The purpose of our Daily Meditations, as laid out in our opening meditation seven years ago, is to assist one another “to pray the news” and not just watch it.
This seems an appropriate goal, as we are not just receivers or passive citizens, but people with values and opinions and experiences worth sharing, people with minds that make judgments and decisions and people with responsibility to ourselves, our planet, our societies and communities where we dwell. And to future generations not yet born.
This past week has hosted a torrent of news, much of it especially ominous. Following are just a few headlines:
‘I’m witnessing a Lot of Emptiness’: How ICE Uprooted Normal Life in Minneapolis: WIRED talks to a postal worker, a teacher, two US citizens detained by federal agents, and six more Minnesota residents about life in an occupied American city.
Yes, occupied by troops sent by the federal government, thanks to $74 billion voted on by a Republican congress.
“‘Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 6,’ former special counsel Jack Smith tells House panel,” read another headline. Smith said, “We followed the facts and we followed the law—where that led us was to an indictment of an unprecedented criminal scheme to block the peaceful transfer of power.”
Another headline reads: “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.” The article begins this way: Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities….Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why… they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.
Said Professor Stanley: “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency.” Professor Shore: “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
Professor Snyder, author of On Tyranny, left to join his wife who got a job in Toronto, but he too warned about the elements of tyranny now becoming embedded in the US body politic.
Mike Brock from Notes From the Circus wrote an article entitled: “The Evil Man and the Empty Congress.” It begins this way: Evil, as I use the term here, is the systemic use of power to dissolve the constraints that protect human dignity and law, while demeaning deference to the very crimes being committed….
This is an absolute emergency….Corporate America, sitting in silence. You have made your calculation. You believe you can wait this out….offend no one in power… We have an evil man in the White House and an empty congress that will not confront him. That is the situation. It is not a drill. It is not hyperbole..
The author believes that “the institutions have failed” and “the cavalry is not coming.”And that citizens must act.He salutes “the people in the streets of Minneapolis” for doing exactly that.
Great praise and thanks is due those who marched in the bitter cold of Minneapolis on Friday and shut down businesses and schools to do so. They are a living witness to what it can mean for citizens who care for one another and the future of this country to act.
And this included the clergy, many of whom traveled to the area to protest non-violently and over 100 were arrested for doing so. The clergy included Catholics, Protestants, rabbis, imams, indigenous leaders and others. Praise to them for reminding all Americans that conscience matters, and that the rights and dignity of all human beings matter.
And praise too to the three American cardinals who, with the urging of the first American pope, Pope Leo XIV, spoke out about the sacredness of all peoples, and the purpose of obeying good laws that assure the common good and disobeying those that do not.
In the dark mist and maze of Christian nationalism and sycophant religion, it is a moment for decent religion to raise its voice, speak out for truth and justice, and pray with its feet.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click HERE.
Banner Image: Minnesotans turn out in force, despite subzero temperatures, for a general strike against ICE occupation, January 23, 2026. Photo by Lorie Shaull. Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
Are you inspired and emboldened to hear these statements and actions on behalf of values you believe in? Do you sense that solidarity is increasing in this current emergency of American democracy?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society.
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ.
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet.
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision For a New Generation.
4 thoughts on “Witness & Response to the Rampaging Evil in American Society”
I am a South African Sister of Mercy witnessing the horror of ICE on TV. It reminds me so much of the Apartheid times in South Africa where people who spoke out publicly against the horrors of the Nationalist regime either disappeared, were put into solitary confinement or murdered. This is what is happening in the USA. The citizens and congress need to do something abut this Hitlerite President and his sycophantic Republican Government. If you don’t stop it now it will become embedded and take centuries to eradicate. America, the land of the Free will become the land of the Tyrannically oppressed, another Nazi Country, ruled by a president that stupidly believes that the terrible snowstorm is not due to climate change because he talks about global warming, an archaic term for Climate Change.
YES! YES! The small book “Infocracy” you recommended in today’s important DM/video seems to be a good one about the growth of lies and fascism in the world, and in the US under Trump’s regime supported and enabled by the cultist ignorant racist MAGA movement, greedy billionaire oligarchs, and our cowardly sycophant Republican congress. Most good people around the world have Faith that God’s Spirit of LOVE~WISDOM~TRUTH~PEACE~JUSTICE~HEALING~TRANSFORMATION~STRENGTH~
COMPASSION~DIVERSE ONENESS… Will Prevail on Our personal and communal spiritual journeys with one another….
A close friend of Einstein and one of the most original mathematical minds of the last century, Kurt Gödel was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and emigrated to the United States in 1939 to escape the rise of Nazi Germany. He is considered as one of the greatest logicians of all times and is especially known for his “incompleteness theorems” showing that some truths cannot be proven. The following dialogue took place in 1947 during Gödel’s U.S. citizenship exam:
The Examinor: “What kind of government did you have in Austria?”
Gödel: “It was a republic, but the constitution was such that it finally was changed into a dictatorship.”
The Examinor: “Oh! This is very bad. This could not happen in this country.”
Gödel: “Oh, yes, I can prove it.”
https://albert.ias.edu/entities/archivalmaterial/9fd45e83-9706-4c1f-92de-302efdc85561
Many have speculated on the logic behind what is called “Gödel’s loophole,” but current events show that, provable or not, “it” could indeed happen in the “Land of the Free.”
Daniel. In regard to your comment, I believe it has already happened.