re: “can you stay in a post-2024 America?”
I want to preface this with, “This is what I’m thinking about,” not “what I’m doing”, and @eingy isn’t “signed on” to any of this explicitly or by inference. I’m just talking about what’s in my mind.
- The constant noise of Trump/Musk/Miller/Bannon et al. on my life, and the MAGAts are like, “this is OUR country GTFO!” will be unbearable and inescapable. Not as bad in California, but online, it’s going to be an unending nightmare.
- Musk has already declared cost-cutting to the point of hardship is his goal, in order to Twitterize the Federal government and make it “more efficient”. Of course, while the government isn’t particularly efficient, like the trust & safety team at Twitter, a lot of those things exist because the government can’t do its job correctly without them. So what gets cut? I’m assuming a lot of social services. Medicare, ACA, etc. but also a lot of oversight agencies like the EPA, and anything that has any administrative power over things business doesn’t like. I’m assuming that the point of Musk’s hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars he invested in this job is that it’ll pay out to him in the tens of billions because SpaceX can just dump waste wherever without any regard to nature, health, etc.
- RFK Jr. in charge of the FDA is an actual nightmare. He’s already said that folks responsible for “repressing” things like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as treatments for COVID had better “pack their bags”. His goal is to utterly gut the FDA. Well, that’s gonna mean all kinds of bad shit re: food safety, drug safety, health policy, etc. – and not just for the next four years. Just like Trump’s first term gutted the civil service to the point where it’s not even close to being rebuilt, destroying the FDA will take another generation+ to rebuild, if we ever get the chance to rebuild it.
- Anything Lina Kahn has been doing will be reversed, and the FTC will likely be destroyed. Anti-anti-monopoly folks win big. Zuckerberg, Google, etc. – expect that consumer hostility is the way of the future. Invisible fees everywhere, impossible-to-cancel shit, tracking software in everything. The opposite of the GDPR in every way. America’s only protections will be international governments that can exert enough pressure on US companies, but US citizens will have no protections from our own government.
- All DEI-related things will be functionally outlawed. Whether practically-speaking or actually-speaking, things that are designed to try to right the wrongs of the past will all be scuttled, because there are no wrongs of the past.
- Education, federally, will echo the worst parts of what’s happened in Florida over the last decade. Textbooks mentioning slavery? Nope. Sexual education/health? Nope. Evolution? I doubt it. I’d be very surprised if we don’t see someone who’s explicitly declared themselves to be a Christian Nationalist in charge of education curriculum by EOY 2025.
Then there’s a whole host of other things.
- Do I have any faith in future elections? Zero. Literally zero.
- Police reform? NOoooooope.
- Any enforcement of white collar crime? Nope.
- Stock buybacks and other manipulations through the roof without any counterpressures.
- Incarceration of black/brown people for whatever reason.
- The “mass deportation” thing, which cannot possibly be done fairly or carefully at scale and speed, will instead by “mass incarceration”, and the time between “incarceration” and “deportation” will be irrelevant once they’ve imprisoned all the minorities they don’t like. Which is anyone who’s not a Christian Nationalist.
Yeah – so that’s “what I could write quickly” about “what’s on my mind”, but the more I think about it, the worse it all gets in every dimension. And do I think it’ll be endurable for four years? It’ll be endurable for us, most likely. Our kids could get swept up in a careless roundup, which is probably my most immediate concern, and obviously friends & “chosen family” fall into that bucket as well.But will we survive? Probably?
But it won’t be four years. It’ll be a generational disaster, between the 9-0 makeup of the Supreme Court by the time this is over, the destruction of tons of important federal agencies, and the permanent entrenchment of the billionaire class in political power – not just implicitly, but explicitly. Which I do think is a change from how things are now, even if I take my most cynical approach to how bad it is now.
So the thing I keep having to think about is not, “Will I be able to ride out the next four years?” It’s “What is a post-2024 America like for the rest of my life? And is that not just endurable, because the difference between living in a place that you can endure and a place you enjoy is massive,?”
And then, “What else is there?” Because everywhere has significant downsides. Other countries are regressive, sometimes in worse ways. Racist as fuck. Economically challenging. Language barriers. Worse weather. Whatever. And then there are huge logistical challenges to emigrating regardless. And disruption to our current lives, and isolation from our friends and our kids’ friends and support circles we have etc etc etc. and none of it is fucking pleasant or fun to think about and GOD DAMMIT FUCK ALL THESE RACIST MOTHER FUCKERS WHO HAVE DONE THIS TO US.
And I keep coming back to the Oodi. The Helsinki central library. And that it’s a monument to Finland’s values that the people voted for. The people voted to spend millions of dollars on a building that provides art and opportunity uniformly to its citizens regardless of their financial standing or race or gender or ability, physical, mental, or otherwise. Holy fuck. This is what we could have been. And instead, we’re … waves hands all around.