The Day After

From a Tuesday in front of Senator John Cornyn’s office. Source: Houston Democracy Project.

Yesterday was a strange and mournful day. I’ve taken an extensive break because I wanted to refrain from giving into the overwhelming nihilism of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. Its passage by the Fourth of July mandated by the Occupier was symbolic and shameful. Once signed into law, the nail will have been driven in fully.

I want to take stock of where we as a nation, are. I am weary and wary of grand, blanket statements, but I would have to be a fool not to recognize that Project 2025’s mission statement has been fulfilled. Now we have the fall-out to deal with.

There are many who will take some solace in knowing that there will be more lawsuits filed in the wake of the passage of this “legislation”; however, given the imperial presidency that the Supreme Court has put in place, it seems unlikely that any major players will be held to account and given the immense amount of funds now in place for the Regime’s fight against immigrants (and birthright citizens…and for that matter, just citizens who the Regime might want to target), it is difficult to foresee just how effective the judicial systems at state levels will be, let alone the defanged federal judges.

We need to be clear-sighted that there are really only a couple of issues to keep our sites on and they are related.

The first is the upward transfer of wealth via the rolling back of any vestige of the social safety net, additional deregulation of businesses that kowtow to the Regime, and the gutting of agencies from the Veterans Administration to the EPA to FEMA. All of this was  purportedly under the guise of “efficiency” and other canards.

The second is the expansion of the ICE budget. The real push for the passage of the bill, of course, was to ensure funding for ICE and the ancillary programs involved in the prosecution of “illegal” immigrants and of course, birthright citizens in a total breach of the Constitution. I put quotes around “illegal” because, so far, the majority of immigrants rounded up, have been law-abiding citizens. But if you’re Brown or Black, does that even count?

I’m not going to discuss the Regime’s international policies, as there really aren’t any, except for how to cash in on making deals with similar like-minded regimes or to try to cow former allies and thereby, impose the Regime’s own rules on the international playing field.  To be truthful, while odious and repellant, the Regime’s foreign policies have to take a backseat to domestic priorities because we the people need to know that we’re in for a long, nightmarish haul.

What we need to do is already under way and has been, for some time now. Organizing,  protests, marches, and petitions have proven effective in galvanizing an often apathetic populace. What has to happen next is to determine what form future action must take.

As long as we have more or less free elections, we need to back progressive candidates and candidates who will call out the opposition for its lies and malfeasance. On the ground, we should continue protests and marches. And if the Regime suspends the right to peacefully assemble?  Then we do what people in these circumstances have  always done; we go underground. We continue organizing. If the internet is no longer free of surveillance, we go analog; if numbers of groups of people are reduced in public gatherings, we find workarounds. Meet at sports events and concerts and find ways to communicate en masse. 

What if there are crackdowns on people in their homes? What  happens when people are disappeared in the middle of the night? Then we keep fighting harder and ensure that for every one of us who is vanished, there are others to take on the work.

Does this all sound paranoid? You tell me. We are watching test cases play out repeatedly. Representatives have been assaulted and arrested; the Regime has already called out some governors as targets, and we have documentation  of wrongful detention on the rise. When neither office nor citizenship is a guarantee against detention/abduction, why would you assume that this is not likely to metastasize with the massive amount of funding earmarked for ICE in H.R. 1.

Do I really think it will get as dark as those questions I just asked intimated? Yes, that’s why I asked them. They weren’t rhetorical. 

If you’ve paid any attention to how oppressive, totalitarian regimes operate, then you know how much they attempt to preserve the outward appearance of normality. Think of Brazil or Argentina in the seventies and eighties. If you were to go to Turkey now, what you see would likely be nothing extraordinary. But at a certain point, disappearance ceases to take place in daylight hours; the knock comes in the evening or the night or the early pre-dawn hours. 

Asking “how can they get away with this?”  Is ludicrous. You saw it happen, in real time. You did nothing; you didn’t vote because you considered both sides to be equally incompetent or venal or there was that one issue that you considered the hill the country should die on that you held Harris to account for. And now?  We all get to pay the price. Every day. 

“How can they do this?” Well, you could even go farther back to the ever-greater expansion of the Executive powers. You can find precedent for all of this domestically. Night raids by the Ku Klux Klan, the upward movement of wealth and power in the McKinley administration, the Red Scare of the McCarthy Era and the concomitant ratting out of suspected “communists” and lives destroyed. The difference is that this time, there is a much greater power structure in place to execute the Regime’s demands. It all happened in plain view and people couldn’t be bothered to care or to take the time to understand that various bills and policies were put in place successively, over time, that brought us to this moment.

“Why are they doing this?” Because they can. Because the rich feel themselves above everyone else by dint of their wealth. Because they also fear the masses. They don’t want a unified democratic movement that will hold them to account for their inhumane practices or their utter lack of humanity. They will continue to detain and deport and attempt to silence all opposition that speaks out for the oppressed. 

“But how much power or money do they need?” You really don’t get it, do you? “Power corrupts, etc.” and “absolute power corrupts absolutely”; look, it’s NEVER ENOUGH. And every person that refuses to bend a knee is a peasant that will be sent to a gulag, stripped of citizenship and likely thrust into slavery. Timothy Snyder’s recent piece is chilling, but demands to be read.

“How could people have voted for this?” Really? Because the people who voted for it are afraid, full of hatred, and believe lies. Because, even if they have a college degree, their critical thinking has failed them. They’ve bought into a vision of the US with cities on fire and Black and Brown people running amok and murdering, raping, and pillaging. I doubt seriously if many of these people have ever visited a city, much less lived in one. Or that they’ve ever someone not white and presenting as heterosexual. However, they have vouchsafed whatever they did learn in school to the likes of Fox News and OAN and Breitbart.

“But so many who voted for this were Gen Z!” Proof that the GOP understands social media far better than the democrats. Also, education doesn’t infer sound critical analysis skill. Education? Schools, if you hadn’t noticed, have been under attack by the right for decades now. This could take a whole column.

In any case, we’ll still go to movies, dine out, go for walks in the park, cross-country drives, and apple-picking in the fall. Each one of those acts will be acts of defiance to preserve the appearance of normality. But under each appearance is the potential threat of being picked up for something you wrote or said, maybe publicly, maybe in confidence. 

I took some time off to give myself a break and order my thoughts and make some decisions about next moves in the wake of H.R. 1’s  passage. In terms of what’s next, I’m just going to do what I’ve been doing and will continue posting whatever makes sense that’s actionable and hopefully helpful.