The Tornado Is Here, In Case You Didn’t Notice

I’m old enough to remember some scary moments in American history.

When I was a teenager, I remember the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding just moments after it took off, killing all on board just 14 years after the last American left the moon. When I was in my 20s, crack had ravaged our cities and politicians decided the best thing to do was lock people up. 

A few years later, I watched two 100-story towers, which anchored much of the global economy, crumble to the ground when two jetliners hit them. I saw political incompetence resulting in a flooded city after a hurricane, killing 1,300. Three years later, greedy bankers almost cost us every dime we have when they tanked the housing market.

Most recently, I watched bodies being loaded into refrigerator trucks, dead of a virus that came from overseas, and who would still be alive but for a president who shrugged his shoulders. 

All of this was terrifying, and frustrating because it was all preventable. But the terror this time is deliberate.

This same president has brought us to probably the most frightening moment we’ve had within living memory: A man is being detained for participating in a demonstration and faces deportation. That’s it, and that’s bad for all of us.

No Warning Siren

Mahmoud Khalil, a doctoral student at Columbia University, was grabbed by ICE agents in his Manhattan home, which he shares with his pregnant wife. He was not charged with any crime, but since he’s an Algerian national, his green card is targeted for revocation by the Trump administration, despite being a lawful permanent resident.

He has not been charged with any crime but is being detained in Louisiana and is facing deportation because Trump has vowed to go after anyone it believes supports Hamas or antisemitism. Of course, there has been massive backlash because this clearly violates any number of established Civil Rights laws, let alone the First and Fourteenth Amendments. A federal judge has been the only thing that stands between Khalil and expulsion from the country.

But here’s the scary part: Donald Trump doesn’t give a damn. For him, the law is whatever he says it is at a given moment, this is especially true for people who were not born in America (with the apparent exception of Melania Trump or Elon Musk). This has nothing whatsoever to do with antisemitism, Hamas or anything else. It’s about him deciding that people who express dissent, have perspectives that run counter to his agenda, or because it’s Tuesday, are subject to punishment.

Trump has already pulled $400 million in federal funding from Columbia because he says they are not doing enough to root out antisemitism. If you’ll remember, a year ago I talked about the Columbia and other college protests over the situation in Palestine. Now that there is a regime that seeks to squash that kind of dissent, first financially and now by criminalizing students, we don’t know how far they will go to ensure free speech and human rights protections are dead.

If protected speech and expression and assembly can be penalized over the president’s whims, who’s to say any of us couldn’t be declared non-citizens because a politician doesn’t like how we vote? Or what our college major was? Or what we wrote on a blog?

We’ve seen this before in history. Of course, the Nazis seized power in Germany using acts like this as one of their many tactics. They came for the universities and the press first, and they had a lot of internal support. In Portugal, the Estado Novo dictatorship held control from 1933-1974 by extremely limiting freedoms by denying voting rights, murdering, kidnapping, and torturing dissenters, limiting education, and censoring media and art. The government had to be overthrown by the military only after Antonio de Olivera Salazar’s death in 1970. People were so sick of him, the 1974 revolt lasted a few hours and no blood was shed.

Late Weather Report

These are just a couple of examples of what happens as an authoritarian regime rises to power.  But they all have ten major characteristics:

1. Scrutiny, threats against, and ultimately capitulation of the media.
2. Suppressing the voices of the young.
3. Favoring one religious denomination over others.
4. Open adoption of systemic and institutionalized racism/xenophobia.
5. Propaganda focused on the poor and economically vulnerable.
6. Catering to and special treatment of the wealthy classes.
7. Voter suppression.
8. Deregulation of industry.
9. Privatization of entitlement programs
10. Nationalization of markets.

You can look back to authoritarian takeovers dating back to Ancient Rome and find some or all of these same things. In the three months since Trump has been president, all of these things have taken place except the last one. But with quixotic trade war now in full swing, the stock market has lost $4 trillion in value. Just to give you a scope, the national debt is $36 trillion. So if the stock market performs the same way nine more times, which could easily happen this year, the value in our markets lost will be equivalent to how much America is in hock.

With a hollowed-out market, it is absolutely not impossible for the federal government to take control of financial markets and assets. Only the chosen wealthy would have access to private ownership and fate of the rest would be determined by these few. That would mean America has become an oligarchy.

I wish I could end this on a positive note. I wish that I could provide a note of hope. The ones that are supposed to be fighting on the nation’s behalf, the Democratic party, is right now no better organized or efficient than the Bad News Bears.

It’s a scary, and ugly moment in American history. I hope Khalil survives his ordeal and continues his studies at Columbia and that he goes on to raise a beautiful family. But it’s important to know that the leadership of this country does not want that for him or any of us.

I still say we should try not to despair. These are hard times, and they will probably get harder. But I descend from people who spent their lives living with injustice and oppression as a norm. They found something within themselves to continue working for a brighter day, even if they knew they would not live to see it. I’m the beneficiary of their tenacity.

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.