Shahid Bolsen: Survival and System Disruption in the Age of Collapse

Okay. Well, first of all, whenever I've done a post in the past or a video or a talk or what have you, I mean, going back twenty five years, this is always the case. Whenever I talk about practical strategies, practical tactics, and so on, there's always only a fraction of the engagement that I get compared to other topics. Only a fraction of people seem to actually be interested in hearing about practical steps that can be taken for change, practical steps that can be taken in terms of activism. And ironically, typically, least interested in practical strategies are the ones who ask for practical strategies.

You can know that someone is not genuinely interested in practical strategies and practical tactics because they're the ones who ask for practical strategies and practical tactics. It's ironic. But it's because they don't ask for the strategies and they don't ask for the tactics because they want to implement them. They ask for them so that they can shoot them down. They ask for them so that they can criticize them, and mock them, and belittle them, and dismiss them.

Because these are do nothing people. They're do nothing people who want to be able to justify doing nothing. So they will ask you for your ideas, they'll ask you for your strategies only so that they can shoot those ideas and strategies down. Because the the the people who are actually active, first of all, are usually not online in the first place. The people who are actually active, they're generally not online.

Second of all, they have minds of their own, so it's actually enough for them when you give them a strategic framework for developing tactics, and then they can do the rest because they have ground experience. I've been frequently told that the strategies and the tactics that I suggest are not dramatic enough. That's one of the typical criticisms. And again, this is coming from people who are never actually gonna be active in any scenario in the first place. Those are the people who will criticize or belittle the tactics that I talk about, because they wanna pretend that if I can suggest some tactic or some strategy that will all at once, you know, in one blow change the world, in one blow end injustice and overthrow the oppressors once and for all and so forth, If I can give them that, then they'll do it.

And anything less than that, well, it's just not worth doing. You see? It's insignificant. Because they're primarily actually just interested in rationalizing continuing to sit on the couch. I mean, truth is even if I could give them a one stop shop strategy that would actually solve everything overnight, even if something like that was even possible, if something like that even existed, they still wouldn't do it.

Even if you could give them a strategy that would solve all the problems in the world, they still wouldn't do it. It reminds me of brothers in prison, when I was in prison, telling me that they would be willing to participate in a prison break, a prison escape, if I could smuggle in AK 40 sevens into the prison, and if I could arrange for a helicopter to pick us all up from the yard. Now, it's just another way of saying that you're happy sitting on the cell block, when you make impossible expectations, impossible demands. I mean, I know that even if I carried you on my back, you're not ready to move, period. So, like, when I used to write about Egypt back in the mid twenty tens, I suggested multiple strategies of non violent disruption, system disruption.

Strategies that were targeting the profitability of Western corporations, the Western corporations that were leading the neoliberal subjugation of Egypt at that time. The idea being behind that strategy, behind those tactics was that to to tell those corporations, you're doing what you're doing in Egypt for the sake of making money. So we will make sure that you do not make money. In other words, we'll make sure that your subjugation of Egypt is not going to be allowed to achieve to achieve the profits that you want to achieve. And then once you realize that your strategy of subjugation is not gonna work, then maybe we can renegotiate how you approach the country of Egypt.

But when you're targeting profitability, obviously, this is not particularly dramatic. It is a sustained agitation and a a sustained interference over time. And of course, anyone who's actually in business, anyone who has a business, or anyone who works in the corporate sector, anyone who's a business owner can easily understand the strategic logic of this, the strategic logic of this approach, but most activists don't have this experience. Most activists are truth be told not professionals. Most activists don't work in business.

They don't work in the corporate sector. They're not business owners. Nine times out of 10. And most activists also are idealistic, they're idealists. And many of them, again, let's be honest, performative, and they lack any realistic understanding of power dynamics in any given society, their society or any other.

