Here's to You Kid

By Matt Stone

This is the world.

They can see storms, military installations, and geological transformations in real time from outer space. Money moves instantly. Cars drive themselves. But people sleep under bridges anyway. People die from being unable to afford healthcare anyway. A rocket takes a billionaire up for fun while the tap spits out something you wouldn’t allow your dog to drink. Western North Carolina is in pieces after Hurricane Helene and the President is still breaking in his golf shoes.

Nothing has changed. We just have a weaker cast of assholes performing for the country every day under fluorescent lights and behind Mar-a-Lago facelifts. The rich keep getting richer. The poor do what they must. The middle class is starting to sound like something Graham Hancock insists once existed. For all the miracles of science and technology, the lesson at the end is still the same: we are, and always have been, on our own.           

Human beings built something that would have looked like sorcery to almost everyone who ever lived. You can call across an ocean and hear the voice clearly. A storm shows up on your screen before the clouds ever reach you. A dead singer releases a new song. Dinner arrives without a conversation. Congress melts down live while you scroll past it. And somehow life still feels smaller. People are tired in a way sleep does not fix. Everything costs more. Work follows you home. The noise never shuts off. It feels less like progress and more like everyone is being slowly ground down by a machine they were told would set them free.

            That is the other thing to understand about this country. We are only 4% of the earth’s population. America did not rise because heaven looked down and said, “These people right here are the chosen hall monitors of the planet.” America rose because history got ugly in ways that happened to favor us—and powerful men with small consciences capitalized on it. World War II wrecked much of Europe and Asia while the United States came out battered but rich, more industrialized, better armed, and geographically lucky. Then came the Marshall Plan in 1948.

            Officially, it was a virtuous effort to rebuild Europe. And yes, it did help rebuild Europe. It also helped create markets for American goods and tied Western Europe more closely to a U.S.-led world order. It was relief with strategy baked in. Charity with a steering wheel. Altruism in its dirtiest form.

            The Marshall Plan helped rebuild Europe, but it also helped lock Western Europe into an American order. It was aid with direction. And that direction happened to only point to U.S.-owned companies and corporations. That is how empire usually work when they want to look civilized.

            From there, we did what every empire does after a run of good luck and heavy production. We took credit for what the generations did before us. We mistook leverage for moral superiority. We took timing, geography, industry, and postwar influence and slowly converted them into a national religion.

America stopped acting like a country that benefited from history and started acting like it personally invented history. That is how decline begins. Not with invasion. With vanity.

            After World War II, the United States brought Nazi-linked German scientists to America under a project called “Paperclip,” and it did not treat them like untouchable monsters. It treated them like useful assets. Some arrived under military custody for short-term work, but the whole point was to use their knowledge before the Soviets could. Over time, officials pushed to keep more of them, let some bring their families, and in some cases even softened or revised security reports so they could stay in the program. That is the cold truth of empire. A man’s past could get very flexible if his rockets looked promising enough.          

            There is also evidence that some were not handled especially well at first in practical terms. A CIA reading room document says that in the West “no great attention was given to their employment, feeding and housing,” which suggests uneven or rough early arrangements in some cases.[1] But the larger direction of policy was clear: the U.S. wanted their brains, and the system was gradually adjusted to keep and use them.

            The darkest part is that their Nazi pasts were often softened, minimized, or worked around. The National Archives’ Nazi War Crimes report says President Truman approved the expanded program in 1946 with limits meant to exclude active Nazi supporters, but officials still pushed hard to bring in more scientists, and some security reports were revised so certain men could participate. That means some were not just tolerated. They were effectively protected by bureaucracy when they were seen as useful.

            Perhaps the most famous of these, Werner von Braun, was not simply a scientist in the employ of the Nazi regime. Von Braun was not just building rockets in some clean little lab outside history. He joined the Nazi Party, became an SS officer, and helped lead a weapons program that ended up using slave labor from Mittelbau-Dora, where prisoners were worked and killed in brutal underground conditions. He later admitted visiting the Nordhausen area multiple times while V-2 production was tied to that camp. Maybe he was not the man swinging the whip, but he was close enough to hear it crack and kept the rockets moving anyway.

            Around that same broad Cold War era, the intelligence state, in all its lack of morals and any obvious decency, also developed the kind of relationship with media that leaves a permanent smell in the furniture and stains on the walls. The Church Committee later documented a wide range of intelligence abuses, and the larger history around CIA ties to journalists and media institutions has never done much for public trust. Mockingbird was not some magic switch that turned the whole press into robots. It was worse in a more American way. It was a government getting cozy with the people who shape public reality and deciding that journalism looked less like a watchdog and more like a field to cultivate public perception in ways that benefited the state.

