The United States is no longer a democracy. And idiotic denialism is getting in the way of rescuing a nation.
I saw a ridiculous headline on Substack the other day. For all I know, maybe the podcast it was promoting was quite insightful, but it offered one of those lines — you know the kind — that soooo put you off that you can’t bring yourself to read or listen to the actual product. The headline read: “If a president can stretch the law to take over the DC police without a real emergency, what’s to stop him from going further in a true crisis?”
I have nothing against Preet Bharara, one of Obama’s prized picks as a State Attorney or his Substack podcast, but I’d like to think a gentleman who was educated at Harvard and Columbia knows enough to see the obvious. THIS IS THE TRUE CRISIS!!! The emergency IS the deployment of your National Guard!
Forehead slap emoji over and over.
For crying out loud, you had a Democratic state lawmaker held hostage in a Texas legislative chamber, all as part of the elaborate plan by Republicans to gerrymander districts.
This is where I let out a string of epithets, including a great blasphemy I learned from Norman Spinrad’s sci-fi novel Bug Jack Barron: “Jesus Christ on a Harley Davidson!”
Hey, Americans, I live next door to your big, sloppy, rude, self-absorbed elephant of a country. And your bronzed illiterate moron in the Oval Office keeps threatening my country. So, I have to care.
Really damn weird that most of you don’t. Or at least, can’t see what’s happening smack in front of you. If you believe in democracy, you lost. The fight is not to prevent the worst from happening — it’s happening right now. You are left only with the fight to take your country back, if you choose to do so. Not in the bullshit conservative “we’re taking our country back” empty slogan but in the very real, tangible sense of rebuilding a functioning state with representative accountability and respect for human rights, as well as proper respect for the sovereignty of other nations.
Your denialism is killing me. I could argue that in a more literal sense, your denialism is helping to kill scores of Ukrainians and Palestinians. And Ethiopians. But I’ll circle back to that point in a moment.
You see, the way this whole thing has been framed, even by liberals, is so batshit demented, it’s infuriating.
When you have masked goons in SWAT gear snatching people off the street, you’ve lost.
When you run extrajudicial gulags and export legal residents to foreign concentration camps, you’ve lost.
When your National Guard occupies your capital for no sensible reason, you’ve lost.
When your Orange-Peel dictator bullies universities, news networks, even countries to try to force them to his will, you’ve lost.
In the last example, I’m thinking not only of my own home, but of Brazil slapped with tariffs just so Trump can help his fellow autocratic buddy, Jair Bolsonaro.
Part of this is understandable. Because Trump has accomplices, even ones who don’t realize it, and it will take years for them to own up to their complicity. Like the mainstream media of CBS, ABC, NBC News and major newspapers. Yes, that’s right, I wrote that the mainstream media are complicit, and I damn well mean it.
Because I can switch on the television any day of the week, and I still see NBC Nightly News treating his actions as if they are normal. As if they are by implication legitimate. Major news networks do not treat his conduct as a massive crisis threatening the life of a democratic nation, merely as a teaser headline for a segment block. The specter of the Epstein scandal has been treated as merely a “political” story — this is how Trump’s minions are fielding the questions and trying to change focus.
For decades now, the American news industry has dumbed down its audience, or at least tamped down its expectations, by focusing on politics over policy. So, you’re getting the equivalent of sports game commentary. You reap what you sow.
The self-appointed critics of Trump & Co., especially leftists, have nothing to brag about either. Robert Reich, bless him, continues to put much his faith in litigation. He is sadly living in a state of denial as much as Reuters, which just ran another of Big Media’s interminable and stupid articles with the theme, “Can Trump really do that?” In this case, it’s: “Can Trump send the National Guard to cities around the US?”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Deny, deny, deny.
Trump doesn’t care about the rule of law. When will you guys get that through your heads?
He is counting on the oldest trick in the autocrat playbook, letting his sheepish enemy go running to the courts, thinking this will be their shield, when he knows damn well that by the time any decision is made, it just won’t matter. His stacked Supreme Court has already given him the powers of a king.
With blanket immunity, he can do anything, and you’ve lost. Why on Earth would you think that the courts should be your prime line of defense anymore?
It borders on delusional.
And why on Earth would you not accept that the National Guard troops were brought in for a “rehearsal?” This is the soft-peddling of martial law. While those troops might be rotated out, the pattern is being tested, and you can be sure that in the near future, major cities — especially one-time Democratic strongholds — will have permanent occupation forces.
But leftists and liberals are also playing an insipid, pointless game of “Let’s see how many times we can make comparisons to Nazi Germany.” There are scores of other examples of fascist conduct for comparison, but nope, the pundits only go rummaging in the Berlin drawer. But what I’m really wondering is… why, so late in the game now, do you bother with comparisons at all?
We sure as hell don’t need academic exiles to “entertain” us with lectures at the University of Toronto on what fascism used to look like and how closely the US resembles their models today.
What we could use, in a very practical sense, is historical discussion of RESISTANCE.
How did the French fight back? How did the Norwegians? In fact, given all the patronizing lectures Americans have given Iranians on the lack of democracy, now might be a good time to shut up and listen to Iranian political exiles and activists on how they conduct their struggle to win back their nation.
I don’t hold out too much hope of that happening because sorry, not sorry — too often Americans are convinced that they can’t possibly learn anything from other countries.
Barack Obama was quick to reject any notion of following the models of nationalized health care in Europe, and so as a result, you ended up with something which yes, helped many but remained a mess and still a predatory landscape for insurance companies, and even that is getting trashed by the Trump White House.
So, no, I don’t expect conscientious Americans to swallow their egos and listen to Brazilians, to Iranians, to Ethiopians and Romanians about how to start a modern revolution. How to organize it and keep the momentum going. More is the pity.
Yet the entire world would, I’m willing to bet, be happy to step up and help. The fact that self-absorbed leftist and liberal Americans continue to moan on Blue Sky as if this is only their problem tells me they are as dim as a fading Fourth of July sparkler. But your mess is now polluting everyone else’s space.
Because of your arrogance, because of your stupidity in allowing an insurrectionist to run again for your highest office, you have let monsters run amuck. Those who are cynical enough to let Ukraine be gobbled up by Putin and who don’t give a damn if Palestinians die in the dust clouds of a shelled and burned-out Gaza. Those who sit by and let the Amhara people get ethnically cleansed in Ethiopia, a horror that Joe Biden didn’t give a damn about and which Trump is pleased to let continue.
Yes, I blame the respective actors in these horror dramas, but you better believe I also blame you. And so will the rest of the world when the butcher’s bill comes due.
So, I don’t think it’s too much to ask you to stop wringing your hands, stop having deep, philosophical and useless café debates about “how far can we go?” and realize a nation doesn’t resurrect itself through happy thoughts and meme cards. Get off your asses and get shit done.
Because in case those professors in exile haven’t mentioned it, when the fascist states became too horrible, others got together in a collective effort and stomped them into ground and occupied them for a while. For years.
Don’t think it could happen to you? Oh, you’ve got the “greatest military in the world?” Uh-huh, yep, sure — right, right, right. Keep flexing. That, too, is denialism.
I did write collective effort.
I won’t bring up a comparison to 1930s Nazi Germany. But I will suggest you take a look at footage of 1945 Berlin rubble.
