Radical Left?
Suddenly I miss the Yippies.
All right, granted, it’s a dark, frightening time in our gathering police state led by an evil comic-book sociopath with the slobbering approval of morons, bigots, cowards, cynics, gun fetishists and a Christian Taliban who think themselves patriots because they worship the flag like a golden calf, but not the rights, freedoms and responsibilities the flag is meant to represent.
Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War Crimes, is a fine example of embracing the very opposite values envisioned and guaranteed in the Constitution. He has grabbed the military by the pussy and yanked it back to the Middle Ages, when men were men and right and wrong were decided by despots marching under the banner of Christ, but with the tactics and moral authority of Satan. (We attempted to get a comment from both the King of Kings and the Prince of Darkness, but had not heard back by the time of publication.)
So, yeah, this is all definitely a problem. Because democracy hangs in the balance, as well as the future of humanity. The War on Windmills, the War on Vaccines, the War on Immigrants, the War on Political Rivals, the War on Iran and the War on Supporting Ukraine’s War against Invading Russians tell you pretty much what you need to know on that subject. Thanks to MAGA depravity, the entire world is on thin ice. Thick ICE, thin ice.
But, of course, the American people will not stand for this. As the polls amply demonstrate, Trump and his craven Congressional enablers are historically unpopular. And the vast anti-Trump majority are mobilized in unimaginable numbers day in and day out to register their outrage and insert monkey wrenches into the machine of autocracy.
Oh, wait. No they aren’t. Yes, there have been a handful of weekend rallies — May Day, No Kings, Free America Weekend, Hands Off — that cumulatively drew millions, but nothing at which protesters took any risk or made any actual sacrifice to defend the Constitution or their own rights or the future of their children’s generation. With the exception of large protests in Minnesota, and quieter ones in Seattle, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, America has been content to cluck in disgust over Christo-Fascism but otherwise to live their lives business as usual.
Never mind the Nazi roundups of brown people. Never mind the dismantling of civil rights, Medicaid, education and environmental protection. Until gasoline prices spiked, middle class society just sucked it up. Poor people and immigrants were under attack, but not so’s you’d notice in the suburbs.
The slogan of the muttering disaffected should be MASA. Make America Shrug Again.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, citizens march, rally, mount general strikes, and civilly disobey at sometimes great personal risk. Because demanding truth, justice and accountability from their governments requires persistence and bravery. In Iran, the citizen victims of murderous theocracy were indeed murdered by the thousands.
America, which sacrificed not only its sons, but important commodities and most creature comforts, to defeat European fascism in the 1940s, nowadays can’t even live without OnlyFans, FanDual and cheese crust pizza without psychic collapse. Our young generations, who (rightfully, in the wreckage of late-stage capitalism) seek a better work/life balance, expend their outrage on innumerable micro-aggressions, but somehow can’t get motivated the way Vietnam protesters once did to resist the criminal predations of The Man.
God help a professor who triggers an undergraduate with uncomfortable realities of life in the world (I’m expecting any day for carbon to be removed, after an anxious student’s complaint, from the Periodic Table of Elements). But watching their universities surrender to the government’s fascist revisionists by censoring science, history and literature — not to mention DEI — doesn’t seem to incite their adolescent self-righteousness. How more complacent can a society be than one where students are more radical about pronouns than about dictatorship?
What should we all be doing? I don’t know, exactly. But rather than No Kings picnics, maybe daily demonstrations designed to gum up the authoritarian works. Maybe a few actual general strikes to grind the economy to a halt. Maybe tax strikes. Maybe online warfare, from Denial of Service attacks to shaming memes to the Nancy Guthrie treatment.
If 10% of the public energy devoted to true-crime sleuthing were devoted to uncovering the sleazy acts of cabinet secretaries and Republicans in Congress, we’d be having a different conversation than, “How do these people get away with this shit?”
Enough is enough. Quit shrugging. If you want to save the Republic, take a chance and get busy.