And now I'm talking about the actual activists on the ground, the actual people who are doing work. But then when you're talking about so called online activists, well of course, these people are mostly not genuinely interested in anything in the real world. They're not they're not really interested in anything practical in the real world, they like to talk. And like I've talked about many times, people tend to want short term solutions, you know, they want big cinematic actions that they can take that will resolve once and for all whatever problems or whatever grievances that they are involved in, that they're trying to address, and that's just not how things work. It's this this quick fix mindset, you know, like if you're overweight for example, you wanna take a pill or you wanna have a surgery or something to remove all that excess weight all in one go, you know, rather than do the actual long term work of changing your diet, changing your lifestyle, you know, going to the gym, working out, jogging, what have you over weeks, over months in order to get your weight down.

That's the right way to do it, but you have a quick fix mentality. Look, systems of oppression were not built overnight, and they're not gonna be dismantled overnight. It takes time. So when I talk about boycott enforcement through legal means of system disruption, I know that anyone who is sincere, and anyone who has a practical background in activism and certainly anyone who has a background in business knows what to do with that framework. No one they know what to do with that theory, that strategic theory.

Like I said, you can just look at the labor movement, the early labor movement in The United States. Anyone familiar with the history of the labor movement in The United States? The labor movement in France, for example, also. In fact, social movements and labor movements across the global South. If you're familiar with all of this, workers in Kerala, for example, or in Bangladesh.

Okay? Once you have the basic theory of system disruption, the basic theory of pinpointing the vulnerabilities within a process, you know, all the machinery that has to work smoothly in in order for any company to make money, if you understand that, then you you can use your imagination. You can use your imagination, your creativity, and all of the different ways that you could potentially interfere with that process. But most of these ways, or maybe even all of these ways, are again, they're not gonna be dramatic. Not even going to be necessarily decisive in and of themselves.

And maybe most crucially, they're not Instagrammable, and they're not particularly emotionally satisfying. But over a sustained period of time, and performed in clusters or performed in waves, again with persistence and with consistence, it's very effective. I mean, if you doubt the the efficacy of this, this is literally what the CIA did in the in so called Latin America and in Eastern Europe. I mean, we're talking about, at that time, the premier intelligence agency in the world. They were completely dedicated to toppling power structures, in foreign countries all around the world that did not adhere to America's agenda, to America's dictates, to America's, interests.

They literally adopted strategies of below the radar system disruption to either create or exacerbate inefficiency, slow down workflows, cause bottlenecks, you know, on and on. And they did this to great effect. I mean, upon the industry, even 10% of the workers in any given company have the power to inflict profit losses through the use of discrete tactics if they are employed persistently. You could decrease profits by 30 to 50% potentially, and if you mobilize the public to engage as well in these sorts of tactics, well then there's no business whatsoever. There's no business that you can't take down.

I mean, accidents happen. Right? People misplace things. They miss file things, they lose invoices, they lose paperwork, you know, they accidentally delete emails. Incompetence isn't a crime.

It's not illegal to be to not be good at your job. Sometimes someone might decide that they want a coffee at the end of the day, right, someone from the public. They want a coffee at the end of the day and it it just so happens that they're just coming from the fish market. They might forget their bag, their grocery bag under the sofa or something. It's no one's fault, you know, if the the next morning when they open the whole cafe smells like dead fish or smells like durian for example, I don't know how many people in the in the in the West are familiar with the smell of durian but it's awfully bad.

Okay. Sure. No one wants to sit in a cafe that smells like rotting fish but what to do? These things happen. No one's to blame.

It's not illegal to be forgetful. Or for example, if any inspector the in The US, if any inspector from any regulatory body, for example, is alerted to potential violations at this or that company, or at this or that warehouse, or this or that restaurant, or whatever, nine times out of 10 they're gonna find a violation. They they will find a violation within the first ten minutes of an inspection. Any inspector will tell you that, you know, fire, safety, health, OSHA, what have you, all of these types of regulatory bodies. You know, I've told you before that America has more laws and more regulations than any other country on earth.

Well, use that, use that, weaponize that, weaponize all of those regulations, you know. An exit is blocked for example, fire extinguisher is maybe expired, you know, something is too close to something else when they're not supposed to be within distance of each other. It's the job of these people, these inspectors to be nitpickers, to nitpick, and it's their job to find violations because it's their job to bring in revenue to their department through issuing fines. They will find a violation or maybe multiple violations and that's expensive. It can be expensive, it can potentially even cause a pause or a a shutdown in the operations of that company or that warehouse or that restaurant or that cafe.

