The Second Republic Is Dead

Who will you be in The Third Republic?

Friends, bison, countryfolk,

As we approach this 250th birthday threshold, it’s important to take a sober look at where we are and where we’ve come from. It is especially important to note that our nation has had two republics, two distinctly different attempts to live up to our promise, and that this second one just ended. In this essay, we’ll do a proper “look back”, a spiritual post mortem on the Second Republic and a “look forward” on the Third. But before I dive in, we have some big pilgrimage news to report.

Our first press release for the National Pilgrimage and Assembly went live on Tuesday, reaching over 400 news outlets including the AP, C-SPAN, and USA Today. We’re getting interest from local news outlets on the West Coast and Midwest, so fingers crossed the nation soon becomes aware of this more honest, soulful, reverent, and hopeful marking of our nation’s 250th birthday. If you haven’t yet made your pledge, don’t. At least not until you read this essay, which lays out why the pilgrimage and assembly is the only thing to do right now.

Also, I am currently in Lakota territory this week for the Bison-Tennial, the 10-year Lakota Commemoration of the National Bison Legacy Act, when we asked the bison to guide our troubled nation. Thus far, we’ve sat with Lakota, Ojibwe, and Mandan medicine women and men to hear the teachings of the bison, how they guide rites of passage and community virtues. We will have two more days of ceremony, teachings, and feasts at the All Nations Gathering Center in Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

I have been humbled and heartened by these relationships and practices. I am grateful that they’ve welcomed me and other white folks into their world, especially in light of the ongoing injustice perpetrated by the white world upon the First Nations. Enough has been said, documented, and filmed about the ethnic cleansing (native genocide / extermination / assimilation / sterilization / concentration camps), so I won’t reprise any of that right now, other than to say that it continues and is accelerating with ICE raids and now the removal of bison from Montana. As an example, in Kyle, a small town on the reservation, a Naked Green Juice cost $6 and 2 tins of Copenhagen cost $1.25. This is not an economic policy of kinship and peace.

Against this daily horror, they persist, continue to perform the sacred rites, continue to mentor and initiate the youth, continue to be guided by the ancestors, who share that it is time to close ranks and live off the land as the white world / wetiko / modernity self-immolates. Now let’s get into the meat of the matter.

The Second Republic Is Dead

Who will you be in The Third Republic?

The covenant of the First Republic was the Mayflower Compact (1620). This was a spiritual vow, where white religious exiles pledged their lives to each other, and put the commonwealth above self interest. We contractualized this covenant into law in 1641 as the Massachusetts Body of Liberties. The power of this covenant and contract spread as other colonies began to constitute themselves. After Canassatego urged the colonies to unite in 1744 at the Lancaster Council Fire, a broader contract was imagined with the 1754 Albany Plan, which failed, and then the Articles of Association in 1774 and Article of Confederation in 1777, and then our Constitution in 1787.

The Constitution (contract) was built upon the beautiful vow in our Declaration that “all men are created equal.” But it came with a terrible asterisk. It really meant: all wealthy white men are to be treated equally under the law, but contained no affirmative rights, nor any responsibilities to each other, no duties to the commonwealth, and nor any provisions needed for people to realize the fullness of life, liberty and happiness. It basically meant, “We’re all now independent from England. I got mine. You’re on your own.” A contract without a covenant is just a bill of sale, an empty promise that we’d break every day, and especially with our First Nation’s teachers, women, and the Africans we enslaved.

For regular white folks, this meant toil. You could have a long shot at life, liberty, and happiness, through 3 options: 1. Go West, murder natives, and take their land to farm, mine, and/or drill, 2. Exploit or enslave Black people to enrich you, or 3. Find a way to exploit other colonizers through pyramid schemes and snake oil. Some took the devil’s bargain. The rest of the white men worked subsistence wage jobs 7 days a week or were tricked out of their meager savings by con men.

All women were silenced and confined to handmaid, housekeeper, or harlot. All Black people were enslaved, raped, tortured, sold, and murdered. All Native people were to be pushed off their land by any means necessary.

And most importantly, most relevant to the moment in which we now find ourselves, the promise of equality, life, liberty, and happiness was impossible for anyone with well-developed religious and moral convictions to achieve. This promise could only be realized through sin, if we violated our souls, exploited each other, murdered indigenous folks, raped the land, and desecrated all we hold sacred.

