News and commentary for understanding and coping with the years ahead...
They knew, and so do we
"But every day," he said, "these people, in their neat Germanic way, would get out their feather dusters and go outside. And, never thinking about what it meant, they would sweep off the layer of ash that would settle on their windowsills overnight. Then they would return to their neat, clean lives and pretend not to notice what was happening next door. When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside," he said. "But they all had ash in their feather dusters."
This powerful essay (pdf), from one of America's most knowledgeable scholars of right-wing movements, crossed my desk a few days ago. I hesitated before putting it up here, because the parallels are not identical between what is happening here now and what happened in Europe during the Nazi reign.
I want to point out when the piece was published: in 1997. It was a warning. The author asked Americans to wake up and look around, to see what was building in the already fetid fever swamps of right-wing extremism. It wasn't all that long after the Oklahoma City bombing. Yet the warning went almost unnoticed, and definitely unheeded.
Today America's slide toward fascism is unmistakable. The radical right-wingers have captured the federal government and many states. The worst case is isn't inevitable, but the slide is accelerating.
The extremists Neiwert has researched for decades have amassed hundreds of millions of firearms. Many are are champing at the bit, waiting for Trump and Musk and Vance and the others running the government to deputize them as the brownshirts of tomorrow. (What are the nation's governors, at least the ones who aren't part of the Trump cult, doing to plan for – and stop – the extremists from doing their worst when the extremist-in-chief gives them the word?)
We have to open our eyes wider. We have to recognize that there is building evidence of 21st Century "ash on the sills."
When, for example, our secret police, a.k.a. ICE, abduct* a young woman off the street in Boston and jail her in a deportation camp at the southern border – because someone in the Trump regime is pissed that they dared to exercise freedom of expression – we must look, and see. We have to care. We have to protest. We have to organize.
Please read the essay. Please don't hide from reality.
*I specifically used the word "abduct" above. Every news article I read about what ICE did in Boston to Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University graduate student, used a different word: "detain." Yes, this is the language law enforcement uses to describe what it does with people it's holding behind bars without having charged them with a crime.
The problem is that the words "detain" and "detention" don't capture the violence embedded in what is being done to human beings. Those words have definitions that are mostly benign – e.g. "She was detained in traffic on the way to lunch.." and "Her 8th-grader misbehaved and got after-school detention..."
Using "detained" to describe what happened is carrying water for ICE, given the gentler definition that moderates the reality. She was abducted – I think "kidnapped" is also accurate – off the street and imprisoned.
Journalism needs to be much more precise, but that would require less stenography and more thinking before publishing.
Top scholar of fascism leaves for Canada
This is related, obviously, to the item above. Please listen as Yale University's Jason Stanley, who has also been warning us about the rising tide of fascism in America, explains why he felt obligated to take his work and family to Canada.
Universities: Collaborate or lose everything (that matters)
Up till now, students and university employees targeted for deportation based on their speech have been largely left to fend for themselves, trying to challenge the deportations after they have already been detained. A lawsuit brought by a coalition of universities would have important advantages over this case-by-case approach.
It has been painful to watch top American universities kow-tow to the Trump regime, though (somewhat) understandable given the reliance many of them seem to think they have on federal dollars. (Never mind that the Ivy League schools have such enormous endowments that they are aptly known as hedge funds with schools attached.)
So the approach here – a Reason magazine commentary picking up on a suggestion from the faculty at Tufts' Fletcher School – makes a lot of sense. Too much sense, probably, for institutions that can't seem to understand the need for collaboration even when it's their best chance of making it through these evil times with their institutional souls intact.
The lack of collective courage is also obvious in other arenas, such as the legal profession, where top law firms are selling out the rule of law for money. Ditto, on a tiny and almost pathetic scale, the feckless White House Correspondents Association; it reacted to Trump's banishment of the Associated Press from its longstanding coverage access with, well, nothing more than some supportive words but not a shred of action.
Bullies have a keen smell for weakness, but they can be stopped if their victims band together at scale and make the cost too high for the bully to continue. The inability of otherwise smart people to understand that, while the Trump regime takes an axe to vital American institutions, will be remembered in history as weakness of the most profound kind.
Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica. In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.
As this ProPublica article makes clear – though the publication is "fair" to a fault in giving government spokespeople a platform to spout nonsense – the Trump regime is increasingly hostile to the decades-long system of protecting the public health that was built up under administrations of both major parties.
The only question is why. One plausible explanation is the same one that explained why the first Trump presidency gave us a covid policy that amounted to "Let it spread uncontrolled and kill whoever is unlucky or unhealthy enough."
Robert Kennedy Jr.'s hatred of vaccines – remember, he has zero medical credentials – is contempt for human lives. Burying a report that could have helped persuade more people to vaccinate their children against common, preventable, and sometimes deadly diseases is an act against Americans, especially the ones who have chosen to be ignorant of reality and consequences.
This newsletter is a compendium of the reporting and commentary that best explains the America's political, economic, and social conditions – and, most important, how we can find a way back from the dark days ahead. You will rarely find anything here from the New York Times or Washington Post or any of the other Big Journalism companies that failed us so completely during the 2024 elections and are now sucking up – even more than usual – to Donald Trump, his cult, and corporate oligarchs. My focus will be on smaller, more honorable outlets (and individuals). I hope you'll support them with your attention and your money. For more details, please read my About page.
Please send your suggestions
I spend a lot of time looking for essential coverage, and hope you'll help me by letting me know about the good stuff you find. Let me know.
Subscribe
Was this forwarded to you? If you would like to have your own free subscription, please click here.
Ilya Somin
Annie Waldman
