If you ever wished you’d been able to march with Martin Luther King Jr. or with the suffragettes, or if you ever wondered what you might’ve done to fight fascism in the 1930s and 40s then you’re in luck, because we are the ones who are being called upon to do it all again. Now.

The monsters are not coming, they’re already here. Will you join the fight against them, or will you run and hide and hope they eat someone else first? Or will you join them, hoping for scraps from their bloody feast? You can hide or try to join them if you want, but the thing about monsters is they’re always hungry - that’s why we call them monsters - and to them you will always look like food. Eventually, they’re gonna show up at your door and when they do they’ll still be hungry, even if they’ve eaten everyone else along the way. In the end - if you don’t want to be monster kibble - you’re gonna have to fight them, but if you wait too long you’re gonna have to fight them all by yourself.

These crazy times that none of us wished for - this week, this month, this year and the next - will be the defining moments of our lives. As history judged the people of Germany and Italy for the evil that grew among them during the 1930s, so shall we be judged for what we allow to grow here in America in our own time. In the current struggle, what we choose to do - or choose not to do - in defense of truth, democracy and equality is how we will be remembered and how we will be judged by those who come after us.

It’s time to choose a side.

The last 125 years of American history have included enormous progressive victories. At the turn of the twentieth century, Teddy Roosevelt took on the monopolies and the oligarchs and reduced the grotesque inequality of our previous Gilded Age. In the decades that followed women got the vote, we built the modern safety net of the New Deal, we defeated fascism in Europe and Asia, and we achieved massive advances in public health, public education, human rights, civil rights, voting rights, women’s rights, gay and lesbian and trans rights, and enacted far-reaching labor and environmental protections. Progressives have won every single one of these fundamental battles, and every single day all of these accumulated victories have made all of our lives almost unimaginably better - in the form of clean air, clean water, access to healthcare and knowledge, and the fundamental freedoms, opportunities and equality that our ancestors 125 years ago could only dream of. All of this progress, every one of these victories, is now on the line, because the oligarchs have returned, bigger and greedier than ever. Donald and Elon and the rest are trying to undo all the progress we’ve made since we drove them off the last time, and they’re trying to destroy the power of the state - which is how we beat them the last time and how we protect ourselves from this kind of predator. They’re doing all this in order to return us all to the position of helpless and obedient servants and underlings, too busy scrambling to survive to be able to pose any threat to their corrupt and ever-increasing power.

This is obviously not good news.

On the other hand, If you ever wished you’d been able to march with Martin Luther King Jr. or with the suffragettes, or if you ever wondered what you might’ve done to fight fascism in the 1930s and 40s then you’re in luck, because we are the ones who are being called upon to do it all again. Now. By rising against the depraved, insane and increasingly illegal wrecking ball that is the Donald and his minions we take our place alongside the ancestors who fought these battles the first time around. If we win now, we become the great protectors and we join the honored ranks of those who won all the great victories that came before. If we lose now, then we will be remembered - if we’re remembered at all - as those who stood quietly and watched while our great inheritance and our children’s futures were destroyed by predators and opportunists and fools.

And I get it, taking a strong political position can be complicated and inconvenient and uncomfortable, even if that position is in support of things as previously uncontroversial as truth, democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. Finding the resolve to stand for something that’s under threat - and to stand for it now, as opposed to standing for it at some point in the theoretical future - takes time and energy and focus we may not feel we can spare in the rush of our daily lives, especially now when everything feels as crazy as it does. That said, the failure to rise - and to rise soon - in defense of these American treasures and traditions will make our lives almost inconceivably MORE complicated, MORE inconvenient and MORE uncomfortable than those of us who’ve been raised in democracies and in peacetime can possibly imagine. And while we dawdle, MAGA has been destroying as much as they can as fast as they can. MAGA is behaving like they’re in the playoffs, swinging for the fences and running up the score, while we in the resistance are acting like the preseason hasn’t started yet, and for the most part we aren’t even on the field. We’re still dusting off our equipment and putting on our cleats. We’re squinting at the sky and wondering about the weather and trying to decide if today is the right day to come down out of the bleachers and actually join the game. Our hesitation and uncertainty is exactly what the Donald and his henchmen are counting on.

We need to accept that “normal” is over. We need to recognize the depravity and the severity of what is happening all around us. If Rumeysa Ozturk and others like her can be deprived of their liberty because of some non-violent thing thing they said or wrote in defense of the civil liberties of others; if hundreds of our neighbors can be deported to some nightmarish foreign gulag without due process because the government is afraid of them (or afraid of their tattoos); if Renee Good can be shot and killed in broad daylight - and in front of multiple video cameras - without any federal accountability or even investigation then it becomes clear that our world has changed. It becomes clear that the United States is no longer what it once was. It starts to feel less and less like we’re fighting against the possibility of some future American dictatorship, and more like we’re fighting against a rising American dictatorship that already exists, that has declared itself and that is at this moment striving to extend and solidify its control over all of our lives. The Donald has clear and obvious intent - he’s not even trying to hide it - and he has immense power. All that remains to be seen is whether we will choose to stop him, and whether we will make that choice while there is still time.

Those of us who are now adults grew up in an America where the concepts of truth, democracy, the rule of law, and the supremacy of the Constitution were overwhelmingly accepted and actively - if imperfectly - defended. That world - the world we grew up in - is already gone. We can rebuild it, even better than it was, but first we need to recognize what’s already been lost and the atrocious and existential nature of the choice before us. We can acknowledge the loss and the escalating danger and we can choose to fight back. Or we can ignore the growing threat and choose instead a life of complicity and collapse and endless retreat, every day less equal and less free, until our children face the same crappy prospects and brutal limitations that our ancestors fought to overcome so long ago, or worse.

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On a personal level, it’s true that there’s a risk in publicly opposing a would-be dictator. How big a risk mostly depends on how many of us choose to take it: more of us coming out loudly in opposition makes all of us safer. For myself, in making the decision to publicly oppose our ridiculous orange wannabe king, I accept that there may be negative consequences for me personally. I also accept that it’s possible - likely even - that few people will read anything I write or hear anything I say, that those who do may not care and that my efforts may not provoke any significant change in the wider world that I ever encounter. That said, openly taking the side of equality and democracy and truth will make all the difference in my own life because it aligns me with what is good and what is real and what is worth fighting for. Because it allows me to look my 12-year-old daughter in the eye knowing I’m doing the right thing: because I will not have squandered the precious and unexpected gift of living in such crazy times, when our words and our actions might make such an enormous difference; because I’m doing what I can - as I must - to bring about the best possible world for her generation, and for all the generations that follow… Your mileage may vary. I can’t tell you how to make your choice, or how to determine which risks are worth taking given the specific details of your life, but I can tell you - definitively - that now is the time and that, in the end, silence and complicity will not protect you or your loved ones.

An imperfect metaphor: Think back to how the pandemic appeared out of nowhere and quickly came to dominate and disrupt almost every aspect of our lives, especially all those parts that were lived out in the world and with other people. And this happened whether we wanted to acknowledge the pandemic or not: even those Americans who didn’t believe the virus was real still died in their hundreds of thousands, and those who tried to ignore it and survived still had to navigate the severe limitations and constrictions of a world that had profoundly changed almost overnight. If we let a fascist dictatorship take hold here in America then the horrors and isolation of fascism will make COVID look like nothing at all, like the sniffles - despite all the suffering and all the death - because the pandemic mostly passed in a few years and because there were steps you could take to reduce the risk to you and your family. Because - unlike the pandemic - fascism will keep getting worse and worse over the course of decades, and because there is no way to reliably protect yourself and your loved ones from the arbitrary and unaccountable power of the dictator and the endless proliferation of shameless, idiot lackeys and goons who spring up around him like mushrooms… Because there is no good way to adapt to constant and increasing danger and corruption and incompetence and fear. It was unsettling to hear so many sirens during the pandemic, but most of those sirens represented an ambulance taking someone to get help. Under fascism, there will be less and less help to go around and - as time goes on - approaching sirens may come to trigger not relief but fear, they may come to signify not that help is on the way but that danger is creeping ever closer to you and your loved ones.

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When the story of our times is written, historians will record that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin rolled the dice - in Ukraine, in the Middle East and in his support of Donald Trump - in an improbable attempt to destabilize America and the West, and that he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Whether he wins or loses in the end is still very much up for grabs. The outcome depends almost entirely on whether we just sit and watch as he and his puppets burn down our world, or whether we rise in furious defense of our democracy, our rights and our lives. But as dangerous as it is, Putin’s Russia is just a shadow of the threat that was once posed by the Soviet Union. If the mighty Soviet Empire could collapse as quickly as it did, then we should take heart that Putin and his puppets - including Trump - may be more vulnerable than they seem, and that they too might soon be swept away. With this in mind, it’s worth revisiting some of the forces that led to the decline and the abrupt fall of the Soviet Union, in order to see how those forces might be relevant to our current task of hastening the decline and fall of the Donald and of his Spectacular Imploding MAGAverse.

The Solidarność trade union became the heart of resistance to Soviet power in Poland. It was an inspiration to opposition groups throughout Eastern Europe, and a pivotal factor in the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The union’s name means “solidarity” in English. Solidarity was established in 1980, and it grew on the foundation of a slightly earlier and less well-known group called the Workers’ Defense Committee whose networking innovations and pragmatic idealism made possible the almost unimaginable change that followed.

The power and the apparent legitimacy of any oppressive regime is based on the fear and the silent obedience it inspires in its citizens. Out of fear, individuals silence and isolate themselves, because speaking out is dangerous and because you don’t know who you can trust. This communal silence and disconnection becomes the seemingly receptive void into which the regime broadcasts its constant lies and distractions. When we choose to set aside our fear we short-circuit the government’s mechanisms of control, which rely fundamentally on us silencing and separating ourselves in ways that the government simply can’t manage on its own. By setting aside our fear we reclaim our ability to speak and act in ways that are truthful and authentic, and we reclaim our power. By setting aside our fear we make it possible to rebuild the social connections that the regime has deliberately destroyed. One voice speaking truth in a desert of lies can remind us that we’re not crazy and that we’re not alone. Multiple voices can quickly join to become a chorus that drowns out the government’s lies and its appearance of legitimacy.

In 1976 the Polish government brutally cracked down on workers who were protesting against steep increases in food prices. Shortly after the crackdown, the Workers’ Defense Committee was formed by Polish intellectuals in order to provide legal and material support to the effected workers and their families. Forming a committee in support of people who are being actively beaten, persecuted, imprisoned and harassed by a totalitarian government is not an obvious, un-dangerous or even sensible thing to do. There was worry at the time that the government would use the establishment of the committee as an excuse for an even worse crackdown, and also that the government would discover the identity of the members of the committee and throw them all in jail or threaten their safety. Faced with these very real and immediate dangers, the founders of the Workers’ Defense Committee made a profoundly unexpected and seemingly insane decision. In late September of ’76, the Workers’ Defense Committee publicly declared its existence by publishing it’s “Appeal to Society and the Authorities of the Polish People’s Republic”. In the Appeal, they stated their belief that “Legal, financial, and medical aid is needed. Equally important is full information about the persecutions. We are convinced that only public presentations of the actions of the authorities can constitute an effective defense.” All of this is obviously relevant and true in our time as well. At the bottom of the Appeal - in a move whose boldness and transformational power is difficult to overstate - fourteen of the founding members of the Workers Defense Committee signed their full names.

By so publicly setting aside their fear, by refusing to hide from the government while at the same time openly supporting those who the government was attacking, the organizers of the Workers’ Defense Committee performed a contagious act of defiance and fearlessness and solidarity that shook the foundations of the seemingly indestructible Soviet Empire and helped bring about its abrupt and almost entirely unexpected collapse.

Adam Michnik was one of the important early members of the Workers’ Defense Committee. He went on to become a leading member of Solidarity. In explaining the principles that guide him, he wrote -

“Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.”

Michnik’s deceptively simple words are more relevant now than they’ve ever been to the survival of democracy and civil society here in the United States. The fearless solidarity that helped bring down the long-established dictatorship of the Soviet Union thirty-five years ago may well be key to defeating the Donald’s rising dictatorship today, and to disassembling the clown car of incompetent fascist enablers who’ve come along with him for the ride. As explained in detail in Part I and Part II of this series, Rumeysa Ozturk was detained by the US government because of her politely-stated and respectful opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. Kseniia Petrova was held in US custody for more than sixteen weeks, apparently - at least in part - because of her protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Both of these detentions could be considered an act of solidarity by the Donald towards the uncivil societies favored by Putin and Netanyahu. Put more simply, the performative arrest and detainment of these two accomplished young women - and of thousands and thousands and thousands of others - is an attempt to scare the rest of us into silence and obedience and isolation. This should just make us louder, more defiant, and more relentless in our solidarity.

{{We’ll return to Solidarity and the Workers’ Defense Committee briefly in the sixth and final part of this series.}}

[This essay was 99% finished back in June of last year when I got flattened by Long Covid. Apologies for the long silence. I’m glad to be back. More soon.]

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Rumeysa Ozturk is in her fifth year of studying for a PhD from Tufts University, so she is - as we say here in Boston - “wicked smaht”. Her dissertation is in child development, studying how adolescents can use social media in prosocial ways, so she’s actively trying to support kids and to make the world a better place. She is a Fulbright Scholar, meaning she has received one of the most prestigious scholarships in the world and that she is literally considered to be among “the best of the best”.

She is also, apparently, a lovely person. In a recent article posted by her academic colleagues, Rumeysa’s fellow students described her like this: "Even in a department focused on human development, Rumeysa stands out as someone who reminds us daily of the importance of protecting children, cultivating joy, and connecting to our own deeper humanity.”

You can read the rest of the article here.

So what exactly did this kind, smaht, talented young woman do in order to get herself disappeared from Boston at the end of March? Rumeysa has not been charged with any crime, but she’s been accused by the government of being “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” What, exactly, were these terrorist-supporting activities? Did she rob a bank or set fire to a police car, or call for mayhem and chaos on campus? No, she did none of these things. What Rumeysa did is this: exactly 364 days before she was snatched off the streets of Somerville, Rumeysa was one of four Tufts grad students who coauthored an editorial in the campus newspaper. In the editorial, Rumeysa and her coauthors called for the university’s president to “meaningfully engage” with a student government resolution that represented “a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law”. The editorial was thoughtful and respectful in tone and content. It’s most pointed sentence stated that: “Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.” In the editorial, each of the accusations in the above sentence included a link to a supporting article by the Guardian, Amnesty International or the International Court of Justice. The editorial further stated “We, as graduate students, affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people”. If the Donald and his henchmen were going to be honest about it - which they’re not - it might turn out that it was this sentence which was most deeply offensive to their delicate sensibilities.

