Meanwhile, We the People have governing to do

 As callous as it sounds, the street murder of two US citizens exercising their constitutional rights is not the biggest threat facing the country right now. The regime has made a direct assault on free and fair elections by raiding the Fulton County, Georgia, election center and seizing ballots stored under seal from the 2020 election. The contamination of evidence means that any "revelations" by the regime are automatically suspect, but don't expect that to stop them.

The current occupant of the Oval Office has already said that he wished that he had seized ballots and voting machines in 2020 to prevent Joe Biden from taking office. Biden was confirmed as the winner of the 2020 presidential election numerous times, as the MAGA regime filed suit after suit, and lost all of them.

While much of the current brouhaha is driven by the thin-skinned and senile dictator's thirst for revenge against imagined wrongs, the forces that have slunk in under cover of his bombast have had their sights on limiting voting rights for decades. Each segment has their favorite targets: the religious right tends to want to keep women from voting. The white supremacists want to keep Black and brown people from voting. The corporatists want to keep the poors from voting.

We on the so-called left would prefer if the supporters of each and all of these enemies of liberty would stop voting that way, but I'd like to think that most of us recognize that blocking anyone's right to vote is a dangerous weapon, lest it be snatched away and used against us.

Unfortunately, we can't try to tell the oppressors that they will be no worse off, and perhaps better, by letting everyone participate. The super rich love being super rich. Falling back to merely filthy rich from obscenely rich would definitely impact their lifestyle. Insecure men who need women to be automatically subservient will have to face more and more women who have no need for them. White supremacists who want to relegate other races to a permanent underclass will have to abandon that notion. 

Elections aren't going away: authoritarian regimes need them to provide the illusion of legitimacy. Election subversion, on the other hand, is a key element in assuring that the designated winner has a comfortable margin. Deftly done, it can even give the opposition party a shred of hope that some day the system might go their way.

Close electoral margins in actual count give the regime the sense that opinion might really favor them, at least by a slim majority. That's why a big turnout is essential to lay down a number that is harder to deny and falsify. If they have to take away ballots by the truckload, it's harder to conceal than just lugging out a couple of file boxes late at night.

While we can fantasize about firefights at polling places, as MAGA supporters literally battle 2A progressives, such fireworks are highly unlikely. We've seen how voter suppression actually works: polling places scattered over hundreds of square miles; long lines; no food or water; maybe some goons in tactical gear slouching around. And ICE, if still cosplaying in full military kit and snatching people might grab as many brown voters as they can, holding them until election day is over. No need to stick their catch in camps or deport them. Just keep them from voting. Sure, there will be lawsuits, but it will be too late to change the outcome of the election.

White people should be fine as long as they (we) don't smart off or kick any taillights. But that puts a lot of responsibility on us to represent for our less privileged brothers and sisters who might be getting more shit as they try to make their way to the polls.

Maybe we reach a point where the supporters of the regime wear clothing or accessories that mark them clearly. A lot of them already do, but it's not a mandatory uniform item. If they adopt the attitude that "if you're not with us you're against us," and extend that to heavy peer pressure to wear the mark of their beast, anyone planning to vote against them will have to choke down that wardrobe choice to mask our intent.

Violence is always a possibility when dealing with people who glorify their ability to dish it out and take it. Maybe they can, maybe they can't, but it's central to their identity. Like any bully, they definitely enjoy beating up on someone they perceive as weaker. So maybe some self-dramatizing popgun patriot starts something somewhere, but it's unlikely. Don't want to risk messing up their costume.

A lot of polling places won't notice anything unusual at all. In my little town, people don't tend to put on their fight face for national elections. We save that for town meeting and school district hearings. Even then, it's been quite a few years since our last fist fight. And we don't have any brown people to exclude, even if someone was so inclined. That's one reason that so many people just chuckle about anyone who shows visible signs of getting upset at the problems we see on the news. It's still mostly theoretical to the people around here, so they treat it like a sport that may or may not interest them. That's a problem, but good luck figuring out how to instill a sense of urgency in a population so isolated for generations.

We are now living in prison

 We are living in prison. This thought struck me as I watched a video by a German immigrant to this country, regarding the recent travel advisories that Germany and some other countries have issued to their citizens who might be planning to travel to the United States.

So far, it's a minimum security prison for most of us, but law enforcement is steadily becoming more strict, especially regarding travel and border crossing. It's focused on foreign visitors, legal permanent residents, and naturalized citizens at this point. It's focused on brown people with tattoos. But perfectly Aryan-looking actual Germans, and innocuous-looking British citizens have been slapped into detention over issues that seem -- as reported to the public -- like things that could have been resolved far less drastically.

 Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney was detained for two weeks. Fabian Schmidt, a green card holder from Germany, was detained back in March when he arrived at Logan Airport on his way home from a trip to Luxembourg and is still being held. And, of course, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was snatched up in that collection of supposed Venezuelan gang members who were sent to prison in El Salvador. He has no criminal record, although he was contesting potential deportation proceedings resulting from an informant claiming that  he was a gang member back in 2019. The regime has said that his rendition was "an administrative error," but they can't undo it. 

Can't undo it? We're supposed to be the most powerful, respected nation on earth according to the current occupant of the Oval Office and his band of braying sycophants, but we can't call back one prisoner from a small country with whom we merely contract to outsource our cruel and inhumane punishment? 

Even traveling domestically, immigrants, legal permanent residents, and visitors on various visas need to carry portfolios of documentation, and even that may not be enough. Ultimately, the decision to deny entry or detain one of them lies with the individual agent with whom they are dealing. And once in the system it's terrifyingly difficult to get out, because our aspiring totalitarians ignore due process.

Kids are being snatched from schools. Workplaces are being raided. Kristi Noem has a different outfit every day to play Gestapo Barbie.

Airport security presents the highest risk because air passengers still receive the most scrutiny in the years following 9-11-2001. This means that Homeland Security gets a gander at you even if you aren't flying out of the country. If an agent decides that you look unsavory, you get special attention. Maybe you disappear.

Germans and Canadians and British people look like plain white folks. Authoritarian regimes are paranoid. In addition to the broad categories of public enemy that they might appoint (Jews, Roma, homosexuals, gang members, terrorists, trans people...) they will have private and specific enemies from within their own social classes: rival politicians, journalists, academics, business leaders who don't pay tribute... And they'll find ways to kick down at community organizers and the working class in general.

What we're seeing now is the beginning of general travel restrictions and the specter of abduction into a prison system run by officials who interpret the law at their whim. You could be anyone. If a front-line agent or cooperating police officer says that you look like a threat under one of their categories, you will disappear. The press release about it will make you sound suspicious. Think about it: you can describe anyone in a way that makes them seem weird and creepy. It's really hard to bring receipts to disprove any and all allegations.

As with anything: air crashes, massive highway pileups, and countless other genuine possibilities for catastrophe, the odds are in your favor, and thousands of people arrive at their destinations every day, no worse for wear than perhaps rumpled and sweaty. But it's worth paying attention to the fact that the current level of scrutiny at all points of entry and exit is beginning to corral us. 

The policies that subtly discourage travel form an interesting counterpart to the policies that discourage voting. Under the guise of "election security," laws are being enacted in state after state to require ridiculous levels of voter identification. At the national level, HR 22 in the House of Representatives amends the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require such elaborate proof of citizenship that women who took their husbands' name when they married may have trouble proving their identity satisfactorily to register to vote.

So...you shouldn't travel and it's at least a hassle if not downright impossible for some perfectly legal residents to vote.

The thing about totalitarianism and a police state is that they evolve gradually. Anyone sounding the alarm early, when the remedy would be fairly easy to apply through educated voters saying that We the People do not approve comes across like a paranoid weirdo. Sometimes, even the first victims don't identify the full extent of the danger. They focus on their own individual plight without seeing the broader systemic implications. 

We got broader systemic implications, people. You're probably fine. But you have no control over that. If you get caught in the machinery, you could end up in a cold cell while the government that could demand your release just shrugs, because you don't really matter to them, and never did.

The love of power has defeated the power of love

 When 50 Republican senators, plus Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, voted to kill the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act yesterday, they affirmed that holding office in a degenerating autocracy was better than living up to the ideals of fully inclusive representative democracy.

The Republicans are correct that they would have a very difficult time maintaining political office if they had to run on policies alone. Some Democrats as well would face greater headwinds in a truly reformed election system. Manchin and Sinema did not need to be among them, but they have to make their own political calculations. Elective office requires a particular skill set to manage the political maneuvering within the government itself as well as the perceptions of voters. All of those forces can distort a moral compass. It's obvious that this has happened to 52 people charged with making critical decisions regarding the present and future course of this country.

This failure will be laid completely unfairly at the feet of President Joe Biden. No political maneuvering can overcome the personal ambitions of officials elected to another branch of government. There is no carrot and no stick large enough to deflect the inertia of people who see a way clear to advance their individual gains, even at a terrible national and global cost.

It's popular to say that history will judge these people harshly, but look how long it has taken to bring shameful facts about our country's past into the public discourse. And we're still not able to face them rationally and eliminate their effects. Too many people depend on maintaining the fable. People whom history has judged harshly remain in the historical record and attract adherents as well as detractors. And that's if the philosophies and movements they represent haven't just kept on truckin' in a somewhat diluted or mutated form regardless of censure. Think of the "victory" over fascism in Europe in the 1940s and the continuation of segregation and bigotry in the rest of the "free world" thereafter.