FREEDOM FROM FREEDOM: 20 Blunt Truths For You In The New Post-Truth American Fascist State
Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.
Photos by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
What we have wrought in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Iran and countless other nations is heading to the homeland.
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (12/23/24)
It’s here. The full-on fascist American state is here and, underscored with every Trump administration cabinet pick and Biden weapons shipment to Isr*el, our grimy partner in genocide.
Phase Two will be the Panzer roll-out of vicious Christian Nationalism.
Life in America has been on a steady downward path for the past fifty years. Economic inequity has risen to levels unseen since the corrupt Gilded Age, as manufacturing jobs have been exported to gin up corporate profits. The rapacious War Department budget grows exponentially to feed our corrupt and failed foreign policy of Forever Wars. Meanwhile, our cities totter, homelessness grows, child poverty rates climb and more suffer without such basic support and civic decency as affordable housing, medical and dental care.
Meanwhile, three capitalist scammers own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent. And suck up more every day.
Peeling veneer
But hold on, it’s about to get worse. The thin, peeling veneer of democracy overlaying the corrupt corporate and Deep State terror system is about to be scorched away. Within less than a month.
We will all be challenged in ways we’ve never imagined possible here. The brutality, dictatorial threats, trashing of civil and human rights we have seen in other nations we have brutalized with our CIA purges, sanctions and coups will now rise up here. It’s all coming home. What we knew — or thought we knew will rapidly fade away.
What we have wrought in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Iran and countless other nations is heading to the homeland.
It’s time to be awake, resolute, prepared individually and — if at all possible — collectively. We need to look for ways to build networks of opposition and mutual aid. But also understand the police and Deep State use of agent provocateurs, as we saw riddle the Civil Rights movement and cripple the Occupy Movement. There is a lot of solid, practical advice to explore in the “Twenty Steps” article below.
The interviews below with Col. Larry Wilkerson add needed context and historical perspective. Wilkerson has said he fully expects to be incarcerated. He won’t be the only one.
Whenever possible, step offline, NOW. Pay cash whenever possible. The coming digital dollar needs to be resisted. Just look what happened to the Canadian truckers. Reduce your online crumbs. It’s impossible to vanish online, but seek to leave as few crumbs as possible; crumbs instead of loaves of private data.
Reacquaint yourself with real books … you know, the ones with pages that can’t suddenly disappear from a Kindle. Books that can be read in untrackable privacy, shared, hidden away and traded for other wisdom-in-hand.
Get realistic about the spies in your pocket, on your wrist and bubbling up Christmas music in the corner of the living room.
Paranoid?
Perhaps.
But I think not.
Time to be practical. Defense mixed with wise resistance. You may not be able to avoid persecution and enslavement, but for Godsake, don’t enable it.
Resist
Persist
Don’t be complicit
TWENTY STEPS: Surviving The Fascist Broligarchy
In the wake of Trump’s unnerving appointees, an investigative journalist and veteran of the libel court offers pointers on coping in an age of surveillance.
By Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer (11/17/24)
1) When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.
2) Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.
3) To name is to understand. This is McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools. It’s the dawn of a new age of political witch-hunts, where burning at the stake meets data harvesting and online mobs.
4) If that sounds scary, it’s because that’s the plan. Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble. Fast. The chilling will be real and immediate.
Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/ WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.
5) You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not. If you’re a US institution or organisation, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice.
6) Do not kiss the ring. Do not bend to power. Power will come to you, anyway. Don’t make it easy. Not everyone can stand and fight. But nobody needs to bend the knee until there’s an actual memo to that effect. WAIT FOR THE MEMO.
[Don’t be shameless and cowardly like the MSNBC Morning Joe simps Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.]
7) Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, “Do not obey in advance”, is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris. In some weird celestial stroke of luck, he calls me as I’m writing this and I ask for his updated advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”
8) Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.
9) Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK. We all did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.
10) Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.
11) Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.
12) Don’t buy the bullshit. A Securities and Exchange judgment found Facebook had lied to two journalists – one of them was me – and Facebook agreed to pay a $100m penalty. If you are a journalist, refuse off the record briefings. Don’t chat on the phone; email. Refuse access interviews. Bullshit exclusives from Goebbels 2.0 will be a stain on your publication for ever.
13) Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”
14) Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do, and do that. They’re not going to the dead drop by Uber or putting 20kg of crack cocaine on a credit card. In the broligarchy, every data point is a weapon. Download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Turn on disappearing messages.
15) Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: “If they try to normalize, let us try to denormalize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.”
16) Find allies in unlikely places. One of my most surprising sources of support during my trial(s) was hard-right Brexiter David Davis. Find threads of connection and work from there.
17) There is such a thing as truth. There are facts and we can know them. From Tamsin Shaw, professor in philosophy at New York University: “‘Can the sceptic resist the tyrant?’ is one of the oldest questions in political philosophy. We can’t even fully recognise what tyranny is if we let the ruling powers get away with lying to us all.”
18) Plan. Silicon Valley doesn’t think in four-year election cycles. Elon Musk isn’t worrying about the midterms. He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there. We need a 30-year road map out of this.
