For the Trump regime, the brutality is the point. It’s the means to the end of a violent, single-party state that they’re openly proclaiming, even though our media insists on turning away from it.

Back in the 1980s, I lived with my family and worked in Germany for a bit short of two years. The international relief agency I worked for (and lived at the HQ of) jumped through all the necessary hoops to get me a work permit, but if I’d overstayed my permit/visa nobody would have kicked in my front door or invaded my home with flash-bangs and automatic weapons drawn.

Nobody would have smashed in the windows of my car, or shot me with pepper balls or rubber-coated bullets, or snatched our three children and put them into a privatized “Christian” foster care system from which thousands of kids simply vanish.

Instead, a polite fellow from the Ausländerbehörden (“Immigration Office”) would have dropped by, perhaps with a local police officer, to tell me how to navigate the system to either acquire the right to stay, or work out how I’d be leaving. He’d give me a few weeks, or possibly even a few months, to get everything together and leave the country.

I knew a few German police officers; they’re incredibly professional, having to have graduated from a three-year college program and undergone what’s typically a yearlong probationary period before they can publicly handle a firearm.

This is how civilized countries handle “illegal immigration.” So, why are Homan, Noem, Trump, et al, engaging in and celebrating such wild violence against people here?

There are now so many videos of ICE thugs unlawfully beating, kidnapping, and terrorizing brown people, their supporters, protestors, and journalists — even maliciously spraying pepper gas at peaceful protesters in inflatable animal costumes — that it’s getting impossible to keep track of them all.

From ICE agents smashing a car window to pull a man from his vehicle in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Apr. 16, 2025), to an ICE agent shooting Eric Díaz-Cruz in the face in Brooklyn (Feb. 2020), to masked agents breaking a car window during an arrest outside a Beaverton, Oregon preschool (Jul. 21, 2025), and even pepper-balling a Chicago pastor in the head during a protest (Sept. 2025), the videos keep piling up.

Add to that a viral clip of a cuffed Portland protester being wheeled away on a flatbed cart (Oct. 2025), neighbors in Nashville forming a human chain to stop an ICE pickup (Jul. 2019), and the on-camera violent throwing to the ground and arrest of a WGN journalist during a Chicago raid last week, and you get the picture.

This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.

When a regime wants to turn the police powers of the state — with all the brutality and violence they can legally wield — against its political opponents, it never starts with the members of the opposition party. But it always ends up there, be it in Germany in the 1930s or today’s Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Iran, etc., etc.

Hitler didn’t start by arresting and imprisoning lawmakers from or supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Centre Party (Zentrum), or even the Communist Party (KPD) even though all of the three major German parties openly and outspokenly opposed his Nazi Party.

German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.

A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.

In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.

Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people — with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people — across German media.

German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.

Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled more than 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was followed by open and widely publicized violence against gay men and trans women.

It was the first major Nazi book-burning and violence against an “other,” and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: soon it spread to libraries and public high schools.

Having established the legal precedent for dragging people from their homes and imprisoning them, Hitler then began arresting members of the non-Nazi political parties and their followers.

But first, he knew he had to get Germans used to the idea of authorities of the state kicking in doors and dragging screaming people into the street.

When the only victims of this brutality were queer people and “non-Aryans,” ethnic Germans let him and his Stormtroopers get away with it because the objects of the violence were “them.”

But it never ends with “them.”

Fascist regimes always turn their police powers against their own people, first going after those who ridicule, oppose, or have turned away from support for their leader.

ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get non-citizens to leave the country.

Instead, like in Germany and most other civilized nations, they could simply give people the equivalent of a speeding ticket with a certain amount of time to get their affairs in order and leave the country before a next step — arrest and forced deportation — takes place. And they could threaten their employers with large fines, like my employer in Germany would have faced had I overstayed my visa.

But not here in America. Here, the agenda is quite different and involves explicit and highly publicized violence against undocumented people and their property.

For a reason.

Stephen Miller told us, when talking with Sean Hannity on Fox “News” in August, what that reason is, what their ultimate goal will be:

“The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” (emphasis added)

Immigrants are just the Trump regime’s warm-up act, just like trans people and Gypsies were in 1933 Germany. The real goal of this administration — by their own declaration — is to turn America into a one-party-rule nation.

To get there, though, they first must get us used to Trump’s masked secret police using violence on the streets and in our homes, right in front of us.

This is why DHS is proudly producing videos showing people being brutalized to upbeat music, why their agents are concealing their identities to increase the terror and minimize the possibility of accountability, and why complicit Republicans refuse to even use the correct name for their ultimate target, members of the Democratic Party.

Back in the 1950s, Joe McCarthy advised Republicans never to use the actual name of the Democratic Party, but instead to slander them with a slur.

“Never say Democratic Party, that sounds too nice, too democratic. Instead, always say ‘Democrat Party,’ with an emphasis on the ‘rat’.”

It’s why they’re flooding social media with celebrations of their violence, and why the millionaire talent on billionaire-owned Fox “News” are cheerleading them. It’s why Trump is openly talking about arresting Illinois’ Governor Pritzker and Chicago’s Mayor Johnson. It’s why his masked thugs tackled a US Senator, arrested a congresswoman, and imprisoned the mayor of Newark, all with great fanfare.

If you think Democrats — including registered Democratic voters — aren’t next, you’re not paying attention. They’re already trying to make sure our votes aren’t counted; when that fails they’ll proceed to Miller’s step two and start dealing with us as “domestic extremists.”

The brutality, in other words, is the point. It’s not an accident, a side effect, or the result of poor training. It’s intentional. It’s a signal of their broader intentions. Following the classic dictator’s playbook.

And if we ever get used to it, God help America.

The endgame for Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi is coming into clearer focus, and it’s nearly a one-for-one, step-by-step implementation of Nazi jurist/philosopher Carl Schmitt’s ideas that created and sustained the early Third Reich. Vance has even gone so far as to directly quote Schmitt.

The concepts aren’t particularly complicated, and it’s easy to see how Trump and his enablers are implementing them:

• First, Schmitt taught, “there is no law, there is just power”: democracy is a messy anachronism in which whomever controls the political majority inevitably imposes their will on everybody else, stifling individuality and freedom, both in thought and behavior. The cure for this messiness of democracy, he argued, is a strong leader who transcends politics, understands the people and reflects their true desires, defends their racial and religious identity, ignores inconvenient laws, and thus leads the superior/majority race of people to their true destiny. A fascist dictator, in other words.
• Second, the way the noble dictator rises to “plenary” (ultimate, unchallengeable) power is by discarding participation in the political process; contemptuously ignoring norms; breaking previous promises; flaunting national laws while blowing up negotiations; and refusing to compromise with “inferior” political parties or political ideas. Instead, Schmitt says, a “true leader” puts every institution and person in the nation into one of two binary buckets: “friends” or “enemies.” Friends are lavishly and publicly rewarded with wealth and power; enemies are relentlessly pursued and conspicuously punished until they’re either neutralized, bankrupted, or dead.
• Third, the way to get past the guardrails built into constitutional republics (like the German 1930s Weimar Republic or today’s American republic) is by invoking “emergency” powers, even if it’s necessary to create an emergency to justify the invocation.

When Vance sat down with New York Times columnist Russ Douthat in May of last year he complained that Democrats opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court weren’t interested in Kavanaugh’s legal positions but, rather, whether he would serve or oppose Democratic Party political efforts. He said:

“The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt — ‘There’s no law, there’s just power.’”

Not only has Vance apparently read Schmitt, his mentor and benefactor, Peter Thiel, has — according to extensive reporting in Wired magazine — long been fascinated by the Nazi theorist’s ideas.

While it’s unlikely that Trump could tell Schmitt from Fred Flintstone, he instinctively understands the man’s theories — he’s systematically following them, starting with his flouting norms and laws like the Hatch Act (two years in prison for selling Teslas in front of the White House) and both US and international laws against selling pardons or killing civilians (in boats in the Caribbean) without trial and conviction.

And that’s just the beginning. Taking a jet plane in an alleged bribe; giving the UAE high-tech chips in violation of America’s national security in exchange for a $2 billion investment in a Trump family crypto business; and exempting companies that gave him gifts or money from antitrust regulation, tariffs, and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcements continue the trend.

From there, Trump moved to Schmitt’s friend-enemy doctrine, maliciously punishing his perceived enemies even when — like James Comey, Miles Taylor, and James Clapper — they’re Republicans.

He’s characterized Democrats in terms never before used by an American president to describe members of his opposition party, using words typically reserved for traitors and criminals. This is incredibly wrong and destructive, which is why George Washington warned against it and no president has ever done it.

His friends, though — even if they took $50,000 in a paper bag in an FBI bribery sting (Tom Homan), or looked the other way from Jeffrey Epstein during her eight years as Florida’s top law enforcement officer (Bondi) — can do no wrong. Attack the Capitol and cause the death of three police officers? You get a pardon, and now it appears even compensation.

And now he’s preparing to use the sledgehammer that Hitler wielded to destroy the German constitution, taking it as a club to seize absolute, plenary power: he’s taking visible steps toward invoking a nationwide state of emergency.

Schmitt first advanced this idea in 1933 when a Dutch communist set fire to the German parliament (Reichstag) building, describing what we call a state of emergency as a “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand).

During such an “exception” or (even phony) moment of “emergency,” Schmitt said, a leader could — indeed, should — use it as an excuse to ignore normal constitutional requirements and laws because the urgency of the exception supersedes the law in order to preserve the republic.

Using this process, Schmitt argued, would allow a “noble Führer” with his finger on the pulse of his people to end-run around the tedious, laborious normal legal and ethical processes by which a nation’s leader normally executed the law.

It would let him become, initially, above the law (as six Republicans on the Supreme Court have endorsed) and, ultimately, become the law himself and rule by decree or executive order.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is calling out Trump’s four-step plan to achieve Schmitt’s goal of plenary power (summary in my words, not his):

1) Deploy ICE to Blue cities with brutal tactics that intentionally inflame local people to protest;
2) Exaggerate the “crisis” and try to provoke the protesters to violence;
3) Deploy troops to further polarize and inflame local sentiment, evoking physical resistance to their presence that justifies arrests and live ammunition, a Tiananmen square of sorts;
4) Citing that resistance, invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to suspend parts of federal law and the Constitution so you can use the troops to steal the 2026 an 2028 elections for the GOP.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has echoed that narrative, explicitly saying that the goal of Trump’s “invasion” is to control and corrupt the elections next year and in 2028, and California Governor Gavin Newsome has echoed the sentiment.

Trump’s behavior is a virtual mirror of the steps Schmitt recommended after the Reichstag Fire, and Hitler followed with both the Enabling Acts (they made it legal to prepare lists of your political enemies to use the state against), and his political assassinations during the later Night of the Long Knives (for which Schmitt wrote the legal justification).

Like so many of us across the nation, Reich is basically begging people not to take the bait Trump is dangling. So far here in Portland, for example, Trump’s and Noem’s attempts at provocation have been met with street theater, dancing furries, people bringing flowers to the ICE building, and a naked bike ride protest.

But the ICE guys, laughing, shot a praying priest in the head from the roof of the ICE building, hitting him with a Pepper ball round that knocked him to the ground.

Baffled, Noem told Trump and America at a cabinet meeting that Portland must have “cleared” the “war-torn” areas and hidden the parts of the city that are smoking ruins from the recent riots she imagines (and Fox “News” lyingly suggests by playing five-year-old B-roll of the BLM protests) have happened:

“[Mayor Keith Wilson] said that Portland was perfectly safe, a beautiful city, no problems. And I said, ‘well, why did you clear the streets for me today then, and build out a four-block radius to make sure I could get in and out of here?’”

Lacking any evidence whatsoever of organized violence against ICE officers or their building in Portland, the notorious puppy killer, her (also married) alleged boyfriend in tow, added:

“This is a sick situation. But those are anarchists, those are people that want to overthrow government. They’re really degenerates. And we’re finding out who is supplying all of those beautiful signs and everything else.”

So far, Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago have succeeded in not giving in to Noem’s and Trump’s Schmittian provocations. Odds are, though, they’ll continue to ramp up the violence until finally a breaking point is reached, and Trump can then claim justification for the Insurrection Act, something he’s now openly discussing almost daily.

Stephen Miller appears to be salivating at the prospect, telling CNN that “under Title 10 … the president has plenary authority” and then suddenly realizing that he’d slipped and let the cat out of the bag; he froze for the next dozen or so seconds until CNN claimed technical difficulties and cut away. When they came back, Miller omitted that “plenary” word that Karl Schmitt so loved — which means “ultimate power that nobody can challenge” — from his final remarks.

As historian Heather Cox Richardson explained:

“It is this power under Title 10 that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller yesterday claimed was ‘plenary,’ or absolute. The idea that exceptions to the rule of law reveal who is really in charge of the government was central to the political philosophy of German political theorist Carl Schmitt, who joined the Nazis and whose work is increasingly popular among the radical right in the U.S. these days.”

Forbes notes that Trump is already claiming that if courts try to stop him, he’ll neuter them by invoking the Insurrection Act, claiming it gives him plenary powers:

“Trump has suggested he could be inclined to invoke the law if courts rule against him. ‘If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that,’ Trump said Monday, referring to using the Insurrection Act.”

The next few days, weeks, or possibly months will be pivotal.

• Will citizens in one of the Blue cities Trump’s thugs have invaded give him the riot he wants?
• If they do and he invokes the Insurrection Act, will the six compliant, frightened Republicans on the Supreme Court back him up?
• If they don’t, will he ignore them and order the military into our streets to establish martial law anyway?
• Will the nation’s military commanders go along with such an order?
• And if they do, can they stop or effectively disrupt the elections of 2026 and 2028 in Blue cities? (We even had elections during the Civil War and WWII.)

Most Americans, polls show, are aghast. Few of us ever thought we’d live to see the day an American president would be following the steps to cripple a republic laid out by Nazi Germany’s most famous political theorist.

But here we are. And the most important things we can do are to fearlessly keep speaking out (“courage is contagious”), demand action from our elected officials of both parties, and show up peacefully in the streets on October 18th for No Kings Day 2.

See you there!

Donald Trump and Stephen Miller say they’re coming for the “communists” in America, and they need the military on the streets of our cities to do it. Here’s what they’ve said recently on the topic:

Trump

• “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” (Rally)
• “The communists attempting to destroy the American human spirit will fail in their dirty deeds.” (Threatening to use National Guard)
• “It is the enemy from within, and they’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick.” (Fox “News” appearance)
• “If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me. They will not hesitate to ramp up their persecution of Christians, pro-life activists, parents attending school board meetings, and even future Republican candidates.” (Miami speech)

Stephen 'Pee Wee German' Miller:

• “We are not going to let the communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation’s capital. Most of the citizens who live in Washington, DC, are Black.” (Speech to troops in DC)
• “President Trump will make this nation safer than ever before, and he’ll do it over the fighting and opposition of the Democrat party, over the fighting and opposition of the communist left-wing judges.” (Fox “News” appearance)

Trump even included “anti-capitalism” as one of the “indica” (indicators) of “potential terror activities” that should cause the 200-plus Joint Terrorism Task Forces — set up in every major American city between local police, state police, and the FBI — to begin tapping your phone, reading your email, and surveilling your activities if they determine you’re an “anti-capitalist.”

So, what the hell are these guys talking about? What do Americans think of all this rhetoric, and what does that tell us about the future of the GOP and the Democratic Party? And the American middle class, for that matter?

After all, capitalism can’t exist without a little bit of socialism, and a middle class can’t exist in a meaningful way without a lot of socialism, as the New Deal and Great Society proved. But only Donald Trump is actually pursuing communism (more on that in a moment).

Gallup recently released a new poll showing that Americans’ support for capitalism has crashed from 60 percent as recently as 2021 to a mere 54 percent this year, the lowest recorded level in the history of their tracking. Big business is also sharply less popular: only 37 percent rate it favorably, the lowest since Gallup started asking.

For the first time, Democrats favor socialism over capitalism (66 percent vs. 42 percent), highlighting a dramatic shift and partisan gap. Republicans, on the other hand, are 74 percent to 14 percent in favor of capitalism over socialism.

Capitalism, simply, is a system that allows people with money (capital) to invest that money in ways that produce more money for them. The two most common ways that happens is by starting a business or buying stock in an existing company.

Most Americans will tell you they’re capitalists, but they’re not; real capitalists make the majority of their money not by working with their minds or hands in an office or factory but, instead, by putting their money (capital) to work via investment vehicles.

But capitalism — as Adam Smith pointed out back in the 18th century in Wealth of Nations and A Theory of Moral Sentiments — can’t exist without a “socialist” government providing guardrails, incentives, and systems for keeping people honest.

From laws against fraud and stock manipulation, to courts and jails to enforce those laws, to public roads and airways to facilitate commerce, a little bit of socialism (government using some of the money produced by capitalism and extracted from it by taxes) is necessary for capitalism to exist.

In fact, Americans have vigorously embraced socialism ever since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s woke us all up to the dangers of raw, unregulated capitalism. We have literally hundreds of socialist institutions all across our various government agencies that not only support capitalism but also built the nation’s first more-than-half-of-us middle class in the middle of the 20th century.

From fire departments to banking and insurance regulators to programs like Social Security and Medicare, socialism has built a massive edifice of American prosperity over the past century. Here’s a list of the top 50 socialist programs or agencies:

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, Unemployment Insurance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Women Infants and Children (WIC), Housing and Urban Development, Earned Income Tax Credit, Public Schools, State Universities, Community Colleges, Minimum Wage Laws, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Public Health Departments, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Public Libraries, Fire Departments, Police Departments, Public Water Utilities, Public Sewer Systems, U.S. Postal Service, Public Transportation, Veterans Health Administration, Head Start, Federal Student Aid, Public Housing Authorities, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Aging, Health Resources and Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, State-Produced Insulin Initiatives, State Disability Insurance Programs, Small Business Administration, National Science Foundation, AmeriCorps, U.S. Agency for International Development, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Affordable Care Act Exchanges, Child Care & Development Block Grant, Green Energy Subsidies, National Endowment for the Arts, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, National Park Service, Community Health Centers.

Rightwing billionaires — who are true capitalists, since they make most of their money with their money — hate the fact that these programs mostly help average working people and smaller businesses, and the rest of us want billionaires to pay their damn income taxes to help fund them.

So, they finance and elevate politicians and ideologues who use their positions and power to try to gut these agencies, while supporting think tanks and media stars who trash-talk socialism and deify capitalism to keep billionaire taxes low.

The most obvious recent examples are Elon Musk and Russell Vought taking chainsaws to the federal government, and red state governors who keep their people in poverty by gutting social programs along with holding down taxes on their richest citizens.

The simple reality, first identified by Adam Smith in 1776, amplified by David Ricardo in the early 19th century, and now understood by most economists, is that without these “socialist” programs, predominantly capitalist societies will revert to their natural state: a tiny 1 percent of the morbidly rich; a sliver of around 5 percent of a middle class made of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who serve the rich; and a groaning, toiling 94 percent of the working poor who provide the labor to make the rich even richer.

Read any book by Charles Dickens and you’ll get the picture; his father was dragged off to debtors’ prison and most of his books accurately depict how capitalism ravaged working class people for a thousand years leading up to and including the Victorian era.

In A Christmas Carol, in fact, the morbidly rich don’t even make an appearance; Scrooge was that era’s middle class, owning a small (one employee plus himself) business, and Bob Cratchit was the working poor who couldn’t even afford healthcare for his disabled son.

This is the world that Trump, Vance, Musk, Vought, and their GOP lackeys want to take us back to: they’re committed to undoing virtually every one of the agencies and programs listed above, along with at least a hundred others.

At the same time, the Overton window for how much socialism Americans want has been steadily shifting to the left.

The majority of Americans today want what other “socialist” developed countries (like most of free Europe, Asia, and Costa Rica) have: free or cheap healthcare and college, top-flight public schools, an end to widespread homelessness, action against climate change and toward green energy independence, and higher taxes on billionaires to pay for it.

Which finally brings us to the real outliers: the communists.

Communism is generally defined as an economic system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are collectively owned — typically by the state — rather than by individuals or corporations. The government, in other words, owns the companies that generate wealth, create goods and services, and employs the people.

Which, weirdly, is where Trump is taking us as he demonstrates his total lack of economic understanding. He’s now had the federal government buy or otherwise acquire stock in multiple companies, including Intel, MP Materials, Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, and the US Steel Corporation.

As a recent contrarian article in Current Affairs points out:

“Since the Intel deal was announced on August 22, making the U.S. government a significant stakeholder in the tech company, there’s been a slew of news articles and op-eds solemnly warning about the rise of an orange-hued Trumpian communism. Variations on this theme have appeared in Fortune, the New York Times (twice!), the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Vox, Axios, Yale Insights, the Atlantic, the Free Press, Reason, and even regional newspapers like Indiana’s Indy Star.”

While Trump is shifting our political system toward the single-party strongman authoritarianism (sometimes called fascism) of his heroes who run Russia and Hungary, he’s pushing our economy in the direction of communist countries like Cuba, Vietnam, and China.

Which just makes sense. Because pure communism only works in small societies like Jesus and his disciples (with “a common purse”) or ancient tribal societies, when it’s tempered with a bit of capitalism the strongman types who run those “communist” countries get to skim massive wealth off the top of the businesses they allow to function.

This is today’s Trump-grift 101, whether it’s his brand-new $5 billion crypto fortune (with government support) or his recent real estate deals around the world cut based on his power in DC.

Republicans are racing toward a billionaire-friendly, every-man-for-himself version of capitalism, while Trump pushes a strongman, one-party communist model of top-down control of the economy (tariffs by fiat, politicize the Fed, have government own companies) that puts political power over markets.

Democrats, by contrast, are trying to restore the healthy mix that once worked here: private enterprise policed by real rules, paired with public investments that serve the common good, the balance that built the mid-century American middle class before Reagan took an ax to it by destroying “socialist” high taxes on rich people and gutting “socialist” labor unions.

Whether America can put its middle class back together will depend on how simply and forcefully Democrats can explain it in the face of Trump’s and Miller’s “communist Democrats” scare talk.

The stakes are enormous. In 1981, roughly 65 percent of households could live solidly in the middle class on a single paycheck. Today, after the Reagan-era shift to “reject socialism” and cut taxes on the morbidly rich, only about 47 percent manage that even with two incomes. Rebuilding a broad middle class is not nostalgia; it’s the foundation of a functioning democracy.

