Seems like every damn day it’s another gut punch to see someone we previously thought was decent make such awful choices that only give more power to the people trying to destroy our country.

It’s not exactly anger (though often it’s that too). And it’s not really even surprise, either—because if you’ve been paying attention at all, surprise isn’t really available to you anymore. It’s something more like grief. It’s truly disheartening to watch someone who knew better decide that knowing better was no longer a requirement. It feels like a loss.

If you saw what Mark Cuban did on Monday, you know the feeling we’re talking about.

Listen, Mark Cuban is an interesting figure. He’s done some pretty good things, and he’s done some pretty, shall we say, controversial things too. But we did respect the fact that he chose to act with integrity when it came to speaking out against the current administration.

At least…until this week.

But this issue isn’t just about Mark Cuban. It’s about a pattern we’re seeing happen, and he just happens to be the latest one to bring it out in the open to discuss. So, let’s do that…

What Actually Happened

For those who missed it: Cuban—the billionaire who spent 2024 stumping for Kamala Harris, who called Donald Trump “the most unethical person he’d ever done business with,” and who said as recently as August 2024 that Trump was “unethical then, and he’s still unethical”—stood at a White House lectern Monday beside Trump, RFK Jr., and Dr. Oz to promote TrumpRx.gov.

His company, Cost Plus Drugs, is now part of the program. Six hundred generic medications, with discounted pricing, distributed through Amazon and GoodRx alongside Cuban’s platform. Though it’s important to note that Yale researchers found that TrumpRx provides minimal benefit for people with insurance, and that many prices were still twice what other developed nations pay.

When a reporter noted the awkwardness of the moment, Trump turned to Cuban and said: “He made a mistake. It was a big mistake.” Meaning: endorsing Harris.

Cuban laughed.

We want to be very clear about something...

Mark Cuban has spent years building Cost Plus Drugs around a genuine and important argument: that the prescription drug system is rigged by middlemen—pharmacy benefit managers who were designed to negotiate lower prices and instead profit from higher ones. The three largest PBMs now manage roughly 80% of all prescriptions filled in the United States. They have every incentive to keep prices high and no meaningful incentive to bring them down.

To combat that, Cost Plus buys generics directly from manufacturers and charges acquisition cost plus a 15% margin. As a result, the cancer drug Imatinib, for example, costs over $2,000 at a conventional pharmacy. On Cost Plus, it’s roughly $17.

This is not a scam. And it is not a vanity project. The work Cuban is doing is real, and it matters.

We say this not to excuse what happened on Monday, but because this complication is very much the point we want to dig into more deeply to understand exactly why we’re all feeling that sick feeling right now (and possibly—justifiably—angry, too).

When asked what his message was to Democrats troubled by his presence at the White House, Cuban said: “Democrats want cheaper medications, too. The goal is the goal.”

When asked if he regretted supporting Harris, he said: “I’m not going into my politics at all.”

Then, when backlash hit social media, he posted—and later deleted—that anyone who criticized him for bending the knee to the regime was a “f*cking idiot” for thinking he’d put politics ahead of helping Americans afford healthcare.

He then apologized. Not for standing there on that stage. Not for laughing when Trump used him as a prop. No, he apologized for using the word “f*ck.”

As practitioners in the field of psychology for decades, we can say with confidence that this single action revealed something very important that we should all be watching out for right now.

“The Goal is the Goal”

Before we go much further, let’s first talk about what “the goal is the goal” actually means—and what it costs.

This is a rationalization, not a justification.

These two words are not actually synonyms, though they frequently are treated as such. In psychology, the distinction matters. A justification is an argument that a choice was actually correct. A rationalization is a story we construct—often very quickly, often very convincingly—to make a choice we’ve already made, whether right or wrong, feel acceptable. It’s a way for the mind to resolve the dissonance between what we say we believe and what we actually do. The difference isn’t always visible from the outside, but it tends to be visible in what gets left out.

When Cuban rationalized that “the goal is the goal” it left out everything else about the regime he publicly legitimized in pursuit of said goal. Case in point, the propaganda moment he handed to a man who has demonstrated, repeatedly and on the record, that he will weaponize every gesture of goodwill as proof of his dominance. Or, the message sent to every other person who has been trying like hell to hold a line—that the line is negotiable if the cause is good enough.

Getting a Seat at the Table

There’s another thing happening here that’s worth noting, and it’s a concept in psychology called the “seat at the table” fallacy—the belief that engaging with a system or a leader you oppose, on their terms, gives you leverage to moderate or improve that system from within.

It is among the most thoroughly documented failures in the literature on institutional complicity and authoritarian consolidation within political science and organizational psychology. The historical record is not ambiguous. People who take the seat almost never moderate the system. The system moderates them. And that’s because the system controls the terms of engagement. The seat is at their table. The agenda is theirs. The power to define what counts as progress always belongs to the person who owns the room.

Cuban did not get a seat at the table. He was placed at a lectern, handed a microphone, and used as a prop. Trump turned to him and publicly performed his submission—”he made a mistake, it was a big mistake”—and Cuban laughed on cue.

This table was never Cuban’s to sit at, and it never will be.

Good Intentions Don’t Absolve Anyone of Complicity

The last part of what Cuban demonstrated in this whole debacle is the truly risky part, because we are all susceptible to it if we’re not thinking critically about our actions and making a mindful choice to live in alignment with our stated values—not just through words, but also actions; not just when it’s easy, but also when it’s very, very hard and costs us something.

