Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWhoever wears the badge to grind us down
Never has to say why: the microphone his,
The podium his, the lie his to spin
"He charged me," they'll say, "he lunged,"
As we watch our brown senator
Pressed to cold marble, steel around his wrists,
His voice still saying "I am a US Senator"
While they call him wildly inappropriate.Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWe witness the heart of the sealed-off room,
Check each breath for the violence
They're already justifying on the apps,
What might snap before it does,
Democracy? Their masks? The pretense
That any of this was about law and order?Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWhen you work the crowd from the outside,
When you ask the forbidden questions
About the raids, about the families
Torn apart while cameras roll,
They will tackle you. They will smile
While doing it. This secretary
With her plastered certainty
Looking down to find the pattern
The uppity one who dares speak
For Echo Park and Boyle Heights,
and the ones they want disappeared.Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWhat does the Speaker already know,
Grinning behind his podium,
Calling for censure before the bruises fade
They would defend shooting him
In the back of the head
With the same righteous voice,
The same lie about charging,
The same smile splitting their faces
With a wound that can’t heal.Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI cannot tell what I need to tell
About a country that handcuffs
Its own leaders for asking questions,
Then calls them thugs
For bleeding on the flag;
Us, still in our beautiful doomed hunger
For something they call democracy
But spell f-a-s-c-i-s-m,
Our elected voice shoved down,
Silenced, his one hand raised
In the old American question
Which never waits for permission,
Never bows to their particular
Bottomless cruelty.Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedEach day democracy paid out
Not by our small resistances
Those are finished now
But by how long we can stand
To watch them lie
About what we all saw,
How long before we name
What they are doing to us,
What they have always
Been doing to us,
What they will do
Until we stop them
Or disappear trying.

Author’s Notes

I watched the video of Senator Padilla being thrown to the ground and handcuffed for the crime of asking a question, and I thought: here it is again. The old American song, the one we've been humming for centuries now. The melody of power maintaining itself through violence while calling that violence order.

People will say I'm being dramatic. They always do. They said it when I wrote about 2016, when I wrote about Charlottesville and January 6 and November 2024. "Surely," they said, "you're exaggerating." "Surely it's not as bad as all that." And then the cameras rolled, and the world saw what we had been seeing all along.

The cameras rolled yesterday, too. Everyone saw what happened to Padilla. And still they lied about it. Not in private, whispered conference rooms, but in broad daylight, grinning while they did it. "He charged her," they said, as we all watched him standing still. "He was inappropriate," they said, as we all watched him being brutalized for asking a question in his own state to the federal official stating she wants to “liberate” his constituents from their elected leaders. Their chosen representatives.

This is the American theater of cruelty: the performance is as important as the violence itself. They don't just want to hurt. They want people to watch them hurt, and then they want us to thank them for it. They want you to call your own brutalization "law and order” and join in on the conspiracy theory.

I keep thinking about the word "inappropriate." It's doing so much work in their telling of this story. What's inappropriate? A brown man asking questions? A senator refusing to be silent while families in his jurisdiction are torn apart? Or is what's inappropriate the fact that they can't say the quiet part out loud yet, that they believe some people simply don't have the right to speak, to exist, to breathe in the same room as power? Fact check. Many of them are already saying this.

The most chilling thing about watching this unfold wasn't the violence itself, though that was terrible enough. It was the speed with which the lie was constructed, disseminated, and thoughtlessly defended. Before Padilla was even back on his feet, they had already decided he was the aggressor. Before the video was even uploaded, they had already written the story in which he was the villain.

This is how fascism works. Not with jackboots marching in the street—though that’s here as well—but with the slow, methodical redefinition of reality itself. Today, asking a question is "charging." Tomorrow, breathing while brown will be "resisting arrest." And they will smile while they say it, because the lie isn't a fluke or a mistake. It’s a tactic.

We are living through the end of something, and the beginning of something else. I don't know what comes next, but I know this: they will not stop lying because they can't. Not until the lie machine breaks down completely, until the theater of cruelty becomes too expensive to maintain, until we refuse to pretend along with them that any of this is normal.

Until then, we bear witness. We name what we see. We refuse to let them speak of us without us in the room. Even when that room is behind bars, even when that room is underground, even when that room is the last room any of us will ever see.