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Hey there everyone,
This is one of those weeks where so much happened—a blizzard of rulings, protests, decrees and in-depth reports—that I couldn’t find my ground. Finally it hit me that if I was feeling like I was in the middle of a snowstorm, then perhaps understanding the storm itself was what I should talk about.
One project of this newsletter is to show how events that appear disconnected from one another in terms of their specifics are linked together at the level of strategy or ideology. It is harder to be buffeted and unmoored by the blizzard of separate events when it is clear that they are unified in their hoped-for effects.
One of the most effective ways to consolidate power, I believe, is to persuade a person that who they are, and what they think, doesn’t matter. To be abhorred is awful, but there’s a tortuous kind of recognition in it. Your existence is enough of a threat, an abomination, to be a grain of sand in the oyster. But if you believe that whether you live or die is of no value to anyone; if you believe you cannot impact others, cannot alter events in your favor, have no special talent or insight; will not be mourned in death. . .
If you are hearing regularly that your history should never be taught or published, your collective existence should be erased from memory–a precursor, perhaps, to your very body being erased, locked up, or obliterated, in the tedious interim period between your being here now and your historical memory being meticulously scrubbed from our nation’s self-knowing . . . well then the line between being a threat or a meaningless cipher can start to blur.
So let’s look at just some of what happened at the end of last week, to see if we can get a sense of the whole, and re-ground:
1.
On Friday, April 7th, a Texas judge, Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, ruled in favor of the plaintiff, The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which seeks to challenge and halt the FDA approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used to induce a chemical abortion or to address a miscarriage.
The judge also cited in his opinion the Comstock Act of 1873, which bars “Mailing every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion or for any indecent or immoral purpose.”
Almost immediately after the ruling, a Washington State judge ordered the FDA to continue to make the drug available. The legal stalemate is likely—or intentionally designed to—land in the lap of the Supreme Court.
The two contradictory rulings have introduced confusion and fear among those seeking abortions or miscarriage care and those who provide chemical abortions. In the interim, it’s unclear if or how many pregnant people, or miscarrying people, will be denied mifepristone. The suddenness of the decision, its efforts to shore up Dobbs and deny those states that have affirmed the right to abortion the ability to mail drugs to those who live elsewhere are all aspects of its impact, both material and psychological.
2.
Speaking of the Supreme Court, on Thursday, April 6th, ProPublica published its report that Justice Clarence Thomas neglected to report his over twenty years of accepting vacations paid for and attended by the Republican donor Harlan Crow. The trips, to places like New Zealand and Indonesia, involved travel on Crow’s private jet and yacht, and included perks like Crow’s private chef. Trips like these are valued at around $500,000 each.
It turns out that Crow has not only busied himself with influencing a conservative Supreme Court justice for decades, but he’s also spent time building up his collection of Nazi memorabilia. Among his collection is a signed copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and a couple of Hitler’s paintings.
3.
Speaking of Hitler, on Friday April 7th, the New York Times reported that former president Trump, who was indicted on March 30th, has asked his aides to hire the anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer to help with his presidential campaign. Ms. Loomer, who is Jewish, used the hashtag #proudislamophobe on Twitter and in 2018 was barred from the platform for her conspiracy theories and incendiary comments. In response, she pinned a yellow Star of David to her clothing and handcuffed herself to the entrance of New York City’s Twitter’s headquarters. I wonder what Ms. Loomer, a proud supporter of Trump, thinks of Harlan Crow’s Hitler collection.
4.
Speaking of Twitter—Elon Musk, the platform’s new owner, used the platform’s guidelines to label both NPR and the BBC “state affiliated media” on Wednesday the 5th. On the 6th, Substack, the very platform that hosts this newsletter, announced it had created a program called Notes that works very much like Twitter. Moments later, Musk blocked links from Substack to Twitter, preventing writers from being able to publish tweets in their newsletters.
The next day, Friday the 7th, Twitter blocked links to all of Substack’s newsletters, effectively silencing Substack’s writers and their efforts to reach readers outside the Substack platform. The irony of Musk’s self-proclaimed “free speech absolutis[m]” resulting in the censorship of an entire platform of writers and their eager readers, as well as the information posted on Twitter that would be of interest to them, didn’t appear to strike him as odd.
5.