And obviously again, if you're able to recruit workers, which you should have been able to done should have been able to do for over the last two years, then the effectiveness of disruption increases exponentially. Just use your imagination, this really isn't that complicated. Look, let me explain something about legality. Okay? There's sort of two theories about the law in the West, in America.

One is that you treat the law as a sort of operative morality in society. Meaning, basically, that you treat the state as if it is God, as if it is Allah with omniscient knowledge of everything that you do. That's the view that the power structure wants you to have about the law and about legality. But the other view of the law is that the law or that legality is determined by the burden of proof. You understand?

A law is not broken if a court cannot say that that law was broken. That's the view of lawyers, that's the view of jurists, that's the view of judges, that's the realists view, that's the practical view. You know, Oliver Wendell Holmes very famously said, the prophecies of what the courts will do are what I mean by the law. Meaning, this is the practical interpretation, the practical interpretation of innocent until proven guilty, you see? Practically, whether an action is legal or illegal is decided by the court, and illegality has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Now, this is the realist view of the law. This is the realist view, and this is the view that activists need to have about the law. That's the view that the power structure has about the law, it's the view that the rich have about the law. I mean, you and I both know that nobody in power believes that the law is actually supposed to determine whether they can or cannot do something. It only determines how they will do it.

Because the truth of the matter is that in America the only crime is breaking the law so obviously that you can get convicted. That's the system that you're in. That's the society that you're in. In that society, the rich have got you, the poor, jumping through hoops while they fly their private jets through loopholes. You understand?

So learn your system. Learn what your system actually defines as legal and illegal. I'm not telling you anything that you wouldn't be told by your attorney. I'm not telling you anything that you wouldn't hear from any attorney worth their salt. Lawyers are never interested in what you did or did not do, they are only interested in what can be proven, and that's how the people who run the system, that's how they operate.

They operate on the basis of what they can get away with. Look, you have to understand something. You are a criminal. If you're an activist, you're a criminal. If you're pro Palestine, you are a criminal.

If you are against oppression, if you're against injustice, if you're against tyranny, if you're against genocide, you're a criminal in your society. I mean, hasn't the system taught you that already by now after two years? You, your organizations, your groups, your communities, these are criminal organizations. Understand this, just like the mafia, just like the cartels, just like the CEOs and just like the politicians, criminal organizations. You have to wrap your head around that.

But just like how the cartels and just like how the mafia are never gonna give up what they're doing, you and I both know they're never gonna stop what they're doing, activists are also never gonna stop what they're doing. You're never gonna give up what you're doing, but you see the mob learned, organized crime learned the system, the cartels learned the system. They completely understand what legal and illegal means in America. So they do their best to stay on the side of what is legal, and legal means, again, whatever cannot be proven illegal in a court of law. That's how your system works.

Do you understand? They don't get legal advice, they don't get high paid attorneys in order for those attorneys to tell them to stop their criminal activity. No. They have lawyers to tell them how to continue their criminal activity without going to jail, without getting convicted. Well, like I say, the power structure views your activity, your activism as criminal activity.

Honestly, they view you as a criminal organization. So are you gonna stop? No. But you need to learn how to continue doing what you're doing, continue your activities without going to jail, just like the mafia, just like the cartels. See, that's if you understand yourself properly as a resistance movement.

Again, it doesn't matter if we're talking about resistance against American genocide in Gaza, or we're talking about, for example, resistance against the takeover of Washington DC, or the takeover of of other cities, or whether we're talking about resistance to ice, slave raids, or anything else. This is where you really need to compute that your paradigm, the paradigm that you grew up with, the paradigm that you've always believed is nothing but propaganda. You think that being an activist makes you a good responsible moral citizen in your country. No. It makes you a criminal.

