“This Is Not America” Is the Most Dangerous Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves
The idea that large-scale state violence and repression are foreign to US soil is a dangerous fiction.
January 28, 2026
A gunshot perforation can be seen in a window in front of a makeshift memorial for Alex Pretti on January 26, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP via Getty Images
Americans are once again searching for historical analogies to explain what is unfolding around us.
As authoritarianism accelerates — as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights — people are scrambling for reference points.
But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn’t Afghanistan. This isn’t Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn’t who we are.
These statements are meant to comfort. They are meant to regulate fear, to calm the nervous system with the promise that no matter how bad things get, this country is somehow exempt from the logic of repression. Instead, they reveal how deeply many people still misunderstand both this country and the nature of authoritarian power.
They rest on a dangerous fiction: that large-scale state violence, political terror, and repression belong somewhere else — to “failed states,” to the Global South, to places imagined as perpetually unstable. This is not only historically false; it is how people in the U.S. have been trained not to recognize what is being built in front of them.
After Davos Speech, Trump Tells the World, “Sometimes, You Need a Dictator”
Polling from August indicates that most Americans already view Trump as a “dangerous” leader seeking to be a dictator. By Chris Walker , Truthout January 22, 2026
The truth is simpler and more unsettling: The U.S. has always governed through violence.
It has always relied on surveillance, containment, displacement, and force to manage the populations it deemed threatening. From slavery to Indigenous genocide, from Jim Crow to Japanese internment camps, from COINTELPRO to the “war on terror” and the modern surveillance state, repression is not an aberration in U.S. history. It is a throughline.
Repression is not an aberration in U.S. history. It is a throughline.
What is changing now is not the presence of state violence. It is the shrinking number of masks it bothers to wear.
What we’re witnessing under the second Trump administration is an acceleration and magnification of policies and processes put in place — or left to grow — under previous administrations. The consolidation of executive power, the normalization of political revenge, the open celebration of cruelty, the expansion of militarized enforcement, and the convergence of the processes of governance and punishment are not isolated developments. Together, they form a coherent project: an empire that governs through fear, spectacle, and coercion — and calls it order.
Faced with this, people reach for historical parallels. That instinct makes sense. When reality becomes disorienting, we look for maps. We want to know where we are in the arc of things. We want to know what comes next.
But the way these comparisons are so often framed reveals something more troubling than confusion. When people say, “This isn’t Iran. This isn’t who we are,” what they are really saying is: This kind of violence belongs to other people. Other countries. Other kinds of societies.
This way of talking treats repression and state terror as natural features of non-Western life — tragic, perhaps, but expected — while preserving the fantasy that the United States is fundamentally different: a country that insists on seeing itself as innocent and as the world’s savior.
This alibi does two kinds of damage at once.
First, it erases the fact that the United States has spent the last century actively producing the very conditions people now point to as evidence of what “happens elsewhere” — through war, occupation, sanctions, coups, counterinsurgency, resource extraction, and proxy violence. Afghanistan and Iraq did not become the political shorthand we reach for when we want to name violence and instability by accident. And the “Middle East” did not become our knee-jerk cultural reference for endless war by happenstance. These associations were produced through sustained U.S. intervention.
Second, it trains people to misread the danger until it is too entrenched to ignore.
The United States does not need to become something new in order to govern brutally. It already knows how.
It knew how when it built an economy on enslavement and enforced it through patrols, terror, and law. It knew how when it cleared Indigenous land through military campaigns and forced removals. It knew how when it incarcerated Japanese Americans in camps and called it national security. It knew how when it ran surveillance and disruption campaigns against civil rights and liberation movements. It knew how when it built a global regime of detention and torture after 9/11 and taught the public to call it protection.
In every era, the language changes. The targets shift. The justifications evolve. But the structure remains intact: a state that decides some people are threats, some lives are disposable, and some rights are conditional — and then builds entire bureaucracies to make that violence feel normal.
One of the most consistent features of this system is denial.
“This isn’t who we are,” people say, as if saying it has ever stopped the government from doing what it wants to do. “This isn’t America,” they insist, as if the U.S. were not a place that has repeatedly refined its methods of control while keeping its hierarchies intact.
