Pick a Side. Fight Like Hell. Repeat.

People want to elect fighters. They want affordability. They want security. Accountability. Voters want to fight corruption. Voters are starving for somebody who’ll stand up to power on their behalf. Yet, almost every time, that sentiment gets pointed at one target, Donald Trump. Fighting Trump, fighting his administration’s grab at our rights, fighting the handful of people at the top who’ve piled up about as much wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent of the country combined. I’m for the fight. But a fight needs an opponent, and you have to be clear-eyed and correct about who the opponent is, or you can’t defeat them. Right now, too many politicians and too many voters have decided their opponent is one man.

Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, and his administration is a threat to people the world over. But you don’t solve that threat by standing up to him, or legislating around him, or writing some new law that says he can’t do the thing he’s already doing. Because we’ve watched a Supreme Court bless this behavior. We’ve watched laws get ignored. Judgments ignored. Courts ignored. So it isn’t a question of who sits in the chair. It’s a question of power, and a question of accountability, and almost nobody with any standing is asking for accountability.

Our enemy isn’t the man. Our enemy is the system in which he’s operating, and that system runs on one thing, a lack of accountability.

Let’s start with what should be the clearest. We have been funding and arming a genocide of the Palestinian people, carried out by a rogue regime in Israel, in plain sight, and none of us can do a thing to stop it. You might think that has nothing to do with your life in Des Moines or Knoxville or wherever you’re reading this. It has everything to do with it. Because a system that lets war crimes happen in broad daylight with no consequence is the same system you live under, and if genocide can’t be stopped then what can? The powerlessness we feel isn’t just a side effect, it’s the point. An inspiration to quit.

Unlike money powerlessness does trickle down. It’s the Epstein operation, where the names are known, and not one person who mattered has answered for any of it. It’s Ken Paxton in Texas, whose office took over the case of a man who admitted to years-long sexual abuse of a young boy, a first-degree felony that carried up to life in prison, and after a mistrial cut him a deal down to two misdemeanors, thirty days in jail, and no spot on the sex-offender registry, and that same Ken Paxton is now his party’s nominee for the United States Senate. It’s an economy that minted its first trillionaire off the backs of American workers, American innovation, and resources we all paid to build. Different stories, same disease. Nobody pays.

The centrists have a ready answer for all of this. They’ll say, “That’s your problem, you’d rather go after the Democratic Party than fight Trump.” The “centrists” are wrong. Working to transform and restore the Democratic Party is one of the few solutions that might work.

There’s not really a center for them to occupy. There’s no neutral ground when the government is actively working to dismantle democracy and we have an economy failing the overwhelming majority of the people inside it. There is no center on genocide. To stand in the middle is to work with the people who currently hold the power, and the people who hold the power are Trump, and Palantir, and private equity, and the billionaires, the ones doing the extracting and the oppressing, here and across the planet.

So when a Democrat says I’m not willing to take on the system itself, the economic system, the justice system, the whole machine, what that Democrat is saying is that the machine gets to stay. And the machine is what empowers Trump. Going after Trump the man instead of the system isn’t a step toward fixing anything. It’s the false option, the move that lets you feel like a fighter while you don’t solve anything. You cannot be a centrist in this moment, because in this moment the center is just a way of siding with Trump.

I don’t see how a centrist can honestly think of themselves as “a fighter.” You can’t both fight for people and not fight to take power away from the institutions and companies that hold it and use it to harm people. You can’t fight against Trump by attacking socialists.

There’s a poem most of us know, written about what Germany allowed to happen. I won’t paraphrase it. It does its work whole.

First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And by then there was no one left to speak out for me

We are doing it again, right now, in the open. Both Trump and centrist Democrats are coming for the socialists, by which they mean anybody standing to the left of a tax cut. They are coming for the immigrants. They are coming for the unhoused and the disabled and the people with the least power to stop them. And, just like in Weimar Germany, the people who should be blocking authoritarianism are instead siding with it to attack the left. Josh Gottheimer. James Carville. The whole Promise to America crowd, the centrists on every channel, lining up with an administration they swear they want to fight, against an ideology whose only crime is refusing to say that things are fine the way they are.

And I don’t mean any of that as a figure of speech. I mean, there’s already a system built and running. ICE has opened more than 150 new detention facilities since this administration came in, the daily detention population has passed a record seventy thousand people, and the plan on paper is to spend thirty-eight billion dollars building toward a hundred thousand beds, in mega-camps run by the same for-profit prison companies that make money off everybody they hold.

In the Florida Everglades, they built a camp they nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz, where the conditions are so bad detainees went on hunger strike and Amnesty International called what was happening there torture. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year, the most in two decades, and this year is worse.

Think you’re safe? It isn’t only immigrants. ICE and Border Patrol agents have shot multiple U.S. citizens and killed several of them, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both gunned down in Minneapolis this January. Good’s death was ruled a homicide, and the Justice Department declined to investigate the agent who shot her and opened an investigation into her widow instead. That’s what no accountability looks like.

And the same machine runs at home. In March of last year, they stood up a federal task force to flood Washington with police, sweep the unhoused out of public space, and run immigration enforcement through the middle of the city. In July came an executive order to make it easier to round up homeless people and commit them to institutions against their will, on the claim that most of them are addicts or mentally ill. In August, they declared a crime emergency and pulled DC’s own police force under federal command, and over the past year, we’ve watched National Guard troops and even Marines pushed into American cities against protesters.

And this June, the Justice Department put out a legal memo arguing that disabled Americans have no right to live in their own communities at all, tearing up twenty-five years of settled law and quietly reopening the door to warehousing disabled people in institutions, right as the Medicaid cuts pull the funding from the services that keep them out. That isn’t a slope we might slide down someday. It’s a machine, already built, made to remove the people the state has decided are a problem.

And the billionaires aren’t standing off to the side, they’re cheering it on. Two weeks ago, the richest man alive, Elon Musk, used his platform to give away for free a film that German censors had refused to certify because, by the director’s own account, they found it incited violence against migrants. Then Musk posted that the sequel will be even better. That’s where we are. The man with more money than most nations is out promoting vigilante violence against immigrants and calling it a movie.

And all of it sits on top of a surveillance system we’ve been building since 9/11, more and more of it run by private companies and now being supercharged with AI, the cameras and the license plate readers and the face scans, pointed at us. People will tell you the lesson is that we let the government get too big. That’s not the lesson. The problem was never the size of the government. The problem is that we let unchecked power pool in the hands of a few, the few who own the system, run the camps, write the memos, and answer to no one.

So no, I’m not interested in fighting Donald Trump. I’m interested in fighting the thing that made him and will outlast him, the system that lets a genocide run, lets the Epstein names stay buried, lets a child’s abuser walk and then promotes the man who walked him, mints fortunes off our work, and rounds up the weakest people we’ve got while calling it order. That’s the enemy. Not a man. A system.

And the first thing we can do is quit pretending there’s a safe place to stand while it runs. There isn’t. Knowing the enemy doesn’t fix anything by itself, it just tells you where to put your shoulder, and the work after that is bigger and longer than anything a single election can fix. But it starts with saying the plain thing the center exists to avoid. You cannot be a centrist in this moment. Pick a side.