I haven’t yet posted about the horrendous state of affairs involving Donald Trump being arrested and charged with crimes for expressing unpopular views and challenging the results of an election.
Please do not mistake my lack of posts on this topic as apathy about the topic, or worse, tacit approval of the events that have happened.
Rather, I have been so upset, angered, and physically sick to my stomach about what has happened that I have been unable to put my thoughts into coherent words and sentences.
In this blog post, I will attempt to do just that, because it is important to make it clear that I am not even remotely okay with what has happened, and continues to happen, in this country.
To put it bluntly, but in my opinion 100% correctly, the United States is a totalitarian dictatorship.
Over the past three and a half years, I have witnessed:
- The election of a president of the United States who believes that he has the right to require people to undergo medical procedures
- A nationwide campaign of obliteration of all public art that represents minority cultural and ideological groups and that allows members of such groups to feel accepted and included
- Mass arrests of dozens of people for the “crime” of holding a protest that advocated for an unpopular cause
- The arrest of a former president for the “crimes” of expressing unpopular views and challenging the results of an election
I state unequivocally that the things that are happening in the United States today, and that have been happening in the United States over the past three and a half years, are completely unacceptable, and I condemn them fully and completely.
What is happening in the United States is nothing less than a war on dissent. A war on unpopular minorities. A war on human diversity. A war on individualism, on individual rights, on liberty, on freedom. A war on the entire concept of being different, of being a rebel, of resisting authority, of thinking for oneself.
And the worst thing about this war is that the people who are most fiercely waging it are portraying themselves as fighting for diversity and inclusion, and their opponents as intolerant, discriminatory, and racist. Those who have most ardently advocated against respect for fundamental rights are portraying themselves as fighting for liberty, freedom, and bodily autonomy, and their opponents as authoritarians, Nazis, and fascists.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The people who advocate for the removal of Confederate statues and the replacement of Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day are the people who are truly intolerant, who are truly genocidal, who are truly discriminatory, who are truly racist.
The people who demand the violation of the fundamental right to decline medical intervention, who demand that all people’s bodies be forcibly penetrated against their will – and make no mistake, that is exactly what proponents of vaccine mandates have been demanding – are the people who are truly authoritarians, who are truly fascists.
The United States today is run, dominated, controlled by people with no moral compass and no logical consistency, people who practice a form of hypocrisy so blatant, so appalling, and so profound that it is shocking to witness.
The very same people who demanded that everyone’s bodily autonomy be taken away, and condemned those who dared to stand up to them as morons, idiots, racists, white supremacists, and fascists, did an about face to immediately commence pontificating about the importance of bodily autonomy, and accusing their opponents of taking away liberties and freedoms, when the Supreme Court made a decision that jeopardized unfettered access to abortion.
The very same people who praised and fetishized “resistance” when it came in the form of destroying public art that represented minority cultural and ideological groups (making these acts of destruction the exact opposite of resistance), viciously insulted as “insurrectionists” and “rioters” those who engaged in actual resistance to authority.
And when it comes to historical figures who engaged in actual resistance to authority centuries ago, the very same people described above condemn those historical figures as “insurrectionists” and “traitors,” and therefore unworthy of honoring or celebrating.
The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty are appalling. The people who run, dominate, and control the United States are using words to mean the exact opposite of what the words actually mean, and acting as if this is perfectly normal and the people who dare to question them are the problem.
People are ridiculed for using the word “tyranny” to characterize the things that have been happening in the United States… but it is 100% correct to characterize these events as tyranny.
I would argue that it is ridiculous for someone to claim that the things happening in the United States do not constitute tyranny.
The condition of the United States since 2020 has been one of authoritarianism, of tyranny, of totalitarianism, of complete intolerance for both human freedom and human diversity.
In the United States today, we live in a society that values conformity and compliance above all else, a society that is not only indifferent towards, but actively hostile towards, liberty and individual rights. Society demands that everyone be the same, that everyone follow the same norms, that everyone undergo the same medical procedures, that everyone live in the same way and think in the same way. It is treated as self-evident that everyone must undergo the procedures recommended by the medical establishment, everyone must follow the advice given by experts, and everyone must live under the policies that scientists decide will make people safest. What matters is that people follow norms, trust experts, and obey authority. What matters is that people silence their own feelings and perspectives and instead grovel at the feet of those deemed less “privileged” than themselves. No one is allowed to dissent, to rebel, to defy, to resist, to question authority, to think for oneself, to live in a way that deviates from the norm, or to be different from the majority in any way. These actions and attributes, which in my opinion are synonymous with being honorable and good, are instead equated with moral badness by a society that values nothing but conformity and compliance.
That is what I see happening in the United States today.
It is not acceptable. It is not even remotely close to being acceptable, and never will be. And I don’t want anyone to interpret a lack of writing on this topic, or the presence of writings on other topics, as acceptance. Because acceptance is the antithesis of how I feel about what is happening in the United States today.