The American Millennial Manifesto

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Earlier published edition. Originally published on LinkedIn on 2026-04-18. Chapter One is under revision; this edition does not fully reflect the author’s current framing. Original publication.

Introduction

Definition: A Leech is an individual or organized body that sustains itself by extracting disproportionate value from others while contributing little or nothing to their long-term health. It survives by dependency, concealment, and normalization of its extraction. It thrives when accountability is weak and when its actions can be framed as necessary, inevitable, or deserved.

Definition: An American Leech is a Leech that extracts disproportionate value from the people, institutions, and resources of the United States while contributing little or nothing to the long-term health of the republic.

The Leech is not a race. It is not a people. It is a behavior—organized, protected, and repeated. Anyone can become it. Anyone can be drawn into it. Anyone can resist it. I call it the Leech not because I claim to know its full essence, but because I am reasoning backward from what I can feel and see. I am moving from lived experience upward: from the corrosion of dignity, and from the sense that something parasitic has attached itself to the republic. In the end, what the Leech is in itself matters less to me. What weighs on me is where our society now stands, how quickly we have declined, and how fast the country seems to be forgetting itself.

A Bootstrapping Revolution

To revolt, we must first understand the Leech. It is a parasitic idea. It is a slow and deliberate infection, a quiet buyout carried out from within. The host’s own immune system is turned against itself.

If we look at the mid-twentieth century, especially the Civil Rights movement, we see a profound moment of awakening. The American people were stirring. They were demanding genuine connection, equality, and a moral reckoning. They were challenging old dogmas and exposing contradictions that could no longer be hidden.

When a society begins to demand moral reform, the Leech understands that brute resistance is costly. So, it adapts. During the Civil Rights era and the cultural revolutions that followed, it learned that openly opposing equality was bad for business. So it commodified the language of equality instead. It absorbed the demand, stylized it, and sold it back to the public in forms that were easier to celebrate than to live.

That is how the Leech survived the challenge. It allowed the aesthetics of power to change while preserving the mechanics of power beneath them. It turned revolution into a brand. It gave us diversity in the boardroom while protecting the boardroom’s true function: extraction. In doing so, it pacified the moral outrage of the middle class. We mistook symbolic change for structural repair.

That is why what I am calling for is not chaos, and not mindless destruction. It is a bootstrapping revolution: a disciplined, bottom-up renewal in which the public withdraws reverence from corruption and begins reviving institutions that have forgotten their purpose. The point is not to burn down every structure in sight. The point is to recover what institutions were for in the first place—truth, protection, accountability, competence, and the common good—and to rebuild public life around those ends again.

A strategic revolt begins with absolute reconciliation with reality. For decades, we have been conditioned to admire the Leech. We measure our worth against its hoarded billions. We confuse status with excellence, wealth with virtue, visibility with value. To revolt is to stop looking at the Leech with reverence. It is to strip prestige from extraction.

And that means something more: a recovering republic must learn to speak plainly again. Moral corruption survives on prestige, euphemism, and silence. If we are serious about renewal, then corruption must be named, its legitimacy must be stripped away, and public discourse must recover the courage to confront what polite society has learned to protect.

That is the first act of rebellion: to redefine success within the republic.

Left and right are not enough. The deeper task is moral and institutional. We must recover the ability to recognize captured systems, withdraw legitimacy from them, and build again with clearer eyes. A bootstrapping revolution begins there: not with fantasy, but with truth; not with surrender, but with renewal.

The Leech and Its Offsprings

Imagine a leech so large that it has wrapped itself around the entire body of the nation. Its mouthparts are buried in our economy. Its body stretches across our media, our politics, and our intelligence agencies. Its offspring crawl through every industry, every institution, every level of government. The host is still breathing, still moving. But the leech has been feeding for so long that the host is now weak, moving, but on the verge of collapse. We have a very limited window to regain control of our republic. Once the host is down, the Leech will feast on it for the last time.

The Leech is no longer at the edges of the republic. It is inside the organs of public life. What remains to us is the narrowing space of our free will.

