Nine True Things
By the end, we will know the difference.
My old friend Josh Berthume is back after freaking us all out with “7 Hours in November,” his pre-dystopian analysis of Election Night. This week, he checks in from Denton, Texas with nine true things. That’s us below, me on the left, him on the right, back in the day when we had faith in the inner workings of the clock.
by Josh Berthume
Here are nine true things:
One
The drive to open schools from the Trump administration is dangerous, recklessly and willfully ignorant of obvious risks, and entirely driven by politics.
Schools have been criminally underfunded in this country for at least a generation. Teachers were severely underpaid even before doing their jobs involved taking on life-threatening risks. Because there is no coherent, coordinated, federal response to the pandemic, there are no mechanisms to improve school facilities to make them safe enough to re-open any time soon.
Sending kids back into schools in these conditions recklessly endangers those children, their teachers, and their families.
Two
No amount of lost socialization or educational quality makes the risk of death or lifelong maiming to students, teachers, administrators, staff, and their families worthwhile.
That this risk is being forced upon us is criminal.
Three
These points can be and are true alongside the truth that parents who cannot stay at home with their kids and engage in remote learning have no good choices. Many parents have no other option but to work out of the house, and as a result may need the school to serve as childcare in the middle of an ongoing public health emergency.
The fact that these parents are forced to make this choice is awful. That many of them must return to jobs and workplaces which are also fundamentally unsafe is unforgivable.
The situation we are in is an unconscionable failure of government. It didn’t have to be this way. Now, the government that failed to perform its most basic responsibility is forcing everyone into more danger for political reasons, and lying for political reasons, both of which create even more danger and unnecessary deaths. Our government did not create the pandemic, but many people died because of our government’s initial, critical failure. Even more people will die because the government chooses to keep failing, because they refuse to admit they were wrong.
They could still fix it, right now. They could shut the country down for two months, pay everyone to stay home, use the DPA to make testing gear and PPE, build a real contact tracing program, cancel rent, suspend mortgages, and support businesses. They could do it. We absolutely have the money to do it. They are choosing not to do this, and then forcing people through the willful engineering of society-wide existential threats, into even more danger.
It is important to keep these truths in your mind, as the Trump administration spends the next weeks and months telling us they had no choice and there was nothing they could, and that they in fact did a great job and that it is safe to send kids back to school. They didn’t. Their policies are killing people, and they could do many things which would not kill people at any time, and they are choosing not to. If you wanted to look at it in a craven, cold, political vacuum: It would even be politically good for the Trump administration to change course and do the totally doable things to get the outbreak under control, but they’d have to admit they were wrong, and so instead they will end up killing tens of thousands more.
This fall will be worse, and that’s six weeks away. The policies implemented (or not implemented) now -- and those who decide to implement (or not implement) them are directly responsible for the deaths we see now, and those to come. The Trump administration could be using federal resources to solve this problem. Instead, Trump is using those resources to engineer civil unrest.
Four
Peaceful protestors should not have to anticipate, accept, or withstand criminal violence and attacks from federal and/or local law enforcement as officers make active attempts to incite violence through police riots. Also, peaceful protestors should absolutely be allowed to resist detention, defend themselves, and flee when unmarked armed men of unknown origin attempt to kidnap them, and they shouldn’t be under any obligation to respond to questions from these people, or tell the truth.
When federal agents attack or arrest the press or legal observers, or they destroy medical supplies and attack or obstruct medics, they should be criminally prosecuted. Until there’s a real process for visiting actual consequences on rioting federal police, this unconstitutional imbalance of power must be addressed.
The person currently helming DHS (despite no actual authority to do so) is a former lobbyist named Chad Wolf. One of his current deputies is Ken Cuccinelli, who had previously also been unlawfully appointed to run US Citizenship and Immigrations Services by Trump in June of 2019. Without a hint of irony, Cuccinelli posted a picture on the internet of gas masks and a shield, declaring that they weren’t for peaceful protest but “preparations for violence.” He is among those visiting violence illegally on these protestors. It is an active disinformation campaign in which they, without hesitation, teargas moms and mayors, and then make a point publicly laughing about it afterward.
Agents of the state wield the awesome, crushing power of the state. When they do so illegally, inhumanely, violently, and in direct and obvious violation of the Constitution, their immunity from prosecution and any guarantee of compliance can no longer be assumed due to station or office.
If an illegally deployed federal agent shoots a peaceful protestor in the face with munitions that can break skulls, cause brain damage, blind, and kill, they currently suffer no real consequences. If an otherwise peaceful protestor picks a tear gas canister up and tosses it back in the general direction of illegally rioting police, that protestor can be charged with felony assault. This is objectively wrong, by any logical or humane assessment. It also represents an incident in which the designed imbalance of power between agents of the state and individual citizens is completely invalidated by the illegal behavior of the state’s agents.
In a democracy, those who wield the power of the state must not be allowed to do so without boundary or restriction, and must suffer the most severe consequences when that power is abused. That any attempt to protect or defend oneself from such abuses is illegal must change.
Five
Federal personnel deployed illegally in American cities must be stopped, by arrest if necessary. These forces are being deployed for purely political reasons; the deployment itself and the tactics they are being directed to use are designed to foment civil unrest and urban conflict. It is an intimidation tactic, a play to reinforce a media narrative with propaganda and disinformation, and a tolerance test wrapped up in one tidy package.
If this is allowed to continue without serious consequence, the Trump administration will absolutely keep ramping things up until they either find a limit, or decide they no longer care about where the limit is.
This is definitely about the election, at least for Trump. For his enablers and the more ambitious ones at his table like Stephen Miller, this is a fever dream fantasy of fascism they’ll take as far as they can.
Six
If you think Tom Cotton, Dan Crenshaw, and others like them -- despots-in-waiting much more capable than Trump could dream of being -- aren’t watching this and forming opinions about what they might be able to get away with a few years from now, you are fooling yourself.
Seven
If you are wondering if all of this means Trump will really do anything to swing the election in his favor, believe it. He will. There’s a reason the GOP is planning to train and deploy 50,000 “poll monitors” and it is, at the very least, voter suppression.
Eight
If you’ve been wondering when you should finally get worried about all of this, we’re there. The time has come.
As I write this, the ACLU went to court less than 24 hours ago to prevent federal agents from attacking or detaining journalists and legal observers in Portland. This activity is illegal anyways, but a federal judge, for some reason, had to rule on it.
A few hours later, the news broke that US Customs and Border Patrol was dispatching a “tactical team“ to Seattle in anticipation of protests this weekend. The so-called Special Response Team deployed by the Trump administration has a similar mission to those federal agents inciting violence in Portland.
Nine
Donald Trump, being robbed of his rallies and suffering in the polls, is no longer really running for re-election. He is instead dedicating his efforts to maintaining a grip on power.
By the end of this, we will know the difference.
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