Stew on This

Stew on This

Soft Power, Hard Empire

What happens when legitimacy fails but coercion remains?

Steward Beckham's avatar
Steward Beckham
Mar 17, 2026
∙ Paid
Made by combining images on Unsplash and Wikimedia Commons.

We crossed the Rubicon of waging wars through lies and deceit a long time ago. Not once, not as an aberration, but as a recurring feature of an American political technology refined for the television age. Gulf of Tonkin offered the script: a contested incident becomes a clean moral headline, a…

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