Advice from Carole Cadwalladr
Friends have already secured permanent residency in Canada. Others are headed there in January. But then they have the means. Following post-election racist texts targeting Black people come a spread of similar intimidating texts targeting Hispanic and LGBTQ people. They warn recipients they have been “selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp.” The FBI still does not know their origin. “The FBI did not say whether it believes the offensive messages to LGBTQ and Hispanic recipients are from the same source as the previously reported messages,” NBC News reports.
Some of my LGBTQ friends were concerned even before this report.
In this threat environment, Carole Cadwalladr offers “How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world.”
The Guardian investigative journalist acknowledges that her list is an homage to Timothy Snyder and his 2017 “On Tyranny.” His first rule for surviving a tyranny is the now-famous: “Do not obey in advance.” Serendipitously, Snyder called her as she was crafting her own list on how to survive what comes next (for however long it lasts). Snyder’s updated piece of advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”
Many of Cadwalladr’s rules are familiar. Others, more practical than one might see elsewhere, since she was been the target of a SLAPP suit over her 2019 TED talk. A couple in particular caught my attention:
8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.
And this:
11 Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.
Cadwalladr has been there.
You’re next
But the message that stood out to me most in Cadwalladr’s list, and may to those of us not (immediately) planning on leaving the country, is this:
10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.
I wrote The Niemöller Countdown a week ago and urged readers not to wait to speak out until they get to the Jews.
Listen. Digby and I treated the threat letter I received from a Trump lawyer in August 2019 largely as a joke. Standard Trump operating procedure. Threaten a lawsuit against someone without pockets deep enough to resist to get them to back down. We simply got caught in the fallout of a Trump tantrum against NBC-Universal.
That was then. Now Trump is drawing up enemies lists that we are not likely high-profile enough to be on. Then again, I would have thought we were too small to notice in 2019. As Cadwalladr warns, “Know that you’re next.”