This Is What’s Happening While You’re Living Your Normal Life
(Read it anyway and buckle up. It is a long one…but worth it.)
“No Kings Protest” Gayatri Malhotra, 2025
**I don't usually do this on any of my platforms... However, this is an urgent message to my readers.**
This isn't a post meant to be palatable.
This isn't a discussion.
This is documentation.
This is My Brutally Honest Opinion…
While we live our "normal" lives—while we work, argue online, fold laundry, send our kids to school, scroll past headlines, and tell ourselves it's not that bad.
Or worse—pretend nothing is happening at all.
I tried to deny it for a long time.
Unfortunately… It is that bad.
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Photo by: Andrew Heald, 2022
People want to believe evil always arrives loudly, that they will see it coming.
It arrives quietly, wearing the language of policy, procedure, and "for your safety."
People of color are being harmed—physically, legally, and systemically—not through chaos, but through design.
Through over-policing, mass detention, selective enforcement, surveillance, and punishment that hides behind paperwork, legal jargon, and technicalities.
And this is not limited to undocumented individuals.
American citizens are being arrested, detained, and placed into camps as well.
Let that sink in.
Not suspects.
Not criminals with convictions.
Citizens.
People with U.S. birth certificates.
Passports.
Constitutional rights that are supposed to be non-negotiable.
And you don't see this in the media, not because it isn't happening, but because the current administration is suppressing honest reporting on current events for U.S. citizens.
You read this correctly.
We are living in a country where the media no longer informs the public—it conditions it.
This isn't ancient history.
This isn't "somewhere else."
This is here.
This is now.
Auschwitz, Holocaust. Photo by: Karsten Winegeart
They often say, "History repeats itself."
It sure does, doesn’t it?
I paid enough attention in history class to recognize the similarities between our country now and a specific mustachioed man's country 85 years ago…
Strikingly similar.
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CHILDREN ARE NOT MEANT TO BE COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Children and adults are being kidnapped.
Families.
Trafficked.
It’s all being done in the name of immigration enforcement.
But somehow, deportees are disappearing at alarmingly high rates.
I hate to be the first one to tell you, if I am.
This is far darker than it appears.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is increasingly operating with military-style tactics—deploying Black Hawk helicopters, conducting large-scale raids, and treating civilian spaces like combat zones.
Photo by: Christian Lue, 2020 (Unsplash)
Entire buildings are being stormed with the force and precision typically reserved for military operations.
And layered on top of that is the trauma inflicted on every person caught in the path of these actions—families, workers, children—treated as threats instead of human beings.
People are being beaten. Raped. Tortured.
There are mass graves that can be seen from satellites outside of ICE Detention centers.
Children are being taken into government custody—and then lost.
"We can't get them back."
That was the official response regarding a U.S. citizen who was deported and placed into custody.
Read that again.
A government admitting it lost a child should have stopped everything, or at the very least, changed something.
It didn't.
Instead, coverage vanished. Stories were minimized. Language softened. Accountability dissolved. Ongoing human rights violations were buried under "complexity," red tape, and silence.
Let me remind you…
We have seen this before.
Haven't we?
Germany did not wake up one day in the 1940s and start committing atrocities.
Life went on. People went to work. Kids went to school.
Until suddenly, they didn’t.
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SEGREGATION DIDN'T END—IT EVOLVED
I honestly used to believe segregation was over.
That belief came from my comfort, not so much truth.
It didn't disappear.
It rebranded.
Now it looks like detention centers.
Like immigration courts without due process.
Like neighborhoods targeted by police and DHS Agents.
Like racial profiling disguised as procedure.
Civil Rights March (1963). Photo By: Library of Congress
We are watching our rights evaporate in real time.
A woman wanting control over her own body is framed as irresponsible, immoral, or dangerous.
Autonomy is labeled as rebellion.
Government overreach is disguised as "protection" and stamped with "national security," while constitutional rights are quietly suspended behind closed doors.
Racism isn't subtle.
It's strategic.
It's systemic.
Fundamental human rights—freedom, bodily autonomy, due process—are being treated as privileges that can be revoked.
And are being revoked.
We are being managed, monitored, treated like property, and herded like animals in cages.
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What terrifies me most isn’t the chaos.
It’s the refusal to look at it.
“I don’t follow politics.”
“I don’t believe that’s actually happening.”
“They’re just trying to take back the country.”
Photo By: Mathias Reding, 2020 (Unsplash)
“yOu cAnT BeLiEvE EvErYThInG YoU SeE On ThE NeWs”
I’ll be honest, that one sends me these days.
That’s ignorant.
That’s avoidance.
That’s weaponized incompetence.
And it’s precisely how atrocities are allowed to grow.
It seems to me that nobody is realizing detention camps are being built in multiple major U.S. cities—one of them in my own hometown.
Did you know that?
And no, this will not stop with “immigrants.”
“No to Racism” Photo by Viviana Rishe
It never does.
People stay quiet when they're afraid—afraid of losing jobs, reputations, safety. Afraid of being next.
I understand that fear.
But this is no longer hypothetical.
Innocent people have already been taken from U.S. soil and sent to a maximum-security foreign prison—without trial, without charges, without due process.
This was documented.
Verified.
Reported.
And then, the evidence disappeared.
Ask yourself why the truth had to disappear—
and who benefits when it does.
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Wars and genocides aren't "out there somewhere." They are happening right now, and the scale is astronomical.
According to global conflict monitoring data, the world is experiencing hundreds of thousands of violent events annually.
These are real people — mothers, fathers, children — being killed, starved, displaced, and targeted as we scroll past headlines.
What follows is even more alarming…
Censorship is sold as “safety.”
Photo By: Florian Glawogger, 2019
Control is sold as “normal.”
People are being told to watch their tone, stay compliant, and not ask too many questions.
Freedom of speech…one of the most basic checks against tyranny is quietly eroding, even in societies that once claimed it as sacred—and people are afraid to speak.
When truth is suppressed, power fills the void.
When speaking becomes dangerous, silence feels safer.
And fear slowly replaces freedom.
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THIS IS NOT INCOMPETENCE—IT IS CORRUPTION
The government is not just flawed.
Not just inefficient.
Photo by: Barbara Burgess, 2022
It is corrupt.
It is evil.
The media does not occasionally lie.
The media does not occasionally lie.
It lies systematically.
Truth is filtered, approved, delayed, reframed—or buried entirely.
Human trafficking is real.
It is organized.
It is protected.
Young women were trafficked, raped, and silenced all from one specific island.
The evidence exists.
Accountability does not.
We were taught rules—laws, ethics, consequences.
Those rules do not apply to people in power.
The Constitution on which this country was built is being dismantled in plain sight—while those responsible act as if they are untouchable.
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IF THIS MAKES YOU UNCOMFORTABLE
It should.
Comfort is a privilege—
And it has been built on someone else's suffering.
This isn’t fear-mongering.
It’s our reality.
This is what happens when people stop paying attention long enough for evil to organize itself. I don't care what side you're on.
Photo By: Jason Leung, 2025 (Unsplash)
There is no right or left in my eyes.
Only Right and Wrong.
