Will Bunch: The frog of democracy is nearly boiled. We can still jump out of the pot

[highplainsdem]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/trump-dictatorship-universities-law-firms-20250323.html

I still remember, from when I was a politically precocious teen in the 1970s, my dog-eared paperback copy of one of that fraught decade’s defining books: The Gulag Archipelago by the Soviet Nobel laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His nonfiction chronicle of the USSR’s Lenin and Stalin eras’ forced labor camps — where he’d spent eight years of his own life, for the offense of a wartime letter critical of dictator Joseph Stalin — could be a dense tome for a high schooler. But I wanted to understand the thin line between tyranny and the freedoms I enjoyed as a young man in America — where Solzhenitsyn himself fled for refuge in 1976.

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts,” Solzhenitsyn wrote amid the grim accounts of conditions in the isolated and often frigid camps.

“This line shifts.”

-snip-

Since Jan. 20, the Trump regime has been slow-cooking the crock pot of American liberty much like the proverbial frog in boiling water, turning up the heat degree by barely perceptible degree, hoping that we merely feel like we are in a hot tub, not tomorrow’s fricassee. Instead of tanks rolling past the bodegas of Washington Heights, we see one Palestinian protester — for a cause that half of the electorate strongly disagrees with — snatched off the street and whisked to a cell in Louisiana, to terrify tomorrow’s would-be marchers. One or two elite universities are punished for politically unpopular things — vague charges of “antisemitism,” or a transgender female athlete — to mask the real goal of crippling their true enemy, higher education as an incubator of critical thinking.

-snip-

A must-read.

[SheltieLover]

1. Kick!

[peggysue2]

2. Here's the concluding paragraph of the Will Bunch OP

We are at a critical point where the frog legs of this American Experiment might soon end up on the serving platter, or we can use them to hop out of their evil, steaming cauldron and gasp the rarefied air of our remaining freedom. We can look inside our hearts and shift the line again. The soaked masses can still emerge to deliver Trump and Musk our simple message: We are not cooked, not yet.

I'm a subscriber to the Philadelphia Inquirer, an unapologetic defender of democracy. And I love Will Bunch.

The word YET is the money word here, the word that sums up the entire article.

The fascist aim is to demoralize Americans which is the main reason these EO's are rolling out so quickly. Speed is their friend, as is the outrage that distracts and diverts energy. Stun the populace with outrage and fear IS main purpose. If the 'frogs' are paralyzed with anguish and fear, they're unlikely to even throw a tootsie over the crock pot edge.

Then, if you can get the opposition to fight among themselves, you have a twofer!

That's where we are. We still have decisions we can make, push back we can participate in, be it at the local or national level.

The moment is NOW. Support the Freedom Frogs.

[c-rational]

6. Well said, completely agree.

[erronis]

3. I fear that our people of your age when you read Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s do not have the understanding

of where we are now.

I was also at that point of time in my life and I was intrigued by what had transpired in history, especially the period from WW-I to WW-II and into the Cold War. I was required to take a class called "Western Civilization" which introduced me to many books but I was already receptive to learning more. And there was the US imperialism in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia; the Soviet imperialism. Student protests and Watergate and horrible moves by those old grey men who wanted to control policy and the world.

Now I read (don't watch much) about how the young people (especially men) are caught up in the propaganda and marketing shit spewed from social media. I doubt that they would understand Solzhenitsyn's writings (or even bother to pick up any book.)

[AmericaUnderSiege]

4. It stops the moment you stop playing along.

American government is not a monarchy or dictatorship, therefore the monarchial / dictatorial behavior going on is an invasive criminal presence without authority. It can be challenged at any time by anyone. Stop playing along with it, and stop playing along with media Munchausens who feed off public despair and learned helplessness.

There is no "cooked frog." Russia was never free, before, during, or after the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn wrote beautifully about the horrors of those times, but really he was rationalizing something wrong in the whole character of his nation. Like the Germans who tried to find reasons for the failure of their nation to resist the Nazis.

We don't need any new examples of our own national failures: We officially tolerated slavery for an entire century, and violent racial apartheid for another century after. This is a continuation of that, but our (eventual, extremely late) responses have repeatedly shocked and inspired the world.

Liberty is and has always been under assault, like life itself. It doesn't need permission to exist, certainly not from the very people who attack it. Nothing that feeds it comes from them, even in contrast. They are parasites with no relevance to the question, and its health is reflected in how little we allow them to define anything we do.

If you can only feel free when authoritarians allow it, you can't be free at all, because that has never happened and will never happen. These people are not "Americans gone astray," they're bugs crawling around in America's garbage. Stop trying to incorporate them into a grand narrative and just tell them No.

No, with the same common-sense obviousness if someone offered you a shit sandwich.

[ck4829]

5. Frogs all over the world are shaking their heads at us

“We would have jumped out of the pot years ago!”