a blob, and there’s more than enough slop to continue stretching the widening divide. 

Maybe this is all just the beginning of the sLopflation era.

The sLopflation Era

On Halloween day this year while I was out pumping gas, a werewolf came out from behind a firetruck and stared at me with its paws down. We had a moment. It lingered on, oddly, for some time. So much so it started feeling strange, like an outer body experience. The strangeness of it all still puzzles me. Why were we so committed to this gaze? And for so long? Why so performative? I still don’t know who that was behind that mask just as much as they still don’t know who I was unmasked. In that moment though we were nobody and everybody in an odd way, and the absurdity of it is what made it all real coincidentally. We were performers engaging in an absurd and impromptu staring contest, and, oddly enough, it felt right in the moment.

As time has passed, it still feels right. Its compelled me to examine the art of performance and the roles we play in this melodramatic moment of American history. Because if you look around, it’s not that far fetched to see we’re living through a prolonged theater of the absurd right now. Everyday feels like a downward spiral of flat characters along flat paths in flat narratives with flat plots. Everyone seems to be haplessly complicit with the choices forced upon them without ever questioning whose forcing them and why. All the while allowing a flatness to be forced upon us to live within, dream within and eventually die within like a holiday ornament in storage. Take your flat identity, take your flat life, and, most importantly, accept your flat death so you can be easily packaged away afterwards. 

Like me and the werewolf, to see the absurdity in real time and remain silent to it is to be complicit in the absurdity’s performance with you. By not distancing yourself from it in real time, you are accepting your role within the story its curating.

And in the history of performance art, this commitment to waking the audience up out of “the fantasy” of a story so that they can stay in tune to the deeper political messaging is known as ‘The Estrangement Effect.’ Its a distancing technique accredited to Bertolt Brecht, a 20th century German playwright who once famously said “art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” This saying gets to the core of how estrangement works. It’s not concerned with what is truth, but, rather, 'how' is truth and 'for whom' is truth? For instance, estrangement isn’t concerned with the truth behind a mask, but, conversely, it’s concerned with the effect that mask is having 'on whom' it’s directed towards. Because that is where the distancing, alienation and/or estrangement is taking place in real time. The Estrangement Effect turns attention itself into the spectacle, so it can observe the ways in which attention morphs its target. I know you’re looking over here, but I’m going to make you look over there instead, and, in doing so, observe what estrangement does to you, knowing that I’m the one that made it strange. It’s uncomfortable, but intentional for political purposes.

And the Estrangement Effect caused by our absurd subservience to these flat outcomes we’re forced into in modern day America (facilitated mostly by 'careerism' & 'tribalism') is that everyone has become newly stereotyped by them. A new strangeness that an unseen puppeteer (or profiteer) curated via astroturfing. And by not committing to destroying the puppeteer, we’ve all succumb to this astroturfed culture we're in where these new stereotypes thrive. We have all been made strange to one and other anew in this absurd play, call us ‘the everyman’ of this melodrama. And what level of importance does this ‘everyman’ play in this modern melodrama? 

The Everyman of today has been relegated to a side character unfortunately. Someone insignificant to the development of the main plot but still there to refract a truth and induce estrangement on an audience demo not known to them but known to the puppeteer. 

The character of Jaques in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ comes to mind as a good doppelganger representation of this secondary role the modern-day everyman has been relegated to in our modern-day melodrama. In Shakespeare’s play, Jaques is a stereotypical wannabe who speaks entirely in ‘woe-is-me’ prose whenever given attention. He is banished to the forest by the Duke to wander with his fellow outcasts. He leads an inconsequential role in the plot, and is just used by Shakespeare to estrange puritanical audiences within the Elizabethan time.

“A fool!” Says Jaques, “A fool I met a fool in the forest. A motley fool…all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts...” 

The Art of Estrangement

Imagine a story if you will, we’ll call it ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told.’ A story great not only in size but in substance too. Where the characters aren’t the central focus - ideas are. And the only thing made clear from the beginning is the protagonist, which is an idea we’ll call ‘America.’ 

At it’s inception, the reader is immediately transported into this dystopian setting. Where the fever of genocide, eugenic treachery and biological war games are so mystifying you can taste it like droplets in the rural air. So much so it forces the reader to presume the setting itself is cursed and must be the true antagonist, but as the story unfolds, the truth turns out to be more sinister. 

To survive this fever, the idea of ‘America’ must jump from character to character like an airborne virus. Spreading through word-spells, creating a gestalten entity that widens and thins through time like wind through the wilderness. At times big and at times small, and it’s those small moments where certain characters become central to the ideas survival.

In the first of these moments we are introduced to George Washington, an evil man burdened with carrying the whole of the idea itself from out of the darkness from which it came into a new and evolved light. Albeit flawed, he does so admirably, leaving a valor to his memory that was never seen in his waking life. Through the sheer folklore of his legacy and iconography, the idea survives and spreads wide again. But the setting, in all its spacious indifference, reoccupies itself with a formidable dominion of confederates. Whose influence dilutes the idea weak and flat once again. Gasping for survival, the idea struggles to find a character-host available to it, again dwindling in the evolved light.

That’s when the second of these frail moments occur, and we are introduced to Abraham Lincoln, a man not as evil as his prophetic predecessor, but still flawed in history’s all seeing eye. Through his unique concoction of melancholic word-spells, he is able to re-inspire a mass that unifies into a militia that fights off the new dominion in the bloodiest conflict ever seen up to that point. And it is there, in the post-glow of that ideological reclamation, Lincoln is killed in an act of cowardice before he can execute a reconstruction, muddying the waters of how to evolve forward yet again. 

And it is in this new confusion, where an old serpent hidden in the setting is able to entice America’s Eve with an old apple.

“Did God actually say you can’t eat of any tree of the garden?” it asks, “or merely Abraham?” 

And thus paradise was lost yet again to the fever. In its new indoctrination paved with good intention, many new serpents manifest. Invoking the ancient incantation of feudalism into the word-spells and forever distorting the idea of America moving forward. For a time, this new indoctrination engineered a system of bifurcation that diluted the original idea of ‘America’ down to a gasping crawl once again.

That’s when the third, and most pivotal, of these life support moments occur, and we are introduced to the true savior of the reclamation against the new indoctrination: Martin Luther King, Jr. 

In his covenant, he is able to break the bifurcation and spread the idea of 'America' farther than it had ever been spread before. But King's victory was short lived, as -like his melancholic predecessor- he was killed in an act of cowardice before reconstruction could be initiated.

This is where we start, in America A.D. Where tribal-primacy is the new god, but an old devil. Overcoming it’s dominion is the task we have been burdened with in our time. And what if I were to bring “Good News” that the next Black Messiah had already risen again? Leaving behind a neosoul gospel for us to re-invoke the original spells to in a new vibration? Summoning the necessary spirits to overcome the fever of feudalism.

MLPMetanarrative

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The 'Civilization' Myth

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The Attention Economy

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