One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

A splintering rage seethes beneath the surface, a desperate attempt to grasp the ungraspable, to impose order upon an unraveling reality that is rapidly spiraling into chaos. It is no longer contained—it festers, spreading like an infection, with its origins in the United States but now metastasizing beyond borders. Every day, the news bleeds with evidence of our descent. Are we all slipping into madness? Have we abandoned the last remnants of our empathy?

The world is turning savage. The illusions we clung to—of progress, of unity, of a guiding light leading us safely to shore—have been shattered. That beacon was never salvation; it was a mirage, revealing instead a nation teetering on the edge of self-destruction, threatening to drag the entire world into its abyss. Free trade, open borders, the seamless movement of people and ideas—these were comforting lies. There is no longer an “us” that encompasses all; there is only “us” and “them.” Perhaps that was always the truth, buried beneath our naive hopes. Progress, we were told, would bring us together. Instead, it has led us full circle, right back to division, right back to the primal conflict we sought to escape.

The immigrant is no longer a story to be told, no longer a journey of struggle and hope—it is a threat to be eradicated. The immigrant is the enemy. The American Dream, once whispered as a promise to all who dared to believe, has been locked away behind walls both seen and unseen. It belongs only to those deemed worthy by birthright, by blood, by the shifting tides of nationalism. For everyone else, it was never real.

Lady Liberty, once the mother of exiles, still holds her torch high—but not to guide the weary to safe shores. No, that flame now burns with menace, an omen of rejection, of fury. She no longer welcomes; she hunts. The same hands that once reached out in mercy now clutch at pitchforks and torches, wielding them with the fervor of a lynch mob. The village has turned against you. They see not a neighbor, not a fellow human seeking shelter, but an invader, a defiler of their sacred land.

And so, in their eyes, you have become the monster. The shadow lurking at their gates. The outsider to be feared, to be expelled, to be unmade. The land of the free has redrawn its borders, not just on maps but in hearts, carving deeper trenches of division. You were promised a refuge. Instead, you are met with fire and fury.

“Liberty” is no longer a word of promise but of contempt, spat out like a curse. Omar El Akkad peers into this fractured landscape, into this so-called promised land, and finds something else entirely: a world imploding under the weight of its contradictions. The tide of history is shifting, not toward unity, but toward schism. Freedom, we are discovering, was never without its price. And now, we are paying for it.

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
-This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

As an immigrant who came to the West, Omar El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has concluded that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, and city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.