Shine A Light
Even in the darkest of times, giving up is not an option.
During the years I was living in the Caribbean nation of Haiti, I frequently had the opportunity to attend the ceremonies of Vodou, as Haiti’s syncretic blend of African religion and Catholicism is called. Often during these services, amid the drumming and singing, the hounsis, or initiates, would be possessed or “ridden” by the spirits of vodou, the lwa, that would then inhabit their bodies and bend them to their will, prompting them to dance, chant and even speak in ways that were very different than the normal, conscious person whose corporeal form was being inhabited.
In the years since 2015 in the United States, I have often viewed Donald Trump and the cult of pagan political idolatry that surrounds him as a case, more than any logical political movement, of the possession of large parts of the American electorate by a malign spirit of bitterness, anger and revenge that erases any conscious reason and leads people to act in support of a man who has shown, time and again, how unfit he is for the office he once held and will now hold again. With Trump’s reelection as president this week, I believe this analogy holds truer than ever before.
Inflation - the lowest inflation among Group of Seven (G7) major advanced economies - or economic anxiety does not remotely explain why 73 million people would vote for a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist who attempted to stage a coup to illegally remain in office after he convincingly lost the 2020 election.
It doesn’t explain why a political leader who repeatedly fantasizes in public about the murder of his critics - who recently called U.S. representative from California (now Senator-elect) Adam Schiff “evil” and “scum” and fantasized about him being decapitated and spoke of former U.S. Represntaive from Wyoming Liz Cheney having “nine barrels shooting at her” and having “guns are trained on her face” - would be viewed as worthy of support [A May 2020 investigation by ABC News identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.] Only last month, John Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, told the New York Times that Trump would like to rule as a dictator, fit “into the general definition of fascist” and confirmed to The Atlantic that Trump had praised the loyalty of Nazi generals to genocidal dictator Adolf Hitler and also Hitler himself. 13 former Trump administration officials then signed open letter backing up Kelly's criticism, inveighing “everyone should heed General Kelly’s warning.” The decision by the U.S. Supreme Court this past July - controlled by Trump appointees and giving the president “presumptive immunity” from prosecution for any official actions he may take as president - makes Trump’s dictatorial ambition even more tangible.
Concerns about immigration don’t explain away a vote for a man who repeatedly praises Russian dictator Vladimir Putin (calling Putin’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine “genius”) to such a degree that, in a 2016 conversation, former House of Representatives Republican majority leader Kevin McCarthy was recorded as saying that he believed Trump was on Putin’s payroll and which prompted Malcolm Turnbull, who served as the center-right prime minister of Australia from 2015 to 2018, to confess that “when you see Trump with Putin…he’s like the 12-year-old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team…It’s really creepy.” Trump is still the same man who said he “fell in love” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about whom Trump recently declared “Kim Jong Un speaks and his people stand up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
Expensive groceries do not explain away supporting a man responsible for the June 2022 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule the Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion, a move that has led to draconian restrictions on reproductive healthcare in many states and, as a direct result, the preventable deaths of woman in states ranging from Texas to Georgia.
No, there is no sugarcoating it. Many millions of our neighbors endorsed putting the safety of their daughters in the hands of a rapist, putting their economy in the hands of a failed businessman and bullshit artist and putting our national security in the hands of a Kremlin proxy. Though the 2016 election - where Trump lost the popular vote but scraped by through the electoral college - could be dismissed as a fluke, this time he won a majority of votes in a variety of states in different geographic regions.
It was a curious election. Though Trump in fact received almost a million votes less than he received during his losing bid for reelection against Joe Biden in 2020, the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris hemorrhaged a shocking nearly 12 million votes from Biden’s 2020 total, her support eroding among Latinos, Asian-Americans and young voters. My own demographic, white men, remains cartoonishly wedded in the majority to the former and now-future criminal-in-chief. African-American and Jewish voters, who recognize Trump for what he is, proved the block most solidly in defense of U.S. democracy, though Trump's share of the vote of African-American men also grew. Despite the crowing of the far left and activists critical of the Biden admisniration’s support of Israel’s horrific war in Gaza (dovetailing nicely with the glee of the Israeli extreme right), both groups barely figure as rounding errors in the final tally, with the Assadist/Putinist Green Party candidate Jill Stein - who Trump repeatedly praised - actually losing almost 7,000 votes from her 2016 results in Michigan and with the pro-Palestinian caucus now having to deal with a man who has plainly stated his hatred of Palestinians and Muslims, vowed to ban refugees from Gaza, called on Israel to “finish the job” and whose son-in-law has suggested the mass deportation of Gaza’s population to the Negev desert in view of Gaza’s “very valuable” waterfront property.
