Image Credit: Resist by Portuguese cartoonist Zez Van.
It's been a really long 28 days for the people of the United States of America, at least if you've been paying attention and reading the news like I have, these days feel endless. Trying to keep up with the news feels like an impossible task and maybe it is; but as a disabled woman, as a scientist, as an academic, as someone who is targeted by the Trump Administration in new and exciting ways every day looking away feels dangerous. Turning off my phone and disengaging from the news feels like a luxury I do not have. It feels like a luxury that we as a country do not have. Intellectually I know this is part of the plan, the Trump Musk Administration is hoping that if they keep the fire hose trained at us long enough we will disengage, we will turn away, and become complacent. I saw a post on social media, probably Facebook but I honestly can't remember, everything is shared so widely across platforms anymore where someone from the far right said that the Republican takeover of America would be bloodless if the Democrats let it be. But he didn't mean "Republican" in the way I learned in school, he didn't mean they would prioritize small central government and states' rights. No, he meant ultra-conservative, far-right, he meant fascism. As angry as I am at the people who have continued to stand by the Republican party as it has been taken over by the cult of personality led by Donald Trump and constantly screaming that they want to "Make America Great Again", I also understand that everyone is susceptible to propaganda. And for a long time, the MAGA crowd has become more and more rabid, while the Democrats watched and wrung their hands and gave them a platform from which to shout in the name of fairness. I remember when news sites insisted they were "fair and balanced" as they allowed people who spewed dangerous misinformation about the shape of the earth, the effectiveness of vaccines, the motivation of scientists, and all of this anti-intellectual vitriol was heralded as presenting both sides of the argument. Because in the United States we value freedom above all and our First Amendment is the right to free speech, and we hold this ideal as a bastion above all. The problem is, that free speech only extends so far, we've always understood this as a country, and that's why our laws prohibit hate speech. But we have gotten lax with the enforcement of those laws in our insistence that we "hear both sides" of every argument. I don't know exactly where it started, I suspect somewhere around the birther movement and Trump insisting that Barak Obama produce his long-form birth certificate because a very loud minority of American people were so invested in their idea of an America that only ever existed in a Maytag Ad in 1956, that they could not accept that the President of the United States, Barak Obama, might resemble America as she really is. If we had only dismissed this racist rhetoric for what it really is we might be in a very different place now, but unfortunately Donald Trump was leading this absurd rallying cry, and he is a very loud man with a large platform and people keep throwing their money at him just to see what he will do next. Before you say, "everyone has free speech in America, that's in the Constitution, it's literally the First Amendment." As I've said before free speech only extends so far, there have always been things that cross the line, and we have dealt with this in different ways in American history. Sometimes it is a very slow cultural shift that never quite fully abolishes the hateful language, other times it is labeled as hate speech in our courts, and using that language has real-world consequences, but how far that is enforced varies depending on where in America you are. After all, sundown towns still exist, and the KKK and neo-Nazis have become louder over the past few decades and we, the People of the United States of America, let them.
It may have started with a rallying cry for our President's birth certificate, one that we should not have given into, but the Democratic party is always so obsessed with fairness and transparency, these are important virtues but you must recognize when you are trying to argue with someone who has been indoctrinated. I don't know what the correct move would have been, I'm sure smarter people than me have spent large portions of their lives trying to figure out what the right move was. But it was Donald Trump's foot in the door that allowed for more and more misinformation and dangerous, hateful rhetoric to become commonplace, normalizing Donald Trump. This has been the downfall of America. We, as a country, could not stop watching that strange orange man because he said the damnest things and we could not wait to hear what he would say next. He would make ridiculous accusations that people just couldn't believe, but then after enough shouting, we would start to normalize it and then he would say more ridiculous hateful things, and he would repeat it enough that we normalized it, and then even more absurd things would come out of his mouth, and we normalized it. This is the paradox of intolerance, we tolerated Donald Trump, we normalized him when he should have never been allowed into American politics let alone into the White House, and that is why we are watching our country be dismantled by Elon Musk and his dozen or so goons with hard drives.
I am not saying that the United States has ever been without fault or that this is even the first time we have allowed hatred to take over our country. I would argue that it has always been there simmering on the back burner while we pretended to be a beacon of morality. America the Great! Home of the Free, Land of the Brave. We bought into our own propaganda of American exceptionalism and we looked away from the shameful parts of our past. But America is a country founded on stolen land; built by slavery, inequity, and child labor; with ideals that we foisted on anyone who would get near to hear us shouting because we were convinced that we have always held the moral high ground. The idea of American exceptionalism grew out of the cognitive dissonance the people of the United States needed to justify our actions in World War II, including the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We justified it as a necessary evil, just like we justified slavery, putting American citizens in camps, and turning away refugees. We toasted as we drank our own Kool-Aid.
Now I am really, really simplifying things and I am not a political scholar or a historian, I'm a scientist who loves to read and learn. I have spent much of my life being frustrated by and protesting against the failures of American politics. But I have never been loud about my thoughts, my displeasure, and my beliefs that we are tumbling into very dangerous territory. Part of this is that I was living my life, educating myself, and dealing with my own personal tragedies. Another part is I was trying to amplify the voices of movements like Black Lives Matter because I support them but as a white woman, I cannot speak for them. Another part believed in the idea that this could not happen here, not in America, where we held our freedom above all.
But we have never been free, not really. For all of American history, we have been manipulated and persuaded by a small group of individuals who increasingly did not have our best interests at heart. This can be seen in rights gained by corporations as the rights of Americans have been slowly eroded. While we have made some very important gains that should not be diminished, the system has always been rigged against the American people. Now that Elon Musk (and his puppet, Donald Trump), have dismantled so many of our institutions we are at a crossroads, a fork in the road, if I can borrow an oft-repeated phrase these days, we can allow our country to continue its slide into fascism or we can take it back. We can remake this country as it was originally envisioned, for the people by the people.
