Someday They’ll Tell You This Never Happened
And you can say no, it did happen. I was there.

You’ll ask someone somewhere – maybe in a couple years, maybe in a decade – if they remember the time the president launched a full-blown military occupation of the nation’s capital.
And that person might look at you funny, and with the sincerity of a child who doesn’t know how to lie, they’ll say no, they don’t remember the president occupying Washington, D.C., because that never happened. What, they might ask, are you even talking about? No president has ever deployed soldiers as an occupying force in an American city. Then maybe they’ll smile and say, oh, I know what you’re thinking about: That time the president asked the National Guard to help with rampant crime in Washington. Is that what you're thinking about?
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You know as well as I do that we will be gaslighted beyond comprehension about Trump’s use of the military and National Guard to take over what might be called “opposition strongholds” if the United States were covered by media outlets the same way developing nations are covered. One day, armed troops harassing and attacking and arresting people on the streets of D.C. – and other cities teeming with people who oppose Trump’s fascist agenda – will be a matter of opinion, something that will get you lumped in with the Loony Left or whatever they’ll call clear-eyed Americans who remember what life was like during the nation’s (temporary?) fall into all-out authoritarianism.
I know this gaslighting will come to pass because it’s already happened with COVID, BLM, and January 6. In the popular American imagination, the COVID pandemic started under Joe Biden. It was Biden who shut down the schools and shut down the offices and restaurants and barbershops and churches. It was Biden who practically welded our doors shut and plunged us into a collective depression that has manifested into political radicalization that threatens the existence of American democracy. It was Biden who held us down and forced us to get the COVID shot, who personally strapped masks to our faces and systematically ostracized anyone who did not obey with the evil agenda to stop COVID's spread.

When cable news pundits or newspaper columnists or your aunt and uncle at the dinner table recall the early nightmare days and weeks and months of COVID, it was Joe Biden who was president. This is the product of a years-long propaganda campaign – call it a psy-op if you wish – aimed at absolving Trump of his endless, deadly failings during the first months of the pandemic, when he all but abandoned Americans in their time of need. It must have been Biden, that doddering fool, who failed us.
Black Lives Matter, in this reimagined history that has taken hold even in mainstream discourse, was a product of Biden’s White House urging his supporters to take to the streets and overthrow the existing (racial) order. The BLM protests – actions so terrifying to white folks that they had no choice but to embrace fascism as a response – happened under Biden’s direction, not as a backlash to the reactionary forces that had taken power four years earlier. That the BLM movement had nothing to do with Joe Biden doesn't matter. It was his thing.

The history of January 6, meanwhile, has been totally rewritten over four and a half short years. A bloody insurrection staged by violent anti-democracy protesters acting on Trump’s behest is now viewed by huge numbers of Americans as either a peaceful protest or a tour of the U.S. Capitol, just regular folks doing tourist shit in DC. Right-wing media and Republicans teamed up to brainwash the public in the months and years after their people tried to kill Congress and overthrow a free election. Democrats tragically thought a good-faith analysis of January 6 would win the day. Today you might get laughed at for calling January 6 an insurrection. It never happened, we’re told with seriousness we can’t believe. That was all in your head. Your imagination ran away with you, sorry buddy. No one was injured, no one died, no threats were made, no weapons were used, no lawmakers hid in closets, and Trump had nothing to do with any of it.
A million shotgun blasts of far-right propaganda straight to the face turned the most significant day of our lifetimes into a nothingburger. People were presented with an alternative history for January 6 and many latched on to that unreality and never let go.
The same will happen with Trump's military occupying American cities he detests. Well actually, the president never took over cities, they'll say. He never took control of local police forces, rigged their crimes stats to bolster his case for permanent occupation, and forced those departments to work closely with his secret police, who snatched people off the streets and disappeared them into legal blackholes. Maybe some folks will acknowledge a fleeting memory of troops on the streets of D.C. or LA or New York or Chicago. They'll tell you those soldiers were there to help, like they do after a natural disaster. Because that's what the TV is telling them. It's what their Trump-friendly algorithms are telling them: That nothing out of the ordinary is happening, that they are not in fact frogs being boiled alive, that they're not even sitting in a pot of water, and that that water is definitely not getting hotter and hotter. Life is the way it's always been, our TVs and phones tell us with one calming voice and all the dopamine a person can handle.

That's why you have to take in what's happening now, as unpleasant as that is. Write it down, blog about it, make videos or audio recordings for your friends and relatives and your children (do not let your kids fall for the propaganda that will wash over them in the coming years). Make your own historical documents of this fascist moment, because one day you will be told by confident, deluded people that this fascist moment never happened. That authoritarian crackdown was a fever dream you had, a symptom of your Trump Derangement Syndrome.
This gaslighting has to be rejected. We can tell these folks, so easily fooled by their phones and TVs, that we saw the authoritarian terror in real time, with our own eyes, and there's no other name for it. We saw people dance and sing and chant in the streets of occupied cities, and we heard stadiums in those cities cry out for freedom. Refuse to be gaslighted, both today and two or five or ten or thirty years from now. I only hope I can refuse. I only hope I can reject the vast, carefully concocted unreality being foisted onto us today and say no, I was there, and you're wrong. It happened. All of it.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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