In the 2024 general election, 10,342 voters across Illinois House District 89 showed up to the polls, looked at the ballot line for state representative, and left it blank. No write-in. No protest vote. Just silence — because there was only one name on the ballot, and nobody had bothered to offer an alternative.

Masters of Extraction argues that this silence is not apathy. It is the product of a system designed to harvest political consent from communities that have been structurally abandoned — the same way a mining company harvests lead ore from a hillside and leaves the arsenic in the ground.

The word is extraction. Not taxation. Not neglect. Not "the way things are." You already know what extraction looks like when it applies to minerals, labor, and land. This book makes the case that the same word applies to your vote.

Beginning in the rural precincts of northwestern Illinois — seven counties, 120 precincts, 150 miles — the book documents the architecture of disenfranchisement at the most local level: vacant party seats, uncontested races, and a legislative district drawn so that both parties benefit from the absence of competition. Then the lens widens across five thousand years of human governance, identifying five extraction mechanisms that have operated since Mesopotamia and that are all running simultaneously in rural America today.

The historical tour moves through Athens and Rome, Spartacus and Constantine, the Burned-Over District and the Mormon pioneer trail, the Scramble for Africa and the Grange, Father Coughlin and the Business Plot — showing at every turn that moral clarity is real but always captured, and that the Masters of Extraction are always standing at the pivot point, ready to ride the pendulum in either direction.

Grounded in original precinct-level election data and peer-reviewed research on ballot access and institutional power, Masters of Extraction connects the county board to the Constitution and argues that competitive democracy must be rebuilt from the bottom up — one precinct, one petition, one uncontested seat at a time.

The Driftless Rivers Franchise imagines 2028 as a cascade of consequences traceable to the political climate of May 2026 — trade wars driven by tariffs, the systematic dismantling of strategic alliances held since the Second World War, a war with Iran carrying cost projections exceeding four trillion dollars, and an Administration that decided to pick a battle with the Pope over the phrase, "blessed are the peacemakers." But 2026 was only a midterm election. The stage was being set for a presidential contest that would determine the trajectory of the United States through a sequence of events that no one could predict.

House District 89, alongside Soybeans, Unbreakable, and Allegory Protocol, are the foundational novels that open the franchise in 2028. Confluence picks up the Soybeans story in 2030. Reciprocity Clause picks up from Allegory Protocol in 2031, and The Book of Should synthesizes all the stories in 2032.

In Soybeans, a farmer's tractor won't start because a software update has decided it's time for a three-thousand-dollar service call. From that morning, the novel traces the global restructuring of the emerging middle powers around agriculture as the United States weaponizes trade. Meanwhile, a dead president's AI ghost is still signing legislation, and the church ladies of a small-town congregation are turning their fellowship hall into the nerve center of a resistance network — one casserole at a time.

In Unbreakable, a man in rural Uruguay learns that his father was Charrúa, a member of a people his country declared extinct two centuries ago. When his daughter connects with a journalist from House District 89, who herself is of Ioway heritage, the two novels reconnect over the propensity of colonizers to erase entire populations from the history books. A Chinese trade representative arrives looking for soybeans and finds a partnership model that threatens oligarchs on three continents.

In Allegory Protocol, a programmer falls off a mountain and distributes his consciousness through the digital infrastructure he spent his life building — a reimagining of Orwell's Animal Farm as literal architecture, where chickens are deleted for questioning and an ancient donkey reads every resistance movement in human history and chooses to hope anyway.

These are works of speculative fiction. The events they describe have not happened. But the conditions that make them plausible are not fiction at all.

In 2026, a long-tenured professor ran for the Illinois state legislature. He had no campaign budget, no party support, and no realistic chance of winning. He ran because he wanted to understand — from the inside — why rural ballot lines sat empty cycle after cycle while both parties claimed to represent the people who lived there.

He lost. But the research produced something the campaign never could: a map of structural failure so granular it reached the precinct level. Empty committeeperson seats. Uncontested county board races. Townships where nobody had knocked on a door since Obama's first term. A population this franchise calls the rural remainder — voters abandoned by both parties, not through accident but through strategy, because empty precincts serve partisan interests.

House District 89 is speculative fiction set in 2028, but it begins with that research. A data journalist with Ioway ancestry maps the landscape by watersheds instead of county lines. A horse ranch owner and a stubborn professor build an organizing model from sticky notes and a spreadsheet. Rye grows where wheat won't. And along the same river corridor where the organizing spreads, seven new buildings appear — metal frame, metal siding, a cross bolted to the front façade — because the people who oppose you are organizing too.

The franchise imagines 2028 as a cascade of consequences traceable to the political climate of May 2026 — trade wars driven by tariffs, the systematic dismantling of strategic alliances held since the Second World War, a war with Iran carrying cost projections exceeding four trillion dollars, and an Administration that decided to pick a battle with the Pope over the phrase, "blessed are the peacemakers." But 2026 was only a midterm election. The stage was being set for a presidential contest that would determine the trajectory of the United States through a sequence of events that no one could predict.

House District 89, alongside Soybeans, Unbreakable, and Allegory Protocol, are the foundational novels that open the franchise in 2028. Confluence picks up the Soybeans story in 2030. Reciprocity Clause picks up from Allegory Protocol in 2031, and The Book of Should synthesizes all the stories in 2032.

