Editorial: The Winter of Our Discontent
By • February 10, 2026 0 127
Have we completely lost our bearings?
Something is rotten in the state of these United States.
A few months from our 250th anniversary, the U.S. has become an unrecognizable dystopia, leaving us and the world agape at the “ambient malevolence” (as MS NOW’s Chris Hayes described it, reporting from Minneapolis) that distorts every aspect of what we thought we knew and loved about our country.
There are no words to describe what we are living through. J6 thugs, born again as ICE and CPB agents, armed to the teeth, hunt, arrest and sometimes murder individuals exercising their First Amendment rights to assemble freely and speak their minds. As of this writing, over 73,000 people, robbed of their due process, are being held in camps and kept from contacting their families or lawyers.
Children are being forced to live out their worst nightmares, kidnapped and terrified by masked monsters, while the offspring of this policy’s perpetrators — Trump, Miller and Noem — live in peace and privilege.
Businesses in the cities of occupation are failing. International tourism has plunged, impacting revenue and jobs. And uninvited troops strut through our streets as if they owned the place. (A little help here with the snow removal, fellas?)
Meanwhile, the president roams like a demented Godzilla, destroying alliances with on-again, off-again tariffs, threats of hostile takeovers — an actual hostile takeover in Venezuela’s case — and the rejection of every diplomatic norm. To this crowd, the Constitution is merely a suggestion. Divide and rule is the operating principle and tyranny the result.
Yet the stock markets are hitting new highs. Regulations are gutted and our well-being is placed a distant second to profits. And expertise? Facts are what the White House says they are; “alternative” doesn’t begin to cover it.
The East Wing is in rubble. The Kennedy Center is being shuttered. Agencies and institutions of long standing have been undermined, if not eliminated. Basic rights, key precedents and our very history are being disappeared. Then there are the Epstein Files, the brazen grifting, the slandering of ICE victims, the arrests of journalists …
We really hope Punxsutawney Phil was wrong about this year’s forecast. We can’t take much more of this midwinter bleakness.
