Wake the Fork Up

<p>What the fork!? It&#39;s only been a year? This feels more like a post-mortem on the American Experiment than a year-end review. Yes, we&#39;re celebrating the fact that we survived an entire year of the second Trump administration&#39;s assault on democracy, but we&#39;re also bracing for the next three. </p><p>Last year, we watched as USAID was decimated; domestic terrorists were pardoned; and truth was flipped on its head. This year, we&#39;re getting civically fit while embracing the reality that nobody is coming to save us. It&#39;s time to wake up, shake off our bias, weigh the facts, challenge authority, resist conformity, and demand accountability. It&#39;s time to go forth and do great things.</p><p>We&#39;re not just doing pep talks though. We&#39;re sharing tools that everyone can use to navigate this new information environment and build more resilient institutions. Let&#39;s start by putting a label on what&#39;s really been happening to American society for the last year. The term that came to define Germany in the 1930s, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1934/01/28/archives/a-single-word-that-sums-up-a-nation-gleichschaltung-which-expresses.html" rel="noreferrer">Gleichshaltung </a>loosely translates to synchronization or coordination, but the English language does little to capture it&#39;s ambition. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels&#39; vision was synchronization &quot;to the point where the whole nation will think in unison and there will be only one public opinion.&quot;</p><p>It sounds alarmist to describe 2025 with such similarity to German Nazification, but the parallels are undeniable. The reservation comes from the first bias we must address, if we wish to remain a free society. </p><p><strong>Normalcy bias</strong> is often described as a cognitive bias that manifests as a tendency to underestimate the possibility of disaster, believing life will continue as normal, even in the face of overwhelming threats. </p><p>Let&#39;s say it together. The threat is overwhelming. </p><p>So, who&#39;s going to stop it?</p><p>This leads us to our next bias. <strong>The Bystander Effect</strong> is a type of cognitive dissonance resulting from the diffusion of responsibility, wherein the more people who are present for an emergency the less likely any one is to intervene. We are seeing this play out across the globe. </p><p>It&#39;s happening on the individual level when law enforcement officers ignore their duty to intervene in the presence o