In psychology, this phenomenon is called moral licensing—it’s the way a demonstrated track record of doing good can function, consciously or not, as a kind of permission structure. The logic goes: I have done enough, built enough, proven enough. My intentions are established. This one choice cannot undo all of that.

Cuban isn’t deploying this on himself in the classical sense. He’s deploying it on us. His deleted post made the argument explicitly: look at what I’ve built. Look at what I’m fighting for. Who are you to question this choice? My record speaks for itself.

But a record of past integrity is not a blank check to do harm. And using your past good acts as a rhetorical shield against accountability for your present ones is also not a legitimate defense. It is, in fact, only a performance of one.

The One Thing Authoritarians Need to Flourish

We’ve recently written in great detail about the psychology of voting against your own interests (here, here, and here). We’ve discussed how skilled manipulators target people’s legitimate grievances and vulnerabilities to offer them an enticing deal: give me this, and I’ll give you that.

Cuban’s situation is that same logic operating at the individual level, in real time, with full visibility before the cameras.

He wanted something real and honorable—distribution, scale, reach for a drug pricing model that actually works and helps Americans. Trump wanted something real too: a liberal billionaire standing behind him at a lectern, on camera, laughing at a joke made at Democrats’ expense. Both men got what they came for.

The question Cuban’s critics are asking—and that he called them idiots for asking—is: at what price?

Authoritarianism only requires one crucial thing to consolidate power. It does not require everyone to believe in it. It does not require enthusiastic supporters in every room.

It just requires respected people—people with credibility, people with reach, people who have publicly opposed it—to engage with it on its terms, normalize it, and to demonstrate, through their presence, that it is a legitimate participant in ordinary civic and commercial life.

It f*cking is not, and decent people refuse to normalize it.

Every person who takes a meeting, shares the stage, laughs at his jokes—regardless of their reasons, regardless of what they got in return—contributes to that normalization. It does not matter whether they endorse what the regime is doing because authoritarianism doesn’t need your endorsement. It just needs your presence.

Cuban gave it his presence. And Trump made sure everyone watching knew exactly what that meant.

We’re All Susceptible to the Same Trap: How to Avoid It

A lot of people are rightly angry and disgusted by what Cuban did (we are too), but we want to be careful here because solidarity and focused resistance matters more to us than score-settling. We don’t need anything stealing our attention and energy right now.

We have just 166 days to get organized and try to turn this thing around or things are going to get A LOT worse.

Do we think Mark Cuban is the villain of this story? Honestly, that’s tough to answer. He certainly made a choice though, and we think it was undeniably the wrong one.

What he really is, more importantly, is a case study in a choice that many people—people with far less power and visibility than he has—are being asked to make right now, in smaller ways, every single day. How much do you accommodate a system you oppose in order to protect something you care about? How much do you rationalize in the name of the goal? Where is the line between pragmatism and complicity, and who gets to draw it?

These are not easy questions. We do not pretend they are.

What we will say is this: the line is so much harder to find once you’ve already crossed it. And the story you tell yourself about why you crossed it tends to get more elaborate with each step.

This is exactly the conversation we were having in our own home when we made the decision to turn away from the conventional 9-to-5 life and, instead, toward self-sufficiency farmsteading. We no longer wanted to participate in normalizing systems that seek to oppress personal sovereignty—ours or anyone else’s.

What we are building out here—and what we believe you are building, wherever you are—is structural independence. Not the aesthetic of self-sufficiency or the Instagram influencer version. We want the real thing: reducing our dependence on systems that have demonstrated they cannot be trusted to act in our interest, one decision at a time.

Growing our own food is not a hobby. It is a middle finger to a dysfunctional, exploitative system. Every jar we put away for the season, every seed saved, every skill learned is a withdrawal from a system designed to keep us dependent, compliant, and grateful for whatever scraps it offers.

The Cuban story is a cautionary tale not because he’s necessarily a bad person, but because it illustrates what happens when you try to work within a system that has already decided you are a resource to be used. You do not reform it from inside. You get used inside it.

The answer, then, is not to find a better seat at their table. It’s to build your own.

SOURCES:

Engels, Z. (2026, May 19). ‘F***ing Idiot’: Cuban Deletes Post Slamming People Who Criticized Him Over Trump Meeting. Yahoo News. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/f-ing-idiot-cuban-deletes-010804106.html

Gioino, C. (2026, May 19). Trump and Mark Cuban end war of words to tag-team America’s drug pricing crisis: ‘Democrats want cheaper medications, too’. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2026/05/19/trump-rx-mark-cuban-prescription-prices-drugs-medicine/

Robbins, R. (2026, May 18). TrumpRx Adds Generic Drugs, With Mark Cuban, GoodRx and Amazon. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/business/trumprx-generic-drugs-mark-cuban.html

Verbalaitis, V. (2026, May 19). Trump makes Eyebrow-Raising claim about Foe-Turned-Friend Mark Cuban. The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-makes-eyebrow-raising-claim-about-foe-turned-friend-mark-cuban/

There’s no doubt about it—we are living through some sh*t-your-pants-level scary times. It’s exhausting. And it’s even more exhausting to be this exhausted all the time. If you’ve been paying attention—and you clearly have, or you wouldn’t be reading this—you’re probably sitting with some version of the same fatigue and worry as we are.

How do we convince ‘them’ that they’re wrong? How do we get someone we love out of this? How do we win in November when his support doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?