Reviving the once-great American middle class is vital for democracy to thrive, and only progressives within the Democratic Party are working for the modest amount of government socialism that history proves will produce that outcome.

If they fail and Trump and his Republicans succeed in making the entire American economy subservient to this country’s billionaires, we’ll all become Bob Cratchits and our children will all become tiny Tims.

This week has felt like one battle after another. We all watched video after video of ICE agents dropping from helicopters onto a Chicago apartment block, kicking in doors and terrorizing Black and Hispanic American and immigrant families, then trashing and stealing their possessions without ever presenting a warrant signed by a judge.

The GOP pushed the country to the brink again with another government shutdown threat while right-wing legislatures redrew districts to erase the votes of millions. We heard more talk of arresting journalists for doing their jobs, and watched as the military rolled through American cities as if people here are the enemy.

Each day has felt like a slow-motion assault on democracy itself.

Louise and I went to see Leonardo DiCaprio’s new movie, One Battle After Another, last weekend, and I was stunned. It’s a film of rare courage and artistry. From the first scene to the last, Paul Thomas Anderson reminds us that cinema can still tell the truth about power and conscience. It’s a film that demands attention, not permission.

The movie runs about two-and-a-half hours, but it’s so action- and drama-packed that it felt like it flew by in less than an hour. I knew people similar to those characterized in this movie when I was in East Lansing SDS back in 1968-69: seeing them portrayed like this was a hoot! This is truly brilliant film-making.

Predictably, conservatives rushed to condemn it. Some labeled it “irresponsible” or claimed it “glorifies violence.” What they really mean is that it unsettles them. They prefer art that flatters authority and soothes the comfortable. This film refuses to do either.

The world Anderson portrays is not a fantasy. When federal agents execute suspects, when protests are manipulated to justify repression, when truth is distorted by propaganda, that is not simply fiction. It reflects the deep anxiety of a society that’s watched Trump’s executive power become far too concentrated and way too cruel. Anyone paying attention to the news knows how real that danger feels.

The rightwing National Review published a piece titled “There Will Be Bloodlust in ‘One Battle After Another’” that accused Anderson of romanticizing 1960s radicalism. Yet DiCaprio, who stars in the film, called it a “timely satire.” Speaking to Reuters, he said, “It’s not a film where people are imposing any political beliefs on anyone else. It’s satire on both ends.”

That contrast says everything. Conservatives want to see chaos; Anderson and his cast are inviting reflection. The violence in the film is not triumphant; it’s painful, personal, and tragic. It shows what happens when injustice festers until ordinary people begin to break, as I saw in the people I knew in the Weather Underground back in the day.

History reminds us that art has always frightened the powerful. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was banned in the South because it forced them to confront slavery. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was smeared by industrialists for revealing the cruelty of unregulated capitalism. Protest music of the 1960s and artists like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger were condemned as “unpatriotic” by the same crowd that called Dr. King a radical.

When art tells the truth, power always howls.

Today the same pattern repeats. The same rightwing billionaires funding “outrage” over this film are working to silence teachers, censor libraries, and rewrite history to protect privilege. They fear a nation that can still feel empathy; they fear what happens when people start asking why power serves so few.

One Battle After Another is not a call to arms. It is, instead, a warning about what happens when corruption becomes normal and compassion becomes rare. It asks us to look at the machinery of cruelty and decide whether we’ll stand by or resist. That choice is the same one that generations before us have faced.

If this film makes people uncomfortable, that’s its purpose. Democracy doesn’t survive by comforting the powerful. It survives when ordinary people demand justice and truth, even when it stings.

One Battle After Another will be called divisive by those who profit from division. They’re wrong. The real division in this country is between those who believe art should serve power and those who believe art should challenge it.

I stand with the challengers, because when we fall silent, we serve power; when we speak, we hold it to account.

Remember the old TV crime/drama shows? A cop would bang on a suspect’s door and the suspect would say, through the door, “Do you have a warrant?” The officer would then walk away, promising to come back later with the requisite paper signed by a judge.

No more. Now they’re kicking in doors, shooting pepper-gas balls into the open windows of cars driven by reporters, smashing windows and furniture, and concealing their faces and identities like the Klan did in days of old. In Chicago, they’ve shot two unarmed people, killing one. And there wasn’t a warrant signed by a judge to be seen anywhere.

People ask, “Are we there, yet? Has America gone fascist? Are we now in a militarized dictatorship?”

Last week’s illegal, unconstitutional military assault on an apartment building in Chicago argues “Yes.” And if it doesn’t stimulate a similar level of public outrage as the Jimmy Kimmel suspension did, we’re all screwed.

And by “all” I mean you, too. None of us are safe if all of us aren’t safe. We have to stand up and speak out now.

Trump, Vance, Hegseth, and Noem carefully selected a low-income apartment building filled with Black and Hispanic people, correctly believing that the American mainstream media wouldn’t give it the coverage they would if ICE and our military had instead kicked in the doors of a building full of middle-class white people.

Soldiers rapelled from Black Hawk helicopters as some 300 masked agents ran throughout the apartment building kicking in doors, dragging American citizens out (including near-naked children) into the street and zip-tying them for hours.

They then trashed multiple apartments, ripping up furniture, smashing windows, breaking and scattering possessions, and removing and carting away phones and laptops. No warrants signed by judges were presented and one ICE thug, when asked about the shivering American citizen kids standing in the freezing cold, said, “F--- the children.”

This is the exact same sort of thing that British forces did against the colonists in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

MAGA is delighted; puppy-killer Noem claims people were “clapping in the streets,” although there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of that. MAGA folks seem to think that because they’re white they’re safe from attack by this regime.

But when they’re done with the brown folks, they’ll be coming for the white people next. They’ll start with Democrats — Trump called them “Satan” last week — but history shows they won’t stop there.

It’s already started, with Trump’s most recent National Security Directive that instructs the 200-plus local police/FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces all across the country to begin investigating anybody or any group that exhibits or has ever given a donation to any group showing “indicia of terrorism” including being anti-Christian; anti-capitalism; extremism on migration, race, or gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional views on family, religion, or morality.

Do you have a queer kid? A Black or Hispanic friend? Are you a union member? Have you failed to attend church over the past few years? Are you Jewish or Muslim? Unitarian? Ever donated to a civil rights group? Voted Democratic? Or voted for a Republican who Trump despises, like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger?

You’re next.

They may have already started surveilling you, tapping your phone, reading your emails, collecting your browser and location history.

This isn’t the first time masked, armed agents of the government have terrorized American citizens. In the late 1870s and the 1920s, in Portland, Oregon (among other cities) armed, hooded members of the Klu Klux Klan were deputized and unleashed against racial minorities, Catholics, Jews, union members, and other “criminals and undesirables.”

Oregon had been so taken over by the Klan that in the election of 1876 their electoral college votes were challenged by both parties in Congress, leading, in part, to the election being handed to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

Eventually, Oregon and the rest of America rejected masked secret police and vigilantes in our streets. Now, in this generation, it’s our turn.

Christopher Armitage, on his Existentialist Republic Substack newsletter, argues forcefully that masked federal agents committing crimes should be arrested by state and local police:

“Here’s what you need to know: Federal agents are committing state felonies every day. Breaking and entering. Kidnapping. Assault. When they kick down doors without judicial warrants, when they detain citizens without probable cause, when they point guns at children, these are crimes under state law. And Democratic governors have the power to prosecute those crimes …“When ICE agents face potential state prosecution for breaking down doors, they’ll start getting real warrants signed by real judges. When pointing guns at families could mean assault charges, they’ll think twice. When detaining U.S. citizens could mean kidnapping prosecutions, they’ll check IDs more carefully.” (emphasis added)

And Trump can’t pardon state crimes; those convicted end up in state prisons. It’s probably why, like the Klan of old, they conceal their identities.

ICE isn’t bothering to get the kinds of warrants required by the Fourth Amendment, instead they’re using “administrative warrants” signed by ICE officials; these are just window-dressing paperwork and are not legal warrants.

Armitage points out:

“So when ICE breaks down a door with only administrative paperwork, that’s burglary under California Penal Code 459. When they haul away citizens without probable cause, that’s kidnapping under Penal Code 207. When they point weapons at unarmed families, that’s assault under Penal Code 245.”

He correctly tells us all to contact our state and local elected officials and demand that they enforce the laws of our states.

You can duckduckgo.com search for your town’s mayor’s office, your state representative and senator, and you can call your House and Senate members at 202-224-3121.

This brutal, illegal attack on American citizens last week was the Trump regime’s most visible “crossing the Rubicon” moment. If it stands, it will become normal and none of us are safe.

When the government becomes the criminal, silence is complicity. The Fourth Amendment is not a relic or a privilege; it’s the firewall between freedom and tyranny. If we allow it to burn, we’re setting fire to the idea of America itself.

Every citizen, every journalist, every elected official who still believes in the rule of law must speak out, organize, and demand accountability before this becomes irreversible. History does not forgive those who stayed quiet while justice was destroyed in plain sight.

The time to speak out and demand action is now.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” —Abraham Lincoln

“The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people. To render us again one people, acting as one nation, should be the object of every man really a patriot.”—Thomas Jefferson

People are baffled. Why are Trump and his Republican lickspittles so intent on gutting our government, destroying our alliances and reputation around the world, and screwing working class people while transferring over $50 trillion to the morbidly rich?

Historian Kevin M. Kruse captured the zeitgeist brilliantly, reflecting widespread public bewilderment when he posted over on BlueSky:

“We’ve had ----ups in the White House before, but never a president who seemed so deliberately intent on being a ---up. It’s been said before, but if these people were actual agents of an enemy power seeking to divide, dismantle and destroy the USA they wouldn’t be doing anything different.”

So, let’s engage in a simple thought experiment. If you or I were hired by Vladimir Putin, an angry group of billionaires who want to end democracy, or a wealthy serial killer, and our orders were to tear our country apart and make us vulnerable to foreign takeover, what would we do? What steps would we take?

As I mentioned a few days ago, if we follow the Dictator’s Playbook there actually is a simple, 12-step formula to make that happen.

The first step would be to turn Americans from E Pluribus Unum (“Out of Many, One”) into hate-filled warring factions. Turn us against each other. Divide us by race, religion, gender, region, education, income, and whether we live in cities or rural areas.

In Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795), he described the first three strategies that “despotic moralists” use to rip apart the fabric of a society. They were Fac et excusa (“Act now, and make excuses later”), Si fecisti, nega (“If you commit a crime, deny it”), and Divide et impera (“Divide and conquer”). Jefferson perhaps inspired Kant when, in 1787, he wrote, “Divide et impera [is] the reprobated axiom of tyranny…”

When Hitler claimed that Jews, Gypsies, and queer people weren’t “real Germans,” he was invoking that principle. Joe McCarthy tried to divide us by political ideology. David Duke said we should be separated by skin color.

Its most recent invocation was just this week when Trump and Pete Hegseth told our nation’s generals that most Black, Hispanic, and female officers were only in their positions because of their gender or skin color. “Whiskey Pete” was blunt, claiming that Ronald Reagan’s invocation of America’s traditional belief that “our diversity is our strength” was an “insane fallacy.”

Next, we’d want to immiserate as many Americans as possible, creating a huge pool of mostly white men who are pissed off because they’d been left behind economically and feel locked out of the American Dream.

That strategy would include several steps:

• Destroy unions that bind workers together with their employers and raise standards of living.
• Gut programs that lift people out of poverty and into the middle class, including high-quality universal public education, low-cost college, and inexpensive access to healthcare.
• Ship manufacturing overseas to low-wage nations while using incoherent, ever-changing whim-based tariffs to batter the domestic economy.
• Build media operations that demonize “the other,” telling them Blacks, Hispanics, queer people and women are the cause of their troubles.
• Ban books that embrace diversity and teachers who use them.
• Spread hate and conspiracy theories via powerful social media and search engine algorithms that make them seem normal, coarsening the entire culture.
• Throw people off programs offering healthcare, student debt repayment, and housing subsidies.

Third, we’d want to destroy people’s faith in straightforward news. Loudly proclaim that it all has a “leftwing bias” and can’t be trusted, that reporters are elite “enemies of the people,” and attack the media relentlessly.

Fourth, shatter people’s faith in reality itself. Challenge science and expertise. Flood the zone with conspiracy theories. Convince citizens to stop taking commonsense steps to protect themselves and their children including vaccinations, precautions against airborne diseases, or measures to slow climate change. Sow confusion until they no longer know who to believe, and then offer yourself as the only source of truth.

Fifth, deconstruct international alliances that go back centuries by alienating traditional friends and embracing openly hostile foes while tearing up norms of defense, trade, and commerce.

Sixth, fracture citizens’ faith in their elected officials and the government itself. Legalize the practice of morbidly rich people and giant corporations buying legislation and the loyalty of politicians with cash by claiming that “money is speech” and “corporations are persons.” Define opposition political parties as “radical,” “dangerous,” and “outside the mainstream.”

Seventh, turn the military and police forces of the nation against its own people, making them terrified of challenging armed, masked men in the streets, kicking in their doors at midnight. Start with vilified minorities like immigrants and, when they’re “under control,” turn those forces against anybody who dissents from the new single-party rule.

Eighth, demolish faith in the nation’s currency by seizing political control of the central bank while villainizing its leadership.

Ninth, run scams to accumulate as much wealth as possible in the hands of Dear Leader and his close cronies while refusing to raise the minimum wage so as to keep people in poverty.

Tenth, use the power of government to force institutions — corporations, universities, law firms — into complete submission and even explicit collaboration in the enshitification of the nation.

Eleventh, seize control of the legislative and judicial branches so your law-breaking, election-rigging, and bribe-taking is never held to account. Openly and brazenly break laws like the Hatch Act that forbids the use of any government agency or property for political or commercial purposes.

Force agencies to make illegal, partisan statements denigrating the opposition party and defy anybody who calls out that naked criminality. Sneer and laugh at those who demand that people committing crimes in office should be held accountable.

Twelfth, turn the nation’s premiere law enforcement agencies into tools for punishing political enemies while ignoring the crimes of friends of the regime, thus destroying faith in equality under the rule of law and terrorizing anybody who speaks out.

All of these 12 simple steps have been used by every despot in history, from the ancient Roman Empire through the kings of the Dark Ages to the fascists of early 20th century Europe to today’s strongmen including Orbán, Putin, Erdoğan, El-Sisi, Maduro, Netanyahu, and Modi.

Whether Trump has put America on this road at the insistence (or by the payment from) Putin, rightwing American billionaires, or just his own authoritarian impulses and with strategies he’s learned from Orbán and Putin, it doesn’t have to end with America resembling today’s Russia or Hungary.

The good news is that multiple countries have elected men to leadership who tried to run through this list and were stopped before they could finish the job. Instead of letting their leaders turn their nations into permanent autocracies, the people rose up and took the power back for themselves and their democracies.

They include Ukraine, the Philippines, Brazil, Poland, Zambia, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Peru, South Korea, Romania, North Macedonia, Slovakia, Gambia, Malawi, Moldova, and South Africa.

History shows that any democracy can fall into tyranny if its citizens grow cynical, give up, or look away. The question — the only question that matters now — is whether enough of us will choose to stand up, to act, and to reclaim what generations before us fought and bled to pass along, like the citizens of those countries listed above have done in the recent past.

If they can do it, so can we.

Recently, I mentioned that when I was 13 years old I went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater. Three years later I was living on my own in East Lansing, getting tear gassed and beaten for demonstrating against the Vietnam War and continuing segregation in the South. In other words, I’ve seen — and participated deeply — in both the right and left sides of American politics.

Although his position against the Civil Rights Act was reprehensible, I took Goldwater at his word that it was based on his concern about federal overreach and the 10th Amendment. Having read both his books, I came to deeply respect his principled stands, even though I also deeply disagreed with most of them.

As most historians will confirm, Barry Goldwater believed what he said, and never, so far as I can find, knowingly lied to the American people.

That was my dad’s Republican Party. They’d spin or shade the truth, but rarely told what they knew were lies. And many among them deeply believed in the principles they espoused.

That party is dead.

Today’s Republican politician quite literally lies for a living, as you can see on any of the Sunday political shows or whenever a Republican is interviewed on CNN or Morning Joe. Consider just a handful of the pre- and post-Trump versions of the GOP.

Before Trump, Republicans largely only shaded the truth:

• Ronald Reagan repeatedly claimed his tax cuts “paid for themselves,” a misleading but not entirely fabricated notion since some revenue returned via economic growth, though far less than claimed.
• George W. Bush’s administration asserted “we know” Iraq has WMDs. The statements danced on ambiguous intelligence, carefully presenting suspicions as certainties.
• Their “War on coal” job-loss talking points made blanket claims that Environmental Protection Agency rules would “kill jobs” even though labor data and research consistently showed EPA regulations were a minor layoff driver relative to collapsing demand for coal in the face of a gas fracking boom.
• Reagan’s “welfare queen” rhetoric was based on one egregious fraud case (Linda Taylor) but was then generalized to stigmatize all welfare recipients and wielded as a racialized caricature.
• Republican pitches for the Keystone XL pipeline claimed it would create “42,000 jobs,” but those were just short-term construction and support jobs; the long-run permanent jobs were only in the dozens.
• The Bush administration defined “torture” in legal terms that excluded waterboarding, technically denying “torture” while knowingly permitting harsh practices.
• Paul Ryan’s claims about Obama “raiding Medicare” to fund the Affordable Care Act gracefully omitted that Obamacare’s cuts were to overpayments, not to benefits.
• Sarah Palin’s “death panels” warning about Obamacare referenced end-of-life planning provisions, not anything like “death panels,” but skirted the border of outright fabrication.
• GOP messaging around the Clinton tax hikes of the 1990s predicted economic downturns, assertions based on selective economic forecasting, not contrary evidence.
• Republican officials regularly portrayed the estate tax as a “death tax hitting family farms.” Cases of family farms being lost were extremely rare, but not fabricated entirely.
• President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner described the end of major combat in Iraq, failing to clarify that significant fighting remained; it was misleading but not untrue.
• Claims that the ACA was a “government takeover of health care” overstated federal involvement but weren’t outright invented; private insurance remained intact.

But then Trump came into office and started lying on his very first day as president.

On Jan. 20th and 21st of 2017, he claimed as many as 1.5 million people attended his inauguration, far above all official estimates; lied that it never rained during his speech, though weather reports and visual evidence proved otherwise; accused journalists of deliberately misreporting on crowd size “to sow discord;” suggested a rift with the intelligence community that was not supported by evidence; and, most disgustingly, at CIA HQ lied about disagreements with the intelligence agencies and the number of times he had appeared on magazine covers.

As the Washington Post documented, during his first four years in office Trump told 30,573 verified lies, a record he’ll probably easily beat in his second term. And Republicans in Congress clearly got the memo. Lying was to be the GOP’s political strategy.

Consider their record with these Post-2016 direct, easily disprovable lies:

• Trump and top Republicans lied that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 election even though there’s not a shred of evidence to supports the claim.
• Lies that Democrats want to “open borders” and “abolish ICE” are utterly false but have become standard Republican Party rhetoric.
• Lying that Biden had hired 87,000 “new IRS agents to harass you.” (This lie was often told using the phrase “jackbooted thugs,” compounding the damage to the agency.)
• Trump repeatedly lied that he “created the greatest economy ever,” contradicting all metrics.
• To this day they lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, a story invented out of thin air and repeatedly disproven.
• Repeated lies — now being used to push back against the government shutdown — that Democrats want to “give a trillion dollars to illegal aliens for health care” was invented without referencing a single actual legislative proposal or law.
• Lies of “total exoneration” by Robert Mueller’s probe of Trump’s many connections to Russia are easily contradicted by simply reading the actual contents of the report.
• Stating that windmills cause cancer and kill birds, coal is “clean,” and climate change is a “hoax” are all baseless lies presented as facts during speeches including Trump’s at the United Nations last week.
• Lying that COVID-19 was “totally under control” at the start of 2020, leading to the unnecessary deaths of a half-million Americans, despite internal warnings and contrary facts.
• Lying that they “passed the Veterans Choice” law when it was enacted under Obama.
• Insisting Mexico would pay for the border wall when they knew full well that Mexico never agreed nor would pay a single penny.
• Trump, Republicans, and Fox “News” personalities repeatedly lied that “Dominion voting machines switched votes,” knowing there was no evidence; Fox hosts internally acknowledged the lies and it cost the company hundreds of millions.
• They repeatedly lied that “China pays the tariffs” when anybody paying attention knew import tariffs are always paid by Americans and American companies.

For reasons unknown, our mainstream media is allergic to using the words “lie,” “lies,” and “lied.”

They overlook the fact that telling lies is a classic fascist strategy to so confound the public that it becomes impossible to know what’s real and what’s not, causing people to check out of following politics or challenging them.

They also overlook the fact that the last time Democrats engaged in systematic lying was when LBJ got us into the Vietnam War. That burned the party badly, and they’ve largely kept to the truth ever since.

That’s not to say Democrats are perfect, blameless, or the solution to all our nations problems. But at the moment, they’re what we have. We need to push them hard.

Nonetheless, like the media, Democratic politicians until recently have kept talking about how their “friends on the other side of the aisle” are engaging in “falsehoods,” “deceptions,” or “misinformation.”

On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer broke with that tradition, telling Joe Scarborough that Trump, Vance, Johnson, and other Republican politicians were “telling an e----- lie” when they said Democrats were filibustering the Continuing Resolution to keep the government open because Dems were demanding “trillions for healthcare for illegal aliens.”

Bravo, Chuck. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a trend.

Not only that, Republicans could pass their continuing resolution through the Senate and reopen the government today without a single Democratic vote. All they need to break the Democratic filibuster is 50 votes to change the Senate rules, which they have, and they’ve used that process to break filibusters and install judges (both Supreme Court and lower) and executive branch appointments in the recent past.

They’re pretending to be helpless because they think this shutdown theater will help them and gives them a great excuse to eviscerate our government.

It’s way past time that Democrats, our news media, and the rest of us start telling the truth about the nearly-continuous firehose of modern Republican lies.

Most jobs have a “playbook,” a sort of instruction manual or checklist for how to do the job right, whether it’s running an assembly line, piloting an aircraft, or redoing a house’s plumbing.

