Now is Not the Time for Fear
They Can’t Silence Us All
I started writing on Substack a little over a month ago with the idea I would post something inspiring from the resistance every week. It should be easy, I thought, as there’s so much to write about! But I launched Liz Field’s Trip in mid-June, and then had a mental health crash.
Everything about the Trump administration finally caught up to me, and the resistance energy I’d felt for the first five months of this regime drained out of me faster than an unhinged Trump rant on the Fox News channel.
At the same time, the summer heat and oppressive humidity finally arrived in central New York, and my body and mind needed a little break. As I sat immobile for long stretches of time in front of the AC, I’d stare into space and wonder how much more I could take while worrying about how we’ll get through this regime. Though I like to stay informed, I had to greatly reduce my news intake in order to protect my mental health.
Today, as we approach six months into this regime, something has shifted to improve my outlook on things. It’s not that anything is better. In fact, things are far worse.
As we know, SCOTUS is giving Trump unprecedented power to decimate our institutions and ignore Congress. Once Trump bullied through his Big Bullshit Bill, and with the power of SCOTUS behind him, he’s been able to unleash utter terror on immigrants, among others.
ICE agents are rounding up families, students, farmworkers, and thousands of others — both documented and undocumented, committed of crimes or not — ignoring due process and deporting them to random countries, or sending them to Alligator Alcatraz, a literal concentration camp in Florida.
The rights of transgender people are being decimated day by day in endless battle after battle. As the mom of a trans woman, I’ve lived in constant fear since November that one day I’m going to wake up and find my daughter’s been shipped off to some gulag somewhere. Maybe you think I’m being hyperbolic, but why else is the Trump admin trying to subpoena the medical records of trans people while building domestic concentration camps and denying trans people the correct gender marker on their passports?
Women in the south are facing higher maternal death rates and pregnancy complications due to restrictive abortion bans, and as was the heartbreaking case of Adriana Smith, who was declared brain dead and then kept alive for months against her family’s wishes to gestate a 9-week old fetus, women are not even seen as human in some places — we’re just incubators.
Our health is being further jeopardized by Robert F. Kennedy and his MAHA anti-science and anti-vax policy. As measles returns for another encore, Andrea Love breaks down how the recently passed bill will destroy the health of Americans for years, possibly generations, to come.
I could obviously go on and on with all the terrible and terrifying things the Trump regime is doing to our country and the people in it, but Heather Cox Richardson’s interview with Jim Acosta yesterday helped me see more signs of hope.
As the uproar over the Epstein files heats up and Trump’s base starts to turn on him even more, Richardson and Acosta take a moment to honor the great Congressman John Lewis five years after his passing and discuss the “Good Trouble” protests that took place across the country.
Acosta and Richardson remind us that while it’s important to pay attention to what the Trump regime is doing, we must not let it define us or what this nation is. This regime, Richardson says, is more about the show and the showy, scary tactics than having real power. We the people have the real power.
The show is there to try and induce fear not just in immigrants but in American citizens, so we are too afraid to act. Richardson reminds us that our country has fought off fascists before, and we can do it again. We must not let this stop us from acting. We must keep fighting because there are so many more of us than there are of them, and we will win.
Acosta and Richardson discuss the Epstein scandal a bit more, and then get into a great discussion on how important independent media is, especially in today’s world, where so many journalists are being fired because their corporate overlords are bowing to Trump, such as what happened this week with CBS firing Stephen Colbert after he called them out for settling a lawsuit with Trump, and when public broadcasting like PBS and NPR are losing congressionally-appointed funding because Trump doesn’t like what they’re reporting to the American people.
As someone who once tried to make it as an independent journalist just as the Internet was heating up and the rate for journalists went from around $1/word in print to maybe $.05/word online if you were lucky — and then watched as most investigative journalism was further destroyed by social media “influencers” — I, for one, am both alarmed at how much Trump is attacking the media and pleased as punch that independent journalists are finally having a day, and I highly suggest everyone take 45 minutes to hear what they have to say.
How ironic that the same corporate media that managed to silence independent journalists in the 90s and 00s and then bought social media influencers in the 10s and 20s would now find themselves in competition once again with investigative journalists who have gone out on their own, using platforms like Substack.
Thousands of people followed Jim Acosta here when he left CNN. He wasn’t afraid to call out Trump, which is what is needed in a free society, but CNN felt differently and was bowing to Trump as he took office for the second time.
Previously, millions followed Dan Rather on Twitter when he came out of retirement and started posting. Now he’s over here, too, with half a million followers, making it clear Trump isn’t going to be able to silence everyone.
And while I think we need a better platform for independent journalists than Substack or some other big tech, it works for now and helps all of us independent writers and journalists. I follow many other writers and journalists here — I love Erin the Morning for their reporting on trans issues — and hope you’ll do the same.
Let’s keep supporting independent journalism. Let’s remember the Trump regime cannot silence us all.
Until next time, thanks for reading.