Even before the protests over George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police, the United States had earned the unwelcome distinction of its first-ever listing in the top five most dangerous countries for journalists, according to the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders. And the multiple arrests and police assaults on journalists covering the Floyd protests seem likely to cement America’s elevated place in that authoritarian hall of shame.
New Republic contributor Linda Tirado was among the first journalist casualties of the new police offensive against the press: Last week, as she covered the demonstrations in Minneapolis, she was struck in her left eye by a foam bullet fired from a cop’s gun. She’s permanently lost vision in that eye, but as
she revisits her trauma, she’s come to realize the despair and rage she feels now is more political than personal.
“Since I was shot,” Tirado writes,
I have been worldwide front-page news: China is using my bloodied face as propaganda, for instance. Hundreds, if not thousands, of interview requests have flooded in. All anyone wants to talk about is freedom of the press, if I am angry, what I will do next. I think that I am angry—but no more than I was this time last week, when I was watching America burn for the pleasure of our vainglorious leader. I lost an eye; George Floyd lost his life. What right do I have to rage on my own behalf? She also notes that the anger that should have been heeded far sooner came via the alarms she and other journalists had raised amid Trump’s unlikely political ascension—that the U.S. was flirting with a form of modern fascism. With federalized troops now cracking down on peaceful protesters in search of the phantom menace of an antifa fifth column fomenting violence in the streets, the fascist specter would appear to be a
specter no longer. But Tirado rightly observes that the crucial early warnings about the real nature of the Trumpist putsch went unheeded under an inert and complacent political consensus:
Back in 2016, a week or so before the presidential election, I wrote a piece about how Donald Trump’s campaign speeches were openly fascist, how they spiked fear in those parts of my soul that remember being raised as a nativist. Back then, you couldn’t say Trumpism was a form of fascism—it was considered a bit hysterical.
That remained true in mainstream consensus throughout 2017 and 2018. Sometime last year, more people started to realize that the norms were shattering, and they weren’t reassembling by way of any magnetic properties of self-healing constitutionalism. It was after we put migrant kids in camps and after the president started encouraging people to batter the press and after impeachment, but before the current stage of authoritarian collapse, which has us gassing clergy and desecrating churches for photo ops. Fascism is always a slow slide into routinized mayhem, noticeable to most people only in retrospect. Tirado also covered the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police killing of Michael Brown. An officer pepper-sprayed her there, and that episode now haunts her recovery from the assault in Minneapolis. This, too, now strikes her as an object lesson in the failure of our collective political vision:
I am thinking about him a lot in recent days, as I watch footage of TV crews being arrested on live air and police spraying what they call “less lethal” rounds into crowds indiscriminately. I am thinking about him as I scroll Twitter, where brave men hide behind burner accounts to tell me “play stupid games win stupid prizes”—alt-right shorthand for calling me a traitor, to either the country or my race. In their discursive world, good white ladies are not supposed to scream that Black lives matter or point out the bigotry inherent in a system of law enforcement that started with slave patrols. White women, to those kinds of men, are not supposed to do much of anything except be quiescent until it is time to have babies or furnish a sexual pretext for some good old-fashioned racism. We are certainly not supposed to refuse to learn our lesson, even after we have been punished by having an eye put out. We all need to heed Linda Tirado’s bravery and her urgent warnings about the imperiled American republic. As she notes, something far greater than the future of journalism is now at stake.
—Chris Lehmann, Editor
