More entrenched by the day
Ralph Nader on the steadily worsening horror:
There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.
Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable George W. Bush is very proud of his Administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program. Immediate harm commenced to millions of victims in Africa and elsewhere who are reliant on this U.S. assistance (including programs to lessen the health toll on people afflicted by tuberculosis and malaria).
Not a peep from George W. Bush, preoccupied with his landscape painting and perhaps occasional pangs of guilt from his butchery in Iraq. His signal program is going down in flames and he keeps his mouth shut, as he has largely done since the upstart loudmouth Trump ended the Bush family’s power over the Republican Party.
Then there are the Clintons and Obama. They are very rich, and have no political aspirations. Yet, though horrified by what they see Trump doing to the government and its domestic social safety net services they once ruled, mum’s the word.
What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state? Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator—declaring war on the American people with his firings and smashing of critical “people’s programs” that benefit liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state residents alike.
Hm. Debatable. Surely some people elected him to do all that and worse.
What about Kamala Harris — the hapless loser to Trump in November’s presidential election? She must think she has something to say on behalf of the 75 million people who voted for her or against Trump. Silence! She is perfect bait for Trump’s intimidation tactics. She is afraid to tangle with Trump despite his declining polls, rising inflation, the falling stock market and anti-people budget slashing which is harming her supporters and Trump voters’ economic wellbeing, health and safety.
This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege.
Why aren’t we hearing from Gary Gensler, former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now being dismantled, especially since the SEC is dropping his cases against alleged cryptocurrency crooks?
Why aren’t we hearing much more (she wrote one op-ed) from Samantha Power, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under Biden, whose life-saving agency is literally being illegally closed down, but for pending court challenges?
Why aren’t we hearing from Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Biden about saboteur Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of EPA, who is now giving green lights to lethal polluters and other environmental destructions?
In short why isn’t the Resistance forming? Why aren’t people who have the power to form it, forming it?
On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.”
She writes: “The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth] fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”
Allons enfants.
They’re all hoping to wait it out; we’re not a courageous people. People who love America aren’t the sort who’d storm the capital; we like rules and look to them to protect us. When they don’t, risking our comfortable lives is very difficult.
Mind you, by the time our lives become uncomfortable and we realize we’re at the Godzilla threshold it’s already probably too far gone.
I’ve been wondering the same myself. Is it because you still retain the British “stiff upper lip” of your ancestors?
One only needs to look to Europe where French, Greeks, and Spaniards will take to the streets when feeling slighted by their government. Or look to the passion exhibited in Thailand. Even Chinese have shown more backbone than Americans.
Maybe its been the dumbing down of higher education from places where students were taught to think and question into diploma mills where the goal is to produce compliant, rules following drones for the economic well being of the 1%.
We watch from afar and with horror as Americans stumble blindly into the dystopian nightmare Trump always promised to create. You won’t need to vote anymore, you gave up your rights as citizens of a democracy when you allowed the leaders of Trump’s Jan 6 insurrection to go largely unpunished, where you kept paying the subscription fees to the voices that most loudly cheered him on, and where you have abandoned political party membership and have left the only chance of a democratic revolt to become sclerotic and disinterested.
America, you fucked around and found out.
I, too, have been thinking the same as BKiSA. The silence of these people is extraordinary. From Nick Cohen’s latest ‘Writing from London’ – ‘America silences its anti-fascist voice: Now Europe must learn to fight alone’..
The Anti-fascist voices are Voice of America & Radio Free Europe.
“Trump was constrained in his first term. Now, as he returns embittered, vengeful, and surrounded by far-right ideologues, the comparison seems bleakly apt.
“As if to prove the point, the Trump administration announced over the weekend that it is silencing Voice of America along with Radio Free Europe (which was set up in the Cold War to combat Stalinist propaganda).
“Their funding is frozen. Their journalists don’t know what future, if any, they have. An embodiment of America’s commitment to anti-fascism that goes back to 1942 couldn’t survive the first few weeks of Trump’s second term.
“People who have not grasped what the US far right wants were astonished.”
I think that last sentence tells it all. If anyone hasn’t by now grasped what the US far right intends, they must be comatose, if not physically, then morally.
The Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas and a great many other people should be doing as Bernie Sanders is doing and shouting from the rooftops.
Cohen also brings in Sarah Churchwell’s ‘Behold America’ – in which Dorothy Thompson is quoted on Charles Lindbergh:
‘In Behold America, her grim history of the fascism of the original America First movement, Sarah Churchwell quotes the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who told readers not to be fooled by the denials of Lindbergh that he was a Nazi. He wanted to confuse people, she said. He admired Hitler and quite clearly wanted to build a new party on Nazi lines.
‘“Lindbergh’s behaviour fits a pattern –a thoroughly familiar pattern. It is the pattern of revolutionary politics designed by Adolf Hitler. Lindbergh’s technique, his whole campaign is singularly without inventiveness. To anyone who has studied popular demagogues bent on making New Orders of Society, Lindberg is old stuff.”
‘And so is Trump.’
Trump has already proven he’ll pardon anyone doing violence on his behalf. I don’t know that I’d be any braver, even if I did have their wealth, in the face of the thought that anyone could assassinate me with not only impunity but the President’s blessing.
ibbica, I don’t know you or your circumstances, but that attitude is exactly what despots rely on; fear.
It was the excuse used to attempt exoneration of Hitler’s Pope. Oh, they’d say, if he stood up to Hitler he’d be killed. Meanwhile, thousands of ordinary people were standing up, and far too many of them were killed. Millions of other ordinary people were being killed because there was no one to stand up for them.
If you ever wonder what you’d have done in Hitler’s Germany, wonder no more, you’re doing it now.
This is not meant as a personal attack, but the emphasizing that when no one stands up, everyone lies down.