What I do know is that fear and hatred of the stranger motivated one of my Chester neighbors to threaten to run me over with their SUV because I’m protesting our local police department’s agreement to work with ICE. Fear and hatred of the stranger were behind one online poster’s suggestion that second amendment remedies and target practice will keep us safe. Fear and hatred are the basis of claims that “THEY” don’t belong here, that this is “OUR” town. Based on those and so many other examples from the past month or so, I know fear and hatred of the stranger are alive and well in Chester. But so is compassion.

I know this because despite heinous online harassment and real-world threats, my neighbors in town have been adding their names to a petition I’m circulating in opposition to the ICE partnership, and have been sending letters to our Chief of Police and Selectboard. I know this because every week I receive messages from folks who urge me to continue on, who tell me I’m doing the right thing, who speak up because their sense of compassion is stronger than their worry. (I got another message while I was drafting this letter.) It is easy to stay focused on the fear and threats, so I carry with me a small, red, crocheted “melt the ICE” hat given to me by someone who shares my belief that the heart is a machine that melts ICE.

The reasons I’ve suggested for reversal of the ICE agreement are many. The petition argues we should maintain local control and local focus for our local police. It argues we should stand strong on principles of due process and other civil rights for everyone who passes through our town. It argues we should ward off liability for individual officers and the town for potential violations of those rights. It argues for compassion for our neighbors, regardless of their immigration status.

When introducing the 287(g) ICE partnership agreement to the Selectboard at the end of April this year, our Chief of Police made it clear what the motivation was: “If we’re already doing it, might as well get some money from it.” The money in question would include payment to cover the cost of purchasing a new vehicle for the department’s fleet. It would cover a portion of the costs to train our local officers and upgrade technology for information-sharing with ICE. In an environment and during a time when town budgets are tight and property owners are loath to take on higher property taxes, the Selectboard indicated support for the agreement. They didn’t vote on it, though, because they have no say over the 287(g) agreement after Gov. Ayotte signed SB62 into law last year.

At a time when ICE has received $144.5B over its nearly $11B annual budget (that’s like getting 13 years of regular appropriations in just one year), the agency has proven to be reckless and unaccountable:

• standards are lower for new recruits and training is deficient;

• technology like body-cams are not in use;

• databases are being used to track people engaged in protected 1st Amendment protest;

• those same databases have led to fatal errors in identification, as seen recently in Biddeford’s tragedy next door in Maine;

• the FBI has declined to investigate deaths that occur as a result of ICE actions; and

• contracts for detention centers claim that state laws “shall not apply.”

I can’t speak to the deepest-held convictions my neighbors have for signing the petition. For my part, I oppose the ICE agreement and the funding from a federal agency that has been transformed from its intended focus on immigration law enforcement to become a paramilitary outfit that is undertrained, over-resourced, seemingly unaccountable, and engaged in terrorizing the interior on the orders of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump. Our local police force is at its best when it remains focused on serving and protecting Chester, rather than taking on federal mandates that have little to do with life here at the crossroads of 102 and 121.

as the bald-faced hornets
scrape silver fences to build

pulp-paper teardrops, long enough
for wrens to fledge their second broods

and send them out from twiggy nests,
tangles arranged in last year’s place

In his important sociological study Dignity at Work, Hodson (2001) writes that “[d]ignity is the ability to establish a sense of self-worth and self-respect and to appreciate the respect of others” (3). A few pages before that, he begins the Preface this way:

Working with dignity is a foundation for a fully realized life. Despite many denials of dignity faced daily in the workplace, people still strive to do their best, to take pride in their work, and to defend themselves against indignities from employers, and sometimes from coworkers. New challenges are constantly being created for working with dignity by the inexorable process of technological and organizational change and by the unrelenting drive of market systems for profit maximization. (xiii)

At the core of this book is the notion that dignity is inherent in every individual, and that no one else can bestow or remove that sense of meaningful self-worth. It is almost religious, this phenomenon of dignity, and yet does not require the trappings or rites so often tied to spiritual practices. Hodson recognizes the prevalence of such language in other fields of study and makes a strong case for the centrality of dignity in the study of work.