No reasonable person can argue that, in the runup to the vote, many traditional media sources did not also fail to accurately describe Trump for what he was.
Despite the evidence of his obvious criminality and authoritarianism, unlike in 2016, the coverage of the election this time around was, from many traditional media sources, abysmal and engaged in a systematic normalization of Trump and his depravities. Under the leadership (if one can call it that) of Joe Kahn, the fabulously wealthy son of the late Leo Kahn (credited as the co-founder of the office supply retail company Staples), the New York Times has consistently underplayed many of the most outrageous statements and behaviors of Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. Earlier this year, Kahn scoffed to National Public Radio of “the view that many on the left have…that Donald Trump is an existential threat to our society.”
The day after Trump spoke of his fantasies of violence against Liz Cheney, for example, the lead story on the New York Times homepage was “Trump Courts Apolitical Young Men.” Regarding Trump’s discursive and often violent verbal meanderings during his rallies, the Times referred to them glibly as “improvisational departures.” During the Vice Presidential debate, as J.D. Vance claimed falsely that Trump had lost the 2020 elections, the Times instead headlined their coverage that Vance and Democratic VP pick Tim Walz had argued “over how to improve Americans’ lives.” [By way of justifying the baseless rumour that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and dogs, Vance blithely admitted lying, telling CNN that he would “create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”] When Trump gave a speech of blood-curdling violent incitement against immigrants in Colorado that would not have been out of place at a Ku Klux Klan rally, both the Times and the Washington Post virtually ignored it. In one September Op-Ed in the Times, Anna Paulina Luna - a raving far-right ideologue congresswoman from Florida who lied to her constituents that Trump “won” the 2020 election, calls herself a “pro-life extremist,” opposes aid to Ukraine and repeatedly lied about her life and family history - was referred to as just a simple “Florida mom.” A steady drumbeat of Op-Eds attacking Harris were also a part of the Times’ recent coverage. No less shameful, after Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, executives of the Bezos-owned space exploration company Blue Origin met with Trump in Austin, Texas. Bezos later issued a simpering congratulations to Trump after the latter’s electoral victory.
But, of course, as wide as their reach is, most people don’t get their news from the Times or the Post. A friend of mine who was recently reporting from North Carolina spoke to me of how she met an electorate in large part divorced from reality, simply refusing to believe in the (very modest) U.S. unemployment rate of 4.1% (compared to above 6% in Canada and above 7% in France) or that the robust U.S. economy, far from being a basket case, continued to provide the engine for global economic growth. Many seemed sold on Trump’s view that the nation was a “garbage can.”
As Renée DiResta, the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, wrote recently, “the right has invested, since 2016, in building participatory, activist, factional social media networks that are directly tied into its ‘small batch’ propaganda media ecosystem (hyper partisan outlets, Substacks, Rumble) and its mainstream outlets (Fox, OANN, etc) + elites. Things move from one sphere to the next: rumors are picked up by the propaganda machine if useful. Memes shape the messaging. The narrative is tight: there’s a cinematic universe of lore. The influencers boost each other. The left continues to sit in divided spheres…Institutional media struggles to tell deep stories - there’s no cinematic universe or sustained understanding...And the institutions themselves are largely absent…or, more recently, cowed.”
