The Age of Innocence is over. No longer can you gain absolution by claiming ignorance. No longer can you cling to innocence by feigning ignorance. Evidence of the gleeful cruelty that is the hallmark of everyone in this regime is everywhere you look. It is the ICE goons lurking in the hallways of immigration courts, skulking around schoolyards, storming public parks, literally hunting innocent people.
It is in the DOJ request for a sentence of one day for Brett Hankison, the cop convicted of depriving Breonna Taylor of her civil rights, after firing 10 shots in the botched raid that killed her while she slept.
It is in the affidavit of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which detailed the torture and brutality he suffered, as one of 200 men wrongfully trafficked to a country they were not from, despite several being asylum seekers.
It is evident in the reports of the degrading treatment of migrants in the south Florida detention centers who were forced to eat with their hands shackled behind their backs,denied medical care, and crammed into cells at triple their capacity.
If you claim not to know that this is happening, we will know that it is because you don’t deem those being persecuted to be human beings worthy of inalienable human rights. It is no longer exculpatory to say that you would never do what this regime is doing, that you don’t condone it. If you are not actively opposing this, in whatever way you can— volunteering, protesting, donating— you are complicit.
Those of you bending the knee— settling baseless lawsuits instead of protecting the First Amendment, staying silent when your own students, or patients, or employees, are kidnapped, purposefully misdirecting public discourse by writing about Biden’s alleged cognitive decline, while ignoring the obvious decompensation of the person who is currently President, you are an accomplice.
We now know that you are a hollow human being, driven either by cynicism or cowardice. We now know that those of you who are cynics never believed that this country could be (or should even try to be) a multiracial democracy that lives up to its motto- E pluribus unum- out of many, one.
We know that those of you who are cowards cling to the illusion of safety. You think that if you are silent about, or make deals with, the insatiable monsters running this country, you won’t be targeted like Brown and Black immigrants and trans kids are. You will learn soon enough that safety is an illusion. Fascism is a hungry beast.
Of course, there is a third possibility— that you are a fascist yourself, just one that doesn’t want to get their hands dirty. There are tells.
You platform eugenicists in the name of “balanced dialogue” as if Watson and Crick had not sequenced the genome and 400 years of brutal enslavement and Jim Crow did not happen. You accept the framing that empathy and the belief in universal human rights is “liberal,” and that a worldview that endorses cruelty and domination deserves equal time. You are content to be capitalism’s eunuchs, with no power of your own, guarding a harem of obscene wealth and privilege, for the oligarchs you serve.
Six months in, consider yourself warned. Those of us who reject a society where power is derived from violence, not consensus, who abhor a society where ignorance is celebrated and intellect is punished, who refuse to be ruled by the spiritual and actual descendants of Confederates, are done with you. We will not pretend that these “differences” can be bridged.
So those of you who think you have no skin in the game better think hard about what side you’re on. Fascism will come for you eventually. At this pace, “eventually” is likely to be December. Choose wisely.
Thank you so much for writing this – you are spot on! No one gets a pass for being unaware of the travesty before us.
Just this morning I was missing your voice and here you are. I am beyond disgusted, listening to the news with its breathless coverage and “analysis” of the Epstein case and all of the other ridiculous distractions that the Trump administration throws up. It’s hard to do the deeper “and yes, more risky, work of telling the stories of Americans who will go hungry, the people who will become sicker, and the next generation who will be functionally illiterate, because of the steps this administration has taken. Thank you for telling it like it is.