More Important Straight Talk from Bill Piekney

He knows what hes talking about.

I highly recommend subscribing to The Steady State for reliable information on the ongoing coup d’etat by a real fascist mafia state insurgency. (my categorization) Bill Piekney is one of the seasoned US intelligence community professionals who speaks clearly and with authority on the real threat to democracy, not just in the US now, but by extension, the world. I start with this excerpt from one of his current essays:

“Make no mistake, we are certainly not defenseless, but these protective walls against foreign subterfuge are straining under a deliberate program, blindly conceived and one which will leave us partially blind to the location, nature and objectives of developing threats.” <> My response to Bill is the following: But the protective walls that guard the United States against foreign subterfuge are straining under a deliberate program; one conceived without foresight and executed in ways that leave us partially blind to the origin, nature, and objectives of developing threats. As we’ve seen in Hungary under Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” and in the corruption scandals destabilizing Albania, democratic backsliding doesn’t always arrive with tanks. It arrives through legal manipulation, captured institutions, and the normalization of criminal impunity.

The Trump–Vance administration has followed this pattern with predictable militancy provided by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and Silicon Valley Oligarch influence in the 2025 DOGE demolition spree and its lingering malfeasance. What presents itself as a political movement increasingly resembles a system of anti‑democratic and organized crime influence networks; a hybrid of oligarchic interests, ideological extremism, and foreign entanglements behaving in ways consistent with democratic erosion. These dynamics echo the tactics of Mussolini‑style authoritarianism: the hollowing out of institutions, the elevation of personal loyalty over law, and the steady corrosion of civic norms that make self‑government possible.

The legal pushback restraining this administration has come primarily from what might be called an archipelago of democracy‑defending states. These states are absorbing the financial and administrative burden of corrective action while the federal executive floods the zone with disinformation, procedural sabotage, and institutional chaos. Our constitutional mechanisms are intentionally slow, designed to prevent rash action. That slowness becomes a vulnerability when confronted with actors eager and now enabled by corrupted 6/9 SCOTUS and Republican Party controlled congress to exploit every gap in the system. State‑level “Little RICO” statutes offer one tool for documenting and countering organized efforts to subvert democratic governance. It’s necessary but can never catch up and stop the crazy train of democracy demolition underway in the US now.

Ukraine’s experience offers a different kind of lesson. Faced with existential threat, Ukraine reorganized itself with admirable speed and civic cohesion, resisting Russian aggression while simultaneously building a globally recognized defense‑technology sector. NATO and the EU now pursue joint ventures with Ukraine not out of charity but because Ukraine has demonstrated competence, innovation, and democratic resolve under extreme pressure. There is inspiration here for American states: not in militarization, but in strategic coordination, economic realignment, and the formation of new commercial alliances with fellow democracies around the world. Simultaneously, economic boycotts and divestment strategies can be powerful tools for isolating anti‑democratic funders and reducing their influence, as can massive and prolonged demonstrations as we see happening in Albania now. For reference on successful general strikes see the list below.

We also need to educate more Americans about the immediate domestic threat posed by authoritarian movements operating under what used to be the Republican Party. Millions of newly disillusioned former Trump–Vance voters have a unique moral standing to clearly alert others to the danger. Their voices can help shift public perception, possibly encourage accountability within the party, and remind fellow citizens of what is being lost through the ongoing demolition of democratic norms. Civic mobilization; peaceful, massive, and sustained, remains one of the most effective tools available to free people.

What Trump–Vance hegemonic intransigence makes plain is that they represent the persistent dark current in human political behavior; the drive toward domination, extraction, and colonization whenever access to power is unsecured by civic norms. Countering that requires more than resistance; it requires changing the underlying paradigms that have allowed wealth supremacy and racialized hierarchy to masquerade as inevitabilities in American life. For effective and sustainable reform of our democracy we need to shift toward regenerative economics concurrently with regenerative civic and environmental frameworks; systems that align human flourishing with ecological balance and democratic self‑governance. These approaches don’t merely avoid harm; they generate shared resilience, shared capacity, and shared prosperity. Regeneration doesn’t shrink the wealth of a society; it broadens it, placing prosperity in the hands of many rather than the few. It’s what we claim to be in our pledge of allegiance.

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References:

Successful, System Changing General Strikes:

1. Armenia - April–May 2018 - The Velvet Revolution

2. Sudan - May–June 2019 - General Strike & Civil Disobedience

3. Bolivia - October–November 2019 - Civic Strike & Uprising

4. South Korea - June 1987 - The June Struggle

5. Poland - 1980–1981 - Solidarity Movemen