The claim is not new. It has appeared whenever violence needs cover: Reconstruction. The Red Scare. Jim Crow. The “war on terror.” It always sounds the same: This is an exception. This is temporary. This is not the real America.
This is precisely the story that allows the machinery of repression to keep moving while much of the public remains psychologically unprepared to name it.
Today, that machinery is no longer subtle. It does not need to be. We see it in the open embrace of mass detention and deportation. In the criminalization of protest. In the expansion of police and federal enforcement powers. In the use of state violence as political theater. In the steady collapse of any meaningful boundary between punishment and governance.
And still, many people find it easier to imagine that the country is becoming something unrecognizable than to admit we are moving deeper into patterns that have always been here.
This is not a failure of information. It is a failure of narrative. And narrative failures are not neutral — they shape what people prepare for, what they demand, and what they believe is even possible.
As long as authoritarianism is imagined as something that happens elsewhere, people will keep waiting for a clearer sign, a more obvious rupture, a more undeniable transformation. They will keep telling themselves that what they are seeing is not quite serious enough yet. Meanwhile, the ground continues to shift beneath them.
The question before us is not whether the U.S. is “turning into” something else.
The question is whether we are finally willing to tell the truth about how power has always worked here — and what it costs to keep pretending otherwise.
Because clarity is not an intellectual exercise. It is a political necessity.
If we treat this moment as an exception, we will look for solutions that restore a past that never existed. If we understand it as part of a longer pattern, we can begin to ask better questions: What would safety look like without punishment? Order without domination? Belonging without exclusion? And what would it require to protect one another — not from some imagined future, but from the systems that have always been with us?
History does not only warn. It instructs.
It tells us that repression rarely announces itself as tyranny. It arrives as management. As security. As common sense. It tells us that waiting for things to become unmistakably unbearable is a losing strategy. And it tells us that the most dangerous myths are the ones that convince people they are immune.
“This is not America” has never been the reassurance people want it to be.
It has always been the alibi.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Rashida James-Saadiya
Rashida James-Saadiya is a cultural educator and Executive Director of the Muslim Power Building Project, a national leadership collective that supports emerging Muslim organizers in build
Americans are once again searching for historical analogies to explain what is unfolding around us.
As authoritarianism accelerates — as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights — people are scrambling for reference points.
But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn’t Afghanistan. This isn’t Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn’t who we are.
These statements are meant to comfort. They are meant to regulate fear, to calm the nervous system with the promise that no matter how bad things get, this country is somehow exempt from the logic of repression. Instead, they reveal how deeply many people still misunderstand both this country and the nature of authoritarian power.
They rest on a dangerous fiction: that large-scale state violence, political terror, and repression belong somewhere else — to “failed states,” to the Global South, to places imagined as perpetually unstable. This is not only historically false; it is how people in the U.S. have been trained not to recognize what is being built in front of them.
After Davos Speech, Trump Tells the World, “Sometimes, You Need a Dictator”
Polling from August indicates that most Americans already view Trump as a “dangerous” leader seeking to be a dictator. By Chris Walker , Truthout January 22, 2026
The truth is simpler and more unsettling: The U.S. has always governed through violence.
It has always relied on surveillance, containment, displacement, and force to manage the populations it deemed threatening. From slavery to Indigenous genocide, from Jim Crow to Japanese internment camps, from COINTELPRO to the “war on terror” and the modern surveillance state, repression is not an aberration in U.S. history. It is a throughline.
Repression is not an aberration in U.S. history. It is a throughline.
What is changing now is not the presence of state violence. It is the shrinking number of masks it bothers to wear.
What we’re witnessing under the second Trump administration is an acceleration and magnification of policies and processes put in place — or left to grow — under previous administrations. The consolidation of executive power, the normalization of political revenge, the open celebration of cruelty, the expansion of militarized enforcement, and the convergence of the processes of governance and punishment are not isolated developments. Together, they form a coherent project: an empire that governs through fear, spectacle, and coercion — and calls it order.
Faced with this, people reach for historical parallels. That instinct makes sense. When reality becomes disorienting, we look for maps. We want to know where we are in the arc of things. We want to know what comes next.
