Who Are We? Bravery Begets Brave vs Fearfulness Begets Fear

 

Who Are We? Bravery Begets Brave vs Fearfulness Begets Fear

“A society in which judges are routinely made to fear for their own safety or their own livelihood due to their decisions is one that has substantially departed from the norms of behavior that govern in a democratic system.” 

 Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in an early May speech in Puerto Rico and on her Website.

"JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others." 

Cardinal Robert Prevost wrote, in response to Vance’s belief in ‘ordo amoris’ (the hierarchy of who gets your love in what order). Prevost is now Pope Leo XIV

We live in an era where the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, appointed by the President ostensibly to purge waste and fraud from the federal government, instead reinforces his notion that the rich should rule, not support governmental agencies that address pain, starvation and poverty, and where taxes only encourage waste. Decried for Musk’s selfish, insensitive approach, the former richest man in the world, Bill Gates, announced that he intended to dissipate virtually the entirety of his foundation’s $200 hundred billion within the next two decades in support of combating disease, lack of access to potable water, starvation and poverty. His efforts failed to convince the self-centered Musk, who used his appointment to generate more federal contracts for his companies at the expense of his competitors. Musk’s destruction of USAID, a modest-cost federal agency that spread food, medication and education to those clinging to life at the edge of subsistence, was clearest evidence of the triumph of rich selfishness.

The vectors of insensitivity, manipulation, fabrication and, most of all, intimidation exemplified by tangible acts of retribution and persecution, define our system of governance today. As high-profile law firms and universities tumbled like dominoes, that intentional ripple of fear and blind compliance became a self-enforcing tsunami that resonated across the entire nation. The goal, quite obviously, was to foment fearfulness… to beget fear and subjugation. It worked… until…

A counterforce of bravery, exemplified by powerful players from Harvard University, Perkins Coie, plus a growing alliance of colleges and universities, blue state attorneys general, but the forces of darkness continue to revile and ignore the Constitution and deploy government agencies as personal instruments of retribution, control and vendetta. Writing for the Raw Story, May 8th, Krystina Alarcon Carroll writes of the blanket of fear that Trump has wrapped above the entire Republican constituency on Capitol Hill: “ ‘Republican politicians face threats of violence if they oppose [President Donald Trump],’ but a New York Times guest essay, published Thursday [5/8] morning , claims that shouldn’t stop them from trying.

“Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt are the three political scientists who wrote the essay. They study how democracies come to an end… America has, with stunning speed, descended into a world in which opponents of the government fear criminal investigations, lawsuits, tax audits, and other punitive measures…. The writers added, ‘Even Republican politicians are, as one former Trump administration official put it , ‘scared’ out of their minds ‘‘about death threats.’’… These threats against Republicans aren’t stopping. According to the writers, ‘Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) reported that the F.B.I. warned him of ‘credible death threats’ while he was considering opposing Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense.’… They believe, ‘Republican lawmakers have abdicated their role as checks on executive power.’”

For me, even as so many Republican members of Congress are beginning to realize they are caught in an election vice – the MAGA base will vote to defeat them just as the once friendly body of independents is defecting and depriving these politicians of the need majority – they face a midterm that will only be lost by Democratic incompetence. There are legislative vectors, focusing on eliminating as many pro-Democratic voters with new voting rules as an example, to a possible extreme in having Donald Trump declare some sort of national emergency to delay or cancel those elections.

A culture war obsession – anti-DEI efforts and purported antisemitism – is MAGA’s defining tool against opponents. “Woke” continues to be used as generic condemnation of everything they disagree with, and their loyalty to Trump, even as the economy devolves around them, is difficult to comprehend. People with manifest antipathy for Jews use antisemitism as an autocratic tool.

Self-righteous rightwing propaganda has elevated MAGA to expect the rest of the world to follow suit. The Department of State, in building a new embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, demanded that that nation’s DEI mandate for workers be stopped for the construction…and the entire city. JD Vance criticized Germany, once destroyed by Nazis, for limiting a neo-Nazi political movement under the notion of “free speech,” odd coming from the party of censorship. The request was rejected by Sweden out of hand, just as Louisiana eliminated school segregation bans and various states and federal agencies are suing private employers for discriminating against white hires. Meanwhile, in Oklahoma public schools, the texts teach that the 2020 US presidential election was “stolen.”

But there are good signs, as Carroll continues, noting her cited authors “do see ‘signs of an awakening.’… This includes Harvard’s refusal ‘to acquiesce to administration demands that would undermine academic freedom.’ They also pointed to Microsoft’s drop of a law firm that settled with the administration and hired one that defied it… ‘When the most influential members of civil society fight back, it provides political cover for others. It also galvanizes ordinary citizens to join the fight.’… They ended by saying, ‘America’s slide into authoritarianism is reversible. But no one has ever defeated autocracy from the sidelines.’”

We’ve seen it in Poland, and there is rustling in Hungary and Turkey… and in a way we’re lucky Trump’s economic plans are/were a disaster from inception; there are now enough anti-Trump Americans who will no long tolerate his bumbling, self-aggrandizing autocratic decisions and leanings! What we cannot stop now, we hopefully will have midterms to end this terror then. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and I have to believe that most Americans won’t allow themselves to be pushed around by an overweight rabble rouser-fraudster from NYC.