They Want Us Dead

A really good one today about – well – everything.

"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," Josh Caress writes.

"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."

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They Want Us Dead

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.