I am afraid for my family

And it's weird that a lot of people don't perceive the same threats.

I have begun to fear for my family.  I am afraid for our safety, our security, even our very existence as a family unit.  And I think those fears are well-grounded.

A quarter of this country is preparing for civil war.  If Donald Trump wins the election, this vengeful mass of people will have the power to implement its rage. In this they are aided by a second quarter of the country that appears to think they won’t really be so bad, and after all what about inflation — all this despite the excruciatingly detailed, 920 page ‘Project 2025’ agenda for how to transform American government and society in radical ways. (

Thomas Zimmer

has a thorough take on that.)  And despite everything Trump says he wants to do.

But even if Joe Biden wins, this angry minority of Americans has transformed “weak” Christianity into a militaristic nationalism.  Not only do they hate people like me – liberal, gay, ‘globalist,’ journalist —they venerate their own hatred.  They’ve made it into a kind of sacrament. 

And they, too, are abetted by others: a right-wing media ecosystem that eagerly fans the flames of resentment; a ‘centrist’ clique that seems to think the threat from wokeness and cancel culture is more serious than the threat from authoritarianism, rage, and virulent misogyny (let alone homophobia); a billionaire class that thinks regulation is the problem and that it can get rich even as the country slides into autocracy.

It’s these enablers who most fill me with rage. Don’t they care what they’re creating? Do they really think it won’t come to pass?

Let me add: I’m fortunate.  On the personal level, I have tools that can keep my fear and anger from taking me over: meditation,  the support of my family and friends, and other spiritual practices (psychedelic and otherwise) that keep me oriented.  Of course, I also have a degree of financial security and white privilege (conditional in the case of Jews, but still largely in place).  Imagine the fears of an undocumented immigrant family in the face of a regime that has promised mass deportations, concentration camps, and the weaponization of local police to knock on the door of every suspected “illegal.”  I have it pretty easy.

But I think it’s delusory to think that my safety cannot be taken away in an instant.  My marriage and family can easily lose its legal protection, just as women suddenly lost rights to bodily autonomy that had seemed secure for nearly half a century. Even beyond loss of legal rights, I fear the loss of the current (illusory) sense of safety that many gay and lesbian people have; some think the cultural backlash can only happen to trans folks, but it can easily happen to us as well. Meanwhile, the mainstreaming of antisemitic conspiracy theories, especially on the quasi-Right, is terrifying. And again, Donald Trump has explicitly said that he wants to “go after” journalists like me.  No amount of meditation is going to keep me safe from that.

There are also threats that will affect all of us together.  If Trump is elected and, as he has promised to a group of oil executives, he undoes all of President Biden’s climate initiatives, we will accelerate the vortex of climate disaster in ways that will make our lives today seem like delightful, decadent ease compared with life two decades from now.  Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax” and minimized the nature of the threat.  Whether he actually believes that or not (who can say if this man really believes anything other than what endears him to the mob), that false belief will become the base for policy.  Our children will be right to curse us, something I think of almost every day as I play with my own daughter.  For now, she is still too young to know.  But not for long.

AI prompt: “a scary spiral”

Jeff Sharlet

has written that the essence of fascism is less about a governmental structure or ideological program than about the “black hole” of rage, resentment, and violence.  Sharlet has gone to Trump rallies and far-right megachurches; he has talked with the people who fill them. And, he has found, they delight in their violent urges, in being able to say the quiet parts out loud—which is why Trump, like Hitler before him, is their hero.  This is the core of demagogic, authoritarian politics: the visceral thrill of the mob, animated by resentment and expressed as retribution. They want to kill us.  They think we are killing America. 

And yet, I find myself surrounded by people who don’t share these fears.  In my Jewish community, centuries-old Jewish trauma has taken hold of our minds, and we now see antisemitism on the Left as somehow more threatening than antisemitism on the Right, a perception totally belied by statistics and by the proximity of antisemites to power.  In progressive communities, many believe President Biden’s policies toward Gaza make it impossible to vote for him—and somehow believe that Trump, whose last administration catered to every whim of the Israeli Far Right, would not be that much worse, or that it’s simply impossible to vote for the lesser of two evils.  The diagonalist “intellectual dark web” has fetishized the excesses of the Left to the point where they have lost the ability to accurately compare the different threats to civil society.  And tens of millions of American voters dismiss Trump’s extremism and focus on inflation, immigration, or other issues.

Even writing these words, I wonder if I’m just getting carried away.  In 2016 (I predicted in June that Trump would win the election), I made a list of the threats I perceived at the time.  Only around half of them came true.  The US economy didn’t collapse, the world order basically continued, and most of the administrative state lumbered on. Of course, I didn’t predict that four years later there’d be a global pandemic that Trump’s incompetent policies would make far worse than it had to be. But still, not everything I feared came to pass. So I could be wrong again.

But that was before the Big Lie of election denial, the spiraling of misinformation online, the radicalization of White Christian Nationalism, the backlash against Black Lives Matter and “wokeness” and “critical race theory,” and a dozen other derangements of the Right.  Things seem far, far worse in 2024 than in 2016, and again, even if Biden wins, these people have a lot more guns than we do. 

In any case, I’m not really trying to persuade you.  I’m not trying to strategize.  I’m trying to reach out to those of you who feel similarly, even if only for a few moments a week, and to say: you are not alone.

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I’ve been taking a rather deep dive into the issues addressed in this week’s newsletter. Some of what I’ve been reading:

• This Conspirituality Podcast episode with Jeff Sharlet covers a lot of the ground I reference above.

• Judd Legum
  ’s useful demolition of the myth that crime is increasing in America (it is not)

• John Ganz
  on “Trump's Gangster Gemeinschaft”

• Gen Dread
  on the climate crisis breaking our brains, and
  Anya Kamenetz
  on how we can bear to look our kids in the eye.

• Robert Reich
  on the fake crises the GOP keeps creating and running on.

Please feel free to share your best “I can’t believe people are treating this like a normal election when the possibility of fascism has never been so real” takes in the comments!