            You do not need every reporter on payroll to poison trust. You just need enough access, enough pressure, enough secrecy, and enough men in suits telling themselves it is for the good of the country. That is how you end up with a public that no longer knows where reporting ends and management begins.

            In Carl Bernstein’s 1977 investigation, CBS is described as the CIA’s “most valuable broadcasting asset,” and Bernstein says William S. Paley and former head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, were extremely close. He also reports that CBS provided cover for CIA employees, supplied newsfilm outtakes to the Agency, and maintained a formal channel between the network’s Washington bureau chief and the CIA.[2]

            Now skip forward to the present, where the little glowing square in your hand has become your boss, priest, casino, confessional, surveillance bracelet, and emotional support parasite. It shows you billionaires in space, children in bomb shelters, floods from above, police bodycam footage, propaganda, ads, and some moron named PatriotPoonSlayer_1776 explaining constitutional law from inside a truck. We thought more information would make people wiser. Mostly it just made everyone reachable. We used to think access to more information would make us wiser. Instead, it mostly just made us more reachable. And stupidity, as it turns out, gets better reception than intelligence or nuance.           

            And through that little square, the contradictions become impossible to ignore. Americans make up about 4 percent of the world’s population, yet in 2024 the United States spent $997 billion on the military, about 37 percent of all military spending on Earth. Four percent of the people. More than a third of the weapons bill. That is not a normal country. That is a man at a barbecue in full battle rattle explaining the first and second amendments to everyone within earshot, while having no idea what the Third is.

            And here is the funny part, if your sense of humor is damaged enough. We still talk like all of this happened because we are naturally better. Not well placed or lucky, or protected by oceans. Not boosted by the rest of the world getting blown to pieces in the twentieth century. Better.

            The dollar did not become central to the world economy because George Washington had a cleaner soul than everyone else. Aircraft carriers did not sprout from the soil like corn and alliances are not decorative ribbons tied to American greatness. Trust is not permanent, and history does not owe us shit. The United States became powerful through industry, war production, reconstruction leverage, institutions, alliances, timing, and a whole lot of good fucking luck. Then we spent decades turning that pile of advantages into a bedtime story where we were simply born wearing a crown.           

            That crown has been slipping for a while. When Bill Clinton left office, the federal government had posted a unified budget surplus of about $236.9 billion in fiscal year 2000. Treasury called it the largest ever in nominal terms at the time. That does not mean the country was perfect. It means something many younger Americans have only heard about in legends: the federal books briefly leaned the right way.

            Since then, chronic deficits became the wallpaper. Wars, tax cuts, financial crisis, pandemic spending, and a political class allergic to math turned “surplus” into a museum exhibit. Somewhere along the way we became a country that can always find money for missiles, consultants, surveillance, subsidies for the already rich, and patriotic flyovers, but reacts to housing, healthcare, and clean water like they are luxuries only to be enjoyed by the wealthy and worthy.

            Housing is where the joke stops being funny and starts clawing at the walls. On a single night in 2024, HUD counted 771,480 people experiencing homelessness in the United States, the highest number ever recorded in that count. That is not a quirky policy wrinkle. That is a full city’s worth of human beings sleeping in shelters, tents, cars, doorways, and under bridges while the wealthiest empire in history lectures them about grit and spends thirty times the amount it would cost to house them on airplanes that Iran can still shoot down and brag about.

            At the same time, housing has been turned into a spreadsheet bloodsport for people who think shelter is an asset class with windows. Large institutional investors do not own most homes nationally, and it is worth being exact about that. But they own enough in some local markets to make regular life feel like a crooked, fucked up carnival game. Urban Institute reports that these investors own about 3 percent of single-family rentals nationally, but in some cities their share is much larger, including 25 percent in Atlanta, 21 percent in Jacksonville, and 18 percent in Charlotte.       

            Then the short-term rental machine arrives in a Cybertruck with a friendly logo. AirDNA reported that U.S. short-term rental supply hit a record 1.76 million available listings in June 2025. So yes, this country can somehow sustain both record homelessness and record piles of houses optimized for bachelor parties and girls’ wine weekends. In America, the sacred right to shelter has been upgraded to a revenue model.

