EVERYONE I KNOW feels the same way about this heinous nasty mess that is being flung at us from the White House: Life has gone haywire. We are being assaulted mentally, emotionally, and physically by a man who should never have been president of anything, much less this country. Good leaders are supposed to lift their people up, not tear them apart. Our other national traumas—like Vietnam or Watergate—were more focused. We weren’t constantly shredded by psychic shrapnel.
As We The People have discussed and read, the Trump Regime—by weaponizing Elon and his Merry Band of MuskRats and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought and his merciless Christian nationalist Project 2025—is devoted to creating chaos for us all, so we will be broken by loss of jobs, loss of resources, loss of hope. So we will cave with fear and anxiety. The point? So the United States will become an autocracy run by White Men for the benefit of the wealthy class (as Bernie Sanders would say, the Oligarchy), with women and people of color to serve them.
It’s like Margaret Atwood actually channeled The Handmaid’s Tale foretelling the future that none of us ever imagined would come to pass.
As David Atkins said in Washington Monthly…
“…the project is about deskilling America: reducing white-collar work through AI and remote job cuts, destroying universities, starving higher education, using tariffs to wall off the country as a manufacturing-and-extraction island, gutting the cities, and pushing men into manual labor while nudging women into domestic roles. It’s not incoherent—it’s a plan being implemented methodically.
“This isn’t about economic efficiency. It’s about political control. Education has always been a democratizing force. It creates citizens who are harder to intimidate, likely to demand fair treatment, and less willing to obey autocrats. It delays childbirth, disrupts patriarchal family structures, and builds civic coalitions that threaten right-wing hegemony. That’s why it’s under attack. The goal isn’t to elevate the dignity of manual work—it’s to eliminate choice, to collapse the pathways that allow people to escape precarity and assert autonomy.
“A key pillar of this reactionary movement is masculinity politics—an obsession with control over women and the restoration of a pre-modern vision of gender roles.”
Beth and Gloria Steinem at Ghost Ranch
We’re back to misogyny. In Gloria Steinem’s latest newsletter, she published a letter from 1971 in which seven waitresses had written to thank her for everything she was doing for social justice.
It’s not enough that we work hard for ridiculously low wages, we’re expected to softly come-on to male customers so that they’ll spend more and return again.
Ms. Steinem is a master activist and journalist, but she didn’t have to be a seer to understand that anti-woman, anti-worker dynamic—then, now, or in the future.
A couple of other prophets—Bernie and Robert Reich—have spent years trying to warn us that we should be paying attention to the welfare of working men and women, because Wall Street and corporate greed were eating us up, at the expense of the Working Class. Economic injustice has been damning for Americans, especially those who live paycheck-to-paycheck. Those citizens have been simmering for a long time, and now they are mad as hell.
Unfortunately, most of us wouldn’t listen to Sanders and Reich, and the Democrats—stuck in a system that was killing our party and our credibility with voters—derided these soothsayers as Radicals. How radical do they seem now? My answer is, they weren’t radical enough.
“If there is going to be class warfare in this country, it's about time the working class won that war.”
--Bernie Sanders on Twitter/X, August 21, 2019
On November 19, 2011, Robert Reich delivered a lecture on Class Warfare in America at Berkeley. Here it is:
In other words, these White Men creating havoc in our lives and country today are the ultimate modern American exploiters. Hard-core working-class MAGA followers made the mistake of believing that Trump and his henchmen were on their side—they have never understood that the GOP’s point is to keep them down, ignorant, and powerless. Then, of course, there are the groups these White Men want to completely eradicate—the old, the disabled, the others.
And the reason these White Men are doing all this is to officially put White Supremacy in place, and for the rest of us to be more or less their slaves
I’M TRAVELING THIS week, so this is a short post. I just want to mention a couple more things:
1. The Face-Off Protests showed us our tribe. We are loud, strong, and proud. When you’re being pounded with Trump’s hatefulness, don’t forget that commanding energy.
2. The hideous tariffs that Trump announced and then took back—again—which would destroy the U.S. and world economies, brought out every Trump team member to publicly flail in defending what was basically the lack of coherence in enacting them. There is no peep of truth in what they were saying. There was no dignity in their flailing. In reality, what Nicole Wallace said on MSNBC was more likely the case: “They are looking for the hostage taker to find a dignity-saving off ramp.” How can they save dignity when there was never any to begin with?
Americans, Chinese: Keep your shit!
I remind us all to take a breath. The chaos is exhausting. We Resistors are in this for the long haul, and we’re no good if we’re lost in the electric haywire that has been planned to upend us. So it couldn’t be more important that you take care of yourselves. Spend time doing something that makes you feel good.
Please send any questions or comments our community can address and respond to.
Peace. We are one.
Love that you included the speech by Robert Reich.
I am feeling the drain, it's so hard to wake each morning and wonder, what will they do to crush us down more today? I agree, we need to learn how to balance.
When you mentioned the Handmaiden's Tale and it made me think of a popular photo that has been floating around for years of Iranian women before the revolution compared to the way they dress today. I always found that horrible and never thought we would end up like that, until now? I see how close we are to falling into something similar, maybe not the exact dress (the hijab to cover our hair) but who knows.
Yes, they are constantly throwing more and more at us each day, it's not far from the famous peom, First They Came by Martin Niemöller .
I wrote a response on a poetry substack I am a member of and would like to share it, it is from my heart.
What struck me most was one of Pádraig Ó Tuama lines "We enter the room of such care through different doors, for sure, but I struggle to know how to uplift care when brutality seems the fluency and empathy is made an enemy."
I could see all the different doors opening to us, each from different experiences and all enter with the same intentions. We meet to love and give hope, to sooth by listening, to encourage those who feel lost and hurting. We are grouped together to fight off the evil and encourage those of us who hearts are breaking because our empathy is overloaded with pains. Those doors welcomed us into the room filled with warmth and comfort of love. It is our hope.