The Emergency & Escapism
A meditation
What if escapism is a tactic? One we can use? A couple flows have come together in my head just lately. One came from Matriarchy Threads and Patriarchy Threads over on … Threads ;) and the other from listening to a very middle of the road liberal pod with Jon Stewart and some hip politics pod bros. These are gelling with Starhawk's recent posts on building a welcoming and enduring movement for a livable and feminist future, and with my intuition that moving from center to margin is the way forward.
I’m also planning a trip for later in the year to see my family in the Old Country and feeling like it’s going to break my heart to be among cousins who still feel so free to make a future rather than rebuild all that the regime is burning down. But, even that is part of the gel in these flows.
What Stewart kept landing on was that the way the regime is taking big swings (evil, murderous, but big) at reordering our way of life via a ‘tax reconciliation bill’ shows that big swings are possible. If the US Dems, or the left everywhere, or maybe even women worked to do it, we could take really big chunks out of history too.
I mean, the ‘big beautiful bill’ is Project 2025 come to life, and it rolls our social order all the way back to before the New Deal. It’s a century-scale big swing.
Caveat, the mob
The regime has a secret sauce. The mob. They're even more effective than the militias and whatever the Proud Boys are. The mob are everywhere, and they are very good at doxxing, threatening phone calls, and SWATting. They are what scares the GOP into compliance even more than Trump or Bondi or Patel. They will call you at 2:11 AM to tell you the names of your children and where they go to college, or your pets, or where your spouse works, what bus they take.
Trump created the mob in his first run and over his first presidency. He kept them vibrating with pride and anxiety, with cognitive dissonance and blind faith, and then he finally pointed them at the Capitol on J6 so we could see what he had made. They are still his best un-secret weapon.
We do not have a mob, neither the Dems or women. And we may not want one, but we need to reckon with the fact they're there and they're eager.
Cuts to programs for women are dire emergencies. We want to feature women & and women's organizations affected by these cuts and funding shortfalls around the globe and in the US.
This issue is getting no press, no attention from Big Podcasts. Let's get the attention vulnerable & suffering women deserve.