You can read the full editorial here:

Non-violently affirming the equal dignity and humanity of all people is not an immoral or hateful or illegal act. Likewise, opposing the slaughter or mistreatment of innocent civilians is obviously a perfectly legal activity and is not in any way a legitimate reason for being abducted and detained by the government of the United States. Rumeysa has explained that when she was grabbed off the street in front of her home she feared she was being kidnapped and she was sure she was going to be killed. Rumeysa has also detailed some of the ways in which her detention was disruptive to her health and peace of mind and to her ability to continue her important work, disruptions that may be experienced by anyone who’s detained by this government. During her first night in custody Rumeysa was not allowed to eat or rest properly, she was not allowed to fill a prescription for her daily asthma medication and she was not allowed to contact her lawyer for more than twenty-four hours. Rumeysa had a dozen asthma attacks while in government custody and did not receive proper medical care for these attacks, which she said were triggered by the damp and unsanitary conditions, the lack of fresh air and by the stress of her confinement. Rumeysa has explained that she was not allowed outside during her first week in custody and that she was one of 24 detainees being held in a unit that was meant to hold 14. She has reported that sleep was difficult and that the guards threatened to withhold meals if detainees didn’t follow orders quickly enough. Rumeysa was scheduled to mentor college students and to teach a class over the summer, but all her plans were thrown into disarray. Rumeysa was trying to work on her dissertation in custody but she reported it took nearly two weeks to get “a few pieces of paper and pens”. It’s important to remember that the government subjected Rumeysa to all these disruptions without even bothering to charge her with an/any actual crime, in order to intimidate others into obeying in advance. Rumeysa’s arrest and detention was not just an attack on Rumeysa herself, nor was it an attack targeted solely against immigrants, or students, or activists. Rumeysa’s arrest and detention represents an attack on a fundamental and necessary pillar of American democracy: the free and protected speech guaranteed to all of us - citizens and non-citizens alike - under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Let us now consider the case of another of “the worst of the worst”. Kseniia Petrova has been a researcher at Harvard Medical School since 2023. She is a Russian citizen with “elite training” and “a combination of complex skills” in embryology, bioinformation and data science, according to the Boston Globe. Michael Gage, the manager of the Harvard lab in which Kseniia works, says “Not only is she a brilliant computer programmer and scientist, she is full of wonder, enthusiasm, and creativity” with “an infectious laugh and a razor sharp intellect that can make very difficult concepts understandable to those of us (myself very much included) that don’t share her intellectual gifts”. (And please note, she’s doing all of this in her second language.) Mr Gage continues “she is a truly remarkable and wonderful person who is deeply missed”. Kseniia’s colleagues have also pointed out that she’s the only person who can properly read the data from Harvard’s one-of-a-kind cancer-detecting microscope - because she’s the one who developed the scripts that analyze the images - and that her continuing detention will prevent important advances from being made. Kseniia’s supervisor at Harvard, Leonid Peshkin, told the Guardian that “she is spectacular, the best I’ve ever seen in 20 years at Harvard”.

“The best”.

So what horrible thing did this obviously extremely talented and apparently much-loved young woman do in order to get herself thrown in jail? You will recall (from Part I, above) that Kseniia was denied parole because she failed to prove that she’s not a “danger to the community or US security”, and that ICE had taken into account “evidence of past criminal activity” and “activity contrary to US national security interests.” With these words fresh in mind, let us explore the dreadful offense for which Kseniia has been labeled a possible threat to the national security of the United States and deprived of her liberty for more than thirteen weeks now.

Ready?

Prepare to be astounded and amazed.

Kseniia’s detention represents a masterclass in bureaucratic pettiness, brazen disregard for the law and shameless doublespeak that would make George Orwell, Richard Nixon and Franz Kafka blush. It starts off - quite badly - in the realm of the purely officious and interpersonal, before exploding into the realm of geopolitics in a way that’s both absurd and profoundly disturbing. Unlike many of the non-citizen students who’ve been recently arrested and detained, the government has not alleged that Kseniia was ever involved in protests against the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. If, however, her detainment IS related to her past political activities - as ICE appears to claim - then her continuing detention would seem to herald the rise of an unholy alliance that threatens democracy and civil society both here in America and around the world.

When you hear how Kseniia’s saga began, I think you’ll agree that the rationale for her detention is so mean-spirited and stupid it almost hurts to wrap your head around it. As Kseniia’s story progresses, I think you’ll also agree that the government’s double-down determination to prosecute this young woman - despite the utter voidness of their case - is so hare-brained and batshit crazy that it’d be funny, if it weren’t also so profoundly dangerous and so cruel.

What happened to Kseniia is this. Kseniia was arrested at Logan International Airport here in Boston back in February, as she flew home from a vacation in France. Kseniia loves classical music and she’d timed her trip so she could attend the concert of an acclaimed classical pianist.

Kseniia was charged with - wait for it - the importation of improperly declared frog embryos.

Really.

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At the request of Leonid Peshkin (her supervisor at Harvard who said she was the best he’d ever seen), Kseniia was bringing the embryos back to Boston from a partner lab in France because a previous shipment had been mishandled and destroyed en route by the delivery service. Kseniia failed to declare the frog embryos properly on her customs forms. Under the law, the normal response to such an infraction would be a fine of up to $500 and maybe the confiscation of the offending items. For a first offense the fine is typically reduced to $50. Not in Kseniia’s case. In Kseniia’s case her visa was cancelled, which Kseniia’s lawyers assert is an entirely illegal action, well beyond the legal authority of a customs agent. Kseniia was denied re-entry to the United States and told that she could either choose to return to France willingly and then immediately apply for readmission, or she would be deported - in which case she would be banned from the US for five years. Kseniia chose to return to France.

In 2022, at great personal risk, Kseniia protested inside Russia against Vladimir Putin’s murderous and unprovoked invasion of democratic Ukraine. Kseniia was arrested for daring to oppose Putin’s war, but managed to make her way to the West. It wasn’t until Kseniia told the federal agents that she would likely face prison or worse if she was returned to Russia that they chose to put her in longterm detention here in the US rather than throwing her out of the country.

To state what should be extremely obvious, screwing up the paperwork while importing non-hazardous frog embryos is neither a criminal act nor a threat to the national security of the United States. When ICE denied Kseniia’s request for parole because of “past criminal activity” and “activity contrary to the US national security interests” what they appear to be referring to is her protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an invasion which was at the time vigorously condemned and strenuously opposed by the government of the United States. The fact that Kseniia is still languishing in jail rather than back at work or out on parole - apparently because of her support for Ukraine - may prove to be the earliest, most explicit and legally binding acknowledgment that our government has largely switched allegiances in this atrocious war and that the United States is now significantly aligned with the Russian invaders in their attack against the innocent democratic state of Ukraine.

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The way the government has treated Kseniia since she landed at Logan back in February is clearly ridiculous and awful and utterly unjustified. You’d be hard-pressed to make up a more outlandish and mean-spirited story that starts with someone doing a favor for their boss on their way back from vacation and ends with a star scientist being held in government custody for more than three months. But wait, it gets worse. Last Tuesday Kseniia had a long-awaited hearing with a federal judge in Vermont that produced both very good and very bad news. On the one hand, it’s clearly (very) bad news that during this hearing the government confirmed their intention to deport Kseniia to Russia, despite the clear likelihood that doing so would put her life in danger. This is against longstanding US policy, and it’s further evidence of the Trump Administration’s growing alliance with Putin. On the other hand, it’s clearly extremely good news that the judge expressed profound skepticism about a customs agent having the legal authority to revoke Kseniia’s visa all by themselves, and it’s great news that the judge scheduled a bail hearing for later this month. These developments made it look like ICE was finally going to be forced to release Kseniia.

But not so fast, because it gets worse. Again. Apparently anticipating a loss coming out of Kseniia’s hearing in Vermont, shortly after that hearing the government changed tack and unsealed a new indictment against Kseniia. Kseniia is now criminally charged by the government of the United States as - drum roll - a smuggler… of frog embryos. By filing new charges and moving the venue from Louisiana to Massachusetts, the government has succeeded in blocking Kseniia’s likely release on bail. They’ve also significantly raised the stakes. If convicted on the smuggling charges, Kseniia could face up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Or the government could try to use the criminal charges as a justification for sending her back to Russia. In the meantime, Kseniia remains in government custody and her fate is still uncertain. Legal wrangling will continue into the foreseeable future. All this over what should’ve been a simple miscommunication and a $50 fine.

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Ok, that’s awful, but why should we care?

It seems clear that the government deprived these two young women of their liberty for no good reason. It’s also clear that the government couldn’t even be bothered to give much thought to crafting a plausible justification for their detention. The government’s original claims - that Rumeysa engaged in activities in support of Hamas and that Kseniia represents a threat to US national security - are transparently absurd and obviously unfounded, and they are meant to be so. In a lot of ways, the government’s reckless disregard and sloppy indifference towards what might be true or false - in these cases or in others like them - is the point. At the end of the day, the government threw these young women in jail because they wanted to and because they could, not because it was the right or legal thing to do. It’s not ok that this administration can unjustly blow up someone’s life with so little effort or thought, and that reassembling that life can be such a long and difficult process. It’s not ok that the government snatched Rumeysa off the street in less than three minutes, while Rumeysa and Kseniia’s supporters have had to spend hundreds of hours researching and explaining the many ways in which the government’s behavior was unjustified, arbitrary and illegal. It should make all of us angry to read about the continuing persecution of these accomplished young women, and to have to wade through a detailed recitation of their obvious virtues and of the petty, bad-faith nothing-burger that is the government’s case against them. Rumeysa and Kseniia should be back doing their meaningful work, surrounded by their friends and colleagues, and we should all be getting on with our lives, not needing to spend time refuting the government’s shoddy, half-assed excuses for their inexcusable behavior. And in the time it’s taken for us to begin to properly respond to the injustices inflicted on these two young women, thousands of other people have been snatched up, both here in New England and across the country.

In this ongoing wave of detentions, some cases have been similarly high-profile and some have been even more appalling, dangerous and unjust. Many of these cases involve the denial of due process rights to those in government custody and, as we’ve seen with Rumeysa and Kseniia, due process makes all the difference: due process is what got Rumeysa out of jail, and due process is all that’s kept Kseniia from being unceremoniously delivered to some Russian gulag. The most egregious of the recent cases include: the deportation without charge of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the El Salvadoran father from Maryland who was “mistakenly” sent to the black hole prison in El Salvador despite an order that he not be sent to that country because of a credible danger to his life (the Trump Administration insanely continues to argue that yes it was a mistake to send him but gosh it’s gonna be really hard to get him back because he’s now outside of our jurisdiction); hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants - many of whom, it turns out, are actually legal immigrants to the US - who were also sent to El Salvador’s black hole prison, many of them because ICE believed their tattoos were signs of gang membership when they were in fact tributes to Michael Jordan, or to the Real Madrid soccer team, or to their Christian faith, or autism awareness, or remembrances of their mothers, or of their daughter’s birthday, or symbols holding some other private and personal meaning; the four-year-old American citizen - with late-stage cancer - who was deported to Honduras without his medicine or medical support. Most of the recent detentions passed with less notice than these insane government transgressions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were any less atrocious and it certainly doesn’t mean they were any less disruptive to the lives of those detained and their loved ones. This tidal wave of aggression and injustice is meant to overwhelm and exhaust and intimidate us. It’s meant to make us tune out and give up. Do not do this. Don’t give them the satisfaction, and don’t give them the win. Because it’s right and necessary to protect our neighbors and the rule of law, and because if the government can get away with depriving any of us of our constitutionally protected rights, then those rights functionally cease to exist in any reliable way for us all.

It is not the case that highly educated young women with specialized skills deserve to have their humanity and their basic rights respected more than those of us who lack their advanced degrees or their rarefied training. We should not care about Rumeysa and Kseniia more than we care about anyone else, because none of us are safe until all of us are safe. All of us deserve to be treated with respect and dignity and to be protected from the depredations of a flailing wannabe dictator, regardless of how many degrees or other advantages we may or may not have.

The reason, however, that it’s worth going into such detail in the cases of Rumeysa and Kseniia is that their experiences showcase the performative level of injustice and the slapstick disregard for reason, decency and the rule of law that this government is bringing to their current campaign against free speech, and against those who they identify as vulnerable and “other”. The absurdity of the charges is part of the performance. The government’s casual cruelty is likewise an embellishment - like a villain’s evil laugh - calculated to heighten the experience and achieve the desired dramatic effect. The arrest and detention of Rumeysa and Kseniia is a drunken kabuki theater of bad faith and impunity, and it is a threat. The Trump Administration is telling us “if we can disappear such high-profile and well-connected people then just imagine what we can do to the rest of you”. And they don’t just mean to intimidate less-well-connected students and immigrants. They mean to intimidate all of us: all students, all immigrants, all professors, all universities, all people of good faith - left, right or center - who might rise in opposition to their injustice and cruelty and lies. They mean to intimidate anyone who might oppose them. They are showing us that criticizing the government or the government’s authoritarian buddies can get us thrown in jail, and they’re showing us that they’re willing to break the law in order to put us there.

They want us to be silent and afraid.

All of us.

Yeaaaah… Fuck that.

This essay is part 2 of 6. You can find links to the rest of the essays in the series below.

Tipping Point, Part I: On Being Disappeared from Boston, Massacchusetts can be found here.

To look at the scary thing is to free ourselves from fear. In the most effective horror movies you hardly ever see the monster, because - in the absence of reliable information - what we imagine in our heads is almost always scarier than a clear view of the creature itself. Donald Trump wants us to be overwhelmed and afraid. He wants us to be paralyzed by these feelings so he can carry on looting and destroying the world our ancestors worked so hard to build. The best antidote to fear and paralysis is knowledge. The Donald does not want us to see what he is doing, so we must force ourselves to look. The arrest and detainment of Rumeysa Ozturk - and others like her - offers us a clear view into this government’s mechanisms for silencing dissent. It would be wise for us to familiarize ourselves with the democracy-crushing machinery the government has unleashed against Rumeysa and their other early targets so we’re better able to defend against its accelerating deployment in the weeks and months ahead.

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There’s surveillance video of Rumeysa’s arrest, which is utterly chilling. You need to watch it if you haven’t already. Really, you need to. At the very least, you should watch it so you can recognize what’s happening in case it ever happens to you, or to someone you know or someone you see on the street. The video is only two minutes and forty-six seconds long, it’ll just take a moment, and in that short time it fully documents the transition from freedom to something much darker and more ominous, and not just for Rumeysa. The video is three things at once: it’s a metaphor for the precarious tipping point at which we are all now suddenly arrived; it’s a disturbing, broad daylight record of a grotesque abuse of power directed against a peaceful young woman; and it is a warning to us all.

At the start of the video, Rumeysa appears on the sidewalk in the lower left of the screen as a man in the official Boston winter uniform of a hoodie over a baseball cap nonchalantly crosses the street towards her. Rumeysa is holding a smartphone and talking to her mother via a bluetooth earbud. The man in the hoodie approaches Rumeysa and she nervously steps back. At ten seconds, freedom comes to an end, as the man in the hoodie grabs Rumeysa’s hands and holds them tightly. At twelve seconds, Rumeysa cries out in panic as more men in civilian clothes approach her. At sixteen seconds, one of these men pulls her phone out of her hand. At twenty-three seconds, as Rumeysa is now frantically talking with her mother on the other end of her call, the man in the hoodie plucks out her earbud with his fingers and hands it to the man who took her phone. Rumeysa is now cut off. She is also physically surrounded by six people in civilian clothes, all of whom - aside from Hoodie Man - are hiding their faces behind masks. Several of them have pulled out what appear to be badges dangling on chains around their necks. As Rumeysa explained later, she couldn’t read what it said on the badges and she assumed she was being kidnapped by people who were going to kill her. At forty-five seconds, the man in the hoodie physically removes Rumeysa’s backpack and tosses it to the ground. At one minute sixteen seconds, Rumeysa is handcuffed. As this is happening neighbors are already filming, and calling out “Is this a kidnapping?” and “Why are you hiding your faces?”. At one minute twenty-two seconds - with the man in the hoodie holding one of Rumeysa’s arms and a masked woman holding the other, flanked or trailed by the other people in masks - they start walking Rumeysa towards an unmarked SUV with tinted windows parked at the end of a connecting street. At one minute forty-seven seconds Rumeysa vanishes into the back seat of the SUV. At two minutes twenty-three seconds the SUV with Rumeysa inside pulls away from the curb, and at two minutes thirty-six seconds the vehicle passes from our view.