I was reminded of Hodson’s book while reviewing the draft Strategic Plan recently published by the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (2026), which includes a section on employment, workforce participation, and workplace supports (231-237). Establishing the objectives and needs for this section, the plan’s authors write that “[t]he federal objective here is to make work possible, sustainable, and meaningful for autistic people themselves” (231) and continue:

Employment is not only an economic outcome. It affects independence, daily structure, community participation, health coverage, social connection, self-determination, and long-term stability. Yet autistic people remain too often underemployed, unemployed, pushed out of work, or limited to programs that do not match their abilities.

The word “dignity” appears elsewhere in the sprawling document, but the notion is encapsulated in those just quoted. A job is never just a job – it is a conduit to the wider world and to the internal worlds of those we work beside. It is an opportunity to make meaning through collaboration and common effort; it is a means to give of ourselves for others as much as it is a transactional, contractual relationship with a faceless organization.

For more than a century, the United States has endeavored to integrate people with disabilities into society, including the workplace. For more than half a century, the country has prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of disability and mandated public and workplace integration as a civil right. Success in obtaining and maintaining competitive integrated employment remains the stated goal of the federal government, which guides the state-level agencies tasked with supporting autistic youth achieve that goal.

However, the legal framework underpinning the right of people with disabilities to live and work with dignity (ACL, 2026) is now under threat. In June of this year, the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum reinterpreting the Supreme Court’s decision in Olmstead (OLC, 2026). In that memo, the OLC argues that the ADA does not mandate community-based integration. But stating the claim is not the same as changing the law, even if it does portend shifting priorities across this federal administration. As the American Bar Association reminds in its response to the memo:

Although not binding on courts and without the force of law, the memo is likely to guide Executive Branch agencies, shaping federal enforcement priorities and substantially narrowing the government’s approach to investigations, compliance, and litigation under the ADA and Section 504. (2026)

Contradicting the OLC memo, the ABA response points out that it was a clear position among members of Congress when drafting the ADA that segregation and isolation are recognized forms of discrimination—lawmakers wrote as much into the statutory findings. And a majority of justices on the Supreme Court agreed.

Dignity at work requires active inclusion, and the attempt to narrow Olmstead reintroduces the risk of increased segregation and isolation of people with disabilities. Protecting the dignity of autistic youth will require not only effective cross-sector collaboration as described and recommended above, but also firm and proactive defense of the broad integration mandate that recognizes community inclusion is a civil right that our government is responsible for protecting.

an unseen spring pushes
up into the woods nearby

and two or three little ponds
joined by conspiracy to feed

a river with a famous name
take no names themselves

there’s an island in the middle 
of the second or third little pond

that doesn't have a name or
no name that a map can say

such a big word—headwaters—
for these turtle-filled stillnesses

Some of the members of the church lived in the same neighborhood, and others lived in more affluent areas nearby. Our Sunday meetings were held in various members’ homes and every third week we met in a building owned by the House of Seven Gables corporation. Each week’s teaching was led, or facilitated, by a different member, and musicians in the fellowship provided accompaniment to our singing. Some of my fondest early memories were etched on those Sundays, and some of my deepest held values were forged there, too.

I still hold a lot of those values closely, even though I am not a religious person and haven’t attended any formal services with the convictions of a believer since the mid-90s. And in any case, I never believed in god the way it was hoped I would, not even as a child, not the way I sometimes still wish I could, and I stopped going to church when I was 15. Rather than putting my energies into the religious project of tending to faith in the unseen, I have endeavored to put a different kind of faith to work as an educator, researcher, and policymaker. Fast-forward three decades and I’m now a Ph.D. with a dissertation conceptually framed around the labor-affirmative tenets of Catholic Social Teaching. That all started for me as a child, in rooms full of the joyful noise of neighbors and friends gathered together to break bread (Italian loaves from Steve’s Quality Market, thank you very much!) and share Welch’s Grape Juice. That’s what my religion would have been built on, had it kindled and roared.

One key aspect of my decision to cease attending was the very clear message I was getting from my elders about my gay friends - and about myself, since I’ve identified as bisexual for as long as I can remember thinking about such things. It is not a stretch to say that my parents, too, contributed to my decision to leave and my suspicion of the love being preached alongside the often dehumanizing talk of queer folk. Musicians I listened to were not “about family values" and I inferred an implicit threat in one pointed inquiry about whether anyone was “buggering” me that made me fear homelessness. This dynamic has shifted in the intervening years - both within my family and in American society - but the agony and anxiety of possible shunning was visceral and immediate, and lingers with me to this day.