These might feel like three different questions, but they’re not. They’re the same fear expressed three different ways: what if we can’t turn this around?

As luck would have it, we spent a combined several decades as mental health practitioners before choosing the self-sufficiency farmsteading life we really wanted—which means we’ve spent a whole lot of time understanding how people get captured by systems that harm them, and what it actually takes to get them out.

We’re not going to pretend we have all the answers. And as much as we’d love to just write about what we’re growing, building, and harvesting on our farm—right now, we Americans have a country to save from fascism. These conversations are something we feel like we can do to be useful.

So let’s start with the most personal version of this fear: someone you love is in the red-hat-cult, and you want them back.

The most difficult truth to accept is that argument—no matter how good—won’t get them out. Not because they’re stupid (we covered that in our previous post), but because facts were never what got them in. You cannot logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

What the research on high-control movements actually shows is that the people who find their way out almost always have one thing in common: someone on the outside who kept the door open. No ultimatums. No “I told you so.” No making them feel stupid for having believed it. Just—I’m still here, whenever you’re ready.

That is a long game. We’re talking about months and years. It requires far more patience and more grace than most of us have bandwidth for right now, and there is absolutely no shame in deciding to protect your own peace instead. Both choices are legitimate.

Focusing all of your energy on those who are already fully captured is a little like trying to turn a ship by pushing on the anchor.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no hope in turning this country around. The good news is that the people who are completely inside the movement—those whose identity, relationships, and sense of reality have been completely and utterly restructured around it—are not the people who decide elections. The research is consistent on this. Deeply committed partisans on both sides are not the margin that tips the scales in either direction. They never have been.

We need to start directing our energy where it will truly make a difference.

The people who actually decide elections are not the ones screaming on your timeline. They’re the ones who aren’t on your timeline at all.

They’re disengaged, disillusioned, and exhausted by all of it, including listening to us. Some of them voted in 2020 and stayed home in 2024. Some of them have never voted and have been given no compelling reason to start. Some of them are super uncomfortable with what they’re seeing happen but haven’t been given a framework for what to do with that discomfort.

These people are not lost. They are still reachable—but not through the usual channels, and not through argument either.

They move through relationships, through trusted voices in their communities, through seeing someone they respect make a different choice.

This means the most radical political act available to you right now might not be the one you’re expecting.

It’s building a life that doesn’t depend on the systems being used to control you. Grow your own food. Support local farms and businesses. Reduce your exposure to the supply chains, corporations, and institutions that have been weaponized against ordinary people. Every bit of genuine self-sufficiency you build is a vote of no confidence in the regime, and a visible alternative for everyone watching you do it.

We also hear the bigger fear underneath all of this: if those deeply entrenched farming precincts were enough to tip a presidential election, what stops the same thing from happening again?

Potentially a lot, actually. In the upcoming midterm elections, where individual votes carry more direct weight than in presidential elections determined by the electoral college, the math changes significantly. The margin that decides who controls Congress looks very different from the margin that decides the White House.

Which means the persuadable “middle” we just described matters enormously—even more than they did in 2024. The question is whether we spend the next 173 days arguing with people who have already decided, or showing up for the ones who haven’t.

We are not about to tell you that this will be easy. It won’t be. And we’re not going to tell you the outcome is guaranteed. It isn’t that either.

But the version of America we all believe in isn’t a myth. Some may be trying to burn it down, but it lives in those of us who are still building it. And it also lives inside the ones who just need someone to show up and invite them in.

So last week, we talked about how that happened in the first place. On the surface, the explanation is fairly straight forward: decades of structural abandonment left rural communities in a state of scarcity and desperation. Skilled manipulators targeted the depleted and vulnerable by making false promises and telling them lies they desperately needed to hear. The people followed.

That’s just how con artistry works. A lot of you understood that. But then you asked the harder question.

Okay. But the con is exposed now. The tariffs are destroying them. The agencies protecting their land and water are gutted. The promised prosperity never came.

So why are they still defending and supporting him now?

That’s the right question. In the 2024 election, 78% of farming counties backed this administration—a number that increased over each of the two prior elections. How do we make sense of this?

Where most people go wrong is that they keep trying to find the answer in the facts.

They think: if those rural voters just saw this data, if they just read this article, if someone could just explain it clearly enough—then surely, they would understand. Right?

But facts were never the glue holding this all in place. To understand why people stay in situations that cause them harm, you have to ask a different question entirely. It’s not a matter of ‘why won’t they look at the evidence?’

The question we actually have to ask is: what would it cost this specific person to accept it?

That’s not a rhetorical reframe. It’s a clinical one. And as luck would have it, we have decades of experience as researcher-practitioners in the field of psychology, since long before we made the choice to become farmers.

As much as we’d love to just be talking about what we’re planting, growing, building, and harvesting, right now, the foundations of our democracy—popular sovereignty, rule of law, individual rights, liberty and justice for all—are being destroyed before our eyes.

That we’re able to put our scholarship and experience to good use during the sh*tstorm we’re all living through feels meaningful in this moment. We Americans have a country to save right now, and this is something we feel like we can do to be useful.

To be clear, what follows is not a defense of how farmers voted or why they continue to support this regime by an unbelievably high margin. But we do think it’s helpful to explain how this happens because understanding a problem is always the first step toward resolving it.

So, here’s the bottom line: Human beings do not evaluate evidence in a vacuum. We evaluate it against the cost of being wrong. And for a significant portion of the people you’re watching with disbelief right now, the cost of being wrong is not abstract. It can be both materially and psychologically catastrophic.

