So many people have written or said it that I can't find a clear original source, but it's too true not to use. If anyone knows, please share its origin. Goes like this:
"If you ever wonder what you would have done in Nazi Germany, take a look at yourself. You're doing it right now."
I'll be at the rally tomorrow in downtown Los Angeles. Where will you be?
Our mafia government with its narcissistic sociopath-in-chief does not care about Social Security. It doesn't care about jobs or other nations' sovereignty or court orders telling it that it can't do some illegal thing it wants to do. It doesn't care about guilt or innocence or "due process." It cares only about power and expressions of power. It believes it has the right to decide who gets treated lawfully and who doesn't simply because it has the power to do it. It wants to demonstrate that. And it wants to lie about everything.
Trump can run for a third term.Modern propagandists, however, have given up on this old model and invented something newer and far more effective. Rather than seeking to create a grand meta-narrative that can explain everything, modern authoritarians seek to destroy the concept of truth itself, making it impossible to explain anything, and possible to deny everything.
Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, in a 2016 Facebook post reminded us, "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so."
And, from "Truth and Politics," Hannah Arendt has this for us:
Why all the lying? To destroy "the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world..." To destabilize reality and replace objective facts with the authority of the Leader, in this case Donald Trump, and by extension his minions. It's a familiar strategy dressed up in a ball cap and a big red tie.The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
Let us gently suggest that these facts don’t matter to Vance in the least. This is not meant glibly: For Vance, that is the case as a matter of principle. He is nakedly asserting the power to decree Abrego Garcia a criminal subject to expulsion, even if—or especially if—the facts show the contrary. The administration is doing this on many fronts, from this case to the efforts to remove foreign students to the deportations of Venezuelans to a Salvadoran prison.
and all the rest of them, too.
This isn't about crimes or "very bad people" (except those in our mafia government h/t Sarah Kendzior) or tattoos. It's about due process. Jeffrey Dahmer got due process. Timothy McVeigh got due process. Nazis got the Nuremberg Trials. The people being disappeared right now--from Abrego Garcia to college students to "the worst of the worst of the worst"--DESERVE DUE PROCESS.
As Greg Sargent wrote yesterday in The New Republic:
It should go without saying that even if we ultimately learn terrible things about all these defendants, they are still entitled to due process. That’s how due process works: It’s afforded to everyone regardless of their eventual guilt or innocence. Indeed, this is precisely how we can be confident in the final decision that they are guilty or innocent under our laws.
Except it doesn't go without saying. The truth doesn't speak for itself; it has to be spoken by someone. And the truth is that this administration, our mafia government, doesn't care about guilt or innocence. It cares only about power and expressions of power. It believes it has the right to decide who gets treated lawfully and who doesn't simply because it has the power to do it and it wants to demonstrate that.
It simply cannot be that one vicious racketeer with his evil band of thugs gets to decide who lives and who dies. We cannot allow it.
Every detainee, and every deportee, and every one of us deserves to face our accusers and have our charges tried in front of judges and lawyers and the people who write it all down. We deserve it because it's right there in the American Bible everyone pretends to care so much about (emphasis mine):
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Persons have a RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS. It's what prevents Abrego Garcia--or you, or me--from ending up in a torture prison in El Salvador or Cuba--or Louisiana--by mistake with the mafia government shrugging that there's nothing they can do.
We are all Abrego Garcia.
"This is why it’d be a mistake to let the Signal story die on the vine of its particulars...
It’s an ur-Trump scandal. A revelation, like the hidden call transcripts in term one, that points to wider wrongdoing and a reason to question just about everything the administration does."
The news is bad. Whether talking about the actual shit that comes screaming out of the teevee machine (h/t Charlie Pierce w/respectful nod to driftglass) and your favorite social media, or about enormous corporate delivery systems scrambling to figure out how to integrate dictatorship into their business models, the news sucks.
People are being kidnapped and disappeared. Prices are about to explode. Canada hates us. This is not, as they say, the country I grew up in.
Not that the country I grew up in was perfect, or even all that great for a hell of a lot of people. It's just that it used to feel like there was progress, and like figuring it out was possible.
I hate the people who've taken that feeling away.
If you're feeling, as I was, that now nothing is possible and everything is pointless and it was all for nothing, I get it. If you're tired of feeling that way and you want to feel some other way, there are ways to make that happen, although some of them involve becoming a dumber, meaner person. Some of them involve drinking a lot, among other things. One thing we did was change the way we consume "news."
The first thing we did was cancel our subscription to the Los Angeles Times. For those who don't know or don't remember, the owner of the L.A. Times spiked a Kamala Harris for president endorsement that had been proposed by the paper's editorial board, instead offering to run a both-sides "non-partisan" analysis of policy. The board declined, and several members resigned. Not saying it would have made a difference in the election; just saying it made a difference in what we read every morning.
