Be Not Afraid

There is a panic blooming in the American news media over Donald Trump. The new year has begun with an avalanche of commentary asserting Trump’s restoration is inevitable and catastrophe pre-ordained. Much of the coverage is deeply idiotic and all most all of it is apocalyptic. The overwhelming point of view seems to be that American democracy won’t survive a second Trump presidency. 

I have made multitudes of comments that express the gravity of my concerns and deep worry about the consequences of a second Trump presidency, but I believe I must be more careful and precise as the possibility draws closer.  

Donald Trump’s election would not kill democracy like an auto ignition button turns off a car engine. It is more accurate to say that Donald Trump will use his power to assault freedom and liberty for his own gain. His goal will to be accumulate as much power as quickly as possible by attacking every law, norm, institution and individual who has opposed him by inflicting consequences aimed to silence and stifle dissent. His extremist movement has a plan to fundamentally dismantle the American civil service within six months and fill the government with people who have a higher loyalty to an individual — Trump — than the US Constitution. It is a dangerous situation to say the least. 

I also want to offer some broader context that I think is important for the Biden campaign to absorb and address in the fight ahead. 

First, the American society is Earth’s most complex and highly decentralized. It was built bottom up, not top down. There are 90,075 local governments, 50 state ones (plus the District of Columbia), and thousands more regulatory bodies that exist under a rule of law that is as complicated as anything that has ever existed in human affairs. The federal government is comprised of co-equal branches of government, and the House of Representatives controls the money. 

The American system is resilient and specifically rigged to thwart the intentions of a tyrant. The dangers posed by Trump and his extremist cadre are very real, but the reality is that the darkness will not fall overnight. The country has existed in a state of crisis at many points in its history, and all the while, life went on and forward with familiar daily routines.

There seems to be a notion that is perpetually repeated by the commentariat based in New York and Washington, DC, that democracy will be extinguished in an instant. One moment we will be America, and the next, Trumpistan. There seems to be a suggestion that all of us will lose our liberty at once when the reality is that encroachments on liberty are well underway in America. In fact, millions of Americans have never tasted democracy, or exist at its periphery where freedom has always been an abstract concept in a world where agency simply doesn’t exist.

There are a few legal cases that demonstrate in practical terms what the loss of liberty in America will look like, where it will be felt, and by whom.

There is a very disturbing prosecution underway in Warrren, Ohio, against a 31-year-old Black woman who miscarried at 21 weeks and five days at home after two visits to the hospital in the preceding days. Here is a summary from The New York Times:

A grand jury in Ohio is expected to decide Wednesday whether to indict a woman who miscarried a nonviable fetus at home and has been charged with abuse of a corpse in what experts say is an extremely rare interpretation of a state law.

The woman, Brittany Watts, 34, of Warren, Ohio, was arrested in October after passing a fetus in her bathroom and trying to flush the remains down the toilet. The case has been before a Trumbull County grand jury since November. If convicted, Ms. Watts, who is Black, could face up to a year in prison. She has pleaded not guilty.

According to a report by the Trumbull County Coroner’s Office, Ms. Watts was 21 weeks and five days pregnant when she was admitted to St. Joseph Warren Hospital in Youngstown, Ohio, with vaginal bleeding on Sept. 19. Doctors determined that her water broke prematurely and her cervix became dilated; Ms. Watts also had a significantly elevated white blood cell count.

Doctors were able to detect cardiac activity but “recommended she be induced and deliver the fetus despite its nonviable status,” the report said, because she was at significant risk of maternal death, sepsis or “complete placental abruption with catastrophic bleeding.”

During her initial visit to the hospital, Ms Watts left after waiting eight hours for a hospital ethics panel to determine whether to induce her pregnancy without legal ramifications because she was on the cusp of Ohio’s viability timeline, 22 weeks, Ms. Timko told The Associated Press. The hospital declined to comment.

Ms. Watts went home to “process the information she was told,” the coroner’s report said. She returned the next day with the same symptoms and left a second time without treatment.

On Sept. 22, Ms. Watts passed the fetus at home alone in her bathroom and returned to the hospital, where she received a dilation and curettage, also called a D and C, to remove the placenta, according to the report. The hospital notified the Warren City Police Department about the miscarriage and “the need to locate the fetus.”

