Happy Thinksgiving

Let’s Not Lose Our Heads

Do you know what time it is? I try not to answer that when I wake up in the dark, hoping it is dawn but suspecting it’s not yet 3 a.m.

I’m not alone with my insomnia. Everyone I meet these days is peering into the dark from under a blanket.

Last night, I was up again, the hour of the wolf, scribbling into a notebook. This morning, I peered at my little scratches on paper. What leering goblins haunted my late fall slumber?

Fanatical morality police: a teeny-tiny man, Opus Dei Catholic lobbyist Leonard Leo, empowered and corrupted absolutely with rich man’s pelf, in league with the white male broligarchy*, having bought the judiciary now promising to seize the means of cultural production – universities, media, and entertainment.

Russell Vought, another small, very angry man, religious fanatic, principal architect of Project 2025, now assigned the job of remaking the entire federal workforce into a purity-tested army of MAGAbots.

Modern-day Emperor Elon, worth a staggering $350 billion, exposing his doughy white midriff in a leap of joy celebrating the re-ascendance of a dictator-worshipping white man to the pinnacle of world power, now positioned to manipulate geopolitics.

What else?

In the dark, I thought about how the trap is set. We are all sticky with the glue of digital surveillance. The system that these men control has been in the making since the dawn of the digital age. It’s fed by the gadgets every man, woman, and child on the planet carries or hopes to soon.

Fanatical religious maniacs, borderless kleptocrats with allegiance only to the bank, and the broligarchy are the lords and beneficiaries of unchecked commercial data harvesting.

I have covered politics for decades, starting in middle America – specifically, Springfield, Illinois, where I got a grounding in public corruption. But I always retained a kind of knee-erk assumption about the good in most people, even after also writing about some of the era’s most heinous crimes.

Eight years of observing Trump has taught me that I’ve been wrong: there is, in some people, maybe many, a bottomless pit of amoral urges and insidious instincts and the will to act on them.

In the summer of 2015, Trump blamed “Mexican rapists” for the discontent of white Americans. This was baffling, since everyone understood average Americans’ real problems come from being deprived of a living wage and decent health care by end-stage capitalism and the bought-and-paid-for policymakers. Surely that was just a disgusting rhetorical flourish and didn’t mean he was an active Aryan superiority fantasy-level racist… did it?

But wait, here come fine people on both sides of a Nazi tiki torch parade.

All Republican Presidents suck up to the hypocritical religious right. Surely the New York libertine, once winning their votes, wouldn’t go all in on their agenda? Well, yes, he would. Now millions of women and girls live in states where health care workers are terrified to touch them if their pregnancies are going wrong.

Trump didn’t want to lose the 2020 election. But surely he wouldn’t shred the fabric of trust in American elections on his way out by bleating a continuous Big Lie. Well, yes, he would – that plus fomenting a violent insurrection replete with a gallows on the Capitol lawn.

When Trump told the nation that his inauguration crowd was the largest in history and that anyone who disagreed with “fake news,” I laughed. What a clown! Eight years later, a majority of Americans apply that epithet to all traditional sources of information, not just on politics and government, but the weather report and public health. Now, Trump 2.0 looks prepared to finish off vestiges of that trust by regulating and litigating the free press to death - or just letting billionaire right-wing allies buy up the companies.

Last week, I went to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual fundraiser and awards dinner in New York. A glittery event. Manhattan skyline blinking beyond the glass walls of the hall. Tables bought by The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the major networks, the big white shoe law firms, Google and Meta. John Oliver as emcee.

The CPJ’s International Press Freedom awards went to four journalists, all women, working in Gaza, Niger, Guatemala and Russia. Each of the awardees risks violence, imprisonment (two have been jailed in hideous conditions), and death simply for observing and recording events and for disseminating information that powerful corrupt individuals and organizations would rather remain unreported.

None of my experiences in the field have approached the risks these brave women are still choosing to take. I’ve been in a few war zones, but it’s not my forte. In theory, I believe in the importance of bearing witness, and the moral duty to speak or act in support of victims. But in some ways, I’ve felt that actually dying to inform a callous and distracted world seems like a wasted death.

In November 2016, I was standing in the ballroom at the New York Hilton at 3 a.m. The lights were low in expectation of President-elect Trump’s arrival. It was a Hieronymous Bosch scene, faces looming from the shadows, drunks in red hats, sweaty with joy, Giuliani to my right, Steve Bannon’s family to the left. Herr Donald took a victory lap around the balcony above, trailed by his females in the ice skater dresses and stilettos, jaw-cocked a la Mussolini.

My first thought was: Wow, I’m witnessing a national disaster, the collapse of a state, journalistically thrilling but, unlike Haiti or Iraq, no military cargo plane or international aid flight on which to hitch a ride home.

We survived the first four years. Now, who knows? People in a position to know are alarmingly alarmed. Are their fears justified or paranoid?

Last week, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy speaking to the never-Trump conservative publication The Bulwark said: “I’m getting prepared for the worst. Which is, you know, arrest warrants for members of Congress, shutdowns of not-for-profit organizations that are trying to cross Donald Trump. I’m legitimately worried about that… I’m crossing my fingers that we will be in some normal world in which I can find some narrow areas of agreement with Trump. But I’m spending most of my time thinking and preparing for dystopia.”

A respected New York defense attorney on Twitter yesterday went full prepper: “Prepare as if a natural disaster was imminent. Food, water, meds, cash, etc. Get in the habit of having more than 1/2 a tank of gas in your vehicle at all times. Get medical procedures done that you were holding off on. Educate yourself on the impact of potential gov policies after Jan 20.”

What time is it? We have exactly 54 days until January 20, the day on which, as Project 2025 has promised, forms of holy hell will be inflicted on swathes of America the minute Trump’s hand comes off the Bible.

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless—if the left allows it to be,” Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast last summer. The veiled and not-so-veiled threats from these angry little men keep coming. All projection. Because we already know what their miniature “revolution” on January 6, 2021 looked like.

A friend of mine who works at one of the biggest American nonprofit civil rights organizations (one of the many threatened by the Republican-led legislation that will allow the government to defund non-profits based on spurious allegations that they support terrorism) said that they wish there was some way to know what people at the dawn of totalitarian takeovers wished they had known or had done before the clampdown.

Maybe it won’t be as bad as all that. But it can’t hurt to get ready to protect yourself, and your people.

British journalist Caroline Cadalladr’s 20 Tips to Survive the Broligarchy is one of the best lists. Some of her suggestions remind me of journalist and documentary maker Laura Poitras’ Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total; Surveillance, a book written to go with a 2016 show at the Whitney about surveillance and 9/11 and Edward Snowden’s revelations.

Read, eat, and try to sleep. I’ll leave you again with the words of the great Italian leftist, Antonio Gramsci, written in the early days of a long prison sentence imposed by the fascists. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimist of the will.”

Happy Thinksgiving.

*Broligarchy - Caroline Cadwalladr’s brilliant neologism, I think.

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