What can we do to save our country?

I’ve been getting a version of that question from readers ever since Trump raised his makeup encrusted right hand and took the oath of office in January. I will have written a piece about some Trumpian horror – he’s firing thousands of good people in the federal government, he’s going to starve children overseas by closing USAID, he’s dipping his thieving little fingers into the public trough in a multiplicity of ways, he’s sending masked men into the streets to arrest otherwise productive people whose only crime is not having a U.S. passport or a green card. My email or Substack Notes messages will light up with, yes, it’s good to know all that, but what can be done to stop him?

This is where we get into the painful business of understanding who we are. We’re not the people who elected him, the 77 million of our fellow citizens, some of whom live on my street here in Milford, PA, others who live in your town or in your apartment building. They don’t want him to stop or be gone. They had a voice in the matter, and they exercised it at the ballot box last November. As Trump is fond of pointing out ad nauseum, he is doing what they elected him to do.

We are engaged in a great struggle, not just against Donald Trump and his enablers at the Heritage Foundation and their ideological fellow travelers, but against those among our fellow citizens who have become known as the MAGA faithful. They didn’t stop with their vote for Trump. Right here in Milford, we know people who are pulling their children out of the public schools in Pike County because of what those Trump supporters have done by taking over the school board. Such takeovers are happening all over the country. What we might call even larger takeovers are happening in red states that are attempting to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in school classrooms. At least one state, Oklahoma, is requiring teachers from New York and California who move to Oklahoma and want to teach school to take what amounts to an ideological loyalty test to ensure they are not “coming into our classrooms and indoctrinating kids and teaching things that are antithetical to our standards," as Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters told USA Today.

See how hard this is? I’m writing a piece about what we can do, and already I’ve veered into a little screed on what they are doing. But right there is a good example of what is already happening. The odious Oklahoma school superintendent wouldn’t even have to come up with his silly “values” test if teachers from New York and California weren’t moving to that state. Even though you and I might not want to move to Oklahoma, people can move wherever they want, and there is more evidence every day that people like us are moving into red states. To some extent, as is happening in Texas, they are helping to turn Texas blue, parts of it anyway. I was once told by a man in one of the deep south states when I was living down there, “I don’t like the way you are infecting people around here with your values.”

Political, moral, and ethical values travel with the people who live by them. The state of Oklahoma is disturbed enough by this fact that they are attempting with a silly test to vaccinate their children against such infection. We should take heart knowing this, because it is evidence of the power of our ideas. People who are secure in the rightness of their convictions do not attempt to protect their own from challenge.

I read this evening that Harvard has won its lawsuit against the Trump administration for cancelling their research grants. You will recall that Harvard previously refused an offer from Trump that would have reinstituted research grants of about $2 billion if Harvard yielded to demands that they in essence change what they teach their students. Yet another example of ideas considered so threatening that efforts must be made to foreclose against their spread.

What I’m pointing out is that these are our ideas and convictions and values that they are so afraid of. The truly ridiculous thing about the Right’s attempts to win what we call the culture wars with ideological loyalty tests and book bans and economic blackmail is how 20^th Century their methods are. Do they really think if they ban “The Color Purple” from a library or forbid its teaching in a classroom that the book is not available to anyone who wants to read it with the click of a mouse?

I have come to the rather astounding conclusion that Artificial Intelligence might not be such a bad thing, because the so-called “large language models” that currently power AI are stuffed to the gills with words and ideas and indeed the very language they have effectively stolen from Alice Walker and James Baldwin and Eugene V. Debs, for crying out loud, because he and his thoughts and values, if you will, are in the history books, and thus in the distribution networks of AI.

It's folly to ban the teaching of critical race theory, to give just one example, when everything it stands for, all its knowledge, every last wrinkle of its genesis and theories and ideas is right there in the search results of that good buddy of every student, indeed every questing mind, in a Google search result that you don’t even have to type “critical race theory” into the search line to come up with. Knowledge, thought, theories, history, ideas – even radical ones – are more impossible to control than ever before in history.

Silicon Valley assholes like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have to know that they are fighting what the military calls a rear-guard action against the power of their own inventions. In taking over X, Musk has attempted to “democratize” – his word, not mine – his platform by allowing heretofore banned material to be published by those we would call bad actors. But really, all he’s doing is allowing Nazis and other scum sucking bottom feeders to compete with their so-called “ideas” against ours. I’ve seen at least two stories in the last month about the return to X by liberals who had abandoned the platform when Musk took over. That is undeniably a “good.” They’re in there swinging in the war of ideas, such as it is, again on X. I know that algorithms can be used to weight certain points of views over others. Musk can certainly do that on X if he wants to.

But he faces the same deadly truth of capitalism everyone else has to face: to make money, he needs what they call “eyeballs.” He’ll get fewer eyeballs and make less money if he uses his algorithms to limit access of certain points of view to his platform. And he’s got to know that those points of view will find other outlets to lend their eyeballs to, which will then reap the economic benefits they bring.

I’ll use the press conference on the Capitol steps by Epstein victims as an example. What those nine women had to say publicly today is worth one thousand times as much as the 33,000 pages of so-called “Epstein files” that were dragged out of a kicking and screaming Trump DOJ last week. Posts lit up on X, on Bluesky, on Reddit, on Facebook – all over the internet today. Trump was sufficiently threatened by the testimony of the victims that he called the victims a “Democrat hoax.” One accuser, who was a central figure in the 2019 indictment, answered Trump’s charge with “This is not a hoax.” Trump was even accused of scheduling a fighter jet flyover of the Capitol to drown out the victims’ words during the press conference.

All of that…every bit of it…went into the gaping maw of AI in real time and is available to anyone curious about what Epstein’s victims had to say. Late this afternoon it was reported that the arch-conservative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, left the Oversight Committee in tears after hearing testimony by Epstein victims. It was revealed after the press conference that the victims are assembling their own “black book” of Epstein “clients” they knew to be involved in abuse of underage girls. That’s got to be giving Trump and others the worst heartburn of their lives tonight, because when that list comes out, AI will have it.

Nothing I’ve written is to say that we should relax our concerns or lessen our efforts against Trump and the forces of evil he has unleashed on this country. But we should take at least some comfort knowing that our ideas and values are threatening enough to Trump and his minions that they have precipitated his authoritarian backlash. He will threaten us. He will try to silence us. He will try to frighten us.

Many things we feared would happen have come to pass. The threat to this country is as real as a proverbial heart attack. He is even trying to intimidate the citizens of blue cities by putting armed National Guard soldiers on the streets. From what happened in Los Angeles and what we’ve seen in Washington D.C., it isn’t working. But that doesn’t mean he won’t keep it up, or that he won’t try something even worse. He is the one who asked General Mattis during the George Floyd protests, “can’t we just shoot them in the legs?” Anything, and I mean anything is possible with Trump.

So, if you want to know what I think we should do at this trying moment in the history of our nation, this is what I have to say. I don’t have a pad of prescriptions I can write with foolproof answers to how we can save our country. We already know some of the things we can do: stand up, show up, go to demonstrations, vote, spread your ideas to anyone who will listen and even those who don’t want to with post on social media.

Finally, we should all study how to go about standing in front of a tank. I intend to Google it. AI will be able to tell me everything I need to know about how to stop a tank in the street with my ideas and my body if or when that terrible choice becomes necessary.