My family arrived (Mayflower crashed into Cape Cod in 1620 - mother’s side) and settled on my father’s side - Maryland 1645. Subjects of the king; property of the Crown – but here to help develop and colonize for mother England. My ancestors were among the first families, signatories of the Mayflower Compact, and later framers of the constitution. But many myths have been taught to all of us about the curious witch’s brew that later became the land of e pluribus unum.

By 1775, George III raised the price of tea, and suddenly Boston thought itself Athens. "No taxation without representation!" they cried, while keeping representation chained up in the back garden.

King George—now there’s a man who thought real estate was forever. He’d paid for the colonies fair and square, with good old-fashioned European conquest. His majesty considered America part of the family—albeit the loud, ungrateful cousin with delusions of grandeur. So imagine his surprise when that cousin burned the family portraits, pawned the silverware, and took up with a French aristocrat named Lafayette.

Ah yes, France. We just couldn’t help ourselves.

England was bleeding, and we caught the scent like a Versailles lapdog with a taste for British ankles. We sent ships, gold, a teenage marquis with a sword longer than his résumé. All in the name of liberty—by which we meant: sticking it to the English, regardless of cost.

And what a cost it was. You see, we bankrolled the American rebellion so thoroughly we forgot to feed our own people. The royal court was awash in powdered wigs and unpaid invoices. And while America celebrated its “freedom,” France stood there, pockets empty, whispering “Mon Dieu… what have we done?”

Enter the French Revolution.

Because if there's one thing the poor can’t stand, it’s watching someone else get a revolution before they do.

So we lit the match under our own monarchy. Not a symbolic match. An actual guillotine.

Louis XVI—our benevolent donor to American independence—couldn’t even flee in a straight line. They caught him dressed like a footman. Robespierre rose up, shrieked about virtue, and began slicing through nobility like a baker through stale baguettes.

And that’s how France got liberty: Not from pamphlets or powdered debates, but from a rain of heads and the efficient grace of falling steel.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Americans were writing a Constitution. Grand stuff—unless you weren’t white, male, or land-rich. They built a government of the people, by the people, for the people—as long as the people looked like Jefferson and owned something taxable.

King George? He lost his colonies and eventually his marbles. Spoke to trees. Appointed them to office, which, in hindsight, might’ve been a step up.

And France?

We got liberté, égalité, and forty years of blood-splattered chaos.

All thanks to helping a fledgling republic that thought "freedom" meant "free shipping."

So when you celebrate the “Spirit of '76,” do raise a glass—to the kings bankrupted, the peasants beheaded, and the nations that mistook someone else’s revolution for their own moral redemption.

Liberty is lovely, yes. But someone always pays the tab. And in this case, it was France… with interest.

Vive la révolution, mes amis. But next time—send cash upfront.

The Pilgrims! Those paragons of piety, those stalwarts of sobriety... or so the history books would have you believe. The truth is, those guys were a bunch of slobbering, stumbling, drunken louts. These were my Ancestors, on my mother's side of the family.

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The recent fires and now $45 billion for “detention facilities” across the country. With the Admin clawback of public media funds, I now volunteer on our 212,000 Watt radio station like a cockeyed Paul Revere. And here we are together. I thank you for your direct support on this platform!

CARY HARRISON: So here we are again!Last week, the DNC was forced to hold their first executive meeting in 5 months. You'd think they’d rally the troops, storm the gates, do something. But instead? Three hours of absolutely nothing—live from a beige room in Little Rock, Arkansas. BUT WHY? There's a reason they do nothing, have done nothing and are not seemingly planning on doing anything. It makes sense now, but it's not what you expect…

We welcome Sam Rosenthal of Roots Action.org, who attended the meeting so you didn’t have to. He looked into the abyss of DNC leadership and came back fluent in committee-speak, the official language of political extinction. Sam Rosenthal showed up. He took notes. And now he answers the looming question about testosterone deficit theater from the so-called opposition.

Sam Rosenthal, Finally, how long can the party keep pretending this is business as usual before their base simply walks out?

How 100 People Can Stop Unpopular Bills and Why Showing Up Matters

The recent fires and now military presence in Los Angeles, I now volunteer on our 212,000 Watt public radio station after defunding. And here we are together. I thank you for your direct support on this platform!

Answered! Why the Democratic Party refuses to show up for its voters

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The recent fires and now military presence in Los Angeles, I now volunteer on our 212,000 Watt public radio station. Defunding, marines, wildfires… and here we are. I thank you for your direct support on this platform!