My point in drudging up hard memories is not to chide my parents, but to point out that the vision of Christianity I was raised on held two foundations: an aspirational basis in kindness and openness, built on espousals of unconditional love and perpetuated by belonging; and the harder feelings of fear and revulsion that were borne on by ignorance. It is this latter “truth” that is rife throughout the Heritage Foundation’s now-infamous Project 2025, and which drives both the viscerally absent morality of ex-president Donald J. Trump as well as the narrowly-conceived “Christianity” that seems to be the core of Ohio Senator James David Vance’s misogyny and racism. And should these two men be elected into the White House I fear that the “ministerial exception”2 will extend beyond its initial confines - protecting the First Amendment rights of religious organizations to determine the makeup of their doctrinal leadership and direction - to include employment and policy directives in all private and public entities, regardless of religious affiliation, mission, or actual practice. In short, I fear a nation in which all decisions are determined by men (yes, all men, and yes, only men) empowered as ministers of their families and businesses.

When I was called in for an unscheduled meeting a week later and told of the decision that my employment would conclude with immediate effect, I was taken completely by surprise. I wasn’t thinking about my disclosure at the time, focusing as hard as I could through body-shuddering sobs to listen to the argument for my sudden dismissal. I was also experiencing Autistic shutdown, instantly quieted and retreating into myself, folding my arms across my chest and closing my eyes, my chin sinking and my jaw clenched and lips shut tight. I was still, listening in a state of shock.

I recall the explanation was vague and well within an employer’s broad discretion in an at-will context, calling into question my commitment to the mission of the organization, my bandwidth for the responsibilities of the role, and the quality of my work. But the centerpiece of the justification was that I posed a risk to the organization’s reputation and ability to operate because I had said in a meeting the prior week that it didn’t matter if we relied on one year’s data on a particular issue or the next year’s data because the relevant metric was absent in the most recent data and was actually irrelevant to our purposes in the first place. What was repeated back in the firing meeting was that I said “it didn’t matter what data we used.” I felt like I was going to throw up.

So the decision was a shock, and an affront, and the explanation felt to me like bullshit. I couldn’t disagree more strenuously with the portrayal of my work ethic as reckless or my work product as shoddy. To be brief and to the point, significant samples of my work were used by the organization after my departure, in some cases with no changes whatsoever. There had been a lot of tension around a project I’d been managing, but by the time of my firing I’d been receiving uniformly and strongly positive feedback. Other than that, I had received no other indication that I was at risk of any kind of discipline or adverse action, least of all sudden termination with immediate effect.

When I got home, I felt relief. I felt anger and sadness and loss and shame. But also relief. I’d been struggling with an ongoing and unpleasant workplace dynamic for what seemed like weeks, to the point where I was avoiding the office and had been suffering gastrointestinal distress. This kind of discomfort is fairly common among Autistic folks, I’ve come to learn, and is perhaps connected to a particular gut biome or “gut profile.”2 In my case, I experience significant and increased distress in my intestines when I am anxious. Just a few weeks before the firing, I half-joked to my wife that I thought I had colitis because of an ongoing bout of diarrhea that had been plaguing me long after what I initially thought was a stomach flu. All that discomfort stopped when I left the office, my arms full of bags and boxes stuffed with my office belongings.

As an example of the workplace dynamic I’m talking about, I recall - vividly - a meeting about a month prior to my dismissal and a little bit closer to my disclosure, of course. In this particular meeting I broke down crying, a full-on sobbing fit, I think in response to a question like “how’re you doing?” As noted above, I’d been struggling mightily with my mental health, and had been extremely anxious and depressed. My response to small-talk questions like “how are you?” is to answer them frankly and sometimes with great detail, and that’s what I did in that meeting. In another context, and certainly in other work places, I would have veered toward the concise and trite, but I was trying to practice vulnerability and opened up. I wept and was brought tissues. It felt cathartic, and I felt seen if awkward.

After I’d finished weeping, the meeting focus turned to some formatting and organizational edits I’d made to a document. That process had been frustrating because the content was still in development and all the feedback I was getting was related to copyediting concerns. As a professional writer and as someone who has taught composition to thousands of college students over the years, I like to think of myself as an adept crafter of constructive feedback. I know what helpful feedback feels like, and also know that I’m bound to get feedback I disagree with that I’ll have to satisfy anyhow. Only once in my life have I received feedback like I did in that meeting. A colleague rose from their seat, strode across the room to a projection of a shared document displaying my work, and pointed sharply at that document, angrily saying: “You should have just done it the way I told you to do it!”

