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2/ "...The United States of America, no longer the land of the free.

Just over two months into the Donald Trump regime, our own nation is, shamefully, beginning work on its own gulag archipelago spanning the clear-blue waters of the lower hemisphere...There are so many outrages around the U.S. flights of 238 Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s CECOT maximum security prison that it’s hard to pick which outrage to focus on."

3/ "Most importantly, there is no denying the evil that is being perpetrated in our names...

In this moment, more than any other, our United States had finally become the monster that we feared in our youth, turning any remaining notion of American exceptionalism into a hideous lie, converting the fiction of Franz Kafka and George Orwell’s 1984 into our new reality."

5/ "Every time that a Mahmoud Khalil is grabbed off the street in the dead of night, or a Spanish soccer tattoo gets a man who thought he was escaping tyranny in his Venezuelan homeland thrown into an American-endorsed gulag instead, or the president of the United States threatens to defund an entire state because its female governor dared speak back to His Highness, the burner is turned up another millimeter or two."

6/ "The hundreds of direct targets create a fascism multiplier in the millions who are now too afraid, in such a climate, to criticize the government or attend a protest. The goal is dictatorship without any major event that sends millions into the streets, South Korea-style — and so after just 62 days you can smell the boiled frog legs."

7/ "It’s instructive to step back from this hour’s headlines and look to history, because almost every shock that we’re feeling right now is an echo of yesterday’s tyrants, from, yes, Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s to Hungary’s Orbán and Turkey’s Erdogan right now...

But while knowing the history is so critical now, the past is also not our destiny."

8/ "When you look across all 50 states, you can see a surprisingly large number of everyday folks — some of whom voted for Trump less than five months ago — flooding town halls to ask Republicans just what the heck they are doing here, or to beg lethargic Democrats to throw their bodies against the gears, to make it stop. They are peering over the metal edge of the pot and screaming that we’re in very hot water."

9/ "...What matters is that so many desperate people feel a need to be in the same place, to know that they are not alone.

It’s utterly demoralizing that our supposed democratic watchdogs — the media, universities, Congress, the courts — are so craven and morally compromised. But there are still paths of less resistance where our nearly boiling water can flow. The rise of America as a consumer nation has meant the power of the pocketbook remains in our hands."

10/ ""Populist protests outside showrooms for Musk’s Tesla have helped slash its overpriced stock by 50% since Trump’s inauguration, weakening the regime’s right arm. The retailer Target has paid a price for following the lead of Trump, and not its shoppers, on diversity. A new poll finds that 20% of Americans now support boycotts or economic pressure against businesses that support, or comply with, the Trump regime — a capitalist chokepoint that could bring the oligarchy to its knees"

11/ "We are at a critical point where the frog legs of this American Experiment might soon end up on the serving platter, or we can use them to hop out of their evil, steaming cauldron and gasp the rarefied air of our remaining freedom. We can look inside our hearts and shift the line again. The soaked masses can still emerge to deliver Trump and Musk our simple message: We are not cooked, not yet."

Please read the entire column.

@GottaLaff
Alas, it requires adblocker disabling, and then tells me I cannot read any more free articles.

I understand that these organizations need money to operate, but this is still a PITA. There's no way I can manage to subscribe to 20 media sources at once.

We could sure use a working #micropayments system so I could seamlessly pay per article from a wide variety of sources. No effin' billionaire techbros are going to build that, of course, but maybe some still-independent news organizations could jointly set up a nonprofit to do that?

@n1xnx That's why I thread it

@GottaLaff
Which I greatly appreciate, and I'm certain I'm not alone in that. It makes a difference. THANK YOU for doing that.

(I'm still jonesing for a micropayments-for-news-articles system, but that's not something either of us can do much about, of course.)

@Papawj Will is stellar. He beats this drum over and over, has for years. I'm here for it.