As stated in the previous essay, the leech confuses many of our citizens by inversion. It reverses reality so that extraction looks like service, betrayal looks like loyalty. The leech is a different kind of oppressor. It does not begin with open violence. It begins with moral corruption, then builds the conditions under which violence can be normalized, hidden, or excused. The Leech on America is a loose, adaptive network of powerful individuals and factions who have learned that secrecy and mutual protection serve their interests.

So, what is this Leech? How do you spot it?

The Leech is not honest. It never has been. It presents itself as a defender of values, while carefully moving society toward oppression. This is not the work of a mindless parasite. This is deliberate. Layer by layer, institution by institution, the Leech tightens its grip. It uses deception as its primary tool. It hides behind admired faces. It speaks the language of love while practicing the craft of extraction. This is why I call it a Leech – because it feeds on the living while pretending to sustain them.

This pattern is old. It is, in the deepest sense, biblical. The scriptures are filled with warnings against those who "devour widows' houses and for a pretense make long prayers." The prophets did not rage against honest enemies; they raged against the ones who wore the robes of authority while grinding the face of the poor. The Leech is not a modern invention of finance or media. It is the same old wolf that has always haunted the human flock, updating only its costume. It is the gap between the righteous performance and the rotten heart. And that gap is as old as fallen man himself.

You spot the Leech by looking for the gap between what is said and what is done.

Between the charity gala and the hidden abuse. Between the public patriotism and the private betrayal. Once you see that gap, you trace it back. You keep tracing. And eventually, you find yourself at the Leech.

I do not locate the Leech in any race, ethnicity, or faith. That would only repeat one of its oldest tricks: attaching corruption to bloodlines and laundering power through identity. The Leech uses symbols, histories, inherited wounds, and sacred language as camouflage. But its essence is not racial or religious. Its essence is organized extraction, moral inversion, and mutual protection for the depraved. Anyone can serve it. Anyone can resist it.

In this essay, I’d like to characterize the Leech as a whole and as composed of several components. You see, the Leech doesn’t care about America. America is just a vehicle it uses to get to its destination. It is now in the driver’s seat. The engine is our labor. The fuel is our silence. The destination is a world where abuse has no consequences.

So, how does the Leech infect America?

It does so through four pillars: finance, influence, abuse, and control. Each engine depends on what we are calling “its Offsprings”, the aspiring professionals, , the captured experts who do the leech's work without ever seeing the full picture. These are not the masterminds. They are the machinery: the ambitious, the captured, the fearful, the career-bound, and the morally fatigued who keep the system moving without ever seeing the whole of it.

Its Offsprings

The Leech requires thousands of tiny mouths and millions of blind hands to manage a machine of this scale. Let us call these “its offsprings”.

For the sake of clarity, I will focus on four institutions that have become malignant under its influence: political discourse and elected power, security agencies, the entertainment industry, and the media apparatus. What makes this especially tragic is that our young have been and are fed to it early, so its influence does not merely spread but renews itself across generations

Offspring Smile – The Entertainment Industry

The Leech uses entertainment to make submission feel desirable.

It uses the following recipe:

Capture attention early, replace depth with spectacle, normalize contradiction, manufacture false aspiration.

It accomplishes this by fastening the public imagination to emotional anchors. Actors, musicians, athletes, and the growing community of influencers now serve as the channels through which messages are delivered.  Think for a moment about how much of our time, and aspirations we pour into movies, sports, celebrity, and spectacle. I am not against that.  Now sit with the darker realization, that using Offspring smile, the Leech is already in our homes, shaping the atmosphere in which children learn to admire.

It does not need to preach openly. It only needs to entertain persistently. Through glamour, repetition, and emotional seduction, it teaches our kids to bond with what weakens them. I have sensed this for nearly 20 years. Now I can name it. Long before I had a framework, I was already unsettled by the cultural drift, the rise in explicit content, the normalization of gore, and the endless appetite for crime shows, cruelty, and psychological darkness. I did not yet have language for the pattern, but I could feel that something was being trained into the public mind. Entertainment was no longer merely distracting. Chomsky described one part of this process as the manufacture of consent. But in the realm of entertainment (including ads), the corruption is also the manufacture of appetite.

