The Ministry of Truth
They're trying to erase our history and our very culture, just as they have erased Jackie's Rose Garden.
On Tuesdays, I leave my home in the north San Fernando Valley (not far from where I attended elementary school) and drive down to an old art deco building in LA’s Koreatown neighborhood near Wilshire and Western, where I take a class in oil painting. And when that’s done, I head downtown where my husband works for a midweek dinner out.
The drive takes me through MacArthur Park, the site of Trump’s military cosplay designed to terrorize the city’s immigrant community. It’s been four weeks since ICE goons descended on a peaceful city park and scared a bunch of school kids who were there for summer camp. And Tuesday afternoon, the corner of Wilshire and Alvarado - which used to be densely populated with street vendors and folks going to and from work - was still a ghost town.
This week, Dear Leader decided to launch a military invasion on Washington, DC - a city that already has to deal with the trauma of just having him and his minions living and working there. He claims that he’s doing it because crime is out of control. Statistics show that to be just another lie: Crime in Washington is at a ten-year low.
As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat points out:
Many strongmen got their start and established their authoritarian credentials by making the cities they governed into laboratories of repression, corruption, and other tools of illiberal rule. Think of Vladimir Putin as Mayor of St. Petersburg, or Narendra Modi as Chief Minister of Gujurat. Rodrigo Duterte first hired thugs to do his dirty work and converted the police into a vigilante force when he was Mayor of Davao off and on between 1988 and 2016. The “death-squad mayor,” as he became known, then nationalized those practices as President of the Philippines.
In America, where Trump started his political career “at the top,” things are unfolding differently. The administration is asserting its power over municipal and state authorities and making Democratic-led cities into showcases of authoritarian repression. The aim is to habituate Americans to see militarized cities and crackdowns against public dissent in cities as normal and justified.”
Trump has also figured out that the best way to deal with pesky facts is to just get rid of the fact-finders. That is what he did when he fired the head of the BLS for publishing lousy numbers on the economy. His nominee for her replacement is a Heritage Foundation guy who makes lots of appearances on Fox News, but doesn’t seem to understand statistics. And that is also the idea behind his “review” of the exhibits at the Smithsonian, which is a government institution tasked with collecting, archiving, and educating the public about our nation’s history.
Karoli, Aliza, and I like facts. And history. And people who care about the well-being of other people. Who fight for the truth and the means to make this nation a better place for us all. This is a dark time, and it’s easy to slip into the darkness. That’s why we need our communities to pull us out and bolster us - because we need to be strong for what’s still to come.
And we need to laugh at what is genuinely funny, like Governor Gavin Newsom’s epic trolling of Trump on social media this week. Nothing pisses off a strongman more than people laughing at him, so this is welcome. The fact that these “mean tweets” are also a preview of how California plans to fight back against his efforts to rig the next election makes them all the more powerful. We’re looking forward to the reveal today of those “beautiful maps.”
One Last Thing
Thirty minutes before we recorded this week’s podcast, Aliza sent us a link to this post from educator Lisa Corrigan. We did not get to it until the very end, and there is actually enough here to do another whole hour. The point is: Trump is actually very, very weak and we have multiple opportunities for fighting him - so many that we can’t show you in one screenshot. View the whole thing on Facebook.