The First Republic started with a devil’s promise and ended in blood and fire. Our Transcendalist poets, authors, and philosophers were disgusted by the moral obscenity that the nation had become, so they put pen to paper. They inspired countless Abolitionists, Quakers, eventually all the Northern States, and the President himself. Lincoln then told us that we must all either be entirely equal before the law or entirely an apartheid nation, culture, and economy of colonizers and enslaved. A house divided cannot stand. The North fought for freedom and equality and the south fought for slavery. 600,000 of us perished in the battle for these ideas. When it was over, freedom and equality had a moment in the sun and we tried again.

The Second Republic was born from the ashes of the first. The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1868 and said something radical: freedom is our cry, equality is our goal, and everyone born in America is a full citizen. No exceptions. For the first time, the law actual meant “all”, not just some.

The Second Republic took a long time to grow up. For nearly a century, the promise of freedom and equality was countered at every turn by Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, redlining, sundown laws, lynching, and “separate but equal.” But slowly, painfully, it got better. The Suffrage Movement. The Civil Rights Movement. The Voting Rights Act. Fair housing. Workers’ rights. For a generation, roughly 1945 to 1975, the middle class grew, wages rose, and the gap between rich and poor, Black and white, men and women, actually shrank.

That was the Second Republic at its best. A Cadillac in the driveway, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jack Kennedy, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the American Century, and whitey on the moon. But like the First Republic, the second neglected to contain a mechanism to develop the type of people democracy requires, no deep vows to equality, no rites of passage, no mechanisms to transform our biases into brotherly love.

“All created equal.” That was the promise. For a moment, just a moment, full equality under the law, the march of progress, the moral arc of the universe bent towards freedom, and the lived experience of freedom and equality in our economy and culture seemed inevitable. But it was not to be. Including Black folks in the covenant was a step too far for many of us, so we unwound it in practice. We stopped saying the “N-word” in public and started saying it with our pocketbook and institutions.

The dismantling of the Second Republic did not happen overnight. It happened slowly, deliberately, sector by sector, employer by employer, case by case, dollar by dollar. Here are a few key of the millions of decisions made by wealthy and corporate interests to turn the Supreme Court against the covenant of equality and kill the Second Republic:

2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

The Court ruled that corporations can spend unlimited money on elections. This opened the floodgate. Billionaires could now buy political influence openly and legally and political action campaigns didn’t have to disclose their sources. Dark money exploded andYour vote became worthless. Their dollar became law. By 2014, the now famous Princeton study demonstrated in only 1 of every 20 pieces of legislation improved the lives of American citizens. The rest only benefitted the already wealthy at the expense of working class folks. This is the moment that the cancer of the Second Republic received its stage 4 terminal diagnosis. But our wetiko didn’t stop there.

2013 Shelby County v. Holder

The Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. States that had a history of blocking Black voters from voting no longer had to get federal approval before changing their voting rules. Within hours of the decision, states began passing new laws making it harder to vote.

2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

The Court took away the constitutional right to bodily autonomy, denying women the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, a right they had held for 50 years. For the first time in US history, the Supreme Court removed a right, rather than expanding one.

2024 Trump v. United States

The Court ruled that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts.” This placed the president, the most powerful person in the country above the law. It gave the Executive Branch total autonomy to deny us our civil rights and resources we need to realize the fullness of life, liberty and happiness.

2026 Louisiana v. Callais

This decision effectively neutered the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal political representation. By allowing racial gerrymandering to stand, it removed the last strong legal shield protecting the voting power of communities of color. This was the final blow. The Second Republic has died.

This isn’t just about court cases. It’s about your paycheck. You know, that unchanging number that buys less and less each week. It’s about having to choose between food and medicine, between rent and a car repair. It’s your family’s future. Here’s what the RAND Corporation found when researchers looked at where America’s money went:

The wealth transferred $79T from us to them (the top 1%) over the last 50 years. This means you are now paid about 50% less than you should be. Combined with record high inflation, this theft is why 78% of us are living paycheck to paycheck. This was a policy choice made by 10,000 white world families who control everything now - our government, our healthcare, our newspapers, tech, entertainment, newspapers, cars, schools, and churches.