It makes you a criminal. Don't you see how they arrested hundreds of people in The UK just for protesting genocide the other day? And how many people have been arrested so far in The US for protesting against genocide? Thousands. Thousands upon thousands of people have been arrested.

Why? Because you're criminals. Okay? Understand. The the the cartels don't conduct their business in front of an embassy.

They don't conduct their business in the public square. They're not offloading trucks of cocaine outside the Capital Building. No. The mafia isn't in the street with a placard talking about extortion now. No.

You have to navigate the system, you have to be smarter than that, you have to navigate the system, you have to circumvent the system, you have to outmaneuver the system. This is the practical reality. But you got so used to the fabricated designated opposition in the in The US that you don't know what opposition really looks like. You don't know what opposition really means. Opposition isn't mainstream by definition.

It's not Bernie Sanders, it's not AOC, certainly it's not Tucker Carlson or whoever else or Candace Owens. I said it before, it's one of the most ingenious and one of the most insidious aspects of how the West or how totally the West has consolidated power, authoritarian power, that they have actually been able to dictate who the opposition will be and how it's gonna look like, what dissent is gonna look like, you know. Not only do they tell you what policy is, but they've also decided for you how objection to that policy is supposed to be, and who is supposed to represent opposition. No. None of that is opposition.

None of that is resistance. None of that is descent. You have to actually wrap your head around the fact that the power structure in America and throughout the West is authoritarian in nature. This isn't rhetoric. And dissent, real dissent is criminalized.

It's criminalized. It's criminalized more than anything that you would normally define as criminal in an authoritarian society, and you're in one. So understand that if you're gonna become opposition, or if you're gonna become, you know, part of the resistance, if you're gonna become a resistance activist, so called, well, you need to understand that that means that you are embarking upon a life of crime. As far as your society is concerned, it's a life of crime and you need to act accordingly. That means that you have to learn the law.

You have to learn what the law means in your society and what it doesn't mean. And you have to find your way around that the same way that the rich and powerful, and the same way that the mafia, and the same way that the cartels, and the same way that the politicians and the CEOs find their way around it. Now again, as I've said before and said repeatedly, that does not mean violence. That does not mean engaging in big dramatic confrontational actions. No.

I've said this many times. The the the way that your system is set up over there, those kinds of actions are not effective, they're counter effective. But you do have the ability to disrupt the system. You have the ability to disrupt profitability, and that's far more powerful in fact than any armed action that you could ever undertake. You actually have the ability to impose loss on companies.

Profit loss. Loss through reduced revenues, loss through increased expenses. You have the ability to push the private sector, private sector power, you have the ability to push them across that threshold of unprofitability, which as I say, is exactly where they never want to ever be. And you have the ability to push them there, and they will negotiate with you to keep themselves out of that zone of unprofitability. It's a very straightforward dynamic when it comes to business.

That's one of the reasons why they never wanted you to even know, they did they never wanted you to even understand where actual power lies. They wanted you to to keep you misdirected, wanna keep you looking at the government, keep you looking at political parties, looking at politicians and so forth. Democracy and all of that, they wanna keep you looking over there because real existing power, the real existing power players in the private sector are fundamentally vulnerable and fragile and they are fundamentally susceptible to pressure by the public. Much more than even your so called elected representatives are susceptible to the the the pressure of the electorate. And that's the other side, of course.

That's the other side of resistance strategies. The other side of resistance strategies is sufficiency, self sufficiency. Creating, building and fortifying community level economic sovereignty, and I've talked about that also many times. Because your dependence upon these companies, dependence upon these corporations, your dependence upon them inevitably interferes with you being able to resist them and being able to pressure them. You understand?

So your your consumption habits, your consumer habits, your spending, your brand loyalty and so on, all of these things keep you subject, keep you dependent, all of these things keep you restrained and docile and passive and compliant. So you have to purge yourself of all of this. You know, I've said before that the main usefulness of public protest, the public protest that we've seen over the last couple of years for Gaza has been that they demonstrate the mood of the market. They show to the private sector public sentiment and that matters to business, that has to matters to business. But the truth is that you could have demonstrated that even more effectively to the private sector without a single march, without a single rally, just by your consumer behavior.