Authoritarian regimes understand exactly how this works, and they skillfully use it to grab and maintain power.

Let’s start by looking at sunk cost. And please understand that we’re not talking about money.

We’re talking about every Thanksgiving-dinner-table argument defended. Every neighbor relationship strained. Every family member written off as a ‘libtard’. Every public declaration of faith in this man, made loudly, on the record, in front of people who are now watching with horror as he burns down our democracy and who are demanding an explanation from his supporters.

To admit the con is to absorb a tremendous amount of loss all at once.

Behavioral economists call this the sunk cost fallacy—the tendency to continue investing in something because of what you’ve already put in, even when the evidence says stop.

But calling it a fallacy undersells it because this isn’t simply a reasoning error. It’s a protection mechanism.

The mind is not going to let you voluntarily walk into that level of loss without a fight. It will do everything possible to find another explanation first, even if those explanations are delusional. And it will find dozens.

This is why the volume of evidence we’re all holding up and waving wildly in their faces doesn’t move people the way logic says it should.

Each new piece of evidence isn’t just information. It’s another demand that they absorb a larger and larger loss. The rational response to loss that size is psychological resistance—not because the person is irrational, but because the emotional cost of surrender keeps compounding.

The more they’ve invested, the higher the wall.

But sunk cost only explains part of it, and it would be the easiest mechanism to override with reason, if it weren’t for something deeper that prevents it. The deeper mechanism is known as identity fusion—and this one was very deliberately built by the regime.

At a certain point in authoritarian movements, the political identity stops being something a person wears and becomes something a person is.

Red hats, special edition Bibles, branded rhetoric (e.g. woke mind virus, fake news, TDS) are not incidental. They are the literal architecture of “oneness” that authoritarian regimes require to seize and maintain power.

Loyalty tests. Purity spirals. The relentless us-versus-them framing. The insistence that any criticism of Dear Leader is a betrayal of the tribe.

These are not the byproducts of a chaotic movement. They are the tools of one that understands exactly what it’s doing.

When your identity and your political allegiance become the same thing, leaving the movement stops feeling like ‘changing your mind’.

It feels like ceasing to exist.

And it’s not just an internal, psychological hurdle to clear. The social architecture gets restructured too.

Friendships are founded on and maintained by loyalty. Family relationships become conditional, based on mutual agreement. Church communities, civic organizations, and online spaces are all gradually realigned around the movement’s identity.

By the time the evidence is undeniable, many people have nowhere left to go.

The community that would receive them if they left has been systematically dismantled or made to feel like the enemy.

This is what cult conditioning is all about.

The tactics used by authoritarian political movements are not meaningfully different from those documented in high-control religious groups and coercive organizations: isolation, information control, escalating loyalty demands, punishment of dissent, and the manufactured sense that the outside world is dangerous and hostile.

The regime operates at a national scale, but the psychology is the same.

Even if you understand the psychological underpinnings that hook and keep a person in a relationship dynamic that is harming them, perhaps the most confounding part is:

Why does exposure of the con so often seem to strengthen support rather than weaken it?

And this is cognitive dissonance in action. To understand it requires understanding something weirdly counterintuitive about how the mind handles conflict.

When a belief we hold collides with evidence that contradicts it, the mind has two options.

Update the belief—and absorb all the costs we’ve already described: the sunk cost, the identity threat, the social unraveling.

Or discredit the evidence—which is free.

Under conditions of high psychological investment, this is not even a remotely close calculation. The mind will work extraordinarily hard to discredit, reframe, dismiss, or simply not see evidence that demands too high a price to accept.

This is why the release of damning information is so often followed by deeper entrenchment.

The evidence doesn’t even land as evidence. It lands as an attack—on identity, on community, on the version of reality the person has organized their life around. And attacks produce defense, not reflection.

You are not failing to reach people because your arguments are insufficient. You are attempting to use argument against a mechanism that argument cannot touch.

So what does this mean for you, for all of us?

First, it means understanding that the question was never about whether the facts were clear enough. They are. You’re not losing your mind (although, in this current nightmare, it may feel like it). And the exhaustion you feel trying to make people see what is directly in front of them is not a failure of effort or persuasion.

You’ve just been spinning your wheels trying to solve an ‘argument problem’. But this was never an argument problem.

But there is something bigger and much more uncomfortable that we all need to face.

The conditions that made farmers vulnerable to putting on the red hat and jumping into that hell hole—their structural dependence, their economic precarity, the slow erosion of any real autonomy—are not unique to farmers. They are the conditions the system produces, reliably and by design, across every demographic it can possibly reach.

Dependent people are controllable people. We must make ourselves harder to control.

The most durable protection against this kind of capture is not better media literacy or stronger critical thinking, though both matter—a lot.

It is structural independence. The ability to meet your own needs—for food, for community, for economic survival—outside the systems that would use your desperation against you.

This is what self-sufficiency actually means, when it is practiced seriously. This is not a social media aesthetic, or a hobby. Assuring your personal sovereignty is about reducing the number of pressure points available to anyone who would seek to exploit them.

Don’t give up hope on the people who were sucked into this con. But do understand that you cannot logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

What you can do is build a life that makes you harder to get into the same position they did. That’s the work. It’s slower than an argument and less satisfying than being right. But it’s also the only thing that actually makes a difference.

Grow your own food. Build your community. Shrink your dependence. Make yourself harder to control. This is what an uprising looks like.

