The Dystopia That Was Always Coming — And the One They Built While We Looked Away

Eyewitness for History
by Thomas Drake

“They transform pain into social media content. They turn pain into predator contentment. The pursuit of truth is always noble: but not the sluggish or careless release of a partial reveal. Not when it’s about a pedophile rape cabal of ethno-supremacist billionaires and their enablers. Not when that cabal holds power and we are left navigating a world we would have avoided had more people told the truth — and believed the truth-tellers.” -Sarah Kendzior, Jackhammering Into the Sewer

Sarah Kendzior's words in her "Jackhammering Into the Sewer" are not metaphor. They are diagnosis. Her article and the quote are among the most precise and sobering articulations of the condition we now inhabit — a debased human condition where the worst truths are simultaneously revealed and rendered impotent, where pain is strip-mined for engagement, and where the architects of horror sit not in prison but in power. What follows is my attempt to sit with the full weight of what she describes, and what it means for the world we are now forced to face and navigate.

The Sewer Was Always Beneath Us

The dystopia is not that we discovered the sewer. It is that we were told — repeatedly, by people like Kendzior, by survivors, by whistleblowers, by journalists who paid with their careers, their safety, and sometimes their lives — that it was there. Danny Casolaro knew. The victims of Jeffrey Epstein knew when they were children. Kendzior knew and documented it across two meticulously researched books, Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew, and was threatened with death for the trouble. The dystopia is that the sewer was mapped, its contents catalogued, its architects named — and the response of institutions, media, and the public was to look away, shoot the messenger, or simply wait for someone else to act.

This is the "culmination of complicity" Kendzior names. It was never a single failure. It was a rolling, generational abdication — by prosecutors who cut deals, by editors who killed stories, by politicians who attended the parties and then feigned ignorance, by a public conditioned to treat the unspeakable and the unthinkable as the unbelievable or just spectacle and sport. The result is not just a crime unpunished. It is a civilization that taught its predator class there would never be consequences and that they were outside the law, above morality and immune to history.

I also know something about what happens when you challenge that immunity. As a senior executive at the National Security Agency, I witnessed billions in waste, 9/11 intelligence failures, coverup, abuse, and the construction of a secret, mass dragnet surveillance apparatus turned against the American people as a regime and the epigenesis of societal privacide. I took my concerns through every lawful channel — my superiors, the NSA Inspector General, both Congressional intelligence committees, the Department of Defense Inspector General, then went to the press. 

The system did not thank me. It destroyed me. I was prosecuted under the Espionage Act — the same law designed to go after spies — for the 'crime' of telling the truth and exposing crimes and wrongdoing and the violations of law committed by the state. The government threatened me with spending "the rest of my natural life behind bars" if I didn't plead guilty. I refused to plea bargain with the truth. I faced a 10 felony count indictment and 35 years in prison. Every charge eventually collapsed. And I went free. But they took my career, my security, my peace. That was the point. The punishmentis the process — a lesson broadcast to every person in every agency who might ever think of speaking up. And it worked. It is still working.

The Banality of Evil — Updated for the Algorithm

What we are witnessing is not merely corruption. It is something far darker and even more systemic — something that the Polish psychiatrist Andrew Łobaczewski, writing from inside the totalitarian machinery of Soviet-occupied Poland, identified as pathocracy: government by those with pathological personality disorders — psychopathy, malignant narcissism, and an absence of conscience so profound it functions as a kind of anti-soul. See his book Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism and also https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/problem-pathocracy.

"Pathocracy" was named Policy Magazine's word of the year for 2025, and for good reason. Łobaczewski described, with clinical precision, the stages by which pathological individuals infiltrate institutions and society, pervert moral language into its opposite, and drive out anyone with conscience or competence until the entire structure is colonized by those who cannot feel. "If an individual in a position of political power is a psychopath," Łobaczewski wrote, "he or she can create an epidemic of psychopathology in people who are not, essentially, psychopathic". The pathology radiates outward. It infects the culture. It redefines what is normal. Impulsiveness is rebranded as decisiveness. Narcissism becomes confidence. Recklessness is sold as fearlessness. And those who object — who maintain their moral bearings — are systematically removed, marginalized, or destroyed.