Although our media seems oblivious to it, dictators have a playbook, too.

It’s one that’s been carefully followed in recent times by Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, and numerous initially-elected leaders of other smaller nations. In previous generations the Dictator’s Playbook was followed, step-by-step, by Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Ferdinand Marcos, Agustin Pinochet, Josef Stalin, and Hideki Tojo (among others).

And now it’s being followed by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are a bit more than halfway through the list. Trump’s speech on Tuesday before our assembled generals and admirals — telling them they should use our American cities as “training grounds” for the military whose job is to “kill people and break things” — is getting us closer to the final steps.

“We are under invasion from within,” Trump said, “no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don’t wear uniforms. … We’re under invasion from within.”

And who is this enemy that’s so bad, so evil, that Trump just declared war against? He was explicit that the “enemies” are his political opponents and average people who live in our big cities:

“The ones that are run by the radical left Democrats ... what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

What’s most astonishing about the reporting on this meeting is that none of the media I follow have even once mentioned that militarizing the nation’s cities is one of the most significant steps in the Dictator’s Playbook.

Combine that with the demand for absolute loyalty to the Dear Leader — Trump told the generals “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room” — and he’s declared himself the absolute ruler of America wielding the most lethal military in the history of the world against our nation’s own citizens.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow recently laid out five moves that dictators reliably make.

• First, they identify an internal enemy to blame for social ills; Trump has spent years turning immigrants, big cities, and universities into scapegoats. Now, like every dictator listed above has done, he’s claiming that the opposition political party, the Democrats, are an “enemy within.”
• Second, they turn security forces inward, exactly what Trump’s new call for turning our military against our cities represents. The moment a dictator turns military forces built to destroy foreign adversaries against his own people, the rest of the transformation becomes easier.
• Third, they criminalize dissent and protest, insisting that when people show up in the streets it is not constitutionally protected free speech and the right “peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances” but a security “threat” to be crushed rather than heard and responded to.
• Fourth, they intimidate or capture the press and punish truth-telling, as we’re seeing now with rightwing billionaires capturing virtually every major traditional and social media source in America.
• Fifth, they seize control of independent institutions like universities, law firms, or the civil service to eliminate any professional standards that interfere with Dear Leader’s will.

Overlay that list with the work of historians and political scientists like Timothy Snyder, Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jason Stanley, and M. Gessen. Their research on how democracies die all point to the same ingredients:

• Deny or rewrite election results to delegitimize democracy itself.
• Declare political opponents enemies of the state.
• Turn independent institutions like the Department of Justice, the civil service, and the military into personal tools.
• Flood the public square with lies so thoroughly (Steve Bannon proudly called it “flooding the zone with ----") that reality itself becomes negotiable.
• Tolerate or celebrate political violence on behalf of the dictator, and demonize violence against his followers and mouthpieces as sedition and treason.
• Demand personal loyalty instead of constitutional duty.
• Invoke a mythic past and promise national rebirth if only the strongman is given total sovereignty.
• Use his office to rapidly enrich himself and his family while creating a patronage network of loyalists who owe their fortunes to him.

There is also the money. Autocrats rarely forget to convert state power into private wealth. Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and commercial properties brought in millions from foreign governments during his first time in office, as documented by House Oversight Committee findings.

His son-in-law Jared Kushner secured a two-billion-dollar investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund almost immediately after leaving the White House. Ivanka Trump picked up fast-tracked Chinese trademarks while advising her father in government.

Kleptocracy is not a side effect of authoritarianism or fascism: it’s essential, particularly when some of that fortune is shared with those willing to break the law to support Dear Leader. So far, according to reporting, Trump and his family have made at least $5 billion from his 9-month-long presidency. It’s a core feature of the Dictator’s Playbook.

And when people protest the theft of the nation’s resources and the personal enrichment based on handing out favors, dictators go after them in the most brutal ways imaginable. It begins with investigations, but never ends there. Just look at what he’s doing to James Comey and Miles Taylor.

And now Trump has issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum that essentially says Democrats, atheists, Muslims, Jews, socialists, and queer people are terrorists. Not because of anything they’ve done, but because of who they are or what they believe.

It directs the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces coordinated with police forces across the country to investigate anybody who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential terrorism. They include, as Ken Klippenstein reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government, extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

Do any of those sound like you? If Trump and Republicans continue down this road, get ready to have your life turned upside down as they tear apart your social media profiles, search your email and postal mail, surveil you, and one day bang on your door in the middle of the night.

And you don’t have to have actually done a thing. Trump’s order explicitly calls on the FBI and local police coordinating with them to “intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

To go after you before you do anything, based entirely on who you are, who you love, what you believe, and what you say.

That is not the America our Founders, or the men and women who’ve fought and died to keep us free for 249 years, envisioned. And, again, the mainstream media almost entirely missed it while rightwing media ignored it altogether. Even though one day it may be directed against them if they say or do anything to offend Trump or his henchmen.

When Trump told the generals he would remove anyone who does not “agree with everything I say,” he also embraced the logic of tyrants who treat disagreement as insubordination.

Democracies rely on officers sworn to the Constitution, not to one man. Trump is trying to undo that distinction. He’s demanding personal loyalty backed by the threat of firing, demotion, or public shaming. Civilian control of the military that George Washington and James Madison insisted on becomes a hollow phrase when the civilian in charge demands the military serve his whims.

What once sounded like fringe rhetoric is now proclaimed loudly to the uniformed leadership of the United States. The generals who heard him are not hypothetical. They command forces, oversee operations, and embody the principle that the military does not exist to occupy American streets.

The notion that they should roll tanks into urban neighborhoods to harden troops for foreign war is not law enforcement: it’s preparation for ruling America by force, a force that may well be preparing for the November 2026 elections.

This is the kind of moment historians point back to later with disbelief. The warnings have been clear for years, but now the mask is off.

Even though our media insists on ignoring it, the Dictator’s Playbook has always included using a nation’s biggest cities as the stage for demonstrating power. It’s always required replacing officers and officials who follow the laws and traditions of a nation with loyalists who obey without question. It’s always depended on turning people against one another so Dear Leader and his lickspittles can step in as the only source of safety or authority.

Nobody can say this is a surprise: Trump pretty much campaigned on exactly what he’s doing now, and people from former intelligence, military, and FBI leaders to scholars of fascism warned us this was coming if Republicans suppressed enough votes for him to win. (Without the GOP having prevented 4.2 million registered citizen voters from voting or having their votes counted, Kamala Harris would have won and the House and Senate would today be under Democratic control).

The question now is whether Americans will accept a president who treats their hometowns as battle simulations and sees disagreement by generals and agency leaders as an offense punishable by firing, imprisonment, or exile.

As I point out in my new book The Last American President, it’ll depend on whether we’ll stand up and speak out. Or whether, like our media and so many universities, law firms, media outlets, and giant corporations, we’ll cower in fear and submit to Trump’s demands.

That is not law and order, and it’s not democracy in a free republic. It’s the language of autocracy that yesterday was spoken out loud in front of the armed forces of the United States and is echoed every time Trump attacks a reporter, media outlet, or one of his many “enemies.”

Will American democracy survive this onslaught, straight out of the Dictator’s Playbook? To a large extent, that will depend on you, me, and our elected officials summoning the courage to resist and protest loudly. And our media to call it out for what it is.

The clock is ticking, and these guys are racing for the finish line.

Trump’s assault on our elections system and the GOP’s successful 2024 effort to deny at least (according to official US government statistics) 4.2 million Americans their right to vote (which gave Trump the election and Republicans the House and Senate) was based on his 2020 Big Lie that our elections were corrupted by “millions” of “illegals” voting, along with “massive” voter fraud.

They’re continuing that Big Lie (which the GOP first embraced in the 1960s with Operation Eagle Eye that intimidated mostly Hispanic and Native American voters) going forward, with some observers expecting as many as 10 million Americans being denied their vote in 2028.

But corrupting and stealing elections was just their first effort, the one that brought them to power. Now, with that power, they’re doing their best to gut the basic guardrails of our 250-year-old constitutional system with brand-new Big Lies.

The newest Big Lie for 2025 is that America is racked by “radical left violence” leading to the disintegration of law and order in our cities and the spread of terror among politicians and anybody else who dares speak out about the issues of our day.

They’re using this to censor speech, ban comedians and commentators, prosecute people (including lifelong Republicans like Comey, Krebs, and Taylor) who’ve spoken out against Trump, violently attack protestors, and to justify the monopolization of our media by rightwing billionaires.

Most recently, when a Trump-supporting (Trump sign in his yard, Trump “Make Liberals Cry Again” T-shirt) straight, white, self-proclaimed Christian who thought Mormons were the anti-Christ murdered worshipers in a Latter Day Saints church in Michigan, Trump’s first response was to claim it was “anti-Christian violence.”

Instead, it appears this former Marine war vet with PTSD thought he was defending Christianity. But instead of asking if he was “radicalized” by preachers like Trump’s guy “Pastor” Robert Jeffress (who goes on and on about how the LDS Church is a “false religion”) or the algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, or X, rightwing media is today filled with rants about “attacks on Christianity,” blaming “the left” even for this attack.

It echo’s the GOP’s efforts to portray the two people who tried to assassinate Trump, Charlie Kirk’s killer, the ICE shooter last week, and other political violence as originating from the “radical left.”

Which is really and truly another Big Lie.

First, there’s basically no “radical left” in America anymore. The anti-capitalist pro-violence subset of SDS that I knew back in the 1960s when I was part of MSU’s SDS are long gone and well discredited (and a few imprisoned).

Second, the “far left” folks who are still around aren’t violent, by and large. Lefties are more interested in protecting Social Security, getting a national healthcare system into place, raising taxes on the morbidly rich, and getting guns off the streets instead of pointing them at people. The last high-profile “leftie” shooter was the mentally ill guy who shot Republican Congressman Steve Scalise back in 2017.

Even the FBI and the Department of Justice themselves had acknowledged the fact that the vast majority of politically-inspired violence in America was coming from the right, at least until puppy-killer Kristi Noem or one of her lickspittles (or her boyfriend) ordered the reports removed from the government websites.

The independent and nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies analyzed 893 terrorist plots that took place between 1994 and 2020. Their report concluded:

“Rightwing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994.”

But don’t expect to hear that from anybody in the administration or on Fox “News” or other rightwing media outlets. Instead, they’re using “far left violence” as their excuse to dismantle our rights, impose soldiers on cities run by Democrats, and pour your tax dollars into extreme policing and militarization of our society.

This isn’t the first time the GOP has used the Big Lie technique to sway public opinion in a way that demonizes Democrats. On September 23, 1944 President Roosevelt addressed the Teamsters and said:

“The opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.“Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book — and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.
“According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible, if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”

He then did what Democrats — and what honest news media we have left — need to be doing today: he called out their lies and exposed their technique:

“Well, let us take some simple illustrations that come to mind. For example, although I rubbed my eyes when I read it, we have been told that it was not a Republican depression, but a Democratic depression from which this Nation was saved in 1933.“That this Administration — this one today — is responsible for all the suffering and misery that the history books and the American people have always thought had been brought about during the twelve ill-fated years when the Republican party was in power.”

He followed that with a list of four other Republican lies, including their assertion that he’d tried to get America into WWII, that he was secretly planning to prevent GIs from leaving the service when the war was over, and even a lie about his dog (Fala, after which his speech was named in the press). He summed it up:

“Well, I think we all recognize the old technique. The people of this country know the past too well to be deceived into forgetting. Too much is at stake to forget.”

They’re still doing it. Which raises the question: What will be Trump’s and the GOP’s next Big Lie?

They’ve already tried convincing Americans that:

• Immigrants are a major source of crime (when crime rates regarding immigrants are about half that of natural born Americans),
• Democrats are the party of rapists and pedophiles (ahem…Trump’s “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein, E Jean Carroll),
• Democrats want to defund the police (when they’re fighting for more cops in virtually every city in America),
• Are in favor of abortion “after birth,”
• That Biden wanted to ban gas stoves and gasoline cars,
• Biden wanted to “ban meat,”
• Democrats plan on huge tax increases on the middle class,
• “Antifa” (“Anti-Fascist”) is a domestic terrorist organization,
• Democrats are “deranged pieces of ----,”
• And liberals want to “force taxpayers to fund transgender surgeries for minors’ nationwide” and, yesterday, Trump said Democrats want to “reopen the wall.“

This after promoting the Big Lie that got three police officers killed and 140 hospitalized on January 6 about the 2020 election was “stolen” and their Big Lie about immigrants voting that resulted in over 4 million citizens being denied their right to vote last year.

Republican Big Lies have caused enormous damage, from FDR’s era through Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts to George W. Bush lying us into two illegal and unnecessary wars to today.

It’s way past time that Democrats and the media start calling these Big Lies exactly what they are, and pointing out that the strategy originated in the modern era with Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler.

Enough is enough.

The world has often seen great wars ignited not by inevitability, but by weakness, hesitation, and betrayal. Cowards playing with matches.

History shows that one of the biggest risk factors for war is an autocratic leader who fears for his own future. Which is why the kind of pathetic incoherence we saw at the United Nations this week should concern us all.

This week’s news brings some alarming data points:

• After four different Danish airports were buzzed by what many assume to be Russian drones (Danes are uncertain), a French airport was hit yesterday and a Norwegian airport was shut down by drones earlier in the week.
• The US Navy fired Trident II D5 ballistic missiles from the coast of Florida, lighting up the sky as they were testing devices that could carry thermonuclear bombs deep into Russia.
• A massive US Navy presence in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela was just this week joined by F35s and Reaper drones as Trump has blown three Venezuela boats out of the water without congressional authorization.
• In an absolutely unprecedented move, Pete “Kegger” Hegseth has ordered all the US military’s flag officers and their staffs to come to Virginia for a meeting with an unknown agenda. This is not normal military procedure; it has the stench of authoritarian consolidation, the kind of maneuver history has shown us precedes purges, coups, and crackdowns.
• Russia is experiencing a nationwide fuel shortage (also in Russian-occupied Crimea) as the result of Ukrainian drones taking out refineries and depots across the nation. It’s so bad, the Kremlin has banned fuel exports until the end of the year. The nation’s economy is teetering and Putin is apparently in political trouble.
• Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister Wu Chihchung warns, “China is preparing to invade Taiwan.”
• Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, just said, “NATO and the European Union want to declare, in fact, have already declared a real war on my country and are directly participating in it.”
• NATO notified Russia that they may shoot down planes that invade NATO airspace, and Russia replied that “would be war.”

As Russian jets cross NATO skies and intelligence warns of an impending strike, while Trump — desperate for a diversion from the Epstein/Trump sex scandal and a collapsing economy —appears to be trying to provoke a war with Venezuela, the question grows louder: are we watching the sparks of a new global conflict?

And is the dangerous bond between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump the match that could light the fuse of World War III?

Remember back in July when Trump told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (during a visit to the Oval Office) that if Europe would pay for the anti-missile defense systems Ukraine desperately needs he’d see to it that they were shipped over there promptly?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted:

“I’m grateful to our team and to the United States, Germany, and Norway for preparing a new decision on Patriots for Ukraine.”

Rutte coordinated with Germany and Norway (and later other NATO countries) to raise the billions necessary to pay for the systems to replenish stocks held by European nations, particularly France, Germany, and Denmark, that those countries are supplying to Ukraine.

The replacements should have arrived in Europe by now, a continent that’s increasingly on edge as Putin keeps flying MiGs over former Soviet client states in the Baltics.

As they supply Ukraine — which is suffering under unprecedented attacks with hundreds of missiles and drones every night — Europe’s own stockpiles that could be used to deter Russian aggression are vanishing.

Between that Oval Office meeting and now, however, Trump had his infamous red-carpet meeting with Putin in Alaska and apparently got different orders from his self-described friend and probable mentor.

As Vivian Salama reports for The Atlantic, there’s been a sudden change in the Trump administration’s position with regard to providing NATO or EU countries with defensive weaponry to replace what they’ve given to Ukraine:

“Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby said that he didn’t believe in the value of certain foreign military sales, according to two administration officials with knowledge of the discussion.”

Adding to European concerns, news broke last week that a Russian Major General who defected claims Putin is planning a full-on invasion of both Ukraine and parts of the Baltic states — all NATO members — “before Christmas.”

The British newspaper the Daily Express reported, in an article headlined “Russia's 'greyzone' invasion plan to start WW3 before Christmas revealed by defector”:

“Moscow is preparing a ‘greyzone’ attack on Poland before Christmas, a senior Russian military official has revealed.“The warning, sent through an Eastern European ally during London’s DSEI arms fair last week, has triggered urgent discussions in the UK and US about the risk of a deniable strike aimed at fracturing NATO.”

Poland, Romania, and Estonia have all seen Russian MiGs violate their airspace in the past two weeks, scrambling NATO jets as Poland and Estonia have invoked NATO’s Article 4 process to stand up to potential aggression.

It appears to me (just my opinion) that when Putin met with Trump in Alaska either he ordered Trump to back away from Ukraine and NATO, or simply took the measure of the man and concluded he could launch an invasion of the Baltics with a low probability that the United States under the convicted felon would respond militarily. Trump’s recent blocking of Patriot systems to Europe suggests the former rather than the latter.

Europe is taking this threat seriously. Great Britain this past week dispatched Royal Air Force jets to Poland with backup from Voyager tankers; they join German, French, Swedish, and Danish jets that began patrolling the eastern flank of the Baltic nations after the first Polish incursions.

Donald Tusk, Poland’s Prime Minister, warned that his nation — and, implicitly, the region — is now closer to military conflict “than at any time since the Second World War.” The UK’s OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) Ambassador, Neil Holland, was explicit that these were not accidental incursions into NATO airspace:

“Either Russia has deployed systems it cannot control, or it is provoking us deliberately.”

According to the Express reporting, British intelligence isn’t expecting a full-on invasion of Eastern Europe but, instead — at least initially — the same sort of “deniable” pinpoint attacks Putin has used to precede his later, larger assaults on other nations including Georgia and Ukraine. One UK intelligence official said:

“There’s no suggestion of a full-scale invasion. But a calibrated strike – something deniable, something confusing – is exactly how Russia has operated in the past.”

He added:

“They’re probing NATO. If they can strike Poland and NATO flinches — even slightly — it undermines the whole alliance.”

At the same time, Russia has reportedly launched a full-scale “coordinated information warfare” assault on Finland via the internet and social media. Finland shares a 833-mile border with Russia, which, as the USSR, has invaded that nation twice in modern times, once in 1939 and again in 1941.

Marco Giannangeli, Defence and Diplomatic Editor for Express, pointed out:

“Western officials fear the disinformation campaign is intended to soften the ground for further provocations along the Gulf of Finland.”

Putin’s apparently taking Trump’s TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) label to heart. Tragically, the entire world may soon see the consequence of a blustering, incompetent, race/deportation-obsessed, apparently terrified-of-Putin president who’s surrounded himself with people whose singular quality is not competence but loyalty and a willingness to break tradition and the law on the boss’ behalf.

History will not forgive miscalculation at this scale. With Europe bracing for attack, NATO stockpiles running dry, Trump near provoking war with Venezuela, and Putin — in deep trouble at home — probing for weakness, the world stands at a perilous crossroads.

The only question now is whether this moment will be remembered as the turning point that stopped another world war, or the disaster when Trump and Putin together opened the gates to it.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, wearing a gold pin of Donald Trump’s head that eerily resembles an old Chairman Mao pin I bought in Beijing in 1988, went after Jimmy Kimmel again just hours before he was back on the air on Tuesday night. Carr also mentioned station licenses again, in what seems like a thinly-veiled threat, when he tweeted:

“Democrats just keep digging themselves a deeper & deeper hole on Kimmel. They simply can’t stand that local TV stations — for the first time in years — stood up to a national programmer & chose to exercise their lawful right to preempt programming. We need to keep empowering local TV stations to serve their communities of license.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s revenge prosecutor is reportedly demanding information on the FBI agent who was first to see the Sandy Hook carnage and testified against Alex Jones.

As I lay out in my new book, The Last American President, this is how terror and intimidation work. This is how free speech and the rule of law die. It’s how kings rule, not elected presidents of democratic republics.

And this is how power enforces obedience: by making an example out of person after person, news outlet after news outlet, comedian after comedian, until the rest of us are too afraid to speak.

That’s the bigger story here. What Trump is doing isn’t politics. It’s the deliberate centralization of power, seizing it from the people and the media, silencing dissent, bending institutions to his will, and cloaking himself in immunity given him by six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

It looks less like a presidency and more like a throne.

• He declared a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., despite crime being at a 30-year low.
• He created permanent “quick reaction” National Guard units, ready to deploy into cities at his whim: a standing domestic army the Founders explicitly warned against.
• He rolled the model into Memphis, calling it a “replica” of D.C., and bragged Chicago is next. Occupation, not governance.

Retribution is the centerpiece of his rule.

• Security clearances stripped from John Bolton, Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, and dozens of others who dared to oppose him.
• Justice Department staff and prosecutors purged for doing their jobs.
• A $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times designed to bankrupt it for printing facts.
• After Charlie Kirk’s death, networks pressured to fire Kimmel and silence Stephen Colbert. Everyday people hunted down online and forced out of jobs, from a Nasdaq employee to a 23-year-old Idaho worker. Fear is the point.

The state itself is being weaponized.

• The FCC warned ABC affiliates they could face investigations, fines, or even license loss after Kimmel’s jokes about MAGA. Within days, Jimmy Kimmel Live was yanked from the air. If ABC can be threatened — and Trump repeated that threat when Kimmel came back — what message does that send to every other network? Stay quiet or be crushed.
• Sanctuary cities are being starved of funds. Immigrants and entire communities are criminalized under Executive Order 14159.
• The administration promises a crackdown on “left-wing groups,” presumably meaning activists, unions, professors, nonprofits, anyone who resists.

And the ambitions don’t stop at America’s borders. Trump has mused openly about reshaping the map of the Western Hemisphere.