Just by your consumer behavior and by your system disruption and by your enforcement of boycotts against those companies that refuse to take the right stand on Palestine. All you have to do is affect their bottom line and they will get the message. Now, I'm telling you for your own understanding, I'm telling you for your own mentality. Moving forward, you need to look at these companies, you need to look at these corporations, you need to look at these financial institutions the same way that an occupied country, a colonized people, a resistance movement in a colonized occupied country, the same way that they would look at institutions, the institutions of colonizing powers, the colonizing occupying powers. The same way that they would look at those institutions, need to look at these companies.

You need to understand that you are living in an occupied country. You need to understand yourselves as living in a colonized country, in an occupied country. You have to operate under this framework. Now, know that this sounds like hyperbole, but this is a useful way to frame how you need to understand your role as an activist and as a, frankly, as a citizen in that country. Now, just as in a traditionally occupied or a colonized country, some degree of cooperation with the occupying power is always gonna be unavoidable, it's inevitable.

You also cannot completely avoid dealing with these companies in America. You can't completely avoid dealing with them. But you should deal with them with the mentality that they are hostile entities that are fundamentally imposing conditions in your society that exclusively serve their interests, that exclusively serve their interests and undermine your interests just like a colonizing power. Now, same tactics and these same strategies that I talked about, these strategies were first pioneered by intelligence agencies in Nazi occupied Europe, and later in Soviet Eastern Europe, and as I say in Latin America. These strategies, these tactics were initially specifically designed as resistance tactics.

Agitation, irritation, interference, and disruption, you know, sand in the gears of occupation. Non cooperation in the guise of cooperation, always with plausible deniability. Listen, the Gaza genocide is going to end. Zionism is going to end. The Middle East so called is going to stabilize, that's going to happen, it's going to be peaceful and it's going to be prosperous.

That's not a pipe dream, that's just the the the trajectory that things are going, and it's being pushed in that trajectory by the most powerful players in the world. So there's very little doubt that that's what's that that's what's gonna happen. But the other side of that trajectory, that upward trajectory for Be'lat HaShem, for the so called Middle East, for the Global South, The other side of that upward trajectory is the downward trajectory of the West, the downward trajectory of America. Both of these, our upward and your downward, both of these trajectories are irreversible, And you can see what's happening over there in America. They're viciously attacking the most vulnerable people in this society, the migrants, the poor, the homeless, and they're putting all of you on a conveyor belt to vulnerability.

Over 700 people were shot and killed by the police just this year. Call that what it is, extra judicial killings by the security forces in America. Over 700 in just the last eight months, you're expendable. And whoever isn't expendable yet is being pushed into being expendable. That's the way that the system is working.

That's not a light at the end of the tunnel, that's a meat grinder. Trump likes to talk about how much money has been raised by the tariffs. Right? Well, that isn't money that they're making, that's money that they're taking they're taking it from who? They're taking it from you, not from anyone else.

Do you understand? Tariffs are paid by you. They're paid by importers and they're paid by paid by consumers. That's $300,000,000,000 that they say that they've gotten so far. Well, that's $300,000,000,000 that they took from you.

Did you have 300,000,000,000 extra dollars to spare? Did you know that there's over a 100,000 jobs in the tech sector that have been cut in The US in 2025? Just 2025. 80,000 retail jobs. That's up 174% from the previous year in terms of job losses.

At least two major refineries have shut down with more planning to shut down. Roughly 2,000,000 people right now today are incarcerated in America if you include immigration detentions. You know that 75% of Americans can't even afford to buy moderately priced home? Home foreclosures are up by almost 10% so far this year nationwide, and it's up by 40 to 55% in some in particular states. A million people evicted from their homes in the last year in America, and the numbers are rising.

I mean, look at Washington DC. Evictions have doubled in Washington DC since 2023, and now they're going after the people that they evicted. They're going after the homeless with federalized police. Can't you see the the way things are going? Homelessness is already at record highs, broad unemployment in The US if you include the underemployed.