But the way these comparisons are so often framed reveals something more troubling than confusion. When people say, “This isn’t Iran. This isn’t who we are,” what they are really saying is: This kind of violence belongs to other people. Other countries. Other kinds of societies.
This way of talking treats repression and state terror as natural features of non-Western life — tragic, perhaps, but expected — while preserving the fantasy that the United States is fundamentally different: a country that insists on seeing itself as innocent and as the world’s savior.
This alibi does two kinds of damage at once.
First, it erases the fact that the United States has spent the last century actively producing the very conditions people now point to as evidence of what “happens elsewhere” — through war, occupation, sanctions, coups, counterinsurgency, resource extraction, and proxy violence. Afghanistan and Iraq did not become the political shorthand we reach for when we want to name violence and instability by accident. And the “Middle East” did not become our knee-jerk cultural reference for endless war by happenstance. These associations were produced through sustained U.S. intervention.
Second, it trains people to misread the danger until it is too entrenched to ignore.
The United States does not need to become something new in order to govern brutally. It already knows how.
It knew how when it built an economy on enslavement and enforced it through patrols, terror, and law. It knew how when it cleared Indigenous land through military campaigns and forced removals. It knew how when it incarcerated Japanese Americans in camps and called it national security. It knew how when it ran surveillance and disruption campaigns against civil rights and liberation movements. It knew how when it built a global regime of detention and torture after 9/11 and taught the public to call it protection.
In every era, the language changes. The targets shift. The justifications evolve. But the structure remains intact: a state that decides some people are threats, some lives are disposable, and some rights are conditional — and then builds entire bureaucracies to make that violence feel normal.
One of the most consistent features of this system is denial.
“This isn’t who we are,” people say, as if saying it has ever stopped the government from doing what it wants to do. “This isn’t America,” they insist, as if the U.S. were not a place that has repeatedly refined its methods of control while keeping its hierarchies intact.
The claim is not new. It has appeared whenever violence needs cover: Reconstruction. The Red Scare. Jim Crow. The “war on terror.” It always sounds the same: This is an exception. This is temporary. This is not the real America.
This is precisely the story that allows the machinery of repression to keep moving while much of the public remains psychologically unprepared to name it.
Today, that machinery is no longer subtle. It does not need to be. We see it in the open embrace of mass detention and deportation. In the criminalization of protest. In the expansion of police and federal enforcement powers. In the use of state violence as political theater. In the steady collapse of any meaningful boundary between punishment and governance.
And still, many people find it easier to imagine that the country is becoming something unrecognizable than to admit we are moving deeper into patterns that have always been here.
This is not a failure of information. It is a failure of narrative. And narrative failures are not neutral — they shape what people prepare for, what they demand, and what they believe is even possible.
As long as authoritarianism is imagined as something that happens elsewhere, people will keep waiting for a clearer sign, a more obvious rupture, a more undeniable transformation. They will keep telling themselves that what they are seeing is not quite serious enough yet. Meanwhile, the ground continues to shift beneath them.
The question before us is not whether the U.S. is “turning into” something else.
The question is whether we are finally willing to tell the truth about how power has always worked here — and what it costs to keep pretending otherwise.
Because clarity is not an intellectual exercise. It is a political necessity.
If we treat this moment as an exception, we will look for solutions that restore a past that never existed. If we understand it as part of a longer pattern, we can begin to ask better questions: What would safety look like without punishment? Order without domination? Belonging without exclusion? And what would it require to protect one another — not from some imagined future, but from the systems that have always been with us?
History does not only warn. It instructs.
It tells us that repression rarely announces itself as tyranny. It arrives as management. As security. As common sense. It tells us that waiting for things to become unmistakably unbearable is a losing strategy. And it tells us that the most dangerous myths are the ones that convince people they are immune.
“This is not America” has never been the reassurance people want it to be.
It has always been the alibi.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Rashida James-Saadiya
Rashida James-Saadiya is a cultural educator and Executive Director of the Muslim Power Building Project, a national leadership collective that supports emerging Muslim organizers in build
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