It’s important to recognize that Rumeysa is not Kitty Genovese, whose murder in 1960s New York became a symbol of supposed urban apathy and indifference. Rumeysa’s neighbors almost immediately began filming and loudly challenging the agents. Also, as Rumeysa is being loaded into the SUV, a red car comes around the corner and - despite being waved on - stops beside the SUV, engages with the agents, and doesn’t leave until after Rumeysa is driven away.

Rumeysa is then disappeared for nearly twenty-four hours. No charges are filed. Her whereabouts are unknown. A judge orders that she not be removed from Massachusetts. Her lawyers are unable to contact her or find out where she may have been taken or by whom.

BEFORE WE CONTINUE, IT IS NECESSARY TO UNDERSTAND THAT - WITH SOME UNCOMPLICATED POLICY ADJUSTMENTS OF THE NOT-ENTIRELY-LEGAL TYPE VERY MUCH FAVORED BY DONALD TRUMP - ALL OF THESE THINGS COULD HAPPEN TO ANY ONE OF US. ONE MOMENT WE’RE WALKING DOWN THE STREET, HAPPILY CHATTING ON THE PHONE, AND ONE OR TWO OR THREE MINUTES LATER WE ARE GONE. IN AN UNMARKED CAR. WITHOUT A TRACE.

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Late the next day, the government revealed that Rumeysa was, in fact, being held in an ICE detention facility. In Southern Louisiana, more than 1,500 miles away. Quickly moving detainees to distant and remote locations can cause great fear and disruption in their lives. The distance isolates them from friends and family, and also from legal and other support networks back home. Whisking detainees out of more liberal jurisdictions - like Massachusetts or Vermont - and dumping them in a jurisdiction that’s more reliably sympathetic to the government’s claims gives the government enormous advantages in any subsequent legal wrangling. None of this is accidental.

It’s worth noting that Rumeysa is not the only foreign national and Boston academic who’s recently been held by ICE in a Louisiana prison cell. In Louisiana, Rumeysa joined Kseniia Petrova, a Russian citizen and a researcher at Harvard Medical School, who’s been in government custody for more than thirteen weeks now. Back in March, ICE denied Kseniia’s request for parole because she’d failed to prove that she was not a “danger to the community or US security”. In defending this decision, ICE stated that it had taken into account “evidence of past criminal activity” and “activity contrary to US national security interests.” We’ll revisit the government’s very serious claims regarding Kseniia’s dangerousness in part 2 of this essay, and it’s worth sticking around because the actual through-the-looking-glass insanity of the situation is beyond anything you could possibly imagine - like something out of an especially bonkers Yorgos Lanthimos movie - and also because the situation has gotten significantly worse and significantly more insane just since the beginning of last week. You literally can’t make this stuff up, and nobody would believe you if you did.

Rumeysa Ozturk and Kseniia Petrova have been in government custody and facing deportation not because of a bureaucratic mix-up or a case of mistaken identity, and not because they’ve been charged with committing grievous crimes. Their arrest and detention is an absurdist and particularly flamboyant piece of fascist performance art, and it is meant to be instructive. It is meant to frighten us into silent acceptance of injustice and atrocity, whether that injustice occurs here in the US or elsewhere. The arbitrary and unwarranted detention of these two accomplished young women connects in surprisingly direct ways to the ongoing horrors unfolding in Gaza and in Ukraine, and their detention represents the cutting edge of the most dangerous assault on liberty and free speech in the history of our nation. Their continuing persecution - and the worldwide assault on democracy, civil society and the rule of law of which it is part - is an existential threat to us all.

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In the late 1980s I had a friend who lived in Boston who said I should move here too. I was a skeptical country boy from a bit farther south. When I asked why Boston he replied “It may be cold and urban but at least it’s expensive”. This is true. I was a couple years out of college, hauling around a guitar I was still figuring out and looking for a place with a decent music scene. Tracy Chapman had recently launched from Boston, so I made the jump. As it turned out, I ended up living in a group house in Somerville that’d been started a few years earlier by Tracy and some of her friends from Tufts. While I was there we got a piece of junk-mail with her name on it (from NOW) and we hung it on the fridge. House lore was that she’d written “Fast Car” while sitting beside the washing machine at the back of our unfinished basement.

The city of Somerville is quirky and surprisingly urban, despite most buildings being less than four stories tall. Tracy’s old group house is in the western end of Somerville, a short walk from where Rumeysa was grabbed off the street. This neighborhood has a decent number of trees, but much of Somerville is tightly packed triple-deckers and very little green. It’s the cheaper northern neighbor to Cambridge and it’s the most densely settled city north of New York. When I lived there it was mostly blue collar families, immigrants from everywhere, students from Harvard and MIT and Tufts, and houses and apartments full of twenty-somethings. About a third of the people who live in Somerville are in their twenties. I was told that the local families called us Barnies, because we stuffed so many people into too little space and presumably behaved like we’d been raised in a barn, but no one in the neighborhood ever said this to my face, or treated me with aggression or disrespect.

During my time in Somerville, I had a friend who lived in another apartment full of twenty-somethings in one of the more closely packed parts of town, a neighborhood where it seemed like you could lean out your third-floor window to hand something to a person in the apartment next door, although I didn’t know anyone who’d actually tried this. There’s a certain etiquette that arises when so many different tribes live in such close proximity, an etiquette that’s not always obvious to the newcomers. My friend's kitchen window looked out on her neighbor’s kitchen window only a few feet away. My friend reported that she’d once made the mistake of waving at her neighbor as they were both doing dishes, an apparent violation of protocol that led to her neighbor immediately pulling down her window shade. The shade had stayed down ever since. Alas.

There’s more money in Somerville now than there was when I first arrived - and it’s significantly hipper, who knew Somerville could be hip? - but it’s still a scrappy, mixed up, unpretentious patchwork of overlapping and poorly defined neighborhoods: a jostling mix of Irish pubs and Peruvian chicken joints and donut shops alongside food from Haiti, Italy, Brazil, Portugal and the Middle East, among many other places. And people from all these places, old-timers and newcomers, all sharing the space and the food in an overwhelmingly peaceful coexistence that has lasted for generations.

It’s this tradition of tolerance and coexistence that I believe will be our salvation in the coming months, both here in Boston and across the country. Or, if we let MAGA pull us apart or scare us into silence while they come after us one by one, then its loss will be our doom.

Since March 2, Israel has blockaded the enclave and prevented all food, medicine and humanitarian aid from entering. Blockading food intended for the trapped and traumatized civilians of Gaza - most of whom are women and children - has lead to an atrocious and utterly predictable disaster: on Monday, a UN-backed consortium of food security experts known as the IPC warned that the people of Gaza face “a critical risk of famine”. Their report states, in part “The entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity, with half a million people - one in five - facing starvation”. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization also warned on Monday of the “imminent risk of famine” and “the possible outbreak of deadly epidemics in Gaza”. In those places where food and medicine haven’t run out already, the dwindling supplies are expected to be completely exhausted in the coming days and weeks.

Please watch the video above, it’s only 44 seconds long. Rashaf is twelve-years-old and so gentle as she talks about wanting to be able to go back to how she used to be, about wanting her hair to grow again so she can brush it. My daughter is twelve and this could be her, or your kid. There’s no world in which this is ok…

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Meanwhile, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and other members of Israel’s right-wing government are openly calling for the total destruction of much of what has not already been reduced to rubble inside Gaza. This destruction is part of a plan - called Operation “Gideon’s Chariots” - that also includes flooding Gaza with troops and driving the surviving Palestinian population into a small, designated “humanitarian zone” in the south. According to Smotrich, the final act of Gideon’s Chariots appears to involve making life in this humanitarian zone unlivable in order to force the remaining Palestinian population out of Gaza. In Smotrich’s words from last week “They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places”. As described by Smotrich, this process and the desired outcome would clearly seem to meet the internationally recognized definition of the crime of ethnic cleansing.

In the midst of our own escalating struggle against a depraved and aggressive would-be dictator, it’s more important than ever to acknowledge those who are suffering through a more violent and advanced stage of democratic collapse. It’s important to use the power we still have to try to make things better in Gaza, as we would wish others to agitate on our behalf if we were the ones being bombed and starved by the government that’s supposed to protect us. It is morally and politically necessary that we try to alleviate or prevent the accelerating catastrophe in Gaza. Ironically, it appears that the greatest hope for de-escalation in Gaza lies with our own ever-escalating, orange king. On Tuesday, Donald Trump arrived in Saudi Arabia to begin a three day diplomatic tour of the Middle East. Netanyahu’s government has threatened to launch Gideon’s Chariots once Trump leaves the region, unless some kind of deal is reached before his departure. Should Trump choose to support a deal and pressure Netanyahu to immediately resume shipments of food and medicine, thousands of lives could be saved. Many see Trump’s presence in the region this next few days as a last chance to avoid a calamitous escalation in suffering and death inside Gaza.

Please spread the word and call your representatives.

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What follows are lightly edited excerpts taken from an essay called “Tipping Point: The Rise of Uncivil Society”, written in the weeks following October 7, 2023 but which Long COVID prevented me from releasing at the time. By way of introduction, let me say that opposing the slaughter of innocent civilians should not be a hard or controversial position to hold - in Gaza or anywhere else - and if you find this position to be for some reason difficult or offensive or threatening to you then I respectfully suggest that fear and anger are clouding your judgement and that you’re in danger of losing touch with your humanity. Also, not that it should matter, but my wife is Jewish as are all the relatives on her side of the family. My stepfather is Jewish, as are many of our closest friends. Under Jewish law, my daughter is Jewish. The following essay is not in any way anti-Jewish or anti-semitic. Likewise, calling any criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s atrocious far-right government “anti-semitic” is foolish and absurd. Before October 7, hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews regularly flooded the streets protesting against Bibi’s authoritarian power grabs, and protests against Bibi inside Israel have picked up again this spring, with more than 100,000 people hitting the streets in late March and protests continuing into the present. Declaring any criticism of Netanyahu to be anti-semitic is either profoundly ignorant or it is - knowingly or unknowingly - part of a deeply cynical and manipulative propaganda campaign which undermines and distracts from the fight against actual anti-semitism.

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The following is offered in solidarity with the people of Gaza, and the people of southern Israel who were brutalized on October 7. It is also offered in solidarity with Rumeysa Ozturk and Kseniia Petrova and the many other foreign-born students and activists here in the US who’ve been harassed, detained, deported or driven into hiding for exercising their First Amendment rights by protesting against atrocities and abuses in Gaza and Ukraine and elsewhere.

This current essay is number five in a series of six that have been delayed by an unexpected Long COVID flare-up. I’m releasing this essay first in hopes that it might raise awareness about the horrors now unfolding in Gaza. I’ll publish the other five essays in the coming days on Substack and at MUDandFeathers.org. The first two essays in this series mostly focus on Rumeysa Ozturk and Kseniia Petrova, two foreign-born academics here in Boston who have been targeted by the Trump Administration, which is why their names are mentioned above. More context and a longer intro to this piece will be available in Tipping Point, Part IV when that essay is posted.

ON GAZA, ISRAEL AND UKRAINE

HAMAS IS NOT THE PEOPLE OF GAZA. The CIA World Factbook tells us that among the roughly two million residents of Gaza there are believed to be between 20 and 25,000 Hamas militants. There’s some debate about all these numbers, but even going with the higher estimates it works out to at least 75 civilians for every militant, meaning that - at the time of the attack - Hamas militants made up less than 1.5% of the population. To put this in perspective, believing the entire population of Gaza to be Hamas militants makes about as much sense, statistically speaking, as believing that everyone in the entire world has red hair; that everyone in Ohio or Detroit or Colorado is Jewish; that all Jamaicans are in fact Chinese; or that every single resident of the state of Mississippi - the poorest state in the nation - is a millionaire. In a war between Israel and Hamas, Hamas militants are legitimate military targets. Civilians, who make up more than 98% of the tightly packed population, are not.

THE ATTACK OF OCTOBER 7 WAS AN ATROCITY. Hamas’s attack on October 7 was an appalling, cowardly, deliberate and long-planned massacre targeting the unarmed civilian population of Southern Israel. The attack will be remembered as a defining moment not just in the history of Israel and Palestine, but in the history of the twenty-first century. As has been widely reported, the approximately 1,200 people - including 38 children - who were slaughtered on that day represent the greatest single-day loss of life in Israeli history, and the largest slaughter of Jewish people since the Holocaust.

THE ATTACK OF OCTOBER 7 WAS NOT UNIQUE. The slaughter of October 7 exists within a wider context. Without context there is no comprehensible response to atrocity and the overwhelming vulnerability it evokes other than rage and retribution. Massacres have been documented throughout human history. Horrors just in the last few years include Srebrenica, and the Yazidi, Rohingya, Darfur and Rwandan genocides. The Russian invasion of Ukraine - in particular the 2022 slaughter in Bucha and surrounding villages, and the Russian siege of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol where thousands of Ukrainians are believed to have been killed - certainly count as atrocities. Elsewhere and earlier, Armenians, Cambodians, Romani, the Irish, African Americans in Tulsa and Rosewood and countless other towns, and Native American and indigenous communities literally everywhere have been targeted for massacre and atrocity. This list may seem overlong, though it could be much longer. It is not included in order to minimize or distract from the horrors of October 7. It is included because without context we are alone in our suffering. It is included because the first consequence of trauma is to narrow our focus to our own overwhelming emotions and the struggle to survive, and because the necessary first step in recovery from trauma is the re-establishment of connection to the other. It is included because a mysterious balm for our own suffering lies in the recognition of the suffering of others, and the community that this implies: a homecoming, and a visceral proof of our interconnection. In Israel and Gaza there are generations of trauma to be worked through. Jewish people have been relentlessly targeted for massacre and atrocity throughout their forced migrations over thousands of years. The slaughter of October 7 belongs to a particular sub-category of massacre known as a pogrom. Oxford defines a pogrom, in part, as “an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people”. That there exists a specific word to describe the periodic and recurring slaughter of Jewish people is in itself an atrocity. The drive for a Jewish state grew from this sense of endless vulnerability, and the longing for a homeland where Jewish people might finally be safe and from which they could not be expelled. All of this is undeniably true. That said, any discussion of the context of October 7 must also include remembrance of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and the many other historical atrocities and displacements suffered by the Palestinian people since the Nakba, the catastrophe that for them heralded the establishment of the state of Israel. To this long list we must now add the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza, which has claimed the lives of at least 52,000 people, of which - according to the UN - at least 15,000 of these Palestinian dead are children. We must remember all of this because grievance and vulnerability and lack of context impair our ability to accurately perceive our world, and because without context there is no comprehensible response to atrocity other than rage and retribution.

