AI Is A Gateway To The Welfare State
October 6, 2026 |
Keith Giles
“Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.”
That line from the Smashing Pumpkins’ Bullet with Butterfly Wings hit like a punch in the gut back in the ’90s—but it lands differently now. Less teenage angst, more prophetic truth. Because these days, the cage isn’t metaphorical. It’s systemic. It’s spiritual. It’s political. And it’s tightening.
Welcome to America, land of the free-range rats, where you can scream all you want—as long as you don’t expect anything to change.
We live in a country where the loudest voices thumping Bibles are also the first to beat the war drums. Where “thoughts and prayers” are handed out like government cheese while actual justice gets defunded, dismantled, or drowned in Christian nationalism.
And somehow, Trump’s still the chosen one—an orange idol molded in spray tan and grift. His followers don’t just ignore the cage; they decorate it in red, white, and blue, slap a cross on top, and call it freedom.
Evangelicals cheered as kids were ripped from their parents at the border. They shrugged when rights were stripped, books were banned, and facts were labeled fake. And now, as Trump 2.0 rises from the ashes of Jan 6 with a vengeance and a vendetta, too many are still playing polite. Still hoping civility will fix this mess.
It won’t.
You can’t reason with a system that only answers to power. You can’t vote your way out of a fascist fever dream when the ballot box has been gerrymandered into a joke.
Now, cue the evangelicals clutching their pearls: “But Jesus wasn’t angry!”
Sure, and water isn’t wet.
Rage isn’t unholy—it’s prophetic. The Bible is filled with pissed-off prophets railing against injustice. Jesus flipped tables. He didn’t whisper sweet nothings to the money-changers. He didn’t call out hypocrisy with a gentle tone and a smile. He shouted it down.
Rage becomes dangerous when it turns inward or sideways. When it becomes performative, destructive, or self-righteous. But rage, when it’s aligned with justice, compassion, and truth? That’s what starts revolutions. That’s what breaks cages.
And it’s long past time to rage.
The system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as it was designed to: protect power, privilege, and patriarchy.
So if you feel like a rat in a cage these days? Good. That’s the first sign that you’re still awake. That your conscience hasn’t been numbed into submission. That the gaslighting didn’t fully take.
But feeling rage isn’t enough. Rage without direction becomes despair. And despair is what they want. They feed on apathy. They hope you check out, unplug, and self-soothe with Amazon Prime and Netflix.
Don’t.
Organize. Vote. Protest. Write. Preach. Create. Fight back with whatever voice you’ve got. They can’t silence everyone. They just hope we stay quiet long enough to make it easy.
Not the soft, sentimental kind of hope that gets embroidered on pillows. Real hope—the kind that shows up bloodied, tired, and pissed off. The kind that refuses to settle.
We rage because we care.
We rage because we see.
We rage because this is not the way it’s supposed to be.So yeah. We’re rats in a cage.
