Several recent opinion pieces and historical reflections concur on one point. Our country was once guided by civility, logic, hard work, capital investment, land, property, and the rule of law. Our economy and society were based on these foundational elements.
Today, our economy has morphed into an attention and speculation-based economy. To quote from a July 13, 2025, New York Times article by Ezra Klein, “Attention is becoming an infrastructure that people have to build upon. So no longer is the economic foundation something like land, which is very physical…it’s attention and then narrative. So the story that you tell to gain attention is the capital that inflates the attention itself.”
In effect, we are rapidly transforming America from the practical, science-based foundations of Franklin and Jefferson into the hype-based, “fake-it-until-you-make-it” world of Trump and Musk. In place of building consensus and knowledge, we are increasingly falling for scammers who assure us that we will reach Mars by 2030, that we will have self-driving Teslas by 2017, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be settled by January 21, 2025, that Haitians are eating neighbor’s cats, and that Mexico will pay for the wall.
Our 21st-century attention-grabbing stars possess enough psychological insight to manipulate a larger-than-expected percentage of American voters effectively. Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman described two styles of human thinking. One is called System 1, which is a fast, intuitive, and automatic way to process information. The other, called System 2, is slower, more deliberate, and analytical. Trump and Musk intuitively understand how to communicate to System 1 thinkers. They are so talented that they likely cause some System 2 thinkers to revert to System 1 when it comes to politics. Why think about or research declarations of “truth” when a conman provides all the easy answers?
One technique used by Trump and Musk is to overwhelm our shared public square with an overwhelming barrage of misinformation. Trump’s sometimes ally, Steve Bannon, calls this “flooding the zone with shit.” It is no coincidence that Trump created his own social media platform, “Truth Social,” and Musk acquired Twitter, transforming it into X. They could not afford to be dependent on “WOKE” arbiters of truth to delete their “truth.” They need unfettered, unfiltered access to distort reality to fit their personal needs.
This desperate, attention-seeking behavior is not without precedent. America’s attention-seekers periodically create speculative bubbles that inevitably lead to disaster. The small cadre of Southern “Fire-Eaters” created the spark that led to the attack on Fort Sumter and the conflagration known as the Civil War. The speculative, roaring Twenties, followed by the protectionist Hoover Presidency, led to the Great Depression. The virtual elimination of financial controls (let the “free market” be completely “free”) during the George W. Bush Presidency led to the 2008 economic collapse.
Most of us are mere mortals, without our own social media distortion field, howl in the darkness of the internet to communicate simple narratives. Trump talks about making America great again, and people like me agree that we should make America great again by returning to the ideals of our Founders.
The following is a short video that might appeal to many, including System 1 thinkers, who prefer concise and emotionally charged messages. We need to flood the zone with simple, truthful messages that might cause some, particularly those born after 2001, to find hope in the old-fashioned but profound ideals of America’s Founding Fathers.
I worked on a watermelon picking crew one summer for 3 weeks near Weatherford OK between summer and fall semesters. The traveling crew was from East Texas and was all black, with a 40+ year old boss/owner, and several young 18-22 year old workers. I think there was some kind of posted notice that announced that they were looking for temporary local workers, and another pharmacy school student and myself showed up for work. We were the only two non black workers out of an approximately 10 member crew. He was an Hispanic student (Joe {actually Jose} Montoya) and I guess I was the token Anglo. We all worked hard (except the boss who drove the truck) bending over quickly to pick up heavy black diamond melons (some up to 50 pounds) and hustling over to the slowly moving truck to hand over to the loaders. We were all young and strong, but I don’t see lots of US residents rushing in to take this type of job, including working in some of my other favorite enterprises such as meat packing plants, and yes, bricklaying. There are people here where I currently live that voted for all the MAGA morons and say “get all those illegal criminals out of here” which technically they say anyone who is not a US citizen is an illegal criminal. JUST NOT MY HOUSEKEEPER, YARD MAN, or MY REPAIRMAN, but, yes, ALL THE REST OF THEM. Very Christian of them, right?