The downward slope of our national state continues to accelerate at an alarming pace. There are unfortunately few to no respected voices on the right willing to risk their careers to make a plea for sanity and calm. In light of the murder of Conservative pundit Charlie Kirk last week, we have seen the right unify around him as a martyr. The danger in this is that it rewards emotion over reason. The campaign to demonize anyone left of Trump is a juggernaut of rash leaps in logic, intentional mis and disinformation, outright lies, and a moblike demand of total acquiescence, all for the cause.
Otherwise reasonable people are falling for the constant barrage of confirmation bias and propaganda and allowing their own minds to be made up for them. So many of us have seen it, are seeing it, and will see it. Families have been torn apart, friendships ended. At its worst, it has led to terrible acts of violence, such as Kirk’s tragic and needless shooting.
I do not support or condone political violence of any kind, regardless of yours or my beliefs. Any act of politically motivated violence is an affront to all of us, and just another step towards a worst case scenario unfolding in the coming months/years.
There has been a number of political thinkers across the spectrum who predict (and many who frighteningly advocate for) a civil war. This must not happen. The result would be catastrophic, not just domestically but globally.
The problem as I see it, is that we have an administration which is led by a forceful populist, whose leadership methods borrow wholesale from The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which actively promotes and works towards the establishment of a unitary executive president. This means that the President would enjoy near total immunity and control over all laws and policies without the need to go through Congress or the court system. He already has the immunity, and he currently controls Congress, who will do almost anything to stay within his graces.
Many on the left are hopeful for the midterms to swing Congress back their way, but there is also a deep fear that Trump will do whatever he can to subvert the election, whether through suppression efforts, spurious lawsuits, or outright force. Which brings up the issue of the next presidential election. The midterms will be a bellwether for how Trump intends to act. He may well attempt to suspend the election altogether under some sort of fabricated national emergency. From there, he might attempt to suspend the Constitution and appoint himself a lifetime term. It isn’t that far fetched to suggest this. Members of Congress have openly called for this already, believing Trump to be chosen by God as the rightful leader of the nation, thus negating the need for things like elections, laws or the Constitution.
Those closely watching the goings on in Washington will have seen that this is already happening. The Supreme Court, heavily skewed to the hard right, has made ruling after ruling which have reinforced the President’s claims of total immunity and power, all the while gaslighting the American people by insisting that those who oppose their rulings are simply radical partisans ignorant of Constitutional law.
The “It can’t happen here” cries have all but died down amongst all but the most hopeful or oblivious of us. It can happen, and it’s happening. The question is how bad it will get and what that means for all of us.
There are no signs that we will see a peaceful transfer of power when Trump’s term is up, and that thought should terrify anyone who believes in democracy (even our flawed version of it). That this is up for debate tells you all you need to know about how far the government had become radicalized to the right.
The faithful are extreme in their views, and they believe completely that the current radical Christian conservative form of coercive, punitive, and extralegal governance is not only moral, it’s righteous.
Look at how they have so thoroughly demonized the banal. Tom Hanks was denied a West Point honorary ceremony due to Trump’s objection to Hanks’ “woke liberal ideology.” Tom Hanks. The Bosom Buddies guy.
Which brings me back to Charlie Kirk. He was an enormously popular podcaster and speaker, known for holding speeches and debates on American college campuses. His method of debate served more to make fools of those willing to challenge his views, which are always presented as unimpeachable, and were packed full of rightwing dog whistles and talking points. He lent a veneer of normalcy to the perception of anyone left of Trump as being a radical. His almost offhand demonization of the African American community, for example (a hardly monolithic leftist force), was presented in a way that rang more as common truth for his followers than as being dog calls for racist replacement theory paranoia.
Kirk was so effective at his job that he was able to convince half the country he was just speaking to a common set of everyday middle American truths, and not functioning as a political idealogue with an extreme agenda. This is reflected in the outcry of grief and intense efforts to martyrize Kirk after his death. Several NFL teams on Sunday even honored Kirk in the middle of their games.
Contrast this reaction to the absence of a response on the right when a radical rightwing gunman murdered Melissa Hortman, a state senator, her husband and their dog, and badly wounded another state senator, John Hoffman, and his wife, in the politically motivated attack. Not a single member of the GOP in Washington expressed anything publicly other than ridicule and mockery of the victims, or total silence. Trump said he wouldn't call Governor Tim Walz after the shootings, and no Federal flags were ordered to fly at half mast. It was simply routine for the GOP to treat the assassination of one of their peers on the other side of the aisle as a nonevent, unworthy of sympathy or concern.
How they felt in private, I can’t say. But this reaction was explicitly designed to be seen publicly as a message: If you don’t walk in lockstep with Trump, you don’t matter. And in the case of the senseless and horrible murder of Kirk, he is being treated as a national hero without fault, a saint. Any criticism now of Kirk whatsoever is being treated as treason, with those responsible being doxed, fired, and harassed, even threatened, with no concern whatsoever for their first amendment rights of free speech. The same First Amendment rights the right were so worried about under Biden’s administration, but now seem to have conveniently discarded in favor of suppressing and punishing opposition of any sort.
Politics are complex and ever fluid. The divisive nature of a bipartisan system was always ripe for a breakdown, given the right (or wrong) circumstances, because it was designed to polarize all of us into two camps. The implication, therefore, being that you are either on the right side or the wrong one, and in times likes these, that division is sharp and wielded like a sword by those in control.
What we need to understand is that this is not a political problem we are facing right now, it’s an existential one. The fundamental freedoms we are supposed to enjoy under the Constitution are in serious risk of being eradicated, and once that happens, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Most people don’t want to think about politics all the time. They want to have a decent life, be with family and friends they can enjoy, live long, have access to quality healthcare, and the freedom to be whomever they want to be. Yes, too many of us are so radicalized and marginalized through exposure to extreme online cultural echo chambers, we can’t see things as anything but black and white, and that is tremendously dangerous.
I certainly don’t know how we find our way out of this without terrible things happening in the near future. I don’t think anyone knows.
All I do know, is that whatever is going on in my country right now, it’s heartbreaking and terrifying, and while I’ve been suspecting this was coming for a couple decades now, being in the middle of it is no less daunting.
Try stepping back from the precipice for a while and be nice to someone. Help someone. Smile at someone. Make a positive difference, no matter how small. We need all the help we can get.
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