Free fall
"During the most unprecedented, illegal, and unconstitutional first three months in office, this regime has managed to tear down not only storied institutions and long-standing safeguards but our entire collective confidence in our government.
We are in the unknown, floating between disbelief and horror, fear and anger, unsure where to place our next dollar, what to tell our children, and how we’re supposed to proceed.
We are in total free fall."
— Melissa Corrigan, If Your Skin Is White, This Is Your Fight.: We're over the cliff. What now? Counterstory Media, Apr 16, 2025
Whirlwind
Brian Klaas says: "Like it or not, the whirlwind is back. My unsolicited advice is this: make a deliberate plan to escape its vortex so you have the energy to push back more effectively. And remember, above all, that digital engagement matters only if it provokes real-world action."
Tidal wave
"The first one hundred days of this bullshit has gone exactly how this regime wanted it to. Steve Bannon calls it “flooding the zone”. Political communication expert Dannagal Young calls it a “tidal wave”. A symposium of journalists call it “weaponizing chaos and overwhelming media”."
— Who I Am, And Who I'm Not: Adjusting to this "new normal", and redefining who I can be in it. Melissa Corrigan, May 6, 2025
We are speechless (Naomi Klein, Doppelganger) before the wreck (Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror).
Dumpster-fire world
"In a dumpster-fire world, I choose over and over again to act treasonously, which is to say, to reach. What does your treason look like? I hope this week, it looks like carrying a plant around for a day, inciting joy in strangers."
— Sara Sadek in Folkweaver, May 6, 2025
Unthreading
"A republic can be lost not only through invasion or secession, but through the steady normalization of exceptions, when agencies stop enforcing the law, when courts narrow the meaning of rights, when elected officials treat whole communities as expendable, and when the machinery of government bends toward the interests of the powerful rather than the protection of the people.
That is the moment we are living in now. The danger is not a single cataclysm but a slow unthreading, a willingness to accept that some Americans can breathe polluted air, lose their vote, or live without equal protection because it is politically convenient to look away."
William Spivey, Approaching America’s 250th Anniversary Requires Reflection on the Times We Almost Lost the Republic: The American Pattern of Forgetting the Fragility of Freedom. The Polis, June 18, 2026
If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write on Medium.
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