19) Take the piss. Humour is a weapon. Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity. Work with that.
20) They are not gods. Tech billionaires are over-entitled nerds with the extraordinary historical luck of being born at the exact right moment in history. Treat them accordingly.
Wilkerson & Jay: Don’t Despair, Organize
[Editor’s Note: The whole broadcast is worth listening to but the focus on organizing resistance to what the Trump rein will rain down on the country begins at the 31:44-mark. Paul Jay makes a strong argument — plea — for people to connect, plan, organize and unite NOW, as things will accelerate and deteriorate as soon as Trump takes office in January and the real possibility of the Biden administration kicking off war with Iran as a final farewell ‘F-you”.
AN OFFER TO ACTIVISTS — Just as a reminder to readers of DeMOCKracy.ink, I make all my cartoons, illustrations, photos and columns available for free use. So in case you need art for your Substack work, signs, websites, newsletters, bumper stickers etc, feel free to use it. I just ask that wording or changes to images are not made without consulting with me first, but if you just want to do a copy/paste, feel free. — Mark Taylor]
the Analysis.news (11/7/24)
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson and Paul Jay analyze Trump's 2024 victory, attributing Harris's failure in part to a campaign that avoided progressive policies that would lower the cost of living - to please billionaire donors.
Wilkerson warns of a climate catastrophe and a draconian Trump administration that leads to the collapse of American society. Jay argues Harris's defeat creates an opening for a broad democratic, independent movement that takes control of the Democratic Party at state and local levels.
Both emphasize organizing in major cities in Democratic-controlled states, focusing on mobilizing the working poor, urban and rural, who usually don't vote - a potentially game-changing constituency the Democratic establishment has ignored.
51-minute video
The Chris Hedges Report: The World According To Trump, With Col. Lawrence Wilkerson
The Chris Hedges Report (11/7/24)
Donald Trump will become the 47th president of the United States and given the host of global debacles the US has its hands in—ranging from the genocide in Gaza, to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Iran to the Ukraine war—nobody is quite certain what direction the country will take with the former president at the helm again.
Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. With his extensive insights and expertise into the Middle East and American foreign policy, Wilkerson provides a valuable understanding into what a Trump presidency may look like outside of the borders of America.
Wilkerson predicts Trump will stay true to “his disdain for war,” emphasizing “it's genuine. I don't think he likes war. I don't think he likes starting wars.” Regarding Ukraine, Wilkerson thinks Trump will shut down the war effort. But when it comes to the Middle East, that commitment clashes with one of Trump’s long standing loyalties: unwavering support for Israel.
War with Iran seems increasingly likely by the day despite, according to Wilkerson, resistance from the Pentagon and prior administrations. In the case of Trump, however, “you wonder how long that resistance can hold up if the president of the United States is intent on—and this is the one place where Trump really worries me—doing everything in his power for Israel,” Wilkerson notes. He adds, “Trump has made it quite clear that that's his policy, that's his belief, and I think he's being honest about it.”
Citing war-game simulations, reports, personal sources as well as his own expertise, Wilkerson lays down the reality of potential war with Iran: sheer disaster. With sources saying that the IDF is already taking heavy casualties in Lebanon, any sort of escalation with Iran would compound the suffering of the US and Israel. “Iran will top $10 trillion, take 10 years to pacify, if it's even moderately pacified, and cost a fortune in blood and treasure,” Wilkerson warns.
53-minute video
'IF WE BURN': The Limits Of Mass Protest With Author Vincent Bevins
The Chris Hedges Report
Real News Network (4/12/24)
The 2010s were a decade of revolt. From Athens to Atlanta, Santiago to Seoul, a global wave of protest brought masses of people into confrontation with the status quo, demanding an end to neoliberalism, racism, climate change, and more. Yet despite this upswell of grassroots political activity, little lasting, positive change followed. What sparked the past decade of mass protest? Why didn't it result in political transformation?
Vincent Bevins, author of 'If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution', joins The Chris Hedges Report for a retrospective on the decade that set the world on fire, and how to adapt its lessons for the challenges ahead.
58-minute video
Updated For The Age Of Trump2.0 — Folk Protest Classic ‘Love Me I'm A Liberal’
Phil Ochs's song "Love Me I'm a Liberal" updated with some of my own words since the election of DJT. This is seven years old, but still timely, including the line about Gaza.
4-minute video
“There's nothing about the liberal class that is liberal any more. They're the illiberal class.”
— Jimmy Dore
"It’s impossible to vanish online, but seek to leave as few crumbs as possible; crumbs instead of loaves of private data. "
It is hard to vanish online--but I think it's doable. Don't shop at Amazon. (Boycott Amazon!) It's amazing how many people who shop constantly online seem to have "identity thefts". I've never had any (fingers crossed), but then I've never shopped much online. I keep my numbers to myself.
So, put the phones away and stop buying sh*t you don't need and start reading more about what you can do to help start the Revolution!
"Whenever possible, step offline, NOW."
If you were taking your own advice, would you be running a Substack? Serious question. Isn't online activity also the best way to oppose this oncoming train?