This Independence Day, free speech comes with decades-long jail sentences

Where are the tornado warning sirens? The USA is rocketing towards becoming the authoritarian hellscape from which it has spent almost a century pretending to be the refuge. Citizens are being shot in the street. People in a book club are being sentenced to decades in prison for wrongthink. Trump is trying to push through electoral changes that mean this regime will “not lose an election for 100 years.” And it’s all being done in the name of fighting imaginary totalitarian communist leftists. Why isn’t there more outrage?

Donald Trump whined to his audience that a “communist menace” was destroying America from within at his July 4^th speech on stolen Lakota land. The land had been granted officially to the Great Sioux Nation “in perpetuity” by the US government in1868. In the 1870s, gold was found. Perpetuity turned out to be short-lived. The right to redistribute wealth belongs not to Zohran Mamdani taxing billionaires’ condos. It belongs to any white man who can take what lies under someone’s feet. Preferably someone non-White.

Trump promised to “exile” communists. “Communism,” he asserted “is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.” It’s a “cancer,” he declared. It must be “cut out fast.” Of course, Democratic Socialist Muslim mayors are a “cancer” if one is a tycoon with billions in property to defend from a mite of taxation. Apparently, no plutocrat needs a servant class that can afford to live within two hours of its workplaces.

Trump’s unsubtle code marked true America as White and Western. The enemy, “the communist party,” he contrasted “is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”

The USA’s birthday collapse is the unveiling of the nation’s Dorian Gray portrait. The secret painting revealing the real America shows it to be tacky, cruel and racist. The sulking baby in the White House speaks nonsense. The militia on the streets of DC that weekend don’t look scary unless one is at a frat party and wondering if one’s drink has been spiked. Chino-wearing Young Republicans with a nappy over their face ape intimidation, but all we see is their inadequacy.

This comes in the wake of the sentences of the Prairieland ICE protestors. These people belonged to a leftwing book and gun club (Texas!) that made zines. Their “noise protest” outside one of the Trump posse’s emerging array of gulags was loud and involved some vandalism. A police officer pointed a gun at one of the protestors. A former marine reservist saw in his body language the intent to reproduce the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. That former reservist fired a warning shot into the air that had the great bad luck to ricochet into the policeman and the great good luck to leave only a minor injury that required no hospital stay.

The government has depicted the club as the imaginary “North Texas Antifa Cell.” 

The Texas court sentenced the shooter to 100 years in prison. Another five received 50-year sentences. The husband of one was not present at the protest but received a 30-year sentence for moving a box of zines.

Their court of appeal is the atrocious, partisan Fifth Circuit and from there to the atrocious, partisan Supreme Court. It is only likely that these protesters will leave jail if the already-flawed democratic process is allowed to work, and an anti-authoritarian President takes office. Neither of those outcomes are assured.

These sentences work to scare the resistance out of protest at the growing number of people being snatched on America’s streets and killed in its intolerable for-profit concentration camps. Centrist Americans are being trained not to care about the deaths or outrageous prison sentences because the label “terrorist” is applied.

We must learn to decode the use of language on the Right, because it is echoed across the transnational space. One term you need to learn is “accusations in a mirror.” That is the pre-civil bloodshed language used to pretend the selected “enemy” is set to carry out the violence the wielder actually intends.

Propagandists for genocide work to create the image that a selected (usually vulnerable minority) group plans to oppress and murder members of the sanctified identity group. Often children are depicted as the targets. Fear, bigotry and rage can unleash violence against former friends, neighbours and work colleagues when this kind of defensive “identity” is activated.

Those of us tempted to assume that is a phenomenon reserved for “barbarians” need to get over our racism and exceptionalism. Germany was amongst the most “cultured” of nations when the Third Reich’s rhetoric grasped so many by the imagination and enabled the industrialisation of their death machine. Everyone is susceptible.

The lying depiction of trans children as mutilated victims of an “ideology” is one of the tropes used to mobilise an army of “protectors,” driven in part by a toxic religious imaginary, to strip the children and their families of their safety.

The imagined threat of antifa and communism in America is a nonsense, but it is one that suits the kleptocrat class terrified to see Bernie Sanders and now Zohran Mamdani retrieve the term “socialism” from its hysterical demonisation over long decades by the propaganda tools of America’s richest. They glorified the debt peonage of the mass of the population. They called that grind “freedom.” 

At the same time, the propagandists worked to take the words of progressives and hollow out the meaning. A process called recuperation or co-optation. In this, radical and revolutionary ideas, such as that all humans have equal dignity and worth, are neutered and made safe. Human rights, which the Right reviles, becomes parents’ rights (to treat their children as property) or women’s rights (to be distracted by victimising trans people while their own rights are being stripped).

Gramsci’s “common sense,” the inculcated truthiness of a society, is co-opted as a positive where “common sense” is ignorant, bigoted nonsense.

Attempts to rectify the ingrained injustice in American society are reframed as punishing victimised White people. It’s not just the victimised poor Whites that respond to this siren song. The middle class has consistently ushered in fascistic forces to protect itself from the workers, blinded by the rich’s media to the rigged system of the rich.

The abusive racist and patriarchal system thrashes violently after its crippling of almost all of us has been exposed, using its crippled White young men as a tool to barricade it. Empathy is labelled “toxic” or “suicidal.” Caring, depicted as despised feminine, is weakness.

And the big money has inadvertently (the internet) and intentionally (hedge fund, corporate owned, billionaire owned) broken our news systems. The information that almost always tended to serve the rich and corporate broke our trust. 

When students rebelled in 1968, the plutocrat’s operations set out to break the public education system: “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite.” 

And where America leads, its vassals soon follow. Australian students are crushed with debt and our universities are undergoing the periodic neoliberal slashing of courses that might lead to critical thinking.

The Melbourne-based IPA, an offshoot of that plutocrat operation, has just doubled its team at war on education. It imports American gumph about the awful grey world of socialist dystopia. God help their donors if you believe a better world is possible.

The blurring of totalitarian communist dictatorships with democratic socialism is crucial to prevent the taxing (or worse) of the propagandists’ overlords.

The fact that Trump’s July 4^th speech and the Prairieland sentences were met with the usual hum of normalisation is a warning sign that the rot is deep. Don’t sleepwalk into a local imitation of this American dystopia.