MKitch3|Sept. 26,2025.
War doesn’t start with tanks. It starts with words. Strip a people of their humanity, brand them “radical” or “enemy,” and you’ve done the hard work before the first shot is fired. That trick isn’t new—it’s the oldest weapon in the American arsenal.
This country was baptized in violence. The Revolution? War. Expansion? Endless campaigns against Indigenous nations, often justified by calling them “savages.” Slavery? A war against human dignity itself, maintained by lash, gun, and statute. When peace broke out, it was never more than an intermission before the next excuse to flex military muscle—whether across the seas in the Philippines or in our own streets during Reconstruction.
The formula is simple: dehumanize, delegitimize, destroy. The rhetoric hasn’t aged a day. The language once aimed at tribes, abolitionists, and strikers has been recycled, polished, and pointed at “terrorists” and “extremists” today. Different century, same script.
And here’s where it turns inward. Citizens—the people allegedly protected by the Constitution—now find themselves described in government briefings the same way Indigenous nations once were. “They” are dangerous. “They” must be monitored. “They” are expendable. Replace “they” with “you,” and the mask slips.
I’m not making this personal for drama; I’m making it personal because it is. I’ve seen how quick the state is to label, how easily neighbors begin to parrot the same script, how fast ordinary dissent gets filed under “threat.” This is how democracy curdles into paranoia.
Here’s the bitter truth: the state loves war because war makes power efficient. When a people are dehumanized, you don’t have to debate them, you don’t have to answer their grievances, you don’t have to see them. You just act. You surveil, you isolate, you crush. It is cheaper than governing honestly, and America has chosen cheap violence over costly honesty more times than I can count.
And you, reader—don’t pretend you’re outside this cycle. Every time you nod along to headlines that reduce people to caricatures, you grease the gears. Every time you swallow “security” as a blank check, you help set the stage for the next round of domestic enemies. That stage is already lit.
The question isn’t whether America wages war against its own. The question is how much longer you’ll tolerate the farce that this isn’t war at all. Call it what it is. Recognize the pattern. Because if you don’t, don’t act surprised when you wake up and find out the “enemy” is you.