Minds are not things, they are processes. Who we are is what we’re doing. That is especially true of minds in societies. The news we see daily during the second Trump administration is proof of this, not just in the monstrous and inhumane policies but also in how these ideas are being opposed.
What America is and will be is undetermined right now. We are in a liminal state, a time of transition.
Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984 broke the Democratic Party’s leadership class. Ever since then, most of the party’s elites have operated on the principle that the American public is far more conservative than it actually is. Instead of forcefully stating what they stand for and why, most national Democrats are deathly afraid of becoming the next Michael Dukakis or Howard Dean. This is a global problem: left party leaders consistently overstate the conservatism of their constituents, as multiple political science studies have shown.
The mainstream media has been similarly feckless; the executives, editors, and anchors have been unwilling to consistently tell the public the larger vision of what the Trump regime is trying to do: completely repeal modernity and replace it with a techno-feudalism in which the American Colossus is torn down and replaced by regional “patchwork states” that are ruled by authoritarian corporations and religious cults.
As Trump, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem and the rest of the regime have been illegally impounding allocated funds, arresting anyone looking suspiciously foreign, and posting on social media about their goal of deporting 100 million residents (roughly the same number of Americans who are non-white), the Americans who elected the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have had to come to realization that most of our purported “leaders” were not going to do much of anything to stop Trump from destroying the country. No one is coming to save us but ourselves.
(Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have been welcome exceptions, forcefully speaking out and utilizing legal maneuvers to block Trump’s deployment of military troops in their states.)
After a full year of Trump’s disastrous leadership, the economy is hobbling into a tariff-driven recession, America’s international standing is in tatters, and the president’s popularity is at record lows. To district from all the failure, de facto president Miller decided to jump on a misleading viral video about daycare centers run by Somali immigrants living in Minnesota. Trump almost immediately was on the case, lashed out at them with a racist attack that included Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar:
“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” he said in December. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”
Shortly thereafter, the regime launched what it called Operation Metro Surge, a massive influx of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol agents that began in Minneapolis, Minnesota and later expanded to the entire state. Thousands of heavily armed paramilitary thugs began swarming into neighborhoods, shopping centers, and even places of worship as they arrested thousands of people, including many who were American citizens, legal immigrants, and even babies and small children like 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos.
Faced with a paramilitary invasion that the judiciary was unwilling or unable to stop, Minnesotans took to the wintry streets, braving sub-freezing temperatures to attend massive protests and to track and report the activities of ICE and CBP thugs in neighborhoods everywhere. And unlike in other states targeted by the Trump regime, thousands of Minnesotans have extensive experience coordinating protests against his first administration after the murder of George Floyd, a black Minneapolis resident killed by police in 2020.
“Our community groups, our unions have never ceased to continue to try to work together and create inflection points,” union organizer Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou told France 24. “So we have a high level of trust. We don’t all agree on everything that we’re working on together here, but we know we cannot be fractured – and that we have to do this together.”
That is exactly what Renee Good and Alex Pretti did. They were two regular people who stepped forward to help their community and nation while the Republican-controlled Congress and judiciary are refusing to do anything to stand up for their supposed beliefs. Working tirelessly for days on end, they were mercilessly killed at point-blank by Trump’s thugs.
Despite the Trump regime’s efforts to smear Good and Pretti as “terrorists” and “assassins,” the public is increasingly able to see through the lies, and it’s sent the president’s approval rating on his top issue of immigration to an all-time low of just 39 percent. The backlash has been so pronounced that the administration announced that it had demoted Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol “commander at large” who had helmed the operation that led to the Pretti shooting.
Trump also announced that the government would be investigating the incident, and there have been multiple reports that Miller and/or Noem may lose their jobs. And there’s more good news: A judge has temporarily blocked Liam Ramos and his father, a legal asylum applicant, from being deported. Even the tech industry, which has been so eager to lick the Trumpian boot, finally has some prominent leaders speaking out against his totalitarianism.
And, at last, the majority of congressional Democrats have stepped forward to demand the impeachment of Noem and the de-funding of ICE.
These are wonderful victories worth savoring. They are proof that standing up to tyranny works. The peoples of Greenland and Europe also demonstrated this as well, as they pushed back aggressively against Trump’s totalitarian threats to invade and colonize the frozen northern island, discovering what investors had figured out long ago: Trump Always Chickens Out. Because he’s a bully.
We can do this. But it will not be easy. Even if all goes well, we still have three more years of Trump in the White House. And there’s no guarantee that it will. But whether American fascism triumphs is not a foregone conclusion either.
That’s because dictatorship is a state of mind, not just for the demented criminal who is currently the president of the United States, but also in the minds of the citizens.
Some of us, like the beanie-bearing Russian asset Tim Pool, yearn desperately to submit to tyranny. The rest of us are learning that freedom only exists if you believe in it—and fight for it together.
This is the Liminal States of America.
