All The Lines Were Crossed Long Before This, But We Have Kept Going Along

I had an interesting experience Tuesday morning. I sat, having my coffee, scrolling social media (something I keep saying I'm going to stop starting my day with), and I came across a combination of posts that I felt captured or described something.

For whatever reason, the algorithm decided to serve up three posts by people who are cable news commentators. I don't follow cable news commentators on social media, so the only reason I can think this would have been served to me is some other political content I interacted with. I don't follow cable news commentators for the same reason I don't watch cable news. I don't find the framing of politics as being solely about the two parties, electoral politics and the horse race competition of it a framework that speaks to reality with much efficacy. It encourages both a faith in and reliance on power that are counterproductive to the political needs of the majority who do most of the living, working and dying between the borders of what we call a country. It's a conception of politics that limits the imagination to the probable, the options that favor these already powerful institutions, whether or not it achieves much of anything for the rest of us. It excludes possibilities by how comfortable power is with them, which is counterproductive when it comes into conflict with the needs of we, the people, but also erodes the appetite for holding power accountable, which as we're experiencing, becomes a structural weakness in democracy itself.

All three of these posts followed a similar format. They were clips from the panel discussions which make up the bulk of cable news programming. You know what I'm talking about... one or two liberals, one or two conservatives, an anchor/journalist supposedly acting in some capacity as moderator. All three featured conservative commentators telling blatant, outright lies, and then the commentator who'd posted the clips, responding with something factually accurate. The posts are meant to convey the person who posted these clips are bringing truth to the table and/or owning the fash on cable news.

It struck me though, how blatant the lies being told by these conservative commentators were. I understand why, it's de rigueur for the conservative movement now, to the degree it's just accepted. They're at war with the concept of verifiable reality as much as they are everything else, and attacking verifiable reality just helps them achieve a number of their goals. If you're the only ones with both the will and the power to enforce the version of reality you have concocted, there's no reason not to. It goes back to the fact that if power can do it, it eventually will, which is why it has to be ruthlessly restrained.

I can't help but wonder why anyone who ever entered any field related to the idea of information as a public good, whether it be journalism, academia, activism, would continue to engage in this ritual though. I don't subscribe to the idea that everyone who's ever gotten involved in journalism or whose career path lead them to be a commentator on cable news began those careers with a nakedly rapacious greed and hunger for prestige. Often, questions like, "Why would they keep showing up to participate in this circus?" are answered with accusations about greed and clout seeking. I'm not quick to believe the easiest answer, especially where individual human behavior is concerned. Some of the people who end up in these commentator positions are offered them because they've done very good work in their field in the past, which is what qualifies them for the offer. I also find it disingenuous, in a way. The majority of the people in the country would find justifications to take a new position if it added to their financial well being, and advanced their careers in a way that opened as many opportunities as being on a cable news channel does. We might not be taking positions with the kind of reach into public conversation, the influence on public information, but that would also be an easy justification. It's the same mechanism, psychologically, morally and economically.

I'm also familiar with the arguments about why it's good to do things like go on a cable news show and push back against blatant lying. If someone doesn't do it, then all the audience is going to see is the blatant lying. They'll never be introduced to the fact based reasoning. There is some degree of truth in this. It's one of the reasons we venerate the idea of a free press, whether or not it is or ever has been quite free.

At the same time, I have to wonder what the point is in doing this when the platform, the cable news channel itself, treats blatantly lies and the factually accurate as worthy of equal attention, and as equal in the necessity to present them to the public. It's not "objective" as so many of the defenses of these practices claim, unless factuality and truth have no value. It's certainly presenting "both sides," but it's not objective. It is deciding the lies has the same weight as the truth, the factually accurate, the verifiable. At what point does the continued decision to give time and space to people who so blatantly lie and attempt to mislead the public step over the line into treating truth, the verification of factual claims and anything like a verifiable reality as without value? This is, of course, a rhetorical question, because we've passed whatever boundary that is, and I know this because of the other things that were popping up in my morning feed.

