They Want Us Dead
Acclimation to mass death—and the devaluing of humanity in general—is their primary purpose
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by Josh Caress
Have you noticed something changing? That feeling inside you that burns against injustice and hurts with empathy—has it been feeling different lately? I don’t believe in the inevitability of doom, so I don’t think that’s what it is, but there’s something new in my reactions to the constant stream of news I’ve lost the adjectives to describe.
During Trump’s first term, I think it was easier for a lot of us to believe that whatever he’d unleashed could be stopped through electoral means. That the people who promised to unfuck the situation really meant it. I’ll admit it was naive, though it was the hope a lot of us clung to. But the impunity of Trump under Biden, along with the deadly throughline from Covid to Gaza, rattled a new kind of awareness in me, a sort of first stage of recognition I call “No One is Coming to Save Us.”
Now we’re here in 2026, and it’s surreal to watch people roll out familiar talking points and reactions to the horrors happening every day. The normalization of things we’re not used to naming and therefore don’t really have common words for.
What do you call a federal “law enforcement” apparatus that targets children and families by the thousands based on their apparent ethnicity, separates them, sends them to concentration camps, moves them around to dodge court orders, then puts them on chartered planes—shackled the whole time—and sends them on flights around the world to dump them in countries they’ve never been to or somewhere they're likely to die?
Except sometimes they don’t do that. Sometimes they just let them starve, or withhold medical attention, or rape them, or release them blind in the cold to die. Sometimes they do let them go home. But sometimes they illegally send them to another country’s torture prison and then stage photo shoots of how awfully they’re being treated because there are people in our country who think that is awesome. Oh, and they also shoot people dead in the street for trying to help. What do you call this?
And of course all that is just “one thing” the government is doing right now, in addition to taking away voting rights, banning abortion, cutting life-saving aid to hundreds of thousands around the world, gutting our health care system, handing government taxpayer databases over to tech companies, raiding the treasury, dismantling our public health apparatus, defunding public education, stripping away food benefits for millions of poor people (and bragging about it), firing thousands of federal employees for not being white males, targeting trans Americans as “terrorists,” attacking care work, defunding scientific research, increasing student loan payments, greenlighting environmental destruction, creating a slush fund for the president’s most aggrieved supporters, halting refugee programs and importing white racists instead, overthrowing a foreign government on a whim and kidnapping its leader, blockading another country while its population has no electricity, blowing up fishing boats in international waters then killing the survivors for fun—all this before mentioning the tariffs, the Hormuz blockade, and the war on Iran that continues to kill innocent people (including over 100 schoolchildren in one bombing) while raising the cost of just about everything we need to survive.
See what I mean? There aren’t simple words that encompass all of this.
The word “fascism” gets tossed around, but the average person doesn’t really know what it means beyond “bad guys.” I’m not even sure it’s the best word for this anyway. Trump is not really a nationalist. He doesn’t give two shits about “making America great,” but it’s useful for him, and it appeals to the actual nationalists, sure.
Trump himself is a kleptocrat. He is stealing from us in ways and in quantities we may never even know. As writer Sarah Kendzior likes to say, he’s “stripping down the country and selling it for parts.” But of course he’s stealing more than money. He’s stolen whatever soul America had, leaving nothing but the original genocidal sadism of Christopher Columbus himself.
Meanwhile, we have an “opposition party” that can’t even agree on unconditionally blocking funding for any of this. Democratic leadership has decided the harms of this administration can be summed up by the word “affordability,” while the real villains are anyone on the left who criticizes them.
By design, all of this is so overwhelming it’s hard to even keep track of. There’s been a very healthy instinct among empathetic writers and reporters to highlight the human cost, to profile individual stories in the hopes of universalizing them and helping us see the victims as human. I don’t want to diminish that instinct, because we’ll need it to survive this. But there are too many stories and too many victims, and everything is moving so fast that we run the risk of missing the enormity of the moment we’re in.