$79 trillion. That’s not an accident. That’s not a “Whoops, sorry about that.” That’s a strategy, executed dutifully over four generations. That’s a policy choice funded by billionaires, made by corrupted judges in courtrooms and corrupted politicians in Congress and the Oval Office, and in corporate boardrooms, to move money from the many to the few.

Why the Second Republic Failed

Obviously, the wetiko of wealthy and corporate interests drove these court cases and policy choices. And we know which ones did it, which ones signed their names and hoarded the wealth. They have names, addresses, and buildings with their names on them. But none of this needed to happen. If we had explicitly developed a healthy culture, with developmental adults, nurtured civic faith, and ways for all of us to be our brother’s keeper, to love each other as much as ourselves and live e pluribus unum, to effectively heal and transform our wetiko, we wouldn’t be mourning the Second Republic. This is the unfinished work of the Founders that is for us to complete.

A healthy democracy has three legs, like a three-legged stool. Those three legs are: a great unify idea that binds us (create everyone equally), a fair economy (sector and institutional design to ensure that people can actually live that idea and have access to the resources to become developmental adults and realize the fullness of life, liberty, and happiness), and a strong culture and spirit (so people become adults, transform their wetiko, believe in, and live by shared values). But we have never been a healthy democracy. We’ve been a two-legged stool (idea and political-economy) leaned against something.

Without the third leg of culture and spirit, our democracy only stood by leaning against something. In our case that something is no viable alternative, no way to make a living without having a master or being one. That something is policed trade routes, economic coercion, anxiety over economic ruin, social shame, and the threat of state-sanctioned violence if you step out of line.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can have it all if we stand our stool on all three legs.

This third leg (spirit and culture) was explicitly named and nurtured by the first and longest standing democracy, the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace. It was even acknowledged as foundational by our Founders, such as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, who explicitly named the third leg as Nature’s God and Natural Law in our founding documents. But it wasn’t nurtured or actioned. There was nothing to ensure we created upstanding moral, spiritual, grown adults.

And now, those two legs have been kicked out and we’re all on our asses wondering what the hell just happened. The courts, as we have seen, have systematically rolled back civil rights, voting rights, and economic rights. The referees of our democracy are now working for one team - the wealthy.

The economy was carefully redesigned to steal from working folks and enrich the leisure class. Unions were crushed. Tax laws were rewritten. Trade deals were made that sent good paying jobs overseas. Corporate regulations were stripped. The result: the richest 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 90% of us combined.

The people’s airwaves have been bought and now six corporations own 90% of all media, providing us a steady stream of state-sanctioned propaganda and distraction. When a tiny number of very rich people control what is deemed a fact, what stories you hear, what you fear, who you trust, that is not a free press. That is a social control and manipulation, a megaphone for the powerful that will only grow stronger when Project Stargate is operationalized to surveil and enforce strict adherence to the agenda of the wealthy.

Our federal government has been captured and will no longer permit a peaceful transference of power, regarless of election results. The policies that actually become law in America match what average citizens need and want will be less than their current 5% of legislation. Think 0%. Think total exploitation. We will keep working harder for less and allow them to remain forever in power over us. Think about the OnlyFans pages your children and grandchildren will need to have to eat.

With the Second Republic in ashes, Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint written by organizations representing the wealthy and corporations, is now being carried out. It is the default contract for the Third Republic. It furher, I mean further, concentrates power in the presidency, eliminates jobs, reduces wages, buying power, and access to healthcare. It dismantles environmental protections, eliminates the Department of Education, and pulls back voting rights further. It is a plan to finish the devil’s job.

We were promised one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. What we got was one nation, divided, with power and wealth in the hands of the few forever. None of us wants it this way, but it does not serve us to pretend it is otherwise. We have to call the game. It’s over. They won.

Look in the Mirror

This might be the hardest part of our journey. Before we can build something new, we have to be honest about where we are and what we’ve lost.

We lost the Second Republic. Not in one big battle, but in a million back room conversations, court cases, country club dinners, private school fundraisers, and pork barrel policies. While we were busy surviving, distracted, afraid, and exhausted, the covenant of equality was set on fire.

I’m serious. Now get up and go look in the mirror and say to yourself: “The game is over. The Republic has fallen. I will no longer throw good money, time, taxes, and votes after bad. It’s time to get busy and create the next society from the ashes of our current one.”

