This is the absolute worst time to lie low

Jeffrey Isaac, an Indiana University political scientist, offered his thoughts last Sunday on the fearful environment in which many on the left are dwelling. My fear is that too many on the left will follow his immediate path, delineated in "What I Think About Last Wednesday."

Political assassination is bad.

Ergo the political assassination of Charlie Kirk is bad.

I know not a single serious liberal or progressive or leftist who thinks otherwise or who has ever done anything that might lead any reasonable person to imagine they think otherwise.

But we are now in a situation—a perilous situation—where it may be dangerous to say anything but that.

Let me take that back. It is dangerous to say anything but that.

And at this moment ... I feel disinclined to say much more than that.

I find that — his disinclination — disturbing, though he modified his negative intent with the positive dollop of maybe, sometime, saying something more.

Still, it remains that his principal reason for saying little or nothing now is that it's dangerous. That's a problem. His two other reasons for demurring are, however, understandable. One, "everything that can be said has already been said," which, as Isaac further noted, is true of pretty much all political writings online.

Two, "I am tired, deeply tired," he wrote. "I have been writing about these things, doggedly, for almost a decade. A fucking decade." (Tell me about it, Professor. So far I've served a 25-year sentence in the hellish Attica of covering modern Republicanism; its nascent fascism, stamped W.)

His third and, it seems, overriding reason: "I am afraid." That of course goes to the prevailing danger that Isaac articulated in the passage above. Fear is not only entirely understandable; it's incontrovertibly reasonable.

Trump's natural malevolence and blanket intolerance of dissent have in short order gone from merely pouring forth to gushing like a friggin' dam break virtually every hour. Only a fool would be blind to the danger of writing critically, which is to say, truthfully, about Trump & Co.'s Gestapo mentality and its now-manifesting tactics.

And Prof. Isaac is no fool. Neither is anyone else in whom real danger triggers the evolutionary response of fear and proceeds to the secondary responses of fight or flight. Decision time — and fast.

That Isaac has opted for flight — at least for a while — in the face of Trump's ramifying fascism is what, again, I find disturbing. Because now is precisely the time in which voices of loud, sustained, no-fucking-way protest are most essential.

They'd be of little use once Trump completed building his police state, which, make no mistake, will be rendered more likely if Isaac's flight plan finds a mass following. Even the narrowest of anti-fascists' temporary absence from battle is the very window of opportunity that Trump needs.

Isaac explained his cracking that window a bit, but here he departed from sound reasoning; indeed, he took leave from it in explaining it:       

I am now afraid to publish things, especially online, that have little chance of making much impact, but a perhaps significant chance of getting me into hot water with people who have real power and who are cruel and vindictive and motivated by values that are anathema to freedom.

Perhaps you recognized the fault line — the dependent clause, "[things] that have little chance of making much impact. Fact is, they'd have a significant and potentially enormous impact but only if they got him into hot water.

Even assuming that Isaac's published words had "already been said," the point of repeating them — to answer his earlier question about online repetition, "What's the point?" — would be the asinine overreaction by vindictive people with power, and that, a rallying point for other anti-fascists.

The anti-fascist opposition is going to need a whole lot of such rallying points. If to online writers there were no danger in precipitating them, then there'd be no fascist regime to rally against. For the times would be ordinary.

Isaac concluded on what strikes me as a contradictory note: "Of course we need to speak out broadly, and act politically at every level." He did qualify the remark: "But I think that we in the U.S. have now entered a situation unlike any we have experienced" — well, yes — hence "We cannot simply continue to act the way we’ve been acting for years."

I'm not quite clear on exactly what way that was and must now be forbidden, but that's another story. And this piece is already trailing too long.

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Cross-posted at Substack.