Ben and Jerry's, Enemy of the State?

When the government starts making lists, nothin good ever comes.

Yesterday the Secretary of State put out a hundred-page report on Cuba, and buried inside it is a list of forty-three Americans.

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, is on it. Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles. Three sitting members of Congress. Amy Goodman, who has hosted the War and Peace Report on Democracy Now for thirty years and who spent those years putting war crimes on the air and exposing the lies that walked this country into Iraq. Ben Cohen, who started Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. And the Amazon Labor Union, which won an election at a warehouse.

And this ain’t no leak. Nobody blew a whistle here. This is what they’re proud of, this is what they put out themselves, and Rubio posted it under his own name. They’re bringing the fight.

They’re not hiding what it’s for either, because right there in the report they bring up the blacklists of the fifties, the McCarthy hearings, the prosecutions, and they bring all that up as a thing that worked.

And none of this came out of nowhere. They already told the FBI to treat anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity and the wrong opinions on migration and race and gender and family as warning signs of a domestic terrorist. They’re subpoenaing the phone records of reporters and then the records of those reporters’ wives and mothers. They sent letters to election officials in all fifty states warning them of criminal prosecution and gave them five days to answer. They put forty-five billion dollars into new immigration detention, enough beds to rival the whole federal prison system. And the Supreme Court told them they can stop a man on the street based on how he looks and what language he’s speaking.

Now put that next to what the Speaker of the House said last week. He’s asking for three hundred and fifty billion dollars for the Pentagon, and the first reason out of his mouth is fighting communism on our own shores. Our shores. Four days later his Secretary of State publishes the names.

You’re looking at a budget and a target list, and they were built to go together.

Three hundred and fifty billion dollars to surveil and to spy and to wiretap, aimed at Ben Cohen who makes ice cream, at Amy Goodman who reports the news, at the mayor of New York, at a union that won an election at a warehouse. And we already know what this government does with the authority it’s already got. It searched a reporter’s home and took her devices. So once you’ve named a man an enemy of the state and appropriated the money to go after him, those tools are going to get used on him, and the only thing left to find out is which ones.

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This is the fight A Fight Worth Having is in.

If communism is so awful, and it is, if it’s such a terrible horrible thing, then why not let it compete? That’s what we do with everything else in this country. Apple against Android. We turn the thing loose and let it get beat on its merits, and we have never once needed the Secretary of State to write down names to settle it.Unless you’re worried it might win something.

Because if a fella could afford a house and a doctor and a decent life working one job, nobody would be sitting around getting inspired by an idea like comunisim. The only way an idea like that gets any traction at all is if the thing we’re living under has quit working for nearly everyone. So all that worry over there is them telling on themselves. They know.

And I’ll tell you something else about authoritarianism. The kind that kills people, that imprisons people, that suppresses freedom. It doesn’t actually require communism or socialism or any other ism for that matter. All it requires is a government that’s hell-bent on suppressing people’s ability to think freely. And if you look through history you’ll see the first ones they come for are always the idealists, the folks telling you this doesn’t have to be the way our society works. Then comes the immigrants, the disabled, the homeless, the poor. They go after the ones without power first.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that poem that starts off with first they came for the communists. I’m telling you that’s what’s happening here.

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So what exactly are they calling communism?

Franklin Roosevelt was not a communist. He was a rich man from New York who looked out at a country on its knees and decided the government was going to do something about it. So he hired engineers and surveyors and welders and concrete men, people who couldn’t find work anywhere else in America, and he sent them into the valleys of Tennessee and Alabama and Kentucky and they built dams. Norris and Fontana. They built something magnificent and it powered this nation for decades and it’s powering it today. It put lights in hollers where no private company would run a line at any price, because there was no profit in it and they said so right out loud.

And when this country needed uranium enriched to end a war, we did it at Oak Ridge, forty miles from where I’m sitting, running on power a government agency generated with a dam that government employees built.

That’s socialism by their definition. The state hired people, those people built something, and the state and the people own it. That’s the whole crime they’re describing. The cooperative keeping my neighbors’ lights on is owned by the members themselves, and that would land you on a list today.

Now you can be against all of it. You can think public power was a mistake and public hospitals are a mistake and public housing is a mistake, and you can go argue that out with me anytime you like. That’s a fight I’m happy to have and I have it on television every chance I get.

What you cannot do in a free country is take a man’s opinion about who ought to own the power company and turn it into evidence that he’s a terrorist. That’s the line. And they have already stepped over it and put it in writing.

And too much of the Democratic leadership is helping them do it. Instead of standing up for the right of an American to argue for public ownership or public health care or a stronger union, they’re out there repeating the same Cold War language and hoping this machinery never gets pointed at them. Nobody’s screaming about this. Nobody’s writing scathing letters. We’re not even getting strongly worded emails out of our leadership in the House or the Senate, let alone a hard push toward defending freedom of thought and freedom of expression. They sit there cowed and terrified, not understanding the history of this nation and not understanding the history of their own party.

So we ought to be concerned about the results. About the use of the power. About the lack of freedom. Not about the ism we apply to it. Because this government, while the Democratic leadership sits idly by or worse, is attacking American democracy and American freedom under the guise of working to preserve it.

They are coming after us. The people saying health care shouldn’t bankrupt you. The people saying everybody ought to have a home. The people saying public money ought to build public things instead of disappearing into somebody’s pocket. The people who look around at all of it and say out loud that this shit ain’t working. That’s who’s on that list, and that’s who the three hundred and fifty billion dollars is for.

They are trying to make us enemies of the state.

And by God, that ain’t American. It ain’t Appalachian. And it ain’t a goddamn thing I agree with and it never will be.

These are people who want masked ICE agents on our streets who can shoot a man in the face and walk away without a single repercussion. No name, no badge, no accountability, nothing.

God damn these people.

Corbin Trent

If you can give, give. A Fight Worth Having is in this fight and we’re yelling as loud as we know how. That costs money, and we don’t take it from anybody who’d ask us to soften it.