• He’s revived his obsession with Greenland, backing a House bill to purchase or “otherwise acquire” it, renaming it “Red, White, and Blueland.” He’s refused to rule out military force if Denmark resists.
• He’s declared the U.S. should reclaim the Panama Canal, calling Panama’s fees “exorbitant” and floating the idea of seizing control in the name of national security.
• He’s even suggested Canada could become the 51st state, and slapped massive tariffs on Canadian goods to show he’s serious.
• Mexico, too, is in his crosshairs: trade wars, tariffs, and rhetoric that treat America’s southern neighbor not as a sovereign nation but as territory to be coerced.
• And now, in the Caribbean, Trump’s America has gone further: U.S. naval forces have literally blown up three Venezuelan boats. People have died. Maduro calls it aggression, militias are mobilizing, and the two nations are sliding toward war. This is what happens when unchecked power turns outward: war abroad becomes the mirror of repression at home.

Abroad, he crowns this vision by embracing Vladimir Putin.

• A red carpet rolled out for Putin in Alaska, gifting him legitimacy amid his war on Ukraine and his penetration of NATO airspace in Poland, Romania, and Estonia.
• Russian state media celebrates Trump’s dismantling of USAID and his praise for Putin.
• Meanwhile, long-time allies are trashed and abandoned. America’s power abroad is being traded away for the company of strongmen.

Support for Ukraine and NATO is now treated as transactional, not principled. Aid is approved one week, paused the next. The administration signals that restoring Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is “unrealistic,” effectively rewarding Russian aggression.

NATO allies are pressured to “pay up” or risk abandonment, as if the alliance is a mob protection racket rather than a shared democratic defense. If America no longer defends democracy abroad, what confidence should we have that it will defend democracy at home?

The same coercive logic drives Trump’s use of tariffs.

• He wields tariffs not as economic policy but as punishment, slapping Canada, Mexico, and Europe with sweeping trade taxes to force compliance.
• Tariffs have become his political weapon: extortion dressed up as trade, a way to bend allies, neighbors, and even domestic industries to his will and intimidate them into giving him gifts like a multimillion dollar airplane or investing billions in his companies.
• Just as troops in D.C. or the FCC threaten to silence dissent, tariffs silence resistance by making the cost of saying “no” unbearable.

And in Palestine, the U.S. has abandoned even the principle of self-determination.

• Humanitarian aid is cut. Palestinian voices are dismissed. U.S. policy aligns squarely with occupation and repression.
• This isn’t about building democracy; it’s about denying an entire people the right to decide their own future.
• And when self-determination abroad is treated as expendable, it sends a clear warning at home: your rights, too, can be conditional, your voice too can be silenced when it no longer serves those in power.

The pattern is unmistakable: everything that disperses power — free media, independent science, civic education, state and local authority, progressive nonprofits, judicial independence — is under siege.

• Scientists and public health experts are being fired, programs gutted, data suppressed.
• Justice Sonia Sotomayor implicitly warns that Americans may no longer know the difference between a president and a king.
• Courts face pressure, judges face threats, and rulings are bent to expand presidential immunity.
• Election laws are being re-engineered to federalize control, cut access, and tilt outcomes.

This isn’t scattershot; it’s systemic. And here’s the truth history tells us: once power is seized, it is rarely given back.

If Trump normalizes troops in cities, that precedent will endure. If he silences networks with FCC threats, that precedent will endure. If lawsuits against journalists succeed, that precedent will endure. Each act rewires the presidency into a throne for a would-be king.

And yet some Democrats act as if this is business as usual while the ground is ripped out from beneath us. Their weakness is complicity.

But democracy is not passive. It has always been the people who’ve seizing power back from kings, dictators, and colonizers. The Founders understood this when they wrote the Constitution to divide power across three branches of government. They fought to prevent a new form of monarchy. And now it’s our fight again.

What we must do is clear:

• Demand Congress block the abuse of emergency powers; contact your elect representatives every week.
• Push courts to stop executive overreach before precedents harden.
• Support independent journalism under attack.
• Push back hard against censorship of the media and corporations that bow their knee to Trump.
• Stand with those being punished: scientists, teachers, comedians, reporters, immigrants, protesters.
• Mobilize peacefully but relentlessly in the streets; No Kings Day is in a few weeks.
• Elect governors, legislators, and mayors who’ll serve as firewalls against federal occupation.

This is about power: who has it, who loses it, and whether it still belongs to the people.

If we do nothing, our children will ask what democracy was like, because they won’t have it. If we fight, we can still preserve the greatest system humanity has ever devised: a republic of laws, not autocrats.

Trump wants to be king. He’s already acting like one. The only question is whether we’ll kneel or rise, together, and take our democracy back.

f Donald Trump's lips move, he’s lying. Or trying to solicit a bribe. Or slandering Democrats. Or, now, taking hostages.

Most recently, he’s started lying about what congressional Democrats are demanding in exchange for giving the GOP the votes they need in the Senate to keep the government open past Oct. 1.

And now, Trump has announced that he's taking hostages. Federal employees will be fired, rather than temporarily furloughed, if there is a government shutdown.

But I’ll get to that in a moment. It isn’t where he started lying, bribe-getting, and slandering Democrats this week.

That was when the entire world watched, aghast, as Trump fulfilled his commitment to the fossil fuel industry and repeatedly lied before the assembled United Nations about fossil fuels, renewable energy, and climate change.

Back in April of last year, he’d addressed a private group of fossil fuel executives and billionaires, and said that he was offering them a “deal”: if they’d give his campaign massive contributions, he’d do pretty much whatever they wanted. The Hill has documented almost $140 million in bribes/contributions that followed the speech, and there’s likely far, far more in dark money contributions that we’ll never know about.

Thus, an embarrassed America had to watch as the entire world was treated to the president of the United States lying repeatedly in exchange for over a hundred million dollars. After all, his lips were moving.

The Emiratis placed a bet recently when they put $2 billion into a little crypto company that the Trump family and Steve Witkoff's family had started. Apparently in exchange, Trump authorized the transfer to the UAE of about a half-million top-tech chips, that had been blocked by national security concerns.

Generally, that’s called a “bribe,” although without the FBI doing an investigation we won’t know for sure. At the very least, it’s a conflict of interest. Ryan Cummings of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy, said:

“If this is true, this is the largest public corruption scandal in the history of the United States and it’s not even close.”

As our Constitution says:

“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” (emphasis added)

And now, on the verge of a government shutdown, Trump has rolled out one of the most audacious lies of the past … er … week. On his Nazi-infested failing social media site, he wrote:

“After reviewing the details of the unserious and ridiculous demands being made by the Minority Radical Left Democrats in return for their Votes to keep our thriving Country open, I have decided that no meeting with their Congressional Leaders could possibly be productive.“They are threatening to shut down the Government of the United States unless they can have over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens (A monumental cost!), force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors, have dead people on the Medicaid roles, allow Illegal Alien Criminals to steal Billions of Dollars in American Taxpayer Benefits, try to force our Country to again open our Borders to Criminals and to the World, allow men to play in women’s sports, and essentially create Transgender operations for everybody.”

Let’s examine that:

— “over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending” is extraordinarily misleading. Even Republicans claim that would be the cost over 10 years to continue the Affordable Care Act subsidies, so people’s insurance costs don’t explode at the start of next year. And don’t forget that Republicans cut that trillion dollars in ACA and Medicaid spending so they could give a $3.5 trillion in tax breaks to Trump and his billionaire friends.

— “to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens” is up to the states, not the feds, as they control how their Medicaid dollars are disbursed. Most Blue states make their programs available to all legal immigrants, and some extend that to undocumented people, particularly pregnant women (and most Red states don’t). The reason is simple: we all share the same space. You don’t want the undocumented person standing behind you in line at the grocery store to have an active case of TB, for example; keeping everybody healthy is only common sense.

— “force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors” is complete horses––t. The Democratic leaders’ public position in the shutdown talks is an “ironclad” extension of ACA premium tax credits and reversing recent Medicaid cuts, full stop.

— “have dead people on the Medicaid roles [sic]” is another lie. Democrats’ Continuing Resolution (CR) demand is entirely and 100% about health coverage affordability and undoing cuts, not “funding dead people.”

— “allow Illegal Alien Criminals to steal Billions of Dollars in American Taxpayer Benefits” is even beyond a lie, it’s a slander against both immigrants and Democrats. There is nothing even remotely close to letting anybody “steal” anything in their CR demand.

— “try to force our Country to again open our Borders to Criminals and to the World,” is another libel against Democrats and the Biden administration. No president of either party since the 1920s has tried to “open our borders” to anybody, particularly criminals. And, again, the only firm Democratic demand is to extend the ACA/Obamacare subsidies and undo the cuts to Medicaid.

— “allow men to play in women’s sports” is both another lie and an attempt to inflame his queer-hating base. There’s no mention of this anywhere in anything any Democrat has said with regard to the CR and it’s not in their formal proposal. And the official Democratic Party position is that officials with responsibility for every sport should be able to decide if they want to allow trans athletes to compete or not (would anybody care if the sport was a Chess tournament?). Ironically, that’s the “small government” position.

— “essentially create Transgender operations for everybody” is so absurd as to be laughable, if it wasn’t that so many Republicans actually believe things Trump and his lickspittles in the rightwing media sewer put out.

On top of all that, the Trump administration announced today that if Democrats won’t vote to help keep the government open, they will begin mass layoffs of federal employees. This is pure hostage-taking, and radically raises the stakes for the Democrats in the Senate.

At the moment, the only solid demands Democrats are making in exchange for their vote to keep the government open are to extend the Obamacare subsidies and eliminate the Medicaid cuts that will phase in during January, 2027 just after the 2026 midterm elections.

They should, in my opinion, add the release of the Epstein files and the unmasking of ICE to that list.

America deserves to know if, in addition to having had a jury already determine that this convicted felon committed sexual abuse, our president was also involved in the abuse of young girls.

And polling shows that Americans are increasingly uncomfortable with unaccountable, masked secret police patrolling our streets and violently attacking citizens and protesters.

Whatever they do, though, I agree with the comment former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh, now a Democrat, said on my SiriusXM radio program yesterday:

Every Democrat in the Senate should spend the next month in the reddest parts of their states doing town halls where Republicans refuse to, leaving the administration to twist in the wind of the bad publicity as the government shuts down and they begin firing federal workers.

Or conducting mock hearings about the UAE chips-bribery and the Epstein files.

What Trump’s doing with his mass firing threat is nothing short of economic terrorism against the American people.

For decades, government shutdowns meant temporary furloughs that were painful but reversible. Now, Trump and his cronies are using the threat of mass, permanent firings to gut the very institutions that protect our food, our air, our water, our workers, and our democracy itself.

This isn’t about budgets; it’s about power. It’s about dismantling the federal government so only Trump’s priorities — ICE, border patrol, and his authoritarian machinery — are left standing.

It’s a smash-and-grab of our constitutional order, a direct assault on Congress’s power of the purse, and an act of extortion against the American people: “Give us what we want, or we’ll torch the house.”

And here’s the bottom line: Democrats must never give in to hostage takers, because if you pay the ransom once, the next demand will be even bigger, the next threat even worse. Authoritarians don’t just bend the rules, they burn them down, and the only way to stop them is to refuse to play their game.

Courage!

We’ve seen this movie before. Or at least our grandparents did. Dictators can’t take a joke.

On Feb. 4, 1939 — seven months before their invasion of Poland kicked off World War II — the man with oversight responsibility for German media officially forbade five comedians from ever again performing in public. As the headline in the New York Times explained:

“Goebbels Ends Careers of Five 'Aryan' Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime”

Their crime, according to Josef Goebbels, was publicly telling “brazen, impertinent, arrogant and tactless” jokes about the Führer.

Their humor, Goebbels told the press, only appealed to the “society rabble that followed them with thundering applause — parasitic scum, inhabiting our luxury streets, that seems to have only the task of proving with how little brains people can get along and even acquire money and prominence.”

The Times wrote that Goebbels and Adolf Hitler were particularly incensed that the actors caricatured and ridiculed Hitler’s followers and the loyal toadies in his administration:

“What amused the public most, however, and presumably roiled the National Socialist authorities most — although Dr. Goebbels does not mention it — is that they deftly, but unmistakably, caricatured some gestures, poses and physical characteristics of National Socialist leaders — sometimes with bon mots that made the rounds of the country.”

The Nazi leaders were furious, arguing that they themselves had, the Times noted, “a keen sense of humor that could kill opponents with ridicule.”

Instead of ordering the offending comedians executed, the Times added, they were simply rendered incapable of earning a living in their chosen profession.

“But as National Socialism proposes to remain in power 2,000 years it has neither the time nor the patience to apply that method to the ‘miserable literati.’”

FCC (“Federal Censorship Commission”?) Chairman Brendan Carr seems to be following in Goebbels' footsteps, having implicitly threatened Disney/ABC and two groups of TV station affiliates with regulatory intervention to block multi-billion-dollar mergers if they didn’t take Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

CBS’s rolling over when Trump was offended by Stephen Colbert appears to have emboldened the administration to go after other comedians.

Donald Trump himself, meanwhile, was blunt about how “illegal” it is for people on television to criticize him. And he wasn’t just talking about comedians, specifically calling out “newscasts” that will presumably be Carr’s next target:

“I’m a very strong person for free speech. But 97, 94, 95, 96 percent of the people are against me in the sense of the newscasts are against me. The stories are — they said 97 percent bad. So, they gave me 97, they’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal, personally.”

Meanwhile, Trump has sent soldiers into the streets of three American cities, purged federal museums of information about slavery and discrimination against minorities and women, and posted what may have been meant to be a private DM demanding that Attorney General Pam Bondi begin prosecuting his political enemies.

Along those same authoritarian lines, three major federal buildings in Washington, D.C. now sport massive new banners with Trump’s face glowering down on people walking or driving by. Paid for with your tax dollars, the banners violate federal law according to a report released by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

Georgia Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson was blunt in his critique:

“When I saw the banners hanging from federal office buildings last week, it reminded me of [the] Communist Party in China and banners hanging from federal offices — just totally inappropriate and a step towards authoritarianism. It’s another indication of the march that we’re on towards authoritarianism in this country.”

Will anybody on network television be willing this week to tell “brazen, impertinent, arrogant and tactless" jokes about the Saddam Hussein-like banners?

Stay tuned.

This is a threshold moment, this stifling of Jimmy Kimmel. It’s the last laugh before the silence.

The attack on him is something everyone can understand.

People didn’t know what it meant that Donald Trump was getting billions for his bitcoin company or a jet airplane in exchange for essentially giving favors to other countries. They didn’t understand how inappropriate, illegal, and unconstitutional that is unless they understand the word “emoluments,” and few do; they didn’t get it.

His hustling Teslas from the White House in violation of the Hatch Act (that would put a normal person in jail for two years) didn’t seem a big deal to most Americans because they’d never seen it before.

They had no idea how bad it was. Only former presidents and people who’d read the Constitution and the law knew.

And that’s a very small percentage of people. Meaningless.

So along comes Jimmy Kimmel, who everybody knows. He’s even more popular than Stephen Colbert, or at least at that level. Everybody knows who he is. And Trump takes aim at him for things he said — his First Amendment-protected free speech — and is explicit and public about it.

Then comes his toady FCC Chairman Brendan Carr — the guy who wrote the part of Project 2025 about how the FCC should be run — threatening to go after the licenses of stations that are trying to merge with Nexstar for what may well be a billion-dollar payout for everybody involved.

They’re referencing a comment Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk‘s killer as an excuse for censoring him, but that doesn’t make any sense. It’s apparently really because Trump is offended by comedians making fun of him. You can’t make fun of the Dear Leader in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, or any other country where the men Trump admires rule.

And Kimmel was relentless in making fun of Trump.

Here’s what Carr — a government regulator — said, doing his best imitation of a mafia bone-breaker:

“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. … These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

The station owners freaked out, because some may get even richer through the merger with TV giant billionaire-owned Nexstar (ABC), and threatened to take Kimmel off their stations. The merger would’ve been profitable for the people at Nexstar (ABC), as well.

And that merger requires Carr’s approval because it requires breaking or changing the anti-monopoly rules that forbid any company to own stations that reach more than 39% of Americans.

So, here’s how it looks to the average person: Trump and Carr threatened the Nexstar (ABC) deal if they didn’t shut up Kimmel, and the company (ABC) said, “OK,” and took him off the air “indefinitely.”

And everybody gets it. It’s not anywhere near as complicated as shady cryptocurrency deals or golf courses or Trump Towers in foreign lands.

This is a classic example of how mob-like corruption works; we’ve all seen it in movies like The Godfather or shows like The Sopranos. We don’t need law or business degrees. We have TVs.

The average person totally gets where Trump’s leverage is and why he’s using it to shut up people who irritate him; this is relatable to the life of anybody who’s ever been bullied or shaken down.

“Nice little TV network you’ve got there, we’d hate to see something happen to it.”

They get how bad the crime is. And it’s all happening to a guy — Jimmy Kimmel — who everybody knows and most people like!

Remember when Mark Twain said, “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel”? This is the same thing: “Never pick a fight with a popular figure who can created a press conference with a quip.” It’s why Vladimir Putin outlawed comedians (and puppets) who ridiculed him.

The reason we’re only now realizing that we’re at a pivotal moment in America is because most people didn’t know how to answer this question:

“How do you know when you’re really and truly no longer living in a democracy?”

How do you know when you’re definitely no longer living in a free nation?

Most people think it’s when the tanks are rolling down the streets, and, while people in Washington DC are seeing that right now, it’s not most people‘s lived experience. They haven’t confronted a tank, been asked for their papers, or been locked up in an ICE detention center.

But everybody knows Jimmy Kimmel. So the new understanding is:

“You know you don’t live in a free country any more when comedians can no longer criticize the president.”

That’s a criteria for the end of freedom that everybody understands.

Up until the last few days, most Americans didn’t think we’d lost our freedoms or are about to. Didn’t think that we’d become a tyranny or are on the verge, where the King will come against you no matter who you are, no matter what political party you vote for (just ask registered Republicans like James Comey, Mark Milley, or Tim Miller), or how obscure you may be (just ask the Columbia students).

Don’t get me wrong: many Americans, perhaps a majority, thought things were bad. They hated inflation and the joblessness going up and all that stuff from the tariffs and Trump’s erratic foreign policy and his constant sucking up to or deferring to Putin.

They didn’t like all their hard-earned tax dollars going into the pockets of the morbidly rich like Trump and his friends and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet. People in America generally realize that pretty much everything Trump has done is either for himself, the billionaire class, or to punish people of color and queer people. They’re generally unhappy about it and pretty much every metric of every study shows it.

But they didn’t realize that we had lost what makes this country great: our personal freedom of speech. Our ability to speak our minds. Our freedom to have multiple viewpoints, and multiple voices and news sources to listen to or watch.

But when this happened to Jimmy Kimmel, everybody suddenly understood. That’s why this is an earthquake moment for the United States.

If the Democrats fail to seize on this opportunity, they are completely incompetent. This has to be the number one issue going forward. Every American understands what it means to be told to, “Shut up!“

And no Americans like it. We didn’t like it as kids; we don’t like it as adults.

In fact, Trump‘s suppression of free speech is already starting, in a small way, to “hit the regular people.” Folks are getting fired, doxed, and even having their lives and homes threatened with violence for things they said online about Charlie Kirk and his shooter. We’re starting to bleed into that “civil war” bottom of the pyramid that I wrote about yesterday.

So, the moment is urgent.

Let your elected representatives know your thoughts on this. That Brendan Carr must go. That the president must stop talking like this. That Pam Bondi must stop talking like this. That they should take the masks off the monsters in the streets so they’re once again human.

To stop making America unfree.

It’s time to stand up and speak out. Because if we don’t now, like Jimmy Kimmel, we may not be able to speak out at all in the near future.

If you’re even remotely associated with the Democratic Party, whether running for office, helping out, or just breathing while Democratic, the GOP and their rightwing media attack dogs will label you a “far left radical.”

So, in the interest of clarity, let me make it official: I’m a far left radical.

Here’s why. I believe:

— Every worker should have the right to democracy in their workplace (a union), and that nobody who works full-time should have to live in poverty because the minimum wage hasn’t gone up in a stupid amount of time. I’m a far left radical.

— Retired people shouldn’t have to pay income taxes on their Social Security (the way it was before Reagan), that morbidly rich people should pay into the system like the rest of us, that Social Security should pay enough to live modestly on, and that Medicare should cover all our expenses with minimum hassle. I’m a far left radical.

— Every American citizen should be able to vote without a hassle, and taking away your vote should require a judge’s action to prove why, just like if a state wants to take away your gun. I’m a far left radical.

— Speaking of guns, it’s obscene that the leading cause of death for our children is bullets, and we shouldn’t have to regularly terrorize our children with active shooter drills. We need rational gun control laws, like almost every other country in the world has. I’m a far left radical.

— It’s crazy that three men own more wealth than the bottom half of America and pay less of their income in taxes than your average teenager. If we want the general prosperity of the 1950s, we should have the same tax rate that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower so loved: 90 percent on the morbidly rich after they’ve made their first few million dollars a year. I’m a far left radical.

— Our children and grandchildren deserve a world where they needn’t fear being killed by climate-change-driven wild weather, drought, or wildfires, and the air and water are clean. And it’s nuts that we’re subsidizing the fossil fuel industry that’s preventing this. I’m a far left radical.

— Every other country in the world helps their young people go to college; in most it’s as cheap as it was here in the 1960s when you could put yourself through school with a weekend job. Some countries even pay people to go to college, like the $100/month stipend my dad had with the GI Bill after WWII that built our scientific and business prowess. And it’s wrong to cripple entire generations with trillions in student debt. I’m a far left radical.

— Across the 34 richest (OECD) countries in the world, over a half-million families are wiped out every year because somebody got sick. All of those families are here in America. Health care should be a right — like in every other developed country in the world — instead of a privilege that depends on how much money you have. I’m a far left radical.

— Starting a small family business, once the backbone of every American town and city, should once again be possible; we need to break up the massive monopolies that have come to dominate every single industry. See: Republican Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Like them, I’m a far left radical.

— Every person in America should be free to practice their own religion — or no religion — and raise their kids that way without government interference, government promotion, or their tax dollars subsidizing local megachurches’ religious schools. Like the Constitution says. I’m a far left radical.

— People should be judged, hired, and promoted based on the quality of their minds, their work, and their integrity, not the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their religion. I’m a far left radical.

— Women should have the same rights and privileges as men, from the workplace to the boardroom to the voting booth. I’m a far left radical.

— Our queer brothers and sisters should have the same rights and privileges as everybody else, and be free to live their lives without discrimination or harassment. I’m a far left radical.