Perhaps surprisingly, the most clarifying thing for me has been the uncritical embrace of AI by the entire ruling and elite class. Seemingly overnight, everyone—the White House, billionaire tech CEOs, scammy crypto bros, stuffy corporations, Republican power brokers, establishment Democrats, progressive Democrats, elite universities, even major Hollywood figures—began parroting the same message: AI is here, it’s inevitable, we will force it into absolutely everything, and it will replace all your jobs.
Even if the promises of AI technology were true (they’re not), this seems like an ominous alignment of the power structure. What is it about AI that they all agree on? And why now, at this particular moment, while everything seems to be falling apart? There’s a nihilism about it, isn’t there? Forget climate change, we can’t stop it now. Forget water shortages, we need the data centers more than we need people. Forget consent, we’ll just take whatever we need. Forget creative work and the humanities, those people were all mean to us anyway.
When you put this together with everything else we’re seeing—the abandonment of marginalized populations, the attack on all forms of social welfare—something doesn’t add up. As Trump’s approval numbers drop lower and lower, I keep having this thought: They don’t think they need to win elections anymore. What’s more, Democratic leadership doesn’t seem to be panicking about this. The familiar American methods of dissent and resistance—elections, pressuring public officials, boycotts, protests, strikes—do any of these things have currency against a power structure that’s decided it doesn’t need us?
Finally, another thought occurred to me, one that I think crystallizes the threat of the moment in ways that “facism” cannot. It’s not that we don’t need to keep pushing each other to care about other people—we do. And I think far more of us do care than we are led to believe. What we need to let go of is the idea that we will make the people in power care. They do not, and they will not. They cannot be convinced, they must be overthrown. Because the crystallizing truth is: They want us dead.
These are the stakes, and I don’t believe it’s doomerism to say so. Rather, I believe we need to embrace these stakes so that our courage to fight can match what we’re fighting for—everything we are, everything we love, everything that makes life worth living. As some guys from my generation warned us back at the dawn of the millennium, We’re not scaremongering, this is really happening. (Maybe don’t ask them their thoughts on genocide though).
So what is it that’s really happening? And how did we get to this point?
The Vision of the New Elite
When Trump first came to power in 2016, there was a journalistic boom in political reporting, as we were introduced to a whole cast of new characters most of us were not yet familiar with. These stories were often presented with a grimly salacious appeal. Remember the rollout of Richard Spencer and the alt-right? Did you know there are young Nazis who wear sharp suits and look kind of cool actually? There was Steve Bannon and his affinity for Darth Vader and Satan, Stephen Miller and his ties to white nationalists, Sean Spicer’s inauguration meltdown over the size of the crowd, and Kellyanne Conway defending him with “alternative facts.”
As foreboding as some of these omens definitely were, the media played it up as a circus-like atmosphere, casting Trump as the “reality TV president” and measuring his ridiculousness in “Scaramuccis.” What else could they do with this new regime that so brazenly lied to and insulted them while behaving like bumbling cartoon villains? It was all a fever dream, right? A kind of funhouse nightmare? Surely we’d get back to “normal” soon.
Nearly ten years on, nobody’s having fun anymore. Most journalists with any credibility have been run out of the legacy outlets, and the rotting husk of mainstream media has turned from bemused disaster porn to something even worse—total complicity. So it might be somewhat understandable if the gravity of our current situation has not yet been made clear to you. Namely, you know, that these people want us dead.
Back in those pre-Covid years, we hadn’t yet been introduced to the MAHA cult of RFK, Jr., or subjected to the spectacle of Elon Musk’s “Dark MAGA.” At the beginning of Trump’s first term, Silicon Valley still appeared to be hedging their bets, letting the public continue to view them as socially liberal libertarians—if not benevolent visionaries. But there was one tech billionaire who had thrown his lot in with Trump via campaign contributions and public support: Peter Thiel.
Amidst the stories of various oligarchs responding to Trump’s election by building outlandish bunkers to survive an apocalyptic collapse, Mark O’Connell wrote a deeply reported piece for The Guardian about Thiel. This tech lord wasn’t so much hiding from the apocalypse as he was cheering it on. O’Connell describes the endgame of Thiel’s worldview:
Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a “cognitive elite” will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends.
