Don't Need No Crystal Ball

Lori Lancaster | September 8, 2025
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Scott Hardie | September 10, 2025
I lack the vocabulary to articulate properly the profoundness with which I despise Donald Trump and the America that recklessly re-elected him, so I shall have to write less than the volumes that I ought to say. What has taken generations of difficult work and compromise and sometimes bloodshed to establish, Trump has obliterated in months. His annihilation of America's hard-earned place at the center of the world's economy, his driving away of all foreigners including the brilliant minds and motivated laborers that we'll need to maintain our society, his destruction of our shared institutions including most of all our mutual agreement about objective facts, and his bottomless need for more authoritarian power with ever-escalating danger to freedom and the rule of law, all feel chillingly permanent, in that probably none of us will live to see the damage undone in even one of these categories.

And then there is the unconscionable cruelty with which he has deliberately terrorized Latino people, who are one-fifth of the population! That America has a long history of atrocious behavior toward one minority group after another does not make this crime lesser; it makes it greater. We all know that this is wrong! It has been wrong every time! Future generations will hang their heads in shame about this, as we do (when we are honest with ourselves) about African slavery and Indian genocide and Japanese A-bombs and countless other mistakes. The crime of outstaying a visa or sneaking across a border hardly merits this highly disproportionate response by officials, and we know it, because we've had many opportunities to fix our broken and outdated system of legal immigration and we've deliberately chosen this route instead. Trump sabotaged last year's latest attempt to fix the problem reasonably, and I think it's clear that it wasn't just about campaigning on the border; it was also about "solving" the problem his way, with violence and inhumanity. Trump's campaign promise to restrict his immigration roundups only to felons was laughable; his denial of due process to suspected foreigners in flagrant violation of the Constitution is totally unacceptable. We are at a point where masked agents are grabbing anyone off of the street and making them disappear, with no authorities stepping in to end this, which should feel like ice in the veins to anyone with any sense of sense of history and where this is obviously headed.

I have it easy. I'm white and vastly less likely to be targeted. I'm financially secure and comfortable not leaving my home. I can, and mostly do, tune out the news because even glancing at the day's headlines leaves a pit in my stomach that lasts for hours. I can disappear for as long as I like into my projects (one of which is taking most of my spare time these days and is why I'm not more active right now), affording me a mental escape from the terrors of the world, and I do so because engaging with those horrors accomplishes nothing but making me feel horrible. Many people do not have the luxury of tuning out as I do. Lori, you and my Latino friends and my immigrant friends all have my deep sympathy for being forced to endure horrors and worries that I can only begin to imagine.

As for Monday's Supreme Court decision specifically: I'm disappointed but not remotely surprised. A key factor in our nation's accelerating decline into authoritarianism has been the modern court's long tendency to absolve one powerful group after another of any accountability for their actions. As I wrote last summer:

So, police cannot be held accountable for their lawbreaking, Supreme Court justices cannot be held accountable for their corruption, the gun industry cannot be held accountable for its violence, companies cannot be held accountable for their lawbreaking (nor as of this court term, for lying to shareholders), politicians cannot be held accountable for electoral interference, and now, as of the last few days, companies cannot be held accountable by federal agencies and the president cannot be held accountable for lawbreaking. And we wonder why Americans are rapidly losing faith in their institutions. Apparently law has no meaning any more and entities can simply do whatever they please with impunity, and no one can charge them with a crime or sue them for violating civil rights. Terrific! This is definitely not at all destabilizing to civil order!

Samir Mehta | September 11, 2025
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