— America is a nation of immigrants, and we have been strengthened in every generation by the diversity of talent and humanity that have come here to participate in the American dream. We need comprehensive immigration reform to clean up our system. I’m a far left radical.

These are all positions Republicans hate, and any one of them will get you labeled as a far left radical instantly.

So, the next time some rightwing idiot attacks you for voting for Kamala Harris or having a D on your voter registration or an anti-Trump bumper sticker, simply repeat after me:

“I’m a far left radical — and proud of it!”

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The FCC chairman just threatened to pull ABC’s license because of a comment Jimmy Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk, and ABC just indefinitely took him off the air. This is the sort of thing you’d expect in Russia, not America.

But let’s back up a minute.

First, those who use violence come for the politicians. Then they come after the pundits and reporters. And finally they encourage average people to turn their guns on each other.

The dark story we’re living — this rise of fascism and destruction of civil order — fits a pyramid, not a straight line. And it explains why the killing of Charlie Kirk, aside from the right’s incessant amplification of their outrage, actually is a big deal and very dangerous sign for today’s political moment.

At the apex of the pyramid of people first targeted for violence are politicians, people who choose to live in the blast radius of public power.

When the taboo against political bloodshed cracks, it often cracks there first, with, for example, the attempted assassinations of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi by Trump’s mob, the murder of Minnesota State House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, the bombs Trump fanboy Cesar Sayoc send to President Obama and other elected Democrats, and our history of political assassinations.

The second tier down from the apex is the world of thought leaders, editors, and reporters, the people who interpret events for the rest of us. In healthy times they’re noisy, sometimes infuriating, and very much alive.

The brutal assassination of conservative activist and organizer Charlie Kirk in Utah wasn’t just another awful headline, it was America making the transition into that second tier on the way toward civil war or a police state. You don’t have to like Kirk's views to see that this is part of the transition from public debate to public violence.

I really wish we didn’t have to be having this conversation, to be considering the possibility that our politicians, our thought leaders, and eventually each one of us ourselves could be the victims of violence incited by political conflict. But that’s where we are.

And instead of trying to bring the nation together or heal it, Trump and those around him appear committed to turning the heat up.

When countries are sliding into fascism, after politicians are cowed, this middle level of the pyramid — the thought leaders and reporters — become targets.

We’re already tracking a surge of assaults on journalists in the United States this year, recorded by nonpartisan monitors, and the warnings from press freedom groups are growing louder as we head into another supercharged election cycle.

It’s why Trump threatening Jonathan Karl this week was such a big deal.

At the base of the pyramid is everyone else, the broad foundation of ordinary citizens who expect to disagree without fear of dying for it. In the last stage of democratic decay, the taboo collapses here too.

Conflict trackers that normally study civil wars abroad are now publishing monthly briefs on our own streets, and their July readout flagged spikes tied to political flashpoints and the growing risk of lone-wolf attacks.

That’s the tremor you feel underfoot; it’s a warning that a nation has been seized by authoritarians and could be on the verge of civil war.

This is not an abstract model that I just came up with this week: it’s American history.

In the 1850s the pattern first announced itself in Washington when rightwing Congressman Preston Brooks walked into the Senate chamber and nearly beat Senator Charles Sumner to death for denouncing slavery.

The attack wasn’t just an assault on a man, it was a public declaration that the rules had changed and that violence could now answer argument. The country was shocked, and then it was hardened. That moment signaled that the apex of the pyramid had been breached.

From there the target set widened into the second stage, the “killing pundits and reporters phase.” In Kansas, proslavery posses sacked the Free State stronghold of Lawrence, destroyed printing presses, and burned the Free State Hotel while waving banners that proclaimed “Southern Rights.”

Across the Deep South, meanwhile, newspaper publishers and editors who called out the Confederate oligarchs or opposed slavery were lynched, shot, or driven out of town.

The point was terror and silence. Smash the presses, you smash the story. The attack was part of the cycle we remember as Bleeding Kansas, when political dispute metastasized into raids and reprisals across towns and farms. Once the middle layer began to break, the base wasn’t far behind.

We can see the rhyme today.

Minnesota mourned Speaker Emerita Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, after a stalker hunted them down. Federal prosecutors have indicted the suspect. You don’t get a clearer sign that the apex is under fire than a state’s senior legislative leader and her spouse being killed.

We’re now seeing a loosening of the bolts on that middle tier with the Kirk assassination. Political leaders sneer at reporters and pundits, crowds chant for punishment of the press, and too many people decide that a camera and a notebook are acts of war.

And then comes the revenge. After our Attorney General, Pam Bondi, threatened to prosecute people for what she called “hate speech” (which is not a crime: remember the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois?), Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was blunt:

“Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school failed.”

The data points stack up, each incident small enough to shrug off, all together large enough to chill a newsroom and make a young journalist, podcaster, or influencer think twice about showing up. Which is exactly what the authoritarians want.

If we want to keep the base of the pyramid steady, we must keep that middle standing, because when people can’t trust that their words will be heard without violence or censorship, some will reach for other tools.

The lesson from the 1850s isn’t that violence always walks in a single file, but that it climbs down the side of the pyramid. Once elites normalize it, once opinion-makers are bullied or bloodied into silence, the next stop is the rest of us.

That’s why the response must be immediate and nonpartisan. Every decent official, left and right, should make it crystal clear that assassination is not politics, that stalking is not activism, that censorship or threatening a reporter or a comedian isn’t patriotic.

And that the worst response to violence is to blame an entire political party, the people who make up half of America, calling them “crazy,” “lunatics,” and “terrorists.”

Tragically, that’s exactly the path Trump and the GOP are following. They’re trying to turn Charlie Kirk into America’s Horst Wessel, the martyr that Hitler used to successfully rally people around the Nazis’ shared sense of victimhood.

We still have time to shore up the apex, protect the middle, and keep the base from cracking, if only Democratic leadership (talking about you, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries) would find the courage to speak out loudly every day against the explosion of blame and hate being promoted now by Trump and the rightwing media that brought him into power.

The few Republicans of good conscience left must reach out to the Trump administration and demand they dial down their own violent and provocative rhetoric. And stop throwing people off television for exercising their First Amendment rights.

We don’t have time to pretend the pyramid will hold itself together without our intervention and that of our political leadership.

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Every president and most members of Congress have known for the past two centuries that having the ability to wield the power of government is a serious responsibility that carries with it real obligations for self-control.

The reason is simple and obvious, although our media appears to not realize it when they act like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s rhetoric is normal: Government can legally kill you, imprison you, and take everything you own. Fox “News” and other commentators can’t.

When some bigot on Fox or another rightwing outlet goes off on how Democrats are “left wing extremists,” “terrorists,” or “traitors,” he doesn’t have the power or ability to do anything about it. They’re just words, which is why they’re protected by the First Amendment. Inflammatory words, certainly, but just words.

But when a government official slaps one of those kinds of labels on you because of things you’ve said or political views you hold, you can lose literally everything.

Just ask Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk, who were imprisoned for expressing their opinions on the genocide Benjamin Netanyahu is carrying out in Israel, or Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had the bad fortune of being brown-skinned when Miller was on one of his racist jeremiads, even though Garcia had legal permission to stay in the US.

This is why even after 9/11 George W. Bush measured his words, going so far as to emphasize that Islam wasn’t our enemy. So did Abraham Lincoln, for that matter, even as the country he led was under attack by actual traitors committed to ending democracy in America.

In his first inaugural address, on the verge of the Civil War, he said:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds…”

Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, understood that as a government official with the power to kill by firing squad or imprison, it was his obligation to turn down the heat.

“We can return violence with violence; we can return hate with hate. That’s the problem with political violence. It metastasizes,” Cox told the nation when Trent Robinson was arrested on suspicion of killing Charlie Kirk. “We can always point the figure at the other side. At some point we have to find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.”

Trump, Miller, and the GOP more generally haven’t gotten the message.

Trump blamed the “radical left” — as if there actually is any meaningful number of people in America calling for communism — for the killing, and then on Thursday told reporters, “We just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics.”

When Matthew Dowd notes on MSNBC that Kirk engaged in hate speech, the worst that happens is the network fires him. Ditto for when Fox’s Brian Kilmead called for America to emulate Hitler’s Aktion T4 program, where physicians killed homeless and disabled people by lethal injection, later moving on to mobile vans that used their exhaust to kill. The worst Kilmead can expect is to be fired, although given how shamefully unprincipled Fox management is, that’s probably unlikely.

But when government officials describe people using language that could lead to any of us being investigated, arrested, or even imprisoned or deported because of our politics, it’s an entirely different thing. It’s a genuine threat to our system of government, our rule of law, and to the safety and security of all of the American people.

Because when they start hauling away Americans for their opinions, when they threaten to pull our citizenship or passports — as Trump and other Republicans have recently done — history tells us it’s not a long trek to using those same tactics against people who thought they were on the “right side.”

Indeed, it’s already started to happen: just ask James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper, who are all now facing criminal investigations for speaking out against Trump. All these lifelong Republicans had to lawyer up after Trump publicly called them “criminals.”

When Miller — who the White House wants you to know definitely does not play with porcelain dolls — says the Democratic Party (which he can’t bring himself to say; he instead uses Joe McCarthy’s “Democrat Party” slur) “is not a political party; it is a domestic, extremist organization,” he’s laying a legal foundation for criminal investigations and arrests per the Patriot Act.

When he vows to “dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” promising under Trump’s leadership to use law enforcement to “strip them of money, power, and freedom” and threatening that members of the left who “spread evil hate” will “live in exile” he’s not just a commentator: he’s a man who wields actual power over life and death, imprisonment or freedom.

This rhetoric is particularly troubling since all of the previous 31 politically-motivated violent attacks in America have been committed by rightwingers.

Or consider Elon Musk, the world‘s richest man who created and ran the DOGE program to dismantle our government. He spoke to a crowd in England this weekend and said:

“The violence is going to come to you. You will have no choice. This is a, this is, you're in a fundamental situation here where you, where, whether you choose violence or not. The violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either the fight back or you die. And that's the truth.”

And he wasn’t talking about Osama bin Laden or anybody like that. He was talking about people like you and me:

“[Y]ou see how much violence there’s on the left with our friend Charlie Kirk getting murdered in cold blood this week and people on the left celebrating it openly; the left is the party of murder and celebrating murder. I mean let that sink in for a minute. That’s who we’re dealing with here. That is who we're dealing with.”

When Trump is asked how to heal the country and says, “I couldn’t care less” and adds that, “The radicals on the left are the problem,” he’s inciting stochastic lone-wolf terror against Democrats and setting up rationalizations for government actions like Hitler’s Reichstag Fire Decree that ended all free speech protections in Germany in 1933.

And now a member of Congress is introduced legislation to strip the passports of anybody who “supports terrorism.“ The bill’s author is a former soldier in the Israeli military: you know what direction this is going.

The few rational people still left in the GOP need to reach out to this administration and convince them to follow the example of every other president since Andrew Jackson to dial back the rhetoric, acknowledge the fundamental humanity of Democrats and others on the “left,” and their absolute right to advocate for their own, different vision of a better America with fewer guns, more unions, and free healthcare and free college (the actual “radical left” positions).

Because when a government points its finger at you — when it decides you are the enemy — the entire machinery of the state lines up behind that accusation. That’s not hyperbole; it’s the lesson of history, written in blood and exile and mass graves.

Every authoritarian regime began not with tanks in the streets but with leaders who used words like weapons and convinced their followers that fellow citizens were traitors. Every one. Trump and his enablers are replaying that script, right here, right now.

The only question left is whether we’ll recognize it for what it is and slam on the brakes, or whether we’ll watch, paralyzed, as the state’s power to cage, exile, or kill is once again turned inward, but this time, against us all.

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As a guy who regularly gets death threats because of my media presence, I shouldn’t have to say that killing people — or even threatening them — for their politics is wrong. But here it is, for the record: nobody in America should die for their politics.

That said, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — the guy who downplayed slavery, demonized Black and brown people, promoted the racist antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, attacked queer people, made degrading comments about women, said gun deaths were fine because that’s the price we must pay for the Second Amendment — the media is afraid to say anything about the state of our politics other than “we need to stop violence-provoking political rhetoric on both sides.”

As if there were two sides here.

Here’s the hard truth that the bullshit-embracing “both sides” punditry won’t say out loud: calling for Democrats to “tone it down” has become a permission slip for Republicans to keep stoking hate, flirting with violence, and treating fellow Americans as enemies rather than opponents.

If you actually look at the political science and the public record, the escalation didn’t start with Democrats, and it doesn’t continue because Democrats use accurate words to describe what we’re facing. The political research is clear.

As Rachel Bitecofer points out, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said the quiet part our loud when they wrote that the modern GOP had become “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition” in their 2012 Washington Post essay and book-length work on asymmetric polarization.

And this isn’t new: the rhetoric that got us here wasn’t even invented on social media. Lee Atwater explained Nixon’s Southern Strategy out loud in 1981, describing how race-baiting messages were laundered into “abstract” appeals that produced the same results without resorting to the N-word.

Ronald Reagan elevated the “welfare queen” trope into a national morality play that exploited poverty and race for partisan gain. The Willie Horton ad and “Revolving Door” spot baked fear-first politics into a Republican presidential campaign’s core strategy.

Pat Buchanan then said the quiet part with a bullhorn in his 1992 convention speech, declaring a “culture war” against Democrats and anyone who didn’t fit his vision of a Christian white America. Newt Gingrich operationalized it with his GOPAC training memo, a how-to guide that told Republican candidates to brand Democrats with words like “corrupt,” “sick,” and “traitors” while reserving terms like “freedom” and “strength” for themselves.

This wasn’t an internet rumor, it was the Republican party’s official training literature.

When the National Rifle Association mailed a fundraising letter in 1995 calling federal agents “jack-booted thugs,” former President George H. W. Bush resigned from their board in protest, which tells you how far the mainstream right still had to travel to normalize incendiary attacks on law enforcement when it suited their politics.

Fast forward to the past decade and the escalation didn’t slow.

Republicans have long normalized calling Democrats “socialists” or “communists” as a baseline insult rather than an argument. This isn’t a fringe habit, it’s a standard applause line for Republican leaders and conservative media outlets.

The “Second Amendment” wink-and-nod-endorsing-violence politics isn’t new either. Sharron Angle campaigned on “Second Amendment remedies” in 2010 and Donald Trump suggested in 2016 that the “Second Amendment people” might have to step up to stop Hillary Clinton.

With Trump’s 2016 campaign, the glorification of violence moved from innuendo to stagecraft. He urged rallygoers to “knock the crap out of” protesters, then later told police “please don’t be too nice” to suspects during a Long Island speech.

Armed rightwing extremists swarmed the Michigan Capitol in April 2020, a preview of how “we the people” could be recast as a threat display when public health or election results didn’t go the way Republicans wanted.

Republican Congressman Paul Gosar posted an anime video that depicted violence against AOC and President Joe Biden, which isn’t normal in an advanced democracy. Nonetheless, all but two Republicans refused to vote for his censure.

The GOP’s information pipeline supercharged moral panics about identity and belonging; the old birther lie about Barack Obama’s citizenship migrated from fringe to Fox to Trump’s core brand.

Then the “Great Replacement” narrative went from white supremacist fever dream to a standard talking point on the country’s most-watched rightwing channel, and then into the manifestos of mass murderers in El Paso and Buffalo, and into the antisemitic rantings of the Tree of Life shooter who blamed Jews for “bringing invaders” here.

After Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, the “groomer” slur against queer people exploded by more than 400 percent because political entrepreneurs like Kirk realized how quickly a smear can mobilize fear and clicks in the current media economy.

Republican officials and aligned media also popularized the false frame that gender-affirming care equals “genital mutilation,” a homophobic slur Kirk kept using that’s been rejected on the record by federal judges examining the facts in these cases.

This is the ecosystem that produced a presidential debate moment in which Trump told the racist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” and a January 6 rally where he urged supporters to “fight like hell.” The Republican National Committee later tried to rebrand the attack as “legitimate political discourse,” which was an explicit signal to their base that political violence is just fine with the GOP.

The Department of Justice charged more than 1,500 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol, including hundreds for assaulting police officers (three of whom died): Trump then pardoned them all, explaining again by his action (and the failure of any Republicans to condemn it) that political violence is just fine with today’s GOP.

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two election workers falsely smeared by Trump’s lawyer, won a landmark defamation verdict because Republican threats to public servants are real, not rhetorical flourishes.

When critics talk about authoritarian drift, they aren’t making it up for cable hits. Trump created “Schedule F” by executive order in 2020 to strip job protections from large categories of civil servants. President Biden revoked it but now it’s back, leading to a dangerous politicization of the federal bureaucracy that’s now hunting and purging “lefties” the way slave patrolers once tracked down escapees.

Alongside that, Trump has publicly urged defunding or punishing the FBI and DOJ when they investigate him, and even floated “terminating” parts of the Constitution, which is rhetoric that would have ended careers a generation ago and now earns a shrug from most of his party’s elected officials.

And, as Jessica Valenti points out:

“[W]hen a pregnant woman dies of sepsis in a hospital that could have helped her but is legally prevented from doing so, that’s political violence. It’s political violence when a child is shot in their classroom because lawmakers refuse to take action on guns. An abortion provider being assassinated after years of conservatives calling them ‘baby-killers’ is political violence, as is the death of a person who had their medical claim denied by companies more interested in their bottom line than people’s lives.”

And now, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, Republicans are again amping up the violent rhetoric.

Laura Loomer posted, “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.” Trump referenced “radical left political violence” as if that’s the only source of it. Sean Davis, the CEO of The Federalist, wrote: “When Democrats lose elections they couldn’t steal, they murder the people they were unable to defeat.” Fox host Jesse Waters said, “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.”

Mother Jones compiled a more comprehensive list of Republican calls for violence against Democrats.

Trump made jokes about Paul Pelosi’s near-murder, and laughed when a thuggish congressional candidate assaulted a reporter for asking him a question about health care policy. That thug is now governor of Montana.

And let’s not forget Charlie Kirk’s hero, Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people and blew most of the arm off a third. Trump invited him to Mar-a-Largo to congratulate him.

Violence is their brand.

And in the wake of all this, Trump pulls the Secret Service security detail from Kamala Harris just as she begins her book tour.

Now put that record next to what Democrats have done.

I realize it makes them sound like wimps, but instead of vilifying their opposition Democrats in Congress have been working across the aisle for the average person, passing healthcare legislation, trying to strengthen voting rights, reduce student debt, clean up the environment, rebuild our infrastructure and kick-start chip manufacturing, and hold corporate criminals to account.

After Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a rightwinger with a list of almost 50 other Democrats he planned to kill, and a state senator and his wife were wounded, Trump refused to even call Governor Tim Walz, much less lower flags to half-staff. Democrats, who’d lost a genuine hero, universally called for toning down political rhetoric instead of vengeance or retributive violence.

While the GOP’s brand is “We’re victims!!!,” Democrats are more interested in getting things done for the people. And when they do call out the authoritarianism of this administration, they’re pointing to actual policies like masked secret police, military in the streets, Trump grifting billions in crypto, using the FBI to go after his political opponents, and Republicans on the Supreme Court giving Trump immunity from prosecution for actual crimes.

On top of passing legislation, Democratic leaders have consistently condemned political violence without caveat, from Biden’s 2020 speech spelling out that “rioting is not protesting” to repeated condemnations after attacks on public officials and public servants.

So when commentators ask both parties to “lower the temperature,” we should be honest about what that means in practice.

Too often, it’s a request for Democrats to stop calling out the very real way the modern right has mainstreamed eliminationist rhetoric, moral-panic politics, and procedural hardball.

It is a call to pretend that saying “you’re child-abusing communists who hate America” versus “you’re undermining democracy and endangering people with lies” are mirror images.

They are not.

One is a smear that licenses political violence. The other is a description of a documented pattern of behavior with decades of receipts.

None of that means Democrats are perfect. It means Democrats are operating inside the reality-based world where deals must be made, bills must be passed, and violence is condemned when it appears on your own side.

Former Republican George Conway warns that the GOP is on the verge of turning Kirk into Horst Wessel, the Nazi streetfighter who Hitler made into a martyr when he was killed. Conway posted:

“They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then, and what Trump and MAGA are doing today, are striking, chilling — and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook.”

Jim Stewartson suggests Kirk’s killing could be used by Trump the way Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to change German law and give himself unlimited power.

These are indeed very, very dangerous times. And the political rhetoric coming out of 1500 rightwing hate-radio stations, Republican politicians, and billionaire-funded hard-right-biased-social-media-algorithms is at the center of the crisis.

If Republicans want the volume to come down, the path is simple.

Stop labeling mainstream opponents as “communists” and “groomers.”

Stop flirting with “Second Amendment remedies.”

Stop normalizing threats against election workers.

Stop trying to bend the machinery of government to punish critics and shield allies.

When that happens, Democrats will meet them in the middle, because Democrats already live there when they write bipartisan infrastructure bills, subsidize domestic chip manufacturing, narrow gun loopholes, and harden the legal process for counting electoral votes.

Until then, asking Democrats to “watch their tone” is not a plan for peace: it’s a plan for unilateral disarmament in a fight the other side first chose.

Our media must call the problem what it is, or we’ll never fix it. The people who lit this fire keep tossing gasoline on it. The only way to put it out is to stop pretending the arsonists and the firefighters are the same.

Republican Charlie Kirk is dead. So is former Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.

Two clearly political assassinations in the past four months.

And a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association’s journal, Pediatrics, suggests that most of the deaths from the more than 250 mass shootings in America so far this year could also be classified as resulting from politics.

How did we get here, and what do we do?

In 2008, the in-the-NRA’s-pocket Republican Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did much the same thing that Sam Alito would later do with his Dobbs anti-abortion ruling: he reached back hundreds of years to look for a definition at the time the Second Amendment was written for how people then viewed the phrase “bear arms” and then twisted it beyond recognition.

The result was the corrupt Heller decision, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, which unleashed a new wave of guns on an unsuspecting America.

It was followed two years later by McDonald v Chicago, another NRA-purchased all-Republican decision striking down Chicago’s gun control laws and forcing cities and Blue states to accept more weapons whether their people — through their elected officials — wanted that tsunami of guns in their communities or not.

As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent:

“Although the Court’s decision in this case might be seen as a mere adjunct to its decision in Heller, the consequences could prove far more destructive — quite literally — to our Nation’s communities and to our constitutional structure.”

