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kentucky
I’ve Seen States Collapse; Now I See It Happening Here
After years reporting from post-authoritarian states, I now see the same patterns in my own backyard—where justice has collapsed, truth is suppressed, and power no longer answers to the people.
Sep 07, 2025
I’ve seen the aftermath of collapsed nations—now I see it happening here.
As a journalist and analyst, I’ve spent the last several years living and reporting in regions that have undergone massive political transformations. I lived for years in the Czech Republic, where I met many people with direct ties to the Velvet Revolution. I walked the streets of Prague with those who once occupied them in protest. I studied the Russian language, traveled extensively through the former Eastern Bloc, and listened closely to the survivors of failed regimes—those who remember the slow unraveling of authority, trust, and truth.
I’ve also spent significant time in South America, where I witnessed a very different kind of collapse—and rebirth. In Bolivia, I spoke with officials and journalists who lived through the 2019 coup and saw their country fight its way back to democracy. I’ve walked with communities who understand, firsthand, how empires and juntas collapse—and how people organize in the rubble.
Now I believe this country is collapsing.
Not in the dramatic, Hollywood fashion we tend to imagine—there are no tanks in the streets, no blackout zones or food lines. But what I am witnessing now in Northern Kentucky, through my work with the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project (NKTAP), is unmistakable: a slow-motion institutional implosion. And it mirrors what I have seen in failed or failing states around the world.
In Northern Kentucky, I’ve uncovered a network of corruption that spans law enforcement, prosecutorial offices, courts, and local media. I’ve documented how whistleblowers are silenced, public records denied, and criminal cases manipulated to protect the powerful.
Police ignore credible murder leads. Prosecutors bury evidence. Courts issue orders without hearings. And journalists—some out of fear, others out of complicity—refuse to report the truth. In my own case, I’ve faced obstruction, threats, targeted harassment, and retaliatory smears simply for investigating what any decent system should have investigated itself.
Our institutions are no longer capable of self-correction. That means the burden of accountability, truth telling, and justice now falls on us.
The structures of governance still stand. The buildings are still open. But the rule of law has collapsed in all but name. What remains is theater—a simulation of justice that functions to preserve power, not serve the public.
This isn’t just about Northern Kentucky. It’s a microcosm. I’m in touch with colleagues around the country—investigators, reporters, former civil servants—and I hear the same story again and again:
- Entire state agencies captured by private interests;
- Local governments ignoring open records laws;
- Whistleblowers retaliated against without recourse;
- Judges ruling from sealed dockets with no oversight;
- Public health policy shaped by ideology, not science; and
- Independent journalism gutted, bought, or blacklisted.
We are in a moment of mass epistemic failure, where truth itself is destabilized and power no longer answers to reason, law, or fact.
It doesn’t come with a bang. It comes with:
- The quiet refusal to investigate credible crimes;
- The steady normalization of lawlessness;
- The dissolution of public trust; and
- The emergence of parallel systems of truth-telling and justice.
This is what I’ve seen before. In Prague. In La Paz. In the fractured republics of the former USSR. It begins when the official channels of accountability no longer function—and the people must build their own.
That’s what I’m doing with the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project. We’re documenting. Archiving. Speaking to victims. Exposing public records that local officials tried to bury. We’re creating a people’s archive—a living record of a regime in decline.
Because when institutions stop telling the truth, the only way forward is to tell it ourselves.
I used to believe that America was “different”—that our legal tradition, constitutional system, and civic institutions would inoculate us from the kinds of collapse I saw abroad. I no longer believe that.
The US is not collapsing because it is uniquely broken. It is collapsing because it is a state like any other, vulnerable to the same corruption, elite decay, and loss of legitimacy that have brought down countless systems before.
The question is not whether collapse is happening. It is. The question is what we do after we accept that reality.
We can pretend this is just “polarization.” We can tell ourselves that if we just wait for the next election, the pendulum will swing back. Or we can admit the truth: Our institutions are no longer capable of self-correction. That means the burden of accountability, truth telling, and justice now falls on us—on journalists, organizers, whistleblowers, and ordinary people with the courage to say: enough.
I’ve seen what happens when people organize. I’ve also seen what happens when they don’t.
And I’m telling you: Now is the time to choose.
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Trump’s Plan to Arrest Our Way Out of Homelessness Won’t Work; Just Ask Kentucky
In April 2024, the Kentucky legislature passed HB 5—the bill that paved the way for Kentucky to ticket and arrest people trying to survive outside. Then, homelessness rose 10%.
Aug 03, 2025
Punishing people for being poor doesn’t make them less poor. And jailing someone who’s homeless doesn’t make them housed. But that’s exactly what President Donald Trump’s new executive order does: It makes criminals out of people trying to survive our nation’s housing crisis.
Only affordable housing and accessible healthcare will get people off the streets so they can live a stable life. Instead, Trump’s order calls for local and state governments to ticket and arrest people for living on our streets.
These policies waste taxpayer dollars just to make our homelessness crisis worse. If you need a preview of how Trump’s disastrous order will play out, just look at my home state of Kentucky.
In April 2024, the Kentucky legislature passed HB 5—the bill that paved the way for Kentucky to ticket and arrest people trying to survive outside. These laws, labeled “camping bans,” are popping up across the country. They’re rooted in the myth that people choose to be homeless—and the only way to help is through jail or involuntary commitment.
Not only is this cruel and inhumane. It also doesn’t work.