THE ATTACK OF OCTOBER 7 WAS NOT JUST AN ATTACK ON JEWISH PEOPLE. Hamas is marketing their atrocity as a slaughter of Jews, and it certainly was that, but that’s not all it was. The massacre on October 7 was indiscriminate: there were no fastidious Nazis saying “your papers please”, trying to sort Jews and gypsies from their Aryan neighbors. Hamas launched thousands of imprecise rockets with no idea where they might land. They threw grenades into shelters crowded with civilians without looking to see who was there. They strafed moving vehicles, shot into running crowds, set fire to homes without curiosity or concern for who might be inside. In their rampage, Hamas killed not just Jewish Israelis, but also Palestinian Arabs, Nepalis, Bedouin, Thais, and Filipinos. They killed people of all ages from 40 different nations spread across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas.

It’s necessary to understand the underlying dynamics and injustices that drive people towards violence. It’s necessary to understand so we can reduce these injustices and heal our societies, so we can strengthen and protect our communities. That said, if we asked one of the militants on October 7, Why did you just kill that grandfather? Why did you shoot that particular young woman? Why did you murder that 8 year old boy? What answer could they possibly give? What rationalization could there possibly be for slaughtering civilians without knowing anything about them: their name, their religion, the languages they speak, their political or ideological leanings, their ethnicity or nationality? And what would we gain from hearing such rationalizations, such excuses for the inexcusable?

Whatever Hamas might say out loud, whatever Hamas might say to themselves, an uncomplicated insight into their motivations can be gained through a consideration of their behavior on October 7: Hamas’s actions speak clearly enough to make up for the absence or emptiness of their words. Hamas does not hate us. To hate something requires specificity and familiarity. To hate something requires that you see that thing clearly enough to be able to differentiate it from some other kind of thing. Hamas does not see us, nor do they care to. They couldn’t be bothered to differentiate us one from another, even through the sights of a gun. As demonstrated through their indiscriminate brutality on October 7, what Hamas hates is not so much any particular tribe or ethnicity, what Hamas hates is multicultural civil society itself. What Hamas hates is a world in which we might all live together in imperfect peace despite our many apparent differences. What Hamas hates is none other than the rickety foundation of our supposedly modern world.

All of the above is demonstrably true, but it’s also true that the same unanswerable questions that stumped the rhetorical militant above might also reasonably be asked of ourselves: What do we gain by killing this particular mother, this daughter, this beloved grandfather with his bad jokes and his funny songs, whose name is unknown to us? It is obviously true that there was something especially broken and depraved in the militants who covered themselves in blood on October 7. But this does not absolve us, or justify the slaughter taking place in Gaza now. How large and how meaningful is the moral distinction between those who revel in seeing the fear in their victims’ eyes and those who kill dispassionately and from a distance? Between retail butchery, up close and personal, and the wholesale slaughter of bombs that flatten an entire apartment building, or an entire neighborhood? How sure are we that one of these things is righteous, and that only one of them is an abomination? If we do not see or even know who we kill, who lies beneath the rubble, then have we not joined Hamas in making furious war on the very idea of civil society? Have we not become active participants in destroying the foundation of our world?

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU IS FINISHED. [please see note, below] A dictatorial strongman who is revealed to be not strong is an unseemly thing without purpose. In the seventies and early eighties, in the name of protecting “Christian civilization”, the military dictatorship in Argentina murdered with impunity tens of thousands of their own citizens. Anyone could be disappeared. The bodies of the disappeared were often thrown - sometimes still alive - from planes that circled regularly off the coast. As a final, flamboyant atrocity - a later inspiration to Margaret Atwood in creating her dystopia of Gilead - the young children of the disappeared were often taken and raised by high ranking supporters of the dictatorship. The mothers were murdered shortly after giving birth. Eight years of unaccountable, unrelenting, unstoppable horror. What finally ended the generals, and quickly, was their utter failure in their war of choice with Britain over the Falkland/Malvinas islands. If the generals can’t even win a war (their supposed area of expertise) then how can they claim to run a government? And they were done. Likewise, Bibi’s blustering strongman persona is forever blown. Netanyahu and his corrupt, incompetent, greedy, bullying, racist cabal are finished, though their actual fall from power may be a while in coming. Clearly guilty of staggering military and intelligence failures, plummeting in the polls, hiding from the shouted outrage of his constituents: Netanyahu appears to believe that prolonging the violence in Gaza is his best chance to cling on to power and to avoid the consequences - and maybe the jail cell - that await him after the war is over. But Netanyahu can’t hide in this river of blood forever, and his war cabinet and the temporary consensus that have allowed him to stay in power while the war is ongoing may be coming apart. It may prove to be the case that Hamas’s nihilistic brutality has (obviously unintentionally) saved Israel from dictatorship, in a way that months of furious mass protests before the war could not. Whatever the cause, Benjamin Netanyahu is finished, and it’s likely true that hastening his removal from power will be a necessary step towards a just and lasting peace.

[I’m sharing this bit about Bibi pretty much as written in late 2023 because I think it’s still fundamentally true. I’m leaving in the bit about October 7 possibly contributing to his downfall more than the mass protests preceding the attack because it may be the case that Bibi’s savagery and self-interested bungling in the last nineteen months have discredited the Israeli right-wing like almost nothing else could. In the same vein, It’s my hope that Trump’s astonishing greed and incompetence will likewise drag down and discredit the American right-wing who’ve enabled and embraced his corrupt rise. Bibi is in many ways Israel’s Trump, and he’s clung on to power longer than many people ever thought possible, but - like Donald - he’s getting older and more disoriented and he appears to be running out of moves. Recent polls show the vast majority of Israelis want to be done with Netanyahu rather than allowing him to drag the whole region down in flames. I think Bibi may end up being the canary in the coal mine of the international fascist resurgence, and that when he’s finally removed from power it’ll be a sign that the tide is turning and that Donald’s time may soon be coming to an end as well. Finally, it’s clearly true that “a just and lasting peace” is going to be hard to achieve after the relentless horrors of the last nineteen months. That said, the only alternative is annihilation or endless war, so I’m all-in for justice and peace, and Bibi’s removal is a necessary step towards both of these goals.]

MEANWHILE, HERE AT HOME

THE MOST IMPORTANT FRONT IN THE BATTLE BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP. The greatest threat to democracy and civil society worldwide lies almost certainly right here in the United States. Most Americans, most White Americans anyway, think Bucha or Be’eri or Gaza or Argentina’s Dirty War can’t happen here, that we’re protected by some kind of bubble that will magically keep life more or less how we imagine it’s always been. That American exceptionalism makes us somehow invulnerable to fascism, and immune to serious political violence. But it can happen here. America came terrifyingly close to dictatorship on January 6, though for the most part we carry on as if this were not true, because it’s scary and overwhelming to acknowledge this is true. Because acknowledging our vulnerability means allowing ourselves to recognize the abyss that is opening beneath our feet. The same people who tried to overthrow our democracy on January 6 are openly trying to do the same thing again now, but much more aggressively this time and with the benefit of hindsight and years of preparation..

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME. The ongoing failures of imagination and attention that prevent us from recognizing the immensity of the threats before us will not protect us from these threats. American democracy and civil society are under furious assault and may fall within our lifetimes, maybe within the next few months. They are falling already. It’s worth saying again that this isn’t just a problem for those of us who live here in the US. If American democracy and civil society collapse then democracy and civil society worldwide are in grave danger, and it becomes very unlikely that we’ll succeed - for instance - in our urgent task to prevent the planet from overheating. This last consequence would represent a disaster of a completely different magnitude. In the long history of our species, one society after another has periodically fallen into darkness and then re-emerged (or not), and this has been apocalyptic for the people living in that particular society in that particular time and place, but it’s not been THE apocalypse. Unmitigated climate change, on the other hand, would pose an existential threat to the entirety of human civilization, a centuries-long parade of catastrophes that would make all our other challenges look like the demoralizing but manageable dumpster fires that they are. Dictators like Putin and Trump will prevent us from making the changes necessary to avoid disaster. We can’t afford to waste decades removing them and their minions from power while the temperature blows past one red line after another.

THERE IS GREAT DANGER IN THIS MOMENT. The two ongoing bloodbaths in Europe and the Middle East represent era-defining calamities for the people of Ukraine and the people of Gaza. They also represent an escalating threat to peace and stability worldwide. Likewise, Trump’s return to power here in the US may represent an accelerating decline towards the brutal norms of an earlier age. For hundreds - if not thousands - of years before the early 20th century, constant, predatory war and rule by tyrants were the norm rather than the exception. The powerful took what they wanted when they wanted it, with minimal concern for the well-being or even the survival of anyone else. “Human rights” were not a thing. Slavery, starvation and public executions - on the other hand - were very common things, and 40% of kids died before reaching puberty: a long age of brutality, vulnerability and deadly inequality. And this wasn’t true always and everywhere, but it was emphatically true in Europe and its many colonies. The last 125 years, roughly since the turn of the twentieth century, have witnessed a profound transformation in human affairs: the expansion of a more civil society - of democracy, equality, human rights and opportunity - to billions of people around the world. This process has been messy, very imperfect, and is far from finished, but it’s broadly true that most of us have vastly more power, stability and options than our great-grandparents did in 1900. Specifically, much of the world has seen transformative growth in: literacy, education and access to information; political empowerment; economic and racial justice; healthcare, longevity and prevention of childhood diseases; civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and personal agency generally. All of this within a shared and growing and increasingly diverse civil space. The change has been profound, and resistance to this change has sometimes also been profound: in many parts of the world, including here in the US, these new rights and the space in which they are exercised are under sustained attack. The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice all by itself, and - on the most profound and dangerous level - it is this shared space and this shared progress that we stand to lose if we’re not bold and vigilant as we navigate this moment.

MEANWHILE, HERE AT HOME. Overthrowing a democracy is an inherently violent act, but the phrase itself is a vague and bloodless abstraction: what exactly is it that’s being overthrown, and where? Maybe it’s just about burning some old parchment and firing a bunch of annoying bigwigs and bureaucrats, which maybe doesn’t sound so bad because parchment’s weird and not super useful, and who loves bigwigs and bureaucrats anyway?

Trump sold his coup attempt like a block party or a monster truck rally: as an exciting patriotic outing, a “Throw the Bums Out” adventure for the whole family. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Glib, festive, fascist-curious FOMO. Not just “wild” but “wild!” with an exclamation point. But overthrowing a democracy is not just about forcing your way into some government building, or burning the Constitution, or running out of town all the people who make it possible for us to govern ourselves, as transgressive and awful as all these things would be. Overthrowing a democracy is also not black and white and aw-shucks wholesome like a Jimmy Stewart movie: Mr Smith Goes to Washington, but with bear mace and with flagpoles used as spears and clubs. Overthrowing a democracy and installing a dictatorship is about two things: it’s about power and accountability. It’s about taking power away from ordinary people, and it’s about making the dictator and their minions unaccountable for any claim of harm. Sound familiar? For those of us not obsessively tracking Trump’s increasingly open embrace of fascism, it’s worth remembering that Trump’s lawyers actually argued in court during the campaign that presidential immunity should prevent a former president from being prosecuted even if he’d ordered SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent while in office. Trump’s lawyer actually said this. Out loud. With a straight face. In front of reporters. In a fucking court of law. Just this one astonishing, depraved, shameless lunatic fact should tell you everything you need to know about Donald Trump, and about all those who continue to enable his utterly corrupt power.

MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES. Lately, it seems like we’ve been living in a disaster movie mash-up written by glitchy AI. The frankly ridiculous and overstuffed script includes: spreading fire and war; looming environmental catastrophe; lingering plague; international intrigue; attempted coups where there have never been coups before; creepy, grotesquely rich villains to rival anything out of James Bond (we’re looking at you Elon, Vlad, Jong Un, and Donald); and icky, scheming henchmen - and henchwomen - as far as the eye can see. At this point, we’re still in that early, nerve-wrecking part of the movie where our heroes haven’t yet recognized the danger. They’re distracted, squabbling over the pizza, vaguely puzzled by all the blinking alerts and flashing red lights, but not yet really paying attention or registering the growing threat. One other thing the script does not include is Bruce Willis or Denzel Washington or Michelle Rodriguez coming to save us. We are going to have to save ourselves.

“May you live in interesting times” is not, in fact, an ancient Chinese curse. It appears to have originated - somewhat more ominously - with the aristocratic Chamberlain family in England in the very late 1800s. Neville Chamberlain, you may recall, was the British Prime Minister who earned lasting disgrace for appeasing Hitler: for allowing the Nazis to occupy much of Czechoslovakia in exchange for a promise of “Peace for our time”. This did not end well. “May you live in interesting times” appears to have originated with Neville’s father, who claimed it was a saying he’d heard during his time in Asia, though there’s no evidence of such a saying originating there and it appears he just made it up. Oh dear. An uncomfortable origin story for uncomfortable times, and a reminder - if one is needed - that we must ferociously oppose the monsters slouching towards our gate. Pretending they’re not there, or trying to bargain with them, or declaring them to be Something Other Than Monsters will not keep us safe. We need to abandon our comforting dreams of normalcy and rise to our own defense. The approaching dangers must be recognized, explicitly named, shouted from the rooftops, and fiercely and relentlessly opposed. Failure to do so, starting immediately, risks disaster. They are almost upon us.

HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S TIME. We have been too long watching through our fingers, in shocked disbelief, as the slow-motion clown-car-train-wreck that is Donald Trump bashes its way unceremoniously through one pillar of American democracy after another. Despite the punch-drunk, smash-mouth, nursing home brawl aesthetic, these flailing and relentless attacks could still bring about the end of our nearly 250 year experiment in civil society and self-governance. We need to stop treating Donald Trump like a normal politician - or like some party-crashing crazy-uncle to be gawked at - and recognize that he represents the flat-out deadliest and most depraved threat to American democracy since the founding of the republic. America’s own Caligula, the debauched and maybe insane Roman emperor whose brief and bloody reign may have marked the lowest point in Rome’s descent from republic to dictatorship. We need to rise - now - to our own defense. We must de-normalize Trump and his minions over and over and over again. We must hold them accountable for their treason. To their face. We must not be polite, or reasonable, or patiently wait for them to stop telling yet another ridiculous lie. It is unnecessary and inappropriate to be polite when dealing with someone who is coming to steal your power, your dignity, your safety, your ability to provide for and protect your kids. It is appropriate to fiercely oppose them. It is appropriate to shout them down. We must hold Trump accountable for all of his crimes and schemes and scatterbrained, nit-wit lies and betrayals, and we must let him be seen as the shuffling, disoriented, feckless orange asshat that he is. Because it must be remembered that, once upon a time, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were also just absurd, scowling buffoons. Until suddenly they weren’t.

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Part I: In Which Every Day is Angry White Man Day

JD Vance’s bravura return to the spotlight in last month’s shameful Oval Office mugging of President Zelenskyy happened one day before the twenty-eighth anniversary of my father’s death. My father, to his credit, would almost certainly have despised Donald Trump and recognized him as the bullying, shallow, incoherent predator that he is. But watching JD’s disgraceful tag team ambush of President Zelenskyy, I was viscerally reminded of no one so much as my dad.

