I have lost count of how many times I’ve left work over the past five years only to realize one push notification later that I had more rights in the morning than I did in the afternoon. The week after Trump’s passport executive order, I kept forgetting to breathe. While social media swirled with speculation about what this was meant to distract the public away from, visions of a grim future unspooled in my head. When it feels like your world is ending and the most people can be bothered to say about it is that something actually important must be happening somewhere else, the clear message is that what is happening to you is a second-tier issue—that you don’t really count.
The distraction discourse also doesn’t account for what happens when politicians supposedly on the “good” side embrace bigotry themselves. Is the response to, say, the recent decision by South Carolina Democratic Senate nominee Annie Andrews to release an anti-trans ad to dismiss it as a distraction—or to ignore it entirely? This wasn’t just a rhetorical shift. This was an otherwise progressive politician being dragged into the realm of authoritarian prejudice—the kind of choice that has potentially life-altering consequences for those of us who live here under the bus. Shouldn’t that matter?