Aren’t Authoritarian Governments Usually More Competent Than This?

Agents of the U.S. government murdered a white American woman on January 7, 2026, just one day after the fifth anniversary of the MAGA attack on our Capitol building. Her name was Renèe Good. They murdered a Black American man on December 31, 2025. His name was Keith Powers. They’ve killed countless others over the years. Governmentally sanctioned violence is nothing new to our country, but this violence is different. Yes, it’s about racism, xenophobia, and a flailing, desperate attempt to hold onto power. But, it’s about more than that now. It’s about the blatant, unrepentant disregard of the United States’ laws, Constitution, and governing bodies, and about the disregard for international laws and norms. The people in power use authoritarian language and tactics to back it up. Our Congress has utterly abdicated their responsibility to the American people and the world. Our Supreme Court is much the same. Our separate, but co-equal branches of government, meant to act as checks and balances to one another have ceased to exist.

Our media uses passive language like falsehoods, misinformation, “she was killed” instead of “the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent murdered a woman,” because doing otherwise could trigger a libel lawsuit. They use editorial discretion to create a narrative that does not tell the full picture of the horror we know to be true. Attempts to be objective but also get those g*dd*mn clicks means they’ve given Trump far more press coverage than they’ve given others over the last decade.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to explain all of this, the danger we’re all witnessing unfold, for a couple of days now. How do you explain the revisionist history, the repetition of history to a society uninterested in even reading short articles, essays, stories, pieces? How do you get people to listen when the world is so damn loud and with the knowledge that opinions are like @ssholes, everybody’s got one? The social media era can be unifying and wonderful and help collapse systems of oppression. It is also a place where even the most uninformed can make a video or a tweet and if the algorithm picks it up, it can go viral and the entire world can see it. It’s often an echo chamber run by some of the worst people on earth. It’s run by men who grew up as nerds and now that they have money, they need the power too. They desperately want to be liked while doing things that ensure their place in history will be one of ignominy rather than reverence. And these men are aiding and abetting a government hellbent on destruction. We can all see that governmental decisions are meted out through Truth Social, X, and the like. We all see the horrifying, inhumane, and just vile posts put out by the official White House social media team, and various other U.S. government agencies.

2026 marks the 250^th anniversary of the United States of America. It may also be the year of the complete collapse of our already tenuous, so-called democracy. Trump intends to mark this anniversary with a cage match on the lawn of the White House and the newly created “Patriot Games” where each state is supposed to send one male and one female high school athlete to participate in some kind of athletic competition, as yet to be determined. The Trump administration has read The Hunger Games as a manual rather than a cautionary tale.  It boggles the mind, but it doesn’t surprise any of us.

Everyone outside of the United States who believes this is horrible or that Americans don’t understand the implications of this utter insanity or that we somehow deserve this, please know that 74 million Americans did not vote for Trump. 74 million. Yet somehow, we still have to figure out how to end this before they end us. We absolutely do understand the ramifications of his, and this entire administration’s actions. We are well aware of the horror and terror and we are sorry. We are trying. Our government is actively murdering and jailing people for dissenting. It feels dystopian, but here we are.

I said we need to drop copies of The Diary of Anne Frank to every American and my dad said, “Even if we did, people wouldn’t read it.” That’s the scary truth of it all.