And for goodness sake, please keep on making good trouble that pisses off bad people.

And that, right there, is the tell.

He didn’t do it despite witnesses. He did it in front of them. Because when you’ve spent years systematically dismantling every accountability structure around you—the press, the courts, the agencies, the guardrails—you stop calculating risk. You stop having to.

Aren’t we all just sick and f*cking tired of being told that what we see with our own eyes isn’t what happened?

A woman was doing her damn job. She’s a journalist. She asked the questions the public wants answered. And he behaved like a racist, misogynistic abuser right out in the open.

Let’s be very clear: We didn’t all just misinterpret him. This wasn’t a gaffe, or a hot mic moment of human weakness, or a joke. This is a man with no filter because he doesn’t feel like he needs one. This is a man who has learned, through long practice, that there are no consequences for him.

That is not just a character flaw, but a structural failure. And it falls on all of us to say enough.

Power doesn’t misbehave in a vacuum.

It misbehaves when the mechanisms designed to check it have been hollowed out—when the people in the room have more to lose by speaking than by staying silent, when institutions have been seized, when the press has been so thoroughly delegitimized that even calling out what we all watched with our own eyes feels like a partisan act.

This is the architecture of authoritarianism. Just one more in a long list of examples of what it looks like when power is not afraid of consequences. And the only way it continues to thrive is by making accountability feel futile…until enough people decide it isn’t.

This is the slow death of liberty—not seized all at once, but surrendered in increments, each one small enough to rationalize.

What we saw on that video is one more increment that slipped away. Another piece of our democracy sullied. And there will be many more, unless we get organized and decide to stop it.

We are living through the steady, deliberate dismantling of every structure designed to hold power accountable, and it is working exactly as intended. Not because the people in charge are uniquely evil—they are, after all, working from a very old and tired playbook that’s been used to oppress and inflict suffering for centuries of human history. But they’re succeeding so easily right now because they’ve spent years making sure that speaking up costs more than staying silent.

That's the foundational infrastructure of fascism at work.

But it only continues to work if we let it feel inevitable. The moment enough of us decide that accountability isn't futile—that our voices, our choices, our refusal to comply actually matter—the whole power dynamic shifts back to where it belongs: the people.

We’re done normalizing what is NOT normal. It’s time for the people to stand up and make it known:

Power should be scared.

Not of us individually, but of what happens when enough of us, collectively, stop rationalizing their actions. Stop deciding the cost of speaking up is too high. Stop waiting for someone else to be the one who says something.

Every uprising in history—every single one—began not when things got bad enough, but when enough people decided that they were done absorbing it. It only happens when the pain of compliance finally outweighs the fear of resistance.

We are not powerless. We are not spectators. We are people who grow our own food, build our own systems, protect our own sovereignty—because we understand, all too well, that dependence is how they control us. And independence—real, practiced, embodied independence—is our refusal to be controlled.

We’re not just building gardens and baking sourdough out here. We’re building resistance by making ourselves harder to be oppressed. We grow food because we refuse to be dependent on systems that don't serve us. We build skills because we refuse to be helpless. We speak out because we refuse to be silenced.

That's what resistance looks like in action.

Because, make no mistake—the power that wants to own your food supply, your healthcare, your financial security, and your silence is the same power that thinks it can call a woman a b*tch on camera and walk away clean.

Nope. That’s not how we do things here. #FAFO

That is enraging.

The amount of hate mail we’ve been receiving lately has increased rapidly as people assume that all farmers voted the same way. They want someone to be a receptacle for their anger and pay the price for the dumpster fire in which we’re all living.

We are enraged too. And we are farmers. And we are also citizens. And we did not vote for this administration.

For the record, yes, we’re a farmsteading blog. But we’re also two mental-health-practitioners-turned-farmers who made the very intentional choice to build this farm and this life over living in the comfortable middle.

Even though we’ve had dirt under our fingernails for well over a decade, the conversation that follows is not just conjecture. It’s coming from people who have spent their professional and academic lives studying the psychology behind why humans do the things they do. And we happen to be living through a time where that seems a bit useful.

So let’s talk about farmers.

We don’t mean the mythologized version you see in the Carhartt ad, with the amber waves of grain, and the bootstrap narrative.

The real version.

Let’s talk honestly about the fact that farm income has been in structural decline for decades. Consolidation has strangled small farms and handed the market to corporations while family operations fought for scraps. Meanwhile, input costs—seed, fertilizer, equipment—have outpaced what the land can even hope to return. And just one bad season can erase what took a generation to build.

The American Farm Bureau reported in April 2026 that 70% of US farmers cannot afford their input costs.

Seventy f*cking percent.

These are not people operating from a position of security. These are people who have been economically abandoned—by policy, by markets, and yes, by the rest of us—for a very long time.

Desperate people are not inherently irrational people. They are people whose resources for careful deliberation have been depleted by years of surviving on the edge.

Con artists, cults, and authoritarian regimes all operate on a foundation of strategic psychological abuse. Our decades of psychosocial research and real-world practice have taught us this:

Psychological abuse does not target the strong. It targets the depleted.

A skilled manipulator does not walk up to someone whose needs are met and offer them salvation. They walk up to someone whose pain is real, whose fear is legitimate, whose exhaustion has made them hungry for anyone who seems to finally understand, and they say exactly what that person needs to hear.

This is not, in any way, a defense of the votes. It is simply an explanation of the conditions that produced them. There is a difference, and collapsing that difference is exactly how we end up blaming the people who got conned instead of the people who ran the con.

