Terrified
I have been, for the last month or so, terrified. When the belligerent liar currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue returned for a second term, it became obvious within the first week that this time, unlike his chaotic, aimless and ultimately inept first administration, he was coming in armed to the teeth and surrounded by sycophantic henchmen, and all of them walked in on day one with hatchets and wrecking balls.
It is OK to feel terrified at the rapaciousness of this blatantly fascist administration. The speed at which they have thrust people of color and queer people back to the margins, the mass firings, the unhinged war on DEI and the judiciary should cause everyone alarm. The claims of white people being victimised by the equality of their fellow citizens should frighten everyone—the equality of your neighbor does not diminish the rights your white Christian family enjoys. Everyone should be terrified that the Executive Branch has arrested a permanent resident, Mahmoud Khalil, a grad student at Columbia University, for opposing genocide (just today CNN referred to his protest against genocide as “discrimination”—western media is as white supremacist as their governments, and as hateful of the truth).
This is not a time for more performative “resistance” like we saw in 2016. Pink pussy hats and hashtags will not slow the progression towards authoritarianism. If we cannot approach intersectionality in our movements to oppose a threat aimed at all of us, then they will win. If Americans continue to drink the cool-aid and turn their fear and frustration on trans people or immigrants or anyone calling out the genocidal crimes perpetrated in Palestine, then Americans hand democracy to those who wish to murder it.
So far the “oppostion party”, the Democrats, choose to censure their own and to punch left, echoing the current administration’s loathing of DEI and wokeness and telling us the party needs to move even further to the right and must act even more like the Republicans. This is how European liberals handed their countries to fascists in the 1930’s—the ruling elites, even the “liberals” retain their privileges under authoritarian regimes. Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer do not care about you, your rights or democracy—they sold us out ages ago, and we were too distracted to notice, like when Pelosi said several years ago that legislating Roe v. Wade when the Dems held the Senate, House and Executive was “too divisive”. If a white liberal lady worth hundreds of millions will use the threat of abortion being criminalized to garner votes and donations while doing nothing to protect the right to abortion, or women’s rights in general, what hope can you have that she will stand up to mass deportations, the eradication of the First Amendment, war on transgender youth and the end of the Republic?
No one is coming to save us, least of all a Democratic Party obsessed with wooing Fascists and convinced that everyone who said “stop the genocide” was a Chinese operative or a Russian asset. The delusions and the fascist leanings and progression are bipartisan.
No one is coming to save us.
