I left behind an authoritarian state to move to the US. Now I see my new home falling to the same dark forces | Mona Eltahawy
“What’s he done now?” My parents live in Cairo and I’m in New York City. We FaceTime once a week and that question is like a game we play. My parents ask about Donald Trump and I ask about Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, whom Trump calls “my favourite dictator”. Aren’t we Egyptian-Americans lucky – a dictator for each side of our hyphen.Tellingly, the “he” my parents ask about has dominated our conversations lately.I moved to the United States from Egypt in 2000 and I have spent the past 25 years watching the US turn into Egypt – from encroaching state power to the increasingly unchecked role of religion in politics.After each travesty – the lies used to invade Iraq, the zealotry that destroyed abortion rights, the arming and financing of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza – I thought: “Any minute now, there’ll be a revolution, they’ll burn things down.”And here is Trump, finessing that state power into a regime that, as with the regime in Egypt, is targeting culture, education, media, judges, students and any group or entity that poses a threat or even the potential of dissent to the regime. And I’m still waiting for the revolution.I now know, having lived in the US for more than two decades, that most white people in this country would rather hear comparisons to Russia or Hungary than Egypt or a place led by Black or brown autocrats, because even autocracies are separated along racial lines.I joined an anti-Trump protest in NYC earlier this month, which along with others across the country, was said to be the largest single-day protest since Trump’s return to the White House. The signs mocking Trump and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk were clever and there were dogs dressed in coats that had “I bite fascists” written on them, but the rage had stayed at home. Revolutions need feet on the ground, yes. But they also need rage, and lots of it.White Americans are the largest voting bloc and the group most responsible for bringing Trump to power both times – and they are the least enraged. The privilege of whiteness means that for many in the US, the loss of rights only happens to people who aren’t white, far away somewhere, in places such as Egypt. Only Black and brown people in faraway countries end up with an authoritarian ruler. But, if anything, where the Trump regime is taking the US is infinitely worse than what is happening in Egypt, because Egypt’s footprint on the world is not nearly as damaging as that of the US. This is why I’m enraged at the lack of rage.White people in the US have a delusional amount of confidence in their government and institutions. They are childishly naive in believing that institutions will save them from autocratic power. That stubborn belief in their exceptionalism undergirds the refusal to see the fascism that Trump brought when he was first elected and that he is now cementing. Black and Indigenous people and people of colour have no such delusions. They do not expect institutions to protect them because they are so often hurt by those institutions. To people like me and others who have lived in and survived autocracies, white state power and its institutions have always functioned like a regime – so we are well versed in scepticism of anything that politicians say.No matter how often those of us from authoritarian countries, who know to be suspicious of state power, and those of us who have fought fascism – whether implemented through military rule or the rule of religious fundamentalists – warned and warned, white people in the US arrogantly shook their heads and said it couldn’t happen here. Because the US is like a teenager who is stubbornly determined in their own self-destruction.In Egypt, when I interviewed officials from the Muslim Brotherhood – political Islamists who were Egypt’s most powerful opposition to the regime – about their policies, their answer would invariably be “Islam is the solution”. Their goal was the establishment of an Islamic state. Though the group briefly ruled Egypt after the 2011 revolution before being overthrown by Sisi, never in its wildest dreams would the Muslim Brotherhood have imagined holding as much power as white Christian nationalists in the US, for whom Christianity is the professed solution and who are creating a white Christian state in the most powerful country in the world.If Pete “I want a crusade and I have enough Crusader crosses to earn it” Hegseth were a Muslim, the US would have invaded his country to save the “free world” from his jihad. It is easy to see theocracy when the theocrats and zealots don’t look like you.The US media have been able to report on the ways the Muslim Brotherhood politicised and weaponised religion. But they have failed to bring that same urgency to the politicisation of Christianity in the US, especially by the white Christian nationalists who have been instrumental in bringing Trump to power. White and Christian are considered default – the harmless norm – in the white-dominated newsrooms of the US.As a feminist, I am especially enraged at the inability of US media, as well as many white people generally, to see what religion has done to women in the US. During this term, Trump has so far rowed back any diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and blocked federal funding for abortion services. During his first term, he appointed three conservative supreme court judges, which led to the reversal of Roe v Wade and the removal of federal protection for abortion rights, meaning that individual states can ban abortions. These policies have been promoted by some white women, who serve as foot soldiers of the white supremacist Christian patriarchy. The women who helped destroy abortion rights, for example, are rarely analysed, examined and pathologised in the way that Muslim women are.Living in the US has radicalised me. Over the past 25 years my rage at the state-sponsored patriarchy in both of my countries has injected anarchism into my feminism. Anarcho-feminist conveys the “don’t mess with me” level of rage I’m at. And unless (perhaps until) the Trump regime targets naturalised citizens, NYC will remain my home.Two years before Trump was re-elected, I began strength training. I can now deadlift and squat more than my body weight. The timing had nothing to do with the occupant of the White House and more to do with my personal goals, but my journey feels apt. When fascism flexes its muscles, it’s time to make feminism dangerous again.The rage must come. It will come.
Mona Eltahawy writes the FEMINIST GIANT newsletter. She is the author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls and Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution
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