Your rates in America are higher than Nigeria, they're higher than Cambodia or Niger or Thailand or several other global South countries. Your unemployment rate is ridiculous. Layoffs, unemployment, foreclosures, evictions. That's the conveyor belt to vulnerability that they put you on. The conveyor belt to poverty, to homelessness, and then from there to prison and slave labor.

Now, you can't tell me that this isn't just like a colonized country. This isn't just like an occupied country. You know that 60% of all the land in your country is privately held by wealthy individuals and corporations? 60%. Do you even know who they are?

Most of them you you haven't even heard of these people, but they own 60% of the acreage in your country. Do you know that the average employee in America, the average employee takes home roughly 10 to $20,000 less per year than what they actually earn because of taxes, because of those taxes being taken out. Not to mention the extra $5,000 a year on average that you pay every year in sales tax. So again, this is just an average. You give the government, state and federal, somewhere between 15,000 to $25,000 every year if you earn median income, just a median income.

So fifteen to twenty five thousand that you give the government. Meanwhile, the average US household only spends $24,000 a year on basic household bills like mortgage, rent, utilities, insurance and other necessities. In other words, you understand, that means that you could literally live off of just what you pay in taxes every year. Just what you pay in tax, you could live on that money. And did you know that roughly half of BlackRock's capital, you know BlackRock, the largest asset management company in the world, they own everything.

Did you know that roughly half of all of their capital comes from pension funds? That's your money. That's your retirement money. Larry Fink, the the the owner and the CEO of BlackRock, he gets to own everything by using your money. And if BlackRock makes spectacular profits on their investments, your retirement money stays the same.

You're an investor with no dividends. They're using your money to invest, but you got no dividends. You have no vote. You don't get any you you you don't get to be on any boards of directors. You don't have the controlling shares in any company that BlackRock owns or that BlackRock controls.

BlackRock controls it, they have the dividends, they have the profits, they have the controlling vote, you don't. They have the controlling shares, you don't. They have the vote, you don't. But they're doing it with your money. And what do you think happens if Larry Fink makes a bad investment?

With your money. Well, BlackRock gets bailed out, but you get kicked out. They get bailed out, but you get kicked out. A senior citizen evicted, like so many others homeless and then probably detained. Because Larry Fink and all of his friends don't have to look at you begging on the street corner as they pass by in their limousines on their way to the Met Gala.

And all of that is legal. I'm telling you, you are in an occupied country. Corporate colonization, neoliberal subjugation, feudalism, it's feudalism. And they've got their eyes on you no matter where you go, no matter what you're doing, no matter where you are. They have all your information, don't they?

They have all your data, all their mass surveillance, their big data, their analytics. The colonizers, the traditional colonizers, the historical colonizers, they extracted the natural resources and the raw minerals of the global South, But they're extracting from you just the same, just the same. They're extracting your money, they're extracting your labor, they're extracting your data, they're extracting your time, they're extracting your thoughts and your creativity. I mean, else do you think trains AI? What do you think that they're training AI on?

It's getting trained on everything that you ever said online, everything that you ever said on the internet, everything that you ever wrote, and everything that you're saying right now to chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or what have you. And they're not paying you for that, you're paying them for that. You understand? You're paying them for the privilege of feeding data into their system so that they can build AI systems that can then replace you at your job. That's what's going on in your country.

See, I've talked about this so many times, I feel almost shy to to to keep repeating it. But you need to recognize, this isn't a cyclical economic downturn. It's not one of those things where you just have to, you know, hang tight during a moment of difficulty and things are gonna get better. No. You can't afford to delude yourself about what's happening in your country.

The center of gravity of the global economy is moving away from America, it's moving away from the West and it's not coming back. This is very important for you to grasp, but this is not happening arbitrarily. It's happening for fundamental reasons. I mean, it's happening for reasons that have to do with economic, social, demographic, geopolitical fundamentals. This isn't a whim of global capital.

This is happening by necessity. It must happen and it's irreversible. America is receding from the international stage. It is receding from the global markets. It is receding from international trade.

