"When your country strips you of rights and protections, it tells you that it no longer recognizes you. Other times, you realize that you no longer recognize your country. People leave; families rupture along political lines; friendships shatter; people and institutions that used to be widely admired are vilified, and yesterday’s villains are sainted; familiar faces disappear from the public sphere; an aggressive conformity takes hold; the material conditions of life change.

The indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show signaled just such a shift in landscape. The news tells us that we are moving from one country to a different, autocratic one. The television shows us: This country looks different, sounds different and feels different. A familiar face and a familiar voice vanish. Some people turned on their televisions on Friday night to see a memorial to Charlie Kirk when they expected to see a comedian welcoming his next guest.

What unites the many actions of the Trump administration, from the sledgehammer it has taken to government programs to the demonstrative cruelty it has built into immigration raids, is that they transform the daily physical, economic and psychic experience of life. President Trump is remaking the country in his image: crude, harsh, gratuitously mean. The ongoing attack on civil society, which his administration plans to intensify in the name of Charlie Kirk, is a part of this program. Civil society makes life more livable. The administration’s message is that the work of civil society no longer belongs in this country."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/opinion/trump-kirk-trans-people-russia.html

#USA #Trump #Censorship #FreedomOfSpeech #Authoritarianism #NeoFascism #Dictatorship

Imagine you're the #DemocraticParty. You've spent two centuries helping to build #US #imperialism into what it is today. You've been collaborating on bringing in #neoliberalism / #neofascism for the last 50 years while crushing #progressive & #socialist #resistance. Now mask-off, you need someone to blame.

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