That meeting changed things for me. I didn’t leave work that day thinking that I would have to find a new job, but I did leave with a good sense of what I needed to ask for in order to create and perpetuate an equitable working environment. In the days leading up to my firing, I was rehearsing a meeting I wanted to have with my supervisor, in which I planned to bring attention to the hostility that had peaked in that meeting, and in which I hoped to reshape a working dynamic that felt toxic. I was nervous about saying anything because that same meeting had been referred to more than once by the boss as an exemplar of how we could “work well as a team.” I was nervous, but motivated - if they wanted my best work, I needed to clarify what kinds of conditions made that most likely.

But I never got the chance to make my concerns known. The firing meeting occurred on the very same day I’d planned to use a standing meeting to discuss my concerns. I was too late.

Too late to realize how and what I was feeling, and why, which is all pretty typical for me. It turns out I have significant challenges identifying and processing my own emotions due to what’s called alexithymia.3 There is an overweening and false assumption about Autistic folks that we don’t have emotions or don’t care about them. The truth is much more complicated and variable for individuals, but I can say for certain that I feel things quite deeply and sharply - it’s just that I also have trouble articulating feelings or even detecting changes in my emotional landscape.

I don’t know if I’ll ever achieve the kind of fluency others have when it comes to talking about emotions and emotional needs, but something I learned through this firing episode is that I have to advocate for myself to create ideal working conditions before they deteriorate. I’m still not great at it, and I recognize the need to improve, which I frequently feel desperate to do. Sometimes it feels like a capitulation to admit it, but it’s true that I’ll always have to work harder than others to know myself in the moment, at least emotionally. That’s incredibly frustrating to contemplate, and I wish for myself and those around me that I’d get better at it, like yesterday please and thank you!

But I’m not starting from square zero these days, and have the luckiest luck to have married an empathic and emotionally attuned person who happens to work with a lot of Autistic clients as a speech-language pathologist. I could hack away at a keyboard for weeks and fail to approach the following, which is a wide-ranging and also very succinct description of me that my wife wrote as a summary to share with family:

Jacob was recently diagnosed as Autistic. This process included screenings that ruled out OCD, Bi-polar disorder, ADHD, and PTSD as diagnoses that are sometimes confused with or comorbid with Autism. He then met with a clinician who after taking a detailed history and conducting a lengthy interview, diagnosed him with Autism. Jacob’s autistic traits include: he info-dumps or speaks in great detail about his special interests (congressional testimony, labor relations, politics, birds, etc.) and doesn’t want others to interrupt by asking questions; he has difficulty predicting and understanding others’ feelings; he has alexithymia or difficulty recognizing and understanding how he feels (I see this especially when he doesn’t recognize that he’s angry/yelling); he has difficulty regulating emotion and sensory information and becomes flooded which creates a fight/flight response; he scores high on “masking” behavior where he compensates for his challenges with social interaction by hiding his social differences which is exhausting and painful; he has sensory differences like aversions to different textures, sounds, smells, visual stimuli like anything on the dashboard when driving; and he is an introvert—social interaction is exhausting for him because masking is hard work. His brain is also amazing at visually organizing a space (packing a car with Tetris-like precision!); he has a steel-trap brain for details that interest him; he's a wizard at patterns of all kinds; and he's a terrible liar which means you can trust him. 

Upcoming from Happy Glasses:

• The next post in the Retroactive Continuity storyline will get to the meaning behind the Happy Glasses newsletter title - and I also hope 🤞 to include some archival photos of the author in his first pair(s) of “happy glasses” (dependent on my finding said photos first).

  • These posts will be part of the paid subscription options, though will be available to all readers before archiving behind the paywall.

• And, following from my very first post, I will commence some explication of the four promises behind the Project 2025 power grab playbook. The next post will cover the first promise to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”

  • These posts will be free and will stay outside the paywall.

Over the past few weeks, though, while I’ve been learning how to utilize Substack, tinkering under the hood, mapping out a posting schedule, constructing outlines for each post, and frankly overcoming a lot of anxiety about a weekly schedule of writing that will sometimes be about me, some ground-shaking has occurred across the American political landscape. This post, and some follow-ups I have planned, will have nothing to do with previously planned and now-postponed opening series about me and my glasses and some of my policy interests in the realms of education and employment.

