America Can - And Must - Be Better Than This...

Across the country, we’re witnessing scenes that would be more at home in authoritarian states than in the United States of America. Masked ICE officers snatching people off the streets without identifying themselves. Detainees held without access to legal counsel. People being deported in the dead of night, with no hearing, no due process, no chance to make their case. Children separated from their families—many still unaccounted for.

Let’s call this what it is: a betrayal of American values.

We are supposed to be a nation of laws, not of men. Yet we’re watching judicial oversight erode in real-time. The Supreme Court—long considered the last safeguard of civil rights and constitutional integrity—has increasingly abdicated its role as a check on executive power. Critical cases are being dodged or decided in ways that empower the government to sidestep basic rights in the name of national security or political expediency.

The executive branch has grown bloated with power, often ignoring congressional authority, manipulating federal agencies for political aims, and normalizing a level of secrecy and impunity that should alarm every citizen.

If this trajectory continues, we will cease to be a free country. 

That’s not hyperbole. That’s history.

In Nazi Germany, the rule of law was replaced by the rule of force. In Russia, “justice” is a weapon, not a principle. In North Korea, government is absolute, dissent is criminalized, and truth is whatever the regime says it is. These are not exaggerated comparisons—they are warnings. Because the slide into authoritarianism is never sudden. It’s a series of small steps, rationalized as necessary or temporary, until one day people realize the republic is gone and only fear remains.

This is a moment of reckoning for all of us. Are we willing to accept a government that detains people without charge? That strips away oversight and transparency? That tells us national security requires secret prisons and faceless agents? Or do we still believe in liberty, equality before the law, and due process?

We must demand accountability.

From our elected officials. From the courts. From the agencies that act in our name. We must raise our voices, organize, write, protest, vote, and hold tight to the Constitution—even when it’s inconvenient, even when it means challenging those in power.

Because if we fail to stand up for American values now, we may soon find ourselves living in a country that looks nothing like America.

This is not someone else’s fight. It’s ours.

And we may not get another chance.