Sarah TaberHello Americans on Mastodon, I know we don't feel like there's much to celebrate this July 4th. It's been a rough several years.
So I want to talk about how we're making history right now.
If you started paying attention to the US in 1960, this sure feels like the darkest timeline. But unfortunately, purges against Black & brown people are normal US behavior.
You know what's NOT normal US behavior?
This is the first time there's been a mass movement to STOP a purge in real time.
This is new and unusual. To get an idea of how weird this is, let's take a quick tour of some of the many times the US federal government has officially persecuted entire groups of people.
And what (if any) pushback there was at the time.
1929-1939: the US "repatriated" somewhere between 300K and 2M Mexican Americans. No due process. The federal government removed them from the US to "stop them from competing with Americans for jobs."
About half of the deported people were US citizens.
Few if any Anglo Americans seemed to have a problem with this.
Mexican Americans ran the court battles, protests, and educational campaigns against forced deportation on their own. While they were struggling to keep their families together day by day.
WW2: the US jails 120,000 people, who hadn't been charged of any crime, as a "precaution." 2/3 were US citizens. Many were farmers. White folks wanted their land, & got it.
The loss of so many skilled farmers dented the US food system & made it harder to fight the war.
Some white Americans did publicly oppose rounding up their Japanese neighbors. They were in the minority & overruled.
Resistance was limited to individual efforts to tone down the impact of incarceration- tending jailed neighbors' farms while they were away, sending supplies to the camps, etc.
Operation Wetback, 1954: a federal program to hunt down & deport undocumented immigrants from Mexico.
Somewhere between 1.1 and 1.5 million were rounded up & deported.
And yet again, many were documented migrants or US citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback#Operation_Wetback_(1954)
Public outrage over the many US citizens deported caused Operation Wetback to get its funding pulled. … After 3 months & over 1 million people deported.
This was the fastest a purge ever got rolled back. But it still took people a while to notice & stop it. At the supposed peak of US unity.
Slavery & Jim Crow: millions of Americans held in captive labor.
Enslaved & sharecropping farm workers knew things were bad! They did what they could to push back the whole time.
But that wasn't enough. Both slavery & Jim Crow finally ended when a critical mass of white Americans decided they should. Not even the majority of white Americans. Just a critical mass. And it took us ~250 and close to 100 years to get there, respectively.
The US & its preceding colonies were at war with tribes ~each year from 1610 - 1920s- 300 years.
There was more opposition from white folks than you'd think; but it wasn't broad-based, organized, or effective. We're still breaking treaties with tribes today.
Sometimes, replacing tribes with settlers wasn't enough. The federal gov't put in the work to keep the new guys down too.
When coal miners went on strike, they sent in the National Guard. To push people back into the mines at gunpoint.
My grandma left Harlan Co so she didn't get stuck in company store debt for life.
So it's frustrating to hear things like "This is the darkest timeline" and "late-stage capitalism."
Yes things suck & you gotta vent. But... do people think the US started in 1960?
We really forget our country, and capitalism, *started* with people on the auction block.
When you know what the US has been about this whole time, that really puts the current moment in perspective.
We've been up to some ugly, ugly stuff. And it usually gets either silence or applause.
2025 is a whole different animal. The response has been strong and immediate. We had *preemptive* mass mobilization.
By millions of people who *aren't* being targeted by raids, jailing, and deportation. (Yet. 🙃)
That's never happened in US history before. This is different.
That's why the right keeps sniveling about how they're under attack. Even while they're successfully pulling off another purge.
They're not used to getting yelled at when they blow taxpayer dollars on witch hunts, they're used to getting high-fives at the country club.
We still have a long way to go. And it's frustrating bc we have leaders who supposedly want to run our country better, and they plain don't have the levers to do much. I'm not making excuses.
I'm just pointing out how weird it is for the US to even *have* leaders who want to do better.
We have so much more going for us than any generation that's tried to stop these things before.
And yes, that's left us without much of a playbook on how to do this kind of change quickly.
These movements usually take decades or centuries to build up steam.
This time, we already had one in place when the problems started. That's weird & nobody knows what to do.
So if you're looking at the US & thinking "This isn't the country I know," you're 100% right. It's not.
We're actually fighting back in real time for once.
I know it doesn't feel like much to be proud of right now, because we're nowhere close to done.
But you deserve to know- in the middle of all of this, we ARE making history right now.
Aaron@sarahtaber Thank you for the positive take. Much needed.
Yappari@sarahtaber The internet has changed our response time. It sheds light into some of the darkest corners and allows us to work through the cycle faster. I am hopeful being able to see and fix the problems faster will limit some of the damage.
jabjoe@yappari @sarahtaber that is kind of true, but also kind of wrong. The internet is also the place people can find out whatever they want, true or not. The crazies in the villages find each other now, rather than get normalized.
