John,
I mentioned this in an email recently, but I think it's worth a deep dive.
Imagine a prison with a central guard tower with inmates living in cells along the outer walls of the jail. From that guard tower, you could see into every single cell of the prison — but the people in the prison cells can't see into the guard tower.
It would be impossible for a single guard to watch every single prisoner at once. But each inmate knows that — at least theoretically — they could be watched at any time. That changes the way they act all the time.
This is called a panopticon and — maybe you see where I'm going with this already — we are living in a kind of panopticon right now. The Trump administration and its allies on the far-right are trying to make us feel watched. They're trying to make examples of people who step out of line with their preferred way of thinking, of speaking, of acting — so that the rest of us will fall in line.
That's why Trump's DOJ is going after people like James Comey and Adam Schiff. That's why Trump's FCC threatened Jimmy Kimmel. That's part of why ICE conducts its raids and its disappearings with such impunity. They want us all to live in fear. They want us all to feel watched.
This should be alarming to each of us, and this is why I do the work that I do: to push back, to fight for democracy, to build a politics where we aren’t ruled by fear.
Because we aren’t in a prison. We aren’t being watched by a guard. For as much power as Trump and the far right have right now, it’s nowhere near as much power as they hope we cede to them. We still have a choice.
So we can’t cede that power to them. We can’t be intimidated just because they want us to be. When they harm people, we have to keep speaking up. When they do something illegal, we have to keep calling it out. And when they tell lies, we have to keep fighting back.
Thank you,
David Hogg
