How To Crack Down On Corrupt Politicians? Make Them Pay. Literally

During the first season of the HBO series True Detective, Matthew McConaughey’s dark, brooding, philosophical character, Rust Cohle, discusses his theory of time in a famous scene that has since become an internet meme. “Time,” he says, “is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.” Cohle is a Louisiana state detective investigating a string of gruesome murders connected to some kind of cult, but the case has gone cold, with the real killer still on the loose. Scarred by the trauma of losing his own child years ago, and worn down by heavy drinking, Cohle says that “nothing ever gets solved” and that life is an absurd, inescapable loop. His character is monstrously pessimistic, if you couldn’t tell.

But if there was any sentiment that could best capture how normal Americans today feel about politics — particularly how they feel about it one month out from a midterm or presidential election that determines the balance of power in Washington, D.C. — it is fair to say that Rust Cohle’s pessimism captures it to a tee. Over and over and over again, Americans elect politicians because they say one thing and that one thing sounds good (maybe too good). But the moment candidates assume office, they, for whatever reason, either quietly renege on this promise or flagrantly betray it. Usually, donors or special interest groups are involved, pulling invisible strings behind the scenes. Sometimes, as is well known, candidates just lie straight through their teeth.

Software developer, media executive, and co-founder of Black Rifle Coffee, Richard Ryan, has an explanation for why politicians can get Americans “so angry, upset, and motivated to get out and vote” every single time, but then three months later, break virtually every campaign promise they made on the trail. Sure, maybe time is a flat circle. Or maybe it’s that “talk is cheap,” Ryan says.

In an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller, Ryan breaks down how political campaigns exploit social media algorithms, whipping Americans into a polarized “frenzy,” and how this endless dynamic plays into the hands of special interest groups while allowing politicians to keep winning re-election despite glaring failures. He is also bringing a unique solution to the table. He wants to make politicians pay. Literally.

Ryan moved to Los Angeles in the early 2000s to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. He performed stand-up comedy and went to auditions but grew frustrated by Hollywood gatekeepers and the constant need to “ask permission” to be creative. When YouTube and the iPhone were released, he decided to leave it behind. He taught himself programming and later built successful apps and brands, catching the attention of both YouTube and Google’s parent company, Alphabet. He launched a daily editorial news company for Verizon Media and Hearst Publications. In 2019, he co-founded the popular coffee company Black Rifle Coffee, which was taken public three years later at a $1.7 billion valuation. There, he worked as Chief Marketing Officer.

Suffice it to say, Ryan knows the ins and outs of social media and content marketing – what is often referred to as the “attention economy.” He also understands how the attention economy and Big Tech companies exploit our psychology in subtle but highly manipulative ways that ultimately shape our consumer and voting habits.

“I started becoming consumed with incentives and trying to figure out problems within society,” Ryan told the Daily Caller, referencing a famous quote from the late investor Charlie Munger: “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.”

“One of the big issues around social media and the attention economy is that we have 20 to 30 years of machine learning and the exploitation of neurochemistry. Billions and billions of dollars have been spent on research on gambling, addiction, and all these things to make the digital experience so addictive,” Ryan said. “It’s been refined, and one of the most effective tools is the negative bias tendency in humans — the twig snapping in the savannah, that primitive threat mechanism. That’s what elicits people’s attention and keeps them on the platform.”

As he conducted research for his 2025 book, The Warrior’s Garden: Tools for Guarding Your Mind Against Big Tech, Ryan began to think about other areas of American life in which algorithmic fear-mongering plays a huge, albeit detrimental, role. The answer came to him almost immediately: politics.

“If you look at any campaigns in America right now, you see fear campaigns,” he told the Daily Caller. “Whether or not it’s intentional is irrelevant: it’s what happens. If you look at the campaign spending of super PACs, PACs, and campaigns, I would say the statistical majority of them are negative towards the opponent, not positive for the candidate. It’s, ‘Vote for me, otherwise the evil threat that you don’t like or you’re afraid of is going to get into office and impact your life.’”

In Ryan’s view, this allows politicians — from local municipalities to the highest reaches of federal government – to virtually do nothing for their constituents while in office — except for, say, serving special interest groups and deep-pocketed donors who financed their campaigns — and keep Americans woefully divided and shut out of the political system.

“They’ll say anything that they can to get elected, because once they get the vote, the name of the game is raising money,” Ryan said, pointing out that polarization and the “divide and conquer” strategy are “counterproductive” for society as a whole but “extremely beneficial for special interests.”

Is there any fix? Can people, as Ryan says, “put the power back into the voter’s hand?” Or are Americans resigned to “doomer takes” and political business-as-usual forever? Ryan believes it’s possible, and for about two years now, he has worked on an initiative to bring more accountability and transparency to American politics. It’s called CivicBond, which Ryan describes as a neutral, third-party “marketplace of promises.”