There are some days where you know as it’s happening that you’re witnessing something important, something that’ll be studied and analyzed for years to come. There are some days after which everything is different. Friday, February 28th was one of those days. For those of you lucky enough to have missed that Friday’s disappointing finale to America’s eighty-year run as Leader of the Free World, an extremely short summary is in order. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to the Oval Office expecting to sign an extortionate agreement granting mineral rights to the US, presumably in exchange for some ill-defined security arrangements. What Zelenskyy got instead was ambushed. It started with a snippy JD self-righteously and dismissively “explaining” that of course normal diplomacy with Vladimir Putin was the proper way to end the war. This was the set-up. President Zelenskyy then patiently listed many of the times that Putin had broken previous diplomatic agreements with Ukraine and asked JD exactly what kind of diplomacy he was talking about. This led to JD turning up the anger a couple of notches and accusing Zelenskyy of being disrespectful and ungrateful and manipulative, and to JD repeatedly demanding that Zelenskyy say thank you to President Trump. Donald himself joined in, angrily scolding Zelenskyy and ranting about world war three and disrespect, and how Zelenskyy doesn’t have the cards right now, to which an incredulous Zelenskyy responded “I’m not playing cards”, but the trap was sprung and it could not be unsprung, nor was it designed to be. There has never been such a public attack on an ally visiting the Oval Office. Ever. The whole thing was insane and delusional, and painful to watch.

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With the fall of France in 1940, Britain stood alone against the Nazi war machine. In response, US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed America to be the Arsenal of Democracy and began sending boatloads of weapons and supplies that allowed the Brits to survive the darkest period of the war. This is not so different from the Biden Administration’s arming of Ukraine these last three years. America does not have a spotless record of supporting democracy. We‘ve supported dictatorships - especially during the Cold War, as a supposed counterweight to Russian/Soviet influence - but what we are witnessing now is a 180 degree turn away from America’s imperfect tradition of defending democracy and towards a new and terrifying alliance with the worst dictatorships in the world.

This is what it would’ve looked like if America had sided with the Nazis in WWII.

Zelenskyy’s Oval Office beatdown is a vision of the upside-down world to come. It’s as if FDR had decided that rather than sending weapons to the Brits, he would instead hold a public event to humiliate Winston Churchill and try to force him to surrender twenty percent of English territory to Hitler in order to achieve something he could then call “peace” during the Battle of Britain. It was an utterly disgusting and appalling betrayal of democracy, of American values, of our European allies, and of the people of Ukraine. It’s also just plain dumb.

The shameful spectacle of JD and Donald giddily slapping around a heroic and vulnerable ally is only part of what happened in the meeting, but it has thoroughly dominated media coverage in which it has generally been presented as some sort of spontaneous and inexplicable lapse of protocol that erupted during one of those normally-oh-so-boring press conferences. How odd. Googling “Trump Zelenskyy spat” returns articles by the AP, USA Today, Fox, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and NPR among others, all of them using this absurd and diminishing word (“spat”) in their titles, completely missing the point. The betrayal of Ukraine is a moral atrocity, but the bigger story, of which Ukraine is only the awful first chapter, is that the ambush of President Zelenskyy is being used as a distraction from - and a justification for - a larger goal, which is a movement away from our traditional democratic allies and a growing alliance with Vladimir Putin’s crumbling medieval dictatorship, and with other atrocious, brutal and anti-democratic regimes around the world.

A more concise, relevant and helpful summary of what happened in the meeting might sound something like this: JD and Donald’s Oval Office ambush featured a lot of Kremlin talking points and absurd lies aimed at President Zelenskyy by two men who are not worthy to clean his shoes. It was a morality play for the After Times, in which the corrupt and the vile demonstrate for our edification their ability to abuse the good and the brave, simply because they feel like it. Because truth and justice and the common good do not exist in their world. In their world only greed and power are real. The whole thing was, in short, evil and stupid and petty. This is what fascism looks like.

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But I digress. Let us return once again to the subject of me and my dad. Like my dad, JD is a lawyer, trained at a fancy law school. They have similar beards, rugged, but not too rugged because it is necessary always to appear to be respectable and proper. Respectability is their protective coloration - like the stripes on a tiger in the forest - making it difficult to see the danger until it’s too late. Like my dad, JD presents himself as a profoundly “rational” person. Like my dad, JD is angry pretty much all the time, but his anger is always righteous and it is always someone else’s fault. Like my dad, JD’s anger may be constant, but it is not without variety and modulation. Sometimes JD is merely annoyed. Sometimes he is very, very angry, but he does not shout. He is “right” and “reasonable”. He is credentialed and powerful, he does not need to shout. He assumes he will win because he is “right”. And much of the time - by virtue of credentials and position and supposed respectability - he is the one who gets to decide who is right, or at least this is the story he believes, and too often we believe it right along with him, because we have not yet freed ourselves of this dangerous habit.

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TO SEE CLEARLY THAT WHICH IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF US IS NOT AN UNCOMPLICATED THING. Years ago I was living in Western Massachusetts when the remains of a hurricane blew through, dumping a ridiculous amount of rain in a day and a night. In the morning I got up and took a shower, and when I came back to the bedroom I remember standing in the doorway - dripping wet and wrapped in a towel - staring at the bed aware that something was wrong and also aware that it was taking me way longer than it should have to figure out what it was. What had happened was this: the rain had collapsed a good bit of the ceiling onto my bed, and there were chunks of plaster and dust everywhere. It turns out that even at the most literal level, what we see is largely what we expect to see. Images are not simply registered by the eyes and then instantly “seen” in the brain. There’s an intermediate step where the images are interpreted before being passed along to the rest of the brain, and this interpretive process relies heavily on prior knowledge and previous experience in order to make sense of what we’re seeing. It was this interpretive process that was having trouble with the fact that the ceiling was no longer where it was supposed to be and that it was now, instead, spread out all over my bed.

Seeing clearly is immensely more difficult when it involves emotionally charged subjects like our fathers and our tribes.

Daddy’s Home

My father had his good qualities, which I miss. He could be warm and thoughtful and protective when it suited him, and when he wasn’t set-off by some random thing: no milk for dinner; the car in front not moving fast enough after the light changed; chores undone. But he was an unaccountable and rage-filled narcissist with unquenchable appetites and there is literally no bad thing of which I believe him to be incapable. Life with him was a scary and unpredictable roller coaster, too often ruled by his anger and his moods. It turns out that growing up in forced proximity to such a dangerous and out of control creature was useful preparation for recognizing danger in these crazy times and for identifying the rituals of domination and aggression and appeasement that are the real engines of so much of what’s going on right now. Those of us who were raised in these circumstances, and there are a lot of us, are presented with a series of moral and existential choices as we’re growing up. Will we reject the predator in front of us - and purge the predator inside of us - in an attempt to become a good and kind and honorable person, or will we embrace the external predator and seek to become an even bigger predator ourselves? Or, alternatively, will we train ourselves to avoid or deny or minimize all the uncomfortable truths so we can pretend that everything’s “fine” and continue our familiar captivity, hoping that our passivity and lack of resistance will keep us safe? None of these paths are easy but only one of them is the path of freedom and sanity, and it’s never too late to change lanes.

Warming up the crowd for a Trump rally last October, Tucker Carlson summarized Trump’s appeal with the words: “Dad comes home. He’s pissed. Dad is pissed.” Tucker then promised that Trump would give America a vigorous spanking for being a “Bad little girl”. When Trump hit the stage people chanted “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!”. You can buy “Daddy’s Home” T-shirts online, with a picture of Donald in front of the White House. Trump’s cult is, I believe, largely made up of people who are still hostage to their own complicated and largely unexamined upbringings: people who feel a homecoming in Donald’s aggressive persona, and who see in Donald a righteously Angry Daddy who they can celebrate and appease, in a way that presumably feels familiar. By proving their loyalty and their worthiness through their uncritical obedience they hope that Donald will see them and love them, and that he will protect them from all the bad things and all the bad people. In reflexively making themselves captive to an Angry Daddy who does not have their best interests at heart, Trump’s followers have sent themselves - and all the rest of us - hurtling towards disaster.

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But it’s not just the people of MAGAworld who would be well-served by examining their daddy issues, the rest of us also have to purge ourselves of our reflexive deference to the Angry Daddies of the world.

Throughout my teens and twenties I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours arguing with my father about politics. Arguing about his personal behavior would’ve been way too loaded, so politics was where we metaphorically battled over truth and justice, and these battles were formative experiences in my life. But even these arguments were, I realize now, a form of obedience and complicity. They were roleplaying. They were a way in which I conspired to keep the secret of his unfitness, from him and also from myself. Such behavior is no longer helpful, if it ever was. In these crazy and dangerous times we are called upon to speak impolite truths, loudly and without apology, in order to break the spell, in order to free ourselves from those who would keep us endlessly debating while they carry on doing bad things.

So, at the risk of oversharing, I offer the following example of the breaking of one Angry Daddy’s spell. And this isn’t the worst of the things my dad did, it’s just the thing that was most obviously and uncomplicatedly and impersonally lame, and that permanently dis-enthralled me from his endless drama:

My righteously angry, moralizing, judgmental, uptight, conservative father cheated on my mother. By this I do not mean that he once made out with an old flame, or that he had a secret girlfriend, or two, or three. I mean that my dad cheated on my mom constantly, for more than a decade, by having unprotected sex with hundreds and hundreds of strangers, male and female, that he connected with by using the back pages of some Philly paper and a secret PO Box throughout much of the 1970s and 80s. In the end, he only stopped because he was afraid of getting AIDS, not because of any moral or ethical qualms he might’ve had. About ten years after he stopped he finally told my mom what he’d done. In response, she told him “then you’re just like your dad and you have no integrity”. My dad’s response was clarifying. My father had lied constantly about where he was and who he was and what he was doing for at least a decade. He had taken time and money and attention and intimacy away from his family. He foolishly risked his own life and health, and he constantly exposed my mother to dangerous and potentially deadly diseases without her knowledge. My father’s response to my mother when she said he had no integrity was the following: he said that no, he had not compromised his integrity because the sex didn’t mean anything, it was “just sex”. At this point my father was in his fifties and supposedly an adult, and this was the best answer his highly trained legal mind could come up with after at least a decade of dangerous, dishonorable behavior, and another decade in which to think about it. I didn’t find out about this until after he died, and my strong initial reaction - which remains to this day - wasn’t anger or indignation or sadness, which had all been so frequently part of my relationship with my dad. It was just this: Ewww. Gross. How Pathetic… And, to be clear, it wasn’t really the sex that was the problem. The problem was his utter lack of principle and accountability and empathy, and the lack of even the most basic self-awareness or curiosity about anyone else’s experience. All the intrigue and compulsion to somehow truly connect with my father was obliterated by the revelation that his inner, moral life was this small and barren and utterly corrupt.

Ewww. Gross. How Pathetic…

I could’ve argued with my father for 100,000 hours and never gotten any closure or progress or meeting of the minds, because my father wasn’t arguing out of principle or curiosity. He wasn’t actually communicating with me, he was only playing a part. He would’ve led me in circles forever, and I would’ve followed, made captive by my desire to understand or to make better, or - like him - to be “right”. But my father was only making angry, meaningless noises with his mouth in order to maintain the protective veneer of principled respectability that gave him power. Seeing this so brutally revealed as the pathetic, empty farce that it was set me free. There was no righteous meaning to understand. There was only ugly behavior to reject and oppose.

To return to where we began, the same moral judo applies to Donald and JD and Elon and the rest, whether they’re grotesquely berating a man who’s many times their better in the Oval Office or traitorously undermining democracy, shredding the Constitution, or destroying the public services on which all our lives depend. There is no righteous meaning to understand. There is only predatory behavior to reject and oppose.

Ewww. Gross. How Pathetic…

Their whole pompous, condescending, righteous, angry schtick only works if we pretend along with them that they’re not entirely full of shit. If we pretend along with them that they’re “proper”, that they are not in fact morally and spiritually deficient and fundamentally corrupt, then we surrender our power and make ourselves willingly captive to their meaningless and aggressive words. If, on the other hand, we focus on their clearly degenerate and predatory behavior then we break the spell and make it possible for us to rise effectively to our own defense.

Part II: In Which We Discover that We are in a Monster Movie, but We’re Behaving like We’re in a Police Procedural

Our current danger descends almost entirely from our inability to properly perceive Donald and JD and Elon as what they are, as insatiable and remorseless predators. If they looked as dangerous as they are - like goose-stepping Nazis or fire-breathing monsters from outer space - we would have driven them off a long time ago. But their symbolic status as father figures to the nation somehow short-circuits our ability to see them clearly - fangs and all - and to protect ourselves. Even many thoughtful and progressive journalists reflexively persist in reporting on them as if they were somewhat normal politicians, even if rather unsettling and potentially disastrous politicians. And even the most daring and clearsighted journalists generally still fall into the trap of saying, well, yes, they have actually done all these terrible things, but they couldn’t possibly, actually be all THAT bad. For instance: yes, they’re breaking all kinds of laws as they smash up the government, but it’s really pretty inconceivable that they wouldn’t stop all their naughty behavior when a judge tells them to. (This particular - fundamental - article of faith took a beating over the weekend when the Trump Administration extradited hundreds of people without due process and despite a judge’s order. It appears that this is yet another bright red line that is now behind us.) Or, yes, it does kind of look like Donald is aligning himself with Vladimir Putin to crush democracy here in America, in Ukraine and throughout Europe, but that can’t actually be what’s really happening because that would be just unimaginably bad. Or, yes, RFK Jr does appear to be destroying our public health system and our ability to fight cancer and measles and a whole bunch of other diseases, but that would be a completely insane thing to do, so there must be some way in which this is part of making an imperfect system somehow better in the end. Or, yes, Elon - the unelected, unconfirmed and profoundly disinhibited South African billionaire - does appear to be “trimming waste” in the federal government not with a scalpel but by knocking down one agency after another and then setting fire to the wreckage, but surely this is just a case of well-intended enthusiasm that will soon be set right.

No - absolutely, utterly and forever no - to all of the above.

We are caught in an escalating feeding frenzy of sociopaths and deranged narcissists, and we are the food. If we don’t start to believe what our eyes are telling us and act - soon - in our own defense, then we stand to lose everything: our democracy, our rights, our money, our health, our lives.

These Angry Daddies are not here to help us. We need to stop parsing their words looking for signs of their love or reasonableness or sanity and we need to start paying intense and obsessive attention to their predatory behavior and to the mortal danger they pose to our democracy and to ourselves.

WE ARE IN A MONSTER MOVIE, BUT WE’RE BEHAVING LIKE WE'RE IN A POLICE PROCEDURAL, OR SOME SORT OF OLD-FASHIONED DETECTIVE STORY. We’re at that part of the movie where the monsters are running amok and bodies are starting to pile up, but we’re still carrying on as usual, apparently assuming that Cary Grant or Colombo or Inspector Clouseau are going to pop up and save us, but they’re not. Colombo’s rumpled “just one more thing” routine won’t work in this situation, and it’s not necessary, because we already know whodunit. The issue isn’t finding the culprits, it’s protecting their intended victims - which is pretty much all of us - and the issue is making them stop.

They will not stop on their own. We will have to make them stop.

But how?

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The current moment is chaotic and overwhelming, which is by design. Trying to find a useful and prudent path forward through all the chaos and uncertainty will make your head spin. So let’s try it in reverse, working backwards based on what we know to be true and what we can assume about how all of this is likely to end. I’d be very happy if any of the following three points were wrong, but I fear they are not.

1. Trump will not leave power willingly. He knows that a return to the rule of law will very likely land him in prison, so he’ll do everything he can to stay in power.

2. When we try to remove him from power, either through elections or for his many high crimes and misdemeanors, Trump will try to use the military to prevent this.

