READ MY NOTICE TO EXPRESS MYSELF AS A FREE ADULT CITIZEN OF THE STATE OF TEXAS

Over the last year, I christened a new shorthand for the dominant socio-political condition of the early 21st century: The Current Empire, a convergent field shaped by neoliberal governance, christofascist revivalism, technological surveillance, and anti-reason ideology.

This is not a singular regime or government, but a global pattern of control, seduction, and systemic drift—an empire that does not conquer by force alone, but by formatting life itself.

Unlike classical empires, the Current Empire no longer needs grand narratives of conquest. Instead, it extends its reach through bureaucratic normalization, algorithmic feedback loops, religious-nationalist fervor, and the hollowing of democratic discourse. The citizen becomes a consumer of identities. Thought becomes content. Education becomes credentialing. Health becomes optimization; critique becomes a liability.

This dehumanizing Empire traffics in illusions: choice without agency, freedom without solidarity, faith without questioning. Its most dangerous quality is its invisibility. It does not always imprison the body; it occupies the soul. It thrives not merely on repression, but on internalized performance, burnout, moral exhaustion, and emotional weaponization. It turns resistance into branding and survival into self-commodification.

In the Mountain Dog School, we mark the Current Empire as the background against which all living thought must now be situated. To do philosophy—to engage in critical thinkering—is to awaken within this Empire and to begin unbinding ourselves from its default scripts.

We see signs of it here in Texas almost every day: in the privatized energy grid that leaves people freezing in silence, in the criminalization of trans children under the guise of protection, in the assault on public education through test-driven metrics, book bans, and recently the approval of the voucher system which will gut local schools. It is a fusion of cruelty and calculation, cloaked in moral certainty.