Instead, I will focus on the heavy scary moment I think a lot of other people, like me, feel we’re in right now. I hope to illuminate and elucidate the very real threat a second Donald Trump presidency holds for all manner of folks across a broad majority of America’s striving multiracial, pluralistic society, and I hope you’ll read and share as widely as possible.

So enough about me! It’s time to reckon with the coming putsch!

There is a lot going on that demands attention, but in this and upcoming posts I’m motivated by and responding to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, or as I refer to it, the Christian Nationalist Handbook. I’ve been aware of Project 2025 since January but only became truly scared by it after the US Supreme Court’s recent decisions to strip federal agencies of their long-held status as expert arbiters in highly technical matters like the accumulation of nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere or the definition of a machine gun, and their other decision granting absolute immunity to any president for any action so long as it’s claimed as an “official act.” It was the delivery of those decisions, and also Kevin Roberts’ strident June 22, 2024 appearance on MSNBC’s The Weekend that really put a fire under my seat and prompted me to rethink my purpose with this newsletter.

I don’t recall with certainty when I first heard about the Heritage Foundation but it is likely that I had some inkling at least by the fall of 2011 when I asked students in a college composition course to analyze the Occupy Wall Street declaration along with Tea Party rhetoric. I’m certain by then I’d seen things like this direct statement of Tea Party boosterism by Heritage or a compare/contrast piece at Slate.com, or similar explanations. Of course, later work would delve more deeply into the funding and organization of the Tea Party, including strong ties to Heritage and the Koch brothers, but my general sense of Heritage was that the whole point of the thing was to deregulate for the benefit of large corporations for reasons related to money and greed for more of it.

My understanding, then as now, is that what looks like a “free” market to some looks to a great many more like an anticompetitive labor regime in which workers have no rights or recourse, or an ecosystem of polluted waters and lands that poison food and drinking sources for those with the fewest resources to find safe and healthy options, or a society that puts children and our elders and those with physical and mental disabilities at risk of neglect and abuse and injury, and an economy in which women and people of color earn less than their White male counterparts all other things being equal. So, no, I am not and have not been soothed by so-called neutral market perspective-taking, or whatever.

In any case things have changed in the dozen years since Jim DeMint left the US Senate to head up Heritage. No longer is it credible to refer to the organization as “a conservative research group.” That’s because their new leader, Kevin Roberts, in place as President of Heritage Foundation since 2021 and of Heritage Action (the lobbying arm) since 2023, is not engaged in a research project – he’s engineering what he calls a revolution.

Ominously, Roberts has proclaimed that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Even when he’s trying to reassure people that his intentions are political and not incitement to bloodshed, he will introduce the notion of violence without prompting:

We’re not saying they’re bad people. We’re not saying we want any harm to come to them. Let me be really clear about that. This is Heritage, you know, not some fringe group on the right. We’re talking about destroying political power. And they have political power. And they wield it.

Statements like this bind notions of ideological purity to messy bureaucratic purges and showcase a rabid vision of an autocratic revolution that is the only outcome that can result from the implementation of Project 2025.

The question for me is not whether Donald Trump, or Kevin Roberts, or Steve Bannon, or Stephen Miller are comfortable with violence as a means to power – I believe without equivocation that they each would welcome violence on behalf of their chosen policies or politicians and will probably even call for violence more brazenly in a (still hypothetical!) second Trump administration. The question for me is whether the people voting in this year’s presidential election know that the decision is between an old guy and another old guy who is a fascist. Because that’s what Trump is: an old fascist.

And Project 2025 is a blueprint designed for a fascist with a desire to seize total control over an administrative state weakened by numerous Supreme Court decisions, with newly-granted absolute immunity for all “official acts” to serve as a shield against any and all accountability, from day one. It's chock-a-block with sweeping proposals to overturn an ostensibly democratic government with one that is explicitly unitary and autocratic and founded on a narrow conception of Christianity that is coupled with a maximalist conception of executive power.

If you’re interested in getting a deeper sense of the “four promises” and other principles that guide Project 2025, OR if you’re interested more broadly in public policy (especially education), OR if you’re interested in some of the more personal content I plan for this newsletter, I hope you’ll consider subscribing.

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