In December in Minnesota, a conservative grifter reapplied the strategy James O'Keefe pioneered in the early 2000s. He claimed daycares run by Somali immigrants were committing fraud, taking federal funds, not providing the service they claimed. He visited one such daycare, where he was denied admittance, and claimed he saw no evidence of children being on the site. That it was in the midst of the Christmas holiday, and many daycares are not providing care, didn't matter. That he was a strange man, showing up demanding access to children didn't matter. The Trump administration, recognizing the opportunity to deliver on one of the goals of its Christian nationalist base, then froze federal funding for child care, claiming states can prove those funds are being used for the intended purpose to have funding restored. That those same Somali daycares have since provided proof, has changed nothing. Opportunity knocked. Fascists took it. They're not going to be bothered by facts in their march to consolidating power. Authoritarian movements of any variety never let reality stand in their way.

It was also January 6, 2026. The five year anniversary of the attempted insurrection at the US Capitol, committed in an attempt to stop the certification of a legal election.

We all saw this with our own eyes, live on television. To say this is not what happened would be akin to saying the World Trade Center was not hit by planes on 9/11. To say this is not what happened would be to say Sally Ride is currently at home with her grandchildren, enjoying their company, serving them sugar cookies and pie.

Yet for the last five years, the American right, and their political arm, the Republican Party, have denied this. In what is likely the most spectacular failure to meet the responsibility of the moment, the Democratic Party not only failed to prosecute the people responsible for planning this attempted insurrection, they then managed to lose the next Presidential election to the man who had the most to gain from it, who helped plan it and send his supporters to enact it. The Democratic Party have spent the last five years acting as if this is not what the Republican Party did, and as if it's not plainly trying to rewrite the history of, before our eyes.

Democratic Party leadership have spent the last year making the public case that there's little they can do, about anything, without their "Republican colleagues" or "friends across the aisle." They haven't attempted to use the vast, incredibly wealthy network they have, as one of the primary political institutions in the nation, to find another way to either create pressure on those Republicans or to give the people who have been bearing the brunt of the consequences of the slide into fascism more ability to shield themselves. They have been parliamentarians yelling about line items on the docket, to people who have manufactured consent and disappeared accountability for a mob sent to kill them. Congress, with one or two notable exceptions, is filled with creatures of a cowardice so complete, its breathtaking in its lack of even basic self respect and interest in survival. This fascist movement tried to kill them once. They have somehow not been moved to urgently prevent fascists from another attempt.

The Democratic Party has been playing a similar role to those "liberal/lefitst" commentators on cable news. Despite how drastic the changes have already been, the erosion of democracy, the consolidation of power, they just keep showing up, and acting as if changing their behavior is neither necessary or would have sufficient effect to be worthwhile.

Earlier this week, the administration ordered a strike on Venezuela, and for it's president be captured and brought to the United States to face drug trafficking charges. The reason given for this was a sloppy combination of those claims of drug trafficking, the number of Venezuelan immigrants entering the United States, and oil. The administration is saying the United States is going to run Venezuela, a formerly sovereign nation, until such time an orderly turn over to... someone, can be completed. That the president only recently pardoned the former leader of Honduras, who was convicted of drug trafficking, is of little matter, apparently.

We will, of course, be sending in US oil companies to take over production of oil in the nation. In his speech following the news of this violation of a nation's sovereignty, Trump made sure to give the impression this was owed, after Venezuela nationalized their oil production, throwing a number of international oil companies out. The administration are now making overtures toward acquiring Greenland, saying publicly at least, they'd prefer to buy it, but also being clear nothing is off the table. Denmark, which Greenland is part of, is a NATO member, as is the United States. Attacking a NATO nation would render the US without any of its former allies, leaving us to decide whether our future is better served by allying with China or Russia or creating some new alliance between the three, which would throw the political balance of the globe into chaos. None of them are talking about this. Stephen Miller, a close advisor to Trump, has openly stated that power is its own justification. The powerful take what they want, and that's the way life is, according to Miller.

Also on January 6, one of the Republicans who voted to deny the certification of the election an insurrection attempted to prevent, in favor of the lies, the false narrative that there was some kind of rampant voter fraud, was killed in a car accident. Somehow, it was decided simultaneously across the news industry that this little nugget of fact was not to be mentioned in the articles about his life, career and death. One of the many ways we all participate in obfuscating and creating the space for the lies that veil the truth is acting as if describing someone's life and actions accurately is speaking ill of them in their death. If the truth shines ill on us on our graves, we were the architects of it in our lives. I have trouble seeing how this is so different from the White House deciding to put up a website portraying Ashley Babbit, who died in the midst of committing insurrection, as a martyr to a righteous cause. Decorum, civility... so often these days are the red carpet for the fascist agenda.

