Prism40%
Another way out: Empires don’t last forever—we help them fall 66%
By William C. Anderson85%
7/23/2026, 9:51:53 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Appeal to Emotion, and Indoctrination, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 31.8% saturation with 471 hits. Analysis detected 3,454 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,483 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 54% and a BS Rank of 66% (8,802 of 25,563 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 65.60% of the article peer group.
“We will never have ‘normalcy’ again.
The water has been clearing up.
Something is happening on this Earth.
People are beginning to see the tops of mountains.
Yes, people are dying, but we need to look at also saving the planet.
We must save ourselves, but we must also save this Earth.
We need to finally answer the question: What does it mean to be human?” – Sonia Sanchez
The U.S. semiquincentennial marks 250 years of devastation.
All it took was a group of people aggrieved by their circumstances to help set in motion some of the greatest destructiveness the world would ever know.
That’s only part of the story, but it was compounded over time, creating unparalleled cycles of genocidal entitlement, consumption, and more deadly grief.
This is something I reflected on while in Leiden, in the Netherlands, when I stood at the very spot where the pilgrims set out for North America.
Now, with domestic fascism approaching what could be its most incredible zenith, these lands misnamed “America” must face a terrible reckoning.
What’s been building for centuries is caked between layers of sediment, where the earth tells the story of terrible times that led to this perfect storm.
I believe that to read between the layers, we have to start from the foundation.
As news of the latest authoritarian incursions spreads, from book bans to travel restrictions to imperialist wars , we have to keep reminding ourselves what the ground beneath us says.
In Leiden, I wanted to see the place I had read up on for an essay a couple of years earlier .
This was where those early pilgrim settlers had their rough start aboard the Speedwell, which hasn’t captured the historical imagination as the Mayflower does.
After visiting the places where the pilgrims had lived and worshipped, I wondered what it all meant to me.
When I got close enough to seminal landmarks of terror, I started to understand some things better.
What I realized was that there’s a difference between leaving and letting go.
One can leave a place or a situation while remaining committed to its idea or utility.
That attachment can backfire if someone is unwilling to sever ties completely.
This world is full of people who have been wronged and forced to leave the place where they were.
However, just because they left does not mean they let go of the many feelings that leaving our world behind can create in us.
What we do with those feelings is important.
My trip to Leiden coincided with the nearly 10 years I have lived after I watched the 2016 election results nearly kill my mother .
I was thinking about the pilgrims and the so-called New World back then too.
As I wrote, “Black people have been tasked with building up the ‘New World’ while the blood of those sacrificed for the American dream collects around our feet.
We have watched our loved ones die or be killed for the sake of empire while Presidents come and go.”
Things have only gotten worse since.
Even my ideas about Black liberation have had to accommodate the arrival of Black ultranationalist politics that embrace white fascistic and xenophobic rationale .
I’m observing how deteriorating conditions, constant catastrophe, and oppression have begun turning many oppressed people in the U.S. into white supremacists with Black and Brown skin.
With improper cultivation, hubris and resentment from grievance can turn victimized people into those who believe that their oppression makes them eternally innocent.
Warped and distorted logic is what told early settlers that their flight from religious persecution justified their genocidal impulse.
As their most famous leader, William Bradford, wrote , “It pleased God to vanquish their enemies and give them deliverance.”
This echoes today in the logic of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians as well as in many of the nationalist, colonial, and genocidal projects that have happened in between.
While claiming liberation, what has become clear is that, for formerly persecuted genocidaires, freedom means having what their oppressors had or have: the ability to destroy anyone who dares to challenge their claim.
This has plagued both capitalist and anti-capitalist, secular and religious, white and racialized aspirations toward many different ends.
This is why for me, Leiden was an opportunity for closure and letting go.
It was a deepening of my understanding of the beginning and, ultimately, the end of the U.S.
Not just a physical place, but a place that I once lived and have now relocated from to live in another country entirely so that I can continue my work to the best of my ability while anticipating what’s to come.
I know there is no escape, but there’s certainly more safety than what’s become the standard.
Before I ever read Toni Morrison’s essay, “ Peril ,” I knew what she said in it as truth:
Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools.
But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts.
They know they do so at their own peril.
They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media.
When we look at what the U.S. is right now, Donald Trump being in power is fitting, and so was climate change canceling July 4 celebrations.
It’s not that vulnerable people who have nothing to do with this mess deserve the pain of the predicament.
Instead, it’s an acknowledgment of what it means for something to be poisoned from the root.
And while many have united across the political aisle to denounce the current state of things, calling what’s happening “not America,” it absolutely is America; it always has been .
More patriotism and more loyalty will only drive us deeper into the problems that got us here.
It will not go away with denial, optimism, and distortion.
We have to see the soil and smell the blood.
There will have to be an abundance of letting go in order to overcome.
Letting go of false realities and dead politics that have become more of a hindrance than a help is just as important in this process too.
Morrison’s essay “ Racism and Fascism ” reminds us:
The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any single political party.
Democrats have no unsullied history of egalitarianism.
Nor are liberals free of domination agendas.
Republicans may have housed abolitionists and white supremacists.
Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist—we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home.
Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power.
We cannot let ourselves become infected.
Far too many of us are being infected by fascism across every inch of the political spectrum (including the radical left).
No one is safe when much of what we know has been hollowed out by the emptiness of an era dominated by influence and anti-intellectualism.
Therefore, I think there is a deeply spiritual transformation we must undertake to let go.
Not to be confused with religiosity, it’s spiritual in the sense that it’s an introspective journey to awaken, depart, and cultivate new traditions and practices.
This place is unrecognizably bad.
It’s a new badness that requires new naming, new maps, new solutions, and new radicalisms.
It’s a new badness that requires new relentlessness, born from people brave enough to sit with themselves and attempt to unleash something never seen before.
The spirit of an explosion with an all-engulfing fire that swallows up the heart of the bloody empire so that its ashes can fertilize the flowers of a better day.
I return to Morrison, who prophetically wrote:
When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas “marketplaced,” our rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.
If we can stop clinging too much, we can come closer to rebirth instead of reform.
I have seen it so clearly from the outside looking in.
Our entangled struggles and the mosaic of forces we need to create in order to resist everyday terror are calling us toward a different reality.
Rather than the wholesale, cataclysmic robbery of everything during dystopian times, we are called to make the passing of empire an opportunity to bring about the better society we need.
Speakers
1speaker1.1%attributed speech1,466writer words
Selected voice
0%flagged-word coverageSonia Sanchez
17 attributed words100% of attributed speech84% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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