3. In the end, our ability to remove Trump from power will depend entirely on the American military making the choice to defend democracy and the Constitution rather than defending Trump. To put this more plainly, I believe it to be the case that American democracy will live or die based on how many of the men and women in our military refuse to follow an unlawful order to shoot civilians and politicians. Period.

To the extent that the points above are true, then the only thing that matters between here and there is what we can do to increase the likelihood that the military will defend democracy. If Trump’s power seems solid and unassailable when Trump ultimately puts the military in the streets, then the individual men and women in our military will be under more pressure to do as they’re told and attack civilians, because it will be less apparent that there is any viable alternative.

Therefore, our goal is and must be to become the visible and viable and irresistible champions of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. Like our lives depend on it, because they do.

Part III: FAFO from the Past - In Which Nelson Mandela and Frederick Douglass Show Us How It’s Done

The Republican Party has become the party of untruth and unreality. It’s their most obvious and unifying brand. They’ve become a social club for people who believe or disbelieve a whole menagerie of ridiculous things, many of which are dangerous, wildly antisocial or flat-out abusive: that violence or discrimination towards lesbian or gay or trans or Muslim individuals either doesn’t exist, or that yes it does exist but it’s both justified and appropriate; that there’s no such thing as climate change; that racism and sexism don’t exist, or if they do exist then they’re probably justified and appropriate, or - alternatively - that yes they exist but the primary victims of racism and sexism are in fact White people and men. Many MAGA followers will tell you with a straight face that a party led by power-mad, chainsaw-wielding billionaires is going to serve the needs of the working class, that Donald is only going to deport the “bad” immigrants and not their friends and family members, and that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent. During the height of the pandemic, MAGA orthodoxy was that Covid wasn’t real, or if it was real then it wasn’t actually all that dangerous, a belief for which tens if not hundreds of thousands of MAGA followers paid with their lives. The cornerstone MAGA belief is that Biden lost in 2020, when he in fact won by 4.4 points and seven million votes representing 51.3% of the electorate. Conversely, MAGA also believes that Trump’s 2024 win - by 1.5 points and 2.3 million votes representing 49.8% of the total - represents an enormous victory and a mandate for unprecedented, wrecking ball change. The belief that Ukraine somehow attacked Russia and not the other way around is a shiny new MAGA belief that pairs well with the older MAGA belief that Putin is a more trustworthy, reliable and desirable partner than our traditional democratic allies in Europe and elsewhere.

All of this is clearly, obviously, demonstrably wrong, in addition to being just plain dumb. Truth is MAGA’s kryptonite. So we should beat them, relentlessly, with truth, and with the escalating costs and consequences of their chickenshit, head-in-the-sand complicity and denial.

But how?

There is a phenomenon called the Mandela Effect, in which people collectively remember some event or cultural detail that didn’t actually happen or that is different from their recollection. I’m aware that I may be contributing to the Mandela Effect with some of the specifics of the following, but the outline of the story is true, and it happens to involve Nelson Mandela. In my life, I have encountered two moments of political and spiritual warriorship that stopped me in my tracks and changed my understanding of what is possible in fierce defense of the truth. (In reality there are probably at least three of these moments, but I learned about Martin Luther King Jr and his “I Have a Dream” speech when I was very young and I don’t remember a moral pantheon without him in it.) At some point twenty or thirty years ago, I saw - only one time - a short video of an interaction between Nelson Mandela, the then newly-freed leader of the Black South African opposition, and F. W. De Klerk, the White president of South Africa who had released Mandela from prison. As I recall, they were both speaking on the floor of the South African parliament. At one point as De Klerk was speaking there in front of the other Afrikaner lawmakers he made some passing claim that I remember as seeming relatively innocuous, the kind of boilerplate and conventional untruth that often passes without notice or challenge. Mandela wasn’t having it. As I recall, the two men were facing one another not that far apart on the floor. Mandela interrupted - immediately and without hesitation - the moment De Klerk spoke the offending phrase. Mandela may have raised his arm, and I recall that he spoke with clarity and directness.

Tyranny itself may seem unassailable, but tyranny is built of a thousand mean and stupid little lies. Let the lies pass unchallenged and tyranny grows stronger. Destroy the lies, one by one - without fear or apology - and the walls must eventually come tumbling down.

What I remember Mandela saying to De Klerk, there in the lion’s den, in a voice that cut like a diamond, was this:

“That, sir, is a lie.”

This, to the leader of a violently racist state and to the man who had personally released him from prison - and who could presumably send him back - while surrounded on all sides by dozens of the highest ranking members of that violently racist state. The gold standard for speaking truth to power. The dictionary definition of fierce and unintimidated resistance to evil. May we all be so bold.

[And I may be misremembering the exact quote, or some other detail of this confrontation, but Mandela’s boldness, his clarity and his irresistible integrity were staggering, and as described. And, regardless of whether Mandela said this particular line in this particular circumstance, “That, sir, is a lie” is a pretty ferocious and appropriate response to much of what MAGA is spouting at the moment. Don’t debate them. Beat them with truth. Over and over and over again.]

The second moment that stopped me in my tracks - and that changed my life - I encountered in high school, when we read “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”. Everything about Frederick Douglass deserves more time than we have right now, but hopefully even a brief recounting of this incident will be of use. About two-thirds of the way through his Narrative, Douglass describes what he calls “the turning-point in my career as a slave”. As punishment for his increasing independence of mind, Douglass was sent by his master to live for a year with a slave-breaker named Edward Covey, where he was brutally abused. About halfway through this ordeal, Douglass went to his master asking for protection and to be sent to another home because he was sure that Covey would kill him if he stayed where he was. His master refused and sent him back. Almost immediately upon his return, Covey attacked him again but, as Douglass wrote, “at this moment - from whence came the spirit I don’t know - I resolved to fight”. To lay hands on a White man was punishable by death, but Douglass did it anyway. The two men brawled for almost two hours and Covey got by far the worst of it. Douglass reports that in the remaining six months Covey never laid so much as a finger on him in anger, and that “My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place”. Douglass also writes that “I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.”

It’s that last sentence, formal as it is, that rearranged my head and has stayed with me ever since. In its simplest form: “If you want to beat me down, you’re gonna have to kill me.”

Amen.

Like the great Frederick Douglass - like Nelson Mandela and Volodymyr Zelenskyy and like the millions who came before us, whose sacrifices and accomplishments this traitorous regime would erase and destroy - let us now resolve to fight.

All political posts will be free until we’re free of the Donald. If you find Mud and Feathers useful and you’ve got a few bucks to spare I’d be grateful for your paid subscription.

All of this is clearly, obviously, demonstrably wrong, in addition to being just plain dumb. Truth is MAGA’s kryptonite. So we should beat them, relentlessly, with truth, and with the escalating costs and consequences of their chickenshit, head-in-the-sand complicity and denial.

But how?

There is a phenomenon called the Mandela Effect, in which people collectively remember some event or cultural detail that didn’t actually happen or that is different from their recollection. I’m aware that I may be contributing to the Mandela Effect with some of the specifics of the following, but the outline of the story is true, and it happens to involve Nelson Mandela. In my life, I have encountered two moments of political and spiritual warriorship that stopped me in my tracks and changed my understanding of what is possible in fierce defense of the truth. (In reality there are probably at least three of these moments, but I learned about Martin Luther King Jr and his “I Have a Dream” speech when I was very young and I don’t remember a moral pantheon without him in it.) At some point twenty or thirty years ago, I saw - only one time - a short video of an interaction between Nelson Mandela, the then newly-freed leader of the Black South African opposition, and F. W. De Klerk, the White president of South Africa who had released Mandela from prison. As I recall, they were both speaking on the floor of the South African parliament. At one point as De Klerk was speaking there in front of the other Afrikaner lawmakers he made some passing claim that I remember as seeming relatively innocuous, the kind of boilerplate and conventional untruth that often passes without notice or challenge. Mandela wasn’t having it. As I recall, the two men were facing one another not that far apart on the floor. Mandela interrupted - immediately and without hesitation - the moment De Klerk spoke the offending phrase. Mandela may have raised his arm, and I recall that he spoke with clarity and directness.

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Tyranny itself may seem unassailable, but tyranny is built of a thousand mean and stupid little lies. Let the lies pass unchallenged and tyranny grows stronger. Destroy the lies, one by one - without fear or apology - and the walls must eventually come tumbling down.

What I remember Mandela saying to De Klerk, there in the lion’s den, in a voice that cut like a diamond, was this:

“That, sir, is a lie.”

This, to the leader of a violently racist state and to the man who had personally released him from prison - and who could presumably send him back - while surrounded on all sides by dozens of the highest ranking members of that violently racist state. The gold standard for speaking truth to power. The dictionary definition of fierce and unintimidated resistance to evil. May we all be so bold.

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[And I may be misremembering the exact quote, or some other detail of this confrontation, but Mandela’s boldness, his clarity and his irresistible integrity were staggering, and as described. And, regardless of whether Mandela said this particular line in this particular circumstance, “That, sir, is a lie” is a pretty ferocious and appropriate response to much of what MAGA is spouting at the moment. Don’t debate them. Beat them with truth. Over and over and over again.]

The second moment that stopped me in my tracks - and that changed my life - I encountered in high school, when we read “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”. Everything about Frederick Douglass deserves more time than we have right now, but hopefully even a brief recounting of this incident will be of use. About two-thirds of the way through his Narrative, Douglass describes what he calls “the turning-point in my career as a slave”. As punishment for his increasing independence of mind, Douglass was sent by his master to live for a year with a slave-breaker named Edward Covey, where he was brutally abused. About halfway through this ordeal, Douglass went to his master asking for protection and to be sent to another home because he was sure that Covey would kill him if he stayed where he was. His master refused and sent him back. Almost immediately upon his return, Covey attacked him again but, as Douglass wrote, “at this moment - from whence came the spirit I don’t know - I resolved to fight”. To lay hands on a White man was punishable by death, but Douglass did it anyway. The two men brawled for almost two hours and Covey got by far the worst of it. Douglass reports that in the remaining six months Covey never laid so much as a finger on him in anger, and that “My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place”. Douglass also writes that “I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.”

It’s that last sentence, formal as it is, that rearranged my head and has stayed with me ever since. In its simplest form: “If you want to beat me down, you’re gonna have to kill me.”

Amen.

Like the great Frederick Douglass - like Nelson Mandela and Volodymyr Zelenskyy and like the millions who came before us, whose sacrifices and accomplishments this traitorous regime would erase and destroy - let us now resolve to fight.

This is Part 3 of 3

Part I: In Which Every Day is Angry White Man Day - is HERE

Part II: In Which We Discover That We’re in a Monster Movie, Not a Police Procedural - is HERE

The Whole Essay (Parts 1-3 as one unit) - is HERE

All political posts will be free until we’re free of the Donald. If you find Mud and Feathers useful and you’ve got a few dollars to spare I’d be grateful for your paid subscription.

No - absolutely, utterly and forever no - to all of the above.

We are caught in an escalating feeding frenzy of sociopaths and deranged narcissists, and we are the food. If we don’t start to believe what our eyes are telling us and act - soon - in our own defense, then we stand to lose everything: our democracy, our rights, our money, our health, our lives.

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These Angry Daddies are not here to help us. We need to stop parsing their words looking for signs of their love or reasonableness or sanity and we need to start paying intense and obsessive attention to their predatory behavior and to the mortal danger they pose to our democracy and to ourselves.

WE ARE IN A MONSTER MOVIE, BUT WE’RE BEHAVING LIKE WE’RE IN A POLICE PROCEDURAL, OR SOME SORT OF OLD-FASHIONED DETECTIVE STORY. We’re at that part of the movie where the monsters are running amok and bodies are starting to pile up, but we’re still carrying on as usual, apparently assuming that Cary Grant or Colombo or Inspector Clouseau are going to pop up and save us, but they’re not. Colombo’s rumpled “just one more thing” routine won’t work in this situation, and it’s not necessary, because we already know whodunit. The issue isn’t finding the culprits, it’s protecting their intended victims - which is pretty much all of us - and the issue is making them stop.

They will not stop on their own. We will have to make them stop.

But how?

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The current moment is chaotic and overwhelming, which is by design. Trying to find a useful and prudent path forward through all the chaos and uncertainty will make your head spin. So let’s try it in reverse, working backwards based on what we know to be true and what we can assume about how all of this is likely to end. I’d be very happy if any of the following three points were wrong, but I fear they are not.

1. Trump will not leave power willingly. He knows that a return to the rule of law will very likely land him in prison, so he’ll do everything he can to stay in power.

2. When we try to remove him from power, either through elections or for his many high crimes and misdemeanors, Trump will try to use the military to prevent this.

3. In the end, our ability to remove Trump from power will depend entirely on the American military making the choice to defend democracy and the Constitution rather than defending Trump. To put this more plainly, I believe it to be the case that American democracy will live or die based on how many of the men and women in our military refuse to follow an unlawful order to shoot civilians and politicians. Period.

To the extent that the points above are true, then the only thing that matters between here and there is what we can do to increase the likelihood that the military will defend democracy. If Trump’s power seems solid and unassailable when Trump ultimately puts the military in the streets, then the individual men and women in our military will be under more pressure to do as they’re told and attack civilians, because it will be less apparent that there is any viable alternative.

Therefore, our goal is and must be to become the visible and viable and irresistible champions of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. Like our lives depend on it, because they do.

But how?

This is Part 2 of 3

Part I: In Which Every Day is Angry White Man Day - is HERE

Part III: FAFO from the Past - In Which Nelson Mandela and Frederick Douglass Show Us How It’s Done - is HERE

The Whole Essay (Parts 1-3 as one unit) - is HERE

All political posts will be free until we’re free of the Donald. If you find Mud and Feathers useful and you’ve got a few dollars to spare I’d be grateful for your paid subscription.

There are some days where you know as it’s happening that you’re witnessing something important, something that’ll be studied and analyzed for years to come. There are some days after which everything is different. Friday, February 28th was one of those days. For those of you lucky enough to have missed that Friday’s disappointing finale to America’s eighty-year run as Leader of the Free World, an extremely short summary is in order. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to the Oval Office expecting to sign an extortionate agreement granting mineral rights to the US, presumably in exchange for some ill-defined security arrangements. What Zelenskyy got instead was ambushed. It started with a snippy JD self-righteously and dismissively “explaining” that of course normal diplomacy with Vladimir Putin was the proper way to end the war. This was the set-up. President Zelenskyy then patiently listed many of the times that Putin had broken previous diplomatic agreements with Ukraine and asked JD exactly what kind of diplomacy he was talking about. This led to JD turning up the anger a couple of notches and accusing Zelenskyy of being disrespectful and ungrateful and manipulative, and to JD repeatedly demanding that Zelenskyy say thank you to President Trump. Donald himself joined in, angrily scolding Zelenskyy and ranting about world war three and disrespect, and how Zelenskyy doesn’t have the cards right now, to which an incredulous Zelenskyy responded “I’m not playing cards”, but the trap was sprung and it could not be unsprung, nor was it designed to be. There has never been such a public attack on an ally visiting the Oval Office. Ever. The whole thing was insane and delusional, and painful to watch.