None of the people responsible for creating the conditions that convinced Babbit in the righteousness of that cause or orchestrating the attack on the Capitol have been held accountable. She's dead. Some of the people as responsible for her death as the officer who pulled the trigger are serving in the Executive Branch. Others are enjoying lucrative careers laundering reality. Babbit no longer has the option to decide what to participate in and the devils who lead her to this have never stopped their work.

Yesterday, news began to emerge that ICE shot a woman in Minnesota. She was engaged in what is nominally a Constitutionally protected practice of recording ICE. I say nominally, because even since the Supreme Court decision which said this was a protected practice, law enforcement's ability to violate what is categorized as a First Amendment right has relied more on the ability of the person's whose rights were violated to mount suits, to gain public support and the like. It's not a right we, the people or our institutions have guarded with much zest. Then again, neither we nor our institutions have zealously guarded many rights. An ICE agent approached her vehicle, and shot her in the head. A different person, recording ICE at the time, caught it on camera. Caught on camera as well, was ICE preventing a physician from administering medical care to her. Once again, we can see with our own eyes.

Kristi Noem, currently the head of DHS, and Donald Trump both issued statements calling Renee Good a domestic terrorist. There is, at this point, zero evidence to suggest that, but we all know, we've come to rely on, evidence not being a particularly necessary aspect of the reality Trump, the fascist movement supporting him or any of his flunkies project. Once again, the proof of our own eyes is being rejected in favor of a narrative preferred by fascist authoritarians.

This morning CNN interviewed Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Yesterday, during a press conference about the murder of Renee Good by ICE in Minneapolis, Frey said, "ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis." During this morning's interview, the CNN anchor asked Frey to reply to Washington Republican's comments that Frey was just making things worse, creating more tension. Again, it doesn't matter that the Republican Party has openly backed an authoritarian's assault on Constitutional and democratic order. It doesn't matter that the administration the Republican Party has backed unquestioningly couldn't have had time to have any idea who the victim was, and still labeled her a domestic terrorist.

We've reached another point of opportunity for this fascist movement. If it can create enough confusion, if it can make the lies slide by, even if they are so blatant everyone knows they are lies, it means domestic terrorist is another magic totem for them, like immigrant, like far left, like woke. It will mean all they have to do to justify whatever actions they take is invoke it. It will demonstrate they have achieved the conditions where any and all dissent can be painted as justifiably murdered or caged.

Add to this, that AI generated images purporting to show the ICE agent responsible, with his mask removed, raced across every corner of the internet in a few hours. None of them can be confirmed, and they are all different. Well meaning people, believing they were making it easier to be able to gain some kind of accountability for a murderer, were participating in this disinformation, which is likely to have a number of different kinds of fallout, not least of which is endangering innocent people who have nothing to do with ICE or the shooting. This will only add to the ability of the fascist movement to paint any opposition to it as extremist. Confusion favors fascists, because it is always part of their strategies.

Maybe all of this won't happen though. Maybe there will be enough pushback, the agent responsible for this will face prosecution of some kind. Maybe his identity will be revealed quickly.

The institutionalists will say, if this agent is prosecuted, and especially if he's convicted, the system has worked as intended. They will continue saying this after the hundredth person is shot and the hundredth agent is prosecuted, though I would wager what little I have that somewhere around the twentieth prosecution, convictions will start getting harder and harder to deliver. Whether prosecutions and convictions will even matter, we have yet to see, considering the president pardon 1500 people who attacked the Capitol. Between 2020 and 2024, our institutions collectively decided giving billions more to police who've been committing extrajudicial executions on camera for decades was the solution to those extrajudicial executions, and every prosecution is declared the system functioning effectively, despite no end to those extrajudicial executions. The system is working as designed, indeed. This same logic has been applied to every variety of First Amendment violation that can be found. If a lawsuit is won against a jurisdiction, it's proof the system works, despite the fact that it changes none of law enforcement's behavior in the face of ballooning costs to taxpayers who pay those judgments. And again, access to this accountability, depends on the ability of the people whose rights were violated to do be able to do things like hire lawyers, attend the long, protracted court proceedings and so on.