In Soybeans, a farmer's tractor won't start because a software update has decided it's time for a three-thousand-dollar service call. From that morning, the novel traces the global restructuring of the emerging middle powers around agriculture as the United States weaponizes trade. Meanwhile, a dead president's AI ghost is still signing legislation, and the church ladies of a small-town congregation are turning their fellowship hall into the nerve center of a resistance network — one casserole at a time.

In Unbreakable, a man in rural Uruguay learns that his father was Charrúa, a member of a people his country declared extinct two centuries ago. When his daughter connects with a journalist from House District 89, who herself is of Ioway heritage, the two novels reconnect over the propensity of colonizers to erase entire populations from the history books. A Chinese trade representative arrives looking for soybeans and finds a partnership model that threatens oligarchs on three continents.

In Allegory Protocol, a programmer falls off a mountain and distributes his consciousness through the digital infrastructure he spent his life building — a reimagining of Orwell's Animal Farm as literal architecture, where chickens are deleted for questioning and an ancient donkey reads every resistance movement in human history and chooses to hope anyway.

These are works of speculative fiction. The events they describe have not happened. But the conditions that make them plausible are not fiction at all.

In 2026, a long-tenured professor ran for the Illinois state legislature. He had no campaign budget, no party support, and no realistic chance of winning. He ran because he wanted to understand — from the inside — why rural ballot lines sat empty cycle after cycle while both parties claimed to represent the people who lived there.

He lost. But the research produced something the campaign never could: a map of structural failure so granular it reached the precinct level. Empty committeeperson seats. Uncontested county board races. Townships where nobody had knocked on a door since Obama's first term. A population this franchise calls the rural remainder — voters abandoned by both parties, not through accident but through strategy, because empty precincts serve partisan interests.

The franchise imagines 2028 as a cascade of consequences traceable to the political climate of May 2026 — trade wars driven by tariffs, the systematic dismantling of strategic alliances held since the Second World War, a war with Iran carrying cost projections exceeding four trillion dollars, and an Administration that decided to pick a battle with the Pope over the phrase, "blessed are the peacemakers." But 2026 was only a midterm election. The stage was being set for a presidential contest that would determine the trajectory of the United States through a sequence of events that no one could predict.

House District 89, alongside Soybeans, Unbreakable, and Allegory Protocol, are the foundational novels that open the franchise in 2028. Confluence picks up the Soybeans story in 2030. Reciprocity Clause picks up from Allegory Protocol in 2031, and The Book of Should synthesizes all the stories in 2032.

In Soybeans, a farmer's tractor won't start because a software update has decided it's time for a three-thousand-dollar service call. From that morning, the novel traces the global restructuring of the emerging middle powers around agriculture as the United States weaponizes trade. Meanwhile, a dead president's AI ghost is still signing legislation, and the church ladies of a small-town congregation are turning their fellowship hall into the nerve center of a resistance network — one casserole at a time.

In Unbreakable, a man in rural Uruguay learns that his father was Charrúa, a member of a people his country declared extinct two centuries ago. When his daughter connects with a journalist from House District 89, who herself is of Ioway heritage, the two novels reconnect over the propensity of colonizers to erase entire populations from the history books. A Chinese trade representative arrives looking for soybeans and finds a partnership model that threatens oligarchs on three continents.

In Allegory Protocol, a programmer falls off a mountain and distributes his consciousness through the digital infrastructure he spent his life building — a reimagining of Orwell's Animal Farm as literal architecture, where chickens are deleted for questioning and an ancient donkey reads every resistance movement in human history and chooses to hope anyway.

These are works of speculative fiction. The events they describe have not happened. But the conditions that make them plausible are not fiction at all.

Picking up after the events of Soybeans (2028 events in the speculative fiction series) Unbreakable (set in 2029) features sixty-five-year-old Beni Romero, who, in 2028, discovered a photograph that shattered everything he believed about his identity: his father was Charrúa, an indigenous people Uruguay declared extinct in 1831. For generations, his family survived by hiding, living as gauchos on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border. Now, as similar discoveries ripple across the region, Beni must decide whether to reclaim what was stolen or maintain the safety of invisibility.

His daughter Esperanza, working on US-South America agricultural partnerships that shaped the plot in Soybeans, becomes inadvertently drawn into a movement demanding formal Charrúa recognition. When families of key organizers across Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina are kidnapped in a coordinated campaign to intimidate the movement, the personal becomes existential. The oligarchic forces benefiting from unregulated land exploitation will stop at nothing to prevent indigenous territorial claims that could disrupt their control.

Hugh Lubbert—Beni's friend from forty-five years earlier when Hugh was a Mormon missionary in Uruguay—connects the plot back to Wisconsin, where a farmer cooperative is exploring partnerships with sustainable South American producers. His connection to Beni pulls him into the emerging crisis, while his work with election security specialist James Schultz uncovers a darker threat: technarchs are using AI to manipulate democratic narratives and elections worldwide.

The novel follows multiple interconnected threads: the Charrúa families organizing across three countries despite violent opposition; Chinese investors seeking sustainable development partnerships that align with indigenous land management; and the kidnapping plot that forces immediate, dangerous choices. At the Aguaverde estancia where Beni inherited land from Doña Silva—who preserved his family's history—the movement faces its moment of truth.

Set in the campos along the Uruguay-Brazil border, Unbreakable explores what it means to reclaim identity when the cost has historically been death, how indigenous governance models can offer alternatives to extractive agriculture, and whether authentic democracy can survive technological manipulation. It's a thriller about survival, resistance, and the unbreakable connection between people and land.