First They Come for the Nonviolent Palestinian Student Protestor with a Green Card...

And then they come for you

We can all see that the U.S. is sliding quickly down the slippery slope toward full-out Fascism or Nazi-ism at this point. But few people are speaking out or showing courage. I’m particularly disappointed by people in two movements that I have been involved with, the “consciousness movement” and the “regenerative movement.” It seems these people are either extremely dissociated or they have completely forgotten the lessons of history. I know it is also the case that many people feel helpless and scared.

I strongly recommend that people speak out loudly now, while we still have the right of free speech. When more people speak out, it is more difficult for the regime to advance its agenda. We are intricately interconnected on social media. Messages can go viral. Words have power. Also, I make it a consistent practice to reach out to people I know who are either maintaining neutrality or expressing sympathy to the regime or are connected to it, to tell them what I think. I recommend you make it a practice to do the same.

I realize this approach has its dangers. I would argue it is far more dangerous to allow a Fascist takeover of America without raising your voice against it. If you are in your thirties or forties, you may have many decades to live in this society. Your children may also grow up here. Of course, those of us with privilege can try to escape to another country. Unfortunately, this regime is actively supporting Far Right takeovers — by the same transnational oligarchy — all around the world. It makes most sense to stop them here, if we can.

I want to unpack the ideologies of these vaguely idealist movements of consciousness and regeneration, which allow people involved with them — mostly people with a degree of privilege — to stay proudly apolitical and disconnected. But first, let’s consider a few pieces of evidence that support the thesis that the U.S. is following the playbook of 1930s Germany, with some new tactics from Victor Orban added into the mix, such as Trump’s absurd lawsuits to break independent media.

In “Trump’s New Deputy F.B.I. Director Has It Out for the ‘Commie Libs”, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times writes on Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and frequent guest on Alex Jones and Fox, who routinely threatens Liberals with violent reprisals. He is now the Deputy Director of the FBI, under Kash Patel, who has an enemy’s list of people in the media he intends to pursue. Goldberg writes:

A man who once claimed that his sole focus was “owning the libs” will now be second-in-command at the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency, a position that doesn’t require Senate confirmation. Last year on his streaming show, Bongino cackled about the idea that America has a system of checks and balances, saying, with wild, angry eyes, “Power. That is all that matters.” He’s about to have an ungodly amount of it.

We are still in a bit of an interregnum before the Trump regime seeks to bring down the hammer on the people. But without tremendous collective pushback, it is coming. “The liberal democracy most of us grew up taking for granted is brittle and teetering, but its fall still feels unthinkable, even if it also seems increasingly inevitable,” Goldberg writes. “Perhaps this is one reason Democrats, with a few admirable exceptions, seem so frozen.” They need to unfreeze, as do the rest of us.

Trump just ordered the arrest of Columbia protester Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder whose American wife is eight months pregnant. As Ken Klippenstein writes:

Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate who is married to a U.S. citizen, is a green card holder, making him a “lawful” permanent resident of the United States. By going after a lawful resident, Trump is expanding his war on the many supposed threats besieging America… The government is not alleging that Khalil provided “material support” to Hamas or other terrorist group, the usual claim. They instead assert a vague national security justification. In other words, the Trump White House doesn’t like what Khalil said…

Criminalizing Khalil’s views endangers all Americans. Trump’s elastic view of “anti-American” activity is ever expanding. Left unchecked, all protesting students and others, including Americans, could be criminalized too.

Khalil’s arrest is a carefully calculated move. It signals an escalation in Trump’s crackdown on dissent. Trump intends to intimidate protesters and expand surveillance on domestic dissenters, with intelligence agencies already monitoring student movements. By stretching the definition of “national security threats,” Trump’s administration moves closer to criminalizing all political opposition, setting the stage for future repression beyond non-citizens and legal residents, to include, eventually, American citizens. Once again, this is exactly following Germany’s Fascist manual from the 1930s.

Metamodernist Hanzi Freinacht: He’s got the look!

I deeply appreciate some recent Facebook posts from metamodernist philosopher Hanzi Freinacht. Freinacht notes that this stage of tyranny was well-known by Plato and others: It is an intrinsic part of the cycle of political systems as they develop and decay. According to Plato’s Republic, aristocracy degenerates into timocracy, then oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. Democratic freedom leads to instability and elite corruption. This causes an eventual breakdown, which creates the conditions for a demagogue to rise. Apparently Athens followed this pattern when Peisistratus — loved by the people — arose as a tyrant who shattered the aristocracy before democracy emerged under Cleisthenes. Freinacht writes:

Trump is a tyrant. Not just in the way we casually toss the word at every puffed-up strongman, but in the classical Greek sense: τύραννος, the very figure Plato feared—a populist demagogue who weaponizes democracy against itself and destroys it from within. But here’s the twist: Tyranny is not the end of democracy. It is often the messy, chaotic, painful prelude to renewal…

Like Plato’s tyrant, [Trump] seduces the masses, feeds on chaos, and positions himself as the avenger of the people while consolidating power. But like Peisistratus, carried on the shoulders of the common man, he has actually managed to topple an entrenched aristocracy—first dismantling the old Republican elite within his own party, and now, with his domination of the political landscape, crushing the Democratic old guard.

For decades, the U.S. political system has resembled an aristocracy where power is passed between old established dynasties within the rigid structure of the two-party system. Trump’s rise has not only shattered the illusion of America as a functional democracy, but it has also obliterated the very power structure that has kept the system going until now.

This is the paradox of tyranny: It clears the field. It demolishes the old elites, leaving a vacuum. And that vacuum will either be filled by something worse—a smarter, more ruthless form of autocracy—or by a new democratic experiment, one that learns from past mistakes and builds something stronger​.

I find this a brilliant and hopeful analysis.I almost feel we must hope that Trump continues to over-reach, imposing punitive tariffs, crashing the stock market, sending troops to invade Canada, Mexico, and Greenland (although I do not wish any harm on these places), and so on,