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Pete Hegseth said, “No stupid rules of engagement.” Trump said, “I don’t need international law.”

They aren’t playing by the rules. A bunch of toddlers throwing temper tantrums on a global stage, except instead of throwing Legos, they are dropping bombs, and instead of stomping their feet, they are trying to stamp people out of existence.

The president who was going to end all wars has started, aided, or instigated three since taking office. He bombed Iran twice. On February 28, 2026, a U.S. Tomahawk missile struck Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, killing at least 168 people, most of them girls between seven and twelve. He bombed Caracas on January 3. Abducted a head of state. Killed eighty people, including an eighty-year-old woman asleep in her bed. He keeps bombing civilian boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. 163 dead. No trial. No charges. He is funding the genocide in Gaza. He added Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Ecuador to the list. Seven countries. One ongoing genocidal spree.

On our own soil, ICE patrols our streets. Power-hungry cowards who get to be called “Federal Agents.” A paramilitary force with a signing bonus whose only goal is oppression. Right in front of your eyes, they have taken it and rebranded it, but it is still the same old evils. Treatment that mirrors slave torture and Holocaust horrors. Resistance is being snuffed out or silenced. We should have learned. We should have grown. If it looks the same, it is. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably a goddamn duck. These evils are one and the same.

On September 5, 2025, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War. New letterhead. New signage. A new URL at war.gov. Two billion dollars to rebrand it.

Meanwhile, people I love cannot fill their fridges. Choose between rent and meds. Decide whether to feed their pets, their kids, or themselves. We build a White House ballroom, fund wars, and send aid to those causing the suffering instead of those bleeding out under it. Americans and people worldwide, in plain sight, begging for humanity, are ignored. So that the rich can be richer and build their mansions on our ashes.

Now the draft. Like most things Trump does, it slithered into existence in the middle of the night. On December 18, 2025, Trump signed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which mandates automatic Selective Service registration. 23 million men will be auto-enrolled starting this December.

We are not warning about a slippery slope. We are on one, and there is nothing to hold onto as we are sliding frantically, trying to grasp anything that resembles hope or joy, getting covered in scrapes and bruises on the way down.

Trans people cannot serve. The Supreme Court upheld the ban on May 6, 2025, and roughly a thousand trans service members were fired and removed from their posts within weeks. Disabled and neurodivergent people cannot serve. “Unfit” has always been political. The state has always seen you as another form of currency they can cash in on when they’re ready. In 1918, Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for a speech against conscription. A hundred and eight years later, nothing about that has changed.

I am glad I cannot be drafted. But the war I fight is here. Trying to help keep my community alive, speaking out, and standing up against this administration and any leadership built on hate. Like so many queer and marginalized people, I am fighting a war on my own soil just to stay alive. I am safe from dying in Iran. I am not safe from being shot by ICE with no excuse needed for my killing. Danger is not gone. It has just taken a different shape and was given a new badge.

Spain closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in the Iran war on March 30. Italy blocked U.S. bombers from Sigonella. France refused overflights for Israel-bound military supplies. Even Giorgia Meloni, an ally of Trump, called the Minab school strike a massacre.

Even Pope Leo XIV rebuked him. The world is awakening to the reality of our true nature, and they’re calling it out. And that’s nothing to scoff at, but it is not enough. We cannot outsource our own uprising to Madrid, the Vatican, or to some power beyond.

Trump is unfit, unhinged, and declining. JD Vance is clumsily dangerous, opportunistic, and loves the spotlight. A man who called Trump “America’s Hitler” and now sits at his right hand, a childlike grin as he seeks daddy’s approval, vice president of a legacy built on lies. Different toddler, same tantrum. Same weapons of mass destruction.

The White House created the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center. Ten federal agencies. $166 million in Trump’s own budget request. Mandated to “proactively” identify Americans it classifies as domestic terrorists. Their targets: anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, antifascism, radical gender ideology, and hostility toward traditional views on family and morality. That might just look like a list of qualifiers, but that’s everyone I love and hold dear, everyone who makes this country truly great and beautiful, giving it color, flavor, rhythm, and wonder. They want a land that’s as bland as sawdust and don’t care how many trees they have to cut down. They are hunting us. Bondi admitted it under oath in February 2026.

Each time I step outside, I weigh the cost of never coming back. I weigh the cost of living, and the fact that my existence and my voice have power in this war we are surviving.

They want our silence. They are screaming that they will do anything to ensure it. But when we rise, when we break down the walls they built to confine us, when we scream at the top of our lungs in the name of liberty and justice for all, when we keep living, keep marching, keep chanting, keep resisting, we are the shield, we are the sword. We will not be silent. And we will go down swinging.