Yves here. With the dial turned to 11 with Trump related commentary, this headline might be seen as hyperbole, or alternatively, yelling into the wind of the Trump counter-revolution. But this piece is not about Trump, but about the collapse of the rule of law in the US, as seen from one journalist on the front lines and confirmed by lawyers and investigators around the US. In other word, this is a bottoms-up as opposed to top-down view of the erosion of systems and once-seen-as-fundamental protections.
By Bradley Blankenship, an American investigative journalist, columnist, and researcher who has lived and reported across Central Europe, South America, Asia, and the United States. He has worked with international media outlets and conducted in-depth reporting on democratic backsliding, public corruption, and civil resistance movements. He is the founder of the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project, a grassroots initiative documenting systemic failure and official misconduct in the American heartland. Originally published at Common Dreams
I’ve seen the aftermath of collapsed nations—now I see it happening here.
As a journalist and analyst, I’ve spent the last several years living and reporting in regions that have undergone massive political transformations. I lived for years in the Czech Republic, where I met many people with direct ties to the Velvet Revolution. I walked the streets of Prague with those who once occupied them in protest. I studied the Russian language, traveled extensively through the former Eastern Bloc, and listened closely to the survivors of failed regimes—those who remember the slow unraveling of authority, trust, and truth.
I’ve also spent significant time in South America, where I witnessed a very different kind of collapse—and rebirth. In Bolivia, I spoke with officials and journalists who lived through the 2019 coup and saw their country fight its way back to democracy. I’ve walked with communities who understand, firsthand, how empires and juntas collapse—and how people organize in the rubble.
Now I believe this country is collapsing.
Not in the dramatic, Hollywood fashion we tend to imagine—there are no tanks in the streets, no blackout zones or food lines. But what I am witnessing now in Northern Kentucky, through my work with the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project (NKTAP), is unmistakable: a slow-motion institutional implosion. And it mirrors what I have seen in failed or failing states around the world.
In Northern Kentucky, I’ve uncovered a network of corruption that spans law enforcement, prosecutorial offices, courts, and local media. I’ve documented how whistleblowers are silenced, public records denied, and criminal cases manipulated to protect the powerful.
Police ignore credible murder leads. Prosecutors bury evidence. Courts issue orders without hearings. And journalists—some out of fear, others out of complicity—refuse to report the truth. In my own case, I’ve faced obstruction, threats, targeted harassment, and retaliatory smears simply for investigating what any decent system should have investigated itself.
The structures of governance still stand. The buildings are still open. But the rule of law has collapsed in all but name. What remains is theater—a simulation of justice that functions to preserve power, not serve the public.
This isn’t just about Northern Kentucky. It’s a microcosm. I’m in touch with colleagues around the country—investigators, reporters, former civil servants—and I hear the same story again and again:
- Entire state agencies captured by private interests;
- Local governments ignoring open records laws;
- Whistleblowers retaliated against without recourse;
- Judges ruling from sealed dockets with no oversight;
- Public health policy shaped by ideology, not science; and
- Independent journalism gutted, bought, or blacklisted.
We are in a moment of mass epistemic failure, where truth itself is destabilized and power no longer answers to reason, law, or fact.
It doesn’t come with a bang. It comes with:
- The quiet refusal to investigate credible crimes;
- The steady normalization of lawlessness;
- The dissolution of public trust; and
- The emergence of parallel systems of truth-telling and justice.
This is what I’ve seen before. In Prague. In La Paz. In the fractured republics of the former USSR. It begins when the official channels of accountability no longer function—and the people must build their own.
That’s what I’m doing with the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project. We’re documenting. Archiving. Speaking to victims. Exposing public records that local officials tried to bury. We’re creating a people’s archive—a living record of a regime in decline.
Because when institutions stop telling the truth, the only way forward is to tell it ourselves.
I used to believe that America was “different”—that our legal tradition, constitutional system, and civic institutions would inoculate us from the kinds of collapse I saw abroad. I no longer believe that.
The US is not collapsing because it is uniquely broken. It is collapsing because it is a state like any other, vulnerable to the same corruption, elite decay, and loss of legitimacy that have brought down countless systems before.
The question is not whether collapse is happening. It is. The question is what we do after we accept that reality.
We can pretend this is just “polarization.” We can tell ourselves that if we just wait for the next election, the pendulum will swing back. Or we can admit the truth: Our institutions are no longer capable of self-correction. That means the burden of accountability, truth telling, and justice now falls on us—on journalists, organizers, whistleblowers, and ordinary people with the courage to say: enough.
I’ve seen what happens when people organize. I’ve also seen what happens when they don’t.
And I’m telling you: Now is the time to choose.
So far our pithy efforts at effecting change have been of the ‘see me-dig me’ variety with a cutely worded sign (not that I’m ever guilty of that online) or clever artwork held aloft.
We haven’t really seriously protested since the 70’s, er 1770’s that is, and are a little rusty. I feel confident we’ll come around once the fuse gets lit, even though there’s really little to bind us all another as the politicians have excelled in only dividing us-not bringing us together.
If you asked 1,000 random American adults:
‘What does America stand for?’
…wonder what they’d say?
‘What does America stand for?’
Pretty hard for it to stand for anything at the moment. All institutions rotting away for various reasons (as the article points out) and nothing on the horizon to replace them. From my perch in Canada and as a reader of American history (old and new), I fear it is headed for the ultimate polarization, that is, the attempted or successful secession of some, most, or all of the blue states. And in all likelihood that scenario ain’t gonna be pretty.
Can’t resist leaving this humorous line I read recently: All that is going on today is enough to make a mime shriek.