Since then, this vision, once shared secretly among the Silicon Valley elite, has been proclaimed more or less out in the open—although it’s typically covered in heavy layers of either techno-optimism or techno-pessimism, depending on your taste. Elon Musk’s overbearing public presence over the past few years has seemingly encouraged others to step out from behind the shroud of the Silicon Valley mythos and make themselves known. So now we’ve been subjected to more and more public ramblings from guys like Larry Page, Marc Andreesen, Jaron Lanier, Alex Karp, and their supposed guru, Curtis Yarvin (also cited as a major influence on JD Vance, whose political career was launched by Thiel).
I’m focusing on these men to emphasize the big picture here. These are not the “odd beliefs” of “eccentric” rich guys. These are the stated goals of the wealthiest and most powerful people on earth, who have spent the last decade putting themselves in positions of direct influence over governments around the world, especially the United States. While hiding behind techno-philosophical monikers like “futurism,” longtermism, or Effective Altruism, the common ideology motivating these men is domination through eugenics.
To put it simply, these men profess to believe—initially in private, but now more openly—in the eugenic principles that intelligence is both genetic and racial, and that the enlightened elite (themselves) have an obligation to shape the future of humanity in ways that propagate higher intelligence (namely, elite white men and the white women who reproduce them) and discount the rest. It’s no surprise that Jeffrey Epstein took a strong interest in this world and financed its projects.
The “futurist” aspect must be understood primarily as a mythology that justifies the eugenics. While these men say a lot about creating a better version of humanity through technology, they also extol a future where computer super-intelligence will replace humanity altogether—and for the better. These claims—often first couched as dire warnings, then as inevitable advances—tend to take up the vast majority of the coverage these men attract.
This is intentional. The more they stoke your imagination with the idea of super-intelligent computers that will usher in either a techno-utopia or a techno-apocalypse (if those are even different things), the less you’re thinking about what they’re really doing—teaching us to devalue humanity itself.
I can’t emphasize enough how important this is. When you hear what these men say, it sounds like either a grand utopian vision or outlandish supervillain shit—and that’s the point. By the time you’re stuck debating whether it’s actually possible for AI to replace humanity (it’s not), they’ve already got you. When they argue that “we should engineer our extinction so that our planet’s resources can be devoted to making artificial creatures with better lives,” what they’re really doing is acclimating you to the idea of mass death. And once you’ve contemplated those possibilities, preserving the survival of a small percentage of humans (always including yourself) at the cost of the rest might seem like a welcome compromise.
Acclimation to mass death—and the devaluing of humanity in general—is the primary purpose of all AI and techno-futurist propaganda. Remember what this is really about? The new “cognitive elite” who will command all resources with impunity and “redesign governments” to suit their ends?
Never forget, as our society crumbles around us, that this is the goal of those causing the collapse.
New Frontiers: How We Got Here
The point is not that this is something new. In a nation founded on genocidal violence, dispossession, slave labor, resource extraction, environmental destruction, exploitation, and self-serving myths, some human lives have always been treated as expendable or disposable by those in power. To return to again to something Kendzior wrote during the first Trump administration:
“No one saw it coming,” but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one… Immigrants, Black Americans, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, LGBT Americans, disabled Americans, and others long maligned and marginalized.
None of the underlying principles or conditions are new, but the particular confluence of events over the past decade has put us all in a position of unprecedented danger. The United States as both an economy and an idea has reached a logical point of exhaustion. This colonial-capitalist model dependent on unlimited growth has always been unsustainable.
We’ve been here before, as the 1800s drew to a close, when Frederick Jackson Turner offered his “Frontier Thesis” of American history. What Turner saw as the end of an era in terms of American identity was in fact the endpoint of the original American economic model. Slave labor and unlimited land theft had been the driving forces of white American wealth creation. The legislative end of slavery and the “closing of the frontier” left this model at a crossroads, as the “Barons of Industry” rose up to usher in the Gilded Age. Cheap immigrant labor largely replaced slave labor, while unlimited land was replaced by the expansion of corporations, which sought control over all economic activity, leading to unprecedented income inequality.
