You Didn’t Elect a President. You Hired a Liquidator
By Tom Hicks - The Unredacted Bastard | Independent Journalist • Democracy’s Fire Alarm • Professional Shit-Stirrer
Bastard’s Law
When someone says they’ll run a country like a business, ask which part—building it… or stripping it for parts.
Opening Shot — The Lie That Sounded Smart
“Run the country like a business” was one of those lines that sounded smart enough to shut people up and simple enough to stick. It felt responsible. It felt efficient. It felt like maybe, finally, someone would treat government like something other than a bloated mess.
What nobody asked—what almost nobody even bothered to think through—was the only question that actually matters:
What kind of business?
Because there’s a massive, screaming, obvious difference between building something that lasts and carving something up for parts. And right now, if you’re paying even a little bit of attention, you can see exactly which model we’re living under.
This isn’t leadership.
This is liquidation.
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Reality Mechanism — What That Actually Means
Let’s strip the buzzwords and translate the bullshit.
Asset stripping isn’t some abstract theory cooked up in a think tank. It’s a brutally simple playbook used over and over again: you take something valuable, carve out the profitable pieces, slash costs—usually by gutting people—load it up with debt, and then walk away rich while the wreckage gets handed to everyone else.
That’s not controversial. That’s how it works.
And when you start applying that mindset to a country, everything changes. Public institutions stop being responsibilities and start looking like inventory. Workers stop being citizens and start being expenses. Infrastructure stops being something you maintain and becomes something you monetize.
Crystallization line:
👉 A builder invests in the future. A liquidator cashes it out.
Take a wild fucking guess which one we’re watching.
Escalation — The Pattern in Plain Sight
You don’t need insider leaks or some secret document dump to see this. The pattern is right out in the open, hiding behind sanitized language and “common sense” talking points.
You hear constant chatter about selling off public assets as if the country were a yard sale. You see essential services treated like failed startups that need to either turn a profit or get scrapped. You watch core government functions get outsourced like it’s somehow cheaper—or smarter—to rent a country than run one.
And every single time, the justification is the same tired line: efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.
That word has been weaponized to the point where people hear it and stop thinking. Because if it were actually about efficiency, things would be improving. Services would get better. Costs would go down. People would feel the difference in their daily lives.
Instead, everything feels thinner, slower, more expensive, and more fragile.
That’s not efficiency.
That’s extraction.
The Part That Hits You — Yes, You
This is where the conversation stops being theoretical and starts punching you directly in the face.
Because when a country gets run like a fucking liquidation project, you don’t experience it as a policy debate. You experience it as a slow, grinding degradation of your daily life. The roads don’t get fixed. The mail slows down or becomes more expensive. Healthcare becomes harder to access and more punishing to pay for. Schools get hollowed out while you’re told to just deal with it.
At the same time, the safety nets that used to catch people in bad moments get thinner or disappear entirely, right when you might actually need them. And somehow, through all of this, you’re still expected to believe that this is improvement, that this is modernization, that this is the system “working.”
It’s not working.
It’s being drained.
And the part that should really piss you off is that you’re not just collateral damage in this process—you are one of the primary sources of value being extracted.
They’re not cutting waste.
They’re cutting you.
Who Benefits — Because It Sure as Hell Isn’t You
None of this happens in a vacuum, and none of it is neutral. There are very clear winners when public systems get weakened, sold off, or hollowed out.
Private contractors step in to replace what used to be public. Wealthy investors pick up assets at a discount. Political allies get positioned to profit from whatever gets carved up next. Corporations slide into spaces that used to be shared, collective, and accessible.
Meanwhile, everyone else gets downgraded from citizen to customer.
And customers don’t get rights.
They get bills.
Gaslight Zone — The Story You’re Being Fed
Here’s where the whole thing crosses from bad policy into straight-up manipulation.
Because while this is happening in real time, you’re being told a completely different story. You’re told this is about cutting waste. You’re told it’s about making government leaner. You’re told this is necessary, inevitable, even beneficial.
That’s bullshit.
If it were about waste, the burden wouldn’t keep landing on the same people. If it were about efficiency, you wouldn’t feel like everything costs more while delivering less. If it were about modernization, it wouldn’t feel like the country is quietly degrading around you.
This isn’t reform.
It’s a transfer of value—from the public to the powerful, wrapped in language designed to make you nod along while it happens.
Democracy Damage Report
The long-term damage here isn’t just economic—it’s structural.
Democracy doesn’t run on vibes and slogans. It runs on systems that function: infrastructure that works, services people can rely on, institutions that maintain a baseline level of trust. When those systems get hollowed out, everything built on top of them starts to wobble.
Trust erodes because nothing feels reliable. Participation drops because people stop believing their engagement matters. Power concentrates because fewer systems are left to distribute it.
And once you hit that point, it becomes exponentially easier to control what remains, because the mechanisms that used to balance things out have already been dismantled.
Danger Pivot — This Is the Model, Not the Mistake
This is the part people resist, because it’s uncomfortable as hell.
What if this isn’t incompetence?
What if it’s the point?
A weaker public is easier to manage. A struggling population is easier to distract. A privatized system is easier to profit from. When people are busy trying to keep their heads above water, they don’t have the time, energy, or leverage to push back.
So if it feels like things are being chipped away instead of built up, that’s not your imagination failing you.
That’s the model working exactly as intended.
Verdict
You didn’t elect a CEO. You didn’t hire a reformer. And you damn sure didn’t get a builder.
You got a liquidator.
And liquidation doesn’t end when things improve. It ends when there’s nothing left worth selling, nothing left worth maintaining, and nothing left standing that can’t be turned into someone else’s profit.
💣 TRUTH BOMB
When your country starts getting managed like a balance sheet, you’re not the stakeholder—you’re the asset.
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The only way he knows how to run a business and that's to the ground.