The idea is to get political candidates, whether they are running for the local city council or a seat in Congress, to back up their campaign promises with their own money.

As Ryan outlined in a YouTube video, a participating candidate would pick a specific, measurable promise — for example, never voting to extend Section 702 of FISA, never approving a budget over a set percentage of GDP, or never signing an NDA on matters affecting constituents — and deposit their money into escrow held by a neutral third party. Independent referees would then track their actual votes and official actions throughout their term. At the end of the term, if the promise was kept, the candidate gets the money back. If the promise was broken, the money goes to a pre-chosen charity. And if a court order, new law, or genuinely unforeseen events make the original promise unworkable, referees can rule that it was not a broken promise.

“It could be something around firearms, Flock, abortion laws, or whatever,” Ryan told the Daily Caller. “It just can’t be illegal. It can’t be like, ‘Whenever I become a city council member, I’ll blow up town hall.’ It has to be something that’s within the control of the candidate and not ambiguous. If they can’t veto, sign a bill, or propose a bill, then it doesn’t make sense to have that as something that they would enter into an agreement for.”

Ryan emphasized that it is a voluntary system and “completely apolitical,” and that he would act as a neutral third party. How much money a candidate deposits would also be revealing.

“I would hope that the constituents and voters of a district would say, ‘Okay, I’m looking at the dollar amount. I know that person’s worth a lot more, so this is just lip service,’” Ryan said. “But if it’s a city council member working two jobs making $60,000 - $70,000 a year, and they offer up $3,000 in a bond, that’s 5% of their annual income. That’s a meaningful amount of money for somebody working two jobs. The bond structure shifts it back to: ‘Okay, this person’s not willing to talk publicly and have a debate with their opponent, and they’re not willing to get bonded? They’re clearly a puppet in some way or trying to play the game.’”

It’s simple, brilliant even. Among citizens who do not participate in the political shenanigans of Washington, D.C., state capitals, and city halls, it would be wildly popular. But Ryan told the Daily Caller he has faced some legal hurdles.

“I started stress testing it with election attorneys, and then pushing back and forth with the FEC [Federal Election Commission] trying out these things,” he said. “The conclusion was that you couldn’t do that because the terms of the operating agreement and everything would be in breach of campaign finance laws.”

However, when he brought the CivicBond structure to his team of attorneys, Ryan said their reaction was more positive. “They’re like, ‘Oh wow, this hasn’t been done before. There’s no legal precedent, but yeah, that would work. Let us talk to the FEC,’ because every state’s different with their own campaign and election laws, and then there’s the federal level.”

Ryan still needs help from the public — city council members, voters in specific areas that offer up candidates, candidates that want to do something, or advocacy groups that want to define promises — to make his initiative work.

“Based on the advice of my legal counsel, I shouldn’t define those promises myself,” he stressed. They’ve advised me that initially, I can define a few promises if advocacy groups or individuals don’t come forward to offer them up. But I need to make sure that I’m hands-off as much as possible regarding the people offering up the promises, and then candidates can voluntarily come to me.”

So far, Ryan noted, he has a potential congressional candidate and a candidate running for a state House seat intrigued by the project. He plans to keep churning out content, gauging the public’s interest, and hopes the “level of gamification” can lead to civic excitement and get otherwise cynical voters engaged in the political process, particularly at the local level, where Ryan believes the most positive changes can occur. He ultimately wants to build “a Palantir-style government tracker of promises, who your representatives are, and how they’re voting on different things.”

“Sunlight disinfects, and we’ve got a really unhealthy ecosystem right now that is extracting a lot of value from the people without providing the value it should,” he said. “The fact remains that people right now are so unmotivated to vote because they feel like they’re being emotionally manipulated and gaslit, and nothing’s ever going to get done other than their taxes going up, their dollar going down, and getting screwed in some way.”

But if Americans remain trapped in this same state of bitter polarization, the middle class shrinks, and economic divides worsen, Ryan fears civil unrest is all but inevitable.

“As someone with a family, and I think for anybody who has anything that they care about — be it kids, dogs, loved ones in any capacity — you’re doing yourself a disservice by being a doomer and waiting for the ship to hit the iceberg,” Ryan said. “My concern with all these pessimistic views is everybody knows we’re going towards an iceberg. If you have a family, or something you care about — if you love your country or your community — we’re going towards something that is not going to be good.”

Maybe CivicBond can change that; help steer the ship just enough to avoid the iceberg.

“If we can shift a little bit of power to the voter here, I think it would fundamentally change American politics for the better, take power away from the super PACs, and give it back to the voters,” Ryan said.