Folk icon and lifelong activist Joan Baez is once again criticizing President Donald Trump and the “cruelty” of his administration, saying that social change requires the courage to risk something — but that this prospect will only get “scarier” for Americans as time goes on.
Baez spoke out on “The Best People with Nicolle Wallace,” a podcast hosted by the titular MSNBC host, who noted that Baez was arrested in her youth for anti-Vietnam War activism and asked her how that era compared to the present.
“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,” said 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 said of the current political climate, noting that none of her peers from the 1960s and 1970s could’ve imagined “this weird sci-fi movie” of America today.
The Trump administration has used tariffs and lawsuits to pressure world leaders and corporations into compliance. Tech leaders have bent the knee, while Trump’s critics have been ousted from their jobs.
Asked about the importance of taking a risk amid the current climate of fear and denial, Baez said, “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 pondered why Americans think “someone else” will save the U.S. or why business leaders aren’t fighting back harder, even if only to save their bottom line — as “there is no autocracy in the world where the economy is thriving.”
Baez then seemed to refer to former Silicon Valley programmer Curtis Yarvin, who has reportedly argued that democracy should 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 said. “And it’s what’s really evolving now. People are getting over their dictator-phobia.”
The singer then shared a grim but potentially inspiring anecdote about what it actually means to live in a dictatorship.
“I have a friend, a Turkish friend, close friend,” said 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.”
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