The police found the fetus clogged in her bathroom toilet, the report said, noting that Ms. Watts had told police that she disposed of what she believed to be the remains in a bucket in her backyard. The police then took the entire toilet out of the home and took it to a morgue, “where it was broken open” to retrieve the fetus, the report said.

The autopsy report found that the fetus had died in utero — before delivery — because of complications of premature rupturing of the membranes.

The police charged Ms. Watts with abuse of corpse as a felony under a law adopted by the Ohio Legislature in 1996. The case is being prosecuted by the Warren City Prosecutor’s Office.

The elected prosecutor’s statement about the matter is terrifying. According to The NYT: 

Last month, Dennis Watkins, the Trumbull County prosecutor, a Democrat, said his office was “duty bound” to follow Ohio law and move forward with a grand jury proceeding.

This is monstrous. It is morally reprehensible and an assault on an American citizen, a Black woman, in 2024.

The prosecutor is certainly not duty bound to prosecute this matter, and his lack of judgement, restraint and discretion is appalling. The voters of Ohio should remove him from office because his statement renders him manifestly unfit to serve as a prosecutor, yet there he sits.

This is not what liberty, justice and freedom look like.  This is what autocracy looks like. This is the type of big government that should terrify every American, and particularly women. 

The most shocking revelation in the story is that medical treatment was postponed while an ethics panel debated for eight hours around what to do regarding Ohio’s restrictive abortion laws since the 22-week line was 48 hours away. 

It is all well and good to talk about the democracy that will be lost, but it is the case that it has already been lost for millions of Americans.  Upon what planet can it be argued that Ms. Watts is a free person? The state’s jackboot is on her throat. She is being criminally prosecuted, and it is going to be a fact of life for millions of women if the authoritarians advance their cause. Like always, poor women will pay the highest price – with the top of the pyramid belonging to Black women who enter every pregnancy with higher risks than other women. Subjugation is a concept that is alien to many Americans, but familiar to many. Soon it might be experienced by millions of previously apathetic people who never imagined their life, property and even freedom would depend on the whims of zealots.  

As a practical matter, Donald Trump’s return to power will create scores of Brittany Watts. Women will be hunted by zealots at a federal, state, county and local level. The dangers will multiply exponentially for minorities, gays, lesbians and other vulnerable populations. There are millions who already know what it is like to live in an America where their democracy has been stripped away. Soon, millions more may know.  

Though I am a White male, I will be a target for retribution, along with thousands of people who have dared to oppose Donald Trump. We will be targeted by violence, threats of violence, and government retribution for asserting our God-given right to dissent and oppose. Over the past seven years, I have been advised by the FBI that I was on the target list of a Trump-inspired bomber, been subject to character assassination and assassination bait with fliers accusing me of being a pedophile and a grifter. Human excrement was mailed to my home, and ultimately, the place where my children sleep became public in a news story on FOX, other right-wing media outlets and also with The Associated Press — a supposed MSM organization. This drove more threats and compelled me to move. I am not alone. Everyone who has spoken out against Trump has been threatened, abused and harassed by a vicious mob often incited by Trump, who is running explicitly to punish his opposition and destroy dissent. All of this is designed to intimidate critics into silence and force them to abdicate their constitutional rights to speech, assembly and conscience.

The answer to that proposition is the same as it has ever been for any American patriot: NEVER.  For me, the aggression of MAGA extremists simply increases my defiance. 

It is important to understand what happened to Michael Cohen, the former Trump fixer turned fierce opponent who has paid a high price for his misdeeds and courage. He was almost certainly abused, jailed, and put in solitary confinement by federal authorities on orders from an American president who routinely threatens to jail his opponents.  

It is important to understand what is happening to Hunter Biden. He is being prosecuted for charges that no other person in America would ever be charged. It is an outrage, and it is a dangerous harbinger of what is to come. The Justice Department is weighing its decisions, trying to balance its political equities, and the result is a travesty that endangers every American who can be the next victim of a prosecutor’s whims and calculations. 

