IT'S 1930 IN 2025

It’s 1930s Germany All Over Again — Only This Time, It’s America, 2025

It’s déjà vu all over again. The world has seen this movie before, only this time, the setting isn’t Berlin, it’s Washington, D.C. The script hasn’t changed much: a wounded democracy, a demagogue with a talent for lies, and a population too divided, distracted, or defeated to resist. The curtain has risen on the American Reich, and the applause, tragically, is deafening.

The authoritarian takeover didn’t come with tanks rolling through the streets. It came with cheering crowds, gerrymandered districts, and a flood of propaganda that drowned reason. The institutions that were supposed to stand as bulwarks, the courts, the Congress, the press, fell like dominoes, one by one, to fear, ambition, or sheer exhaustion. Those who thought “it can’t happen here” forgot that every country that ever fell to tyranny once said the same thing.

The political elite won’t stop it. They never do. They are too busy negotiating their relevance, too addicted to the perks of proximity to power. The Republicans have already sold their souls for survival. They line up behind the strongman, nodding in robotic unison, afraid to break ranks lest they be banished, imprisoned, or worse, tweeted about. The Democrats? Their hearts may be in the right place, but their spines remain somewhere in storage. They issue statements, hold hearings, and then fade back into procedural paralysis while democracy burns.

The so-called “No Kings March,” intended to rally the masses, is little more than an exercise in wishful thinking, a symbolic stroll while the empire solidifies itself. Millions should be in the streets; instead, there are thousands, waving signs that will soon be banned under the new “Patriot Restoration Act.” The machinery of repression is already in full operation. Surveillance is normalized, dissent criminalized, and free speech sterilized under the guise of “national unity.”

And the military? Forget the cavalry, they’re not coming. The generals have been replaced, retired, or reprogrammed. Those who once swore to defend the Constitution now salute the man who shredded it. Their silence speaks louder than any oath. They are the German officer corps of 1933, convincing themselves they can contain the dictator even as they enable him.

The damage is not coming. It’s here. It will take decades, if not generations, to undo. Once the truth is outlawed, and fear becomes the air everyone breathes, courage becomes a relic. When propaganda is indistinguishable from news and loyalty from love of country, the nation’s moral compass spins itself into dust.

What is to be done? The bleak answer may be: nothing. History rarely grants do-overs. Once a nation trades liberty for order, it never quite finds its way back. But even in despair, truth must be recorded. Someday, when this darkness lifts, and it will, for tyranny always devours itself. Someone will ask, “How did it happen?” Let the record show that some of us saw it clearly, shouted into the void, and refused to call this travesty by any other name.

America, 2025: the fire alarms are blaring. And once again, too many are sleeping through the smoke.

William James Spriggs