Thread by @matt_cam

1/ AN ASYLUM LAWYER SEEKS ASYLUM
Bein an #asylum attorney requires many hours working closely with citizens of failing/failed states to draft lengthy statements & brief country conditions.

Here's how I would write about our 2020 if it were playing out in one of those countries:

2/

By August of 2020, the President had replaced the administration of the country's postal service with loyalists from the ruling party and openly announced his intent to publicly dismantle it in order to suppress votes.

salon.com/2020/08/08/fri…

3/

As a pandemic raged, the President intentionally withheld federal relief from regions ruled by the minority party--effectively condemning perceived opposition voters to death. His administration then openly stole private PPE sales en route to them.
nymag.com/intelligencer/…

4/ The ruling party continued to obstruct passage of vital legislation as a second wave of the pandemic loomed, including basic humanitarian relief which would have mitigated the inevitable mass poverty & homelessness which soon followed.

democracynow.org/2020/8/14/head…

5/ The country's enormous wealth & global influence were largely founded in a long history of brutal white supremacy, chattel slavery, & violent electioneering throughout the Western Hemisphere. The President and ruling party easily exploited these unresolved ethnic tensions.

6/ As Central American refugees came in record numbers to seek asylum from the ruin the U.S. had brought to their countries, they were turned away in violation of intl law & weaponized by the ruling party in an authoritarian fearmongering campaign

thenation.com/article/archiv…

7/ The President consolidated power within the federal "homeland security" services, shifting their focus from defending the borders--an obsession which secured his nomination by the ruling party and ultimately his election--to internal enforcement

nytimes.com/video/us/10000…

8/ This including the deployment of federal shock troops to cities controlled by the minority party ahead of the 2020 election, ostensibly in the name of enforcing federal immigration law

nytimes.com/2020/02/14/us/…

9/ In the final days of the American public's unrestricted access to social media, advocates attempted to warn the public of the potential dangers of a newly-consolidated federal police force.

https://twitter.com/BuddJenn/status/1227623752583667713

10/ The President successfully weaponized a fictional terrorist organization ("ANTIFA") to consolidate federal power and convince supporters of the ruling party that anarchy was imminent. "ANTIFA" became synonymous with the minority "Democrats."

theguardian.com/world/2020/jun…

11/ Widespread disinformation campaigns siloed millions of Americans into fantastical conspiracy theories, including one movement which believed that members of the minority party raped & ate children. The President & ruling party refused to denounce it.

nytimes.com/2020/08/13/tec…

12/ The ruling party, long obsessed with eliminating even the de minimis public benefits available to impoverished citizens, put ideology over any attempt to mitigate mass unemployment, homelessness, and immiseration.

foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/31/us-…

13/ As the mail-in ballots were counted and the country waited for the results of the 2020 presidential election to be finalized, the President railed angrily against his opponent and the minority party. He accused them, with no evidence, of "stealing" or "rigging" the election.

14/ The President's supporters, many of them armed, took to the streets to defend what they had been told by the ruling party was his electoral victory. Members of the minority party and known leftists were suffered often extreme threats and persecution.

15/ Having secured the fictional "ANTIFA"'s designation as a "terrorist organization," the President's Department of Justice began mass arrests of alleged ANTIFA members who were subsequently charged with, among other things, election interference.

ok, I need to stop this!

Feel free to add your own but this is getting a little too familiar, and way too real. It's so easy to slip into the same flow I get into when describing how conditions in Uganda, El Salvador, the Congo, & other countries I routinely work with developed

My work has taught me that no country is any more than 1 or 2 bad governments (or pandemics, economic crashes, etc) away from political collapse, and certainly even more so when the populace is susceptible to propaganda & unable to agree on a shared reality. Nothing is inevitable