LA burned in 1992, after a jury found the police officers who were videotaped beating Rodney King were found innocent. George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013. Black Lives Matter first protests were in 2015. It is now 2026, ICE agents are murdering people and the administration is calling those murder victims domestic terrorists, because they've learned from this history.

This is the ninth person shot by ICE since September, under the auspices that an immigrant horde is here to attack our "way of life." This is itself a fabrication, passed along by influencers and news media. It has no basis in anything one might call a verifiable reality. I'm not sure exactly what the number is, but there is a number, an important number. It is the number where ICE agents victims become no different than the victims of police killings. It's the number of dead where school shootings become part of life we accept and say there's nothing we can do to stop them. At some point, there are enough dead, the bodies pile high enough, and we start to call the theater of the absurd attempts to address the reasons for those deaths. They just become a thing we live with.

It is plainly naive to expect this will be the total of it. Power never passes up an opportunity to expand its reach. A grifter with a camera was opportunity enough to stop all funding of childcare though.

Even if should ICE agents begin to face prosecution, those prosecutions, the press and news around them will be an opportunity for them to further the narrative of dissent or attempting enable accountability as domestic terrorism. It will be the same process it has been, repeat the lie, insure the media outlets friendly to them are repeating the lies ad infinitum. Then, when they begin to arrest people calling dissent, attempts to engage in oversight or create accountability, there will be nothing new, nothing shocking about this. It will be an already established narrative, a lie they are telling daily, and pundits on cable news channels will debate it. Democratic lawmakers will be saying they can't believe their Republican colleagues are going along with, history will judge them poorly and so on. None of that will change the fact that the murders and the arrests, people being disappeared for dissent, as they had been for their immigration status.

I'm sure I'll write about it, unless of course I'm among the disappeared. We'll all post on social media about it. The gnashing of teeth and the beating of breasts will go on, as well it should. If nothing else, at least there's some chance a record will last so that the generations who come later, after this all collapses can realize we weren't all in favor of any of this, and we just didn't know what to do.

I think about all of this and it all has in common our participation. The liberal commentators and pundits keep participating in the segments where cable channels keep inviting conservatives to tell the most obvious blatant lies. Democrats keep participating in the performance of democracy, as if there is some kind of compromise possible with an institution empowered by a movement whose entire organizing principle is domination. We all get up, go to work everyday, say our platitudes to each other and on social media, as some kind of attempt to signify our fear, our disgust, what sense of solidarity we feel or believe in.

It occurs to me, this is real power. No matter how obscene this all becomes, we have no power to withhold our participation. The power is to force us to participate, and now, to participate in our own oppression. We get up each day, and because we have to, we go and we participate in all the things that make the machine function, that fuel it and maintain it. If we don't, our survival comes into question. The most basics of food and shelter become out of our reach otherwise. And that, that is the ultimate power, isn't it? No matter how absurd, how insane this all gets, we don't have the power to say, "I won't participate in this until something is done to rectify the horrors being perpetrated against us." So, the machine being used to run us down, to erode or demolish the most basic concepts which we have believed, which we have been told govern our lives, continues to do so.

It is antithetical to Americans, to even consider this. The idea we might be able to remove our labor, because some line has been crossed in the morality of our politics. This, it seems, doesn't serve us though. It certainly serves power. It serves the wealthy, the government they've purchased. It looks very much to me, what we're seeing is that without that option, without the power to choose to withhold our labor, there is no way a people is going to ever be free, and there is certainly no way a nation or culture is ever going to remain free.

I believe, it is because we see this as, we call it, politics. We do not see it as the safeguarding of our rights. We do not see it as the responsibility of holding power to account. This is not, in The American Way, what life is about, despite what history has to say about power wielded without accountability, about the degree to which the lust for power and wealth is relentless, constant and patient. History says there are always people for whom no amount of power is enough, and they will do anything in their quest to maintain and expand whatever power they can accrue.