Because appetite is easier to govern than thought. A people trained to crave spectacle will struggle to sit with truth. Once the Leech shapes what the public hungers for, it no longer needs to command openly. The culture begins to police itself. People defend what degrades them and pass the pattern on to their children.

This is part of the American condition. We are not merely distracted, we have become easier to govern, easier to sell to, and easier to hollow out. Not because we are stupid, but because we are overworked, overlooked, tired, busy, and trained to tolerate pain, even the most intolerable kind. That is the outcome of Offspring Smile in action.

I was made by an America I believed in, and that is why I grieve what I now see.

I was entertained by this culture too. I enjoyed many of its movies. Sports. I know the seduction from the inside. That is why I am worried about the danger it poses. The Leech does not always arrive as something ugly. It comes smiling. Sometimes it comes as pleasure, familiarity, and escape. But it is still my enemy, because it seeks to weaken us, lower our guard, and make submission feel natural. And it is your enemy too. It’s the enemy of all.

Patterns of the Smile Offspring

I have said that you spot the Leech by looking for the gap between what is said and what is done. One defining trait of the Leech appears to be depravity—not merely as behavior, but as orientation, almost as if it were a governing doctrine. With that in mind, its method is systematic rather than blunt. It is playing a long game. It does not need to rush.

Let us take the movies and shows we watch for instance. The Leech’s purpose here is to sow mistrust amongst us. Reduce family cohesion which ultimately dismantles the community. This is a page from a dictatorship’s playbook. Take a romantic scene as an example. The scene may claim to depict intimacy. This is the said purpose. Under that cover of intimacy, the Leech inserts sexual imagery that serves appetite more than relationship. The viewer is invited to think the scene is deepening emotional meaning, while the real effect is to stimulate, capture attention, and lower the guard. What is said is intimacy. What is intended is conditioning. What is cultivated is a confusion of love with appetite.

Another pattern of the Smile Offspring is the sway of idols. A passing comment, an offhand statement by someone admired can move millions without ever declaring itself as command. That is the elegance of the method. The Leech works through familiarity, and trust. It captures entertainers, often unwittingly, and turns their cultural weight into influence. All of this to fracture the social and community bonds.

Offspring Mask – The Media Apparatus

Entertainment trains appetite. Media trains interpretation.

If the Smile Offspring makes submission feel pleasurable, the Mask Offspring makes deception feel credible. This is the branch of the Leech that manages perception while pretending merely to report. It does not exist to help the public see clearly. It exists to arrange what can be seen, and what must be made to feel unquestionable. Many of the talking heads in this realm also belong, in part, to the Smile Offspring, because they are performing in front of you while asking to be mistaken for truth. The entertainer performs for your pleasure. The media figure performs for your belief. At least the actor admits the job is acting.

The power of this Offspring does not rest mainly in brute censorship or obvious lies*. Its strength lies in inherited trust.* It feeds on populations trained to see existing institutions as fundamentally legitimate, even when those institutions are visibly decaying. In the American case, it found especially fertile ground among populations raised during a period when institutional polish still carried real moral authority. Many people were trained to associate the polished anchor, the formal set, and the confident expert with legitimacy itself.

Just like my dad, they think the performance signaled legitimacy. That the confident voice was the informed voice. That the formal set meant integrity. For many of them, that presentation still carries emotional authority long after the substance has rotted. If we are to take back the republic, it’s up to the millennials and Gen Z to wake this generation up. They hold immense wealth and presence. The Leech is after their vote and pockets.

Under the Leech’s influence, much of the media apparatus functions as a narrative escort. It does not simply tell the public what happened. It tells the public how to feel about what happened, which facts deserve outrage, which deaths count as tragedy, and which corruption should be treated as scandal.

This is why the modern citizen often feels manipulated without always being able to explain why. The manipulation does not always come through obvious lies. Often it comes through arrangement. Through omission. Through timing. Through repetition. Through framing. A fact can be technically present and still be functionally buried. Facts can be spoken and yet surrounded by so much distortion, and selective emphasis that the public never really receives it.

That is one of the Mask Offspring’s favorite techniques: managed visibility.

