Closing 2025. Opening 250 Years of USA. Why 2026 is the New 1776

By Robert Paulson

As 2025 closes and America approaches its 250th anniversary, the parallels to 1776 grow impossible to ignore. Not because we're celebrating independence, but because we're confronting the same fundamental question that faced the Continental Congress: when systematic theft and corruption become institutional policy, what recourse remains for honest citizens? The answer in 1773 was tea barrels in Boston Harbor. The answer in 2026 must be truth, transparency, and the courage to act. Happy New Year, and welcome to the reckoning.

The Somali Fraud: A Trillion-Dollar Preview

Minnesota's Somali welfare fraud scandal represents the greatest peacetime theft in American history that nobody wants to discuss. Billions of dollars, stolen in broad daylight. Federal funds flowing to a single state, converted into cash, shipped overseas, laundered through community organizations, and nobody in power noticed until independent investigators forced the issue. Not the media. Not Congress. Not even Rand Paul, the Senate's supposed fiscal watchdog, caught this systematic looting until it became impossible to ignore.

The brazenness is breathtaking. Fraudsters filed tens of thousands of fake childcare claims, fabricated entire facilities, invented children who never existed, and collected taxpayer money at industrial scale. When questioned, state officials offered bureaucratic shrugs. When federal authorities finally investigated, they found corruption so deep and pervasive that prosecuting it all became logistically impossible. So they prosecuted a few dozen cases and declared victory.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: this isn't the crime. This is the preview. Minnesota's fraud likely represents less than one percent of similar schemes operating nationwide. Multiply this by fifty states, add in federal programs with even less oversight, and you're staring at a trillion dollars in systematic theft. Not waste. Not inefficiency. Theft. Organized, deliberate, and ongoing. And we're treating it like an accounting error instead of an existential crisis.

Where was Doge? Where was any systematic effort to audit these programs before they became cesspools of fraud? We needed a Department of Government Efficiency in every state, finding this corruption before it metastasized. Instead, we got silence, complicity, and bureaucratic cover. The federal government sent the money, states distributed it, fraudsters took it, and everyone pretended not to notice. Meanwhile, honest taxpayers funded the whole sick show.

Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations: "There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people." In 2025, we learned the corollary: there is no art which criminals learn sooner than draining money from inattentive governments. The question is whether anyone in power actually cares to stop it.

The European Shakedown: Modern Highway Robbery

While Americans were being robbed by domestic fraudsters, European governments perfected their own grift: extracting more revenue from fining American tech companies than from taxing their own failing tech sector. Let that sink in. The European Union collected more money by punishing foreign success than by fostering domestic innovation. That's not regulation. That's a protection racket.

The pattern is unmistakable. Before Elon Musk even walked into Twitter headquarters carrying that sink, European regulators had already prepared their fines. The Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the endless "competition" investigations. All teed up, ready to extract billions from American companies the moment they became inconvenient to European political interests. Musk's Twitter takeover just accelerated the timetable.

This was predicted. Critics warned that Europe's regulatory framework existed not to protect consumers but to protect European governments' ability to tax and fine American innovation. Those warnings were dismissed as paranoid American exceptionalism. Then Europe proved the critics right, collecting tens of billions in fines and back taxes from Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, and now Twitter. Not for genuine antitrust violations, but for being successful while American.

Call it what it is: a mafia shakedown. A criminal enterprise masquerading as government oversight. European bureaucrats, incapable of building competitive tech companies, simply confiscate the profits of American ones. They dress it up in language about "fairness" and "competition," but the math reveals the truth. They make more money from fining foreign success than from cultivating domestic achievement.

The United States needs to respond in kind. Not with complaints or diplomatic protests, but with action. Claw back every cent of illegitimate fines, plus interest. Add a 20% tariff on European goods for good measure. Make it hurt. If there aren't bread lines in Europe this year, if their economy isn't feeling the consequences of treating American companies like colonial possessions to be plundered, then we've failed. Worse, we've proven we're marks, willing to be robbed indefinitely because we're too polite to fight back.

Richard Feynman observed: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." European regulators have been fooling themselves into believing they can extract unlimited wealth from American innovation without consequence. It's time to unfool them, forcefully.

