New York City: The Extraction Engine, the Extreme Center, and the Hollowing of Oklahoma City or Dasha Nekrasova vs. Woody Guthrie

New York City. The city of the world. The city that devours. It tells you it's the cradle of culture, of greatness, of voices that matter, of people who shape history. But listen. Really listen. You can hear the hum of the machines underneath. The gears grinding. The sucking sound of everything being pulled toward it. Ideas. Bodies. Money. Meaning. And what does it leave behind? Nothing. Just the bone. The husk. Places like Oklahoma. People like us. Left to rot while they toast each other on rooftops in Manhattan, drinking cocktails named after extinct birds.

And somewhere in this parade of the absurd is Dasha Nekrasova. She slips into the frame like a joke everyone’s in on but you. The Sailor Socialist. The one who made irony look sincere and sincerity look like a joke. She showed up with big eyes and a voice like smoke and said something clever on InfoWars, and everyone clapped and shared it and called it radical. And then the turn. Always the turn. Red Scare goes from pink-hued aesthetics and Bernie love to Peter Thiel-funded farce. She became a reactionary muse. Because in New York, that’s what they do. They chew you up. They spit you out. And you become what they need. Something to gawk at. Something to sell.

I saw it happening. It’s always happening. Just like it did here. In Oklahoma. Before the press releases. Before the vibrant rebranding. Before Mayor David Holt and his LinkedIn-optimized heart started posing with Thunder mascots and property developers. This place had fire. It had teeth. You want to talk socialism? You want to talk populism? Talk about the tenant farmers with sunburned arms who passed around worn-out union pamphlets. Talk about the Green Corn Rebellion. About the folks who said no to war, no to bosses, no to being chewed up and forgotten. We had that here. We lived it. It bled in our soil. And now. Now it’s PowerPoints and tax-increment finance districts. Now it’s restaurants with single-syllable names and unaffordable, unpronounceable dishes.

The same way New York took Dasha and made her hollow, they took Oklahoma City and turned it into an Airbnb host’s dream. Something they could sell. Something they could show their friends at conferences. This used to be a place with memory. With history. But now it’s clean. So clean it squeaks. It’s all brand and no blood. They paved over everything and told us it was progress.

David Holt. The mayor of portfolio management. Up dancing on a bar in New York City, drink in hand, talking about the Thunder like it was his stock pick of the week. This is where he’d rather be. Of course it is. Oklahoma City is a step on the ladder. Not a place to love. Not a place to fight for. Just something to polish for his next interview. And the worst part is, we let him. Because we’re tired. Because we’ve been gutted. Because we don’t know what else to do.

And then there’s Penn Square Bank. The bank that flew too close to the flame. All that oil money, all those dreams. And then the crash. The quiet collapse of a whole economy. New York cleaned up, got out, left us bleeding. Again. And again. And again. Philip Zweig wrote it down in "Belly Up," but nobody learned from it, Or they did and shrugged. Or they treated it like Michael Lewis' "Liars Poker" and made it a how to manual. Because this is the machine. This is how it works. And right there, in the middle of it, was Meg Salyer. Back then she went by Meg Sipperly. A transplant from New York. Fresh-faced and eager to fit in. She rode the wave of that banking bubble, part of the machinery that inflated the dream and helped it rupture. And instead of vanishing with the rest of them, she dug in. Rebranded. And resurfaced. As a city councilor, ensuring we stayed the course. That we followed the plan. The plan that never came from us. And now she’s everywhere. On art boards. Nonprofit boards. School foundations. Always smiling. Always saying the right things. Always helping the right people. The right people being not us. People with names that smell like law firms. People who use the word community like a marketing hook. She’s the face they use to soften the blow. And we’re still paying for it.

(Salyer, pictured at a Council event declaring some stupid art council deal..she told
me to go fuck myself right before I took this picture. Nice gal.)

And then the bombing. 1995. I was waiting tables at Abuelo’s, a couple streets down. The smoke. The screams. The blood. And the cameras. New York media swarmed in like it was a show. Connie Chung asking if we could handle it. If we were capable. As if we were animals poking at fire for the first time. As if we hadn’t been through hell already. But they didn’t want to know. They wanted a story. And they got it. And then they left. Just like they always do.

And then Jeffrey Toobin. The guy who couldn’t keep it together on a Zoom call. Comes to town to write a book about the bombing. About McVeigh. About how it all led to January 6. Like we’re a prophecy. Like we’re a warning. But he doesn’t talk about Holt. Doesn’t talk about the Chamber of Commerce. Doesn’t talk about the real extremists. The extreme center. The ones in suits. The ones who sell off the city piece by piece and call it investment. Toobin saw the smoke but never looked at what was burning.

(Toobin speaking at the OKC bombing memorial being weird with his hands)

They all do this. They come here, they take what they want, they leave. And we’re left picking up the pieces. I had a Supreme Court case. Jay Barnett helped me fight back after they tried to keep me off the city council. And when we won, they had to make the decision to not take jurisdiction. An absolute farce. Then the so called newspaper gave it a blurb after the fact. A single paragraph. Because Gannett doesn’t care. Because Fortress Investment Group owns them. Because New York owns everything.

(Me & Jay at the County Election board hearing that turned me down, Probably due to the high number of Chamber of Commerce jerks in attendance, forcing us to
take the case to the State Supreme Court)

We are ruled by ghosts. By distant hands. By algorithms in Manhattan that decide what food stamps look like in Tulsa. We are governed by private equity firms that don’t know the names of our streets and bulldoze senior living facilities, perhaps for building a rental home neighborhood or selling the property to the highest bidder. And all the people that lost their lives shortly after being kicked out, it doesn't matter. No one cared. They might have if it was reported like it should have been but of course it wouldn't since Holt at the time worked for a private equity firm, Hall Capital, that was probably friendly with Welltower Capital. And all the while, the faces they give us—the Dashas, the Holts—smile like mascots for the end of the world.

If we want to break this. If we want to have something left. We have to fight. We have to reclaim our stories. We have to say no. Not just once. But every day. We have to break the machine. Pull out the gears. Smash the teeth. Because if we don’t, then this ends like it always does. With another bankruptcy. Another bombing. Another podcast episode that pretends to care.

I’m not asking you to believe in miracles. I’m asking you to remember. Remember what this place was. Remember who we were before the moral filth of NYC asset stripped the City. And fight like hell to make it matter again.