Welcome new subscribers! I hope you find the latest podcast episode beneficial. It was recorded as part of my monthly community discussions and workshops with fellow author-educator-activist Dora Rodriguez. The next meet-up of our Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series is Sunday, May 25, and we hope you’ll register to attend. You’ll find more information following the post below. In the meantime…
The Revolution Will Be Broadcast
Things are bad out there, folks. No doubt about it. ICE is sowing terror across the land, hunting and abducting our community members with the complicity of local police, Customs and Border Protection, the FBI, National Guard, etc. As the Trump regime chips away at what few rights remain for the newcomers and safety seekers among us, so go our rights as well.
Many of us are struggling to understand how we got to this wretched place. But as I illustrate in Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, it has been a multi-decade project during which our elected officials, on both sides of the political aisle, as well as first the right-wing then, increasingly, the mainstream media, effectively pulled us further and further and further to the right.
The result has been 40+ years of very bad policy making, leading to very bad budget appropriations and congressional expenditures that have funded and fueled the unbelievable expansion of the Border Industrial Complex, creating a cruel deterrence to detention to deportation pipeline fraught with human rights abuses that the pundits and politicians love to decry as “broken” but which they just can't seem to fix.
Why?
Because it works just fine for the demagogues and profiteers who benefit from it.
Where are we now?
Rising fascism. A government run not by the people for the people but by the bullies for the billionaires and Broligarchs, in the words of
. A wannabe authoritarian regime that has harnessed the ICE gulag and Gestapo handed to them by their presidential precursors. A xenophobic regime that has weaponized immigration and immigrants to whip up a moral panic and drive US democracy ever closer to a constitutional crisis, if we’re not there already.The Trump regime and its congressional MAGA-party sycophants are right now attempting to expand the ICE Gestapo and gulag system with 10,000 additional ICE raiders and another 80,000 ICE prison beds through a shadowy budget process — called reconciliation — that aims to decimate such social benefits as public education while it boosts spending into the hundreds of billions dollars for more southern border militarization and mass deportation. All to fund a made-for-Fox-TV “invasion.”
Folks, we're living in the upside-down…
…where the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, rules 9-0 — an unprecedented outcome, I might add, for the conservative Roberts court — that the Trump regime must facilitate the return of a man they abducted and forcibly disappeared into a concentration camp in El Salvador only to find that evil-wizard-behind-the-throne Stephen Miller manages to convince half the nation that it was a 9-0 decision in the regime’s favor just by saying it’s so.
We're living in the upside-down…
…where the regime gets to turn off admissions for legitimate refugees that have been waiting in line for years — decades even — determined to migrate to the US the “right way,” as it fast-tracks resettlement and citizenship for white descendents of South Africa’s former apartheid state, claiming that the are running from a genocide that simply does not exist.
Eschew the Language of Fear and Division. Choose Language That Touches Hearts and Changes Minds.
Now, I know folks are feeling desperate. I know I am. But we can resist: We can refuse their lies, and we reclaim the narrative. And what better way to do that than with our language?
That is why mi hermana Dora Rodriguez and I focused the April meetup of our Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series on how language has enabled the relentless, propaganda-fueled shift to the right. We believe that with awareness as to how commonly used nouns, frequently brandished slogans, and empty positional arguments perpetuate the regime’s fearmongering and hate, we can encourage people to think more critically and, in turn, use language to confront their disinformation, rewrite their heinous narrative, and tug the nation back to its senses.
The Revolution Begins Now. With Us.
Like all revolutions, the revolution in speaking the truth will have to start with us. If each and every one of us chooses our words more carefully, we can influence the thinking of the people and communities we touch until even members of the media and of government are using labels to describe things as they really are:
not arrests, but abductions;
not detention, but imprisonment, for profit;
not deportations, but renditions to concentration camps
to name just a few examples.
In solidarity and with high hopes for engendering deep social change at the thought level, Dora and I offer you the audio of our April 2025 workshop:
Shifting the Paradigm: Finding the Words to Touch Hearts and Change Minds
Join us for our next workshop, May 25, 2:30-4:00 pm ET, on the human and environmental impacts of the unrelenting expansion of the Border Industrial Complex. Click the image to register…
If you find this podcast and project worthy, my friends, please share it far and wide because the only way through this is…
Together.
In Solidarity,
Sarah
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