Winter is Here: On the Chilling Effect of Elon Musk and Donald Trump

A functioning democracy needs dissent and debate. Trump won the 2024 election with 49.8 percent of the vote (with 77,302,580 total votes) over Kamala Harris’s 48.3 percent (with 75,017,613 total votes), yet many of these 75 million citizens are either being shut out or are too fearful to publicly dissent for fear of retaliation. I’m seeing this intimidation every day in my work with the OpEd Project, where I am a fellowship coach, helping under-represented voices get into print and reach wide audiences.

Over the last fifteen years the OpEd Project has had a remarkable track record, placing thousands of opinion pieces while changing the discourse. For example, OpEd Project Fellow Carol Anderson’s bestselling book White Rage; The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, started off as an Op-Ed in the Washington Post in 2014 in the aftermath of Ferguson, and put a name to the seething resentment felt by working-class white men which would be exploited by Trump in his first run for presidency.

Ten years later, with Bezos now at the helm of the Washington Post, knee firmly, permanently flexed in supplication, I doubt very much the Post would publish such a piece. Nor would the LA Times, whose new billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, ordered any criticism of Trump to be countered by a pro-Trump piece in the opinion pages. The New York Times’s coverage of the election went out of its way to include “both” sides, false equivalencies, and the sane-washing of clearly unhinged statements by Trump and his sycophants, threats to democracy that we are now seeing play out in even more unhinged ways than they promised.

The phrase “Do not obey in advance” has been thrown around a lot lately on social media, and it’s worth quoting in full the opening to Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny (which has been a bestseller for 36 weeks now):

Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which brought Nazis into government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.

We’re all seeing how amoral oligarchs like Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Soon-Shiong try to out-genuflect each other every day, but more insidious are the unseen decisions across the country to simply avoid anything remotely “controversial.” I see this often at the OpEd Project with opinion pieces that are stripped of direct critique. Not through self-censorship by the writers, but rather because their supervisors (who are fully aligned with the writing) are rightfully worried that any mention of Trump or Musk will jeopardize their own projects, everything from federal funding for domestic violence shelters to federal grants for academic institutions researching climate change; these are very real fears given the destruction of USAID. For the sake of the crucial work these underfunded institutions are doing, the supervisors can’t afford to risk pairing terms like “systemic racism” or “institutionalized racism” with “Trump” or “Musk.”

With his authoritarian orders, the president—and his unelected South African Rasputin—have not only pre-emptively cut off discussion and debate, they have eliminated the fundamental tools of discussion and debate, namely words themselves. Mother Jones reported that “a worker at an intelligence agency says unidentified outside staffers arrived to sweep the office of anything they felt was related to diversity, equity, and inclusion… [Such as] a plaque, confiscated from a supervisor’s desk, that read, ‘Be kind to everyone.’”

“Kind” and “kindness” are now forbidden along with “diversity, equity, inclusion.” Cruelty is the point, of course. Punishing the most vulnerable while enriching the most privileged is their entire agenda. George Monbiot recently posted on Bluesky: “Trump is capitalism in human form, stripped of its disguises. The violent seizure of other people’s resources, the exploitation of other people’s catastrophes, the predatory gleam in the psychopath’s eye.” Greenland, Panama, Canada, Gaza, USAID, Social Security, non-white immigrants, trans people, women—Trump is reaching his predatory little hands towards them all—and to the actual words that would name his and Musk’s predatory actions.

It is our job as writers and editors to step into this breach and say what the vulnerable are rightly afraid to say out loud. To bear witness. To document. To not only preserve these words and their meaning, but to use them to fight back. To not let Trump and Musk rewrite reality with their Orwellian doublespeak. To not let them take words from us. To instead use these words loudly, clearly, and share them as widely as possible. To not obey in advance.

Say it: Kindness, empathy, diversity, equity, and inclusion are fundamental to civil society and democracy. Manmade climate change is real, getting worse, and disproportionally impacts the poor and people of color. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are racist, misogynist fascists who are systematically dismantling democracy and speeding the destruction of our planet in order to enrich themselves and their oligarch enablers.