Actually, the pulled endorsement was just the final straw in a series of disappointing moves by The Times, which also included giving "terminally smug Republican political propagandist and professional liar, Trump fluffer Scott Jennings"™ a prominent platform on the Opinion Pages of the paper. Oh, and getting rid of the box scores (I hear they may be back? Sort of?). Anyway, canceling that subscription was an easy call.
We've also migrated from Xitter to Bluesky. Even though it's a work in progress, I've almost entirely withdrawn from that other place, and I find it immensely more satisfying. Virtually everyone I read every day is here and I find the links helpful in keeping up with news I'm tracking. Find me at @jeffwaid.bsky.social.
We've cut way back on teevee news. We haven't been CNN fans for decades, and since they also pay Jennings to smirk and deflect (What about Biden!), that's unlikely to change. Haven't watched the Big Three in forever, and that includes the "Sunday Shows." The clips I see sometimes remind me of a middle school art class with a substitute teacher.
Other times, it's just a teevee robot talker with a list of approved questions facing off with the dissembler of the moment. No probing follow-ups. No holding firm until you get an answer. Moving on. And always both-sidesing the most obvious issues. "Critics are saying that kidnapping people off the street using unmarked agents in unmarked cars is a violation of due process protections, potentially illegal. Joining me today a spokesperson for the kidnap administration to offer a different perspective and explain why kidnapping is actually good." We're going to have to leave it there.
Actually, that's pretty much all of teevee news. It may be different on FOX; I wouldn't know. I used to check in once in a while just to see what the enemy was up to, but every time I did what I saw was misleading and aggravating, sometimes appalling, and always the same. No surprise; it's their nature.
I suppose it's only disappointing if you allowed yourself to have a different expectation, which I did with respect to MSNBC. My love affair with the network began with Keith Olbermann, whose Countdown with Keith Olbermann gave me some place to put my anger during the Bush, W years. When John Kerry lost in 2024, the first presidential contest since the lawless 2020 Supreme Court election and the even more lawless invasion of Iraq, to say Countdown saved my life is only a modest exaggeration. It inarguably saved my sanity.
Now MSNBC has become, with a few notable exceptions (fewer, with the departure of Joy Reid, and before that Tiffany Cross), just another corporate message machine dodging the tough stuff and staying out of the kitchen. They trot out the same old list of paid analysts to hem and haw and shake their heads and sometimes their fists. I'm sad, but now I have a lot more time for other stuff.
What now? As I say, in our house we've changed the way we consume news. We've cut back, not just on teevee news and the L.A. Times, but also on the amount of time spent doomscrolling. The anger and frustration that come with ingesting the images and stories of the daily horrors perpetrated by the present administration were not sustainable.
For me, I'm mostly on Bluesky in the morning with local teevee news in the background. Traffic and weather! I use it to get current and to point me toward the pieces I need to read first. It also helped me find the substack/newsletters from writers I feel share my concerns. I subscribe (for free) to several and they arrive in my inbox throughout the day. True, the content that is restricted to paid subscribers can be frustrating, but our plan is to spend some of our L.A. Times savings to support a handful and get the full experience. I return to Bluesky in the afternoon/evening for updates.
We do still take the New York Times, but keeping it is an object of conversation. Were it not for our being native New Yorkers (it's The Times!) and the crossword puzzle, that conversation might end differently. Finally, we have a digital subscription to the Philadelphia Inquirer because Will Bunch.
The news sucks, but for me it's better than it used to be. This is going to be a long and intense battle. It's going to be essential that we have trustworthy sources of information and the energy and passion to act on that information. We need to keep fighting and we need leaders who will fight for us and along with us. The other side will not quit. They will never give up. It's existential for them and their privilege and their view of the universe, and this is an extinction burst. Time is not on their side, and (warning: Xitter link) they know it.
In the meantime, remember: It's baseball season!
What's a rally really like?
"It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come." - Phil Alden Robinson, Field of Dreams
If you're looking to do something, please consider joining us!
Since people are still coming here, I figure they must be looking for something. We in this nation are at a critical stage of our evolution. We may become the thing we dreamed of and promised to be. We may become just another fiefdom with a tough-guy boss--a mafia state full of minions trying to keep our heads low enough to keep them from being chopped off. The answer is unclear. The contest is, as yet, undecided.
Each of us is trying to figure out what we can do as individuals to save the dream we had for this country.
I've decided that, among other things, I'm going to continue writing. I'm going to write about what I'm doing, and I'm going to write about what we each of us can do to put us back on the path to freedom and equality. I know that a lot of better writers and better thinkers are doing the same thing much better than I can. Doesn't matter. It's one thing I can do.
I'll do what I can to amplify stronger and smarter voices than mine. I'll report on what we're doing in this house to save the project and the planet.
If not now, when?
In the meantime, I'll dream of the day when I can again write about education as if it's the most important thing in the world.
Speak to you soon,
Jeff
