Let’s get one thing straight: the United States isn’t a benevolent empire. It never has been. It didn’t “spread democracy” to Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam. It didn’t “liberate” anyone when it installed dictators across Latin America or propped up apartheid in South Africa. What it did do–and still does–is colonize, exploit, and annihilate in the name of profit.

This isn’t ancient history. It’s currently happening. It’s the drone strikes that don’t make the news. It’s the “aid” packages that comes with strings attached and private contractors waiting in the wings. It’s military bases dotting the globe like pimples of power on every continent but Antarctica.

I’m anti-imperialist because I don’t believe any nation has the moral authority to dominate another. Especially not through force, especially not under the smokescreen of “freedom.” American imperialism wears many disguises: NGOs, trade agreements, coups, color revolutions, Hollywood, but underneath, it’s always the same face: power backed by violence.

I’m anti-colonial because the world is still bleeding from wounds inflicted by white supremacy and extraction-based economies. Colonization didn’t end with flags being lowered. It evolved into debt traps, resource plunder, and forced dependency. Look at how the Global South is treated when it tries to resist. Look at how indigenous people in the so-called “developed world” are still pushed off their land for pipelines and lithium mines.

And I’m absolutely anti-military industrial complex because we spend trillions every year not on health, not on housing, not on education, but on weapons, surveillance, and endless wars. The Pentagon is the world’s biggest polluter. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, these are the real welfare queens, sucking on our tax dollars to build machines that blow up brown children in countries most Americans can’t find on a globe or a map.

And we’re told to be proud of this.

We’re told this is “defense.” That’s Orwellian doublespeak. You don’t “defend freedom” with cluster bombs and occupation. You defend it by dismantling the systems that profit from bloodshed.

To be anti-imperialist today is to be a threat to bipartisan consensus. Democrats and Republicans alike bow to the altar of militarism. They clap in unison for war budgets, while telling us there’s no money for universal healthcare. The only thing they agree on is that endless war is good business.

But some of us aren’t buying it anymore.

We’re organizing. We’re protesting. We’re resisting not just war, but the machinery that makes war possible. That means opposing U.S. hegemony, standing in solidarity with liberation movements worldwide, and rejecting the normalization of violence as policy.

The empire has no clothes. And it’s time more of us said so … loudly