Hero shit. Okay, I do find it genuinely difficult to tell if the world is ending or if the smallness of social media makes it feel like the world is ending, but even by the “everything is burning” standards I’ve come to expect from Twitter it’s been a wild week. Spared the full Katrina, New Orleans was nonetheless savaged by Hurricane Ida. Today, the city is looking at a month without power. In California, our endemic wildfire crisis has destroyed 1.7 million acres since July 14th. Of note: less than a year ago, the state cut proposed spending on controlled burns by about a half billion dollars, and Governor Newsom punted the already-modest goal of 500,000 treated acres to 2025. Covid spikes across the country have prompted the European Union to restrict travel from the United States, as if we’re ground zero for some kind of zombie apocalypse, and the last American troops have left Afghanistan. In their wake? We gifted the Taliban, a terrorist organization dogmatically obsessed with a militant murder faith, an 18-billion-dollar armory. In almost every piece of this, there’s a story to tell of stunning government failure. But the failure isn’t strictly speaking American, or at least not as defined by the broader American people, and therein lies our hope.

One of the strangest aspects of American representative democracy is the citizens of this country are somehow not reflected in their leadership. A few friends of mine over at Anduril reminded me of this when they put an incredible project on blast: