By Brenda Johnson
There’s something terrifying about watching a country implode in real-time. It’s not loud at first—it’s subtle, strategic, a chess game years in the making. And right now, we’re playing right into it.
I look around and I see a nation tearing itself apart, not just from one side, but from both extremes. MAGA on the right, the radical left on the other, both convinced they are fighting for freedom, when in reality, they’re dancing on the strings of something far darker: hate, fear, and the hunger for control.
The scariest part? We’ve seen this before.
History has been trying to warn us. The book The Tenets of History, written back in 1995, laid it out plainly—how empires fall, how societies destroy themselves from within. And if you look closely at the tactics, the rhetoric, the division being fed to us every single day, it’s impossible not to see the shadows of 1930s Germany creeping in.
MAGA rallies echoing chants of exclusion, promising to “take back” a country they never lost. The left, in its own echo chamber, sometimes weaponizing identity politics without building real solutions. Both sides unwilling to hear the other. Both sides so consumed with pride and power that facts, truth, and common ground have become casualties of war.
This is how it happens. This is how movements lose their soul and how nations crumble.
But here’s the question that haunts me: How can a people who call themselves “the greatest nation on Earth”—the land of freedom, progress, and innovation—refuse to question facts? How do we live in a world where truth is at our fingertips—search engines, books, AI, entire libraries in the palm of our hand—and still choose to bury our heads in the sand?
I watch the right, in particular, double down on delusion as if ignoring reality will somehow make it go away. I want to believe that this movement isn’t rooted in hate—that it’s just fear, confusion, misplaced loyalty. But is it? How do we explain a movement that watches inhumane things happen and never bats an eye?
How do you sleep at night knowing the cruelty being done in your name?
Is there something deeper—something in the human condition, maybe even genetic—that separates those who can feel empathy from those who shut it off like a switch? Or is this what centuries of unchecked privilege and power do to people? Do they become numb to the cost, blind to the destruction, until it’s too late?
Because when the dust settles, the ones left bleeding are never the ones who held the megaphones and stoked the fires. It’s always us. People of color. The marginalized. The communities who have clawed their way toward equality only to watch the table flipped over again and again.
It’s almost as if we’re destined to be behind—not because we lack the will, but because the game is rigged, and we’re too busy fighting each other to see who’s moving the pieces.
But here’s what keeps me up at night: Is this really destiny? Or is it the result of generations of people who refuse to imagine a world built on equity because they are too addicted to control, too rooted in hate, too comfortable in their own power to let anyone else share the table?
The world is watching. But more importantly, history is watching. And it’s begging us to look in the mirror before we write the next chapter in blood.
This isn’t about left or right anymore. It’s about whether we want to break the cycle—or if we’re willing to watch the pieces fall the exact same way they always have, until there’s nothing left to fight for.
