We keep being told to relax. To stop overreacting. To understand that this is just politics, and politics shouldn’t come between friends and family.

I think that is an interesting response to a government threatening elections, seizing foreign resources, and killing civilians at home.

This is beyond simple arguments over policy, and most would agree that we are arguing over morality at this point. However, therein lies the rub. I am no longer convinced that we are arguing about morality, either. Morality went out the window years ago. What replaced it is winning. Not justice. Not democracy. Not stability. Just winning. As long as the political opposition is angry or afraid, the damage caused is treated as success. I see this mindset constantly. Online. In conversations. In the casual way people shrug at things that once would have ended careers. Remember Howard Dean? His political career was ended from a weird noise. Now, being friends with the most notorious pedophile in American history is simply taken care of with a few thousand redactions.

I do not recognize this country right now.

This is not just about Donald Trump’s actions, or how he “jokes” about things that would otherwise be appalling in polite society. For the record, I never believed he was. This is about how many people still insist that none of this is as serious as it most certainly is.

According to reporting by The Associated Press and Reuters, during the last few months the Trump administration has engaged in military actions and foreign seizures without meaningful congressional authorization, including the interception and redirection of Venezuelan oil shipments under executive authority. These actions are not hidden. They are framed as strength. As decisiveness. As necessary. Since when is actual piracy necessary in modern society?

At the same time, this same administration has openly discussed acquiring Greenland, a territory belonging to a NATO ally, and has refused to rule out the use of force. That should have triggered an immediate national reckoning. Instead, it passed as another headline.

Elections are now discussed as inconveniences. Trump has repeatedly suggested canceling or delaying elections and has framed the importance of electoral outcomes lest he be removed from office, statements documented by Time magazine and PBS. You know who talks like that? Someone who knows that what they are doing is wrong. Whether supporters choose to interpret these remarks as bravado is beside the point. Power does not require sincerity to be dangerous. It only requires permission.

I keep hearing that comparisons are unfair, that calling this authoritarianism is hyperbolic. That we should wait for something more explicit. Something unmistakable. As if history ever worked that way.

If this were happening in any other country in the 1930s, Americans would not be debating tone. We would already understand the story. We would have turned it into a comic book. A hero on the cover slugging an obvious villain. A punch frozen in time. Moral clarity rendered in ink.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to recognize abuse of power unless it announces itself with a costume and a bad accent.

Satire helps us cope with this. It lets us laugh at the absurdity. It lets us pretend we are still observers rather than participants. It works right up until the moment it does not.

That moment came recently in Minnesota.

By now we have all seen the videos, Renee Good was shot and killed by a federal immigration agent during an enforcement operation. In the hours that followed, behind an oversized cowboy hat and camo draped podium (absurdist third-rate theater), the administration moved quickly to control the narrative, portraying her as a “domestic terrorist” while limiting transparency and federal cooperation with local investigators.

This is where satire stops.

An innocent woman is dead. I will not hear any debate to the contrary. And instead of accountability, I watched the machinery of the state shift into defense mode. Instead of transparency, I saw narrative management. Instead of grief, I saw a self professed dog killer casting aspersions at the recently deceased. The question was not what went wrong, but how quickly the institution could justify itself.

This is what normalized abuse of power looks like when it becomes operational.

It does not arrive with speeches declaring the end of democracy. It arrives with press statements. With qualifiers. With people saying this is unfortunate but complicated. It arrives with silence from those who once claimed to stand for law and order.

If this had happened somewhere else, Americans would already know what to call it. We would demand investigations. We would call it state violence. We would be demanding military intervention.

Because it is happening here, we are told to lower our voices.

I am no longer interested in lowering mine.

This does not feel like the country I was raised to love while watching “Rocky IV.” It does not feel like a nation built on civilian oversight, constitutional limits, and the idea that power should fear the people rather than the other way around. It feels like something older and darker. Something we recognized immediately in just about every movie from the 1980s I’ve ever watched.

The most dangerous lie we tell ourselves is that this cannot happen here. The second most dangerous is that it already has, and there is nothing left to do.

History rarely announces itself as history. It presents itself as exhaustion. As inconvenience. As one more thing people do not have the energy to fight. It depends on people choosing comfort over confrontation and calling that realism.

This piece is another wake-up slap. Not because I enjoy alarm. Not because I want to be right. But because complacency is exactly what this moment feeds on.

We are long past the phase of asking what this might become. We are living inside the answer.

The choice now is simple and brutal. Push back while you still can, or accept complicity and call it normal.

Captain America didn’t stand for this in the 1930’s. We shouldn’t be standing idly by in 2026.

(LaRue is a resident of Steubenville)