            Then there were the leeches in loafers who built software to squeeze tenants like produce at the grocery store. RealPage’s rent-setting system, according to the Justice Department, pulled in nonpublic data from competing landlords and used it to push “pricing recommendations” that helped them align rents instead of actually competing. DOJ said the software let landlords swap sensitive data and “maximize” rent hikes, including what RealPage called “stretch and pull pricing,” meaning they could spot specific days to hit renters with a $50 jump instead of a $10 one. In plain English, they took the basic cruelty of landlord greed, ran it through a dashboard, and optimized it to take as much out of the consumer’s pocket as possible.

            And if you want the legal joke, here it comes in a black robe. In Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court helped build the idea that money spent on politics can count as speech. In Bellotti, it gave corporations more room to spend money on ballot fights. Then Citizens United came along and said corporate money in political ads could not be limited the same way. So now we live in a country where a corporation, which cannot bleed, cry, bury its dead, or rock a sick child to sleep, gets treated like a fragile little speaker whose rights must be protected when the money is political enough. Apparently if you have enough cash, even a legal fiction gets a tender human soul.

            Set that next to Roe and Dobbs and the whole thing starts to look like a bad joke told by men who will never have to live inside the punchline. A made-up paper person gets strong protection in politics, but a real woman can lose protection over her own body. That should have flipped desks and shattered windows. Instead, most of us just stared into the glowing square, typed our disgust, and then checked to see how our own personal takes were holding up in the ever-important hall of online opinions.

            That gets to one of the great humiliations of modern American life. We got lazy and traded the guillotine for the harshly worded tweet. We replaced consequences with content. Revolt became branding. Outrage became a hobby with a charger. The public sees corruption, war, theft, child abuse, trafficking, rot, and open contempt in real time, then answers with short bursts of anger on platforms owned by the same class of people they claim to hate. I am guilty of it too.

            It is one of the best pacifying systems ever built. We are angry enough to notice everything and trained enough to do almost nothing. We do not storm the gates. We refresh. We do not scare power. We feed it clicks, data, and the last scraps of our attention, even when railing against it.

            And while we perform rebellion through the same machines that melt our brains into soup, America has been taking a hammer to its own place in the world. Allies do not just care whether you are strong. They care whether you are steady, serious, and able to act like an adult for more than two news cycles in a row. That trust has been rotting for years.

            Trump did not create every crack in the floor. He just cannot help tripping over every single one as he lumbers around in lifted golf shoes. He sleepwalks through the ruins in spray tan and makeup like a casino ghost in a ill-fitting suit, reminding everyone that the rot was always bigger than one man. A country that can hand power to someone that vain, ignorant, and morally hollow is sick in ways it still refuses to confront. But whether a patient listens to a doctor or not, it does not stop the disease from metastasizing and spreading.

            An entire political party bending to your will out of fear is not strength. It is what it looks like when your friends keep the car running while they talk to you, when the group chat keeps going, but your name quietly disappears from it. This is the part Americans hate hearing. We are not wrecking our place in the world because other countries are jealous of our freedom. We are wrecking it because trust is real, and we keep setting it on fire for applause. This week, Republicans created an award just so they could hand it to Donald Trump, a gesture so servile and embarrassing it barely qualifies as politics anymore. It was court ritual for a King Baby. Pathetic is too kind a word to describe this clown show.

            We built an alliance system over decades, then treated it like a mob racket with flags. We built trust through rules, then mocked rules the second they got in our way. We inherited a huge house, ripped copper out of the walls, insulted the neighbors, stopped mowing the yard, told the HOA to go fuck itself, and now keep yelling that the real problem is the disrespect we receive.

            It gets darker when you remember what we claimed to be. The country that sold itself as a republic now acts like a franchise for chaos. The land of free speech bans books. The land of liberty tolerates towns without safe water, or any water at all. The defender of democracy lets money scream louder than citizens, and the Supreme Court said that was close enough to freedom. The richest society in history steps over homeless veterans on the way to conferences about grit, resilience, workflow optimization, and shareholder returns.

            We have a political culture that can spend six months fighting over pronouns, hanging Ten Commandments posters in classrooms, or staging one more useless spectacle about tech censorship, then call the resulting paralysis democracy. Meanwhile, it somehow cannot find time to address the things actually crushing Americans: the cost of housing, the cost of healthcare, the cost of gas, or corporations using the Constitution like a ventriloquist dummy while harvesting our personal data, even our faces.[3] And through all of it, Silicon Valley operates like a sovereign class while the government pretends regulation is too much to ask of the men wiring the world to serve themselves.

            And still, and this is the part that keeps me from going fully feral, it is also amazing to be alive right now. Not in the fake gratitude-journal way. In the eerie, cosmic, what-the-fuck way.

