Every few months, someone in power wrings their hands about how America is a divided nation and asks “why can’t we all just get along?”
It sounds reasonable. It sounds kind.
It’s also a trap.
That framing treats our division like bad weather — something that just happened to us, that nobody chose, that we could fix if we’d all simply be a little nicer to our neighbors.
It’s a comforting story.
It’s also false.
The division is real, but it didn’t fall out of the sky. It is built, funded, and profited from. And the first step to getting out of it is refusing to pretend it’s an accident.
The Man at the Top Tells You Exactly Who He is
You know when the tone was set. You might not remember, but in that moment you recognized that it was happening.
The remarks themselves were divisive and inappropriate, but in that moment, in that environment, they were striking. Those remarks set the tone for the next four years — and possibly for years to come.
At the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, Kirk’s widow Erika stood in front of a grieving crowd and said the answer to hate is not more hate — that we should love our enemies.
She said she forgives the man accused of killing her husband. Whatever you thought of Kirk’s politics, it was an act of grace.
Then the President of the United States took the stage and threw it in the trash. Speaking right after her, Trump said the one place he disagreed with Kirk was the idea of wishing your opponents well. “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them,” he told the room, adding that right now he can’t stand them. The crowd laughed.
That is the leader of the country, at a funeral, announcing that he hates roughly half the people he governs — and getting applause for it.
When people ask why America feels like it’s tearing apart, a very large part of the answer is that the man in the most powerful office on earth wants it that way.
The Violence is Real — and How Leaders Respond to it is the whole story
Political violence is not a hypothetical.
In June 2025, a gunman dressed as a police officer murdered Minnesota House leader Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark inside their own home, and shot another state lawmaker and his wife the same night.
Investigators found a list of targets in his car — names of Democratic officials, including Governor Tim Walz and Senators Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar.
The Hortmans were killed alongside their dog. An entire family, gone, because of politics.
The part the “both sides” story can’t explain: When Charlie Kirk was killed, Democrats across the federal government condemned the murder immediately and offered sympathy to his family.
Compare that to what happened when an intruder broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and fractured her 82-year-old husband Paul’s skull with a hammer.
Republican officials — including the President’s own son — turned it into a punchline, and Trump has mocked it publicly more than once.
The issue isn’t that one side has feelings and the other doesn’t. It’s that one party’s leadership treats the near-killing of an elderly man as comedy material.
You cannot heal a divide while one side keeps laughing at the wounds.
Follow the Money, Not the Finger They’re Pointing
So who actually benefits from keeping us at each other’s throats?
Not you.
We laid this out in “Don’t Look Up”: the people running the show want you looking left, looking right, looking down at someone more vulnerable than you — anywhere but up.
Because if you look up, you’ll see who’s actually emptying your pockets, and you’ll notice it isn’t your coworker who votes differently.
A huge engine of all this is what passes for “news.” When Fox News pushed the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, it wasn’t a mistake — internal messages later showed hosts knew the claims were false and said them anyway.
The network paid $787 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over it.
Companies don’t write checks that size for cases they expect to win.
Outrage is the product. Division is the business model.
And it has a body count — the same lies helped fuel the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6th.
The Secret They Don’t Want You to Know: We Agree on a Lot
For all the noise, Americans are remarkably united on the things that would actually change their lives.
Large majorities — including most gun owners — support universal background checks.
Majorities consistently tell pollsters they’d trade our broken insurance system for Medicare for All. Across the political spectrum, people want money out of politics, the Epstein files released, no new wars, and an end to our tax dollars funding the genocide in Gaza.
The things most of us want are blocked not because we disagree with each other, but because the people in power answer to their donors instead of to us.
The real divide in this country was never left versus right. It’s the people who have to work for a living against the handful at the top who’d rather we stay too busy fighting to notice.
So What Do We Actually Do?
Not this: we don’t fix it by being more polite on the internet.
Arguing with a stranger on social media has never once de-radicalized anyone, and “civility” by itself just asks the people being targeted to be quieter about it.
What works is unglamorous and local. Get off the platforms engineered to enrage you and into a room with real people.
Show up at a town hall. Check on the neighbor that could be destroyed by a hospital bill or an ICE raid.
Plug into organizing where actual decisions get made. (Our free community lets members find others nearby to do exactly that.) And refuse — every single time — to accept that the people being scapegoated are the enemy. They’re not. They’re bait.
Unity was never going to come from hating each other a little less. It comes from waking up and seeing who is actually doing this to us, and standing together against them.
That isn’t division. It’s the one thing they’re genuinely afraid of.
Choose love. Resist hate.