1776 in 2026: What Independence Means When the Republic Crumbles

The Tea Party of 1773 wasn't about tea. It was about the principle that free people do not accept taxation without representation, that distant authorities cannot govern without consent, and that systematic injustice demands systematic resistance. In 2026, as America marks 250 years since independence, we face the same questions in new forms. What does sovereignty mean when foreign governments loot American companies? What does federalism mean when states turn into fraud machines? What does constitutional government mean when judges appointed yesterday overrule presidents elected by millions?

The Constitution wasn't designed to handle this. It assumed good faith. It assumed state governments would police themselves, federal authorities would enforce the law, and courts would interpret rather than legislate. It did not anticipate California deliberately ignoring forest management to create fire disasters that generate federal aid requests covering other budget theft. It did not anticipate the DOJ and FBI becoming politicized to the point of impotence. It did not anticipate DEI-appointed judges blocking executive authority based on feelings rather than law.

We have reached a crisis point. The executive branch, elected by the people, wields less practical power than a single district judge who got their position through demographic quotas. The Supreme Court, meant to be the ultimate arbiter, barely maintains authority over lower courts openly defying precedent. State governments act as enemy combatants, suing each other, harboring fugitives from each other's laws, and treating federal funds as free money with no accountability.

Elon Musk put it bluntly: "If the laws are such that you can't get to Mars, then the laws must change." Substitute "run an honest government" for "get to Mars" and you have our current situation. The system has become so corrupted, so captured by interests that profit from dysfunction, that fixing it through normal channels may be impossible. When senators like Rand Paul, supposedly champions of fiscal responsibility, preside over trillion-dollar theft through inattention, what hope remains for reform within the system?

President Trump campaigned on draining the swamp. The swamp proved deeper than anyone realized. It's not just Washington. It's every state capital, every federal agency, every court system captured by ideologies that prioritize procedure over justice and optics over outcomes. The question for 2026 is the same as 1776: what do free people do when their government becomes the enemy of freedom?

Nikola Tesla once said: "The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine." In 2026, we must decide whether the future belongs to those who steal from the present or to those willing to fight for what was meant to be passed down. The founders chose rebellion. What will we choose?

The Only Path Forward: Truth and Action

Edmund Burke's famous principle remains true: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." We have done nothing for too long. We've watched fraud consume our welfare systems. We've watched foreign governments plunder our companies. We've watched our constitutional order collapse into anarcho-tyranny where criminals roam free while productive citizens face prosecution for defending themselves.

The solution is not complicated. It requires two things: truth and action. The truth about where the money goes, who's stealing it, and which officials are complicit through negligence or design. And action from righteous men and women willing to enforce consequences. Not strongly-worded letters. Not committee hearings that produce reports nobody reads. Real consequences. Prosecutions. Firings. Clawbacks. Tariffs. Whatever it takes to make theft unprofitable and corruption intolerable.

The Tea Party wasn't polite. It was vandalism in service of principle. The founders who signed the Declaration knew they were committing treason against the Crown and would hang if they failed. They did it anyway because the alternative was accepting permanent subjugation. In 2026, we face a similar choice. Not between independence and monarchy, but between accountability and corruption, between self-governance and rule by hostile elites, between a republic and its corpse.

We still have tools the colonists lacked. We have transparency technology that makes hiding fraud harder than ever. We have communication systems that route around captured media. We have a president elected explicitly to dismantle the administrative state. We have governors in some states willing to fight back against federal overreach. We have courts that occasionally remember their job is to interpret law, not invent it. We have, if we choose to use them, all the peaceful means necessary to restore honest government.

But tools mean nothing without will. The Minnesota fraud continues because we lack the will to prosecute it fully. European theft continues because we lack the will to retaliate effectively. Constitutional collapse continues because we lack the will to demand courts follow the law rather than their preferences. Until that changes, until good men act instead of complain, evil will continue to triumph.

As we close 2025 and open 250 years of American history, the question before us is simple: will we deserve the country we inherited? The founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to create a nation where free people govern themselves. We're being asked merely to enforce our own laws, audit our own spending, and refuse to be robbed by foreign governments. If we can't manage that, we don't deserve what they built. If we can, 2026 might truly mark a new founding, a return to principles thought lost, a restoration of government by consent rather than by corruption.

The truth must out. And righteous men must act. Everything else is just noise. Happy New Year, and may 2026 be the year we remember what 1776 actually meant.