            You are a thinking creature on a spinning rock in a black, freezing universe. You come from survivors. From people who starved, crossed oceans, buried their dead, lived through wars, plagues, kings, and generations of bad decisions. And somehow all of that ended with you here now, in the strangest moment human beings have ever made for themselves. The moment when one little electronic square in your pocket can show you a war, a wedding, a lie, a symphony, a riot, a nebula, a recipe, and a goose chasing a cop through a parking lot in the same five-minute window.

            That is insane. And it’s beautiful. And it’s confusing as hell.

            The same device that sells you garbage can also let you read Baldwin, hear Coltrane, learn who Baldwin and Coltrane are, study ancient religions, watch a surgeon fix a heart or pop a pimple, see the rings of Saturn, learn why empires fall, and hear some old song that hits you so hard it feels like your chest is remembering something your brain forgot. The machine is cheap, manipulative, addictive, invasive, and bad for the soul. It is also, somehow, a window. A ridiculous, cursed, beautiful little window into something bigger than us. Something the human brain seems ill-equipped to grasp or understand.

            The human brain was built to survive the savanna, not the smartphone. It is a threat detector, a tribe machine, a reward chaser, and a story factory. It is brilliant at keeping a frightened ape alive long enough to reproduce. It is much less impressive at handling push notifications, political tribalism, algorithmic manipulation, and twenty-four-hour access to everyone else’s lies and what should probably be private thoughts. We now live with a biological alarm system that never stops firing, warning us of danger to ourselves or our kin, yet unable to tell the difference between a predator in the grass and a massacre on a phone screen.

            And even now, on this broken carousel of debt, propaganda, rent extraction, and legal theater, people still do miraculous things. They pull strangers from floodwater. They make art. They laugh in hospital rooms. They show up for each other. They fall in love. They tuck their kids in at night. They still look at the moon like it means something.

            Because it does. Not in the corny way. In the real way. In the way that says no system has fully beaten the human animal yet.

            That may be the strangest fact of all. We built a world that can track us, rank us, sort us, price us, addict us, distract us, and lie to us with machine-like skill. We also built a world where beauty can travel farther than ever, where truth can still slip through, where history is visible, but where stupidity is visible too, which may be its own public service. We can see the whole mess at once. And we are all collectively still scanning for the adults in the room that left a long time ago.

            The truth is the grown-ups built amazing tools and awful systems. They made medicine and missiles, libraries and lobbying firms, satellites and slums, constitutions and loopholes, neighborhoods and hedge funds. They inherited something rare and acted like they invented the sun. The hard years built people with discipline. The easy years gave us people with branding, confidence, and a bloated sense of their own importance, plus generational amnesia about what it took to build any of this in the first place.

            They got greedy. They got distracted. They got arrogant. They got soft. They made the world meaner than it had to be. Still, people remain people. They love, laugh, help, wonder, sing badly, and refuse to become fully mechanical. That is why the world feels so dreadful. It is also why it still feels miraculous at times too. It is ugly, funny, shameful, brilliant, and unbelievably alive.

            So, this is where we are: standing in the wreckage of our own cleverness, angry about what has been stolen, grieving what has been broken, and still unable to kill the beauty of being here at all. We live in a moment so corrupt it can make a person sick, so absurd it can make a person laugh at the worst possible time, and so miraculous it can still stop you cold with a song, a moonrise, a dog losing its mind with joy, or a stranger choosing kindness for no benefit at all.

            That is the curse and the glory of being alive right now. We can see too much, feel too much, and still keep going. The systems are ugly, the lies are loud, and the people in charge are often too weak, greedy, or vain to deserve the power they hold. But the human heart, stubborn little bastard that it is, still reaches for truth, still aches, still loves, still refuses to become fully mechanical.

            Maybe that is the last real miracle: even here, even now, with all this grief and rage, beauty still gets in. Not because the world earned it, but because people keep making it anyway. On canvasses, through music, in kitchens. Even at funerals. In flooded streets. In grimy apartments. In jail cells. On the side of a mountain ripped apart by a hurricane. In films, jokes with strangers, shared cigarettes, and hands reaching for each other in the dark. For all our noise and delusion, we are still just people riding this out together, trying to love each other and make the suffering a little smaller before the lights go out.

            We tried. At least some of us did. But you’re inheriting a broken world. Try not to become what broke it. Be better than us. Build something better. Here’s to you, kid.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/00010786

[2] https://archive.org/stream/nsia-BernsteinRollingStoneArticlesCIA/nsia-BernsteinRollingStoneArticlesCIA/Bernstein%20CIA%2001_djvu.txt

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/business/clearview-ai-facial-recognition-settlement.html