The villain is not the farmer who believed a liar. The villain is the system that made them desperate enough to believe him—and the liar who knew exactly how to use that desperation for his own gains.

If you’ve read this far and you’re nodding—if you can see how decades of economic abandonment made farmers vulnerable to someone selling them false promises—then you already understand the important part.

You understand that desperate people in real pain can be led somewhere terrible. Even otherwise good, loving people can be manipulated and exploited if the conditions are right.

It’s still completely justifiable to be angry at the people who helped give the regime its power. That anger is not wrong. But anger needs a place to go. And right now, a lot of people are carrying around something even heavier than anger.

Right now, a lot of us are feeling deep shame about the state of our country and the horrors playing out every single day.

Shame is one of the most painful emotions we experience because it isn’t about what we did—it’s about who we are. It doesn’t say you made a wrong choice. It says you are complicit in something that horrifies you.

And when shame becomes unbearable, the mind wants to protect itself by finding a target.

Blame is the fastest way to put the shame somewhere else. And “farmers voted for this” is somewhere for it to land that feels, at least for a moment, like relief.

We are not saying this to call anyone out. We are saying it because we’ve spent decades watching this exact mechanism operate in human beings under pressure, and naming it is the only way to move through it.

Blame as relief is very temporary and always comes with a cost. It allows us to feel righteous without feeling responsible. It lets us feel clean at someone else’s expense.

And right now, when we need every person who gives a damn about democracy to be rowing in the same direction, we cannot afford that.

Yes, the anger we all feel over this sh*t show is justified, but blame and fury aimed at the wrong target doesn’t move us forward. If we’re going to dig ourselves out of this dystopian nightmare, the question we actually need to be asking is not: did you vote for him? But: how did we all get here together?

We saw something this week on Threads that really gave us pause. It went something like this: How many people can honestly say they never supported this—not through their vote, their actions, or their silence?

Hands shot up everywhere and the comments section was overflowing. But we think they missed the real point of the question that was being asked.

Do you know where your money goes?

Do you have a Prime membership? Do you buy your produce at a big box store? Do you reach for the $1.29 tomatoes without thinking about who grew them, or what it actually cost to get them there?

We absolutely are not asking this to shame anyone. We’re consumers too. We understand the challenges.

We’re asking because we all need to acknowledge that we don’t just vote at the ballot box. We vote with our dollars, too.

For decades, that has added up to something, and part of what it added up to is this hellscape.

We’re not here to ask you to forgive votes you find unforgivable. We’re not asking you to pretend the consequences aren’t real. And we’re definitely not asking you to stop being angry.

We’re asking you to point the anger at the right thing.

Not at the people who got conned, because that was all of us to some degree. Direct it at the con. At the system that set up the conditions for it. At the consolidation, the abandonment, the decades of policy that served corporations and left farmers to drown.

That’s where the fury belongs.

Then, we all need to prepare ourselves because, after the anger, there is often grief.

Grief that we didn’t see it sooner. Regret that our own choices, however small, were part of a bigger picture we didn’t want to look at.

That sadness is not a punishment. It is information. It is the feeling of a conscience doing its job.

Regret, when we let ourselves feel it honestly, is how we learn to do differently. It is not the end of something. It is the beginning.

So, where do we all go from here?

Well, regardless of how any farmer voted—we all eat.

That is not a metaphor. That is a biological fact. It means every single one of us has a direct, non-negotiable stake in whether farms survive.

Farms do not exist to serve as an aesthetic or a political symbol. Farms are the infrastructure that produces the food that keeps human beings alive.

This is not optional solidarity. This is shared survival. And the good news is that the infrastructure of food sovereignty already exists.

Farmers markets. CSAs. Direct relationships between the people who grow food and the people who eat it. Local mills, regional supply chains, community gardens, seed libraries.

It is not yet big enough. It is not yet fast enough. But it is there, and every dollar you redirect toward it is a vote cast in the right direction.

You don’t have to agree with how someone voted to decide that their farm surviving is in your interest.

When all is said and done, we are not asking for absolution—yours or theirs.

We are only asking for clarity about who the enemy actually is. We are asking for the willingness to sit with uncomfortable truths about our own participation. We are asking for solidarity built on shared stake rather than shared purity.

Because purity doesn’t feed anyone. But solidarity might.

Listen, at the end of the day, we are just two mental-health-practitioners-turned-farmers trying like hell to fight for democracy from our little piece of land.

But we are also people who have spent a long time studying what it takes for humans to change—and we know that it never starts with blame, but with honest reckoning.

We all have a role in what comes next. And, we are in this with you.

Sources:
Parum, F. (2026, April 14). Farm Bureau survey reveals real impact of fertilizer availability and price. American Farm Bureau Federation. https://www.fb.org/market-intel/farm-bureau-survey-reveals-real-impact-of-fertilizer-availability-and-price

Listen, as farmers ourselves, we will be the first to tell you honestly that our experience with the Department of Agriculture has never been perfectly…shall we say, smooth. Hey—that’s bureaucracy for you.

But that file is now going to contain: your land holdings, your yields, your conservation practices, your loan history, your insurance claims, your financial picture. All consolidated in one place. All managed by a company that also built a tool for ICE that generates deportation target lists from Medicaid data.

If that pisses you off, well yea. Same.

