Author: Chris Connors Jr.

The Minuteman - Bring Meaning Back to the News - Written by Chris Connors Jr. Founder of TheMinuteman.org, & Morristown Minute. Best-selling playwright with Off the Wall Plays.

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Too Big (Not) To Fail
ByChris Connors Jr. November 9, 2026November 9, 2026

The future of AI is sold as an inevitable clash of abundance or apocalypse, but the money behind these prophesies depends on a gamble. OpenAI and Anthropic have promised to spend hundreds of billions on computing power, while their suppliers help finance the companies paying their bills. That loop connects the AI boom to retirement funds, insurance companies and the price of a new phone. AI’s promised future still has to pay for itself, and we already have money riding on whether it can.

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The Death of the Price Tag
ByChris Connors Jr. October 5, 2026October 5, 2026

More of what you pay is now set by software built to find out how much you’ll pay. Sometimes it’s one company studying you: what you click, what you post, how badly you need it. Sometimes it’s a whole industry feeding its prices into the same program, and landlords, gas stations and the biggest french fry makers in the country have all been sued for it. With so few companies left in so many industries, there’s often no store across the street to walk to. Next come AI agents that do your shopping for you, so you never see the price at all. The price tag used to protect us from this. It’s going away.

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The Trash Problem
ByChris Connors Jr. September 24, 2026September 24, 2026

Every bag of trash you leave at the curb gets weighed, priced, and driven somewhere. Where it lands isn’t chance. It follows almost the exact map federal regulators drew when they graded neighborhoods for lending in the 1930s, the practice known as redlining. That’s the trash problem: the poorest places take in the most of it, get paid a dollar a ton for keeping it, and lose far more than that in property values and school funding for decades after.

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Somebody Paid to Make Socialism a Slur
ByChris Connors Jr. August 10, 2026October 22, 2026

When your house is burning down, a truck the government owns shows up, staffed by government employees, and nobody calls it socialism. The VA owns its hospitals and employs its doctors, and the word mostly leaves it alone. Then in 1961 a record album full of that word helped kill hospital coverage for old people, and in 2025 a sitting senator aimed the same word, correctly, at a president buying ten percent of Intel, and the government kept buying. The definition never explains which way the word cuts. Something else does, and it has a price.

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Who Pays to Stop Inflation?
ByChris Connors Jr. July 24, 2026October 22, 2026

We think inflation is bad, but almost nobody can say what it is. The United States has fought it with legal price ceilings, government rationing, a wartime tax that took most of corporate profits, and interest rates high enough to put twelve million people out of work. Every one of those methods worked by sending somebody the bill, and who gets the bill has always been a political choice. This is the cost of our attempts to battle inflation, what worked, what didn’t, and who paid.

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The Government Hired Its Own Replacement
ByChris Connors Jr. July 8, 2026October 22, 2026

Everyone calls it corporate capture: a government outmaneuvered by companies that got too rich to regulate. That story runs the sequence backward. The dependence wasn’t seized from the state. The state handed it over, on purpose, in public, in writing, across fifty years, with both parties holding the pen. The capture story has a villain. The truth is worse: nothing was broken. It worked exactly as designed.

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The Whole World Runs on Rocks Nobody Wanted to Mine
ByChris Connors Jr. June 24, 2026October 22, 2026

Everyone keeps calling it a chip war. The fight that actually decides it is happening one layer down, in the mines and refineries China spent thirty years quietly cornering while the rest of us chased the clever, profitable end of the chain. A walk down the semiconductor supply chain, from a refinery in Inner Mongolia to your driveway, your doctor’s office, and your electric bill, shows how a few unglamorous rocks ended up holding up the AI, the missiles, and the minivans. And why the countries most able to destroy each other are the ones that most need each other to get through the week.

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The Price of Your Hatred
ByChris Connors Jr. June 18, 2026June 16, 2026

There was a time you could disagree about politics without hating each other over it. This is the story of what changed: why the medium we communicate through manufactures our division for us, and how we can choose to stop paying for it.

