The Captured Republic: How Foreign Influence Rewrote American Power
June 26, 2025•558 words
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society." ~ Edward Bernays
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
"The modern dictatorship is a committee government, a government of nobody, because everybody on the committee can always blame somebody else." ~ Hannah Arendt
Reading and listening to an interview of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs...
You find yourself living not in the republic you once believed in, where elections happen, courts issue rulings, and newspapers were somewhat objective, yet none of it touches the true areas of power.
What you once thought of as sovereign authority now feels like a carefully staged illusion. The President, appears less a leader and more a polished Mafia Don, answering not to citizens or generals or his own intelligence agencies, but to distant voices through donor networks and foreign agendas. You begin to see that power has migrated, away from public institutions and into the hands of oligarchs who move money through think tanks, lobby groups, and media platforms.
As scholars like Jeffrey Sachs warn, the democratic architecture of American decision-making is no longer national, but transnational, shaped in backrooms and war rooms far from public transparency. In one such moment of revelation, you recall 25 years ago, General David Petraeus discussing the shared belief among top American officials and Israel’s leadership that illegal political regime change should occur in seven specific Middle Eastern and African countries.
It was never framed as open conquest, but rather as a coordinated ideological mission, a strategic reshaping of the Middle East to reflect a vision formed not by the American electorate, but by geopolitical imperialistic hegemony ambition. Here, the “deep state” isn't a myth of conspiracy theorists, but a system of bureaucrats, operatives, and unelected influencers who manage outcomes with chilling precision, enforcing silence with surveillance and obedience with career death.
You begin to realize that even outrage has been engineered into the spectacle. The rituals of governance continues, State of the Union addresses, televised debates, bipartisan committees, but they’re free from consequence.
Behind closed doors, the real decisions are made, when to bomb, whom to sanction, which countries to tariff, what truths to suppress. The Constitution, once a safeguard, is bypassed in favour of legalistic chatter, while dissenters are sidelined not with violence, but through digital blacklists and economic erasure.
And always, beneath it all, the same foreign agenda persists, unshaken by domestic will or global condemnation. When atrocities occur abroad, it’s not the aggressor who is warned, but their victims, and when the U.S. vetoes global outrage, you see clearly, it’s not principle, but servitude. You understand now that the roadmap for reshaping the targeted countries of Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, and finally Iran were not some classified anomaly, but part of an openly discussed strategy embraced by both American and Israeli power centres such as politicians, intelligence agencies, and lobby groups, all six out of the seven countries are considered failed States now.
You are no longer a citizen shaping history, you are a spectator to a captured state, watching as empire follows a script written elsewhere, hurtling toward moral and institutional collapse under the weight of unaccountable negative influence.