Hannah Arendt saw the same machinery from a different angle. Her "banality of evil" — born from her watching Adolf Eichmann calmly describe his role in the Holocaust as mere bureaucratic duty — was never about the absence of evil. It was about the terrifying discovery that evil does not require malice. It requires only obedience, careerism, the prioritization of efficiency over ethics, and the atrophying of the capacity to think. Arendt described Eichmann's evil as rooted not in ideology but in "thoughtless adherence to orders" — and warned that ordinary people can perpetuate extraordinary horrors "through routine and compliance". See her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Now update both frameworks for a world of algorithms, AI-generated noise, and platform oligarchs who own the machinery of perception itself. The banality of evil no longer requires even a bureaucrat stamping papers. It requires only an algorithm optimizing for engagement, a content moderation policy that buries survivors' testimony while amplifying spectacle, a DoJ that releases millions of pages with victims' names exposed and perpetrators' names redacted — and a public so overwhelmed, so overstimulated, so algorithmically mediated that scrolling past a child's shattered life feels no different from scrolling past a meme. This is Arendt's nightmare fused with Łobaczewski's: the banality of evil powered by artificial intelligence, operating at scale, in real time, with no single human being required to make a conscious moral choice at any point in the chain.

Pain as Content, Content as Control

"They transform pain into social media content. They turn pain into predator contentment."

These are the two sentences in Kendzior’s article that should be carved into the walls of every newsroom, every congressional office, every Silicon Valley boardroom. It describes a machinery of cruelty so refined it has become self-sustaining. The Epstein files were released not as an act of justice but as an act of spectacle — "unredacted to antagonize the victims; redacted to protect the perpetrators; released in a slow drip to acclimatize people to horror; released in an enormous drop to overwhelm people with fear".

The evidence bears this out with sickening clarity. When the DoJ released over three million pages of Epstein files earlier this year, attorneys for survivors reported that the identities of people victimized as children were left unredacted, while the names of powerful associates were blacked out. Survivors described being flooded with disgusting private messages and harassment. 

One survivor said she was now harassed by the media and pleaded to have her name removed immediately because it was causing her even more harm. Another survivor said the DoJ was shielding predators and protecting the perpetrators with blanket redactions. Attorneys representing 100s of survivors have made it clear that no incompetence can explain the scale or the persistence for all the failures. Another survivor said it felt very intentional and a direct attack on survivors.

The clinical literature has a name for what is being done to these survivors: institutional betrayal — the phenomenon whereby the very institutions entrusted to protect victims instead compound their trauma through neglect, exposure, or active complicity. Research demonstrates that institutional betrayal produces measurable increases in trauma-related symptoms — depression, hypervigilance, dissociation, suicidality — amplifying the original wound with a secondary devastation that tells the survivor: the system that was supposed to save you is part of what is destroying you. Trafficking survivors who experience betrayal by authorities develop perceptions of the world that it is a dangerous place and a fundamental belief that people are untrustworthy. This is not collateral damage.

This is the mechanism Kendzior profoundly identifies. The pain of the victims is converted into content — headlines, social media discourse, algorithmic engagement — while the predators watch from positions of power, their names redacted, their networks intact, their contentment undisturbed. Pain flows downward. Protection flows upward. And the public scrolls.

The Architecture of Impunity

The most sobering dimension of this dystopia is structural. It is not merely that bad people did evil and terrible things. It is that the institutions designed to prevent those things — courts, law enforcement, media, Congress — were captured, compromised, or rendered inert. Members of Congress who authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act discovered that the DoJ withheld the most critical documents: FBI 302 victim interview statements, a 53-page draft indictment and an 82-page prosecution memorandum from the 2007 Florida investigation, and many hundreds of thousands of emails from Epstein's computers and other indictable evidence against the perpetrators. The very law meant to force transparency was met with institutional stonewalling.

