unINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Your unintended consequences are the planned outcomes.

This week has been a whirlwind, marked by a deluge of executive orders that have left many of us stunned and struggling to process their implications. While these measures are shocking on their own, a particular post shared in a military/veteran social media group caught my attention and highlighted a much deeper issue. The post came from an individual who had been fervent in his political support but now finds himself in a personally devastating situation—one he described as the "unintended consequences" of his choices.

The story is simple yet profoundly unsettling. This individual and his wife were en route to new jobs with the VA in a different city. They had packed up their lives, spent significant money on relocation, and were prepared to start fresh. Then, the executive orders dropped, and their plans unraveled. Suddenly, they were left high and dry, stranded with no jobs and no recourse. The irony? This individual, in his post, explicitly acknowledged his zealous support for Donald Trump but stopped short of admitting, "I really messed up."

Instead, he framed his predicament as a series of unintended consequences—a phrase that feels like a misnomer when you dig deeper. Because, let’s face it, these consequences were not unintended for everyone. They were clearly intended for somebody else.

This is what gets under my skin. We hear so much rhetoric about accountability and personal responsibility, yet when faced with the fallout of their own actions, people like this seem unable or unwilling to connect the dots. When you have a roadmap like Project 2025 explicitly laying out these plans, a candidate who conveniently denies any association but surrounds himself with the people who authored it, and a campaign strategy that transparently aligns with these objectives, how can you feign surprise when the train wreck finally happens?

The betrayal here isn’t the kind that blindsides you. It’s the kind you signed up for. They weren’t duped; they were complicit. This wasn’t an ambush; it was a planned event with clear signals along the way. The consequences you now call "unintended" were always someone else’s intended outcomes. Policies are crafted with objectives, and if you were paying attention, the outcomes were predictable and deliberate—just not in your favor.

But here’s the thing: it cannot just be called "unintended consequences" when it affects you personally. We have the opportunity—the responsibility—to change the consequential outcomes. We know or can accurately predict the outcomes of one voting direction, but the alternative often feels murky. This is precisely where we need clarity in policy, purpose, and its intended outcome. This clarity takes effort on our part. It demands that we educate ourselves, critically evaluate the information available, and advocate for transparency in the decisions that shape our lives.

In my younger, more carefree days, I never blamed the friend who suggested, "Let’s grab some drinks," for my hangover the next day. I knew what I was getting into, and I owned it. Why, then, do we see so many people recoiling from the reality of their own decisions, pointing to unintended consequences when they should be looking squarely in the mirror?

This isn’t to revel in someone else’s misfortune—far from it. There’s a human cost to all of this that’s deeply troubling. But if we’re ever going to get to the root of these issues, we have to call things what they are. These weren’t unintended consequences; they were the predictable outcomes of choices made by individuals and leaders alike.

There’s a lesson here, but it’s one I’m not sure everyone is ready to hear: when you’re part of the machine that generates chaos, you don’t get to play the victim when that chaos comes knocking at your door. The true "unintended consequence" might just be that more people are waking up to this reality. Here’s hoping it happens before the next hangover.

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This will not make me rich but helps me keep up the fight. It also lets you show your support for retaking America with a movement of sanity and practicality.