One story is repeated until it occupies the emotional horizon. Another is mentioned briefly and then dropped. One group is individualized, humanized, and mourned. Another is abstracted, depersonalized, and folded into policy language. One abuse becomes a national moral emergency. Another becomes a regrettable complexity. The public is told you are being informed, while in reality it is being trained submission.

The Leech needs that moral asymmetry. It needs a population that can be made to care intensely here and go numb there. It needs outrage that can be activated on command and compassion that can be suspended when inconvenient. This is not journalism, its control.

And because the Mask Offspring speaks in the language of professionalism, expertise, and urgency, it becomes very difficult for ordinary people to resist. The tone sounds responsible. The set looks polished. The graphics imply authority. The anchor speaks with confidence. The panel is filled with approved interpreters. Everything about the presentation is designed to make the narrative feel settled before the citizen has had a chance to think.

That is the deeper corruption. It packages interpretation before understanding can arise. It shortens attention, inflames tribal instinct, and rewards emotional compliance over patient judgment. In that environment, clarity becomes exhausting. The Leech understands this. So, it does not ask the public to study. It asks only that they absorb.

Patterns of the Mask Offspring

The Mask Offspring can be recognized the same way the others can: by studying the gap between its stated purpose and intended outcome.

One current example is the recurring preparation of the public for confrontation with Iran. The public rationale is always dressed in necessity, deterrence, security, or moral seriousness. But beneath the stated rationale lies another lesson: organized power can escalate, and ordinary people can be trained to absorb the spectacle while feeling increasingly unable to resist it. That helplessness is not accidental. It is part of the conditioning.

This is the Leech I am describing in these pages—not the overlay of political theater. Those are “what it does.” The deeper intention is more sinister. It is to teach submission. To train fear. To condition the public to internalize helplessness in the presence of organized power.

That is why the spectacle matters. It is not only about destruction abroad. It is about psychological conquest at home. We are being trained to witness organized violence, absorb it, and conclude that power is untouchable. That helplessness is the point. And we are next in line for violent treatment. These hours are the most critical.

I don’t want to minimize the suffering of our people or Iranian people. Nor is their suffering an isolated case. Many people have been subjected to similar violence under different slogans and different flags. The point is not to collapse those tragedies into one another, but to recognize the recurring logic beneath them. The Leech thrives in such conditions. It feeds on public normalization of devastation. Whether its final ambition is domination or something even more spiritually devoid, I cannot fully say. But this much is clear: it is attached to depravity. It returns to it compulsively. There is something stunted about it, something morally infantile. It does not want to mature. It does not want to evolve. It wants to remain vicious and still be obeyed. This is the only thing capable of breeding people like Epstein.

By now, some of you are probably asking the obvious question: what about the politicians, the president, the government itself? People speak of “the government” as though it were a neutral structure that has merely been mismanaged. I do not see it that way. In this writing, the government is not outside the Leech. Its offsprings are crawling its halls. The ones in suits. And once you begin looking across the world, the resemblance becomes hard to ignore. Different flags, different slogans, different parties — yet the same broad pattern: managed populations, hollow representation, public theater above, coercive machinery below. That is why we have to move carefully here. We must avoid all traps at any cost.

And before the American exceptionalist rises to object, let me say this. Our country is not exempt from the pattern. Yes, we have differences. Left vs right. History of slavery and genocide.

They are real. The Leech is larger than anyone our internal problems. It is more adaptive than ideology, more patient than a party. It changes colors easily. It can wear the language of the right, the language of the left, the language of justice, the language of order, the language of patriotism, or the language of grievance. Its purpose remains the same: to weaken the public, divide it against itself, redirect rightful anger toward easier targets, and make takeover easier.

I am momentarily relieved as people begin to sense that something parasitic has taken hold. More people should. Also, awakening alone is not enough. We must find a way to face the Leech. Too often, people blame the vulnerable, the migrant, the wounded, and the already burdened, while failing to direct equal moral seriousness toward the Leech. That misdirection is also part of the Leech’s method. It takes real pain, real betrayal, and real confusion, then turns it downward.

