Yes, it’s a good thing. It does feel a bit like having the carpet yanked out from under your feet—sudden, disorienting, maybe even hopeful. But let’s not start patting ourselves on the back just yet.
Big, ugly scams like the climate grift don’t quietly disappear into the sunset. They’re not stage villains who die on cue. They’re more like leeches—tenacious, parasitic, and grotesquely adaptive. Even when their natural swamp begins to dry up, they cling to whatever warm-blooded host is still willing to carry them.
And let’s be honest: the victory, if we can call it that, is largely American. The rest of the world is still wide open for business, still feeding the beast with subsidies, slogans, and policy theater. The narrative may be losing its grip in one hemisphere, but the infection is still spreading elsewhere.
It won’t vanish overnight. These institutions have survival instincts honed over decades. They’ll coast on inertia, ride old grants and bureaucratic momentum for as long as they can. And like all dying empires, they’ll grow more reckless, more erratic, more ideologically rabid the closer they get to collapse. Desperation breeds fanaticism.
Which means we’re not done. Not even close.
This is a long unwinding, and before the machine finally sputters out, it’ll do real damage. To policy, to infrastructure, to people who just wanted to be left alone. And as it lashes out, it will alienate more and more of the sane—but that takes time.
Cycles like this don’t end cleanly. But they do end. Eventually.
Until then, there’s still plenty of work to do.