Instead of distractions and dictatorial decrees rooted in stereotypes and stigma, we need real leadership on real solutions to homelessness, like higher wages, and rents people can afford.
In Louisville earlier this year, a pregnant woman in active labor was ticketed by police because she had no choice but to sleep outside. Law enforcement did not offer her help,
Fortunately, she was able to deliver a healthy baby. But she’s still housing insecure—and now burdened with a citation too. Her story proves that making criminals out of people who have nowhere to go doesn’t reduce suffering—it makes it worse.
So it’s not surprising that even with this new law in place, there was still an over 10% rise in homelessness in Kentucky just last year. Similarly, national rates continue to increase even as more cities and states pass “camping bans.”
I’m the director at VOCAL-KY, a movement of low-income people. I’ve gotten to know the folks living in Louisville’s shelters and on the streets. It’s not hard for me to relate. When I lost my housing, my family and I lived out of my car until we could get back on our feet.
We work day in and day out to support our neighbors who live outside by providing a safe space and connection to services. And the pregnant woman, Samantha, who was cited while in active labor, is now a part of our drop-in center community.
This is what compassion looks like—not citations that put struggling people further in debt or behind bars.
People living on our streets and in our shelters want services and housing, but there isn’t enough to go around. With this executive order, the Trump administration is diverting even more money toward arresting and jailing people—and away from the housing and care that urban, rural, and suburban America all need.
Instead of distractions and dictatorial decrees rooted in stereotypes and stigma, we need real leadership on real solutions to homelessness, like higher wages, and rents people can afford. The reality is most Americans are closer to becoming homeless than becoming billionaires.
But instead of investing in solutions, Trump and the GOP gave massive tax breaks to the ultra rich—including to some of the same people and companies who make billions off driving up rents—while cutting programs for low-income people. In all likelihood, next year we’ll see another record number of Americans in homelessness.
We need federal lawmakers to sign onto the Housing, Not Handcuffs Act and invest in communities by directing federal funds to support local solutions that address the root causes of homelessness, not just force people into jail or detention centers dressed up as treatment.
Trump’s plan to arrest our way out of homelessness won’t work, because it’s never worked. Only housing, care, and services will help people get back on their feet, and we need our policies and politicians to act on those solutions now more than ever.
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In 'Attack on Trans Students,' Federal Judge Strikes Down Biden's Title IX Protections
The Republican judge cited the Supreme Court's recent decision that stripped federal agencies of their regulatory power.
Jan 10, 2025
In a decision that was partially underpinned by the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of a 40-year-old legal precedent last year, a federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Joe Biden's expanded protections for transgender youths and other vulnerable students, saying the administration overstepped in introducing the rules.
Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky ruled that the Education Department did not have the authority to expand the protections provided by Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which since 1972 has prohibited sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funding.
The ruling applies to the new definition in Title IX that was proposed by the department last April, which prohibited "discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex-related characteristics (including intersex traits), pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity."
Right-wing activists and politicians objected in particular to the protections for gender identity.
The rules stopped short of requiring schools to allow transgender students to play on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity—a key fixation of the far right—but required schools and staffers to accept students' identities on a daily basis, for example by calling them by their preferred pronouns rather than according to their sex assigned at birth.
The rules have been blocked in 26 states as Republican leaders in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and other states have filed legal challenges.
In his ruling, Reeves, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, wrote that "the entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex."
"Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless," he said.
Reeves wrote that "the final rule and its corresponding regulations exceed the department's authority," citing Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court case in which the court's right-wing majority overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine. The legal precedent held that judges should defer to federal agencies' reasonable interpretation of a law if Congress has not specifically addressed the issue at hand.
The judge also rejected the Education Department's position that protections for transgender people against workplace discrimination—which were established in 2020 in the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia—should also apply in schools that receive federal funding.
At Law Dork, journalist Chris Geidner wrote that Reeves rejected "Bostock's application to Title IX and [cited] his newfound authority in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo to determine 'the statute's single, best meaning' himself."
"As such, he took that authority to decide what Title IX means, the department's view notwithstanding, and set aside the rule," wrote Geidner.
Reeves also wrote that requiring teachers and schools to use students' preferred pronouns and names "offends the First Amendment" and violates the free speech rights of teachers.
That assertion, said Jennifer Berkshire, author of The Education Wars, "really shows you how fake the rhetoric of 'parents rights' is."
"The idea that using a student's preferred pronouns is in any way an imposition on teachers is patently absurd," added Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Massachusetts. "If you can handle using nicknames, you can handle correct pronouns."
Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, said the judge turned "longstanding legal precedent on its head in a direct, disproportionate attack on trans students," and noted that the harm caused by the ruling will extend beyond transgender students.
"Today's decision displays extraordinary disregard for students who are most vulnerable to discrimination and are in the most need for federal protections under the Title IX rule," said Goss Graves. "The Biden administration's Title IX rule is essential to ensure that all students—including survivors of sexual assault and harassment, pregnant and parenting students, and LGBTQI+ students—are able to learn in a safe and welcoming environment. With these protections already removed in some states, students who experience sexual assault have had their complaints dismissed, or worse, been punished by their schools after reporting; pregnant students have been unfairly penalized for taking time off to give birth to a child; and LGBTQI+ students have faced vicious bullying and harassment just for being who they are."
Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of the LGBTQ rights group GLSEN, told The New York Times that the ruling "shows a stunning indifference to marginalized youth facing harassment and discrimination, as well as hardworking school administrators and principals who are working to build safer learning environments for their increasingly diverse student populations."
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