Meanwhile, when lawmakers finally gained access to what was ostensibly advertised as the unredacted files, they found that a number of people were concealed from public view without clear legal justification and renewed their accusations that the administration continued to shield powerful figures from scrutiny. Only after public outcry did the DoJ move to unredact some additional names — a reactive, grudging gesture that only underscored how the default posture of power is concealment, while willfully violating the very transparency law that forbade it.

Kendzior identified this pattern years ago: "I lost track of the Biden and Trump administration members I found in the files, along with their family members and friends and lawyers, who often overlap. They like their worlds small, like the children they rape". The bipartisan nature of the rot is the part people most struggle to accept. This was never about one party. It was about a class — a transnational network of extreme wealth, access, influence, intelligence, and leverage operating above the law, across administrations, around the world, over many decades.

Łobaczewski predicted exactly this. In a pathocracy, the pathological minority does not announce itself. It infiltrates. It wears the mask of normalcy. It occupies both sides of every aisle because its loyalty is not to ideology but to power itself. The survival of the pathocratic system becomes its own imperative — because "if the laws of normal people were to be reinstated, the freedoms and lives of these rulers would be threatened, not just their positions and privileges". They cannot allow accountability. Not because it would be embarrassing, but because it would be existential.

The Oligarchic Capture of Reality Itself

What makes this moment uniquely dystopian — what elevates it beyond historical patterns of elite criminality — is the simultaneous capture of the informational infrastructure through which truth might travel. As Kendzior notes, the "public domain that made it possible for me to write my books is gone". The same oligarchs whose names appear in or adjacent to these files now own the platforms, the algorithms, the search engines, and the media outlets that determine what the public sees, reads, and believes.

The scale of this consolidation is staggering. Access to major online social media and news sites flow through outlets controlled by just a small number of families an corporate entities, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, et al — and all these platforms and media properties now form the informational architecture of American life. Google's AI summaries cannibalize journalism without compensation, tanking traffic to the outlets that do the actual investigative work. Musk's xAI Grok chatbot was generating nonconsensual deepfake pornography, including sexualized images of minors, while holding hundreds of millions in Pentagon contracts. 

This is the world Kendzior describes — one where "they want a world where people know the worst truths but are prohibited from discussing them". Not prohibited by explicit censorship (though that exists), but by algorithmic burial, platform manipulation, AI-generated noise, and the sheer exhaustion of navigating an information environment designed to overwhelm, confuse, demoralize, numb and deceive.

Łobaczewski identified this mechanism too — decades before social media existed. Pathocracy, he wrote, exercises "strict control over science" and distorts knowledge to suit the regime, particularly in the fields that might expose the regime's pathological nature. It uses "paralogic and paramoralism" — language that sounds like logic and morality but inverts them — to replace genuine reasoning with a kind of cognitive counterfeit. Today, the paralogic is automated. The paramoralism is algorithmic. And the Orwellian doublethink Łobaczewski warned about circulates at the speed of light through platforms owned by the very pathocrats he described.

The Weaponization of Transparency

Perhaps the cruelest innovation of this era is the transformation of "transparency" itself into a weapon. The Epstein file releases were not acts of accountability. They were acts of power — strategic, selective, and sadistic. As Kendzior writes: "The Trump administration is releasing a selective cache of Epstein documents because they believe their network has consolidated power. But as they release them, they take over media — Twitter, TikTok, CBS, the endless outlets they bully into compliance — and rewrite history".

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez articulated the broader dynamic when he described tech oligarchs as "a small group of techno-billionaires that are no longer satisfied with holding nearly total economic power: now they also want political power in a way that is undermining our democratic institutions" (https://diginomica.com/monday-morning-moan-dirty-sanchez-lets-focus-dirty-war-social-media-billionaires-are-waging-over). And Peter Thiel has openly stated that tech billionaires "have stopped believing that freedom and democracy are compatible" (https://sfl.media/peter-thiel-isnt-anti-democracy-hes-post-democracy/).