I wish there was more concrete, “operational” detail to anchor the soaring rhetoric of this brief essay. I personally am inclined to believe the thesis, but there is risk of misunderstanding or misapplication in letting readers fill in the details from their own perspective and experience. In a time of partisan polarization and ideological fragmentation, when people are contending over alternate versions of reality, the risk is particularly acute.
That was my reaction as well.
The specific matters cited are not new, and there are numerous historic examples of institutional rot at higher and lower bureaucratic levels. What feels different to this reader now v. earlier eras, besides the noted pervasiveness, is the MSM is entirely “in sync” with the TPTB and, unless a story involves Trump’s (many) nefarious actions, has no interest in pursuing corruption. It does not help that SCOTUS has largely legalized political corruption unless a politician provides a notarized statement acknowledging the receipt of funds in exchange for votes or other favors.
The “bottom up” preface is interesting since ~ fifteen years ago I read a book about Afghanistan and it noted that much corruption is from lower-level officials buying influence or favors from higher-level officials, as opposed to higher officials demanding bribes from their subordinates. This low-level corruption is dangerous as it can become a societal norm that is difficult to eradicate once established (but I have heard that Russia has much less petty corruption now than twenty years ago).
This guy is just noticing all this now? Better late than never I suppose.
But his conclusion is somewhat encouraging in that he doesn’t simply expect a new election to bring a return to “normalcy”. The “polarization” of our society is a deliberate attempt by the elites to divide us against each other precisely so we do not get organized. Better that we fight amongst ourselves than against those trying to put the boot to our necks.
@lyman a b — “attempt” ? I would say “our elites” achieved a slam-dunk that has lasted, albeit with a few kerfuffles, since at least the 1930’s.
Thanks Carla – you are of course correct. That Bernays guy was on to something, unfortunately….
I found quite interesting the point of view of the author. One that i don’t have. Not at least to the same extent as Blankenship because I don’t have such an ample experience on institutional collapse/malfunctioning in several other countries as the author claims to have. Perspective is possibly more valuable than being the fastest in town.
The whimper not a bang version of the collapse. More plausible IMO. Although we do have the national guard and ICE and some police forces seemingly ready to help TPTB rather than us mopes.
I recently read the novel The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks Dalton. The author very nicely captures this quiet collapse. It is set in Florida. The government has been haphazardly evacuating citizens permanently as the sea creeps and floods in, taking over the land. One of the characters works for a fictional municipality fixing and maintaining hydro lines. Municipal services and workers slowly disappear and one day the linesman’s pay isn’t deposited and when he goes to the office to find out what happened and the office has been permanently closed, one lowly bureaucrat packing a few things up on his way out. And things go in from there as a huge hurricane comes in. As I read it seemed more a prediction of things to come rather than fiction.
PS – while not the best book I’ve ever read, I appreciated the author’s imagining of things to come but think the lack of violence she depicts is probably not the way things will go down.
Jack Reacher would certainly get this matter sorted in just a few days, and with the requisite violence the situation most assuredly calls for. I am currently 11 books into the 30 book series, and while not to be considered high literature, it holds it’s own in the Elmore Leonard genre. Once, he only killed 2 people in the entire book! Personally, I thought he left some money on the table, but who am I to say?(shrugs)
re disasters and violence. At least 10 years ago I had a chance to talk with a person got to ride with the utility trucks that were sent to another state to help repair a hurricane’s aftermath. The trucks were accompanied by armed men (can’t recall if state police or military of some sort). She was startled by the expectation of violence in what she envisioned as normal neighborhoods (suburbs, small cities).
An institutional framework can hardly survive a near-total lack of faith and trust in said institutions; and if social relations have degraded enough, a civil war might well ensue. The Ancien Régime had perished in all but name a while before the French Revolution guillotined its most notable representatives. The question is, what comes afterward? I’ve been seeing rumblings of something akin to balkanization from localized blocs states have been forming (the Northwest bloc for firefighting being a sort of prototypical form of what I’m thinking). I would disagree that organizing can impede or reverse the process; it seems to be an inevitable byproduct of the end of the American empire which is bound to be painful, as are all imperial collapses.
The author lists these as indications of being within a collapsed state:
… but all of these have been in evidence for generations in the poor and black and native communities. This is just the class war moving up the chain so it is now visible to the formerly middle class. I’m all for designating vast swathes of the US as imperial sacrifice zones as it will make it clear to those who think we’re still in 1996 that the tide of history has indeed moved on. But shocking transgressions against legal precedent, like militarizing and funding ICE and turning them loose to do mass racial profiling and illegal detention and deportation on wrong-voting blue cities at the direction of a federal government with historically low approval ratings, seems more of an indication of state collapse to me than ‘quiet refusal to investigate credible crimes’. Just one woman on the street’s opinion!
It’s a common saying that “a dystopia is when you take what happens institutionally to the underprivileged and applied it to the privileged”.
Transparency would lead to wholesale revolution.
Politicians are the accepted liars.
Doctors, among other formerly very respectables, got dragged along by, uh, institutional forces. See which PE, Wall Street, lobbyists, teachers, many others.
When all people see the lies, deceit and misrepresentation manifest in their daily lives, and learn that everyone else sees those, too, is it any surprise that societal glue is dissolving?
More people are choosing to believe their lyin’ eyes than anything in media or public life. Hard to blame them.
I don’t know, you can have innumerable generations of widespread corruption endured without pushback. Look at India. Bribery is just a way of doing business there.
Baksheesh to the Future!
If trust in institutions and the institution of law is gone, can trust in the dollar be far behind?
The institutional corruption is society wide in the US.
The wars, genocides, bribery and raw corruption everywhere you look, will continue till a full collapse occurs.
The US has been gutted and looted. The OLIGARCHY has destroyed the US.
We are owned by the apex predators. The next elections will not change a thing.