A friend recently contacted me saying she was temporarily unfriending me on all social media because she was preparing to go to America to visit family.
She couldn’t risk being connected to a politically outspoken person in case she’s subjected to interrogation by US Customs and Border Protection.
I totally understood, but it’s disturbing to experience this creeping silence overshadowing our lives. It must be absolutely terrifying for the people inside the US being targeted by the increasingly sadistic administration.
Moral courage
How do you find your moral courage to resist when your country goes rogue? As the saying goes ‘eternal vigilance is the price of freedom’.
Constant awareness and effort are required by ‘we the people’ to ensure our rights and freedoms are not whittled away or stolen from under our noses. Each of us must do what we can to speak truth to power, no matter how big or small the encroachment or our capacity to respond.
The Palestine Action Group challenge to NSW Premier Minns’ refusal to allow a peaceful march in solidarity with the horrific situation in Gaza, is moral courage in action.
The Supreme Court overruled the premier to allow the march to proceed across Sydney Harbour Bridge today as I pen this column. The world is finally starting to speak out. Our leaders need to find their moral courage too.
While atrocities are taking place in Gaza, and other countries, like Sudan and Ukraine, it’s difficult to watch White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, wearing her oversized Christian cross, deflecting legitimate questions from the media and spinning coverups for the venal President Trump, who’s slowly congesting from his puffy ankles up.
It’s particularly distressing because she’s effectively providing cover for a convicted sexual abuser. She speaks in deceptive tongues on behalf of the White House while innocent children are being plucked from their classrooms and people nabbed off the streets by unidentified masked ICE mercenaries to be disappeared into inhumane detention facilities or deported to foreign countries.
This is USA 2025.
Spinning lies and blatant hypocrisy
Spinning lies and blatant hypocrisy for Trump doesn’t go unnoticed. When asked about Leavitt’s performance as press secretary in a recent interview he replied, ‘It’s that face. It’s that brain. It’s those lips – the way they move – like a machine gun’.
He’s clearly chosen the perfect person to deliver his propaganda, and don’t you get the icky sense she’s like an aphrodisiac for him? South Park nailed it. Trump is in bed with the devil.
As a practising Catholic, Leavitt is causing herself a gaping moral injury doing the dance of the seven veils for her king, daily in front of the world. What it if turns out her boss really was a key player in a global network of sex traffickers and money launderers?
Whatever may happen, Leavitt will likely need an exorcism by the end of it to rid herself of that deeply internalised demon.
Speaking of exorcisms, I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw The Australian front-page story, worthy of a Dan Brown novel plot, headlined ‘Money-laundering smoking gun could bring Vatican to its knees’.
It was reported Cardinal George Pell, in 2016, discovered the workings of a secret financial records system at the Vatican. Forensic auditing showed it ‘would turn out to be a skeleton key for money laundering’. There’s apparently still a lot more to be revealed.
Sitting on a volcano
It feels like we’re sitting atop a volcano about to blow. The need for vigilance and action has never been greater with the shakeout of the world order and a teetering global economy being tortured by Trump’s tariff wars, like an evil bastard pulling the wings off flies and watching them suffer.
The world is becoming increasingly polarised, oppressive, and desperate. Our leaders are not finding the backbone to solve structural inequalities making life miserable for so many people, nor are they making the hard decisions needed to urgently address climate and ecological disasters.
Through our media we’re being conditioned by dumbed-down debate to ‘pick a side’. Fear of judgement and retaliation is leading to silence in the face of terrible injustices. Jewish people speaking out about genocide in Gaza and calling out other falsehoods about what constituents antisemitism, demonstrates enormous moral courage.
Finding the sunshine
Truth always has a way of finding the sunshine. You can’t make it disappear by firing it or painting over it with a lick of faux gold paint. Even ‘machine gun’ Leavitt will eventually crumple under the weight of lies.
Truth whispers, it follows you to the mirror and stares back at you. It waits patiently for those with moral courage enough to speak it and act.
In the end it’s only our ability to be decent and kind human beings, to stand by our values and principles, as individuals and as a nation, even when it’s uncomfortable or risky, that will make a difference.
Jo Immig is a former advisor to the NSW Legislative Council and coordinator of the National Toxics Network. She’s currently a freelance writer and researcher.
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