So Trump and Pete Hegseth call a meeting with war generals. What comes out of it? Pete announces, “no fatties, no beards.” Trump points at Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles and calls them war zones. Translation: the enemy is not a foreign state. The enemy is us. Ordinary people. Our neighbors. Our sons and daughters.
I am not interested in unpacking every revolting syllable of that shitshow right now. I will when it matters. What I am watching is the reflex reaction everyone keeps having. The hot take, the trending headline, the polite centrist demand that shows up immediately after every outrage: “He needs to be removed from office.”
Okay. Fine. Remove him. That is the bare minimum. It is not an answer. It does not change the fact that this man is the symptom, not the disease. He did not invent the machinery that lets politicians turn whole cities into boogeymen. He did not invent the courts that slow-roll accountability until the damage is permanent. He did not invent the media industry that profits from making everything louder. He is the most visible part of something that has been humming along long before he ever learned to read a teleprompter.
So while everyone screams for removal, we should also ask the sharper question. What are we actually trying to fix when we say “remove him”? Are we trying to return to the sound of polite governance, to the version of normal where a few people still get hurt quietly? Or are we going to admit that quiet violence was always violence, and then do the harder work of building something that does not run on fear and extraction?
The Good Old Days Were Never Good
This is where we are standing on the precipice of something so much bigger. Because when people say, “we just want things to go back to the way they were” back to no wars, back to healthcare, back to a time before the circus I need us to pause. That is the wrong approach.
What the fuck are we doing? That is the only real question left. People act like if we could just rewind back before Trump, things would feel safe again. Like the world only broke once he opened his mouth and stirred up chaos. But let’s jump in a time machine and be honest about 2016.
- Black kids were still being murdered by cops. Ferguson was not ancient history. Michael Brown was killed in 2014, and by 2016 Black Lives Matter protests were still filling the streets. Police were killing roughly 1,000 people a year, the same rate as today.
- Gaza was already blockaded and bleeding. Israel’s 2014 assault killed more than 2,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and the siege that strangled everyday life never lifted.
- Russia had already annexed Crimea in 2014. By 2016, war in eastern Ukraine had killed 10,000 people and displaced over a million.
- Mass shootings were not rare either. Sandy Hook in 2012. Charleston in 2015. Pulse nightclub in 2016. School lockdown drills were already a grim ritual for kids. Gun deaths had climbed past 36,000 a year.
- The Supreme Court had already gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, paving the way for new voter ID laws and mass purges of voter rolls.
- Trans women of color were already being murdered at epidemic rates. In 2015, at least 21 trans women, almost all Black or Latina, were killed.
And people were protesting all of it. The Standing Rock movement rose in 2016 against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Climate marches filled cities demanding urgent action. Workers in the Fight for 15 struck against starvation wages. Women’s marches and campus protests against sexual assault laid the groundwork for #MeToo. Students walked out over gun violence. Prison strikes began drawing attention to mass incarceration.
So no, the world was not “better.” The headlines were just quieter. The violence was the same. The resistance was already there too. It simply was not being livestreamed every five minutes or blasted across your feed by a president addicted to chaos.
The Machinery Was Built to Hurt You
When you strip Trump’s clown show away, you do not get a functioning, just system. You get the same machinery, running a little quieter, with slightly better rhetoric.
Democrats promise repair, but their version of “repair” is just reapplying polish. The machinery is still designed for extraction, hierarchy, and control. Let’s be clear about what that machinery actually is.
- A Constitution written by enslavers who called human beings property.
- An Electoral College built to protect slaveholding states.
- A Senate that gives Wyoming the same power as California.
- A Supreme Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act, legalized corporate personhood, and greenlit endless gerrymandering.
- Police forces that grew out of slave patrols.
- Prisons packed with Black and brown bodies to feed labor markets and private contracts.
- Indigenous land stolen, divided, and poisoned for profit.
- A healthcare system run like a casino where Big Pharma rigs the table.
We talk about “saving democracy,” but democracy for who? Wealthy white men wrote the rules to protect themselves. Everyone else - Black people, women, immigrants, queer people, Indigenous nations, disabled folks - had to claw their rights out inch by inch, nail by nail, against a machine that was never designed for them.
So if all we are trying to save is the same machine that feeds on us, what are we really fighting for?
California, the Liberal Fairytale
Take California. We are constantly branded as the most liberal, most progressive state in the country. Our governor leans hard into that image. He drags Republicans in soundbites, files lawsuits against oil companies and Big Pharma, and positions himself as the antidote to right-wing chaos. On paper it looks progressive. In practice it looks like this:
- He has pushed cities and counties to ban encampments, demanding ordinances that criminalize persistent camping or limit how long people can stay in one spot.
- He has threatened to withhold or cut funding from jurisdictions that fail to crack down on encampments.
- He routinely blames local governments for not “clearing their streets” or for misusing grants, shifting accountability downward.
- His administration frames enforcement as “taking back public space” from “unsafe, unhealthy” encampments.
And then what? The police still roll in to sweep unhoused communities, sometimes within hours of courts ruling those sweeps unconstitutional. Los Angeles spends billions more on policing than on housing. San Francisco clears tent communities before international conferences, not because housing appeared but because visibility embarrassed the wealthy.
So yes, this is the so-called most progressive state. This is the model others are told to admire. And the output is the same brutality: punishment for being poor, punishment for being sick, punishment for being disposable.
Meanwhile, “Breaking News” drops every 45 seconds. A new scandal, a new speech, a new lawsuit filed with great fanfare. But underneath the volume, the system has not changed. It is the same circus, the same playbook, the same ringmaster swapping costumes.
And that is what I hope you take away. This is not anything new. Do not let the volume trick you into thinking the danger is brand-new. Do not let the nostalgia trick you into thinking the old days were better. They were not.
Keep the Ideals, Trash the System
So what is worth keeping? A few ideals, yes. Free expression. Due process. Protection from arbitrary detention. Those principles are worth fighting for. But let’s be honest about the structure that has wrapped itself around them. The Electoral College was built to protect slave states. Lifetime judges were created to insulate the powerful from accountability. Corporate personhood handed human rights to businesses while stripping them from workers. Police were sold to us as “public safety” while functioning as punishment patrols for poverty and dissent. None of this was designed for freedom. It was designed to consolidate wealth, maintain hierarchy, and keep power locked in the hands of the few.
The ideals are worth keeping, but they do not live inside that system. They live in us. They live in people who are willing to demand them, defend them, and expand them far beyond the narrow boundaries the framers imagined.
If the goal is just to save the system, count me out. I am not here to polish the gears of a machine that has run on exploitation since the beginning. The question is not whether we can restore what we had. The question is whether we are ready to admit it was never just to begin with, and finally start building something of our own.
Because I do not know about you, but I believe we can do better. I believe we deserve better. My neighbors deserve better. My friends, my siblings, my children deserve better. And so do you.
Add comment
Comments
I love what youre doing here....You ckd out our SB Greens fb page and gave us a thumbs up. I messaged and friended you. Now Im asking you contact me cause we DEFINITELY need your passion, blogging and Instagram skills to help build the SB Greens into a political FORCE for elections, radical change, and community.
PLEEEZE give us a chance...see what we can do together.
Best......Donna