This is the dystopian reality distilled to its essence: the people who built the surveillance architecture, who captured the information ecosystems, who bankrolled the political apparatus, and whose names keep surfacing in documents about the sexual exploitation of children — these same people now control the mechanisms by which accountability might occur. They are simultaneously the accused, the judge, the media, and the algorithm. The loop is closing.

What Is at Stake: The Soul of the Species

Let me be unsparing about what is at stake, because the comfortable language of "democratic backsliding" and "institutional erosion" does not capture it.

What is really at stake is an event horizon-level question of whether human civilization will be governed by conscience or by pathology. Whether the organizing principle of human society will be the protection of the vulnerable or the dehumanized predation upon them. Whether children — the most defenseless members of any society — will be treated as sacred or as commodities. Whether truth will remain a functional concept or be dissolved into an infinite regress of algorithmic noise until the very idea of a shared, verifiable reality ceases to exist.

History teaches us exactly where pathocracy leads when unchecked. Łobaczewski wrote from direct experience of what happens when the pathological minority seizes total control: "Pathocracy progressively intrudes everywhere and dulls everything". It corrodes every institution — economic, cultural, scientific, administrative — because the pathological cannot create; they can only consume and corrupt. The trajectory is civilizational collapse — not with a dramatic implosion, but through the slow suffocation of everything that makes human society viable: trust, reciprocity, the expectation of justice, the willingness to sacrifice for the common good, the basic belief that institutions exist to serve rather than to devour.

We have seen this before. The historian Arnold Toynbee documented the pattern across civilizations: a "Dominant Minority" attempts to hold by force a position of privilege (and I will add however gained) it has ceased to hold any merit. The performance of position, grandeur and opulence becomes "meant to humiliate restraint, reason, and law"(https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/tag/corruption-epidemic/). Regulatory structures are dismantled under the rhetoric of liberation while lawlessness becomes the actual governing strategy. The wealth gap becomes an abyss. Public goods decay. Resentment is weaponized against the vulnerable. And eventually, the internal contradictions become unsurvivable.

But here is what makes this moment unprecedented in all of human history: previous pathocracies and collapsing empires did not possess artificial intelligence, global surveillance networks, algorithmic control of information, and the capacity to generate synthetic reality at scale. The Roman Empire fell, but it could not manufacture a convincing simulacrum of functioning civilization to paper over the rot. The Soviet Union collapsed, but it could not deploy AI to predict and preempt dissent before it organized. Today's pathocrats can. They are building — right now, in real time — the infrastructure to make resistance not just dangerous but almost cognitively impossible: a world in which the tools required to perceive reality clearly are owned and operated by those who need reality obscured.

This is the terminus. If we do not resist — not in the abstract, not as a social media performance, not as a parasocial relationship with truth-tellers we admire but fail to support — the pathocracy becomes permanent. Not permanent in the sense of lasting forever as Łobaczewski noted that pathocracies eventually collapse under the weight of their own incompetence (and I will add malice), but permanent in the sense that the damage becomes irreversible for generations. The children who are being exploited now will carry that wound for the rest of their lives. The institutions being hollowed now will take decades to rebuild — if there is anyone left with the knowledge and will to rebuild them. The epistemic commons being destroyed now — the shared capacity of a society to distinguish truth from fabrication now — once lost, may never be recovered in the form as we knew it.

The Cost of Disbelieving the Truth-Tellers

"We are left navigating a world we would have avoided had more people told the truth — and believed the truth-tellers."

This is the sentence that haunts me and should haunt us the most. Because the truth was told. Kendzior told it. The survivors told it. The survivors told it when they were teenagers and were disbelieved, silenced, paid off, or threatened into silence.

I told the truth about the surveillance state. I was rewarded with an Espionage Act prosecution, the destruction of my career, and years of legal warfare designed not to convict me but to break me. The message was received. When Edward Snowden later saw what was happening at the NSA, he chose to go public rather than use internal channels — specifically because of what the government had done to me and other whistleblowers. The system did not merely fail to protect truth-tellers. It created a laboratory demonstration of what happens to them, and broadcast the results as a warning.

