Please, please, please spread the word to neighbors, colleagues, family and friends about their rights, here is Make the Road’s immigrant defense manual.
The Republican party has engaged in
rampant sabotage of the democratic system: fundamentally reshaping the
judiciary, shifting the ideological center of the Supreme Court
rightward through dubious appointments, and engaging in a sustained
campaign of voter suppression including the tampering of ballots, the
stripping of powers for incoming Democratic legislatures, and recently,
gaining a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court which allows
gerrymandering to take place of the explicit purpose of favoring one
party. This, of course, effectively allows for racially-motivated
redistricting. And now, in Oregon. American fascists have managed to use
the threat of lethal force to unilaterally kill popular legislation
proposed by a supermajority of elected representatives, underwritten by a
majority of the citizenry.
This
is the groundwork for a nightmarish conclusion to 2020, whether or not
Trump wins a second term. Trump himself has expressed a coy fondness for
international authoritarians who can disappear journalists and overturn
election results, free from the shackles of public consent. His
followers revere those reactionary death squads who ran roughshod over a
population opposed to their hateful politics, killing and brutalizing
their enemies with the support of heavily-armed police. His supporters
in the state are gradually entrenching their power to the point that one
party is significantly more powerful than the other, despite widespread
public opposition to their agenda. It is imperative that liberationists
of all stripes recognize the situation we are in: while lawless thugs
terrorize political prisoners in concentration camps at the border, the
government is teetering on the precipice of a chain-reaction breakdown.
The major threat of fascism comes from its appeasement. Each time
fascist elements are capitulated to in good faith, each time they swear
their latest transgression or violent outburst is the last, each time
the public defends them from their critics on the grounds of civility or
fairness, the fascist learns that they are exempt from the rules of
society, and they rush to take advantage of the privilege afforded to
them. They will accept nothing less than absolute totalitarian control; a
nation in which whites are held superior in the written and unwritten
law alike, where women are kept in bondage through the denial of their
autonomy, where heteronormativity is a prerequisite for full
citizenship, where Christian theocracy is common law, where Fortress
America is somehow both in command of the international community and
simultaneously divorced from it as an isolationist ethnostate.
This
is not hyperbole, but the actual rationale being expressed by the
Republican platform and its legislative decisions. We have already seen
the mad twinkling of this vision in the eyes of Trumpists; we now live
with the terrible knowledge that millions of Americans were always
feigning their polite “cultural conservative” objections, always waiting
for the chance to carry out an ethnic cleansing campaign, to watch
starved babies die in the arms of their mothers for daring to pollute
American soil with their presence. If 2020 becomes a year in which
fascist violence and political arson escalates, or worse, is paired with
an electoral victory, there is no telling what nightmare will be born
from the failure of our society to stand firm and proclaim, “no
farther.”
