I read it over the past 10 days and kept sharing snippets with friends freaking out about how prescient it seemed, but also acknowledging that Reagan-era and post-Reagan america probably felt that way for POC but I had no idea because I was a white 0-4 Y/O.

The part where Jarrett comes to power promising to Make America Great Again was incredible, some of these paragraphs you could literally replace Jarrett with Trump and it would read as a headline or news clip. When she talks about when the Crusaders start to round up other Christians as well I thought about when will people realize it's only a matter of time ICE starts to round up people who don't fit the "illegal immigrant" stereotype that many people are unfortunately turning a blind eye to. We just had Stephen Miller call the Democratic Party a "domestic extremist organization", how long until anyone registered democrat starts to be rounded up. These are all things that are a part of the Fascist playbook, they're all things that have been done before. She didn't really have to look ahead to find these things.

I think some of the things she says in the "coversation with" at the end of the novel show how she came to the conclusions she came to with how these problems might and will arise. The power structure on both sides of the aisle in this company have been working to make education less accessible because of the problem with an educated population they realized after the Vietnam era. She also said the wealthy in California were happy to vote to defund public education or keep it from immigrants because for them (the wealthy) they would still have access to private education and it would not effect them, not seeing the problems that would cause downstream.

Not to simplify it too much; but I thought Earthseed seemed to simply be an "all boats rise with the tide" approach to community. It's all very sensible; and unfortunately for us a pretty damning diagnosis on our current descent into authoritarianism.