There are no easy fights in the struggle against the empire. Lots of losses and no clean wins.

You spend years protesting the genocide in Gaza, and you get a fake, shitty "ceasefire" deal that's just designed to shut you up while Israel continues creating hell for the Palestinians and carving off more pieces of their territory.

Humanity manages to avoid nuclear conflict at the most dangerous points of the Ukraine war, but the country continues getting torn apart for years in an idiotic bloodbath that could have been easily avoided with a little diplomacy and common sense.

Assange gets free, but only after he agrees to plead guilty to doing journalism, and only after years of cruel treatment have made an example of him for all the world to see.

Public trust in the mainstream media finally gets obliterated, only for the imperial perception managers to come up with Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and plutocrat-owned AI chatbots to retain control of the narrative.

The capitalists get everything they want, and succeed in advancing any ecocidal, dystopian agenda of their choosing so long as it generates profits or bolsters the imperial power structure.

Republicans win and they still act like underdog victims. Democrats win and they act like Republicans. Meanwhile any real political opposition which starts getting its legs underneath it gets stomped into the dirt in its infancy.

Your heroes let you down. Your allies die. The geopolitical developments you hope to see never quite pan out. Whenever there's a moment of relative calm the dissident factions get restless and start cannibalizing themselves with counterproductive infighting and lateral-punching.