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The Stock You Never Bought
ByChris Connors Jr. June 8, 2026June 23, 2026

You never bought SpaceX, and you may not even like Elon Musk. Within weeks of the largest IPO in history, it could be sitting in your retirement account anyway. An exchange quietly rewrote the rules that once made a new company prove its price was real before millions of people were made to own it, and no one asked the people whose savings would carry the result. A story about money, diversification, and the consent you were never given the chance to withhold.

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The Wrong Thief
ByChris Connors Jr. June 2, 2026June 2, 2026

A man in Pennsylvania is one paycheck from losing the house his grandfather bought outright in 1962. He knows his rent went up. He knows his grocery bill went up. He knows that when he turns on the television, someone is shouting at him about a caravan. He is right that something has been taken. But he has been handed the wrong thief.

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The Machine That Captured the State
ByChris Connors Jr. May 26, 2026October 22, 2026

Somewhere in Virginia, a windowless building the size of an airport draws the power of a small city, and you’re paying for it. Residential electric bills are up forty percent since 2021. The same servers raising your rates are running deportation maps for ICE. The data center, the electric bill, the federal contract, and the surveillance state have become one machine, and almost no one has explained how the pieces connect.

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How to Win A War
ByChris Connors Jr. May 18, 2026May 18, 2026

Two nations declared victory in the same war on the same day. The bombs kept falling. The prices kept climbing. And the rest of us are still paying for a win that nobody can find. Something about the way we fight wars broke after 1945, and we never learned the new rules.

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The Price of Being Alive in America
ByChris Connors Jr. May 13, 2026October 22, 2026

The cost of being alive in America has gone up in every year that both parties have been running on affordability. That is what happens when the price-setters and the rule-writers are the same people, and when the rule-writers’ campaigns are funded by the price-setters. The standard political conversation has not yet given us a name for what this is.

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The $100 Bill Isn’t For You
ByChris Connors Jr. May 4, 2026May 1, 2026

The most printed bill in America is the one Americans use least. Where the missing hundreds actually live, and why the government keeps printing them anyway, is a story about who currency is really for.

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The Machine Isn’t Coming for Your Job. The Business Model Is.
ByChris Connors Jr. April 27, 2026May 1, 2026

The AI Work Crisis has been focused on the wrong question. The question isn’t whether AI will displace workers or how. The question is why are we paying for it.

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Crypto’s Best Customers Are Arms Dealers, Dictators, and a Sitting President
ByChris Connors Jr. April 22, 2026April 29, 2026

North Korea has stolen $6.75 billion in cryptocurrency to fund its nuclear weapons program. Iran is using it to sell armed drones and charge ships $2 million each to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. And the sitting president profiting from it just disbanded the agencies investigating it.

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How the Banana Shaped the World
ByChris Connors Jr. April 14, 2026April 29, 2026

How does a corporation become a government? How does a banana become a weapon? And how can a cheap yellow fruit help us understand the world?

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The Death of Authorship
ByChris Connors Jr. April 8, 2026April 29, 2026

A monkey took a selfie that sparked a copyright fight over who counts as an author. Now AI is raising the same question at a much larger scale: if a machine creates something, who owns it, and who profits from the gap?

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They’re Not Hacking Your Computer. They’re Hacking You.
ByChris Connors Jr. April 1, 2026October 22, 2026

A worker in Hong Kong thought he was on a video call with his company’s CFO and colleagues. He was not. Every face and every voice had been generated by AI, and by the time the illusion broke, $25.6 million was gone. This is the new cybersecurity threat: not hackers breaking into your machine, but attackers learning how to manipulate the human being sitting in front of it.

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Why We Fight. The Middle East Conflict, Explained
ByChris Connors Jr. March 24, 2026April 30, 2026

The Middle East’s constant conflict isn’t an unavoidable clash of ancient religions. It’s a deliberate power play by authoritarian leaders who use oil wealth, water scarcity, and religious identity as tools to keep themselves in charge. The violence is not an accident of history. It is a business model.

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The Lie That Becomes the Law: How the Noncitizen Voting Myth Traveled from Social Media to the Floor of Congress
ByChris Connors Jr. March 19, 2026October 22, 2026

The noncitizen voting myth was never about election security. It is the clearest example of how an emotional lie gets amplified on social media, manufactured into a political grievance, and converted into legislation that suppresses the votes of the very citizens it claims to protect.

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