Only one thing matters now

More precisely, one thing matters more than everything else.

Back in May, I took a break from writing the Night Watchman. It turns out that writing two posts a week about John McGuire does not bring you contentment.

The hiatus went on longer than I expected. As the summer turned to fall, I kept thinking: There’s a lot going on; I should get back to it. But I just couldn’t get going.

As Trump sent federal troops to L.A. and D.C. in the name of public safety, I looked into murder and violent crime rates around the country. Surely there were lies to call out, and indeed there were. Just last week, I looked at historical parallels—how the Charlie Kirk murder is or isn’t analogous to the Reichstag fire. I thought about the hypocrisy of flying flags at half-staff for Kirk but not for a Minnesota legislator.

Finally I realized why I wasn’t moved to write about warning signs and hypocrisies and all the rest: They’re beside the point. None of it matters as much as resisting the Trump regime’s destruction of our civil liberties, because our freedoms are not being taken away. They have been taken away.

J.D. Vance says he’ll use the FBI, IRS, Treasury, military, and every other arm of the federal government to attack people for saying things he doesn’t like. He’s telling his voters to rat out their neighbors if they speak ill of the dead. That’s not a sign of encroaching tyranny. It is tyranny.

(Vance is threatening the Ford and Soros foundations because they maybe gave grants to The Nation at some point. There is no logical or legal distinction between this and using the power of the federal government to pursue every one of The Nation’s paid subscribers. Here’s their subscription page.)

I’m not saying nothing else matters. We still have to hold the administration accountable for taking school meals from kids and letting a million children die and all the other horrors it’s inflicting on the world.

But we won’t be able to do those things if we can’t speak without fear of retribution. That’s why nothing else is as important as wrenching our civil liberties out of Donald Trump’s wretched little hands and back into our own.

Reporters should be grilling Trump about this at every single press avail. And if you’re in a congressional hearing and you ask more about Jeffrey Epstein than you do about this, you’re wasting our time and failing at your job.

For the rest of us who aren’t politicians and professional reporters, I’ll be damned if I know where to draw the line. We all have day jobs and want to watch movies and go out to eat and play with our kids. But my political engagement will never stray far from pushing back against the tyranny we’re living under.

As for this Substack, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I know I want to get back to writing here occasionally. At a time when it’s getting harder to speak up without fear, the worst thing you can do is to stop speaking up at all.

Of course, if I practiced what I preach, every post would come back to this point. And maybe they all will. I have no idea.

Anyway, I’ll be here, not twice a week, but from time to time. I hope you will too.

- Boot

P.S. I haven’t checked my email in months, so if you sent me a personal message, I apologize for missing it. If you were just checking in on me because of the long silence (as at least one or two of you did), thanks for doing that.

P.P.S. Trump has become so brazen with his dictatorial moves that the name Night Watchman doesn’t even really make sense anymore. They’re not trying to hide their actions in darkness—they’re doing it all in broad daylight. But as they say in my home state, you dance with the one that brung ya.