Gard Jameson, a chairman of the board with the Interfaith Council of Southern Nevada, introduces a screening of The Essential Link: The Story of Wilfrid Israel at the King David Memorial Chapel Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2022. STEVE MARCUS Photo by Steve Marcus

by Gard Jameson
Sunday, March 23, 2025

Editor’s note from Brian Greenspun: My friend, Gard Jameson, is a kind man and a man with a conscience —through good times and bad. So when he speaks out, I believe it is incumbent on all of us to pay attention. Sometimes dreams are just dreams. And sometimes ...

On Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, the sleepy town of Honolulu was just awakening when out of the sky, bombs and bullets rained terror upon its citizens. The U.S. Naval Fleet anchored within the sheltered harbor of Honolulu was destroyed within hours, thousands of its sailors lay dead within the iron caskets of those ships. It was a day of infamy.

Decades later, on a Sunday evening, a dream startled me from my own slumber as the image appeared in my mind of hundreds of airplanes descending yet again upon the island of Oahu, with the same sense of terror, the same sense of infamy.

Laying in my bed, I quickly discerned the meaning of the dream and grappled with the realization that infamy comes in many forms. The dream presented a metaphor for what has been happening to the country during the first two months of President Donald Trump’s second term in office.

Trump returned to power by promising to solve inflation and every other challenge facing the nation. “I alone can fix it,” he said. Despite the many Republicans who were witness to the debacle of Trump’s first term, despite thorough and thoughtful investigations that proved the wrongdoings of the first administration and despite an additional $7.8 trillion of debt incurred by the first Trump administration, the American electorate returned him to the White House.

Little did anyone realize the arsenal that lay at his fingertips: Project 2025 — the authoritarian handbook that Trump claimed to have no knowledge of — contained step-by-step instructions for subverting the U.S. Constitution’s system of checks and balances.

With the same speed of those Mitsubishi airplanes over Honolulu, executive orders descended across the whole of America, destroying and ripping apart national traditions and institutions within days — the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI, the Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, U.S. Agency for International Development, and so many more.

Shortly before his inauguration, the Supreme Court granted the president, a convicted felon, unusual and extraordinary powers — powers that allowed him to transform the Justice Department into the department of retribution and vengeance, and create a new advisory office led by Elon Musk called the Department of Government Efficiency.

One by one, government employees who did not subscribe to the new national order were fired or retired by Musk, an unelected bureaucrat. The vacancies were filled by individuals who have neither the credentials nor the experience to fulfill their missions of sustaining American democracy. This new president had learned during his first administration that “absolute loyalty” must be the predicate of all of his minions. Devoted service to the Constitution was no longer the primary condition of public service.

In Orwellian fashion, we were instructed that lies are truth and truth is a lie, that science is not about facts. We were told that words like diversity and gay are now forbidden, as our dictionary is rewritten, and books are removed from library shelves. Any person or institution that resists is fired, deported, defamed or otherwise threatened.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is no longer the party of conservative principles. That party’s legislative accomplishments are nil; its capacity for bipartisanship nonexistent and its leadership nowhere to be found. The party has become a shadow of its former self, with profiles of cowardice everywhere to be found. The party of Abraham Lincoln now follows a president who had previously tried to steal an election, befriended dictator after dictator, took pleasure in dehumanizing our fellow citizens, and endorsed and pardoned a violent mob that stormed the Capitol.

Sometimes it takes a dream to wake us up. While Trump’s actions may not have brought the same immediate loss of life witnessed during the horrific attack on Pearl Harbor, his actions have brought similar feelings of helplessness and hopelessness about whether the American people and the great American experiment can survive such madness. It echoes what our parents and grandparents must have felt upon realizing that authoritarians had their fellow countrymen in their crosshairs, and that the fight for democracy and freedom was only just beginning.

Today we must ask ourselves: Is this the future we want? Is this the country that my ancestors and yours fought for? No matter what your political persuasion, do we trust this person, who was elected by a margin of less than 2%, whose promises are already proving empty? Already within the first few months, he has proven that he does not intend to “fix it.” Nor is he a truthful person who lives by a moral ethic. Are you willing to resist a movement toward authoritarianism?

In his final address to the nation, President George Washington made it clear: The greatest threat to our country is the threat from within. The signs are so clear. The Russian oligarchy is celebrating the emerging American oligarchy. American oligarchs are bending to the will of their leader. The First Amendment is being ripped apart. And even our close friends and allies, Canada and NATO, are shaking their heads and wondering what happened to America.

When will we wake up from this nightmare?

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Gard Jameson is an instructor in philosophy at UNLV, founder of Compassionate Las Vegas and co-founder of Volunteers in Medicine of Southern Nevada, the Children’s Advocacy Alliance, the Nevada Community Foundation and the Interfaith Council of Southern Nevada. He has deep roots in conservative politics, as his family helped manage the Republican National Convention for President Ronald Reagan and served in the administration of President George H.W. Bush.