When I was a child, I recall watching the 1996 Presidential election between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton. I was freshly five years old, and I got to stay up late if I watched the election results. I didn’t want to go to bed, so I watched and I asked questions. I asked who my parents voted for (Dole). I asked whether he would win (“No, probably not”). I asked why they voted for him (“Because we agree more with him than the other guy”). I asked if there had been a time where people thought he would win (“Not really”). I asked why the GOP ran him if he wouldn’t win (“Because it was his turn”).
I was kind of an annoying kid. But I learned a lot from watching: I learned that Bill Clinton was very popular (everywhere except my house). I learned that he could play saxophone (very interesting to me at the time). I learned that when you run candidates because it’s their turn, they lose.
I don’t know if the DNC ever really got the message on that, but we’re all paying for that now.
In a truly unprecedented event, California Senator Alex Padilla was arrested by federal agents for announcing himself and saying that he had questions for DHS Secretary Kirsti Noem. This is the first time to my knowledge that an American Senator has been arrested for this sort of action; plenty have been convicted of bribery, and a few for drug possession, but nothing like this.
This marks yet another day of firsts in a new fascist America. Truly, there isn’t much to say about this event in particular except to say that it seems like a flail of desperation from an embattled Presidency that looks more and more untenable as the month of June progresses. For six days now, lawful and peaceful protest actions have led the L.A.P.D. to carry out mass arrests and to brutalize citizens with batons, by stomping on them with horses, by firing 40mm rubber rounds directly at them from point-blank range, and more. These escalations are in no small part to a federal demand for a show of force, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s federalization of the California National Guard and Pete Hegseth’s authorization for the deployment of 700 Marines to Los Angeles. To be sure, there have been some protesters who have broken laws, a topic that I touch on in my recent piece about the government messaging surrounding those protests. Protesters who are committing civil offenses or violating laws like staying in an area where they are subject to arrest are not, by those actions alone, needing to be beaten or shot at to be corralled, and perhaps they wouldn’t be if larger eyes weren’t watching over the shoulders of local law enforcement.
Due to these escalations, other protest actions have sprung up across the country to be met with similarly overbearing responses. The intent here is clear: this administration wants citizens afraid. It wants citizens quiet. It wants citizens compliant. Including, obviously, people whose very jobs are not to be compliant but complainants, apologists and advocates for their constituents.
There will of course be people who say that perhaps the Senator was out of line in his interruption of the Secretary’s press conference. I will not argue this point. What I will say is that a Senator or Congressman being out of line is not something we traditionally arrest them for. Typically, a member of the political class is shielded in a position of privilege from following most laws — while they may follow many laws, single deviations from lawfulness are usually looked over, because they are a member of this protected group. We do not, without evidence of a crime (and typically a criminal conspiracy), charge Senators or House Representatives with much of anything. Politicians have walked away from DUIs, speeding tickets, simple affray, innumerable crimes over the history of the U.S. and we have accepted this as part of the American canon by now, rightly or wrongly.
The “uncharted territory” that I speak of in this essay’s title is of a targeting of political opponents, large and small. In America, we do not go to places where our political opposition lives and make gigantic shows of force — Nazis do that. We do not purge voters from the rolls in swing states to tip the scales in our favor — Communists do that. We do not conspire to prevent those with ideas different from us from being able to present themselves — juntas do that. Places with gulags do that. Our enemies do that. War-torn nations grappling for control do that. America doesn’t. We are above this sort of behavior, goes the story we tell ourselves. The problem is that America has not been itself in a long time.
The United States was never great for a large number of people who have lived here, but we are truly in perigee today, at least in White People Land. I like to call White People Land the space where most mainstream news and discussion exists. WPL doesn’t acknowledge many of the goings-on in the country, but it is a thermometer of where WP (White People) are emotionally and psychologically. Right now, it’s all over the place. Call your Congressperson. Write a letter, call in to the radio, hit the street. No matter what your opinion is of what is happening, speak up and let people know. Americans have to decide quickly what kind of country we want to have going forward, before the new iron curtain that just got put in gets too low. The longer we wait, the harder we have to fight, and the more likely we have to actually fight.
Stay safe out there.