Some Sleepwalk into Autocracy – Radio Free

I am a whistleblower with a master’s of public policy from Central European University (kicked out of Hungary by Orban’s regime), and I have spent the last several years feverishly trying to blow the whistle about authoritarianism and rising fascism in the U.S. On Christmas Eve in 2023, I wrote a prescient and illustrative letter to civil society abroad as I begged for help on behalf of a marginalized, targeted U.S. activist. When the international civil society employee had a call with me, she explained what human rights are to me, assuming I did not know, and she seemed to think Americans have said rights to such an extent that we could not possibly urgently need the support her organization provides.

“We don’t help with democratic backsliding,” she said.

“How bad does it have to get?” I replied.

I am not angry at the Trump voters who ”chose” Trump when they did not have a choice, as the U.S. has not had enough election integrity for it to matter for years. At best, billionaires gave ordinary voters the illusion of choice, asking them to pick between two right-wing candidates on the menu the oligarchy provided. It is like children being told, “You must wear pants, so do you want the red ones or the blue ones? We bought them both.” I am angry at the careerist civil servants and civil society members who served themselves at society’s expense, leading us to this point instead of preventing it. Almost every time I tried to explain the Orwellian details of U.S. case studies, and the playbook of corruption paving the way for fascism, to supposed experts and members of civil society, I was dismissed or laughed out of “the room where it happens.” Far from helping us, civil society betrayed us.

Benefiting from the system and becoming one with it—seeking status, fancy titles, and nice salaries, as well as a seat at the politician’s table—precludes the due diligence of protecting the public from the system and the excesses of those politicians. Chris Hedges likes to refer to this gutted and gutless “Liberal Class” as “careerists” and “courtiers” in his books such as Death of the Liberal Class. Many of these “experts” who got interviewed on mainstream media over the past few years still thought “everything is fine” like the dog drinking coffee in the house on fire meme out of excessive privilege, fragile egos, and self-delusion. Other “experts” and members of civil society knew things were bad, but did not want to sound the alarm with accurate urgency because they wanted to keep their rapport with the powers that be such as the morally bankrupt Democratic party (as Chris Hedges calls it). There were powerful people who admitted privately to me that they knew our supposed rights and the constitution do not function in practice, but who feebly justified being two-faced when it was time to face the music. They are, in the worst cases, members of marginalized groups themselves who helped corrupt cronies by misleading people like them into traps set by state-sponsored perpetrators.

Funding was doled out by billionaires and corporations, and accepted by supposedly independent academia with strings attached, leading partially to the crackdown on speech against the genocide in Palestine. I believe civil society groups and researchers partnered with Big Tech to whitewash AI’s impacts and image, especially when it comes to harms related to journalism. Some civil society groups even operate on behalf of the enemy, redefining victims as perpetrators and perpetrators as victims. As a whistleblower, I found no help for people like me, but I did find organizations helping people who are part of the problem. I attended one Florida-based “whistleblower” organization’s vicariously embarrassing online event two years ago, and concluded they were supporting people who had been justly punished for racism, sexism, and homophobia, not the victims of said people.

In other situations, I recall civil society members allowing pure egotism and petulance to prevent their receptivity to the truth and willingness to find real solutions. A program coordinator at a legal aid organization got angry when I said they were bringing their programs to the U.S. late and explained how access to justice would not solve the problem of a corrupted and commandeered judiciary. She practically pouted like a child as though the truth was a personal attack, and I received no replies to my follow-up emails even after her boss tried to direct me back to her through LinkedIN. Instead of spending their money and advocacy training on me, perhaps they trained some of the other people in the info-session: A Native American conspiracy theorist supporting anti-trans parents against Child Protective Services intervention for their kids, and an open pedophile trying to conflate being a pedophile with being gay and a victim of unfair state persecution.

It is telling to me that I am so relieved when someone like Ellie Mystal so much as states the obvious and asks,

To turn it around back on the people who were telling me for months that the courts would save us, what do you all got now? What’s your plan now? Now that the courts have issued their order and Trump has ignored their orders, what’s plan B because plan A was the courts going to save us, and that was never going to work?

A few days ago, after trying for seven months to reach one of the most powerful and important people I have ever managed to contact to ask for help fighting fascism, I was dismissed with the worst, most tone-deaf and delusional advice I have ever received in my life which was essentially:

“Come back to the U.S. and get any job you can find regardless of how houseless it leaves you. Convince people not to believe Trump’s lies, and work your way up into politics.”

Nevermind that dissidents, LGBTQ+, disabled people, houseless people, etc. are being targeted and will certainly be put into prison camps such as those called for in Project 2025 domestically (not just in El Salvador). Nevermind that I tried everything to organize, and collaborate, and resist, over the last few years, and have worked in advocacy and awareness-raising pro-bono since 2021. Nevermind that there is no such thing as working your way up into politics from the working class under autocratic dictatorships. I should thank this rich, white, boomer member of the establishment for the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and return to stand in front of the firing squad pitch. I know he did not mean it to be arrogant, condescending, negligent, and reprehensible, but it is.

We are now witnessing the social media and televised version of developing genocide, and while false information and free press concerns make the truth harder for people to discern, the regime is allowing photo journalists in and creating a public spectacle as it gloats about its crimes. I wish everyone in the world could see that photo of bound detainees having their heads shaved and read about how innocent Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist deported to Trump’s torture gulag, called for his mother as he wept with his hair falling all around him. I wish everyone would read ProPublica’s article detailing the experiences of the helpless and morally-conflicted flight attendants on the unmistakable modern version of the trains to the concentration camps.

I cannot share my 2023 letter here, but I wish I could submit it as a primary source if there is a future museum or archive where people go to see evidence painting a picture of a dark chapter in history they promise to never repeat. It is worth noting that, in 2023, the Holocaust Museum in Mexico even had an exhibit on Trump, playing his dehumanizing quotations about immigrants and vulnerable people on repeat. This time, we won’t be able to say we did not know. People like me who had little power knew, and people who had the most power and authority did not listen, would not help, and did not protect anyone but themselves. Psuedo-experts whose careers rested on fealty knowingly or unknowingly participated in a collective gaslighting of the victims of the broken system and sick society in a cover-up for the increasingly authoritarian and oligarchic state. They dragged us kicking and screaming into autocracy, or threw us under the bus, and I will never forgive them for it.