CARY HARRISON: So here we are again!On this anniversary of D-Day, we see a very different Democratic Party than the one that launched us into victory over the Nazis, many years ago. Picture it: This time, our own nation teetering on the lip of autocracy, the founding ideals smoldering in the trash barrel behind Mar-a-Lago, and over at the Democratic National Committee…

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Thanks to the FCC’s defunding of our public radio and PBS stations, I thank you for your direct support on this platform!

CARY HARRISON: So here we are again!Apparently, women now trust bears more than men in the woods. Yes—actual apex predators are beating American males in the approachability Olympics. Why? Because bears don’t mansplain. They don’t run podcasts. And they sure as hell don’t send 3 a.m. “u up?” texts. This week’s monologue dives headfirst into the absurd, dystopian love triangle between women, men, and carnivorous wildlife. It’s not just a dating issue—it’s the collapse of public trust, weaponized loneliness, and the rise of Big Tech data-driven nightmare. Swipe in. The empire’s burning, and the bears are the only ones minding their own business.

we plunge snout-first into a headline so perfectly absurd, so magnificently bleak, it could only come from the annals of a dying empire: "Women would rather encounter a bear in the woods than a man."

Now, let’s be clear. This isn’t satire. This is science—or at least the mangled remains of a survey bobbing in the septic tank of the Internet. Yes, when asked to choose between the fanged, 600-pound personification of death and Chad from the hiking trail, a statistically non-trivial number of women are saying: Give me the apex predator.

Why? Because bears, you see, don’t ask if you’ve read Jordan Peterson. They don’t “circle back” after ghosting for six weeks. And most importantly, bears don’t podcast.

Now, I hear some of you sharpening your keyboards. “But not all men are terrifying in the woods!” True. But let’s not get lost in the foliage here. And there will be a distinction between gay men and straight men and incells and all the other variants we find in the land of e pluribus unum The problem isn't any one man. It's the vibe—the ambiance of threat, cultivated over centuries and now wearing Oakleys and carrying protein powder in the same bag as their concealed carry.

You’ve got to admit, we’ve reached a special kind of low when the average American male has been outcompeted, in sheer approachability, by a carnivorous quadruped with a known tendency to maul. It's not just a failure of image. It's a failure of evolution. Women aren’t swiping left—they’re running full-speed into bear country with peanut butter in their pockets like it's a safer bet.

Let’s zoom out. This isn’t just about dating. It’s about trust—public trust in men as civic companions, co-workers, fellow bus riders. And that trust, friends, is in freefall. Like Blockbuster Video or democracy.

Blame what you want: incels, Andrew Tate, the algorithm that turns disaffected teenagers into pocket-sized Mussolinis. But the result is the same—an entire gender association now synonymous with menace. That’s not a PR crisis. That’s a civilization-level whoopsie.

And here’s where the dystopia creeps in on little cat feet. Because the same culture that shuns men in the woods celebrates them online—where the worst of them monetize grievance, weaponize loneliness, and pitch dating courses with the psychological complexity of a sledgehammer. We’re living in a time when “how to talk to women” is now a course—an industry!—as if basic empathy was some kind of lost martial art.

Meanwhile, Big Tech watches the show from above, monetizing the collapse. Every swipe, every rejection, every paranoid tweet is just another data point in the great machine learning model of the American apocalypse. Women afraid of men? Fantastic! That's clickbait. Men angry about women being afraid of them? Even better! That’s engagement. And bears? Bears don’t use Instagram, which makes them the most trustworthy creatures in the woods.

You see, in the eyes of our algorithmic overlords, there’s no such thing as dystopia—only data. And right now, the data says we trust wild animals more than each other. Which, frankly, sounds about right.

So next time you're out on a hike, and you spot something large, hairy, and vaguely dangerous in the distance, don't panic. Just ask yourself: Is that a grizzly... or just a man with a podcast?

Either way, don’t make eye contact. And for God’s sake, don’t feed them.

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Thanks to the FCC, and thanks to the defunding of public radio and PBS, I thank you for your direct support

CARY HARRISON: Well, here we are again, teetering on the jagged edge of progress like a drunk tightrope walker over a canyon full of terms and conditions. This is a special edition of the Cary Harrison File, still broadcasting from inside the belly of the algorithmic beast, armed with a microphone, a moral hangover, and just enough bandwidth to piss off the surveillance gods.

