In the rotting amphitheater of empire, where the bloated carcass of democracy is dragged across the marble floors of Capitol Hill, the true legacy of American leadership is made hideously clear: constitutional betrayal wrapped in the American flag and sold as freedom. The men and women who chair committees, wave gavels, and clamor into microphones—each one a merchant of illusion—have become the most dangerous enemies of the Constitution they swore to uphold. These are not public servants, but actors in a grotesque farce, dancing to the tune of financial overlords and military contractors, devouring rights at home while exporting chaos abroad.
Through coordinated campaigns of censorship, warfare, coups, and the weaponization of legality, the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties have overseen what might fairly be called the most sustained, deliberate assault on human rights in modern history. Their enemies are not foreign—though they pretend so—but the citizens themselves. Their betrayals are both global and domestic: the destruction of truth, the erosion of speech, the commodification of war, and the silencing of the young. They do not serve; they feed.
On college campuses across the nation—once citadels of inquiry and dissent—students have learned the hard lesson of American exceptionalism: you may criticize your own country’s genocides, massacres, and wars; you may call your president a war criminal or your governor a tyrant; you may desecrate the flag or burn the Bill of Rights in effigy. But if you utter criticism of Israel—if you question its occupation, its apartheid architecture, or its war crimes—you will be harassed, silenced, expelled, or arrested.
This is not metaphor. Students have been doxxed, defamed, and detained. Diplomas have been revoked. Encampments have been razed in the dead of night by university security forces acting as extensions of the state. Donor pressure, federal funding threats, and ideological purity tests have transformed higher education into a controlled laboratory of speech—a sterilized zone in which the only acceptable dissent is the kind that does not threaten actual power. The freedom to protest has been hollowed out and replaced with a pantomime of resistance, choreographed to avoid offending billionaires or triggering “donor discomfort.”
University presidents, neck-deep in endowments and fealty to power, shriek and grunt into their press releases, spewing verbal sewage about “community safety” and “hate speech” while issuing expulsions like autocrats. Federal agencies howl about extremism as they draft speech codes in partnership with corporate lobbyists. A grotesque procession of senators and governors shat out statements about “supporting Jewish students” while ignoring the rights of the very students being punished for peaceful protest. With their mouths caked in layers of sanctimony and state-sanctioned falsehood, they uphold a vision of “free speech” that applies only to those who agree with the empire.
And while the silencing of American students unfolds in real time, these same political elites continue to export violence abroad with the clinical detachment of a banker signing off on a foreclosure. From Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954, from Chile in 1973 to Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, the U.S. foreign policy apparatus has refined the art of toppling governments and replacing them with regimes that specialize in torture, disappearances, and mass graves. The excuse is always the same—freedom, security, democracy. The result is always the same—blood, displacement, profit.
These acts are not ancient history; they are the foundation of U.S. foreign policy. In recent years, the machine has continued: funding for right-wing death squads, military training for authoritarian states, drone wars that vaporize children and label them “militants” after the fact, the economic asphyxiation of entire nations through sanctions, and support for regimes with records of torture so extreme they would make medieval inquisitors blush. These are not foreign policies. They are coordinated crimes.
And at home? The machinery is no less brutal. Protesters in the streets of U.S. cities have been tear-gassed, kettled, and assaulted. Immigrants have been detained in for-profit prisons and deported to countries where U.S. coups made return a death sentence. Journalists have been arrested, banned from press briefings, or surveilled without warrants. Whistleblowers—those rare lights of conscience—have been imprisoned, exiled, or driven to suicide.
The mouthpieces of this carnivorous state—the senators, the bureaucrats, the billion-dollar press outlets—grunt and screech through their justifications. They do not speak; they emit. Their words are not ideas but gas—manufactured emissions designed to cloud, confuse, and conceal. They do not listen to the people because they do not see the people. What they see are audiences, demographics, markets. Their America is not a republic, but a theater of illusions kept alive by repression and distraction.
But against this putrid tide, the ordinary people rise.
The student who calmly reads a poem while riot police stand inches away. The whistleblower who, in a whisper, reveals a cache of crimes more damning than any shouted speech. The immigrant mother who, with quiet conviction, fights the deportation of her neighbor. The journalist who, denied credentials, documents injustice with a phone camera and the resilience of truth.
These people do not seek power. They are not seduced by authority. Their protest is not performance, but presence. Their philosophy is not written, but lived. They carry in their silence more substance than a thousand congressional hearings; in their compassion, more clarity than every presidential address combined.
They do not belong to parties or factions. They belong to the world.
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What this moment demands is not reform, not better leadership, not a more competent bureaucracy. What it demands is an unflinching confrontation with the entire spectacle—a confrontation with the false architecture of governance, with the idols of party and office, with the very notion that liberation can be legislated by those who profit from subjugation.
This confrontation must begin where no party can reach: within. Not as ideology, but as clarity. Not as opposition, but as awakening. Until each person—student, worker, refugee, citizen—can look through the veneer of nation and see the humanity beyond it, nothing will change. Until each person can reject fear, hierarchy, and control in favor of a compassionate self-awareness, no institution can save us.
Freedom does not come from governments. Justice does not flow from the mouths of officials. Truth does not depend on permission.
It lives in the spaces between us, waiting.
Footnotes:
- Documentation of increased repression and censorship on U.S. campuses surrounding criticism of Israel, including doxxing, disciplinary actions, revocation of degrees, and administrative investigations.
- Public records and reporting on U.S.-backed coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), and Nicaragua (1980s), as well as ongoing support for repressive regimes in Honduras, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
- Testimonies from student protesters and whistleblowers targeted by domestic surveillance, university crackdowns, and legal intimidation.
- U.S. immigration policies involving expedited deportations under the Alien Enemies Act and Title 42, resulting in forced returns to countries destabilized by U.S. foreign policy.
- Glenn Greenwald’s coverage of campus censorship, freedom of speech hypocrisies, and federal government interference in academic dissent.
- Investigative journalism documenting military aid, drone strikes, and economic sanctions resulting in mass civilian casualties and humanitarian crises abroad.
- Reports on the treatment of journalists, suppression of protests, militarization of police, and erosion of First Amendment protections within the United States.