It is receding from international engagement. Now, not saying that America is gonna become completely irrelevant, but I am saying that it's not gonna be what it has been. It's not gonna be what you've always known it to be or what you always thought it was. It's never gonna be that again. It's never gonna be the the the global superpower that it that it once was.

It's going to be a regional power, no more, no less. In many ways, already is just a regional power. And this downgrade is being accelerated. No one is trying to prevent it. Obviously, this is gonna have very serious ramifications for everyone living in that country.

Look, for example, you know, most people think that America they they they think of America as this high-tech empire or military empire, you know, Silicon Valley, Google, Apple, Mac, Microsoft, what have you. Or they think of Wall Street, the Pentagon, you know, or they think of the let let let let supremacy let let of the dollar, the economic power of America. But the truth is that one of the deepest foundations of US global power has always been agriculture. This is overlooked. This is sort of the silent pillar of American dominance globally.

And their agriculture was never just about domestic consumption, it was about feeding the world. Wheat shipments, soybean exports, food aid, none of this was charity. These were all instruments of control. This gave Washington control around the world. Washington weaponized surplus grain for example, the same way that they weaponized the dollar.

For decades, if you wanted to feed your people anywhere in the world, you had to deal with America. You had to deal with America. But now look where we are in 2025. Those ice raids have completely gutted the agricultural labor force in California, where I think something like over half of the workers were undocumented. When those raids started up and they intensified, up to 45% of workers just stopped showing up.

Crops were left in the field to rot. This is collapse engineered from within. Then you've got the tariffs, Trump's trade tariffs. That pushed exports off a cliff. Shipment of US soybeans to China, which was once over $12,000,000,000 a year has collapsed by more than 50%.

It's gone down by half. Total agricultural exports to China fell by 53%. That's the first time in American history that agriculture has run a trade deficit and we're not talking about a small trade deficit. $28,600,000,000 in the red in 2025. Okay?

That's not just a financial number, that's the inversion of American empire. That's the inversion of American reach and power. Meanwhile, who's feeding China? Well, Brazil. Brazil is feeding China.

It's now the world's largest exporter of soybeans, shipping more than 60 of its crop to China. In 2024, Brazil overtook The US by a massive margin supplying I think a 100,000,000 metric tons of soybeans, while American farmers watched their silos just fill up with soybeans, while the markets vanished. They had nowhere to sell them. India has become the largest exporter of rice on earth controlling I think something like 40% or over 40% of global rice trade. By the way, rice is what most people on earth eat as the main staple of their diet.

Rice is what most people in the world eat. And Russia has become the world's top wheat exporter, sending over I think 45,000,000 or 50,000,000 tons abroad in 2024. I'm not sure what is that now, but The US barely managed to even export 20,000,000 tons. Argentina is is is becoming the beef and corn exporter. The Gulf States are pouring investment into African farmland, trying to secure their own supply, their own food food security.

I'm telling you, global South is feeding itself and they're feeding each other, and this is by design and you have to grasp this. This is not happening by accident. It's not just about food, this is about power. You have to understand when America was the world's breadbasket, they could dictate the terms, they could punish their rivals, they could reward their allies, but when China can now turn to Brazil, when Africa can buy rice from India, when The Middle East can can get their wheat from Russia, America's leverage is gone. America's leverage has evaporated in this sector.

The weapon of food is no longer in Washington's arsenal and it's out of their arsenal because the a national OCGFC want it to be out of their arsenal. And inside The United States in this same sector, consolidation is driving small farmers and mid sized farmers off the land. You know that black owned farmland was was I think twenty years ago, it was about 20,000,000 acres and that's collapsed now to just 5,000,000 acres. There's only 5,000,000 acres of farmland that's owned by African Americans in America, it used to be 20,000,000 acres. Rural America is dying.

It's being swallowed up by big agriculture, by big agricultural companies and it's being suffocated by rising costs. So understand what's happening. The dismantling of US agriculture is the dismantling of American hegemony. The decline of American farms, the decline of American farmers is the decline of American empire. They are intertwined.