Martin Vermeer FCD@jabjoe @yappari @sarahtaber Both are true. Both information and disinformation travel faster, and the Internet offers both SURveillance and SOUSveillance. But not just the Internet: cameras on mobile phones in the hands of ordinary people, Internet connected.
This is how BLM became a thing - though still not a big enough thing. In the old days, it was the cops' word against the victim's or his family's - or a random witness's - word, and the cop's word always won. Now there is video all over social media.
This is also what changed the dynamic with Israel/Palestine. In the days of corporate legacy media, it was relatively easy to control the narrative. They are still trying, cf. all those dead Gaza journalists, but no way to stop war criming IDF soldiers from proudly posting all over TikTok...
64 Islands Aroha Cooperative@sarahtaber 1954! living memory for those involved, people who grew up in a conservative tradition, whose parents and grandparents were part of the effort, or benefitted from it
cakemix@sarahtaber Thank you. Seriously. Thank you.
social elephant in the roomI appreciate the vision that all is not hopeless.
I would also add there was another first lately; people actually cheered the death of a C.E.O.
Perhaps people being fed up increased response time?
Mathias ❄️🐺🐶 is wrathly 
@sarahtaber Thanks Sarah. It's important perspective, both on the brutal history of this flawed nation and how things are tangibly different today than in the past.
For what it's worth I totally understand the, it's worse than it's ever been, I don't recognize this country, sentiment. I think for a lot of us (some millennials, gen Z & beyond) it's "worse than it's been in my lifetime", and it's not just the horrendously racist and cruel acts of 🧊 and their ilk, I think it's colored by the rest of the environment. The rollback of rights that seemed solidified, whether from before some of our lifetimes or for much of it (or especially our adult lives), everything that feels like a reversal of progress, even the 🏒-graph greedflation, all at once. I empathize with how hard it is not to see doom when you can't afford your rent or even a 🍔 (at home or fast food), your healthcare is getting taken away, your neighbors are getting kidnapped, and you or your 🏳️⚧️ loved ones are being actively targeted.
Play Ball and Fight FascistsDidn't realize how much I needed to hear this, especially today.
Thanks for taking the time to put this out there.
Viss@sarahtaber fantastic thread
Phoenix Gee@sarahtaber One thing i would like to point out...
Yes, we're probably making history, but in more senses than one:
We're headed straight for a self made climate crisis. The Parasite class knows this, plays it down in the belief that they will survive, to hell with everyone else.
The only thing that could possibly throw a wrench in the works is democracy. So it's got to go. Not just in the US.
Joy_intl@sarahtaber Thank you for bringing together this thread, for doing the research and for sharing it in a hopeful way.
I think we needed this more than we even knew.
I'm rooting for democracy, for the real freedom that means getting close to self actualization - for everyone.
I think we needed this more than we even knew.
I'm rooting for democracy, for the real freedom that means getting close to self actualization - for everyone.
Tink@sarahtaber thank you. This was very helpful and encouraging.
Linda 🏴🇮🇪🇮🇹@sarahtaber you’re not doing enough though. Why are you not rioting, closing down cities, states, even Gov?
LevkaWe need a general strike.
contrasocial@LevZadov @Lassielmr @sarahtaber
Shawn Fain/UAW is aiming to organize one in May 2028. Which is further down the line than any of us want but this stuff takes time to get people onboard and organize them.
We need to be doing other forms of resistance in the meantime, but now is still the time to be putting it in peoples heads and getting them prepared.
LukefromDC@Lassielmr @sarahtaber I do all that I can do and have done so for over 40 years. I was in much of the Uprising in DC. just 5 days ago I had to travel 220 miles each way to the Alligator Auschwitz opening day protests. I spend the first half of Jubne in DC for D-Day, WorldPride, and the only protest against Trump's military parade to call his bluff about "massive force" and set up right outside an exit checkpoint.
I got my start in 1982 fighting against Reagan's attacks on El Salvador and his attempt to bring back the draft to make a conventional forces invasion there possible.
People ARE rioting BTW: in LA, Portland, Seattle, Austin TX, Minneapolis, and NYC, ICE raids have been resisted by force. Big crowds counterattacking ICE have been credited with forceing ICE to go from offense to defense in every place we have sought to break up ICE attacks.
Way back in February ICE was defeated in Plant City, FL in a failed attack on migrant farmworkers there. The first day of Trump's term they had to cancel a planned attack on Chicago because it has leaked. People had a whole week to prepare and to essentially set up on ICE. ICE cancelled as they would have been raiding into a trap.
As of right now, between the extralegal detentions and concentration camp projects by Trump on the one hands, and the battles to beat back ICE raids on the other,I think it is safe to say the US is now in a state of low level civil war.
Checkpoints on highways that hunt on the basis of race, Marines deployed to defend secret police (ICE) and concentration camps (Alligator Auschwitz), and street battles lasting weeks in many places against all of these are not the hallmarks of a country at peace.
