An Open Letter to Rachel Maddow:
You are going to disappear. That’s not a threat; it’s a prediction. You will disappear and be no more, and we won’t even know it. We will see you and hear your voice each evening on television and not even realize you are gone, or that you have been replaced by an AI generated avatar that imitates every characteristic of your image, your voice, your mannerisms.
Your evening reports will gradually change, until you are professing that Putin is a friend to our country, January 6th was a show of brave patriots fighting to save our nation, and Trump is a very wise and caring leader. Then we will know you have left us, not by your own will. We won’t know where you are, or how to find you, or even if you are alive.
By then we will be asking, “Where is Mary_McCord? Where is Joy_Reid? Where is Andrew_Weissmann? Where is Ali_Velshi? Where is Jonathan_Capehart? Where is Jamie_Raskin? Where is Katy_Tur? Where is Kamala_Harris? Where is Rachel?” We will see their images and your image on television. We will hear their voices and your voice. We will hear MAGA concepts that are not honest, noble, or empathetic. Then we will know, but it will be too late.
It will be a time when, “Truth is not truth,” as Rudy Giuliani said. For this is what oligarchs and dictators do: They target the media and steal truth and knowledge from the masses, because they know knowledge and truth are the greatest weapons against dictatorship.
They will start by targeting the weakest among us, deporting immigrants that are not yet citizens, even without due process as guaranteed in the Constitution which the ruler of the land swore he would uphold. They will make sure we see on television people being shipped out of our country. They will remove people from our country with such frequency, that it becomes normalized, ho-hum, just another group of people being sent away. Then they will go after anyone who questions what they are doing or tries to stand up to them. They will go after all those who have left wing ideologies. They will go after you. They will go after me.
They will use the removal of birthright citizenship as a means of ridding our country of anyone they please. For instance, when they come for me, I will say I was born here. They will say that doesn’t make me a citizen. I will tell them my parents were born here. They will again say being born in this country does not make them a citizen. I will tell them my parents’ parents were born here. Again, they will say that doesn’t prove citizenship. I will tell them the law can’t be retroactive, but that won’t matter to them, because they don’t follow the law or the constitution. I will tell them my grandfather’s ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and they will say, so you are an immigrant. They can deport me, because they can deport anyone by removing the guarantee of citizenship to those born in this country, because if we don’t have citizenship by being born here then neither do our parents, or our parents’ parents, or their parents. All the generations past who were citizens by birth would have their citizenships revoked. None of us would be citizens and all of us could be deported, to where, I don’t know.
I would be shipped to some strange foreign land where I don’t speak the language and don’t know the culture with nothing but the clothes on my back. I would be at the mercy of the citizens of that land, but why should they show any mercy to me when my country showed no mercy to their immigrants?
We will have a choice to obey or disappear. Yes, some of us will disappear from the land where we were born, where we grew up, where we have lived our lives, the land we know, the land we love, our land, our country that we stood by and watched disintegrate and lose its democracy.
I sincerely wish you well but fear it is not our fate.
Yours truly,
B. P. Gibson
https://bpgibson.com