Where we are now is the long result of wealth and power chipping away at what guardrails had been in place, limited as they were in who they were designed to protect. This is what power and wealth do. Always, over time, they work to consolidate more of both, because it's what they are designed to do. Without the ability to withhold our labor, all we're really doing as they consolidate that power and wealth, is fueling the machine that gives them power. This is part of the problem of American Exceptionalism, as if the wealthy and powerful of this Great Nation would somehow be so much different than the wealthy and powerful of so much of human history. How could they not be so loyal, so patriotic to this nation, because it's uniqueness, it's specialness is so overwhelming, as to not undermine it? This is, and always has been a fiction. It is like saying some of us stopped being human, because at some point, some human beings became American.

Maybe we can be forgiven this, to some degree. They have certainly spent many years and many fortunes in making these delusions part of the foundation of reality for a great many of us. They have, as they always do, built on existing narratives, created new iterations to fit culturally and so on.

This is also to say nothing of the fact that a sizable minority of people in this country believe it is pre-ordained, the will of God, and it is their duty to see their understanding of God's Kingdom created here. It is their holy duty to install an authoritarian government, run by principles of their particular religious persuasion. I don't really care that they call themselves Christians, nor do I care whether other people who call themselves Christians say these people aren't. None of that matters quite so much as the plain fact that they have no tolerance for the concept of a self governed people and nation, rights and decency.

Neither of these groups are going to be reasoned with. Neither are going to suddenly decide compromise is a better option. They've already decided that's not the case. Dominance becomes the organizing principle of your movement, when you've rejected compromise. The rest of us have to wake up to the fact that they have made this decision, that to their minds, be they the wealthy and the powerful or Christian white nationalists who believe it their divine duty and right to enforce their beliefs on the nation, they're not going to stop because we have the right discussion or we discover the right argument. The wealthy and powerful believe they are superior, and therefore deserve what they can take. The Christian nationalists, depending on the particular vein, either believe they're saving us all or that they too are better than us, because their God says so.

This isn't going to stop. It's not going to reach some point of stasis that isn't oppression, dominance, more genocide, more atrocities, unless we stop it. The lines were crossed long before most people realized it, and many of those lines, were fabrications of the illusion of American Exceptionalism to begin with.

The inability to withhold our labor is also necessary for them because it will always lead to violence. Very few people actually want to see widespread violence, much less participate in it. It's part of how authoritarians gain and maintain power. Contrary to the way we've been taught to fear each other by exactly the people we should have been afraid of, the overwhelming majority of us would rather not participate in violence. At some point though, there are always going to be people who recognize this cycle, and without enough of us to withhold our labor, they will be left with nothing but violence, because it becomes the only recourse. Because of this, because it's always a small minority, it's easy to demonize those who make this choice. It's something we've seen as part of the steady roll to this point, isn't it? Broken windows in businesses, as protest boils over at yet another example of rights denied, undefended, assaulted by the state or the corporate entities they serve, are outrageous.

Murder... extrajudicial killings by the state, the ritual abuse of our rights when we try to assert them, these things are impossible to stop. They are business as usual. These are things we must just live with, the chaff of the systems and institutions. Broken windows though, the instinct to respond to dehumanization in destroying the thing which is given more value, property, this is anathema. Verboten. Our lives are cheap. There are always more workers wiling to take our place. Emerson, a boy waking up with no mother because an ICE agent shot her in the face, doesn't matter. None of us matter in the quest for power. Billions of us have died without names transcribed in our history books are the testament to this fact.

It certainly seems we have very little choice but to start building the networks and structures which will allow us to do just that, withhold our participation, in the form of our labor. All the rest of this, looking at the current conditions, laws, rights, democracy... without the ability to withhold our labor, all those other things might as well be discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of pin. No people will remain free, without the ability to withhold their labor when power is abused.

I fear that if we don't begin to look forward to what kind of state, what kind of society we can build that will be able to withstand the long, relentless, consistent tests of how power might be grown and consolidated by those who believe themselves our betters, mounting an opposition to fascism will never be successful. Looking backward to the failed order, the state which lead to the failure this one is, doesn't take into account that it was unable to withstand this, and I think, the majority understands this. If we don't start imagining a new order, one that takes the lessons of the failed one we're living into account, what reason, what offer does any of us have for anything better for anyone?