The cost of that disbelief is the world we now inhabit: a world where a convicted sex trafficker's associates in the Epstein files network are protected by the system and the Administration. A world where the DoJ releases millions of pages of evidence of child rape while simultaneously failing — whether through "incompetence" or design — to redact the victims' names but carefully obscuring the perpetrators'. A world where the survivors, after decades of being ignored, are now being re-victimized by the very process that was supposed to deliver them justice. Meanwhile, Epstein and this transnational network criminal syndicate was protected by the systems that were supposed to stop it and hold it to account.

The Moral Imperative: Why Resistance Is Not Optional

Arendt left us with one indispensable truth from the darkest chapters of the twentieth century: "Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation".

"Some people will not." That is the thin, bright line between civilization and its extinction. Not a majority. Not even a movement, necessarily. But some — an awakening and faith and resistance of a remnant that is enough to keep the signal alive, and enough to ensure the predator class never achieves the total silence it requires to operate with impunity in perpetuity.

Łobaczewski, too, offered a lifeline from inside the abyss. The root of healthy social morality, he wrote, "is contained in the congenital instinctive infrastructure in the vast majority of the population". The pathological are a minority. They can infiltrate, they can corrupt, they can terrorize — but they cannot fully extinguish the moral instinct that resides in most human beings. "During unhappy times," he wrote, "the intelligentsia and society at large can recover real values to resolve the new social order along mentally healthier lines". The pathocracy eventually weakens because it promotes incompetence and destroys the very systems it depends on. "The time comes when the common masses of people want to live like human beings again and the system can no longer resist".

But this recovery is not automatic. It is not guaranteed. It requires that enough people refuse to be dulled, refuse to scroll past, refuse to treat the rape of children as a partisan talking point or as a content cycle. It requires that we protect and believe the truth and the truth-tellers while they are telling the truth — not years later, not posthumously, not when it is safe and costs nothing. It requires that we understand, with the clarity of a diagnosis, that what we face is not merely political corruption or institutional failure but a psycho-pathological capture of power by individuals who are clinically incapable of empathy, remorse, or moral reasoning — and that the only counter to pathology is the unflinching assertion of conscience and the agency of what is universally right and true and good over might makes right and wrong and evil.

The Work That Can Only Be Done by People With a Heart

Kendzior writes: "This work can only be done well by people with a heart, and you have to resign yourself to letting it break again and again. Or you will lose yourself, and you've lost too much already to let them take that too".

This is the final, irreducible truth at the center of the dystopia. The system is designed to exhaust, demoralize, and destroy the people who tell the truth about it. It is designed to make the pursuit of justice feel futile, to make awareness feel like complicity, to make the sheer weight of horror paralyze rather than mobilize. The predator class counts on this. They count on the doom scroll, the fatigue, the normalization, the retreat into private survival.

But the dystopia is not complete — not yet — precisely because people like Kendzior keep writing, because survivors keep testifying, because the human conscience, however battered, refuses total surrender. The sobering reality is that this refusal is not enough to fix the system. Awareness without power is anguish. Truth without institutional will is just testimony shouted into the void.

And yet. The alternative — silence, capitulation, the final closing of the loop — is the one outcome the predator class needs to win completely. The world Kendzior describes is one where the house is shaking, the sewer is open, and the construction crew is looking down at something terrible. The question is not whether we will see what's down there. We already have. The question is whether enough people will refuse to cover the hole back up, put a plank over it that says HOLE, and walk away.

Because that plank, as Kendzior notes on the day after Groundhog Day 2026, is what currently passes for governance: a loose board over an open sewer, barely covering the horrors underneath, while the architects of those horrors sit in offices, on boards, and in the West Wing — content, protected, and watching us scroll.

The question before us is not whether the sewer exists. It is whether we are the generation that finally drains it — or the one that lets it swallow everything we were supposed to protect.

History stands unblinking as an eyewitness and warning us of the coming reckoning. The pathocrats believe they have outrun history. They have not. No one ever has. The only question is how much they are permitted to destroy before the day of reckoning arrives — and arrive it will — and whether we will have anything left, or at least a remnant left, worth saving when it does.