So let us move carefully now. My wish is for the public to move beyond the cheap reflexes of left versus right soon. The Leech is not waiting politely at the edges. It is moving closer fast. It is nearly on our head. And if we cannot outgrow our issues, we will not be able to resist what is coming.

Offspring Suit – Political Discourse and Elected Power

If the Mask Offspring manages perception through information, the Suit Offspring manages submission through politics.

This is the branch of the Leech that infects democracy, representation, patriotism, law, reform, public service, and national duty. It hijacks the machinery through which the people govern themselves. That is what is said. But under the Leech’s influence, political discourse becomes a theater of containment. The citizen is invited to vote, react, identify, defend, and repeat, while the deeper architecture of power remains remarkably undisturbed. What is said is self-government. What is intended is managed consent.

That is how the Leech uses politics to take over. It does not always abolish elections. Not in America. More often, it floods the public sphere with performance. It gives the citizen endless slogans, endless outrage, endless scandals, endless personalities, and endless reasons to identify with one team against another. And while the public remains trapped inside that emotional bubble, deeper systems of influence continue their work with far less scrutiny. Politics has become a ritual of managed attention. The public is kept busy, divided, and emotionally saturated, while the machinery tightens underneath.

Look at the churn: accusations of antisemitism, accusations of racism, accusations of extremism. Some of these charges name real evil. But in the hands of the Leech, moral language can be turned into theater. The accusation becomes less a path toward truth than a mechanism of reaction. The public is triggered, sorted, shamed, inflamed, and redirected. Everyone is pushed to choose sides at the level of surface conflict, while the deeper architecture of power goes largely untouched.

The Leech is deeply entangled with American political discourse. It is the organized management of what can be said, what must be feared, and which forms of violence are granted political cover. It repeatedly narrows what can be said, what can be opposed, and what forms of violence must be rationalized in public. Lobbying groups such as AIPAC openly define their mission as strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship. That is not hidden. What concerns me is the hidden intention.

In the argument of this essay, that network is not the whole Leech, but it is one of its most consequential instruments inside our politics. It matters because it helps fuse foreign policy, media discipline, and domestic political fear into a single channel of influence. Criticism is policed. And our public is taught, once again, to mistake coordinated influence for democratic process.

Patterns of the Suit Offspring

The Suit Offspring can be recognized the same way the others can: by studying the gap between what politics claims to be doing and what it is actually cultivating in the public. It claims to represent, protect, and govern. But once the noise settles, the pattern becomes hard to ignore. Most of our politicians do not appear to serve the public in any meaningful sense. They appear to serve the Leech.

The pattern is also visible in the way American political life often handles Israel. Here too, the Suit Offspring works through performance, and selective moral language. One may condemn obvious cruelty elsewhere with ease, yet become evasive, or suddenly “complicated” when Israeli power, lobbying influence, or Palestinian suffering enters the picture. That is managed permission.

The Suit Offspring also knows how to borrow legitimacy from suffering. Jewish history contains real pain, real persecution, and real catastrophe. But the Leech has no reverence for suffering. It uses it. It hides behind memory it did not honor and turns historical trauma into political cover. In this way, the public is trained to confuse moral sensitivity with moral surrender. Criticism of power becomes taboo, not because it is false, but because fear has been attached to it in advance.

Offspring Shield – The Security Agencies

If the Suit Offspring manages submission through politics, the Shield Offspring manages it through force, secrecy, and intimidation.

This is where power stops pretending. I suspect this is the strongest offspring of the Leech because it stands closest to coercion. The others prepare the population. This one manages the consequences. Entertainment can seduce, media can distort, and politics can contain, but the Shield Offspring surveils, classifies, threatens, conceals, and kills. It is the offspring that gives the Leech some teeth.

This offspring infects the organs supposedly tasked with protection: intelligence services, law enforcement, surveillance systems, military bureaucracy, and the wider security apparatus. It presents itself as necessary, disciplined, patriotic, and responsible. That is what is said. But under the Leech’s influence, security becomes protection of power.