Today's flavor of dystopia, just the usual, governments gorging on your metadata like it's an all-you-can-eat buffet of broken privacy, tech billionaires trying to colonize Mars because Earth is too full of poor people, and a current government shoving culture through a blender until it sounds like a TikTok remix of Orwell and Huxley doing karaoke. But fear not, you sentient flesh pudding, you're not alone. We're all stumbling through this simulated reality together.

We're clutching our smartphones like digital rosaries, now that we have a new pope, praying to the church of the algorithm for one more dopamine hit before bedtime. And who better to help us navigate this beautifully absurd hellscape than a man who's seen the future firsthand from the bridge of a Federation starship. Joining us today is none other than Tim Russ. He's an actor, director, musician, space navigator, and a man of a thousand hats, all worn with elegance and exquisite competence.

You'll remember him as Tuvok from Star Trek Voyager, the only guy on that ship who didn't fall for every spatial anomaly or temporal paradox like it was a free cruise. But Tim's resume doesn't stop at space. He's composed music. He's directed FBI commercials. Yep, the FBI, and voiced more characters than your average hallucinating screenwriter. Tim is one of the most articulate and conscious advocates for common sense and human decency in the matrix that is now so upside down that a Presbyterian U.S. president has declared himself a Catholic pope. Mr. Russ brings some sobriety back to Twitter, X, and some sanity at a time when we all need more of it.

Tim Russ, I want to welcome you to the Cary Harrison Files.

TIM RUSS: Thank you very much, Cary. A pleasure to be here. Appreciate it. Thank you for the intro. It was volupt.

CARY HARRISON: Tim Russ, you've navigated black holes and bureaucracies. What's more dangerous to you, a Romulan warbird or the current level of propaganda and doublespeak raining down from D.C.?

TIM RUSS: Well, the thing about a Romulan warbird is that, you know, it's very clear, you know, that they're the bad guys and you're the good guys. And now it's no longer clear who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. The that's that's the main difference here is that, you know, the Romulan warbirds coming at you. You know what? It's pretty much laid out and clear what's going to happen and what it's all about. And now it's just, you know, nothing but mass confusion and disinformation. And and nobody knows what, you know, half the time knows what's real and what isn't real and what's what's A.I. and what isn't A.I. And, you know, so now today you can't even rely on what you're listening to or watching or hearing because you're not even sure if it's real.

CARY HARRISON: Yeah, there was an era where whatever we saw, you made. I mean, you directed your own Star Trek movie, and you had live human actors, and you had sets, and you had all of that stuff, because without you creating that, it wouldn't have been done. Now, you... they can efficiently replicate you and me. And sometimes we might not even know the difference. So it's a special kind of, I don't know, it's a dangerous trickery, especially you as a storyteller, as an imagine imagineer using a Disney term, but that's what you are as a creative.

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Thanks to the FCC, and thanks to the defunding of public radio and PBS, I thank you for your direct support!

The Cary Harrison Files’ Unzipped:

Welcome back to the only program brave enough to stare into the gaping mouth of modern society and say, “Is that breath or just moral rot?”

You’re listening to Unzipped’s Half the Effort, Twice the Nerve—the broadcast equivalent of a polite middle finger. Because these days, being helpful gets you treated like a vending machine: push a button, get your snack, walk away. No “thanks,” no “you didn’t have to,” just the vague expectation that you’ll be fully stocked next time they get a craving for convenience.

Somewhere along the digital highway, we swerved off gratitude and crashed straight into entitlement. You help someone move a couch, they ask if you can paint the walls. You loan them twenty, they come back for two hundred. And God help you if you ever say “no”—suddenly you’re the problem. The nerve.

And then there’s relationships—oh yes, let’s wade into that tar pit. We’ve been sold this slick little slogan that “relationships are 50/50.” Equal give and take, split down the middle like a pizza—no anchovies. But out here in the real world? One poor b*****d’s usually doing all the work while the other’s emotionally unavailable and thinks “reciprocation” is something that happens in biology class. Someone’s always scheduling, apologizing, explaining, holding the duct tape while the whole damn thing falls apart—and the reward? Being told you're "too much."

It’s exhausting. But sure—let’s all keep pretending we’re partners in this, even as one of you’s rowing and the other’s scrolling through motivational memes about “self-care” and “protecting your peace.”

So welcome… if you've ever been the one holding the bag, the phone, or the relationship together while the other party treats you like Siri with better manners.

Today, we speak loudly for the ones who are tired of being quiet, tired of being used, and just plain tired.