Folks icon and lifelong activist Joan Baez is as soon as once more criticizing President Donald Trump and the “cruelty” of his administration, saying that social change requires the braveness to danger one thing — however that this prospect will solely get “scarier” for Individuals as time goes on.
Baez spoke out on “The Best People with Nicolle Wallace,” a podcast hosted by the titular MSNBC host, who famous that Baez was arrested in her youth for anti-Vietnam Warfare activism and requested her how that period in comparison with the current.
“Well, I went to jail twice, and it was all for aiding and abetting draft resistance, but you know, we had our lawyers, we had the call, we had the families come visit, we had our medication,” stated Baez. “And right now … the first order of the day for this group of people is cruelty.”
“And [they] don’t just put people in cages, [they] love putting people in cages,” she added. “And that’s what makes it scary in a way that I was not scared back then.”
“I haven’t experienced anything like this in my life,” Baez stated of the present political local weather, noting that none of her friends from the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies might’ve imagined “this weird sci-fi movie” of America in the present day.
The Trump administration has used tariffs and lawsuits to stress world leaders and companies into compliance. Tech leaders have bent the knee, whereas Trump’s critics have been ousted from their jobs.
Requested concerning the significance of taking a danger amid the present local weather of concern and denial, Baez stated, “I’ve said that social change cannot happen until somebody is willing to take a risk. And I believe that. And I believe it’s going to get scarier and scarier to take a risk.”
Wallace contemplated why Individuals suppose “someone else” will save the U.S. or why enterprise leaders aren’t combating again tougher, even when solely to avoid wasting their backside line — as “there is no autocracy in the world where the economy is thriving.”
Baez then appeared to confer with former Silicon Valley programmer Curtis Yarvin, who has reportedly argued that democracy needs to be abolished in favor of a so-called “national CEO.”
“The first thing that comes to my mind is one of Elon Musk’s little puppet people on TV, saying, ‘We gotta get over this dictator-phobia,’” she stated. “And it’s what’s really evolving now. People are getting over their dictator-phobia.”
The singer then shared a grim however probably inspiring anecdote about what it truly means to stay in a dictatorship.
“I have a friend, a Turkish friend, close friend,” stated Baez. “She’s been living in a dictatorship forever now. And she had the only progressive newspaper that still existed as time went by. And I called her the other day, I said, ‘Help.’ I said, ‘Why are you not in jail?’”
She continued, “She said, ‘Because I am very clever.’ I’m not that clever, but she has walked that line. But she gets very depressed, because Turkey is this wonderful place … it’s been diminished, one thing after another. But it remains to be seen if I can be very clever.”