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With the fall of France in 1940, Britain stood alone against the Nazi war machine. In response, US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed America to be the Arsenal of Democracy and began sending boatloads of weapons and supplies that allowed the Brits to survive the darkest period of the war. This is not so different from the Biden Administration’s arming of Ukraine these last three years. America does not have a spotless record of supporting democracy. We‘ve supported dictatorships - especially during the Cold War, as a supposed counterweight to Russian/Soviet influence - but what we are witnessing now is a 180 degree turn away from America’s imperfect tradition of defending democracy and towards a new and terrifying alliance with the worst dictatorships in the world.

This is what it would’ve looked like if America had sided with the Nazis in WWII.

Zelenskyy’s Oval Office beatdown is a vision of the upside-down world to come. It’s as if FDR had decided that rather than sending weapons to the Brits, he would instead hold a public event to humiliate Winston Churchill and try to force him to surrender twenty percent of English territory to Hitler in order to achieve something he could then call “peace” during the Battle of Britain. It was an utterly disgusting and appalling betrayal of democracy, of American values, of our European allies, and of the people of Ukraine. It’s also just plain dumb.

The shameful spectacle of JD and Donald giddily slapping around a heroic and vulnerable ally is only part of what happened in the meeting, but it has thoroughly dominated media coverage in which it has generally been presented as some sort of spontaneous and inexplicable lapse of protocol that erupted during one of those normally-oh-so-boring press conferences. How odd. Googling “Trump Zelenskyy spat” returns articles by the AP, USA Today, Fox, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and NPR among others, all of them using this absurd and diminishing word (“spat”) in their titles, completely missing the point. The betrayal of Ukraine is a moral atrocity, but the bigger story, of which Ukraine is only the awful first chapter, is that the ambush of President Zelenskyy is being used as a distraction from - and a justification for - a larger goal, which is a movement away from our traditional democratic allies and a growing alliance with Vladimir Putin’s crumbling medieval dictatorship, and with other atrocious, brutal and anti-democratic regimes around the world.

A more concise, relevant and helpful summary of what happened in the meeting might sound something like this: “JD and Donald’s Oval Office ambush featured a lot of Kremlin talking points and absurd lies aimed at President Zelenskyy by two men who are not worthy to clean his shoes”. It was a morality play for the After Times, in which the corrupt and the vile demonstrate for our edification their ability to abuse the good and the brave, simply because they feel like it. Because truth and justice and the common good do not exist in their world. In their world only greed and power are real. The whole thing was, in short, evil and stupid and petty. This is what fascism looks like.

But I digress. Let us return once again to the subject of me and my dad. Like my dad, JD is a lawyer, trained at a fancy law school. They have similar beards, rugged, but not too rugged because it is necessary always to appear to be respectable and proper. Respectability is their protective coloration - like the stripes on a tiger in the forest - making it difficult to see the danger until it’s too late. Like my dad, JD presents himself as a profoundly “rational” person. Like my dad, JD is angry pretty much all the time, but his anger is always righteous and it is always someone else’s fault. Like my dad, JD’s anger may be constant, but it is not without variety and modulation. Sometimes JD is merely annoyed. Sometimes he is very, very angry, but he does not shout. He is “right” and “reasonable”. He is credentialed and powerful, he does not need to shout. He assumes he will win because he is “right”. And much of the time - by virtue of credentials and position and supposed respectability - he is the one who gets to decide who is right, or at least this is the story he believes, and too often we believe it right along with him, because we have not yet freed ourselves of this dangerous habit.

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TO SEE CLEARLY THAT WHICH IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF US IS NOT AN UNCOMPLICATED THING. Years ago I was living in Western Massachusetts when the remains of a hurricane blew through, dumping a ridiculous amount of rain in a day and a night. In the morning I got up and took a shower, and when I came back to the bedroom I remember standing in the doorway - dripping wet and wrapped in a towel - staring at the bed aware that something was wrong and also aware that it was taking me way longer than it should have to figure out what it was. What had happened was this: the rain had collapsed a good bit of the ceiling onto my bed, and there were chunks of plaster and dust everywhere. It turns out that even at the most literal level, what we see is largely what we expect to see. Images are not simply registered by the eyes and then instantly “seen” in the brain. There’s an intermediate step where the images are interpreted before being passed along to the rest of the brain, and this interpretive process relies heavily on prior knowledge and previous experience in order to make sense of what we’re seeing. It was this interpretive process that was having trouble with the fact that the ceiling was no longer where it was supposed to be and that it was now, instead, spread out all over my bed.

Seeing clearly is immensely more difficult when it involves emotionally charged subjects like our fathers and our tribes.

Daddy’s Home

My father had his good qualities, which I miss. He could be warm and thoughtful and protective when it suited him, and when he wasn’t set-off by some random thing: no milk for dinner; the car in front not moving fast enough after the light changed; chores undone. But he was an unaccountable and rage-filled narcissist with unquenchable appetites and there is literally no bad thing of which I believe him to be incapable. Life with him was a scary and unpredictable roller coaster, too often ruled by his anger and his moods. It turns out that growing up in forced proximity to such a dangerous and out of control creature was useful preparation for recognizing danger in these crazy times and for identifying the rituals of domination and aggression and appeasement that are the real engines of so much of what’s going on right now. Those of us who were raised in these circumstances, and there are a lot of us, are presented with a series of moral and existential choices as we’re growing up. Will we reject the predator in front of us - and purge the predator inside of us - in an attempt to become a good and kind and honorable person, or will we embrace the external predator and seek to become an even bigger predator ourselves? Or, alternatively, will we train ourselves to avoid or deny or minimize all the uncomfortable truths so we can pretend that everything’s “fine” and continue our familiar captivity, hoping that our passivity and lack of resistance will keep us safe? None of these paths are easy but only one of them is the path of freedom and sanity, and it’s never too late to change lanes.

Warming up the crowd for a Trump rally last October, Tucker Carlson summarized Trump’s appeal with the words: “Dad comes home. He’s pissed. Dad is pissed.” Tucker then promised that Trump would give America a vigorous spanking for being a “Bad little girl”. When Trump hit the stage people chanted “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!”. You can buy “Daddy’s Home” T-shirts online, with a picture of Donald in front of the White House. Trump’s cult is, I believe, largely made up of people who are still hostage to their own complicated and largely unexamined upbringings: people who feel a homecoming in Donald’s aggressive persona, and who see in Donald a righteously Angry Daddy who they can celebrate and appease, in a way that presumably feels familiar. By proving their loyalty and their worthiness through their uncritical obedience they hope that Donald will see them and love them, and that he will protect them from all the bad things and all the bad people. In reflexively making themselves captive to an Angry Daddy who does not have their best interests at heart, Trump’s followers have sent themselves - and all the rest of us - hurtling towards disaster.

But it’s not just the people of MAGAworld who would be well-served by examining their daddy issues, the rest of us also have to purge ourselves of our reflexive deference to the Angry Daddies of the world.

Throughout my teens and twenties I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours arguing with my father about politics. Arguing about his personal behavior would’ve been way too loaded, so politics was where we metaphorically battled over truth and justice, and these battles were formative experiences in my life. But even these arguments were, I realize now, a form of obedience and complicity. They were roleplaying. They were a way in which I conspired to keep the secret of his unfitness, from him and also from myself. Such behavior is no longer helpful, if it ever was. In these crazy and dangerous times we are called upon to speak impolite truths, loudly and without apology, in order to break the spell, in order to free ourselves from those who would keep us endlessly debating while they carry on doing bad things.

So, at the risk of oversharing, I offer the following example of the breaking of one Angry Daddy’s spell. And this isn’t the worst of the things my dad did, it’s just the thing that was most obviously and uncomplicatedly and impersonally lame, and that permanently dis-enthralled me from his endless drama:

My righteously angry, moralizing, judgmental, uptight, conservative father cheated on my mother. By this I do not mean that he once made out with an old flame, or that he had a secret girlfriend, or two, or three. I mean that my dad cheated on my mom constantly, for more than a decade, by having unprotected sex with hundreds and hundreds of strangers, male and female, that he connected with by using the back pages of some Philly paper and a secret PO Box throughout much of the 1970s and 80s. In the end, he only stopped because he was afraid of getting AIDS, not because of any moral or ethical qualms he might’ve had. About ten years after he stopped he finally told my mom what he’d done. In response, she told him “then you’re just like your dad and you have no integrity”. My dad’s response was clarifying. My father had lied constantly about where he was and who he was and what he was doing for at least a decade. He had taken time and money and attention and intimacy away from his family. He foolishly risked his own life and health, and he constantly exposed my mother to dangerous and potentially deadly diseases without her knowledge. My father’s response to my mother when she said he had no integrity was the following: he said that no, he had not compromised his integrity because the sex didn’t mean anything, it was “just sex”. At this point my father was in his fifties and supposedly an adult, and this was the best answer his highly trained legal mind could come up with after at least a decade of dangerous, dishonorable behavior, and another decade in which to think about it. I didn’t find out about this until after he died, and my strong initial reaction - which remains to this day - wasn’t anger or indignation or sadness, which had all been so frequently part of my relationship with my dad. It was just this: Ewww. Gross. How Pathetic… And, to be clear, it wasn’t really the sex that was the problem. The problem was his utter lack of principle and accountability and empathy, and the lack of even the most basic self-awareness or curiosity about anyone else’s experience. All the intrigue and compulsion to somehow truly connect with my father was obliterated by the revelation that his inner, moral life was this small and barren and utterly corrupt.

Ewww. Gross. How Pathetic…

I could’ve argued with my father for 100,000 hours and never gotten any closure or progress or meeting of the minds, because my father wasn’t arguing out of principle or curiosity. He wasn’t actually communicating with me, he was only playing a part. He would’ve led me in circles forever, and I would’ve followed, made captive by my desire to understand or to make better, or - like him - to be “right”. But my father was only making angry, meaningless noises with his mouth in order to maintain the protective veneer of principled respectability that gave him power. Seeing this so brutally revealed as the pathetic, empty farce that it was set me free. There was no righteous meaning to understand. There was only ugly behavior to reject and oppose.

To return to where we began, the same moral judo applies to Donald and JD and Elon and the rest, whether they’re grotesquely berating a man who’s many times their better in the Oval Office or traitorously undermining democracy, shredding the Constitution, or destroying the public services on which all our lives depend. There is no righteous meaning to understand. There is only predatory behavior to reject and oppose.

Ewww. Gross. How Pathetic…

Their whole pompous, condescending, righteous, angry schtick only works if we pretend along with them that they’re not entirely full of shit. If we pretend along with them that they’re “proper”, that they are not in fact morally and spiritually deficient and fundamentally corrupt, then we surrender our power and make ourselves willingly captive to their meaningless and aggressive words. If, on the other hand, we focus on their clearly degenerate and predatory behavior then we break the spell and make it possible for us to rise effectively to our own defense.

This is Part 1 of 3

Part II: In Which We Discover That We’re in a Monster Movie, Not a Police Procedural - is HERE

Part III: FAFO from the Past - In Which Nelson Mandela and Frederick Douglass Show Us How It’s Done - is HERE

The Whole Essay (Parts 1-3 as one unit) - is HERE

All political posts will be free until we’re free of the Donald. If you find Mud and Feathers useful and you’ve got a few bucks to spare I’d be grateful for your paid subscription.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that defying the courts would be a Very Bad Thing, and that such open defiance of constitutional authority would throw us into “previously unexplored territory”. Polite society is not yet ready to use the C-word. For reasons explained above, I’m not optimistic that Elon and Donald will abandon their coup or their criming just because some smarty-pants judge has pointed out that it’s illegal. This view is rather abundantly supported by the fact that as recently as this past Sunday, upset that a federal judge had paused Elon’s raid on Treasury, JD Vance (remember JD Vance?) felt the need to declare that “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power”. Also this past Sunday, Elon called for the same judge to be “impeached NOW” and suggested a purge of the “worst 1% of appointed judges”, presumably meaning those judges who oppose his power grabs. And on the same day, Donald bashed the same judge, saying “No judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision, it’s a disgrace”. These statements are dangerous and wrong in more ways than we have time to explore right now, but it’s worth pointing out that it no longer counts as “saying the quiet part out loud” if you say it as loud or as publicly or as often as these guys do. We should consider ourselves warned. If they do finally blast through this last judicial guardrail, then we’ll be in constitutional free-fall and an intensifying struggle for real power.

The next big escalation available to Elon and Donald would be to declare martial law or a state of emergency, These declarations are always presented as a necessary response to some extreme threat, real or manufactured, and their invocation is often one of the last stops on the road from democracy to dictatorship. Probably the most famous modern example comes from 1933, when the Nazis used an arson attack on the Reichstag building - which housed the German parliament - as an excuse to pass legislation allowing them to jail their opponents and crush what was left of the free press. The suspension of rights formalized by the Reichstag Fire Decree paved the way for all the horrors that followed. This is a worst case scenario.

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More recent history provides an instructive and more hopeful counter-example. At 11pm on December 3rd of last year, the embattled right-wing president of South Korea shocked the world by declaring martial law. South Korea has been a robust democracy for almost forty years, but before that the country suffered through decades of military rule and multiple impositions of martial law. People were not going back without a fight. What happened next reminds us of the power we still have, should we choose to use it. Politicians and protesters opposed to martial law raced to the National Assembly building in Seoul. Some politicians shoved their way inside, others crawled through the legs of the police and military who’d been put there to keep them out. Others broke through barricades or were boosted over walls by the protesters. There’s a video online showing Ahn Gwi-ryeong, the 35-year-old spokesperson for the opposition Democratic Party as she and other lawmakers try to block soldiers who are advancing on the assembly. In the video, Ahn confronts a soldier in full battle gear who may be a foot taller than she is. As they scuffle, Ahn grabs the barrel of the soldier’s automatic weapon - which is now pointed in her direction - while shouting “Don’t you feel ashamed?” She is utterly fierce, defiant and unintimidated. After a moment the soldier tugs his weapon free, turns and walks away from the assembly building as Ahn continues to shout “Don’t you feel ashamed?”. In an interview afterwards with Reuters, Ahn said she never made a conscious choice to grab the gun, that her only thought was that she had to stop the soldiers. She also said there were lots of other people who were braver than she was, blocking soldiers and even armored fighting vehicles.

Meanwhile, the politicians who’d made their way inside the assembly barricaded the doors and - less than two hours after it’s imposition - voted unanimously to request that martial law be lifted. This is a constitutional power held by Korean lawmakers. There is no similarly clear-cut power held by the US Congress that I’m aware of. By dawn, martial law had been completely dismantled. President Yoon, who initiated what must be one of the world’s shortest impositions of martial law, has since been impeached, arrested and charged with insurrection. His trial is ongoing. His party is in tatters and expected to be driven from power in the next elections.

To be clear, I am not in any way advising anyone to try to grab someone else’s gun. The contemptible Kyle Rittenhouse shows why this would be an extremely bad idea. What Ahn’s actions and the Korean example do clearly demonstrate however, is that quick, fierce and decisive action in defense of democracy can stop a coup in its tracks.

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Back here in America, Elon and Donald continue to say absurd and hateful things while hacking away at the power of the federal government and at much of what makes it possible for all of us to live a good life. But they’ve not - yet - called for troops in the streets. Emerging from this ongoing crisis with our democracy, our health and our sanity intact will largely depend on our ability to recognize what is happening, and to endure this first onslaught without panicking or obeying in advance. We are not doomed to suffer through any or all of these scenarios, they’re just the usual tricks in the bag. By recognizing what’s happening and responding quickly and effectively we increase our chances of being able to limit the damage and shut down the coup sooner rather than later.

