Is the one-man rapid response team part machine?
The Old Man: Nice shootin’, son. What’s your name?
RoboCop: Murphy.
Went out for dinner last night. Looked around the restaurant and said, “This is what it’s like living in a dictatorship.” Normal to most appearances. Except it’s not.
“We are all afraid,” Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski said on Thursday. She took a long pause to consider what she just admitted aloud. “And I’ll tell ya, I’m often times very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.”
Well, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut is not afraid. The one-man rapid-response team has been everywhere except El Salvador lately speaking out against the criminal Trump administration. Perhaps he’s part machine. This long thread from Thursday afternoon is a solid indictment (with recommendations for action at the end).
We were warned. Half of voters didn’t listen. Murphy is not dancing around the descent info fascism led by Donald Trump’s.
Thank God for Mike Luckovich without whom the sanity of many would be lost.
Donald Trump is wiping his ass in public with the “due process” clause of the Constitution while his staff looks on admiringly. He has the unquestioning support of Vice President JD “slippery deception” Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the “utterly reprehensible” Attorney General Pam Bondi, propaganda chief Stephen Miller, spokesliar Karoline Leavitt, and, of course, Border Czar Tom Homan.
The only thing American about them are their birth certificates.
4/ The modern, time-tested way to destroy a democracy is NOT a coup or burning down the Parliament or a public confrontation with the judiciary.
It’s a slow methodical campaign to weaken the structures of accountability necessary for the political opposition to win elections.
Murphy lays out his case:
11/ This is all happening so fast it’s hard for the public to see it all as part of one plan. But it is. And the press, lawyers, colleges and opposition political groups don’t have to be DESTROYED in order for this plan to work.
12/ They just have to be weakened enough so the tools of accountability don’t work anymore. The press can’t tell enough truth. The lawyers won’t protect our rights. Campus protest disappears. Opposition funding dries up. We still have elections. But the regime always wins.
Trump? “He’s an idiot.” So much is happening at once that it is clear whomever is stage-managing this multi-front assault on constitutional order, it’s not him. But it matters less which Wormtongue is whispering in his ear than it does what we can do to stop it.
Murphy offers his take:
13/ How do we stop it? First, though solidarity. Each set of institutions can’t let the regime pick one off from each others. The legal profession failed miserably at this this, but the universities can model a collective strategy to fight back and win.
14/ Second, through mass mobilization. When hundreds of thousands of people rally against this kind of assault on democracy, history shows it works. There is a strange, magic power to mass activation which makes supporters of the regime start to jump ship.
15/ Third, through risk taking by political leaders. No citizen will take the risk to mobilize if leaders are playing it safe. This means speaking daily truth to the regime and taking tactical risks (like voting against the CR or boycotting the SOTU would have been).
16/ I believe those three steps, taken together, will arrest Trump’s assault. But if it doesn’t, then civil disobedience. And this conversation will need to happen sooner than we would like. We still have the power, but we have less time than most think.
Tomorrow is the 250th Anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. A quarter of a century later, there are still royalists among us trying to restore the monarchy even while waving flags and celebrating the start of the Revolutionary War.
See you in the streets tomorrow.
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Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
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Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense