STP - Speak Truth to Power

You may have watched the CNN live broadcast of the Broadway play, Good Night and Good Luck, starring George Clooney. I won’t bore you with the history of that production or the real-life politics that were behind the play. You can look all that up on your favorite information search application.

With Trump and his Project 2025 band of fascists, we need more than ever for the media, the courts, and for Americans to embrace our Constitution and belief in freedom to speak truth to power. That truth is that we will never knuckle under or kowtow to an authoritarian form of government.

After the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Founders turned to a Bill of Rights to protect the citizens. The Constitution’s supporters realized it was crucial to achieving ratification. It is not by chance that the First Amendment reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Our founders, every one of them, had lived under a monarch in Europe where if anyone spoke against the king or queen, they could be disappeared, only to reappear on a pointed stick in front of the castle. They understood the importance of freedom of speech and the press in maintaining a check on the powers of a nation's leaders.

More than once in our history, we have seen political leaders attempt to overreach their authority. The play, Good Night and Good Luck, presents one of those times, referred to as the McCarthy era. 

I lived through that time. True, I was only about ten years old when I first learned of McCarthy, but his brand of fascism persisted until I was fifteen. His was a political movement based on repression and fear-mongering, using the communists as the fuel for his demagoguery. And I can tell you that his politics didn’t die with him in 1957.

After he was condemned by the United States Senate in 1954, his followers withdrew into the shadows to avoid the scrutiny of the media and public opinion that had turned quite vicious against them and McCarthy’s authoritarian approach to governing.

They reemerge every decade or so like Cicadas rising from under the earth every seventeen years to try to regain their terrorist hold on the public. They have emerged at times as libertarians, the Tea Party, and most recently, they are rebranded as MAGAts. A turd by any other name is still…

Trump and his acolytes are the latest and one of the most virulent reincarnations of the fascist ideology that drives the extreme-right segment of politics. As I write this, he has called out federal troops to California to put down protests that look like a picnic in the park compared to the protests during the Vietnam era. This is yet another power grab by Trump and his supporters of presidentialism. 

Presidentialism, or "executive absolutism,” refers to the concentration of power in the hands of the president, like a dictator, king, or monarch. The president holds significant control over governmental functions, often without sufficient checks and balances.

This is what we are facing today as Trump wields his mostly unchecked power while the Republican-controlled Congress does nothing to enforce our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The courts, notwithstanding SCOTUS, which has emboldened the Presidentialists, have attempted to block some of his directives.

He is attacking the media, education, migrants, our allies, world visitors, and virtually every social program enacted in the last 100 years designed to address the inequalities of our social network that resulted from a nation that believed in slavery and the oppression of women. He brandishes his Richter-scale-like signature on Presidential Executive Orders like a child at school during show-and-tell.

We must all speak truth to power. Whether it’s in writing like this, or showing up to demonstrate, and I mean by the tens-of-thousands of people at a time, supporting organizations like the media, and civil rights groups who are dedicated to preserving our freedoms. All those actions, and more, qualify as speaking truth to power.

It’s either activism or turning a blind eye to a government that employs masked and unidentified vigilantes sweeping our neighbors and even our loved ones off the streets of our cities and sending them to foreign countries to die in prison.