This is not a reason to despair. In every faith and wisdom tradition, there is a practice for moments like this: lament. You look in the mirror and sit with what is so, what you have lost. You cry, because what you lost was sacred - your hope, your future, your children’s future, all the striving, all the good money, time, volunteering, marching, taxes, and voting wasted. You name what was taken and by whom. You curse and then forgive them. You honor yourself and all the people who fought and suffered for what we had. And then, only then, are you ready to dream and create.

Now we can shift into wonder and gratitude. Now we can be grateful for all the trapped potential that the Second Republic held, that was once prohibited from being released. And is now free. All the soul and creativity trapped in bureaucracy, trapped in “gotta earn”, trapped in “keeping up with the Joneses”, is now free. All the glorious tech and best practices, all the wisdom of all the traditions are now on the table for us to play with. This is not a funeral. It is a jubilee. It is time to rise.

The question for every one of us is the same: Who will you be in the Third Republic?

Will you relish in this collapse, save what’s good, hospice what no longer serves us, and co-create?

Or will you be a “good German”, someone who says “politics isn’t your thing”, who went along with the wealthy fascists and let Project 2025 become law, who kept lapping up the partisan propoganda of working, investing, and consuming, throwing good time, money, votes, and taxes after bad? Will you be a coward who looked away, because it wasn’t your rights that were stripped, because it didn’t impact your 401k and lifestyle in the near-term? Will you be a bootlicker who enthusiastically defends the right of the wealthy to fuck us harder every day?

Or will you be someone who stood under the stars, arms raised, and said: Thank you for letting me live to see this day, for freeing us, for letting me be part of the great co-creation.

If you’ve made it this far, I know you’ll rise with us and co-create.

What We Can Do Right Now

Here is the good news - there is only one thing to do right now at the national level. And if you’ve been following it’s not anything the establishment is offering us votes, politicians, taxes, protests, etc. We must remember that we’ve been this way before.

The covenant of the next republic, the Third Republic, must now grow in our hearts. It must be built by people, by folks like you and me, organized, awake, grieving, creating, building, and moving. We don’t just need a new election results, a new Constitutional amendment, a new white knight (Newsom) or a new law, but a new vow, one that is right for us now, with all we know to be true about our land, our large and diverse population, our history, our arts, the human condition, with all the power, technology, and wisdom of 2026. Not the very small world, limited wisdom, arts, tools, and science of 1776.

We need a new moral vision made by real people, not experts or elites from the coast, but from real people in real places, to generate a binding vision, a vow that we make to each other and to the future. Our moral vision must include and build upon “All created equal” and “E Pluribus Unum” and rattle our souls. And this time, we pledge our lives to build the economy and the culture to match the beautiful covenant in our hearts.

The Nation Needs You

This work has already begun. People across this country are gathering in churches, in community centers, on road trips and pilgrimage routes to grieve what was lost, to imagine what could be, and to write a new covenant together. The National Pilgrimage and Assembly begins in June to accelerate and democratize the crafting of the covenant. People just like you and me will gather nationwide and carry the questions: What values must guide us? What does the Third Republic stand for? What would it take for this place to be a great place to raise children?

The National Assembly (7/6-9) will bring all of our voices together. It will be a people’s covenantal moment. Not a campaign rally. Not a protest. A covenant. A vow. An oath. A new beginning for a new nation.

We were made for this moment. Every generation is given one great question. Ours is: Will we meet this moment and summon the beauty and depth of our faiths, wisdom, arts, and technologies to realize the full liberating power of democracy? Will we unleash the full promise of equality, freedom, and prosperity?

If you answered yes, drop what you planned for June and join us on the road for the National Pilgrimage. If your health or family or money are keeping you home this summer, at least clear your calendar for the evenings of July 6th and 7th (5-8pm PT) and register for the National Assembly to make your voice heard. Bring your grief, your anger, your love, and your hope to the Assembly.

And most importantly, please financially support this effort. To host the pilgrimage, assembly, and document the process for the people, we need to raise another $80k total, so every dollar and introduction helps. If you make less than $50k/yr, consider investing $35. If you make over $50k, consider investing hundreds. If you make over $100k, consider investing thousands, and introduce me to your friends. Thank you in advance for your generosity and introductions. On behalf of all who call this land home and all who will, we thank you.

Big bison luv:)

Brandon