That is the deeper corruption here. A healthy security institution exists to defend the people. A captured one changes its center of gravity. It no longer treats the public chiefly as the body to be protected, but increasingly as a population to be managed. The language of defense remains in place, but the moral direction has changed.

The danger here is different from that of the other offspring. Security apparatus can coerce. It wants to turn fear into compliance. Once that machinery is captured, the republic enters a more serious phase of decay, because the instruments that were supposed to defend the people can now be used to manage them.

The Shield Offspring can be recognized by a different pattern: secrecy without meaningful accountability, selective enforcement, self-protection, the burial of inconvenient truths beneath procedure and classification, and the quiet conversion of emergency powers into habits of rule. It does not always need visible violence. Often its power is felt through opacity. Through what cannot be accessed. Through what never fully surfaces. Through what the public is trained to accept without ever being allowed to examine plainly.

That is how fear becomes structural. Not always through open force, but through the learned suspicion that some names are too protected to confront, and some institutions too insulated to challenge without consequence. In that environment, the public begins to censor itself before power even needs to act openly. People lower their expectations of truth. They adjust inwardly to pressure they can no longer clearly name. And that too is part of the capture.

This is also why the Shield Offspring stands so close to the abuse pillar of the Leech. Not because it creates depravity. Human corruption is old. Its role is more chilling than that. It protects depravity from consequence. It knows how to conceal. It knows how to turn public horror into administrative fog and moral outrage into a dead end. It makes abuse survivable for the powerful by making truth slow, fractured, deniable, and exhausting.

Patterns of the Shield offspring and The Litmus Test

There is one question I cannot move past, one severe enough to cut through everything important. One that strips the paint off every institution:

What does a society do when its children are being harmed?

So how do I judge whether our security apparatus has been captured? I use one litmus test.

What does it actually do when children are exploited, when predators circle wealth, influence, and institutional power? Does it tell the truth, or does it begin immediately to manage perception?

A society can survive periods of decline. But when it repeatedly fails to protect its children, that reveals something more serious than dysfunction. It reveals moral rot.

That is why I do not treat the abuse of children as one crime among many. It is a measure of the soul of a people*. It tells you whether a nation still possesses the courage to defend innocence when innocence becomes expensive to defend*. It tells you whether truth still matters when truth threatens status, careers, money, agencies, reputations, and whole systems of mutual protection.

This is where the Leech becomes easiest to recognize. The Leech feeds on cowardice. It thrives wherever the vulnerable can be consumed while the powerful remain insulated. When the vulnerable are children, the evil becomes harder to disguise. So the Leech learns to do what corrupted systems always do: fragment the truth, isolate the victim, and train the public to move on before anything fundamental is exposed.

That is not accidental. That is one of the clearest signatures of the Leech.

Because the issue is never only the predator. Human depravity has always existed. The deeper issue is the environment that allows depravity to persist, circulate, and protect itself. Who looked away? Who delayed? Who intimidated? Who buried? Who translated horror into public relations language, and exhausted attention? Those are not side questions. Those are the real questions.

A nation that cannot face the abuse of children honestly will eventually fail every other moral test as well. Because once innocence can be traded for access then the republic has already conceded something essential. At that point, law is still speaking, media is still speaking, politicians are still speaking—but the conscience of the nation is no longer speaking.

That is why I call this the litmus test.

It reveals, with almost unbearable clarity, whether the society still knows what protection is for. A healthy society does not merely punish abuse when it becomes impossible to ignore. It builds itself around the defense of the vulnerable. A diseased one does the opposite. It asks the vulnerable to carry the burden of proof while others are granted time, ambiguity, and discretion.

And when that pattern repeats often enough, the damage does not remain confined to the victim. It spreads outward into the moral psychology of everyone. People begin to lose faith that truth matters. They begin to suspect that power is untouchable, that innocence is cheap. Fear deepens. Cynicism hardens. Silence begins to feel rational.

This too is part of the abuse.

Because abuse is not only what is done to the child. It is also what is done to the conscience of the society that learns to live above buried innocence.

And if we are serious about moral awakening, then this is the only places where ALL excuses must end. No slogans. This is Chapter 1. Chapter 2 is coming.

End of essay

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