In the early 1900s, the ongoing labor wars and the Great Depression eventually showed this new model to be unsustainable, and the New Deal programs responded to this. Forged from the anti-Nazi propaganda of World War II, a new American myth also began to take shape, one which positioned the United States for the first time as a truly egalitarian society that extended freedom and prosperity to everyone. Though this “freedom” was still limited to whites, the post-war boom and creation of white middle class security marked a stark contrast to the extractive exploitation of white American labor that had defined the previous era. The new “American dream” was born.
But, of course, this model still depended on the exploitation of the American underclass, especially Black Americans. The Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and 60s capitalized on the post-war mythology, exposing its hypocrisy and pushing the nation to “live up to” its newly adopted ideals. In response to this challenge, white America fractured.
Even as laws changed across the country, ushering in a new era of institutional diversity, those foundational forces of American power never went away. From the moment the civil rights framework first began gaining acceptance among regular white Americans, white American power has been working to dismantle it.
The shock of many older white Americans to our current situation can be traced to a belief in this inclusive vision. In this myth (the one I grew up with), the post-war ideal of a strong middle class—built on access to education, stable careers, home ownership, and retirement—simply needed to be extended to all. Though this nostalgic point of view comes from a place of privilege, it’s rooted in the memory of an American system that actually prioritized those things (for people like themselves) and a culture that viewed them as signs of a healthy society.
Older white Americans remember a time when a company’s success seemed to be premised on manufacturing a reliable product at a decent price, while maintaining a high standard for customer service. When loyalty to your corporate employer could result in a lifelong career of promotions, benefits, and a pension. When college education was affordable and practically guaranteed a good job (again, for people like them). In short, the system manufactured consent by actually providing for the people who bought into it.
But that economy was built on domestic manufacturing, union jobs, middle-class consumer spending, and the expansion of corporate brands—a model that had run its course by the dawn of the 21st century. The “frontiers” of American labor and middle-class consumption had been tapped out. To maintain unlimited growth, American capitalism had to go global—and digital.
In this new century, a number of things have happened very quickly and sometimes simultaneously. The 1990s overhaul in US trade policy, along with financial and corporate deregulation led to the consolidation of the American economy into an increasingly small handful of gigantic corporations controlled by even fewer private equity firms, while outsourcing most manufacturing to cheap labor in other countries and expanding markets overseas.
Wealthy conservatives continued their project to undo both civil rights and the New Deal safety nets, doubling down on increasingly virulent appeals to the latent racism of white Americans. This project was turbocharged by the election of Barack Obama and his focus on government-subsidized health care. By the time of Trump’s 2016 election, the myth of a multi-racial democracy had been successfully quashed among the majority of white Americans.
Decades of constant messaging and propaganda had falsely framed all social spending as unfairly subsidizing minorities at the expense of white advancement. In Trump’s 2024 campaign, all pretense was gone, as anything that did not explicitly center and benefit white men was now derisively labelled as “woke,” even among many white “leftists.” This has manufactured consent for the creation of all types of permanent underclasses, both exploitable and disposable.
Finally, the technological revolution rebooted the old patterns of wealth accumulation, this time on a scale of global instantaneous transactions. This became the “new frontier” for these established models: corporate colonization of the digital landscape, extraction of labor in manufacturing and content, all-encompassing surveillance, consolidation of platforms, and the replacement of an embodied analog world with a new digital reality.
However, even given all of these conditions, the biggest factor that took us over the edge—from vague belief in a mythical egalitarian America to our current position on the verge of total collapse—was a federal government willing to fully take that leap. The first Trump administration was full of discussions about “guardrails” and “testing the strength of institutions.” But nobody in power is under any illusions about these things now, thanks to the breakdown of institutional credibility in the Biden administration’s response to Trump.