If you’re a large commodity operation, maybe this is just annoying. But if you’re a small specialty grower—a CSA, a flower farm, a market garden—like we are, this is your entire business model in a privately owned database. And when Palantir says “don’t worry, we promise we won’t share it with other agencies”? They said the same thing about Medicaid data and there’s a big ol’ bunch of lawsuits now. What we know from experience is that, once built, data flows where power directs it.

So, yea, farmers are more than a little worried.

But this isn’t just a farmer problem.

Because when small farms disappear, we—as a community—lose food sovereignty. The farmer we know down the road who grows fifteen kinds of peppers for our farmers market can’t absorb a 20% jump in input costs the way a commodity operation can. So what happens to these farms? They sell. Or they just close and go out of business. And their land gets absorbed by the conglomerate that was waiting for exactly that moment.

What we’re left with is fewer farms. Fewer varieties. Commodity agriculture optimized for shelf life and shipping distance—not flavor, not nutrition, not the ecological health of the land where it came from.

We’re already watching this happen. Farmers across the country are telling us they can’t afford to harvest what they planted. Some are just leaving crops in the field. That’s not a prediction of something that’s maybe going to happen down the road—that’s happening now. If you’re not already, you’ll feel it at the grocery store very soon, but farmers are feeling it right now.

That Palantir deal doesn’t help any of this. What we small farmers need is relief from input costs, protection from consolidation, and we need a government that isn’t actively making our situation worse just to stuff their own pockets. (That’s sure how it looks from where we’re standing, anyway.)

Apparently, no one ever explained it to them, but you can’t eat money. So, what’s the plan for when all the farms are gone?

We’re not telling you the food system collapses next Tuesday. But what we are telling you is that the skills of growing your own food, finding local farmers you trust to grow it for you, and building relationships with people who produce food outside these systems are not hobbies anymore. They are infrastructure that you need to start building now, while it's still a choice, not a necessity.

To be clear, this isn’t about being anti-technology or anti-modernization or anything like that either. We’d love a Department of Agriculture that actually worked more smoothly—ask us sometime about the paperwork and hoops.

This is about recognizing the patterns of how fascist regimes work.

We know from history that some of the quickest ways to control a population is to take control of the economy and labor, restrict peoples’ access to money, to food, and to the ability to move freely from place to place.

These are things that are already happening, and this latest announcement is just another piece of the puzzle that keeps us up at night.

We’re going to need to stick together to get through this. So, if you aren’t already growing food, or don’t know how, NOW is the time to start learning and practicing those skills. If growing isn’t an option for you, then NOW is the time to start finding farmers with CSAs or other growers that you can trust.

Food does not come from the grocery store. It comes from farms and gardens. Find one or plant one right now. This season. Not when it’s too late.

Yet, we all keep buying from them even when we’re furious at them. Trading the precious hours of our lives to work for them just to earn enough to turn around and pay them for everything we need.

There’s a reason for this and it isn’t weakness. It isn’t hypocrisy. It isn’t some fundamental character flaw that makes you complicit in your own oppression while simultaneously raging against it.

It’s the fact that they built gilded cages for each and every one of us. And those cages were engineered to be just comfortable enough that you wouldn’t notice the bars.

Here’s the important thing they understood about human psychology before most others: you don’t control people by making their lives miserable. Miserable people revolt. Miserable people have nothing to lose. Miserable people are dangerous.

No. You control people by making their lives just comfortable enough. Convenient enough. Just easy enough that the friction of doing things differently feels like more trouble than it’s worth. You give them two-day shipping and a rewards program and a playlist that knows what they want to hear before they do—and then you sit back and watch them hand over their autonomy one transaction at a time, voluntarily, gratefully, with a five-star review.

This was not dumb luck on their part. This was not an accident. This is the architecture of dependence, and it has been deliberately constructed around your life at every level—what you eat, where you work, how you learn, what you consume, who you trust, what you believe is even possible for someone like you.

Here’s the really disturbing thing about this oppression strategy: they don’t need you in chains to maintain their control over you. They just need you comfortable. Distracted. Slightly too tired to imagine anything different. And absolutely convinced that nothing you do as one single person could possibly make a dent in something this enormous.

That last part is the biggest lie of all.

As we see it, the billionaire class that wants to control us has terribly miscalculated how this will all play out. Because, here’s what is also true about human psychology: agency is not just a feeling. It is a practice. It is a muscle. And like any muscle, it atrophies when you stop using it and rebuilds—slowly, stubbornly, but undeniably—when you start.

Every time you make something instead of buying it, your nervous system remembers: I can do this.

Every time you grow something instead of consuming it, your nervous system remembers: I don’t need them for this.

Every time you choose inconvenience over compliance, your nervous system remembers: I am not powerless.

These are not small things dressed up in revolutionary language. These are the literal neurological mechanisms by which people reclaim their sense of agency after it has been systematically stripped from them. We know this from research. We know this from decades of working with people who had forgotten what it felt like to trust themselves. And we know it from our own hands, in our own soil, on our own farm—where every seed we put in the ground is a deliberate refusal to stay in the cage and a middle finger to a broken system.

This Friday, May 1^st, people across the country are participating in a general strike and economic blackout. No Amazon. No Walmart. No Target. No unnecessary spending of any kind. One day of collective non-compliance—not because one day dismantles the entire architecture of their kingdom, but because your nervous system needs evidence. It needs proof that you can choose differently. That the bars of the cage are not as fixed as they’ve been made to appear.