As we saw yesterday with the right’s new martyr, and have been seeing in the daily toll of gun deaths that America suffers from — alone among all other nations in the world — Stevens was prescient.

We are literally the only country in the world that is experiencing this magnitude of gun crisis. Half of the guns in civilian hands in the entire world are here in the United States, so it shouldn’t surprise anybody that the leading cause of childhood death in the US is bullets and political assassinations have become routine.

The study in Pediatrics looked at child gun deaths in America before and after the 2010 McDonald decision. What they found is shocking.

That decision caused two major changes in gun laws across America. The first was that nearly every red state loosened their gun laws, sometimes in the extreme, even allowing open carry of semiautomatic weapons of war without any permit or regulation. Most blue states, on the other hand, looked for and found ways around the decision to actually tighten their gun control laws.

The result was astonishing. Between 2011 and 2023, the study period, red states that had loosened their gun laws saw 7,453 more children killed by firearms than the pre-McDonald statistical trends would have predicted had the Republicans on the Court not further loosened gun laws.

In blue states that maintained or strengthened their gun laws, though, child gun deaths remained the same as before McDonald and Heller, and, to quote the study:

“Four states (California, Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island) had decreased pediatric firearm mortality after McDonald v Chicago, all of which were in the strict firearms law group.”

Melissa Hortman was a strong advocate of gun control laws. Charlie Kirk opposed them. Both are dead by gunfire, along with hundreds of children and adults this year.

When Hortman was murdered by a politically-inspired rightwing thug, some conservatives on X and other platforms celebrated.

Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, tweeted: “This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” along with a picture of the shooter. An hour later, again showing the suspect’s picture, Senator Lee wrote: “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” apparently trying to humorously reference Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Tim Walz and his advocacy for gun control.

Yesterday, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, some liberals were posting the equivalent of “good riddance” to social media platforms, some making Lee’s obscene posts seem tame.

Both are reprehensible.

Instead, let’s take this moment to reflect on how the NRA’s work over the past decades — often funded and supported by Vladimir Putin’s Russia (where gun control is rigid) — killed both of them. And tens of thousands of children and adults over the years.

This week NPR reported that school shootings have spawned a $4 billion industry selling everything from bulletproof backpacks to “panic buttons, bullet-resistant whiteboards, facial recognition technology, training simulators, body armor, guns and tasers.”

They note:

“Tom McDermott, with the metal detector manufacturer CEIA USA, says schools used to be a small fraction of their U.S. business. Now they’re the majority.“‘It’s not right. We need to solve this problem. It’s good for business, but we don't need to be selling to schools,’ McDermott says.
“Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.”

It’s insane that America’s answer to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court and the NRA flooding our country with deadly weapons is to create a multi-billion-dollar industry to stop bullets or ameliorate their damage in our public schools.

The vast majority of Americans want rational gun control laws instead of this Wild West insanity. Every other developed country in the world has them; not a single one forces their children through the trauma of active shooter drills or subjects them to metal detectors and requires them to occasionally come face-to-face with murderous psychopaths armed to the teeth.

It’s way past time for our politicians to wake the hell up, and hopefully the assassination of a far-right “gun rights” icon will cause at least a few Republicans to break with their party’s fealty to the weapons industry and join with Democrats to Make America Safe Again.

If you’re not a criminal, you shouldn’t fear government. Instead, as Thomas Jefferson often pointed out, government should fear you.

This is the foundation of the American experiment, that our system of government was created, as the Declaration of Independence says, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

And, yet, today increasing numbers of Americans are afraid of their government, or at least afraid of the people who now run it.

Our news media are terrified of being sued or otherwise harassed by Trump, so much so that two of our three big TV networks have paid him millions in what was essentially protection money.

CBS just put a rightwinger with ties to the GOP as their ombudsman, and NBC is on the verge of spinning off MSNBC, which is increasingly problematic for the network as it regularly draws Trump’s ire.

Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate are so cowed by Trump’s primary threats and the hundreds of millions in political dollars he controls that they’re desperately engaging in a coverup of his alleged participation in Jeffrey Epstein's crimes.

Writers I know on Substack and elsewhere are watching their words carefully to avoid provoking rightwing ire and the death threats it often brings, at the same time a series of very-well-funded rightwing media empires are growing.

Armed men in civilian clothes with masks on their faces are snatching people off the street and disappearing them, now with the blessing of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court; it’s often impossible to distinguish them from gang members trying to kidnap people for torture or ransom.

People of faith and goodwill are fleeing social media sites ever since their billionaire owners opened the sites up to Nazis and tweaked their secret algorithms to favor hate, fear, and the hard right while suppressing voices of compassion or advocates for democracy here or abroad.

Government workers live in terror that some old tweet or message board posting might be discovered that will cost them their jobs. Some, like Lisa Cook, were just doing their jobs when Trump’s toadies decided to scan everything they’d ever done and find the one checkbox they shouldn’t have clicked that can be used to discredit and then destroy them.

Former government employees and elected officials — from John Brennan and Miles Taylor to James Comey — are wiping out their retirement savings to pay for lawyers because our government has targeted them for Trump’s “retribution.”

Protestors objecting to the militarization of our nation’s cities are arrested for “conspiracy” and charged with crimes that could send them to prison for years or even decades. People who volunteer to help out with voting operations find themselves doxed and vilified on national rightwing media and have to go into hiding, the peace and normalcy of their lives shattered.

Captains of industry, CEOs of the nation’s largest companies, trek to the White House to bow and scrape in front of His Orangeness, and cabinet meetings have turned into a bad caricature of Hans Christian Anderson’s Emperor’s New Clothes fable. We watch, yelling at the TV, “Tell him he’s naked!” but to no avail; they can’t stop slobbering over him like terrified victims being held at knifepoint by a serial killer.

None of this is normal in a democracy; all of these are signs of a creeping dictatorship taking over our nation. It’s particularly not normal in America: we’re the country that invented citizens rising up against an oppressive government. When the South abandoned democracy in the 1850s, and when Europe lost its democracies in the 1930s, we went to war and shed blood and treasure to defend the right to dissent.

And what’s particularly ironic is that the very same people who’ve been loudly warning us about the day coming when the government becomes oppressive and tyrannical — from the John Birch folks to militia members — are now in the vanguard of authoritarianism advocacy. If it wasn’t so tragic — and dangerous — it’d be funny.

Our Attorney General is apparently leading the Epstein coverup, our Secretary of State cheerleads murdering civilians on the high seas, our Treasury Secretary is reportedly provoking fistfights, our Energy and EPA chiefs deny climate change and push more fossil fuel pollution, FEMA is being gutted, Social Security has been crippled, Medicare is about to start pre-clearance of payments in six states, millions will soon be thrown off Medicaid, aid to student borrowers is gone, and food support to needy Americans is being pulled along with food and medicine for millions around the world.

All being done so the morbidly rich (like our billionaire president and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet) could get another $4 trillion tax gift, paid for by the rest of us as our schools are gutted and our children fail.

And it’s not just America that Trump, MAGA, and the GOP are destroying on the altar of bowing to the very rich: Everything Vladimir Putin wants, he gets. As Trump discards America’s allies, Xi Jinping is picking them up, and country after country around the world is abandoning democracy for the siren song of big-money-driven autocracy.

Tariffs, which historically have been the careful, surgical tools of trade policy wielded by Congress since the days of George Washington, are being used as blunt cudgels to beat foreign countries into giving cash, jumbo jets, and Trump Tower opportunities to America’s parasitic ruling family.

Even our Supreme Court has fallen to big money corruption, allowing Trump to do anything he wants — no matter how criminal or anti-democratic — without any pushback or consequences. A billionaire-funded think tank is writing our domestic policy, while Putin and Netanyahu appear to be running our foreign policy.

None of this reflects the traditional American values of fairness, honesty, and rule by the consent of the governed.

With most of our institutions now captured by the morbidly rich, racism and voter suppression openly celebrated, and our police agencies shifting from protecting to oppressing our people, the only group left to stand up to defend what’s left of our shredded republic is We, the People. Us.

History shows that when fascists haven’t yet entrenched themselves as far as Hitler or Mussolini did (or Putin and Viktor Orbán today) it’s still possible for the people to rise up and throw them out. It happened in Ukraine, in South Korea, in Spain and Chile, among others.

People stood up in the face of fear of their governments and, instead, peacefully made those governments fear them. And it can happen here, too.

So, now it’s our turn. And our obligation. We’re the ones who must save us, who must stand up to these fascists, who must awaken our friends, neighbors, and relatives.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference and declared that America is “a nation and a people.” With those five words he threw aside the pluralism that has defined this country since before its founding and embraced an ideology rooted in blood and soil, in exclusion and hierarchy. He put it in context:

“That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract ‘proposition,’ but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests…“When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America — with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us.”

It’s not new to hear Republicans peddling this kind of racialized “us versus them” rhetoric, but it’s still shocking to see a sitting United States senator parrot phrases that would be more at home in the speeches of European fascists or Confederates in the years leading up to the Civil War than in the halls of Congress today.

Schmitt offered no acknowledgment of the millions of enslaved Africans whose stolen labor helped build this country, no recognition of the generations of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa who contributed to our prosperity, no admission of the bloody sacrifices of those who fought for civil rights, equality, and inclusion.

Instead he spoke only of a singular people and a singular nation, implicitly white, implicitly Christian, and implicitly obedient to his party’s authoritarian vision.

This is not some isolated gaffe: it’s part of a pattern. At the same moment Schmitt was narrowing the definition of who counts as American, he’d chosen as his spokesman Nathan Hochman, who was forced out of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign after circulating a promotional video featuring Nazi imagery.

That a man with such a stain on his record can walk comfortably into the Republican fold today says everything about the party’s trajectory. It’s no accident, no oversight, no slip. The GOP is nakedly embracing white supremacy and the Confederate neofascist ethos.

They’re not ashamed of it, either, as previous generations would have been, speaking in Nixonesque “law and order” code. Today, they flaunt it. They want to redefine America itself, not as a democracy where all people are “created equal,” but as a fortress where some people’s bloodlines, wealth, and religions entitle them to power while others are cast aside or erased from memory.

This assault is not simply rhetorical. The Trump administration has already shown us the template they’re using to deconstruct a democratic America and replace it with a whites-only neofascist ethnostate.

Their racist attacks on the Smithsonian and other national museums weren’t about efficiency or budgets — they’re about rewriting history, about stripping slavery, segregation, and genocide from the story of America, and replacing it with sanitized myths that glorify the Confederate ethos and erase the Confederacy’s victims.

They want future generations to walk through America’s most important cultural institutions and see nothing of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Sitting Bull, César Chávez, or Bayard Rustin. They want a nation of children raised on the lie that America was always a white, Christian ethnostate, that pluralism and democracy were well-intentioned but impractical mistakes to be corrected.

This is how authoritarian regimes always consolidate power: as George Orwell wrote in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which the GOP has apparently adopted as an instruction manual, control the narrative of the past and you control reality of the future.

But history refuses to be erased. The graves of the people who fought and died to end slavery and grant civil rights to nonwhite people and women are still here.

The gravestones of Black soldiers who charged Confederate lines at Fort Wagner, who bled and died under the Union flag, are still here. The blood of abolitionists lynched by mobs is still in our soil. The memories of those who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were beaten nearly to death by racist sheriffs are still vivid.

The soldiers of my father’s generation who fell on Omaha Beach didn’t die so that a senator from Missouri could try to turn our country into a singular “nation and a people.” They died for liberty, for equality, for a world where democracy could flourish instead of fascism. To erase their sacrifices by redefining America as a white nation is to spit on their graves.

Where are the Republicans who once called themselves the Party of Lincoln? The ones who agreed with President Ronald Reagan when he famously said:

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American. …“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.
“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

Abraham Lincoln himself declared at Gettysburg that this was a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He didn’t say “all white men.” He didn’t say “all Christians.” He said all men, a word that at the time encompassed all people. He understood that America’s strength was not in its uniformity but in its aspiration to universality.

Have they all been purged from the GOP? Has the last Republican who believes in a multiracial democracy been driven into silence or retirement?

Watching today’s party leaders it seems so. The few who whisper their discomfort are drowned out by the roar of those who openly embrace bigotry, authoritarianism, and historical revisionism. The Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, right down to Trump renaming military bases after traitorous Confederate generals and Klan leaders.

This is not a mere political dispute: it’s a struggle for the soul of America.

Our choice is between the pluralistic democracy that generations of Americans fought and died to protect, or an authoritarian nationalism that dehumanizes millions and threatens to dismantle our most cherished institutions.

When Schmitt stands before a crowd and offers them a vision of America as a singular people, he’s calling for the death of the American experiment itself. When Republicans bring men like Hochman into their fold, they’re saying right out loud that Nazi imagery and Confederate ideology are no longer disqualifying, but are welcome.

When Trump and his administration try to rewrite history in the Smithsonian, they’re declaring war on truth itself. And on the concepts and ideals that made America a great nation.

The outrage is justified because the stakes are existential. A party that embraces white supremacy and fascist ethos cannot coexist with democracy. A nation that allows its museums, its textbooks, its speeches, and its laws to be purged of pluralism cannot endure as a democracy.

America has faced down this poison before. We lost 700,000 people fighting a Civil War to crush it. We passed civil rights laws to dismantle its legal scaffolding. We buried tens of thousands of soldiers in Europe who died fighting against fascism abroad.

To let it rise again here at home, wrapped in the flag of one of our two great political parties, is the ultimate betrayal.

And to put a massive punctuation mark on it, on Monday Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a shadow docket opinion for his five corrupt Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court saying that it’s now perfectly legal for ICE and other federal, state, and local police authorities to engage in racial profiling.

Protesting Republicans bringing us fully into a “your papers please“ type of race-based fascism, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that because of the Republicans on the Supreme Court:

“The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”

The question now is whether we’ll rise to the moment. Will we allow a senator’s words to pass unchallenged, a party’s racism to be normalized, a nation’s history to be rewritten? Or will we push back with the force of truth, with the weight of history, with the unyielding conviction that America belongs to all its people, not just those deemed acceptable by the far right?

Silence is complicity, both on the part of our media and our politicians of both parties. Pretending this is normal politics is complicity. It’s time for every American who still believes in the Constitution, in equality, in pluralism, in democracy itself to speak out in favor of an inclusive America.

This is not about left versus right. This is about democracy versus fascism, inclusion versus exclusion, truth versus lies.

Eric Schmitt and those like him want us to forget who we are. They want us to forget the Declaration’s promise, Lincoln’s dedication, King’s dream, and the sacrifices of millions of ordinary Americans who fought for liberty and justice. They want us to forget the very idea of America as a pluralistic nation.

We must not forget. We must not be silent. We must not surrender America’s future to those who would drag us back into the darkest chapters of America’s past.

Last week, Donald Trump posted a stolen valor war meme on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site, with the bonespurs-draft-dodger wearing a US Army Cavalry hat and the slogan, paraphrased from the movie Apocalypse Now:

“’I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of War. ”

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker replied on BlueSky:

“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”

So, how could this play out? It’s important to begin the conversation — and planning — for what appears to be the Civil War 2.0 that Trump’s apparently trying to incite.

First, there’s precedent for the federal government to send federal troops into a state to enforce the law as ordered by a court.

JFK did it in the 1962 Ole Miss crisis, to enforce the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision, mobilizing up to 31,000 federal troops, including the 503rd Military Police Battalion, the 108th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and soldiers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. Kennedy also sent federal troops and readied thousands near Birmingham, Alabama, during violent resistance to those same federally mandated desegregation efforts.

To accomplish this, Kennedy invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, which is actually a series of laws passed over a two-decade period, that constitute a virtual blank check for presidential power.

Particularly problematic is Section 253 of the law that allows the president to use troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”

As the Brennan Center for Justice explains:

“This provision is so bafflingly broad that it cannot possibly mean what it says, or else it authorizes the president to use the military against any two people conspiring to break federal law.”

Adding to Trump’s potential power, in 1827 the Supreme Court ruled that “the authority to decide whether [a crisis requiring the militia to be called out] has arisen belongs exclusively to the President, and . . . his decision is conclusive upon all other persons.”

Both JB Pritzker and California Governor Gavin Newsom have explicitly said that they believe much of this is Trump preparing to use troops for voter suppression in Blue areas of the country during the 2026 elections to prevent Democrats from taking Congress.

Pritzker said voters “should understand that he [Trump] has other aims, other than fighting crime” and that this is part of a plan to “stop the elections in 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections.”Newsom pointed out, “Interestingly, we still have federalized National Guard assigned through Election Day. Is that a coincidence? Through Election Day?!”

Additionally, the governors of 19 Blue states issued a statement saying:

“Instead of actually addressing crime, President Trump cut federal funding for law enforcement that states rely on and continues to politicize our military by trying to undermine the executive authority of governors as commanders in chief of their state’s National Guard …“Whether it’s Illinois, Maryland and New York or another state tomorrow, the president’s threats and efforts to deploy a state’s National Guard without the request and consent of that state’s governor is an alarming abuse of power, ineffective, and undermines the mission of our service members. This chaotic federal interference in our states’ National Guard must come to an end.”

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner went a step further, saying he was willing to actually arrest federal agents who exceed or break the law:

“Let’s be clear: if the National Guard comes to Philadelphia and commits crimes, they will be prosecuted locally and Donald Trump cannot pardon them.”

So, how does this play out?

Trump is already reportedly positioning Texas National Guard troops and other federal officers at the Naval Station Great Lakes, just north of Chicago, presumably preparing for an invasion of that city as soon as this week.

The vision of former Confederate-state troops seizing control of the largest city in a former Union state is explosive and may well provide Trump with the violence he’d hoped for but didn’t get in LA and DC. Violence he could use to justify invoking the Insurrection Act like Kennedy did, and then using that to lock down the 2026 elections.

If this happens, will Pritzker follow Krasner’s model and begin arresting federal agents and Texas National Guard members if they’re found breaking Illinois or Chicago law? Or will he sue at federal court the way Newsom did? Or both?

If he does the former, it could literally kick off a second American Civil War. If he does the latter, Trump may win Civil War 2.0 without a shot fired, particularly if the six corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court overrule the lower courts and endorse Trump’s actions.

And if Pritzker and Newsom are right, all of this is being done — along with extreme gerrymandering — as part of the widespread Republican effort to rig the 2026 election so Democrats can’t take back the House and begin subpoena-based investigations of Trump’s crimes from the Epstein era to his recent murder of 11 immigrants in a boat off the coast of Venezuela.

Meanwhile, as Trump pits Americans against each other, dismantles our federal government, ensures future epidemics, and grifts billions in cybercurrencies, China and Russia are pulling the rest of the world together against America. It’s almost as if Vladimir Putin was giving Trump weekly directions, a dystopian Manchurian Candidate notion that seems more credible with every passing day.

He’s systematically weakening America while boosting Putin. By shutting down Voice of America, dismantling defenses against Russian election interference, ignoring Ukraine, and bungling diplomacy with tariffs and summits that drive allies toward Moscow, he’s handed Putin victories that come at the direct expense of U.S. power and security.

In the face of this, Trump is doing everything he can to ramp up tensions and provoke people in Blue cities to violence which he can then exploit to increase his power and further crack down on elections, particularly next year.

All, apparently, in-service of converting America from a historic liberal democracy into a one-man personality-driven dictatorship that’s increasingly aligned with — and following the model of — other tyrants around the world.

As a result, now is the critical time for all Americans to get educated about what’s going on and prepare for the eventuality of a totally locked-down police state being imposed on multiple Blue cities, particularly in states where not counting the urban vote can flip the entire state Red (which is most Blue states).

Trump is trying to take down American democracy for good. This is not a drill. Organize, educate, call your representatives, and prepare to show up in the streets.

NOW READ: Expert warns of 'absolute madness' — thanks to 'worst dregs of society' in the GOP

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a dinner for lawmakers on the newly renovated Rose Garden patio, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 5, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a dinner for lawmakers on the newly renovated Rose Garden patio, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 5, 2025. REUTERS/Brian SnyderU.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a dinner for lawmakers on the newly renovated Rose Garden patio, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 5, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker isn’t pulling any punches. On Tuesday, he gave a speech calling out Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s fascist cosplay, their lies and distortions, and predicting federal troops will soon be on the streets of Chicago.

Pritzker came right out and said Trump is doing all this for his own wealth and power:

“None of this is about fighting crime or making Chicago safer. None of it. For Trump, it's about testing his power and producing a political drama to cover up for his corruption.”

Ominously, he added:

“Any rational person who has spent even the most minimal amount of time studying human history has to ask themselves one important question: Once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next?”

Pretty much every time a nation tips toward authoritarianism — as America is doing today — there’s a strongman at the center of it.

The idea goes back at least to Thomas Carlyle, whose “Great Man” theory argued that history is the story of exceptional leaders whose charisma and force of will bent the times to their shape. From Napoleon to Hitler to Trump, we see the pattern over and over.

It’s no accident that Republicans have remade themselves into a cult built around one man whose sheer audacity and appetite for power dominates the news cycle and the national conversation. After all, as Malcolm X famously said, “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” The GOP hasn’t stood for anything other than the interests of the morbidly rich for at least 44 years, so its base voters were sitting ducks for a demagogue with a good sales pitch.

It’s also no accident that Democrats appear, by contrast, weak and divided, a chorus without a soloist, trying to make an argument while their opponent simply shouts. In an age of television and social media this is an existential liability. If we’re going to stop today’s Trump-driven slide into fascism, Democrats must grapple directly with this reality and build an alternative form of charismatic leadership.

That does not mean mimicking Trump’s grotesque personality cult (although California Governor Gavin Newsom’s satire is spot-on and is working). The Democratic Party should not, and cannot, center itself around one authoritarian figure. But it does mean understanding that media is not neutral, that charisma matters, that the public imagination is moved more by spectacle and story than by policy papers.

If Democrats don’t field leaders who can seize the camera, hold attention, and embody a vision, then they’ll forever be fighting from behind while Trump and his enablers drown out every other sound.

Voters, after all, are human beings, not spreadsheets. They’re moved by the emotional gravity of people they trust, admire, or even fear. Republicans learned this long ago and built their machine around it. Democrats can no longer afford to pretend that calm reason, logic, and rational policies will carry the day without their own powerful messengers.