Misuse Case@LukefromDC @sarahtaber You don’t have to explain or justify yourself to someone on the Internet who is basically playing Resistance Cop.
@Lassielmr @sarahtaber Anyone who demands to know why I’m not throwing Molotov cocktails and demands that I detail my past, current, or future Molotov-throwing activities on the public Internet in order to prove my bona fides is a cop.
SouprMatt@Lassielmr @sarahtaber A subject of the King of England lecturing former English colonies on how to gain independence.
Now that’s comedy!
manchicken@sarahtaber I needed to read this thread. Thanks.
Candace Robb@sarahtaber I needed to read this, to hear this. It gives me hope.
fool@sarahtaber I appreciate what you're saying here, and am grateful, but I'm having to intentionally stop thinking about how this could be interpreted as "the bastards got away with it every previous time"
.
Nobody ناچیز नास्ति (he/him)@sarahtaber
And this improvement hasn't yet been extended to humans in occupied Palestine or others in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin American countries.
And this improvement hasn't yet been extended to humans in occupied Palestine or others in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin American countries.
@tadbithuman weren't they fine until the US of A interfered? So, "this improvement reaching them" is not needed, the interference needs to go - but it has kept increasing as before.
Support for Israel has been at its lowest since ever. Polls show a 40+ point swing in democratic voters support pf Palestinians over Israel in the last 8 years. And that's zionist CNN polling.
It's not enough, but it's a sign that zionism is coming to an inevitable end. There will be a Democratic admin that cuts aid to Israel.
@contrasocial @sarahtaber yeah... I don't think it will be Democrats (the party leadership) that do anything though, because they're comfortable in the pockets of billionaires and grifting, much like the riot wing reactionaries.
Not the current leadership, agreed.
sandywb14@sarahtaber Thanks so much for this thread. It helps put things into perspective. I’m still in a major funk but it gives me the incentive to keep showing and speaking up.
July! Our Sex Is On Fire! 🔥☀️🧨Really good thread. Appreciate all the historical context. I learned something here. So, definitely well done.
But.
This also has vibes of, bc I like sports, hey last week we lost 100-0 and this week we only lost 90-0. Progress!
Uhhhh, we're still getting our ass absolutely kicked.
I can't put lipstick on this pig. Not today.
Marc Singer@sarahtaber good points all, but I guess this time seems worse because we thought we were making progress and we expect that people should know this is wrong. If you’re trying to make me feel better, I don’t know if it’s working.
Matt McIrvin@sarahtaber So far it doesn't feel like fighting back, it feels like shouting down a hole in the ground. The bad guys have all the cards and even our side seems to agree that this is somehow all our side's fault.
People won't start fully fighting back until they're able to actually admit that, yes, people like Biden, Newsom, Buttigieg, Jeffries, Pelosi etc. are not leaders who will fight and who are in fact complicit in fighting to keep the racist, imperialist status quo.
We need leadership that will lead the charge, and that means letting neoliberalism fall by the wayside and admitting it's non-viable. There can be no centrism with fascists.
@sarahtaber Thank you for this historical perspective, it's very helpful.
Ricki Bowie Knives Tarr@sarahtaber Fucking fantastic and well researched thread Sarah, thank you so much.
Venita@RickiTarr @sarahtaber The United States is based on a White Supremacist system which includes laws and institutions and that hasn't changed. Constitutional amendments and social/cultural changes have been made, and there has always been backlash. Change the system and change the outcome. I don't see that happening.
Tiota Sram@venitamathias @RickiTarr @sarahtaber I'm half in agreement with you here, but it can be true both that the whole system is rotten and that we are currently in a moment of unprecedented change/challenge in/to that system. Recognizing that newness doesn't mean you have to be hopeful, but I think it helps create room for hope if you want to.
@tiotasram @RickiTarr @sarahtaber Of course, I can't say that the US white supremacist system will never change. The quick overturn of DEI policies and institutionalized racism shows me that the system is intact and holding strong. The fish rots from the head.
MooMoo the Cat@sarahtaber Thank you for this. 🙏
BenjaminKlein@sarahtaber thank you for this thread, it's often useful to listen to people who have been dealing with oppression and fighting fascism for 400 years. Here is Dr. Cornel West & Rev. Amos Brown on America's chickens come home to roost moment.
Dr. Cornel West & Rev. Amos Brown - A Conversation W/ Clergy (POWERFUL)
CavyherdThere's another factor at play here, also. Not only are we seeing a backlash in realtime but, possibly even more important, we're seeing into the perspectives of the target populations, also in realtime, in a way that hasn't been possible or available before.
The humanity of the marginalized groups is much more visible than previously. & that humanity is MUCH harder to gloss over with propaganda than it used to be.
Chris Petrilli@sarahtaber thank you for bringing some reality tinted lenses to this dark time.