Kevin Maley & Sean Dempsey Discuss Politics: Has America Been Purchased?

In this special crossover episode between Metamodernism Uncensored and Kevin Maley’s Zipcode Zero, Sean Dempsey joins Kevin for a wide-ranging June 12, 2026 conversation about American politics, foreign influence, postmodern collapse, and the unsettling question hanging over the republic: has America been purchased?The discussion begins in the hard terrain of 2026 politics, including the recent Maine primary, the defeat of Thomas Massie’s Kentucky seat, and the staggering amount of money being poured into American elections by AIPAC and the broader Israel lobby. Kevin and Sean examine what these races reveal about the modern political machine: who gets protected, who gets punished, and what happens when a candidate challenges the donor class, the lobby state, or the approved foreign-policy consensus.From there, the conversation turns toward the shifting identity of the America First movement. Is it still a serious rebellion against empire, globalism, and elite capture? Or has it become another slogan absorbed by the same forces it once promised to confront? Sean argues that the real test of America First is not whether politicians repeat the phrase, but whether they are willing to put American sovereignty, American taxpayers, and American soldiers ahead of foreign interests and domestic donor networks.At Sean’s urging, the episode also moves beyond election analysis into culture, philosophy, and postmodernism. The political crisis, he argues, is downstream from a deeper spiritual and cultural crisis. A country that no longer believes in truth, limits, loyalty, or shared moral reality becomes easy to manipulate. Once politics becomes performance and language becomes branding, the republic becomes vulnerable to capture by money, ideology, and fear.The episode closes with its most provocative question: has America become a captive country? Not conquered by tanks, but captured by influence. Not occupied by soldiers, but occupied by interests. This crossover between Metamodernism Uncensored and Zipcode Zero is a blunt, unsettling conversation about power, money, dissent, sovereignty, and whether the American people still control the country that claims to represent them.