EDITOR:
The other day, in my new app, I scrolled past three headlines in row:
“National Guard troops arrive in D.C. as White House touts arrests on first day of takeover (NBC 4 Washington),”
“Trump administration rewrites and scales back annual human-rights report (BBC News),” and
“White House to vet Smithsonian museums to fit Trump’s historical vision (The Wall Street Journal).”
This is dictator behavior.
I think deep down, everyone truly does understand what we are seeing from our government. Taking over citizen policing with military force, muddying-up human rights data collection and reporting, and re-writing history to fit a politicians’ preferences and agenda is undeniably the behavior of a politician interested in authoritarian rule and actively on-ramp to dictator status.
And for a county as bespeckled with the “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and bumper stickers as Platte County, I wonder when we will recognize the tyranny at our doorsteps. If this “red town” doesn’t wake up soon, instead of being ‘defenders of liberty,’ or ‘fighting the oppression of tyranny,’ they will be the very ones who deliver us into it.
In fact, the crumble of our civil liberties has already begun here at home in Platte County. Let’s recall the Platte County Commission and their failure to implement the citizens vote on the Children’s Tax Fund approved in the 2024 election. A group of politicians enacting own preferred agenda over the democratic will of the people? Gee, I wonder where they learned that from…
Trump and his cronies don’t care about you. The government-interfering, tech-bro billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the ilk don’t care about you. Your neighbors do. Hopefully soon, we will wake up to this fact and start working together to resist the local and national slide towards authoritarianism that will, otherwise, harm us all.
–Kate Acton
Platte City
