I’ve seen reference made in a few comments here regarding Rachel Maddow’s monologue, broadcast Monday on MSNBC, but thus far I haven’t seen anyone post the video itself.
We’ve been hearing for months now how this country is “approaching” an authoritarian takeover: a descent from the country we all grew up in into something grotesque and unfathomable in our experience. That fascism is “just around the corner,” perhaps when Trump and Miller finally find their excuse to declare martial law on some pretext.
Just asking for a show of hands here. How many of you believe that Trump won’t declare martial law at some point in the next three and a half years?
Yep, that’s what I thought. Of course he will. With no legitimate justification whatsoever.
But that misses the point Maddow tries to get across here. Yes, martial law (“targeted” or otherwise) may shock Americans into suddenly realizing what’s been done to them. The point is that by then it will probably be too late. The cake is already being baked, right now.
Maddow flatly states an autocracy is not ‘coming.’ It’s here: ”We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country.”
Her monologue is below:
As reported by Marco Margaritoff, for Huffington Post:
“We have crossed a line,” she said on “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday. “We are in a place we did not want to be, but we are there. The thing we were all warning about for the last few years is not coming, it is here. We are in it. This is what [it’s] like, it turns out.”
What Maddow does most effectively is illustrate how nearly all of the authoritarian, dictatorial, and arbitrary actions of the Trump administration are deliberately premised and justified by employing the incantation of stopping “immigration.” That if you scratch the surface of most of the administration’s extralegal (and extrajudicial) outrages, the “cover story” almost always comes back to “illegal immigration.” She emphasizes that the focus on an internal enemy is the standard, go-to modus operandi for all dictatorships. And that it’s already worked swimmingly here, too. Anything and everything is justifiable if it’s linked to “immigration.”
This is straight out of the same autocratic playbook dutifully employed throughout the 20th and 21st century, and undoubtedly well before that. “Immigration” here is the excuse for seizing absolute power, not the reason.
On this point, it’s important to remember that the problem of undocumented immigration — to the extent it ever was actually a major “problem” at all — was poised for resolution through a bipartisan bill that was heading for passage in the Senate last year. But Trump didn’t want that. So the legislation — that they themselves had helped to craft — was duly scuttled by Republicans. To any extent immigration is now a “problem,” justifying these extreme and autocratic measures, it’s because Donald Trump and those who back him wanted it that way. What we’re living through now was always the endgame, because it was the only way they could exercise their vision of complete and enduring control.
Finally, Maddow points out that the tools we have available to stop this from happening probably aren’t going to be available to us in a short time. In other words, right now is as good as its going to get. And she points to those Americans who are waking up to that fact and pushing back.
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Thoughts on this? Leave them in the comments below.
Written by dartagnan. Cross-posted from Daily Kos.
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