One way to answer this problem is to reject the premise that only one Great Man can command attention. Imagine instead a bench of great women and men, a shadow cabinet of governors, senators, and policy innovators who step into the spotlight issue by issue. Rather than waiting for one savior figure, Democrats could show the country that they have a team of giants ready to govern.

To show America not just one alternative to Trump but an entire government-in-waiting.

A practical way to operationalize this idea is to create a visible Democratic shadow cabinet, as I proposed back in May. In parliamentary systems, this is how opposition parties signal to the public that they are ready to govern: they line up ministers-in-waiting who mirror the actual cabinet and speak with authority on their issue areas.

Democrats could adapt this model by assigning leading governors and senators to clear portfolios and making them the public face of the fight.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren could take the economy, standing up every time Republicans peddle trickle-down nonsense. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could own healthcare, drawing on her state's record of expanding coverage and protecting reproductive rights. Newsom could be the climate voice, touting California’s leadership on renewables and electric vehicles. Pritzker could hold the voting rights portfolio, a relentless reminder that democracy itself is under siege.

Each of these figures is already capable of commanding national attention, but the effect would multiply if the roles were coordinated and reinforced.

The press would know who to call on any issue, and Americans would see not a muddle of competing Democratic voices but a disciplined government-in-waiting.

Rapid responses, monthly press events, and consistent messaging would project competence and readiness in contrast to the chaos of Trumpism.

This is not just about communication strategy: it’s about showing the country that Democrats have the people, the policies, and the charisma to step in tomorrow if the public gives them the chance.

This idea is not unprecedented. In parliamentary systems, opposition parties have long organized “shadow cabinets” to show voters they’re ready to take power at a moment’s notice. In the UK, Labour and the Tories alike have named shadow ministers to every portfolio, each one responsible for criticizing the government and putting forward an alternative vision.

It works because it projects competence. Voters can see the depth of the bench, not just the figure at the top. In times of crisis, this has been decisive. When Winston Churchill rose to power, it was not only his charisma but the fact that the public knew there was a team of capable ministers around him that gave Britain confidence.

Democrats would do well to borrow this model and Americanize it. Instead of being a collection of individuals jostling for position, they could present themselves as a disciplined bloc with defined roles, each amplifying the other.

At the same time, Democrats must stop letting Washington gridlock define their image.

The truth is that blue states already govern some of the largest economies in the world. California, New York, Illinois, Washington, Michigan, and Massachusetts together represent a bloc of prosperity, innovation, and rights protection larger than most nations. By acting through interstate compacts and model laws, those states can prove that Democrats deliver even when Congress stalls.

Coordinated carbon markets, clean procurement policies, abortion shield laws, voting rights protections, and labor standards can all be advanced at the state level. This is how Canada built its national healthcare system, province by province until the federal government could no longer ignore it. It’s how the early American labor movement forced reforms onto the national stage.

Call it soft secession if you want, though the better term may be the Blue States Bloc. The message is simple: if Republicans sabotage governance in Washington, Democrats will show the country how it is done in the states. It’s strength, not retreat. It’s evidence, not just rhetoric.

This is where narrative judo becomes essential. Republicans — and the corporate media — paint Democrats as weak, divided, indecisive. Democrats must flip that story on its head.

They must say clearly: we lead together because we are a coalition, not a cult. They must remind Americans that our system was designed not for one man to dominate but for leaders to share power. They must repeat, over and over, that diversity is competence, that depth is resilience, that collective leadership is how democracy works.

Instead of apologizing for the absence of a single Great Man, Democrats can show that they have something better: a team of proven leaders, each charismatic in their own right, each capable of commanding attention when the issue is in their domain. This isn’t weakness; it’s the true antidote to authoritarianism.

History is filled with moments where the survival of democracy depended on whether its defenders could command attention with the same force as its enemies. In Weimar Germany, democrats ceded the stage to demagogues and paid the price. In Spain, anti-fascists failed to unify and lost to Franco.

In contrast, during the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, leaders rose from the crowd and became the visible face of resistance, embodying the movement in a way that gave courage to millions. We shouldn’t kid ourselves: Americans are living through the same sort of crisis. The question is whether Democrats can find the discipline to project strength and charisma in time.

And when the time comes to choose a presidential ticket in 2028, that choice should be the culmination of years of visible leadership, not a scramble at the last minute. A Pritzker-Newsom ticket, or some other pairing of governors who have already shown themselves as national executives-in-training, would make the case that Democrats are ready to scale up.

Their record in the states would become the national campaign platform. Jobs growth, climate leadership, healthcare expansion, protection of rights: all would be proof points. They wouldn’t have to argue in the abstract. They could simply say: “We already govern like a nation. Now we’ll do it for the whole country.”

None of this will happen by accident.

Democrats must choose to stop ceding the stage to Trump. They must stop assuming that reason alone will defeat spectacle. They must understand that media is the battlefield now, that charisma is not optional, that in an era of constant feeds and fragmented attention the messenger is as critical as the message.

And they must realize that the perception of weakness is fatal. Authoritarians thrive when their opponents look uncertain, divided, and unready. “Strongly worded letters” are fuel for them. The only way to blunt Trump’s charisma is with charisma of our own, wielded not by one savior but by a disciplined coalition that embodies both competence and passion.

Carlyle was wrong to think that history is only made by solitary Great Men. History is also made by movements, by coalitions, by generations who decide they will not be ruled by a tyrant.

But Carlyle was right about one thing: people follow leaders they can see and believe in. If Democrats want to save this republic from sliding into fascism, they must stop hiding their leaders and start elevating them, not in dribs and drabs but as a chorus of commanding voices.

Trump’s cult of personality isn’t the only way charisma can work. It can also be the charisma of democracy itself, embodied in leaders who respect the people, who work together, and who are ready to govern.

And they must begin now. Not in 2027 when the next campaign is already underway, not in 2028 when it’ll be too late, but today. Governors, senators, mayors, party leaders must convene, assign portfolios, step into the spotlight, and begin the disciplined work of shaping the public imagination.

Because if Democrats don’t seize this moment and fill the stage with our own chorus of leaders, Trump will fill it for us, and America will be left with nothing but the hollow echo of one man’s ambition.

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America is at risk of abandoning its founding principle of government, “by and for the people,” in favor of a system older than democracy itself: rule by one man.

Pretty much everybody understands that the United States and the old Soviet Union both had governments based on ideology or principle. The main notion of the US was expressed in the Declaration of Independence and has guided us toward what Lincoln called “a more perfect union” for 249 years:

“[T]hat all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

We call it democracy. It’s larger than any one president, any one Congress, any collection of Supreme Court justices or governors. It’s a foundational principle that’s held together by our Constitution and the laws we’ve passed over the years grounded in these core ideas.

For the Soviet Union, the idea was Marx’s, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” To accomplish this, they put together a single-party state that provided housing, medical care, food, employment, and education to every Soviet citizen; in exchange the populace was expected to work hard and never challenge the power or legitimacy of the state.

Everybody understood these basic structural differences. Both were governments being driven not by personalities but by philosophy.

Although one could argue that FDR and Stalin both had widespread support and, upon their deaths, left their nations shaken, neither was truly what you’d call a cult leader. Truman and Khruschev stepped in and each country kept humming along because both countries claimed guiding ideas larger then either of those men.

But there’s a third form of government that is rarely acknowledge in the American press or high school civics classes, except in history: rule by a popular strongman. When, on April 13, 1655, Louis XIV said, “L’état, c’est moi” (“The state is me” or “I am the state”) he summed up that perspective.

Saddam Hussein called it Ba’athism, but in reality he was the government of Iraq. Pol Pot called it communism, but in reality he was the government of Cambodia. Putin claims Russia is a democratic republic with a free-market economy, much like the US, but in reality he is the government of Russia.

From the earliest days of political science, scholars have warned of regimes where the ruler and the state become one and the same, something political scientists call a “personalist dictatorship” or “personalist rule.” (Jim Stewartson does a deeper dive into this here.)

Niccolò Machiavelli, in The Prince (1513), observed that in such systems the survival of the government was entirely bound up in the survival of the man at the top: “In a principality where the people have no share in government, if the prince is destroyed, the state is likewise ruined.” He understood that once power is concentrated in a single figure, the institutions around him become little more than ornaments.

A century later, the French jurist Jean Bodin gave this reality a new name: personalist sovereignty. In his Six Books of the Republic (1576), Bodin defined it as “the absolute and perpetual power of a republic, which is vested in a prince or in the people.” When that sovereignty was vested in a prince, the fiction of shared governance disappeared: the prince was the republic.

Modern scholars have only refined this insight. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, in their classic Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), argued that “the essence of the totalitarian state is that power is monopolized by a single man or a small group, and that all institutions are subordinated to this monopoly.”

Political scientist Juan Linz later described this even more bluntly:

“Personalist rule emerges when power is concentrated in the hands of one individual who dominates not only the state apparatus but also the party, the military, and the economy.”

Whether the label is Ba’athism, communism, or “sovereign democracy,” the reality is the same. When one man becomes the state, when his survival is the survival of the regime, you are no longer looking at a republic, a democracy, or even a functioning ideology. You are looking at a personalist dictatorship, a form of government as old as Machiavelli’s princes and as modern as today’s autocrats.

This is what Donald Trump is trying to turn America into, using the template Putin, Hitler, and Viktor Orbán — all personalist dictators — provided him.

This explains why he’d fire people with genuine expertise, from the State Department to the CDC to our intelligence agencies and beyond, and replace them with incompetent toadies.

Their first loyalty in a democratic republic would be to the truth, to the people, to serving a “we society” nation with their best diplomacy, science, or spycraft.

But in a personalist dictatorship, the job of every person in the government isn’t to serve the citizens who provide the “consent of the governed” but, instead, to exclusively serve Dear Leader.

This explains the mass firings, the slavish Cabinet meetings where Trump’s toadies slobber all over him, and the casual lies that are routinely told by the White House press office and senior Republican officials. It tells us why Republican members of the House and Senate only speak up for principle when they’re willing to also abandon their reelection plans.

It also explains the fragility of our current government, given Trump’s age and poor state of health.

When nations run of, by, and for Dear Leader lose that leader, the result is typically chaos and a major change in that form of government, unless the leader has first so successfully co-opted the entirety of the state systems that they’ll continue following the corrupt structures Dear Leader had put into place.

When a democracy loses a leader, in other words, the system continues. But when a personalist dictatorship loses its strongman, the system shatters.

Franco ran a personalist dictatorship in Spain right up until 1975, when he died and democracy returned to that European nation. Although defeat in war took them down, the loss of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo all signaled political transformations in Germany, Italy, and Japan. The same was true of Hussein’s Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya, although their removals left power vacuums that led to arguably worse forms of government as opportunists and predators stepped in to fill the void.

Understanding these dynamics should inform Democrats and the few remaining Republicans who haven’t pledged their entire loyalty to Trump and Trumpism. The only true north of his reign has been self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, things that require cult-leader-level charisma to maintain, so if Trump suffers death or incapacity before his term is out the power vacuum will be massive.

Already, Republicans are jockeying for the position of inheritor of the MAGA crown in an effort to replicate Trump’s one-man rule. JD Vance is assuring us he’s had plenty of “on the job training.” Marco Rubio is trying to play the statesman on the international stage, although Trump keeps sabotaging his efforts, from bringing peace to Ukraine to preventing India from dumping America in favor of an alliance with China and Russia.

Other opportunists and hangers-on, from Ted Cruz to Steve Bannon to Tom Cotton, are trying to position themselves as rightwing power brokers, although given how completely the Party has sold out to America’s rightwing billionaires and Middle Eastern autocrats, the final decisions about the fate and future of the leadership of the GOP will probably be made by a handful of morbidly rich men.

Democrats, meanwhile, are learning the lesson of fighting fire with fire, in this case the need for a “big” personality to take on the massive cult following — among the Republican base and within our now-corrupted government institutions — Trump has created. This is why Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker are getting such traction: both are punching back at the bully.

And they’re probably right about the way they’re going about it. In this era where spectacle and outrage have replace newsworthiness as driving forces propelled by social media, search site, and news site algorithms, it’s going to take a big personality to take down Trump or his successors. Somebody who can dominate the news cycle day after day while pounding a pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian message.

We’ve seen this in America before. When the GOP destroyed the economy with the Republican Great Depression, the huge personality of FDR stepped up and used the force of his own personal charisma and magnetism to put the nation back on track. Republicans squealed that FDR was “imposing socialism,” but he largely ignored them and focused on what was best for average working-class Americans, literally creating the modern middle class.

Right now, the only organizing principles held by Republicans are fealty to Trump’s whims and their own personal greed (and that of their billionaire donors). “Conservative” principles of efficiency in government, defense of democracies around the world, and fiscal responsibility at home have all been thrown overboard in favor of raw power, corruption, and a willingness to burn down the institutions of the Republic if it keeps them in charge one more election cycle.

To the extent that Democrats can forcefully point this out and strong, genuinely progressive politicians can step up into leadership, there’s a huge opportunity here to reclaim political power and put America back on the small-d democratic path. Particularly if or when Trump is no longer a factor in the GOP’s political equation, leaving his Party lost in the wilderness.

If Democrats rise to that challenge, they can lead America back toward democracy and progress. But if they hesitate — or if too many cling to the illusion that Trumpism is just another policy debate — then history will record that the oldest democracy in the modern world fell not to an ideology, but to the vanity and greed of one broken man and an opposition that failed to understand and then meet the moment.

We can’t let that happen.

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Former Republican strategist and operative Rick Wilson called out Robert F Kennedy Jr. as a “heroin addict, sex addict, anti-vaccination lunatic and aspiring architect of millions of deaths” who’s dedicated to replacing real scientists with “radical eugenicists.”

And why would Kennedy be doing this?

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis — one of the top scientists and physicians who quit the CDC in protest over the anticipated replacement of Dr. Susan Monarez with an anti-vax crank — was unambiguous:

“I really hear the echoes of the word, ‘superior genetics.’ He referred to very high members of this administration and their improving health status. And said, well, that person has superior genetics… That is eugenics. Wake up. This is a red flag.”

And Daskalakis wasn’t condemning Kennedy for some obscure rant or policy about cub bears, sawed-off whale heads, or research animals. He was, instead, horrified that the senior-most Trump administration health official is again paraphrasing Hitler, this time in the Fūrher’s insistence that Germany could only become strong if the state employed eugenics to prevent the weak and hereditarily ill from reproducing.

Kennedy — the guy in charge of our entire nation’s health policies and their implementation — was, the CDC doc told MSNBC — explicitly boosting the idea of “weaker” Americans dying so those left will create a genetically superior America. As Dr. Daskalakis said:

“So, fast forward to West Texas and measles, where he [Kennedy] says, you know, getting the infection is fine, really, because only the strong will survive.”

And it was all wrapped in a level of weird that left doctors around the world aghast. At a marathon press event last Wednesday in Austin, Bob Kennedy, standing beside Texas Governor Greg Abbott as MAHA‑inspired laws were signed, claimed that he could detect serious illnesses in kids just by glancing at them:

“I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection, and I know that that’s not how our children are supposed to look.”

Kennedy — an attorney with no formal medical training — is dressing up an old poison in new clothes and calling it the MAHA movement. It’s not about health, though, not really. It’s about resurrecting the old, toxic doctrine of social Darwinism and giving it a fresh coat of populist paint.

The message, stripped down, is the same one plutocrats have always used to justify their privilege: if you’re rich, powerful, and healthy, it’s because you’re “fit.” If you’re poor, struggling, sick, or broken, well, that’s just nature’s way of weeding out the weak.

It’s a twenty-first-century neo-eugenics scheme, a moral excuse for selfishness, and Kennedy and Trump have found a way to wrap it in the language of health freedom and liberty. But it’s the oldest con in the book.

My old friend, the late David Loye (and his wife, Riane Eisler), spent decades trying to undo this exact lie. Loye pointed out that Charles Darwin himself never reduced human progress to “survival of the fittest.” That phrase wasn’t even Darwin’s; it was Herbert Spencer’s. Darwin did pick it up later, but by then industrialists were running wild with it, twisting his science into an ideology to prop up inequality.

Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man, was explicit: it’s not just competition that defines humanity, it’s compassion, cooperation, and the moral sense. He worried that “survival of the fittest” was being misunderstood, that it would be used to excuse cruelty. And Loye was right: Darwin would have rejected men like Kennedy out of hand, because they’re not standing up for science or truth but for a brutal pseudo-economic philosophy that elevates greed above care for others.

This worldview is nothing more than a justification for screwing the average and the needy while cutting government spending so morbidly rich people like Trump and Kennedy can get more tax breaks. It’s Ronald Reagan’s ghost rising again, whispering Ayn Rand’s catechism of selfishness, telling us that “greed is good” and compassion is weakness.

And just like Reagan, Kennedy is trying to pass this off as the “American way.” But it’s not.

The real “American way” has always been rooted in looking out for one another. Even the first president of our republic, George Washington, was personally involved in caring for the poor: he gave funds to the Alexandria Poor Relief Committee. That sense of noblesse oblige, that duty to help those in need, was fundamental to the American experiment from the start.

That’s not socialism; it’s basic decency. It’s also Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount doesn’t say “blessed are the billionaires.” Jesus didn’t say, “render unto those with the best lawyers.” He didn’t say, “let the strong crush the weak.” He said, “whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” The gospel couldn’t be clearer: our moral worth is measured not by how much we hoard for ourselves, but by how we treat the poor, the sick, and the stranger.

Kennedy’s MAHA movement and the post-Reagan Revolution GOP spit in the face of that teaching. As John Kenneth Galbraith once put it:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

That’s exactly what’s happening here. RFK Jr. and his billionaire allies are recycling the same fraudulent morality used by the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the same poisonous reasoning that told factory owners it was fine to work men and women to death because if they couldn’t hack it, they weren’t “fit.” The same warped logic that defended child labor, starvation wages, and opposition to Social Security and Medicare.

And it’s been accelerating since the Reagan Revolution. Reagan idolized Ayn Rand’s brand of ruthless individualism, elevating selfishness as a civic virtue. He gutted government programs for working people while slashing taxes for the rich, and in the process rewrote the American social contract.

Ever since, Republicans and their wealthy patrons have been trying to drag us back into a society where only the wealthy thrive while the rest are left to rot. Reagan sneered at government itself, calling it the problem. But what he really meant was that government that works for the people is a problem for the morbidly rich who don’t want to pay for it.

Kennedy and the people he’s installing at the CDC and throughout our public health system are now running the same scam, draping their project in the rhetoric of “health” while selling the same poisonous brew of deregulation, disinvestment, “individual responsibility,” and cruelty.

Just look at the results. The United States today has the worst life expectancy in the developed world. Our people die younger, sicker, and with more preventable disease than citizens of countries that see healthcare as a right rather than a privilege. In Japan, in Canada, in most of Europe, people live longer and healthier lives because their governments take seriously the responsibility to ensure access to healthcare, clean food, and safe living conditions.

Here in the U.S., the rich buy themselves concierge doctors and organic diets while millions of working families can’t even afford insulin. That’s not “fitness.” That’s systemic cruelty.

Darwin understood that our species didn’t survive and flourish because the strong crushed the weak, but because we cared for each other, because we developed the instincts of sympathy and cooperation. David Loye called it “Darwin’s Theory of Love,” and Rianne Eisler documented across her many books how societies across history embraced egalitarian principles and so often rejected the kind of brutal patriarchy that Trump and his followers celebrate.

Anthropologists tell us that when early humans tended to the sick, shared food with the injured, and supported the elderly, that was when civilization began to take root. Dr. Margaret Mead told us she saw the beginning of civilization in a healed human femur from hundreds of thousands of years ago, something that only could have happened if the entire tribe had cared for its wounded member.

That’s the evolutionary advantage that made us who we are. Strip that away, and you don’t have a healthy society: you have a jungle ruled by predators.

And that’s what Kennedy and his MAHA movement — and the entire GOP for the past 44 years — appear to want: a jungle where the predators can get tax cuts while the rest of us lose healthcare, pensions, clean air, and safe food. They want to call it “natural” when kids get asthma from polluted air or cancer from toxic pesticides. They want to say it’s “survival of the fittest” when working people die ten years earlier than their wealthy peers because they spent their lives exposed to poisons in the workplace or because they couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit.

That’s not natural law. That’s man-made cruelty funded by the morbidly rich and justified by pseudoscience.

We can’t let them get away with it. We can’t let this neo-eugenics movement masquerade as patriotism or health reform. America was built on the promise that “We, the People” look out for each other, that we form a government to promote what the Constitution calls “the general Welfare,” not to serve as a handmaiden for the rich.

Washington knew it. Lincoln knew it. FDR knew it. Every generation that has bent the arc of history toward justice has known it. The question today is whether we’ll remember it in time.

Because this is not just about RFK Jr., or Trump, or Reagan’s long shadow. It’s about what kind of country we want to be. Do we want to embrace the morality of Jesus, of Washington, of Lincoln, of Roosevelt and LBJ, who all understood that caring for the vulnerable is the essence of civilization? Or do we want to embrace the morality of the jungle, where selfishness is recast as virtue and cruelty is excused as “fitness”?

Should America continue to be the only developed country in the world where healthcare is a privilege instead of a right? Or are we truly called — both by our Founders and our religious leaders — to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers?

David Loye dedicated his life to rescuing Darwin from the distortions of men like Kennedy, and to reminding us that our evolutionary destiny is not competition to the death but moral progress. We ignore his warning at our peril. If we let Bob Kennedy, MAHA madness, and his billionaire patrons redefine America as a place where only the strong survive, we will lose not just our health but our souls.

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Thursday was the 70th anniversary of the brutal murder of Emmett Till. This week also brought us another mass school shooting, this time in Minneapolis with two children dead and 17 people in the hospital.

There are lessons we must learn from both, as I’ll lay out in a moment.

Immediately following the Minneapolis shooting, another pathetic Republican congressman claimed that the slaughter wasn’t facilitated by guns but by “mental illness, including radical gender ideology.”

A community is grieving, school kids across America are terrified, and after 339 mass shootings since the start of this year you’d think average Americans would finally understand that the horrors of this gun violence have been intentionally inflicted on us by Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court in exchange for cash from the NRA and Russia.

This is a phenomenon as systemic and unique to the United States today as Jim Crow was in the 1950s. The gun control movement needs to learn from the Civil Rights movement.

Back in 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever.

