2 days ago

Here’s a New Year's resolution for Trump’s America: no snitching | Hamilton Nolan

Are you, like millions of Americans, feeling hopeless and fearful about the dawning of a new age of fascism? And are you, like millions of Americans, in search of a New Year’s resolution that won’t require you to lose weight or go to therapy? Happily, both of these problems can be solved with one action: resolve to make 2025 the year of no snitching.

Choose as your New Year’s mantra that great civic-minded slogan: “If you saw something, no you didn’t.”

Bad times are coming. In less than a month, Trump will return to the White House, with far fewer checks on his power than he had the first time around. He will be surrounded by a team of sociopaths, internet-poisoned bigots and single-issue quacks who have figured out that for the low, low price of absolute loyalty, their boss will grant them the absolute right to pursue their deranged passions as far as they please.

We are entering an age of boutique persecution, in which a broad swath of maniacs will be unleashed by a president devoid of ideology but full of narcissistic craving. A thousand petty tyrants will soon occupy the halls of the federal government. On the other side of this corps of gleeful little bullies sits the general public. We will all be enlisted, to varying degrees, as either collaborators or targets.

Yet hidden in this grim forecast is a chance for all of us to do something righteous. Government persecution requires a lot of informers. It is hard to deport immigrants, infiltrate protest groups and attack civil society without a lot of people telling the powers-that-be where all their enemies are and what they’re doing. None of the most oppressive regimes in history could do it with secret police alone. They needed the help of snitches. Fascism needs snitches everywhere in order to work. By vowing not to snitch, you can therefore strike a blow for justice, without doing anything at all.

It’s easy: when Ice shows up at your workplace asking whether you’ve got any immigrants working there – you don’t know. Have you seen any foreign-looking day laborers working around town? You sure haven’t. Has anyone speaking Spanish offered to babysit for you, tutor your kids, sell you food, do your yardwork or write for your op-ed page? Nope. Hey, have you left water for people wandering through the desert borderlands, or given money to immigrant mothers peddling candy on the train? No, officer, I’m sorry. It doesn’t ring a bell.

“But if you give me your card, officer, I’ll be sure to give you a call if I see anything,” you add helpfully, while dropping the card directly into an oversized envelope with “FOR ANTIFA” scrawled on the outside.

Protecting hardworking immigrants from red-faced deportation thugs is only the most obvious venue for not snitching. The principle can also be applied anywhere that a boss is likely to take advantage of our newly callous political climate.

Have you heard any whispers about a union drive here at our lovely workplace? Sorry, no. Have you heard any of your fellow college students plotting a new Gaza protest encampment? No, sir, not a word. We’ve gotten reports that your co-workers have commandeered one of the storage closets here at Walmart and turned it into an unauthorized nap room; can you point us in the right direction? There could be a promotion in it for you.

Gosh. You would love to. But you just don’t know anything about it.

A resolution not to snitch will, I assure you, be condemned as anti-American. So it is. The US relies on snitches to carry out secret drone strikes, to kidnap foreign nationals to black-site prisons, to send Swat teams breaking through the door of your friend who sells weed, to sic the code enforcement squad on your neighbor who has not kept their lawn trimmed to the mandatory length. Snitching is as necessary to the US’s most oppressive impulses as oxygen is to fire.

This dynamic will only get more true next year, since Donald Trump makes retaliatory decisions based not on the consensus advice of a meticulous team of professionals, but rather on the gossip he heard from a thrice-divorced Mazda dealership owner on the patio at Mar-a-Lago. The full apparatus of the state will now be conducted according to rumors and innuendo filtered through the addled mind of a reality television star. If there were ever a time to refrain from unleashing the authorities on a minor quality-of-life offender out of an abundance of concern for human rights, this is it.

Though always popular with normal people, “no snitching” has long been derided by the lords of public opinion: “Why, that is a slogan of rappers, and gang members, and people who are stealing cable straight from the pole! Hardly something that should be tolerated in civic society!” That haughty attitude is more wrong now than ever.

Set aside the slogan and consider the values that we are trying to promote here: protecting the weak from the strong; shielding the vulnerable from powerful sadists; and, above all, trying to make high-strung White House crypto-fascist Stephen Miller so frustrated that he bursts into a puff of smoke like the villain in a Looney Tunes cartoon. These are all proper – even admirable – ethical goals.

So stop asking yourself what you can do to help our nation next year. Channel your nervous energy into keeping your mouth shut. The truth is that the country’s problems are not, and have never been, caused by unlicensed taco vendors or people playing reggaeton a little too loud or people whose zealous Halloween decorations are not explicitly allowed by zoning bylaws.

The country’s problems are caused by the people most likely to be snitched to, not snitched on. What we really need to fear are those eager to lord their positions over everyone else. The boss, not the worker. The cop, not the vagrant. The president, not the protesters. Today, billionaires with White House offices are much greater threats to our quality of life than anyone whom those billionaires might brand an enemy.

That is why it’s OK to maintain at least one exception to your New Year’s resolution: if you know a rich person cheating on their taxes, snitch away. Law and order, after all, must be maintained.

What’s giving me hope right now

Trump’s election in 2016 produced widespread shock, followed by a fruitless four years of quasi-religious belief that our precious norms would save us from his ravages. This time around, we have that experience to teach us all that those norms are utterly illusory. Resisting a slide into fascism means building institutions powerful enough to counter Trump on his own terms.

I put my hope in a resurgent labor movement, which is now boiling with grassroots enthusiasm, as well as the unavoidable fact that a growth in worker power is the only thing that can reverse our 50-year-long crisis of inequality. If you need hope, join a union. We’re all going to need them.