Welcome to the Era of Big Republican Government 🐘

By Rob C.

Art by Alexander Hunter

TL;DR: After decades of performance art about “small government,” the Republican Party has finally admitted they love massive government overreach—as long as it’s used to police your doctor’s office, hide climate data, and protect corporate polluters. While they gut the agencies that keep your food safe and your weather forecasts accurate, they’re spending their energy banning trans youth and hoping you’re too distracted to notice that today is the legal deadline for the release of the Epstein files.

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For decades, we’ve had to endure the high-octane theater of the Republican Party railing against the “tyranny” of big government. They’ve spent forty years treating “regulation” like a four-letter word and slashing any attempt to use the government’s collective power to, say, negotiate lower drug prices for seniors. We were told that the government is a bumbling, overreaching monster that needs to be “starved” until it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub. But now that the curtain has been pulled back on this lawless administration, we can finally see the truth: they don’t actually hate big government; they just wanted to control the outcome.

Welcome to the era of Big Republican Government, where the “overreach” is coming from inside the house. Through their hand-picked, illegitimate Supreme Court, they have managed to do what no “liberal bureaucrat” ever dreamed of: they’ve crawled onto the exam table at your doctor’s office. They are now the ones telling you which medical procedures are allowed and which ones might get you or your doctor thrown in a cage, even if the alternative is a body bag. It turns out that “bodily autonomy” was just a suggestion, but the state’s right to monitor your reproductive health or your child’s gender identity is a sacred, taxpayer-funded mandate.

While they’re busy playing God in the clinic, they are methodically demolishing the “deep state” institutions that actually keep you alive. They’ve decided that if we stop tracking the cost of climate disasters at NOAA, the hurricanes will simply stop being expensive. They’ve gutted the FDA and USDA to the point where food inspections are a nostalgic memory, apparently deciding that a little E. coli or avian flu in the milk supply is just the “flavor of freedom.” They are dismantling the very agencies that provide the data we rely on to know if the air is breathable, the water is drinkable, or if the toys we buy for our children are essentially lead-painted shrapnel.

This isn’t “efficiency”; it’s an intentional lobotomy of the state. They are blinding the public so that corporate donors—the real architects of this “Democracy for Sale”—can pollute, price-gouge, and poison without a pesky federal agency to stop them. As the price of a grocery haul starts to resemble a luxury vacation and the “Big, Beautiful Bill” funnels billions more to the billionaire class, the administration is frantically waving the “culture war” flag. They’re banking on the hope that if they yell loud enough about banning trans youth from existing, you’ll forget that your healthcare is collapsing and your rent is a ransom note.

And, of course, they are desperately hoping you’ve lost track of the calendar. Today is the legal deadline for the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. You remember those, right? The records of the world’s most prolific pedophile and his high-flying “friends”? While the The Tan of La Mancha screams about the “affordability hoax” and Venezuela his administration is frantically redacting a mountain of documents that might just illuminate exactly why he’s so eager to burn the DOJ to the ground.

Most Americans are drowning in a sea of rising costs and dwindling safety nets, but the man currently wandering the halls of a gaudy, gilded White House has no clue how real people live. He’s too busy checking his crypto-leaderboard and ensuring the government is just big enough to punish his enemies, but too small to protect your children’s future.

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— Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet.