WOW! This piece by my friend Faisal Khan is so excellent, powerful, and horrifyingly true. Thank you, Faisal! These are the facts that we need to see, absorb, and be continuously inspired to act upon in every way humanly possible. Blessed be the truth-tellers!
Failing to individually and collectively recognize, own, heal, and transform the shadow side of America has cost us all dearly. Every day we witness in the United States and beyond how the violence of the past ―that has been with us since the earliest days of colonialism, slavery, and the genocide of the Indigenous Peoples ― continues to play out and haunt us in the present. Nothing can be healed until it is faced. And, indeed, these truths that are so well articulated in my wise and courageous friend's article reveal a reckoning that is long, long overdue. ― Molly
The Unveiled Truth:
A Reckoning Long Overdue
The curtain has been pulled back, the veneer stripped away and suddenly, those who never flinched are flinching. Let us be unambiguous: this nation has not become something different in the last eighteen to twenty months. It has always been this. The hypocrisy is not new. The double standard is not new.
What is new is that the ugliness is now too raw, too visible, too loud to ignore. As Dr. King warned, the greatest purveyor of injustice often wears the costume of the righteous and that costume has been worn by both parties, for decades, without interruption.
The Numbers Don’t Lie and They Don’t Care About Your Party. Healthcare costs in the United States have been crushing working families long before any single administration took credit or deflected blame. In 1984, the average American spent roughly $1,200 per year on healthcare. By 2023, that number had exploded to over $13,000 per person annually, a trajectory that climbed steadily through Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden alike. The average home price in 1980 was around $76,000. By 2024, the national median had surpassed $420,000, while wages, adjusted for inflation, have remained largely stagnant for the bottom 60% of earners since the 1970s. Infrastructure? The American Society of Civil Engineers has given this country a C minus grade, the result of decades of deferred investment, bipartisan neglect, and misplaced priorities. These are not eighteen month failures. These are fifty year decisions compounding into a national crisis.
Wars Without End, Administered by Both Parties. The invasion of Iraq was launched under Bush and sustained under Obama. Libya was bombed and destabilized under Obama. Afghanistan was invaded under Bush, escalated under Obama, and left in ruins after twenty years of bipartisan mismanagement. Syria was bombed under Obama and again under Trump. Yemen has been relentlessly devastated, with American manufactured weapons and American logistical support flowing under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Drone strikes, which became a signature tool of extrajudicial killing, were massively expanded under Obama, who oversaw strikes across Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan, often killing civilians and rarely facing accountability.
The occupation and dispossession of Palestinian land, now over seventy seven years deep, has been funded, armed, and diplomatically shielded by every single American administration regardless of party. This is not a red or blue failure. This is an American foreign policy doctrine, consistent, bipartisan, and brutal.
Some have spent the last eighteen months writing passionately about how cruel this country has become, how unrecognizable, how hostile to immigrants and refugees. And yes, the savagery is more unfiltered now, more visceral, more unrestrained than before. But it did not conjure itself out of thin air. Every mechanism, every tool, every infrastructure of control that is being wielded today was already in place, already signed into law, already normalized long before the last general election.
The Patriot Act, one of the most expansive surveillance apparatuses ever built in this country, was signed by George W. Bush and then reauthorized and expanded under Barack Obama. The surveillance of Muslim communities in this country, the monitoring, the infiltration, the profiling, generated barely a whisper of outrage from those who today cannot stop talking about civil liberties. ICE, the detention infrastructure, the deportation pipelines, all of it was built, funded, and refined across multiple administrations. The monster people are horrified by today was not born in the last eighteen months. It was engineered over decades, piece by piece, bill by bill, with bipartisan hands on the drafting table.
What is revealing is not the cruelty itself but who is now suddenly alarmed by it. For years, communities of color, immigrant families, Muslim Americans, and the poor watched this machinery operate against them in plain sight and were met with polite indifference or outright dismissal. Now that the same tools are being turned in broader directions, now that more people feel the cold air of it at their own threshold, the dread has set in. Some have already left the country. Many more say they will. And that choice is understandable but it also tells its own story about who felt insulated enough to remain silent for so long. This did not ferment overnight. It was orchestrated, methodically assembled, and deliberately fortified while too many people were occupied singing the blue song or the red song, persuaded that their team in power meant the machine was a guardian rather than a predator. It was never your guardian. They were simply more calculated about who it was pointed at.
What we are witnessing today is not an anomaly. It is a symptom. A boomerang. Decades of violence exported abroad, of double standards dressed as diplomacy, of occupation rebranded as security, all of it returning home in a form too grotesque to spin. Yes, things have grown more aggressive, more brazen, more naked, but that aggression did not materialize from thin air. Hold Bush accountable. Hold Obama accountable. Hold Biden accountable. Hold them all accountable, because the thread of complicity runs through every administration, every party platform, and every carefully worded press release that said nothing while doing everything.
Before you beat the drum of DNC orthodoxy, before you reduce generations of suffering to eighteen or twenty months of political theater, understand this: selective outrage is not conscience. The propaganda is sharper now. The packaging is more blunt, more raw, more ugly. The rhetoric is more emotionally traumatizing because there is no longer any varnish over it, no careful language softening the blow, no polished spokesperson standing at a podium making devastation sound reasonable. What you are seeing is the same machine operating at full speed with the hood finally open. The noise is louder not because the engine is new, but because nobody is pretending anymore that it was ever built for you.
Until you see this through a genuine lens of honesty, self reflection, and freedom from partisan bias, you are not truly seeing it at all. You are curating an outrage that is comfortable, one that conveniently begins when your party (Democratic) loses power and ends when it regains it.
And let us be direct about credibility: if over the last three years you have not written, posted, spoken, or raised your voice in any meaningful way about the genocide and the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory, then your sudden moral urgency rings hollow. It does not matter how many followers you have. It does not matter how many likes your post collects or how many times it gets shared.
Silence during the atrocity and noise during the election cycle is not activism. It is performance. Real conscience does not have a schedule and it does not answer to an algorithm.
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