The Golden Calf
When I was five years old, I took a tiny blue soldier from the boy who lived in the big white house next door.
I don’t remember exactly why. It fit in my palm. It was perfect. I wanted it.
My father discovered it.
He yelled. Really yelled. I was scared in the way you’re only scared when someone you love is that furious at you — not because you might get hurt, but because you know you did something wrong and now they know it too. It was not acceptable. Not in our family. Not ever.
I had to go back to that house, knock on that door, and return it.
It wasn’t just shame. It was guilt — seared into me, the kind that doesn’t leave. I can still feel it. I passed the same lessons to my own son. That’s how it’s supposed to work — the basic thing, the foundational thing, the thing that makes civilization possible:
It’s not yours.
I never really understood the golden calf when I was growing up. Moses goes up the mountain to get the actual law — the thing that will protect people, govern them, make them a society — and while he’s gone, the Israelites melt down their gold and worship it. It seemed like a strange story. Why would people do that?
I understand it now.
Wealth worship is empty by design. Overabundance has no bottom. There’s no point of satisfaction, no moment where you have enough, no place it ends. The calf doesn’t deliver anything. It just demands more of itself. And the people worshipping it go blind — blind to what they’re destroying, blind to what they’re losing, blind to the fact that they traded the real thing for a shiny object.
That’s where we are.
The campaign finance system didn’t collapse overnight. It rotted slowly, and both parties let it rot.
Democrats took the money. Republicans took the money. Foreign governments and the industries they back figured out how to launder influence through PACs representing their friends, their interests, their agendas — quarter-billion-dollar contributions flowing into elections from people and entities that have no business deciding who governs America. Qatar bought a plane for the president that he keeps after he leaves office. The people who were supposed to represent us got purchased instead — not all at once, not dramatically, just steadily, deal by deal, donation by donation, until the system was thoroughly compromised.
When your representatives are bought, the laws they write serve the people who bought them.
That’s not a theory. That’s arithmetic.
Good law comes from wanting good things for people. Honesty flows into regulations that protect against pollution, against deception, against harm, and for community benefits. That’s the foundation. When you corrupt the people writing the laws, you corrupt everything downstream.
Let me give you the blue soldier at scale.
GEO Group runs private prisons. In Louisiana alone, they operate four detention facilities — in Jena, Basile, Pine Prairie, and Alexandria. In 2025, their ICE contracts were expected to generate over a billion dollars in revenue.
On August 18, 2016, the Obama administration announced it would phase out the use of private prisons. GEO’s stock tanked.
On August 19, 2016 — one day later — GEO Corrections Holdings donated $100,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC.
Federal contractors have been barred from making political donations for 75 years. The law exists specifically to prevent this — to keep companies that profit from government contracts from buying the politicians who award those contracts. The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint. The FEC deadlocked on partisan lines and dismissed it.
In February 2017, Jeff Sessions reversed the Obama policy. The private prison contracts came flooding back.
In 2024, GEO donated another million dollars to a pro-Trump PAC. In 2025, their CEO called the current political moment “one of the most exciting periods” in the company’s history.
That same year, Rümeysa Öztürk — a Tufts University PhD student — was held at GEO’s South Louisiana facility in Basile. Court filings documented that when she had asthma attacks, it took 20 to 60 minutes for a nurse to arrive. The ACLU filed complaints alleging sexual harassment, medical neglect, and coerced labor.
One day. One hundred thousand dollars. One policy reversal.
The blue soldier, a billion times over.
This is what wealth worship actually produces.
Louisiana’s Governor Jeff Landry is facing active ethics charges for undisclosed private flights on a donor’s plane, while his personal attorney simultaneously helped draft the law that restructured the ethics board charging him. He now controls nine of the fifteen seats on that board. The same lawyer defending him helped write the bill that makes it nearly impossible for that board to successfully charge anyone.
Scott Bessent shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while holding undivested assets in the financial sector that the CFPB regulates.
Elon Musk ran a government operation with access to federal payment systems while his companies are regulated by the very agencies DOGE targeted for cuts.
The president launched a personal memecoin three days before his inauguration, with 75 percent of proceeds flowing to his personal LLC, and subsequently pardoned a convicted money launderer connected to a two-billion-dollar investment in his family’s stablecoin.
None of this is hidden. It’s in public records. Ethics filings. Court documents. FEC reports. They don’t bother hiding it because they’ve bought enough of the enforcement apparatus to make hiding unnecessary.
That’s what blind looks like.
And then AI arrives.
Here is a technology that could genuinely change the equation. That could give organizing tools to people who have never had them. That could lower the cost of collective action, put real capability in the hands of people who’ve always been locked out.
Instead, it’s being hoarded.
A handful of companies, backed by the same billionaire class that purchased the political system, are locking up the most powerful technology in human history behind subscription walls and proprietary systems designed to ensure the people at the top stay at the top.
Over thousands of years, humans went through slavery. We went through serfdom. And now here we are — tech feudalism. A tiny number of people who own the infrastructure decide what everyone else gets to access, at what price, on what terms.
The golden calf doesn’t just blind you to what you’re destroying. It blinds you to what you’re preventing. All that promise — all that possibility — while the people who built it take meetings in Washington to make sure the regulations that might distribute it more fairly never get written.
My father was a physicist. He worked for this country his entire career. He believed that science in the service of the public was one of the highest callings a person could answer.
He also believed that what isn’t yours isn’t yours.
He didn’t just make me feel bad. He made me go back and knock on that door. He let the guilt do its work — because guilt, seared into a five-year-old, is the right teacher. You don’t forget it. You carry it. You pass it on.
There is no one making these people knock on that door.
That’s the problem. Not that corruption exists — it has always existed. The problem is that the mechanisms built to enforce basic accountability have been systematically dismantled by the people they were designed to constrain.
The ethics board gets stacked. The oversight agencies get gutted. The watchdogs get fired in a midnight email. The investigators get their cases closed by the people they were investigating.
And the worship continues — blind, bottomless, consuming everything it touches.
The Israelites didn’t build the golden calf because they were evil. They built it because Moses was gone and they were scared, and gold was shiny and certain and immediate, and the law he was bringing back required something harder: accountability to something beyond their own appetites.
That’s what we’ve lost. Not just the law. The belief that accountability is real. That it applies to everyone. That the rules aren’t just for people who can’t afford to buy their way out of them.
My father understood that. He taught me. I taught my son.
The question isn’t whether we still know it’s true.
The question is whether enough people decide it’s worth fighting to make it real again.
The calf never saved anybody.
It never does.
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The rope up gets frayed and worn. Usually the people at the bottom replace it if they want to get back up there. Otherwise, it gets left to a few who let it go and it’s not that great anymore.
"What isn’t yours isn’t yours" Yes.