You don’t have to go live off-grid. You don’t have to quit your job tomorrow or sell your house or start homesteading on your apartment balcony. You just have to do one thing differently on Friday than you did today. Buy nothing. Make something. Grow something. Fix something. Call someone to ask for help. Show up somewhere to help others.

Prove to yourself—not to them, to yourself—that you are not as dependent as they need you to be.

We have always known that personal sovereignty and political sovereignty are the same fight. So this Friday, we’ll be right here on our farm—potting up tomatoes and basil, planting this year’s dahlia crop, doing the work that reminds us every single day why we started this. Not because it’s romantic. Not because it looks good on a social media grid. Because every plant we put in the ground is a vote for the life we’re choosing instead of the one that was chosen for us.

Every dollar you spend with them is a vote to stay in your cage.

This Friday, we’re voting for something better.

Can we be honest here? We’re tired. Like, really f*cking tired.

There is a bone-deep kind of fatigue that comes with having to fact-check even reality itself every damn day for more than a decade. Seriously, it makes you just want to throw your hands up and walk away from it all.

This is what classic narcissistic abuse looks like applied at a societal scale. And this particular strategy from the playbook has a name. It’s called gaslighting, and it’s one of the most powerful control tactics an abuser has because it deliberately erodes the ability to trust reality.

This doesn’t just happen in toxic relationships. It happens in toxic systems of power, too. When someone lies to you repeatedly—

and gets caught,

and lies again,

and gets caught,

and lies again—

your brain eventually stops trusting anything they say. Even when they might be telling the truth. That strategy also weaponizes your own basic human decency against you because you actually feel bad for mistrusting the abuser.

But really, what we’re all experiencing right now is a totally rational survival response to a pattern of long-term deception.

• Mexico will pay for the wall.

• I have (concepts of) a healthcare plan.

• January 6th was peaceful and loving.

• You’ll get a DOGE check.

• We’ll end the wars.

• No new wars.

• We won the war.

• The Epstein files are nothing.

At some point, the only rational response to the next claim is skepticism because—for crying out freaking loud—we learn from experience. We know that when people show you who they are, we should believe them.

The way concentrated power operates is actually very simple. It doesn’t need you to believe the barrage of lies. It just needs you to be so overwhelmed by sorting truth from fiction that you give up.

An exhausted population is a compliant population. Apathy is the goal, and the weapon they use to obtain it is an unrelenting stream of chaos and confusion.

When you can no longer trust what’s real or fake, you stop being able to respond to what really is happening. That’s when the things that actually matter slip by unnoticed.

The bombing of a girls’ school in Iran. Americans killed in the street for exercising their right to protest. Modern-day concentration camps on U.S. soil. Environmental protections gutted. Women’s rights dismantled. A president whose name appears (at least) 30K times in sworn testimony regarding the abuse and trafficking of children by a man who was his best friend for years.

These are not hypotheticals. These are documented facts.

Spectacle is a tool.

It truly doesn’t matter whether last Saturday was staged or not. What matters is that while we’re all focusing on it, distracted by it, and debating it—real harm is happening to real people in real time.

That’s the whole point of spectacle. It doesn’t have to be fake to be a distraction. It just has to be loud enough to drown out everything else.

We’ll be honest: we don’t know exactly what happened Saturday night. And we’re not going to pretend we do.

It’s not hard to imagine a president who is polling in the 30^th percentile, has no way out of a misguided war-of-choice, has burned bridges with every ally our country ever had, and whose own party is jumping ship like the rats they are might try to create a spectacular distraction in front of a room filled with cameras.

It’s also not hard to imagine one person being so broken by this administration that they’d allegedly do what they’re accused of doing. That’s not hard to believe at all. That’s what happens when people are pushed past their limits with no other outlet. And that’s on the people who pushed them there.

And truly, we find it very difficult to muster up sympathy for the guy who told a crowd of people—on camera—that the “Second Amendment People” might be able to do something about it if his political opponent were to win the election.

Cry us a river, Generalissimo Spray Tan. This is precisely YOUR brand. You built it, you own it.

(And for the record: political violence is always wrong, not just when it’s used against your preferred party.)

Make no mistake, this is all part of their playbook. The system is working exactly as intended.

An overwhelmed person doesn’t organize, doesn’t vote, doesn’t resist. They doom scroll. They numb. They disconnect merely to survive.

This is exactly what they want from us.

In our opinion, though, they forgot who they were dealing with and seriously underestimated what we’re capable of doing when we work together.

People who have been pushed to their limits don’t always break. Sometimes they build. Sometimes they organize. Sometimes they get very, very clear about what actually matters—and they refuse to look away from it.

You are one of those people.

We know it because you’re still here, still paying attention, still furious enough to care.

We don’t have to resolve every question about what’s real or staged. That is little more than a distraction. What we have to do right now is stay focused on what we know is real:

• People are being harmed.

• Rights are being stripped.

• We have 27 weeks until midterms.

• Every single one of them matters.

• Call your reps.

• Show up for your community.

• Grow something. Build something.

• Make yourself harder to control.

Yes, we’re a farmsteading blog. We talk about growing food and flowers, building self-sufficiency, and reclaiming the skills that modern systems have stripped from us.

But we’ve always known that personal sovereignty and political sovereignty are the same fight.

They don’t want you to be able to feed yourself, think for yourself, or trust yourself. Because the moment you can do things for yourself, they lose their control over you.

Refuse to let their noise be louder than your clarity. Speak up. Stay connected. Make good trouble that pisses off bad people. We’re in this with you.