As I say, the global center of gravity in food has already shifted. Brazil, India, Russia, these are the new bread baskets. The global South is no longer dependent, and is no longer dependent on America. It's no longer dependent on the West. When you control your food supply, you control your future.

The empire, the American empire of corn and wheat and soybeans is collapsed, and a new order is being planted in the global South, and it's being cultivated in the in the global South, and that's all being done according to a plan, And there is no plan to reverse it, and it cannot be reversed. Americans have to understand that your future does not look at all like your past, it looks like our past, you know. Americans have been trained to believe that they are exempt, that their society, that their culture, what have you, their cities, that their country is exempt from collapse. You know, they look at the so called third world and they imagine nothing but poverty and instability in crisis, but they don't think that that's ever gonna happen to them because they're a superpower. And yet here we are.

The jobs are unstable, the farms are vanishing, the government is broken, the government is captured. America is now entering the reality that the global South has lived with for generations. So what are you supposed to do as a the average American? Well, on an individual level, first advice is very simple, stop waiting for politicians, stop believing in politicians. The state is not gonna come save you.

The state does not work for you, they do not care about you. You need to learn to cut your own consumption, like I said, you need some serious lifestyle changes. Learn to live lean. Learn to grow even a little bit of your own food. Learn some skills that will help to make you less dependent.

You know, to fix things, how to cook, how to barter, try to get yourself out of debt as best as you can because debt is the system's main leash, it's the main chain that they put around your neck to enslave you. In the global South, people survive not because they're rich, but because they're resourceful and you have to learn those skills, you have to learn how to be resourceful. And then at the at the community level, that's at the individual level, at the community level, you know, in Cairo, in Lagos, in Karachi, survival is collective. Neighbors share food, families live multi generational, informal economies thrive. You've got mutual aid societies, rotating savings groups, neighborhood markets.

These aren't this isn't just quaint, these are these are gonna be your lifelines. Americans need to rediscover this because you're not gonna make it alone. Individually, you're not gonna make it. You need networks of trust and networks of solidarity, you need to build that. In the global South, people know how to endure crisis because they're used to it.

Crisis is normal for them. You know, power cuts happen, okay, you light candles, you cook on charcoal. If there's food shortages, okay, then you buy from the street vendors who are are outside your house, outside your block that source from 10 different places. If there's inflation, then you switch to barter, to community credit. These are all skills that Americans have lost.

And let me tell you, there's a deeper blessing in this, that there's a deeper blessing in this, because collapse strips away the illusions. It tears down that myth that your whole life depends on these corporations and that your dignity depends on your material possessions. When the empire falls away, the only thing that's left is what's real, Your family, your neighbors, your faith, your skills. This is where survival is, this is where dignity is. So don't cling to the corpse of that collapsing empire, look to the global South.

Look to the people of the global South, look to the Muslim world. Because people who you might have looked down upon before, okay, you've been looking down upon them but they've been rehearsing survival for generations and they know how to endure. They know how to endure what you're only now just beginning to face and if you learn lessons from them to live simply, live in a in a connected way with other people, be resilient, then you might be able to survive America's collapse. You might do more than survive. You might even come out of it with more humanity than you had when you were at the height of your empire.

So bringing it back to what I was talking about earlier regarding tactics and strategies and so forth. Americans are gonna have to understand moving forward that survival is not gonna just be about trying to endure or being able to endure what the system does to you. Also gonna be about learning ways to disrupt what the system itself depends upon. Because corporations don't care about your vote, they don't care about your protest, they don't care about your suffering, that's very clear. But what they do care about is their own bottom line.

They care about their own profitability. So if you can insert yourself into that equation, if you can alter or impact their profitability, suddenly you become relevant, suddenly you have leverage, suddenly you have a voice. Now again, I'm not talking about some fantasy of storming Wall Street or what have you. Like I said, I'm not talking about anything dramatic, I'm not talking about anything cinematic. I'm talking about persistence, a persistent demonstration that ultimately you have the ability to impact the profitability of these predatory corporations that are in fact your feudal lords in America.