Nowhere has this been more the case than in the far-right sewer that Twitter has turned into since it was purchased in October 2022 by drug-addled billionaire Elon Musk - who has been in regular contact with with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin since late 2022 and recently sat in on a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. [It was Trump’s attempted blackmail of Zelenskyy into starting an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter in exchange for military aid that led to his first impeachment in 2019, even as his own children raked in millions overseas business deals.] Once global village square, the platform is now something like a Der Stürmer or Radio Mille Collines for the terminally uncool and terminally unfunny bros who now can find one another and hit without the fear of ever being hit back
Despite the fact that he has successively driven Twitter (now called X) into the ground - last month, Fidelity Investments estimated X is worth nearly 80% less than when Musk bought it - Musk has still turned his toadyism for Trump and his reactionary ideas into cold hard cash, with the avaricious South African becoming became $15 billion richer upon Trump’s election as shares of Musks’s automotive and clean energy company Tesla surged. Becoming even more delirious in his visions of vindictive grandeur, after Trump’s electoral victory Musk declared that Special Counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice Jack Smith - who has been overseeing investigations into Trump's role in the 6 January U.S. Capitol attack and alleged mishandling of government records - “cannot go unpunished.”
But none of that - none of it - exculpates U.S. voters from their catastrophic and ultimately self-destructive decision on 5 November.
Trump has promised to deport 11 million people from the United States, an amplification of his previous horrific policy of family separation that led to a government-sanctioned mass kidnapping spree of children from their parents at the border during his first term. During a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this past February, the odious Stephen Miller - who served as Senior Advisor to the President during Trump’s first term and who seems desirous to play Himmler to Trump’s Hitler - talked about establishing “large scale staging grounds” - concentration camps - “for removal flight” locales “where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to move those illegals home.” By one assessment, if implemented as stated, the plan would lead the state of Florida alone to lose about 5% of its population, or about 1 million undocumented residents, leading to a collapse of industries such as agriculture and construction. A recent analysis by CBS News concluded that apprehending and deporting 11 million people could cost U.S. taxpayers nearly $400 billion (yes, you read that right), so, clearly, steering the U.S. fiscal ship would be a low priority.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy theorist and depraved dauphin of the political clan turned Trump acolyte, told NPR that the new administration would recommend getting fluoride out of drinking water and give out “information” on vaccines. Kennedy is said to be reviewing candidate resumes for the top jobs at the U.S. government's health agencies for the incoming administration.” To give you an idea of what lies in store for the United States, when the Canadian city of Calgary stopped adding fluoride to its water in 2011, the need for intravenous antibiotic therapy by children to avoid death by infection rose 700% at the Alberta Children’s Hospital.
This is what many Amercians voted for: Internment camps, midnight raids, economic dislocation and collapse, medical quackery and mass death. If the incoming administration's vows are to be believed - and there is no reason to think they are bluffing - they are going to get it, good and hard. One is reminded of the observation of John Adams, the second President of the United States, that “it is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy…Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.” But at least in a sense we now know what we are facing. As a friend of mine in West Virginia wrote to me after the vote was in, it is not always the worst thing to see the forces arrayed against you when they finally take their masks off.
So in the coming months and years, those of us in the minority who believe in things like civil rights, reproductive rights and the rule of law are going to have to guard our own emotional well-being somewhat carefully against what will no doubt be a serious assault. My advice would be to step out of the virtual world in every sense. Take a walk in the woods, swim in the ocean, go on a hike in the mountains, for the glories of this country’s natural world are a manifold and they can’t take those away from you.
On a local level, we can also all make a very tangible difference in the communities we interact with every day. I write these lines in Baltimore, where groups like Intersection of Change seek to serve some of the most disadvantaged communities in the city. In my hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Church World Service works to welcome refugees, immigrants, asylum-seekers and other uprooted people within the United States. In my former home of Miami, Dade County Street Response offers free medical care and legal advocacy for those most deprived. In Austin, Casa Marianella welcomes displaced immigrants and promotes self-sufficiency by providing shelter and support services. In the Mexican border cities of Matamoros and Reynosa, The Sidewalk School works to ensure the safety for asylum seekers in the region. Nationally, groups like the reproductive healthcare organization Planned Parenthood continue to wage the battle for the simple right of women to control their own destiny. I’m sure there are many organizations in your hometowns if you look for then. They will all need our help and we should get to work quickly by offering it in our areas of expertise.
Though you may feel like it, you are not alone. As someone who has had cause to do a lot of thinking about the meaning of life and mortality in recent months, all we can do is make the time we have on earth count for something greater than ourselves and this extends beyond national politics to the local and personal level, as well. And never forget, joy and love and empathy and compassion are also forms of resistance.
I send you love and solidarity.
In strength,
MD