Those of us defending democracy, equality, diversity and the planet are clearly the good guys of this story. Elon and Donald and their henchmen are clearly the villains. In the end, I believe they will lose because they are greedy and selfish and wrong, and because they’re willfully blind and shockingly ignorant and running scared from a world they don’t understand. In the end, I believe we will win because we must, and because what they’re selling just doesn’t work. At all. We will also win because we care about something other than confirming our own narrow and frightened beliefs, because we love and defend people even when they don’t look or worship like we do, and because we have done the work that allows us to see the truly dangerous things - climate change, inequality and fascism - that desperately need to be fixed.

And yeah this sucks, but - as I’ve written elsewhere - in some ways we’re lucky to live in such crazy and dangerous times. It’s nice to be comfortable, but even the most comfortable life can feel lonely and small if it lacks meaning or purpose or connection to something greater than ourselves. If part of the purpose of a life is to be of use - to protect and inspire and look out for one another - then those of us alive in these frightening and ridiculous times are actually very lucky, because simply by standing up for decency and truth - by opposing pointless cruelty and absurd greed and sloppy lies - we have the ability to do great and transformative good. We can choose to be the generation that saves democracy. And by saving democracy we make it possible to save the planet as well.

The rights and freedoms that we enjoy weren’t just given to us. Generations of women, Black folks, immigrants from everywhere and people of every possible color and orientation fought hard for these rights - against those who would have kept us as servants and slaves - and we have beaten them again and again. America has a long and brawling democratic tradition. We are the rightful heirs to this tradition, the guardians of this legacy, as our children will be in their time. To imagine we’d just surrender our hard-won liberty, equality and power to a bunch of degenerate billionaires without a furious fight is just dumb. Good luck with that.

So…

Don’t panic.

Get your sleep.

Make fun of them.

They want us to freak out or despair. Don’t give them the satisfaction.

Get your laughs where you can and laugh a lot.

If you own a Tesla then condolences, and probably time to sell it before some kid covers it in eggs or something worse.

History will judge us based on what we do next.

Game on.

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Find Part I and Part II on Substack, or at MUDandFeathers.org

Since the beginning of the republic, people have been predicting the rise of a populist king who would overthrow our democratic experiment, and now they are arrived. Not one but two - one orange, and one very, very white - revealed in all their splendor, channeling the tyrants of the past through their own erratic and malevolent personalities. Watching them on stage is like watching a garbled, continually morphing AI mashup of very bad people including Caligula, Hitler, your creepy high school civics teacher, George Wallace and Krusty the Clown, where the not insignificant menace is constantly undermined by the sheer, cringey awkwardness of the whole twitchy package, and by their graceless attempts to appear both human and sane.

Twenty years ago, if someone had sent these guys down to play the heavies on a movie set they’d have been sent right back - too cartoonish, too unlikable, too one-dimensional, and what’s with all the orange stuff on that guy’s face? Eww… But times have changed.

In a lot of obvious ways it’s very unfortunate for us and for the world that our new would-be kings are so extraordinarily ignorant and nasty. At the same time, it’s also true that their ignorance and depravity and ridiculously high ick factor is a huge stroke of luck. Elon and Donald represent the greatest threat American democracy has ever faced - they have intention, ability and access, and piles of money - but, other than their most devoted followers, most people recognize there’s something seriously wrong with both of them. Their support is softer than they think it is and they are overreaching. Recklessly setting fire to the federal government and probably the economy as well is gonna drive away millions of people who held their nose and voted for them despite all the obvious red flags. We can beat these guys.

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Which is not to say it’ll be easy or without risk. Donald and Elon are clowns, but they’re incredibly dangerous clowns. Giddy billionaires who throw Nazi salutes on the very first day of their rise to power are not “ironic” or “playful” or owning the libs. They are exactly what they appear to be. They are degenerate and unprincipled and we need to assume they’re capable of whatever cruelty they think they can get away with. Darth Elon is telling us who he is. We must believe him, and we must remember. We must also remember that - according to multiple scientific studies - the last time Donald was in the White House, his inattention and mismanagement of the pandemic caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths, many of them among his own most ardent supporters. It would be foolish to assume that either of these men would turn away from any actions, no matter how extreme, in their pursuit of power. We must be clear-eyed and alert, and prepare ourselves for what may come.

Just out of college I worked briefly as a research assistant for Ralph McGehee. Ralph was a former CIA officer who became profoundly disillusioned with the Agency and wrote a book called Deadly Deceits. One of Ralph’s central insights was that there were only a limited number of dirty tricks that got used over and over again in the process of overthrowing governments around the world. He believed that the more familiar people became with these dirty tricks, the less likely they were to work, so he talked about them all the time in his speeches. I’m frankly hesitant to go down this particular rabbit hole - not wanting to overwhelm or over-hypothesize or sound like a crank - but knowledge is power and knowing something about the usual bag of tricks may, if nothing else, help us to feel less anxious and overwhelmed. This is kind of fundamental actually, because making us feel anxious and overwhelmed is the primary or secondary purpose of a lot of these techniques. Before briefly exploring these dark arts, I’ll recommend two academics who’ve spent decades researching the protection of democracy, how dictatorships rise and grow in power, and how that power can be reclaimed and used once again to drive the engine of democracy in service of the greater good. Prof Timothy Snyder writes clearly and helpfully about dictatorships and about resistance to tyranny. If you were only gonna read one source in order to make sense of what’s unfolding around us and how to push back then he’d be a good choice. Another excellent choice would be Prof Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who writes powerfully about democracies and wannabe dictators and how to ruin their day. Also, if you were to study Victor Orban’s dictatorial rise in Hungary - as Elon and Donald certainly have - you’d encounter many of the same dynamics and techniques there as well.

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So, with gratitude to Ralph (and professors Snyder and Ben-Ghiat and the many others who counsel clarity and resistance) I offer for our shared consideration the following unfortunate scenarios, some or all of which may lie not that far in our future. Our actual president will almost certainly continue to spout distracting, inflammatory nonsense and break whatever shiny object catches his attention, while Elon will keep beavering away at destabilizing one agency or department after another. They will make people fear for their jobs and their ability to feed their families, both inside and outside the federal government. They will flood the zone with shit. They will spread chaos and instability and then offer themselves as the only possible cure for the instability they’ve spread. They may accuse their opponents of financial or sexual or drug offenses, planting or manufacturing evidence when necessary. We should expect that Elon will search whatever data he extracts from the pillaged agencies for institutional or individual weaknesses he can use against them, or against the government at large. That’s a lot of why he wants the information in the first place. Elon will also, of course, be looking for ways to make money from all this valuable and confidential information. For both of these reasons, we should be very concerned about any data Elon manages to extract from the Pentagon. We should expect Elon and Donald to attack schools and colleges and universities and they will defund, disperse or destroy any organizations or institutions they see as possible havens for free thought or opposition. They will attempt to do as much damage as they can as quickly as they can, before people can organize to stop them. This is where we are now. Most people didn’t vote for this level of chaos and cruelty and greed, and we can expect more and more people to turn against them as they realize what’s going on.

What happens next is about effectively mobilizing public opinion and about our ability to effectively block or embarrass Elon and Donald. The goal is always to find a lever of power and use it to produce effective political pain or embarrassment as a disincentive to the ongoing heist. Progress going forward will be about the actions of the press and the courts and Democrats in Congress, and about the level of opposition in the population at large: a hundred thousand small levers can make all the difference. It’s possible that effective pressure will significantly slow down or stop Elon and Donald’s dismantling of federal power and of the services and systems on which we all depend. It’s also possible that despite serious opposition and in violation of any number of court orders Elon and Donald will continue with their power grab.

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Find Part I and Part III on Substack, or at MUDandFeathers.org

What would you call it if people forced their way into your house, took control of your computer and your bank accounts, then started rewriting the underlying code of your computer - and also of your bank - in ways that would allow them to block transactions or move your money around without your approval? All of this while also browsing or hoovering up all your personal information as fast as they could. You’d call it a crime, a whole bunch of crimes actually, and you’d call the police.

Something like this appears to have been happening down in Washington, D.C. all this past week.

A normal politician, when contemplating doing something potentially illegal or unpopular, would hide behind plausible deniability. They would move slowly and subtly. They would avoid drawing attention to themselves and they would pause or withdraw if they thought they were about to be challenged or subjected to public scrutiny. To state the extremely obvious, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are not normal politicians. They are also not cat burglars, sneak thieves or your garden variety shoplifters, which is unfortunate, because if they were then our present situation would be much less dangerous than it is. None of that is their style. Elon and Donald’s shared style leans towards things that are flashy, attention-getting and loud. A smash-and-grab is all of these things. A smash-and-grab is a type of robbery in which a swarm of looters burst into a store with no effort to avoid arousing suspicion or setting off alarms. They smash windows and display cases, then grab as much valuable stuff as they can and try to run off before anyone can stop them. At the moment, Elon and Donald appear to be leading a smash-and-grab, but rather than knocking over a local jewelry store or electronics shop their target appears to be the Treasury Department and numerous other agencies of the federal government of the United States.

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It used to be the case that if someone wanted to rob you they needed to do it in person, either to your face or by waving a gun around down at the bank. Up until very recent times, if you were a faction wanting to seize control of the US government’s money and of the millions of payments coming and going from a sprawling and resistant bureaucracy, then you would have needed hundreds or thousands of soldiers to occupy Fort Knox, and thousands more to intercept all the mail and packages coming and going from the various non-compliant agencies. This kind of project was obviously impractical and impossible and no one ever attempted such a crazy thing. But nowadays, control over the government’s money is mostly all about ones and zeros, and it appears to be the case that a few properly motivated twenty-somethings with decent hacking skills and uninterrupted access to the root code may be able to do things that were previously impossible. They may, for instance, be able to cut off the flow of the government’s money to any particular agency or individual. If this is what’s happening (and there’s a lot of good reporting suggesting that it is) then it may be the case that our venerable, nearly 250-year-old system of checks and balances, separation of powers and Congress’s power of the purse has survived less than three weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, all of it effectively overthrown - or maybe so far only profoundly weakened - by Elon Musk’s van-load of absurdly racist, bad boy hackers. The fact that this accomplishment represents an illegal, unconstitutional attack on the foundation of our federal system and the rule of law is obviously more a feature than a bug.

In any system, controlling the scarce and necessary resource allows you to control the system as a whole. If you want to control agriculture in Southern California - or some other dry place - then being in charge of the distribution of water gives you that control. In a war zone or crisis situation, warlords, militias and hostile governments have not infrequently used food to control the local population. Similarly, if you want to exercise dictatorial control over the government of the United States then the ability to unilaterally turn off the flow of money to any agency or individual - an unaccountable decision for which there is no recourse or appeal - goes a long way towards giving you that control. It appears to be the case that Elon and Donald are now in the process of seizing this control, without bothering to ask anyone for permission or authorization, and without needing the compliance of anyone beyond the roomful of obedient MAGA button-pushers who appear to be inserting themselves as the gatekeepers of US government spending.

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In the summer of 1972, five men were arrested breaking into an office on the sixth floor of the Watergate complex in Washington, D. C. Between them, the five men had lock picks, door jimmies, surgical gloves, two film cameras, forty rolls of film, one walkie talkie, two bugging devices, a handful of sequentially numbered $100 bills, and “three pen-sized tear gas guns”. From this small and almost comical beginning, Watergate grew to become the defining political scandal of the past one hundred years. The break-in and the subsequent investigation ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, still the only US president ever forced to step down, and jail terms for many of his top lieutenants.

Despite it’s enduring significance, Watergate begins to look quaintly old fashioned when compared with the style and scope of Elon and Donald’s current operation.

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People whose opinion I respect and who have access to the most current insider information seem to believe that the rule of law can be restored if only senior Democrats would give Elon and Donald a stern talking to. They’ve expressed the Very Reasonable Belief that the threat of not supporting the next budget or a rise in the debt ceiling would be sufficient to force an end to Elon’s lawless rampage and a return to the bad old days of uncivil-but-strictly-legal groin kicking, institutional vandalism and performative insanity that has been the GOP’s modus operandi for way too long now. I disagree. Elon’s behavior this past week makes me think those days are done.

Donald Trump was facing the likely prospect of jail time before he squeaked out his win back in November. Since staying in office is the only way for him to be sure of staying out of jail, and since reinstating the rule of law is literally what he is most afraid of, the odds of anyone successfully pressuring Donald Trump into making his way back to the straight and narrow have never seemed all that good. He’s too openly committed to the Dark Side. The fact that Elon Musk, on the other hand, has taken such public ownership of the ongoing and clearly illegal attacks against the US Treasury, USAID and an alphabet soup of other US agencies and departments is both unexpected and ominous.

It’s possible that Elon’s recent crime spree is just some manic episode that he’ll snap out of, or maybe he’ll get bored and wander off in search of some other pretty toy to break. But knowing the precedent of Watergate, it seems very unlikely that Elon would put himself in such serious jeopardy unless he planned on staying the course. Why risk jail attempting to break the will of millions of annoying bureaucrats when there’s so many other people who’d be so much more fun and way less perilous to antagonize and harass? Also - and this is fundamental - even Elon has to recognize that turning a bunch of barely supervised, power-mad wunderkinds loose on the code base of the United States government has the potential to turn into the biggest bureaucratic and computing disaster in the history of both bureaucracies and computers. Any crash, glitch or sudden incompatibilities going forward will be on him, and every one of these potentially very public fiascos will threaten Elon’s valuable and carefully cultivated brand as the Eccentric But Bankable Boy Genius. And should his wilding minions have left behind any trackers, keyloggers, backdoors or other malware - or should any of the data they likely took with them get leaked - then any exploitation or fallout from these vulnerabilities at the heart of the US government will also land squarely on Elon’s head. All of which is way too big a risk to take on a whim.

So, based on the developments of this past week, it seems clear that Elon Musk has thrown his lot in with Donald Trump for the long haul, and that they’re right now in the process of openly breaking all kinds of laws in a mad rush to pull down every obstacle to their power before anyone can organize to stop them. Break the law, go to jail. Break the rule of law, become king.

And so, just like that - first slowly, then all of a sudden - we are arrived.

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There is a bright line that separates the normal, squabbling back-and-forth of legal, constitutional government from an illegal and unconstitutional attempt to overthrow that government. I believe that line is now clearly behind us.

Welcome to the After Times.

Put simply, our current situation includes the following unfortunate realities. A grotesque, obnoxious, unelected, Nazi-saluting, South African billionaire has somehow elevated himself to the office of co-president of the United States of America, a completely imaginary position from which he is currently launching a series of brutal, reckless and potentially devastating attacks on the power of the federal government. Meanwhile, our actual president continues to captivate much of an easily distracted media with his endless clown show of threats against immigrants and trans kids and unhinged schemes to invade Greenland, or seize control of the Panama Canal, or to commit the war crime of ethnic cleansing in order to - wait for it - build luxury condos and casinos on top of what is now the smoking, blood-covered wreckage of Gaza. The president’s party is utterly craven, compromised and complicit. Any Congressional Republican with ethics or a spine has been driven with shrieks and hoots away from the fires and the feast. The Democrats in Congress are scrambling to organize an effective response but they have no control over any branch of government, nor will they until next year’s elections at the earliest.

No one is coming to save us. We will have to save ourselves.

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Find Part II and Part III on Substack, or at MUDandFeathers.org