Steve Hicks, a retired nuclear machinist at the Y-12 National Security Complex who says he is now battling skin cancer after years of handling hazardous materials, stands outside his rural log cabin in Harriman, Tennessee, U.S., August 8, 2025. REUTERS/Eric Cox

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.

Bradley Blankenship is an American investigative journalist, columnist, and researcher who has lived and reported across Central Europe, South America, Asia, and the United States. He has worked with international media outlets and conducted in-depth reporting on democratic backsliding, public corruption, and civil resistance movements. He is the founder of the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project, a grassroots initiative documenting systemic failure and official misconduct in the American heartland. He is also the author of a forthcoming investigative memoir.