16 Suggestions for the Justifiably Paranoid
Welcome to Trump 2.0. He really means it this time.
To my friends and subscribers who voted for Kamala Harris:
1. She did nothing wrong. This is who we are as a nation.
2. Or, if you’re still willing to entertain optimism despite all evidence to the contrary, this is a part of who we are. It’s a bitter, bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also a historical truth: Our nation is built upon ideals of freedom and opportunity but also deeply rooted realities of racism, misogyny, and a love for uninhibited strongmen. There was a measure on the California ballot yesterday to “bar slavery in any form and repeal a current provision allowing involuntary servitude as a punishment for a crime.” It failed by a vote of 55% to 45%. This is who we are.
3. Be kind to yourself and the people you love, today and for the foreseeable future. Request and receive extra hugs.
4. Be kind to strangers. Be unforgiving of cruelty.
5. Take a deep breath, mourn as much as you need to, then figure out where and how to help those more in danger than you are of what the coming administration has promised it will do. As one of my favorite bloggers wrote this morning, “Seek people whose lives are hard, and make it easier for them.”
6. Think and act and give locally. Start fresh coalitions or join existing ones and help build them from the ground up.
7. Find and patronize alternative sources of news. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the traditional media failed to meet this moment, and, yes, I am aware of the irony of a freelance arts writer for the Washington Post typing these words. (That said, I am not in the mood to play f***ing Wordle any time soon.) A handyman is working on a plumbing job in my kitchen as I write this; we didn’t really get into it, but he expressed the belief that “neither of them were worth my vote. I wish we could have chosen ‘None of the above.’” I don’t blame him for that; I blame a TV and print news industry that pushed a flawed, outdated “both sides” journalism grievously unsuited to the times, if not actively in the tank for Trump, such that a woman with an irritating laugh lost a national election to a man who promises to put people in concentration camps. Suggested media alternatives: The Guardian US edition (with reservations), ProPublica, The Center for Public Integrity, any local news organ owned or run by journalists and not Internet gazillionaires and legacy-media fail-sons. A good list can be found at trustworthymedia.org, but I am open to additional suggestions, should you have them. (NOTE: I've been informed by Stephen Engelberg, Editor-in-Chief of ProPublica, that The Center for Public Integrity is no longer in business as of 2022, but that The Center for Investigative Reporting's news site Reveal, is an excellent alternative.)
8. Corollary to the above: You will hear a lot about how the electorate voted on the economy, the price of eggs, crime, and the crisis at the border rather than abortion (other than locally – figure that out) or the threat of fascism. That Harris somehow vaguely embodied everything in the first category, despite putting out detailed position paper after position paper and pointing to an incredibly robust economy, plummeting crime rates, and falling border-crossing rates. But, yeah, the price of eggs.
9. Assume that the incoming administration will do exactly what they have been telling us they will do. Back in 2018, right after Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, my wife and I had brunch with another couple, and the talk turned to the contentious confirmation hearings. I hazarded the notion that the Court could indeed overturn Roe v. Wade in the near future and was roundly pooh-poohed by the others. It’s settled law! Has been for half a century! You’re being paranoid!
10. Turns out I wasn’t. Thus you should assume a Trump administration that has promised to round up legal US citizens and deport them will actively be making plans to do just that. That a national abortion ban is in the works. That the Supreme Court really means it when they rule the President is a king and can do whatever he wants. And so on. (And, honestly, it's not so much Trump I'm worried about at this point as it is the men who are behind him and who will follow him.) Does this mean thinking about whether you’d actually be willing to be part of a new underground railroad? Or, I don’t know, building a secret room in your house in which to hide any 21st century Anne Franks? Listen, it’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you. (Yeah, you, even if you voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party because the leopards certainly won’t eat your face.) The coming times will test people’s humanity to other people in ways a lot more personal than you may want or expect.
11. Don’t leave it up to the next generation to save us. The shock of the numbers rolling in today is the rightward shift among young men and, to a lesser extent, young women, even though both groups favored Harris overall. Bro culture and the Barstool Sports-ification of media and the Internet are on the ascendant, and Joe Rogan’s last-minute endorsement of Trump ultimately meant a lot more than Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Harris. It’s a good time to be a young guy, especially a young white guy, in America, in part because it’s an absolutely catastrophic time to be a woman.
12. Get off social media and unhook from the Internet as much as possible. Delete your Twitter/X account, please. Apartheid Goebbels is running it. Assume in the coming days/weeks/months that your Facebook account will be monitored by the government if it isn't already (see: Just because you’re paranoid etc., above), as well as Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, whatever you subscribe to. I’d suggest signing onto BlueSky, which has ballooned to 14 million subscribers since Elon took over Twitter (I'm on there as @tyburr.bsky.social), but even though it’s much more politically and personally sane, that doesn’t mean that your every post won’t be taken into account by someone, somewhere. Some good first steps are available at PrivacyMonitor.com.
13. Get a VPN account to anonymize your Internet location. Buy a burner phone just in case. Consider switching to Signal for texting. Delete all your stored online credit cards and clean out your cookies often. Yeah, yeah, I sound like I’m wearing a tinfoil hat. Thank me later.
14. Internationally speaking, we are now the Dark Side, along with Russia and the world’s other bad actors, against the cause of freedom from tyranny and the possibility of a planet our grandchildren will be able to live in. (You can and will argue we were on the Dark Side before this, but now it’s official.) We are the baddies. We are the Galactic Empire, not the Rebel Alliance, and we just handed the keys to Emperor Palpatine. Another way of looking at it is that we just lost World War II – we were fighting fascism, remember?
15. Apologize to your children for the world you’re bequeathing them.
16. Then shut up and listen to what they have to say.
To my subscribers who voted for Donald Trump:
1. Congratulations on your victory. You reap what you sow.
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