Disclaimer: Opinion, satire, and righteous fury. Not legal advice. If you’re looking for nuance, try a pamphlet—this is a punch to the throat.

They didn’t cut special education because the math didn’t add up. They cut it because the people it helps don’t add up in the one ledger that matters to this regime: profit and power. If you’re not rich, straight, white, cis, Christian, and willing to clap on command, congratulations — you’re an expendable line item.

This administration doesn’t govern. It curates. It’s not a government so much as a members-only country club where everyone who’s “not one of us” gets the boot—and the keys to your benefits.

Listen: firing the folks who run OSERS (that’s the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services for anyone who thinks acronyms mean compassion) isn’t a budget move. It’s an erasure plan. It’s saying, in plain terms, “We don’t want to see those kids. We don’t want to know they exist. We don’t want to be reminded that democracy obligates us to the weakest among us.” So they make the office homeless. They make oversight impossible. They make responsibility someone else’s problem.

And here’s the genius of it — if you starve an office of staff, you didn’t break the program by accident. You made it look broken. Then you point at the ruined thing and say, “See? It failed. We told you government doesn’t work.” Translation: replace actual services with narratives that justify replacing services with donors and contractors who kiss the ring.

Oh, and the ring? It’s gilded with Project 2025 shiny-ness and stamped with the initials of a few very tidy hedge funds. Don’t be naïve: scrapping public care doesn’t just shrink the state — it creates a market. People who can’t get care will buy private “solutions.” That’s a bonanza for private lenders, clinics, and the kind of philanthropists who put their faces on textbooks when the cameras roll. One man’s cruelty becomes another man’s cashflow.

Look at the pattern. It’s not chaos. It’s choreography.

They cut special ed. They cut SNAP and Medicaid in the reconciliation bill. They threaten to withhold infrastructure money from blue cities and then shake their fist like a disappointed patriarch. They weaponize tariffs for friends and loans for allies. They fire federal workers as though public servants are the enemy. They call journalists “enemies,” scientists “gamblers,” teachers “indoctrinators,” and anyone who doesn’t genuflect “un-American.” It’s the same drumbeat: make empathy illegal by making it inconvenient.

And that’s the cruelty trick, the one they laugh about in smoke-filled rooms: you don’t need to pass a law to strip rights if you can starve the institutions that enforce them. Starve the office that makes sure kids get services, and suddenly parents are begging in school board meetings while the kids sit in classrooms with no help. Starve the agencies that review contractor abuse, and watch predatory firms bloom like mold. Starve the Census and suddenly whole communities vanish from the books and the ballots. It’s bureaucratic apartheid—done with spreadsheets and press releases instead of chains and guns.

They call it “efficiency.” We call it selective neglect.

And don’t give me that recycled argument: “Government is wasteful.” Yeah, sometimes. So are private prisons. So are for-profit colleges. So are billionaire charities that flip their profits into naming rights. But there’s a difference: government is supposed to be the brake—the institution that slows down the petty whims of the powerful so society doesn’t lurch into a ditch every time a grifter gets hungry. Government gives us stability. It means the lights stay on, water flows, kids get their meds, and the weak don’t have to beg at the altar of capital just to survive.

This clan of opportunists? They don’t want brakes. They want a really fast car with a roll cage and no speed limit, full of people who look like them. They want to tear out the safety lanes and rebrand potholes as “entrepreneurial opportunities.” And the slogan? “Make America Great Again.” Translation: make it small, exclusive, and profitable.

Now let’s talk morality—or rather, the commodity they sell under the name of it. They preach about “family values” while gutting programs that support families. They tout “law and order” while pardoning cronies and weaponizing the law against political opponents. They reverence the flag and then sign executive orders that make protesting that flag a criminal enterprise if the optics might be bad. This is not governance; it’s performative grievance turned into policy.

And the people in charge? They smile like men on a sinking ship who found a buyer for the life vests. They point to an economy that counts GDP while forgetting the “G” stands for “goods and services for people.” For them, the economy is a scoreboard of presidential brand value. If the scoreboard looks good for the donors, who cares if the kids with special needs don’t get their therapy? Reality is inconvenient, but narrative is flexible—and narrative is what keeps them in office.

Let’s give that propaganda its full title: Othering as Statecraft. First you make someone invisible—call them “special interests,” “woke,” “illegals,” “parasites.” Then you strip their protections. Then you privatize whatever remains. Dial it down a notch and they’ll call it “reform.” Crank it up and they’ll call it “national cleansing by paperwork.”

Do not be fooled by their theatrics about “freedom” and “saving taxpayers.” This isn’t thrift. This is discrimination by policy. This isn’t austerity in the abstract; it’s austerity aimed with surgical precision at groups who can’t hold a lobbyist’s cocktail party. The disabled kid who needs a therapist? Not lucrative. The school in a poor neighborhood that needs infrastructure? Not politically profitable. The immigrant family that needs a lawyer? Hard to brand on a bumper sticker. So they shrink resources until those people stop being people and start being statistics on a budget sheet that reads like a shopping list.

And while we’re being honest: this isn’t accidental incompetence. There’s incompetence enough, sure—paperwork bungles, misspellings, filings with the wrong case numbers (you want comedy? appoint an insurance lawyer to run federal prosecutions). But incompetence is their cover, not their goal. The goal is power without pushback. You can’t prosecute a graft if the investigators are gone. You can’t enforce civil rights if the civil rights office is hollow. You can’t show up in a courtroom demanding remedies for abuse if the lawyers aren’t there to bring the case. So they manufacture incapacity.

And what do they use to keep people from noticing? Spectacle. Deepfakes. Rally theater. “Look over here!” says the Twitter-enabled circus while the work of democracy is quietly dismantled behind a velvet curtain. They litigate in the press with memes while the actual lawyers are fired or reassigned. They promise “efficiency” and deliver cruelty.

You know what the Founders warned about? Factions. They didn’t imagine political parties as we know them so much as the slow capture of institutions by private interests. That’s what’s happening now, but with better merch. The “empire” they imagine is not across the ocean—it’s inside your government, repackaged as “innovation” and “reform” and “common-sense cuts.” They talk about “draining the swamp” while installing a private drainage company and keeping the swamp for themselves.

So here’s the thing to remember when the next press release comes: they are not neutral stewards. They are not benevolent managers. They are architects of a system that prizes loyalty above competence, donor dollars above human dignity, and stability only for the privileged. They are building a country where citizenship is conditional on conformity and compliance.

You want the final act? It isn’t just about who gets fired today. It’s about what’s left standing tomorrow: a diminished public, gutted oversight, privatized commons, and a citizenry told to be grateful for crumbs while being policed by the same people who starved them.

Here’s the last line, and it’s simple:

They say freedom isn’t free. That’s true. But decency isn’t free either. It costs money, effort, and a willingness to fight for the people who don’t have the platform to tweet their suffering. This administration would rather thumb its nose at decency and call it fiscal prudence because cruelty funds campaigns and narratives line up donors.

So what do we do about it?

We remember who the state is for. We show up. We refuse to accept erasure as policy. We fund schools, not PR firms. We keep voting. We keep suing. We keep telling the truth louder than their memes. Because if you don’t defend the people the government is supposed to protect, you’ll be next on the list when they decide who’s “useful” and who’s “disposable.”

And if that sounds dramatic?

Good. It’s supposed to. Because when ordinary cruelty becomes policy, complacency is complicity.

They call it making America great again. I call it making America small for the few—with a very nice clubhouse, a private jet, and a really, really tidy list of people who don’t matter.