By Bear Howard
As the United States approaches its 250th year, one might expect a season of reflection and renewal—a chance to measure how far we have come since 1776 and how we might grow into the next quarter millennium. Instead, the country seems to be tumbling toward the darkest echoes of its own past, replaying the very sins that once scarred its promise.
The signs are everywhere if one cares to look. The president recently boasted, “I love the smell of deportation in the morning,” a cynical parody of the infamous line from Apocalypse Now: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” In the film, the line is a grotesque quip about mass destruction, delivered with a cavalier detachment from human suffering.
By transplanting that imagery onto immigration enforcement, the leader of the United States has signaled more than a taste for dark humor—he has revealed a willingness to celebrate cruelty as policy, to frame the expulsion of families and workers as a cinematic victory scene. It is not just rhetoric; it is an invitation to dehumanization, a reminder of how quickly humor can become the mask of brutality.
This is not new. America’s history is crowded with moments when those in power diminished the humanity of others to tighten their grip. Children once toiled in factories and mines, treated as expendable cogs in the machine of industrial wealth. For centuries, slavery stood as the ultimate dehumanization—people reduced to property, families severed at auction blocks. Even after abolition, a system of sharecropping, debt peonage, and Jim Crow laws sought to replace slavery with a new form of bondage, offering little chance of advancement or dignity. Women were denied the vote until 1920, their voices silenced in a nation that prided itself on democracy. Workers, fighting merely for the right to unionize, were beaten, blacklisted, or shot for daring to demand humane wages and conditions.
At each of these junctures, America looked away from its own creed of liberty, finding ways to rationalize exclusion and inequality. And at each juncture, voices of conscience warned that such dehumanization corrodes the very fabric of the republic. Yet the pattern repeats, in cycles that reveal more about our frailty than our progress.
Today’s flirtations with cruelty are accompanied by a revival of old banners. “America First,” once the slogan of 1930s isolationists and Nazi sympathizers, resurfaces as a proud rallying cry, despite its poisonous lineage. Then, as now, it was rooted in a willingness to admire authoritarian power abroad while dismissing the human costs of such admiration. Then, as now, it reduced the American experiment to a tribal fortress, defined less by aspiration and more by exclusion.
The irony is sharp. The United States—only four percent of the world’s population—once imagined itself as a beacon of democratic possibility. But in the current climate, that self-image has withered into entitlement: the idea that dominance is a right, compassion a weakness, and cruelty a mark of strength. A spoiled republic, like a spoiled child, is heading toward an extended period of diminishment, where arrogance becomes fragility and hubris precedes decline.
The president’s war-movie quip is not a throwaway joke. It is a symptom of a deeper sickness: the normalization of language that dehumanizes, trivializes suffering, and frames politics as a game of dominance. Just as the Kilgore character in Apocalypse Now stands on the battlefield joking about napalm while surrounded by destruction, today’s leaders risk standing on the smoldering ruins of democratic promise, laughing as they turn citizens into enemies and human beings into disposable characters in their theater of power.
If history teaches anything, it is that such indulgences come at a cost. Nations that revel in cruelty, that redefine strength as callousness, and that substitute slogans for solidarity do not endure as beacons. They falter. They collapse inward, victims of the very darkness they unleashed.
As America enters its 250th year, the question is whether we will see these patterns for what they are—a dire warning, a mirror of our own past missteps—or whether we will once again laugh off the warning signs, mistaking gallows humor for leadership, until the damage is irreversible.
This is an advertisement
5 Comments
The Smell of Reality in the Morning
Rebuttal by Fox Snooze
Let’s get something straight: America isn’t collapsing into slavery 2.0, or goose-stepping into fascism just because the president cracked a movie joke at a rally. What’s actually happening is that millions of voters—hardworking, tax-paying Americans—finally have a leader who speaks their language instead of lecturing them from a faculty lounge.
When the president said, “I love the smell of deportation in the morning,” the media acted like he’d declared war on humanity itself. They missed the point. What he did was take a serious problem—illegal immigration—and slice right through the nonsense with humor that hits home.
