It didn’t happen overnight. It was slow, deliberate, and brutally effective. A sleight of hand so seamless, most never noticed. The American mind was rerouted.
There was a time—within living memory—when the economy sat at the center of political life. People argued about interest rates, tax burdens, trade deficits, and the weight of the national debt. Even the average voter had opinions about the Fed. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it was serious.
Now we shout over flags and pronouns.
The cost of groceries is up nearly 30 percent since 2020. Median rents are up 25 percent. Credit card interest is nearing 30 percent, and household debt just hit $17.5 trillion. But you’d never know it from the news cycle. Or from Congress. Or even from most political debates.
Because now the conversation has been hijacked. We’ve been funneled into endless loops about identity, race, and gender abstraction. Cultural landmines with no solutions and no endpoints. The social fabric isn’t being debated. It’s being frayed on purpose.
It’s not just the left. It’s not just the right. It’s a bipartisan betrayal, a silent truce between power brokers who realized long ago that people distracted by moral outrage are easier to manage. No one riots over CPI data. No one marches about interest rate hikes. So the outrage industry shifted the target.
The result? An uninformed electorate wandering through a minefield with no map. The economy no longer drives our elections. Not meaningfully. The average voter can’t tell you what M2 money supply means or how government spending fuels inflation. They’ve been fed cultural flashpoints and TikTok panic instead.
That isn’t neglect. It’s design.
Because once you stop thinking about the structure of your paycheck, the cost of your food, and the purchasing power of your future, you become easier to fleece. Every new policy, every central bank maneuver, every quiet corporate consolidation becomes just background noise in a country that’s busy arguing over bathroom signs.
We are living through a controlled demolition, and half the country’s staring at the wrong floor.
There will be more rug pulls. More shocks. More planned crises. And the fewer people paying attention to economics, the easier it will be to gut what’s left of the middle class and transfer more wealth and control upward. This is how you unmake a republic. Quietly, in plain sight.