The Covid-19 pandemic was instrumental in building popular acclimation to mass death, as Trump stoked denialism and ableism throughout 2020. The standard talking point that “only sick people” died of Covid ignored the fact that an estimated 60% of Americans had what were considered “underlying conditions.” Though Biden ran on a platform of “trusting the science,” his administration systematically downplayed Covid risks, over-touted vaccine protections, and deceptively hid numbers. By the time he declared the pandemic “over” in 2022, nearly twice as many Americans had died on his watch than on Trump’s. Biden advocated return-to-office policies, rescinded masking recommendations, and cut millions off from life-saving vaccine coverage, completely ignoring ongoing death tolls and the growing documentation of Long Covid risks. The message was clear: capitalist accumulation would resume unencumbered, regardless of who might die.
The “guardrails” and “strong institutions” were also lacking in Biden’s response to January 6th and Trump’s long list of crimes while in office. As we watched the Democrats chicken out of an impeachment trial, and as Merrick Garland’s DOJ ran out the clock on high-level prosecutions, Biden pushed a narrative about how “our institutions held.” When Trump returned as the Republican nominee in 2024, with no one seemingly able to enforce any laws (or convictions) against him, Biden stepped aside, leaving every “guardrail” blowing in the wind like tissue paper.
To make matters worse, Biden provided one final inoculation against our collective sense of empathy. By embracing, arming, and aggressively defending Israel’s genocide in Gaza (to the point of blatantly lying about it over and over again), Joe Biden forced the Democratic electorate to weigh the lives of an entire people against our well-founded fears of Trump’s return. By criminalizing dissent, he also paved the way for increased state repression. Much of the initial enthusiasm for Kamala Harris was driven by disapproval of Biden’s genocidal actions, but once she doubled down, that enthusiasm waned and Trump sailed to victory. The red carpet was now laid out—door open wide—for every thief, scam artist, and predator to feed on the dismantled scraps of the American government and prey on its people with impunity.
Here We Are
So here we are, back where we started—in more ways than one. This unsustainable system will keep doing what it was designed to do. We can slow it down, throw wrenches in it, even temporarily hold it up. But there is no point at which it decides to stop, because this is what it does. The vice-grip will continue to close on us until the machine itself is destroyed. We’ve been on this trajectory from the beginning.
The logic of settler colonialism is “kill and supplant.” The logic of slavery turns human beings into property to extract labor from. The logic of capitalism creates profit for the few at the expense of the many. It all depends on infinite growth, stealing and devouring whatever is available to feed the beast. These systems have now devoured everything they could while still maintaining the pretense of a human society. But with nothing else to devour, those in power will let the facade collapse in order to devour what’s left—us.
I keep thinking of the image of the Uvalde school shooting, with the shooter as the Republicans, the Democrats as the useless cops in the hallway, and all of us trapped in the classroom. Democracy was always pageantry, the story we were told along with the other myths, to keep us in line while they needed our cooperation. But they don’t believe they need us anymore. The current power structure is an alignment between those that would devour us and those who would feed us to them for personal gain.
It doesn’t matter that none of their ideas are grounded in any kind reality, these systems and ideologies have consequences. Given enough power, they will destroy us all, and the people in charge do not care. They told us more than twenty years ago: When we act, we create our own reality. And those of us in the “reality-based community”—we who live in a world of flesh and blood, life and death, art and love, empathy and humanity, contingency with the natural world—we will be left to sift through the ashes of what they’ve wrought.
Anyway, fuck that.
It’s time to fight with all we have for everything we love. We don’t have to take up arms. It’s not about playing hero or savior or blowing shit up. In these times, keeping even one person alive through mutual aid is a radical act of solidarity. Standing up to anti-trans bigots in your families and communities means more than you know. Stop talking over the people who are suffering so you can maintain a sense of “normal.” Get out there and help however you can. Take time to show each other the humanity we’re no longer supposed to share. Imagine that a different world is possible.
But also, in the midst of all that—and maybe through the courage we gain from these very connections—we do need to dismantle this shit, all the way down to the roots. Because they want us dead, and we refuse to die.
Josh Caress is a writer and musician with a day job who lives in Western Massachusetts with his family. He is currently querying his unpublished first novel, The Arrow: An American Myth. You can find more of his writing and original music at www.joshcaress.com.
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