At a high-profile, televised funeral last month, the President of the United States stood on a stage and said, “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them. … Maybe they can convince me that that’s not right but I can’t stand my opponent,” and the funeral attendees responded with what sounded like laughter.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson — whom it appears would rather shut down the entire federal government than risk a vote, led by Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, to release the Epstein files — has amped up his rhetoric in recent days saying, “They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for Oct. 18 on the National Mall. It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and the, you know, the Antifa people, they’re all coming out.” Joining the Speaker, Rep. Steve Scalise and Rep. Tom Emmer also called the upcoming No Kings rally, which will be held in cities around the country, a ‘Hate America’ event.
The “they” Speaker Johnson refers to are not just Democrats, but anyone who opposes the president.
It’s been a long ten years since Donald J. Trump came down the escalator, 24/7 tweets from political figures became official government statements, and both our news feeds and social media feeds were transformed into daily, disturbing dumpster fires of resentment and rage.
Prior to 2015, we had mostly normal news at news outlets, facts were not ‘alternative’, and a tweeting president would have been a joke. Social media was mostly for keeping up with far-flung friends and family.
Man, those were the days.
Before Mr. Trump first became president in 2016, we did not have incessant talk of Red States vs. Blue States; politicians did not openly call the free press “enemy of the people”; political protests would have never been called ‘Hate America’ rallies by the House Speaker; we could not have imagined the deployment of masked, secret police thugs in our streets as if we were a third world country; we would have been aghast to see political appointees like Attorney General Pam Bondi speak so flippantly and condescendingly to our senators — OUR elected representatives — in an oversight hearing; we could not have imagined a president, cheered on by his party, giddily telling us how hateful he is while speaking at a funeral.
We are so very far off the rails.
And it took us a barely decade to get here.
I recently took a month away from American political news and social media to see if I could gain some perspective.
Here is my full report in one sentence: It all feels very 2+2=5 Orwellian.
As Raoul Peck, director of a new documentary on Orwell, explains in a PBS interview, “to watch the news every day, you know, to hear elected officials trying to convince you that what you are seeing is not what it is, or that you shouldn’t use that word to describe something that obviously is an abuse of rights. When you attack academia, when you attack the justice system, when you attack the journalists or the networks, those are known tools to degrade democracy. So at one point, you have to accept that this is what’s going on.”
A few days ago, a female WGN reporter in Chicago was roughly thrown to the concrete, cuffed, and thrown into an unmarked van by masked men who then sped away from the scene as citizens bravely recorded what was happening on their cellphones.
The Pentagon is making journalists sign an agreement to have their reporting pre-approved and saying, if they decline, those reporters will lose access to the building.
The Secretary of Defense insists on being called Secretary of War.
The president is suing news organizations for millions of dollars and winning.
Universities are being monitored and punished.
An unelected bureaucrat named Russ Vought is firing government employees by the thousands.
Our federal government is closed because Republican leadership in congress can’t allow the Epstein files, which are rumored to indict the powerful, to come to light.
The president, who spent months shamelessly insisting he should win the Nobel Peace Prize, is using the Justice Department we pay for to go after his perceived, personal enemies while constantly threatening to send military troops into American cities that did not vote for him.
Maybe most disturbingly, Congress is no longer a check on executive power. The president now tells gives our elected officials — the folks who spent millions of dollars to campaign and beg us to vote for them — their marching orders as they bend over and yell, THANK YOU, SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER. I am reminded of the scene in Eddie Murphy’s “Coming to America” where his new wife (an arranged marriage) does whatever he tells her to do, no matter how absurd, without question.
If you spend any time on social media, you cannot help but witness the wanton destruction of friendships, families and communities which can be directly tied to the stream of disinformation and hate-speech coming from the White House. Not to mention the monitoring of social media in order to get people fired from their jobs for posting what they think.
This is — all of it — Orwellian.
But we can fight back in our refusal.
We are not a Red vs. Blue country, we are the United States. The Defense Secretary is not the Secretary of War just because he says so. Congress does not report to the president, they report to us. We do not accept masked, secret police in our streets. It is unAmerican to silence or arrest members of the press. We do not use our Justice Department to punish political opponents. Decent human beings don’t turn funerals into political rallies. And we will not bow to a president who says he hates his opponents, his fellow citizens, while begging for a peace prize.
Like thousands of my fellow Kentuckians, I refuse to say that 2+2=5.
I still can’t define Antifa and no one, per usual, is paying me, but I’ll be at the No Kings rally on Saturday. And I’ll be carrying an American flag.
--30--
Comments
