It’s Mt. Denali If You’re Nasty
  January 21, 2025 Fair Monduesday, Meteor readers, I spent most of my day yesterday guiding my child around the Liberty Science Center along with what felt like every other kid in New Jersey. What did I miss? If you, too, pulled a Michelle Obama and sat out the day’s events, we’ll catch you up: In today’s newsletter, we wrap our heads around the sweeping pardons granted to January 6 insurrectionists. Plus: what Cecile Richards would want us to do. ♥️ ✊🏼, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONThe longest Day One ever: Yesterday, shortly after he was sworn into office (with his hand not on the Bible), Donald Trump grabbed his favorite sharpie and started signing a flurry of executive orders, including reinstating the death penalty, declaring that there are only “two sexes,” laying the groundwork for more oil drilling in Alaska, and mass pardoning nearly every January 6 rioter. (Even this guy). And we haven’t even gotten to his attempt to rewrite the Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship. (States are already suing over this.) While you can point to nearly every order signed and find something frightening, let’s focus for a moment on the January 6 move—which wipes out more than 1200 convictions, dismisses over 300 pending cases, and commutes the sentences of 14 violent, racist, and seditious rioters who sought to overturn an election with which they disagreed. That means that every person currently serving a prison sentence will be released, including the leader of a self-described anti-government militia. The pardons and commutations also mean that anyone convicted of a felony will have their full legal rights restored. Do you know what felons can’t do after a conviction? Legally purchase guns. But these people now can do that, and they are thrilled. This isn’t just an incidental ripple effect of the pardons. Rather, with the stroke of a marker, Trump has signaled, as several counterterrorism experts voiced to reporters at NPR, an “endorsement of political violence…as long as that violence is against Trump’s opponents.” For followers of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, this is very good news: Their ally in the White House has greenlit whatever they might do and the guns with which to do it. But for the rest of us, it raises real, unsettling questions: What does the future of political protest look like when the opposition has become so emboldened? For me personally—a Puerto Rican Muslim—the prospect of a rejuvenated and protected modern-day KKK fills me with dread and fuels a deep-rooted mistrust I’ve had for years. There’s a pit in my stomach any time I go to the “good” grocery store and see white men walking the aisles. Is he one of them? Am I safe here? I have renewed doubts about the white people in my life. Would they stand up for me? Would they even know they needed to? With Trump rolling out all of the horrible things he’s promised, I am mentally exhausted and emotionally drained—and it’s only been a day and a half. But all of that is the point. Fear is paralytic. It is divisive. It is distracting. It is the master’s tool. And when we think about what it will take to live through a second Trump presidency, the first unavoidable step is learning how to operate beyond fear. I don’t say that lightly; I say this as someone who is in the pit with you. Surviving this administration will demand an enormous amount of work from every single one of us. And that work has to be based in community, or it will not survive the years ahead. Maybe that’s joining a PTA or neighborhood association, or running for school board. It could be working against gun violence. It could be running for city council or county commissioners office. It could be volunteer work or handing out supply kits to the unhoused or donating to local drives. I also suggest engaging in the simplest act of defiance there is: reading. Go to your library and learn from those who fought these rights before we even got here. Read Audre Lorde. Read James Baldwin. Read Iris Morales. Read Angela Davis. Read Grace Lee Bogs. Read bell hooks and keep reading until you read yourself out of fear and into readiness. There is no white hood, no “Roman Salute,” and no executive order stronger than what we can do together. AND:
 DIVINE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 CECILE RICHARDS FOREVERYesterday morning, hours before we inaugurated a president who campaigned on his disdain for women and for democracy, we lost a woman who crusaded for both those things. Cecile Richards was probably our country’s best-known abortion-rights advocate; she led Planned Parenthood for a decade, testified for 12 hours before a hostile Congress, and helped launch Supermajority, Charley, and Abortion in America. She was also funny, determined, and cheerfully relentless; she gave spot-on advice, sized people up perfectly, and adored her brand-new grandson Teddy (when I typed her name just now, her contact auto populated and a picture of him in a little red onesie popped up on my screen). She was a mentor and a hero, to those of us she knew and to plenty she didn’t; if you had lunch with her, women would approach with tears in their eyes and a story you could tell they wanted to share. And she is gone far too soon: at 67, of a brain cancer that could not stop her from speaking on behalf of Kamala Harris at the convention last summer. The daughter of Texas governor Ann Richards, Cecile understood organizing (and the strength of women) on a cellular level. Those are two things we need more than ever right now. We need Cecile, to be honest, but in her absence, we need each other. And as her family wrote yesterday, “We’ll leave you with a question she posed a lot over the last year: It’s not hard to imagine future generations one day asking: ‘When there was so much at stake for our country, what did you do?’” And she said, of course, that there was only one answer: “Everything we could.” —Cindi Leive   FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? Sign up for your own copy, sent Tuesdays and Thursdays. |
