Yes, it’s f*cking political, but it’s not a joke.

Fair warning, the following post is about politics. It is long. It is passionate. It is me. You’ve been warned. Do leave a comment and share, it is important.

I don’t know if I should be afraid or if I should just laugh.

Every day, the news feels more like satire. A twisted reality where things that should be impossible keep happening. The US president just banned the Associated Press from the Oval Office, the White House, and the Air Force One because they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

Read that again.

It’s not a joke. This is real. And while it might seem like a petty, ridiculous power move, it’s more than that. It’s about control. It’s about rewriting reality. It’s about punishing those who refuse to obey.

And the worst part? It’s just one piece of a much bigger pattern.

For years, we told ourselves that dictatorships happened somewhere else. We studied them in school. Saw the old footage. Listened to the stories of people who watched their own countries slip away. We said we would never let it happen again.

But it is happening.

Not through war. Not overnight. But step by step. Undermine the press. Stoke fear. Divide people. Rewrite facts. Reward loyalty, punish dissent.

It is happening in the US. It is happening in Europe. It is happening now.

Fear is the oldest trick in the book. The far right plays the same game everywhere. They tell you that foreigners are the problem. That they are coming to take your job, your money, your family, your home. They create enemies and tell you they are protecting you. And people believe it.

Because fear is easy. Fear makes people cling to the ones who promise to protect them. Fear makes people stop questioning. Fear makes them vote for the same leaders who are failing them.

They say immigrants are stealing jobs.
They mean look over there, not at how we are failing you.

They say the EU is controlling your life.
They mean we need a villain to justify our power grab.

They say the press is lying to you.
They mean believe only us.

And we let it happen. Again and again.

The Netherlands just voted in Geert Wilders, a far-right leader who built his campaign on fear. He promised to stop asylum seekers, pull the country away from the EU, and put Dutch people first. His victory shocked Europe, but it shouldn’t have. The warnings were there.

In Italy, Giorgia Meloni plays both sides. She softened her tone after winning, but her policies tell a different story. Stricter migration laws. Tougher penalties for NGOs rescuing migrants at sea. A government that still leans hard right, no matter how carefully she crafts her image.

Germany should know better. Yet their borders are closing. Luxembourg petitioned against it. Thousands of people cross those borders every day to work, to live, to keep the economy running. Germany says it’s about security. But security from what? The far right is rising. The government is afraid. The move is political, not practical. It won’t solve anything. It will only reinforce the fear. Germany has not responded to Luxembourg. The petition might be ignored. And those who rely on open borders to survive will pay the price.

And then there is the US.

At the Munich Security Conference, the American vice president had a choice. He could have met with the German Chancellor, one of the most important leaders in Europe. Instead, he ignored him. But he found time for the leader of Germany’s far-right AfD party.

AfD is under surveillance by Germany’s intelligence agency. They are seen as a danger to democracy. And yet, they got the meeting. Not the Chancellor. Not the leader of the government. But the extremists.

That wasn’t a mistake. That was a message.

And it is not just happening here. The far right is connecting across borders. US conservatives praise Hungary’s Orbán, calling his model of “illiberal democracy” the future. Italy’s Meloni is welcomed as an ally. These groups are learning from each other, spreading the same fear, pushing the same agenda. And they are not just taking power. They are dismantling the institutions that could stop them.

In Hungary and Poland, the courts have already been weakened. In the US, the Supreme Court is stacked with far-right judges, undoing rights that took decades to secure. When the law no longer serves those in power, they change the law.

And then there is Gaza.

The forced displacement of an entire population. The plan to turn the land into a luxury destination while deporting the people who lived there. The expectation that neighboring countries should absorb them, even when they do not want to.

How is this not history repeating?

How is this not ethnic cleansing?

Western leaders who claim to defend democracy and human rights are standing by, funding, justifying, or ignoring it. The same governments that condemned other regimes for suppressing minorities are enabling the erasure of Palestinians.

And what happens next? What happens when those neighboring countries refuse to take in millions of displaced people? What happens when this crisis spreads? When the displaced have nowhere to go?

Maybe the real danger isn’t renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe the real danger is that we are talking about it instead of talking about whatever is happening in the background. That is how this works. They throw something absurd into the air. Something that makes people laugh or rage or argue. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, something much worse is slipping through.

What laws are being passed today? What alliances are being broken? What freedoms are being chipped away while we are too busy reacting to a distraction?

This isn’t new. It has happened before.

In the US, while people were distracted by social media scandals, they passed laws restricting voting rights. While the headlines were focused on celebrity drama, reproductive rights were stripped away. While everyone was talking about meaningless culture wars, LGBTQ+ protections were quietly removed.

And the war for information is just as real. Social media floods with AI-generated propaganda. Right-wing networks push conspiracy theories. Bots and troll farms make extreme views seem mainstream. They don’t just control the narrative. They create it.

It is easy to feel powerless. I feel it too. But that feeling is a lie. It is exactly what they want. They want people to give up. They want people to stop paying attention.

So I remind myself to stay awake. To keep watching. To question everything. To resist the fear because fear is a weapon, and I refuse to be used. To vote because apathy is what feeds this beast.

I don’t know where this road leads.

But I know how roads like this have ended before.

I know that no one ever thinks it will happen to them.

Until it is too late.

And I know I am scared.

Are you?