When reporters, writers and members of Congress are intimidated by a party, a movement or a mob of thugs, their democracy is stripped from them as it is from the 40 percent of the country who don’t have $400 for an emergency. Tens of millions of Americans are imprisoned by algorithms, and millions more can’t open a savings account because the biggest banks in the world don’t think they are worthy enough to have one. They are called the “unbanked,” and are sloughed off to cash checking centers and payday lenders. They lost their democracy a long time ago.  

FDR understood democracy at a moment when it was imperiled. He knew how to talk to Americans about it. It is essential that President Biden find his way to this place.  Here is how FDR framed the choice. There is no reason why this won’t work today. In fact, it fits perfectly:  

In those days we feared fear. That was why we fought fear. And today, my friends, we have won against the most dangerous of our foes. We have conquered fear.

But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places. In our own land we enjoy indeed a fullness of life greater than that of most Nations. But the rush of modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.

Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776—an American way of life.

That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy—from the eighteenth century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man's property and the average man's life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.

And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own Government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Since that struggle, however, man's inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people.. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age—other people's money—these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor—other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

The pursuit of happiness is more than words on old parchment. It is the American creed and cause. This must be the cause of the Biden campaign. Democracy must be defended by renewing its promise and restoring faith in its virtue by making it real in the lives of all Americans. This dangerous moment in America and around the world does not call for panaceas, but rather, sincerity and conviction.

There are millions of words that have been written about what Joe Biden’s message should be, and what his strategy must be. The answer is simple, and can be found in a song. The test for Joe Biden won’t be whether he can sing the song, but whether he can feel the message and convey it. This is Joe Biden’s song — “I’m On Your Side” — written by Michael Franti:

I’d encourage you to listen to the song, but if you’d prefer, here are the lyrics:

If you ever lay awake at night
Wondering if we'll be alright
I'm on your side
I'm on your side
If you're sitting at the kitchen table
Counting up your bills to pay
I'm on your side
If you're staring at the TV stations
Wondering how we got this way
I'm on your side
I'm on your side

Can you hear me?
Is your heart beating like a drum?
Can you hear me?
I don't care where you come from
I am on your side
I'm on your side
I'm on your side
I'm on your side
I'm on your side

If ice is clinking in your cup
You're thinking about giving up
I'm on your side
I'm on your side
And if you got the news today
Doctor's telling you to pray
I'm on your side
I'm on your side
And if you feel the pounding fear
When flashing lights are in your mirror
I'm on your side

Can you hear me?
Is your heart beating like a drum?
Can you hear me?
I don't care where you come from
I am on your side
I'm on your side
I'm on your side
I'm on your side
I'm on your side

If you're weary and you're broken
And you don't know what to hope in
If you're willing and you're able
Come and meet me at the table
If you've lost your way to laugh and
Can't remember how to dance and
If you're out of tears to cry
Take my hand
I'm on your side

President Biden should embrace this song, and reconnect to what the American people have always admired about the working-class guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who suffered in public and rode the Amtrak home to raise his kids. The Biden campaign doesn’t need to conduct more dial tests and focus groups. It needs to listen to Michael Franti.

A message that makes clear that no movement that wants to take away your rights can ever be on your side can help build an American coalition that will choose the only candidate on the ballot who stands for the American way of life. 

Remember though, democracy has never existed for many, and is being stripped from many more. If the state of Ohio can perpetrate this injustice and cruelty on Ms. Watts, no one in Ohio is safe. 

When democracy disappears, safety goes with it. This is the most important lesson in the annals of human history and the central teaching of the 20th century. 

This is why no matter what happens, no true American will ever submit to any government that is illegitimate, corrupt, malicious and tyrannical. 

The Democratic Party is deeply flawed, but it stands for the American way of life, and it stands alone today in its defense.

Yet, the cause of this election is not the Democratic Party or President Biden. The cause is the United States and the Union, which is under threat and must be sustained by the devotion of the American people. It is time for us to unite around the most important identity of all — the one that unites us. We are Americans, and that is the greatest cause for which any of us can ever fight. It is our gift, inheritance and obligation. 

Let us perfect the Union and never stop fighting towards that goal no matter what, ever. There will be no Trump dictatorship in this land no matter how loud the furies roar. We live in America. There will be no submission to the ambitions of tyrants — ever. 

There is a great contest and choice ahead. 

Be Not Afraid. 

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