Because while elites are busy wringing their hands, real Americans are watching their schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods buckle under the weight of unchecked migration. That’s not theoretical. That’s Tuesday in their town.
And the hand-wringers comparing deportations to slavery or women being denied the right to vote? Give me a break. That’s not analysis—that’s emotional blackmail. Nobody being sent home today is being sold on an auction block. Nobody’s being stripped of their citizenship. To pretend otherwise is to cheapen the actual horrors of our past.
Here’s the truth the critics can’t swallow: “America First” is not a dirty phrase. It’s common sense. We’ve spent decades subsidizing foreign wars, foreign economies, and foreign elites, while our own workers are told to sit down and shut up. Wanting to put American jobs, families, and borders first isn’t fascism—it’s patriotism. And if you can’t see the difference, maybe you’ve spent too much time in a think tank and not enough in a factory town.
The president’s popularity isn’t a glitch in the system. It’s a referendum on decades of broken promises from both parties. Ordinary people are tired of being ignored, tired of being told their pain doesn’t matter, and tired of being called racist or cruel just for wanting their own country to work for them. That’s why they laugh when the president makes a dark joke. Because in that moment, they know he’s laughing with them, not at them.
So go ahead, write your dire essays about democracy dying in darkness. Meanwhile, the rest of America wakes up, smells reality in the morning, and votes accordingly.
@FoxNews
Haven’t you learned anything from your bullshit election claims and lies after being successfully sued by Dominion and others?
You obviously are a Trump Sycophant illegally using a News Parody network name as cover. Fact is Trump is following the playbook of every slave owning, goose stepping fascist tyrannical DICKtator ever, you’re just too Deaf DUMB and Blind to see it over your lifetime tax break.
MAGA is rapidly coming unglued with in fighting and internal strife while the nation is going to literal Hell in a Hand. Basket! Utility Prices are soaring, Food Prices are OUTRAGEOUSLY higher than ever, Unemployment is also soaring! And yet you are on here defending your Convicted Sex Offender Felon and Insurrectionist with bullshit and lies ad nauseam. You should be ashamed of yourself but I know you’re not. All assholes (who flock to other assholes) think their shit don’t stink until they catch a good whiff of reality! Your reality is rapidly approaching whether it be full disclosure of Trumps involvement on Epteins Pedo Island or a MAGA revolt as the economy crashes into a severe depression because of the self proclaimed GenieASS’s ignorant tariffs and WAY overblown Nazistic deportation policies.when non criminal teenagers are being swept off the streets by ICE and DHS and rapidly deported without any rights whatsoever we are living in a Fascist Autocracy not a Democracy or even as you idiots insist we are “a Republic” without Democracy. And only a Fascist idiot would say otherwise!
Hearing a Draft Dodging Insurrectionist quote a war movie is a hoot to say the least! It’s always the cowards who act the toughest and when the shit hits the fan they’re the first to claim innocence or attempt to flee.
“Because while elites are busy wringing their hands, real Americans are watching their schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods buckle under the weight of unchecked migration“
Dump is an “Elite” you wanker cu@t! He was also BFF with a pair of sex trafficking pedophiles who raped and molested teenage GIRLS not women!
His rapidly declining economy isn’t going to fix anything other than his legal debts and personal wealth he gains from grifting his followers who are dumb as rocks and believe the televangelist shite that flows from his uh uh a brain!
Talk out your arse much?
Besides your ridiculously ignorant propaganda do you do a stand up routine as well? You should because you suck at propaganda. Most propaganda is cleverly disguised with a mish mash of fact and lies not just outright ridiculous lies like yours. But then again MAGA is the party of stupid wealthy elite oligarch convicted felons. Can’t get any dumber than that or can you?
The only thing America is smelling is your bullshit mixed in with the rest of the bullshit emanating from your greedy mouth holes or wherever it is you talk out of.
“When the president said, “I love the smell of deportation in the morning,” the media acted like he’d declared war on humanity itself. They missed the point. What he did was take a serious problem—illegal immigration—and slice right through the nonsense with humor that hits home.“
So you find innocent people (yes there are innocent people to include dreamer children) being deported “humorous”? You’re just as mentally depraved as Trump is! Get some professional help!