{"id":43839,"date":"2025-09-10T23:26:59","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T06:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=43839"},"modified":"2025-09-10T23:26:59","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T06:26:59","slug":"when-government-is-afraid-of-the-people-tyranny-has-no-chance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2025\/09\/10\/when-government-is-afraid-of-the-people-tyranny-has-no-chance\/","title":{"rendered":"When Government Is Afraid of the People, Tyranny Has No Chance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

But today, Americans tremble as elected leaders kneel to greed, fear, and authoritarianism\u2019s dark shadow\u2026<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"Thom<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>THOM HARTMANN<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SEP 10, 2025 (hartmannreport.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of the decision made this week by the doughiest white boy on the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, to allow racial profiling by ICE, 65 million Hispanic Americans now live in terror of the police, carrying their passports and dreading traffic stops or shopping at Home Depot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re not a criminal, you shouldn\u2019t fear government. Instead, as Jefferson<\/a> often pointed out, government should fear <\/strong>you<\/strong><\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the foundation of the American experiment, that our system of government was created, as the Declaration of Independence <\/em>says, \u201cderiving their just powers from the consent of the governed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, yet, today increasing numbers of Americans are afraid of their government, or at least afraid of the people who now run it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our news media are terrified of being sued or otherwise harassed by Trump, so much so that two of our three big TV networks have paid him millions in what was essentially protection money. CBS just put a rightwinger<\/a> with ties to the GOP as their ombudsman, and NBC is on the verge of spinning off MSNBC, which is increasingly problematic for the network as it regularly draws Trump\u2019s ire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate are so cowed by Trump\u2019s primary threats and the hundreds of millions in political dollars he controls that they\u2019re desperately engaging in a coverup of his alleged participation with Epstein in importing \u201cmodels\u201d from Eastern Europe and raping underage girls.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writers I know on Substack and elsewhere are watching their words carefully to avoid provoking rightwing ire and the death threats it often brings, at the same time a series of very-well-funded rightwing media empires are growing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Armed men in civilian clothes with masks on their faces are snatching people off the street and disappearing them, now with the blessing of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court; it\u2019s often impossible to distinguish them from gang members trying to kidnap people for torture or ransom.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

People of faith and goodwill are fleeing social media sites ever since their billionaire owners opened the sites up to Nazis and tweaked their secret algorithms to favor hate, fear, and the hard right while suppressing voices of compassion or advocates for democracy here or abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Government workers live in terror that some old tweet or message board posting might be discovered that will cost them their jobs. Some, like Lisa Cook, were just doing their jobs when Trump\u2019s toadies decided to scan everything they\u2019d ever done and find the one checkbox they shouldn\u2019t have clicked that can be used to discredit and then destroy them.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former government employees and elected officials \u2014 from John Brennan and Miles Taylor<\/a> to James Comey \u2014 are wiping out their retirement savings to pay for lawyers because our government has targeted them for Trump\u2019s \u201cretribution.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Protestors objecting to the militarization of our nation\u2019s cities are arrested for \u201cconspiracy\u201d and charged with crimes that could send them to prison for years or even decades. People who volunteer to help out with voting operations find themselves doxed and vilified on national rightwing media and have to go into hiding, the peace and normalcy of their lives shattered.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Captains of industry, CEOs of the nation\u2019s largest companies, trek to the White House to bow and scrape in front of His Orangeness, and Cabinet meetings have turned into a bad caricature of Hans Christian Anderson\u2019s Emperor\u2019s New Clothes<\/em> fable. We watch, yelling at the TV, \u201cTell him he\u2019s naked!\u201d but to no avail; they can\u2019t stop slobbering over him like terrified victims being held at knifepoint by a serial killer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is normal in a democracy; all of these are signs of a creeping dictatorship taking over our nation. It\u2019s particularly not normal in America: we\u2019re the country that invented citizens rising up against an oppressive government. When the South abandoned democracy in the 1850s, and when Europe lost its democracies in the 1930s, we went to war and shed blood and treasure to defend the right to dissent.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what\u2019s particularly ironic is that the very same people who\u2019ve been loudly warning us about the day coming when the government becomes oppressive and tyrannical \u2014 from the John Birch folks to militia members \u2014 are now in the vanguard of authoritarianism advocacy. If it wasn\u2019t so tragic \u2014 and dangerous \u2014 it\u2019d be funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our Attorney General is apparently leading the Epstein coverup, our Secretary of State cheerleads murdering civilians on the high seas, our Treasury Secretary is reportedly provoking fistfights, our Energy and EPA chiefs deny climate change and push more fossil fuel pollution, FEMA is being gutted, Social Security has been crippled, Medicare is about to start pre-clearance of payments in six states, millions will soon be thrown off Medicaid, aid to student borrowers is gone, and food support to needy Americans is being pulled along with food and medicine for millions around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All being done so the morbidly rich (like our billionaire president and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet) could get another $4 trillion tax gift, paid for by the rest of us as our schools are gutted and our children fail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it\u2019s not just America that Trump, MAGA, and the GOP are destroying on the altar of bowing to the very rich: Everything Putin wants, he gets. As Trump discards America\u2019s allies, Xi is picking them up, and country after country around the world is abandoning democracy for the siren song of big-money-driven autocracy.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tariffs, which historically have been the careful, surgical tools of trade policy wielded by Congress since the days of George Washington, are being used as blunt cudgels to beat foreign countries into giving cash, jumbo jets, and Trump Tower opportunities to America\u2019s parasitic ruling family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even our Supreme Court has fallen to big money corruption, allowing Trump to do anything he wants \u2014 no matter how criminal or anti-democratic \u2014 without any pushback or consequences. A billionaire-funded think tank is writing our domestic policy, while Putin and Netanyahu appear to be running our foreign policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this reflects the traditional American values of fairness, honesty, and rule by the consent of the governed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With most of our institutions now captured by the morbidly rich, racism and voter suppression openly celebrated, and our police agencies shifting from protecting to oppressing our people, the only group left to stand up to defend what\u2019s left of our shredded republic is <\/strong>We, the People. <\/strong><\/em>Us.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

History shows that when fascists haven\u2019t yet entrenched themselves as far as Hitler or Mussolini did (or Putin and Orb\u00e1n today) it\u2019s still possible for the people to rise up and throw them out. It happened in Ukraine, in South Korea, in Spain and Chile, among others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People stood up in the face of fear of their governments and, instead, peacefully made those governments fear <\/a><\/strong>them<\/a><\/strong><\/em>. And it can happen here, too.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, now it\u2019s our turn. And our obligation. We\u2019re the ones who must save us, who must stand up to these fascists, who must awaken our friends, neighbors, and relatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tag, we\u2019re it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But today, Americans tremble as elected leaders kneel to greed, fear, and authoritarianism\u2019s dark shadow\u2026 THOM HARTMANN SEP 10, 2025 (hartmannreport.com) Share Because of the decision made this week by the doughiest white boy on the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, to allow racial profiling by ICE, 65 million Hispanic Americans… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43839"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43840,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43839\/revisions\/43840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}