Speaking of censorship and the suppression of free speech, on Thursday April 6th, two of three Democratic Tennessee lawmakers who protested the House’s lack of progress in gun reform legislation were expelled for their lack of decorum. The three Democratic lawmakers were responding to a school shooting in which a shooter fired 152 rounds and killed six people, an act that led a mass of schoolchildren and others to come to the legislature to protest. The legislators voted to expel two Black men, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, who are freshmen lawmakers, but allowed the white woman, Gloria Johnson, to keep her seat.
Other than the labeling of the BBC and NPR as state propaganda outlets, which happened on Wednesday, everything I summarized above happened in two days’ time. I started making a list of the groups of people who were impacted by these interlocking events. I started with those who are directly impacted, such as writers, pregnant people, Black lawmakers, schoolchildren who protest or are victims of gun violence, employees of BBC, NPR, Substack and Twitter.
But then I started thinking about the people who don’t know they’re going to miscarry this week. I thought about the people who are considering becoming pregnant, or who were just raped. I thought about the Muslims who endured Trump’s last campaign, and the violence they witnessed or experienced, and what it means to anticipate Laura Loomer.
I thought about the attacks on synagogues in the last year, in part because of the ways antisemitism and Islamophobia work together to consolidate the idea that the only authentic American citizens are white Christians. I thought about the people in Iowa who have been told that if they drive toward the state border to try to obtain abortion care they can be arrested for crossing over, or for having mifepristone in their bag. I thought about what it does to a person to know that a Supreme Court justice is hanging out for decades with someone who displays Hitler’s artwork in his home. I started drawing the spiral of impact, and it just kept turning and widening, breathtaking in its scope.
These events, occurring in tandem and evoking one another in their logic, are designed to create a sense in the public that almost everyone is unsafe, that they could be attacked at any moment, that their rights are not secure, and that institutions cannot be trusted to fight back fast enough, because they aren’t nimble, aren’t designed to respond to so many competing demands at once, or may be compromised from within.
From my perspective, perhaps the most effective impact of these events is psychological. After the Dobbs decision came down I wrote about the ways the law is an act of psychological warfare. I see the Kacsmaryk decision as an effort to recontain the political force and energy that has arisen to overturn Dobbs and return rights to pregnant people. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his decision came down two days after Wisconsin voters elected a justice to their Supreme Court, Janet Protasiewicz, who is going to return abortion rights to that state.
I see these events as efforts not only to attack particular identity groups, but also to split collective movement-building efforts by eroding trust among them. These actions press on historical conflicts between identity-based groups, reminding them of the people they shouldn’t trust, the people who refused to organize with them in the past, the people who wouldn’t stand up for their rights and instead focused on their own needs.
In a climate of fear and confusion, it's crucial to distinguish between what is anticipated and what is known. Consider these facts:
–We don’t know if the abortion pill will be banned or not—the judge put a 7 day stay into his ruling to allow the Feds to respond and we aren’t through that window yet.
–We don’t know yet if Laura Loomer will actually be hired by the Trump campaign.
–We know that Democratic legislators voted yesterday to reinstate Justin Jones.
–We know that the Justice Department has filed an appeal to block the ruling against the FDA.
–We know that over three hundred CEOs of pharmaceutical and biotech companies have written a public letter decrying the abortion pill decision for its impact on the FDA’s approval process of other drugs.
And yet, despite these countermoves, and regardless of whether any of these actions ultimately succeed in their efforts, the psychological blow has already landed. Terrorizing and exhausting a majority of citizens is itself an action. It is one that people who work in mental health are particularly well-suited to address.
We have the tools to help people distinguish between their anticipation of an attack in the future and the actual threats they face in the present. We have the capacity to help people slow down and attend to their somatic responses. We can help people notice the ways a context of imminent but unverified threat may be impacting their capacity to focus, to attend to themselves and those they love.
We can notice an increase in shame, self-blame, hopelessness, and despair, and work with it not only individually but by contextualizing these feelings as in part responses to collective stress. We can come together, knowing that there is no clear distinction between therapists and trauma survivors, clients and practitioners, activists and healers—that we can contract into isolation and despair, or acknowledge and work through the ways we may be rehearsing and reinforcing our own lack of trust. We can remind people of their curiosity, creativity, spirituality, community, and other sources of personal and collective power.
I know I’ve said a lot today, and I appreciate you hanging in with me if you’ve made it this far in this long post. I’m sending you love and snarkiness; I’m sending you history and perspective; and I’m holding your grief and your terror in my own being today, because your being here gives me hope.
Take good care out there this week.
xo
Rebecca
Countering The Psychological Effects of a Blizzard of Violence