I was watching Apple’s “For All Mankind” the other night—this fascinating alternate history of the space program that spans from the late 60s through a fictional 90s Mars mission—when something hit me like a cosmic meteor floating randomly in space.
There’s a storyline in season two where tensions between Americans and Russians on the moon escalate into actual violence. The Americans, in their infinite wisdom, decide to weaponize the moon. A Russian gets shot, burns alive in his oxygenated suit, and suddenly we’re watching the Cold War play out into hot war in space. But here’s what really got to me: the show depicts a Russian wanting to defect after the trauma and altercation, and it immediately transported me back to the endless parade of anti-Russian movies from the 80s.
Remember those films? White Nights, Spies Like Us, Moscow on the Hudson—Hollywood couldn’t stop making movies about desperate Russians trying to escape their oppressive system. The narrative was crystal clear: the Soviet Union was this depraved hellscape of lies, deceit, and brutality where people would risk everything for a chance at freedom.
Fast forward to today, and I have to ask: When did we become the country people want to defect from?
The Security Theater That Isn’t About Security
Here’s what really pisses me off: Ron Paul nailed it when he said the Department of Homeland Security isn’t designed to keep people out—it’s ultimately going to keep us in. Think about it. What problem does DHS actually solve that wasn’t already being handled?
Border security? We had that. Airline security? We had that too—and here’s the kicker—there was way more terrorism and plane hijackings in the 70s than there ever was leading up to 9/11. Yet somehow we managed without turning every airport into a mini police state where grandma gets the naked body scanner treatment.
Don’t kid yourself about those scanners either. Sure, they’ve programmed the display to show generic outlines instead of revealing everything, but the technology is still capturing our naked body. They’ve just added some digital fig leaves to the operator’s screen. The capability to see through your clothes hasn’t gone anywhere—it’s just been temporarily obscured by software that could be removed with a few keystrokes.
The brutal truth? The Department of Homeland Security is just another layer of bureaucracy designed to funnel money out of productive society and into the police state apparatus. It doesn’t make us safer—we’re living in literally the safest time in human history. Crime has been on a downward trajectory since the mid 90s. What the police state does is normalize the idea that we should be treated like potential criminals before we’ve committed any crime.
The Great Narrative Flip
Growing up in the 80s, America was the beacon of freedom precisely because of the contrast with the Soviet Union. We were the good guys because they were the ones with the police state, the surveillance, the assumption of guilt. They were the ones whose citizens risked everything to escape.
Now look at us. We’ve got:
- Pre-crime policing that treats every citizen as a potential terrorist
- Surveillance systems that would make the Stasi jealous
- A security apparatus that costs billions while solving problems that didn’t actually exist
- Government agencies that lie to us with such frequency it’s become the norm
The Americans in “For All Mankind” weaponize the moon and create conflict where none needed to exist. Sound familiar?
Learning Nothing from History’s Lessons
This brings me to something that’s been gnawing at me: how little we understand about the historical patterns that got us here. General Patton saw it coming. He made observations that weren’t popular with the US government because he was starting to question whether we’d fought the right enemy—or at least whether we should have allowed Eastern Europe to be brutalized by the Soviet Empire after defeating Germany.
But here’s the deeper problem: World War II happened because of World War I, and World War I happened because of… what exactly? The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Serbia somehow triggered a global catastrophe that reshaped the entire world order. The Treaty of Versailles then financially destroyed Germany, creating the exact conditions that made Hitler’s nationalist rhetoric appealing to a desperate population.
We keep making the same mistakes because we refuse to understand the actual causes of the conflicts we claim to be solving.
The Real Question We Should Be Asking
Here’s what I want to know: When did we decide that freedom was worth sacrificing for the illusion of security? When did we become okay with being treated like prisoners in our own country?
Look, I don’t care what games the power brokers want to play. Want to keep certain substances illegal so you can charge premium prices when they cross borders? Fine. Want to run your spy operations and geopolitical chess matches? Go ahead. But here’s where I draw the line: leave the rest of us the hell alone.
Stop treating law-abiding citizens like criminals. Stop building surveillance states. Stop creating problems that require more government solutions. Stop turning America into the thing we used to point at as the example of what free countries should never become.
The Soviet Union collapsed because its people knew they were living a lie. The constant defections, the economic failure, the obvious gap between propaganda and reality—it all became impossible to maintain.
Are we paying attention to our own defection rate? Are we noticing how many Americans are looking for exit strategies?
Because if we’re not careful, we’re going to find ourselves in the position of those 1980s Russians—desperate to escape the very system we once thought made us free.
The question isn’t whether we can build a more secure police state. The question is whether we can remember what made America worth defending in the first place.
Are we becoming the country our grandparents would have tried to escape from?