Emmett Till was kidnapped by two Mississippi white men on Aug. 28, 1955, brutally tortured, murdered, and his mangled body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. (And the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a lie, never suffered any meaningful consequence.)

His mother, Mamie Bradley, made the extraordinarily brave decision to show her child’s mutilated face with an open-coffin funeral in their hometown, Chicago.

Jet magazine ran a picture you can see here of Emmett, which went viral, invigorating the Civil Rights movement as it horrified the nation. As President Biden said two years ago, honoring the release of the movie Till:

“JET magazine, the Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers were unflinching and brave in sharing the story of Emmett Till and searing it into the nation’s consciousness.”

That picture made real the horrors of white violence against Black people in America for those who were unfamiliar, or just unwilling, to confront it.

We’ve all heard about Newtown and Stoneman Douglas and Las Vegas, but have you ever seen pictures of the bodies mutilated by the .223 caliber bullets that semi-automatic assault weapons like the AR15 fire?

The odds are pretty close to zero. Most Americans have no idea the kind of damage such weapons of war can do to people, particularly children.

But we need to learn. Because pictures really work when it comes to changing public opinion.

In the 1980s, egged on by partisans in the Reagan administration, America’s anti-abortion movement began the practice of holding up graphic, bloody pictures of aborted fetuses as part of their demonstrations and vigils.

Their literature and magazines, and even some of their advertisements, still often carry or allude to these graphic images.

Those in the movement will tell you that the decision in the 1990s to use these kinds of pictures was a turning point, when “abortion became real“ for many Americans, and even advocates of a woman’s right to choose an abortion started using phrases like “legal, safe, and rare.“

Similarly, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 9-year-old “Napalm Girl” Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked down a rural Vietnamese road after napalm caught her clothes on fire was published in 1972, it helped finally turned the tide on the Vietnam War.

Showing pictures in American media of the result of a mass shooter’s slaughter would be a controversial challenge.

There are legitimate concerns about sensationalizing violence, about morbid curiosity, about warping young minds and triggering PTSD for survivors of violence.

And yet, pictures convey reality in a way that words cannot. One of these days, the parents of children murdered in a school shooting may make the same decision Mamie Till did in 1955.

America’s era of mass shootings kicked off on Aug. 1, 1966 when Charles Whitman murdered his mother and then climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas and begin shooting.

The vast majority of our mass killings, however, began during the Reagan/Bush administrations following the 1984 San Ysidro, California McDonald’s massacre, the Edmond, Oklahoma Post Office shooting of 1986, and the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre in Killeen, Texas in 1991.

Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the gun lobby, his repeal of modest restrictions like the Brady Bill waiting period, and his rhetoric casting firearms as symbols of “freedom” helped unleash a flood of guns into American society, fueling the explosion of both gun ownership and gun violence that has scarred the nation ever since.

We’ve become familiar with the names of the places, and sometimes the dates, but the horror and pain of the torn and exploded bodies has escaped us.

It’s time for America to confront the reality of gun violence. And all my years working in the senior levels of the advertising industry tell me that a graphic portrayal of the consequences of their products is the greatest fear of America’s weapons manufacturers and the NRA.

We did it with tobacco and drunk driving back in the day, showing pictures of people missing half their jaw or mangled and bloody car wreckage, and it worked.

And now there’s a student-led movement asking states to put a check-box on driver’s licenses with the line:

“In the event that I die from gun violence please publicize the photo of my death. #MyLastShot.”

This isn’t, however, something that should just be tossed off, or thrown up on a webpage.

Leadership from multiple venues in American journalism — print, television, web-based publications — should get together and decide what photos to release with parental permission, how to release them, and under what circumstances it could be done to provide maximum impact and minimum trauma.

But Americans must understand what’s really going on.

A decade ago, President Barack Obama put then-VP Joe Biden in charge of his gun task force, and Biden saw the pictures from school shootings back then.

Here’s how The New York Times quoted Biden:

“‘Jill and I are devastated. The feeling — I just can’t imagine how the families are feeling,’ he said, at times struggling to find the right words.”

Obama himself, after seeing the photos, broke into tears on national television.

And we appear to be tiptoeing up to the edge of doing exactly this. The Washington Post featured an article about what happens when people are shot by assault weapons and included this commentary:

"This explains the lead poisoning that plagues survivors of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex.; David Colbath, 61, can scarcely stand or use his hands without pain, and 25-year-old Morgan Workman probably can’t have a baby. It explains the evisceration of small bodies such as that of Noah Pozner, 6, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Peter Wang, 15, killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.
“The Post examined the way bullets broke inside of them — obliterating Noah’s jaw and Peter’s skull, filling their chests with blood and leaving behind gaping exit wounds.”

But we need to go the next step and show the actual pictures for this truth about the horror of gun violence to become widely known. Doing this will take leadership.

And, of course, there must be a Mamie Bradley: a parent, spouse or other relation willing to allow the photos of their loved one to be used in this way.

In 1996 there was a horrific slaughter in Tasmania, Australia, by a shooter using an AR15-style weapon, culminating a series of mass shootings that had plagued that nation for over a decade.

While the mainstream Australian media generally didn’t publish the photos, they were widely circulated.

As a result the Australian public was so repulsed that within a year semi-automatic weapons in civilian hands were outlawed altogether, strict gun control measures were put into place, and a gun-buyback program went into effect that voluntarily took over 700,000 weapons out of circulation.

And that was with John Howard as Prime Minister — a conservative who was as hard-right as Reagan!

In the first years after the laws took place, firearms-related deaths in Australia fell by well over 40 percent, with suicides dropping by 77 percent. There have only been two mass killings in the 29 years since then.

The year 1996 was Australia’s Emmett Till moment.

America needs ours.

NOW READ: How to hit Trump hard on his own horrific record

On Wednesday, there was another highly publicized school shooting. Republicans, as usual, are offering thoughts and prayers.

But why?

Why have Republicans — who, before Ronald Reagan, were the party in favor of gun control — decided that it’s just fine for America to be the only country in the world where the leading cause of childhood deaths and injury is bullets?

Why have Republicans — who during the Eisenhower administration pushed for massive public works programs like the interstate freeways and new schools coast-to-coast — decided instead to kill off as many of those sorts of programs as possible to pay for tax gifts to billionaires?

Why are they defending insider trading in Congress, supporting monopolies that rip off consumers and small businesses, and refusing to do anything about uninsured people or student debt?

The question is answered most easily with another set of questions, these ones rhetorical:

Would you trust your doctor if she told you the only reason she went into medicine was to get rich and doesn’t much care for people? Would you take your kids to such a physician?

Would you trust your child’s teacher if he said he hated kids but needed the paycheck and though teaching might be a great way to meet attractive single mothers of young kids?

Or a pilot who hates flying but loves the paychecks and the flight attendants?

Yet this is exactly what Republicans have done with government. They stand up at campaign rallies and proudly proclaim that government doesn’t work and never will, and then voters hand them the keys.

Once in office, they make sure their wealthy friends and donors get the perks while they steer the rest of us straight into turbulence. It’s sabotage disguised as leadership, and the only way they get away with it is because they’ve convinced enough people that wrecking the plane is the same thing as piloting it.

Republicans — in the years since Reagan told us that, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” — have been like that doctor, teacher, and pilot. They run for public office because it can make them rich, introduce them to people who’ll help them get richer, and might even improve their sex life.

Look, for example, how Tiffany Trump’s new husband suddenly got rich once Donald was back in the White House.

But making life better for average Americans? Hah, they’ll tell you: that’s for Democrats and suckers.

JD Vance has taken seven very expensive taxpayer-funded vacations in the eight months since he became VP; Trump plays golf about every third day and has made an estimated $3.5 billion off his having occupied the White House so far; every Republican in the House and Senate knows that if they treat the right industry the right way they’ll have a very-well-paid job waiting for them when they retire.

They don’t care about governing; they’re just in it for themselves.

This is a far cry from the idealistic notions of public service that animated the Founders and generations of Americans who’ve fought and died for this country in the years since. It’s a twisted embrace of Ayn Rand Libertarianism, a philosophy that says greed is good and whoever’s the most efficient predator deserves whatever they can steal or con people out of.

Once you understand that simple reality, everything else the GOP is up to makes sense.

It explains why they’d saturate our country with guns while taking billions from the gun industry, why they’d deregulate polluters while Americans are dying from pollution and climate change, why they’d sanction a healthcare system that has caused millions of unnecessary deaths but has meanwhile made insurance, hospital, and healthcare executives into billionaires.

This past Spring was the 22nd anniversary of my radio program. During that entire time, I’ve run a contest for anybody who can name even one single piece of legislation from the past 40+ years (since Reagan) that was:

• authored by Republicans,
• principally co-sponsored by Republicans,
• passed Congress with a Republican majority,
• signed by a Republican president,
• and benefited average working people or the poor more than it did the GOP’s donor class.

Outside of a feeble-attempt bill to regulate spam callers during the first Bush administration and legislation reversing the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, nobody has ever won the autographed book prize.

Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or subsidized higher education.

In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis; nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick; and jobs pay well enough and have union pensions so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

But not in America. Republican politicians have fought tooth-and-nail for generations to prevent any of those things from happening here.

Which again raises the question: “Why?”

Why do Republican politicians promote hateful messages and cruel policies? Why are Republican-run Red states the real “s------” parts of the US with the highest rates of poverty, violence, early death, disease, and illiteracy?

What motivates these Republican politicians to say they’re for the “little guy” when the only policies they pursue are to cut taxes on the morbidly rich, gut unions, destroy public schools, and ship jobs overseas?

It’s not about ideology.

Republicans don’t hate Social Security and Medicare, for example, because they’re afraid that those programs are going to somehow turn America into a “socialist” country. They hate those programs because they’re paid for with tax dollars, and greedy Republicans hate to pay their fair share of taxes.

It’s not just about racism, although it often appears that way.

The reason Republicans work so hard to keep Black and brown people down is because they subscribe to a weird economic theory that “requires” an underclass who do most of the hard work for very little money. Thus, morbidly rich Republican “donors” — being part of the overclass — can reap the benefits of increased corporate profits while keeping their taxes low so they can stuff the extra cash into their money bins.

If their use of racist language and Confederate iconography brings in a few more low-IQ white voters, that’s just icing on the cake. They can use the racist yahoos to get themselves reelected so giant corporations will continue to stuff their SuperPACs with lobbyist cash they can use for their own retirement.

It’s not about charity.

Republicans say that the housing, healthcare, and other needs of poor people should be taken care of through “private philanthropy” instead of government. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes to maintain a healthy society.

It’s not about Christianity, although they’re constantly invoking Jesus for everything from pushing the death penalty on women who got an abortion to giving bigots the legal right to discriminate against gay, lesbian, and trans people.

Jesus never once mentioned abortion and decried bigotry, but they regularly ignore and even flout His teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and His warnings in Matthew 25. They protect multimillionaire evangelists’ tax-free status, and the preachers repay them by preaching politics from the pulpit.

It’s not about saving Americans from the pandemic or concern for public health.

Last time he was president, Trump used the Defense Production Act to force mostly brown and Black meatpackers back to work, not to keep Americans safe. As long as the factories were humming and the stock market was rising, a few hundred thousand dead Americans were just collateral damage with the 2020 election looming.

It’s not about conservatism.

They’re not interested in slowly or “cautiously” improving society, or “conserving” anything other than the balances in their own checking accounts. They like to use the word “conservative,” but they’ve rendered it meaningless at best and code for “racist” or “obsessively selfish” at worst.

It’s not about making the world a better place.

Republican politicians deny climate change, deregulate industries that poison our air and water, and do everything they can to screw working people out of unions, good wages, and decent benefits. They’re totally down with pesticides that are killing our pollinators while they poison our atmosphere with their carbon emissions, all just to make a buck.

It’s not about having a better-educated electorate or populace.

They’ve spent decades trying to destroy our public education system that was, in the 1960s, the envy of the world. When they did away with free and low-cost college education during the Reagan years they kicked off almost $2 trillion worth of student debt which is preventing young people from starting families, opening small businesses, or even buying their first house. But it sure is profitable for Republican-donor banksters!

It isn’t about “culture.”

They do a good-old-boy NASCAR/Duck Dynasty routine to bring in the rubes, but there’s no way Trump would ever invite the average Republican voter with a giant flag and a pickup truck to any of his golf clubs, nor would Ted Cruz want to vacation with one of them or their families in Cancun. And if any of their daughters were raped, they’d be getting an abortion in a New York minute.

It’s not about “gun violence.”

As long as their investments in weapons manufacturers are profitable and the problem of gun violence is limited to poor- and working-class Americans, Republican politicians don’t give a rat’s ass about “gun safety.” Although they’re happy to use guns as a wedge issue to bring in male voters who are insecure about their own masculinity. As California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on Wednesday:

“We cannot even make it through the first week of school without mass shootings. And the @GOP will continue to do absolutely nothing while our kids are being gunned down. This is sick.”

It’s not about “protecting our children.”

The main through-story of the GOP attacks on queer people is that “they’re coming for your kids.” If Republican politicians actually cared about our kids, they’d do something about America being the only country in the world where gun violence is the leading cause of childhood death.

Republican politicians know that most pedophiles are straight men, but attacking defenseless minorities has been the cheap trick of craven demagogues from the eras of crusades, pogroms, and witch burnings to this day. And don’t get me started on the damage Bobby Kennedy Jr. is inflicting on our public health system and programs to vaccinate our children and grandchildren.

It’s not about immigrants taking jobs from working-class Americans.

After “reforming” our immigration laws in 1986, Reagan stopped enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring people who are here without documentation (even though those employers were — and are — committing a crime by hiring undocumented workers). This was part-and-parcel of the GOP’s war on unions.

As a result, entire industries like construction and meatpacking that once provided good union jobs have been de-unionized, their former American-citizen union employees replaced by low-wage workers without documentation.

And when the spotlight gets shined on those industries, Republicans are more than happy to put poor, hard-working brown people in jail, but there’s no way they’re ever going to go after wealthy white employers. Not a single wealthy white employer ever goes to jail, although they’re the ones who initiated the “crime.”

Republican politicians don’t give a damn about your job, particularly when they can find somebody else to do it cheaper, although they do have to put on a little show from time to time to keep the racists happy.

It’s not about putting America or Americans “first.”

Reagan and Bush the Elder negotiated NAFTA and revived the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) so businesses could offshore entire factories. Since the Reagan administration instituted neoliberalism in 1981, over 60,000 factories have left America, taking along with them at least 15 million jobs.

Trump’s rewrite of NAFTA even gave American companies a huge new tax break if they’d move their factories from America to Mexico.

At the end of the day, all Republican politicians care about is money. Greed is their principle animating force, and is what binds them to their morbidly rich donors.

The greed embraced by Republican politicians — and the billionaires and CEOs who fund them — is why average Americans can’t have nice things. It’s why we and our children must walk the tightrope of life without the same safety net other countries — from Canada to Costa Rica, France to Taiwan — offer their citizens.

It’s why children are dead this week in Minneapolis as Republican politicians happily pocket NRA cash.

It doesn’t matter to Republican politicians how many Americans die unnecessarily, how many of our fellow citizens struggle in misery and poverty, how many children’s growth is stunted or bodies and brains are poisoned by industrial and mining waste being poured into our air and rivers, or terrified by active shooter drills in our schools.

It’s a safe bet that over the next three years Trump and Republicans in Congress will not give my listeners an opportunity to win that contest.

As long as the money keeps rolling in and the GOP’s billionaire patrons keep paying less than 3 percent in income taxes, greed and their own wealth and power are all Republican politicians care about or are willing to fight for.

Monday night, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker came right out and said it. Trump sending troops into American cities has nothing whatsoever to do with crime or policing but, instead, is all about stealing the 2026 election:

“Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

In fact, the cities with the highest crime and homicide rates are, respectively, Memphis, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri — both in red states.

So, if this isn’t about crime, why is Trump working so hard to get Americans used to heavily armed troops — who aren’t trained in policing but can be very effective at crowd control — in our blue cities?

The simple answer is that he and his cronies are terrified of suffering Richard Nixon’s fate (40 of his senior officials were indicted; many went to prison including his Attorney General and White House Counsel). That’s why they’re planning to steal the 2026 and 2028 elections by any means necessary, and the troops are part of their plan.

Because they know that one of the most common causes of people pouring out into the streets — including in ways that brought down authoritarian governments — was the regime in power stealing an election.

Pritzker said it clearly and emphatically:

“This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections.”

Let that roll around in your head: “Militarize our cities, and end elections.”

Pritzker is no wild-eyed leftie or crazed conspiracy theorist. He’s the billionaire heir to the Hyatt fortune so he knows the billionaire circles Trump travels in well. He’s the governor of America’s sixth-largest state, with a population larger than 170 nations or 87 percent of all UN member states.

He’s an attorney who knows the law, and a successful businessman who’s founded multiple companies, including backstopping tech companies, starting a venture capital operation, and building a private equity firm from scratch. He was elected in 2022 with the highest vote share of any Democratic governor anywhere in the nation in over 60 years.

And he’s watching what Trump is doing far better, apparently, than our mainstream press. He’s tracking Trump’s executive order giving the president the power to direct the military to seize voting machines (and thus nullify their votes) in blue cities that may swing states away from the GOP. And Trump’s executive order to end mail-in voting.

Trump’s statement this week that Americans “want a dictator,” was almost certainly cribbed from his mentor, Vladimir Putin. His new order for the National Guard to work with ICE (eventually, presumably, to work for ICE, Trump’s personal secret masked police force) to create a “Rapid Reaction Force” to deal with civil disturbances reveals his end game.

Its mandate is to assist “local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.”

It appears to be modeled almost exactly after the Rosgvardiya National Guard rapid reaction force Putin created in 2016 to put down anti-Putin and pro-Alexei Navalny protests. Today the Rosgvardiya numbers over 600,000 men under arms. Putin probably told him about it in the car in Alaska, as this EO came right after that meeting.

Additionally, Trump‘s executive order essentially invites Proud Boys and other white supremacist militia into the tent to help with election intimidation efforts. It creates “an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” who National Guard leaders “shall each deputize the members of this unit to enforce federal law.”

As Alec Karakatsanis of the Civil Rights Corps, wrote on X, this will “permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers.” It’s a 21st-century echo of the GOP’s Operation Eagle Eye, which enlisted white men to threaten people of color at voting polls in the 1960s and 1970s, or Hitler’s SA, the Sturmabteilung.

So what sort of civil disturbance is it that Trump’s anticipating putting down with his Rapid Reaction Force?

Here’s a partial list of countries where a recent stolen or apparently stolen election caused citizens to pour out into the streets to challenge the regime in power:

Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Panama, Philippines, Georgia, Mozambique, Serbia, Malawi, Hong Kong, Comoros, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mauritania, Tunisia, Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, Peru.

Stolen elections and the protests they provoke are one of the most common features of countries that are in the process of sliding from democracy into authoritarian fascism and strongman rule.

And if you think Trump doesn’t believe people will turn out in the streets — sometimes violently — to demand the overturn of a stolen election, just remember January 6. If you truly believed that an election had been stolen in broad daylight, might you have been among those protestors, too? Given that example, you can add the United States to the list above.

And Trump definitely doesn’t want Americans — particularly Democrats — out in the streets protesting a stolen election again (unless Republicans lose so decisively he can’t steal the election, in which case he’ll try to repeat January 6).

Make no mistake: this is what Trump’s militarization of blue cities is all about. If he can confiscate enough voting machines, refuse to count enough votes, intimidate enough voters, and disqualify enough mail-in ballots to invalidate Democratic majorities in a few dozen big cities, he can flip as many blue states to red as he wants. And keep the GOP in power forever.

And he has to. In his mind, he has no choice.

After then Attorney General Merrick Garland finally got off his a-- following two years of worried thumb-sucking, just the smallest and most tentative efforts to hold Trump to account for a tiny percentage of the many crimes he committed both in and after his first term would have sent him to prison for the rest of his life.

Trump knows this well. He was arrested and mug-shot photographed in Georgia, convicted of fraud and adjudicated liable for sexual abuse in New York, and was looking at dozens of other lawsuits and potential criminal and civil charges that are now on suspension, since his election as president last year.

He can’t go back. His life and his fortune literally depend on his holding power and never allowing Democrats to have subpoena ability in the House or Senate again, at least as long as he’s alive.

It might explain why he just appointed 2020 election denier/activist and Cleta Mitchell protégé Heather Honey to a senior position charged with “overseeing” the 2026 and 2028 elections, particularly, as Miles Taylor points out, the overseas mail-in votes that tend to trend Democratic.

As ProPublica noted:

“Honey has led at least three organizations devoted to transforming election systems in ways championed by conservatives, such as tightening eligibility requirements for people to be on voter rolls. Members of Honey’s Pennsylvania Fair Elections, a state chapter of Mitchell’s nationwide Election Integrity Network, have challenged the eligibility of thousands of residents to be on voter rolls.“Honey has also been involved in numerous other efforts to transform elections around the country, including a successful push to get many states with Republican leadership to pull out of a bipartisan interstate partnership to share data to make voting more secure.”

He’s getting ready.

After all, Trump is the man who cheered as his followers killed three police officers and smeared feces on the walls of America’s Capitol while trying to overturn the 2020 election.

He’s the guy who routinely lies to the American people while threatening and castigating reporters who dare call him out on it.

He’s the one who openly admires Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Kim, Xi, and pretty much every other tinpot and major dictator in the world.

And the people who work for him — looking at the fates of John Mitchell, John Dean, G. Gordon Liddy and others who were busted for following the illegal and unconstitutional orders of a corrupt president, Richard Nixon — are equally emphatic that they’re never going to spend a day in a federal prison, either.

So, get ready because Trump’s already well more than halfway down the road toward fascism and, in his mind, there’s no stopping until America’s democracy is buried under the old Rose Garden and our dissenters are as quiet and terrified as are those few still remaining in Russia, Hungary, and Turkey.

If Democratic governors and mayors are going to stop Trump from having his armed forces pre-positioned to help Republicans steal the 2026 elections, they need to get an infusion of Pritzker’s and Newsom’s courage and begin to seriously fight.

A coalition or interstate compact — formal or informal — will be absolutely necessary to resist Trump’s armed forces. Perhaps even a sort of soft succession, openly defying Trump’s illegal orders and threatened violence.

Governors are not without resources, as both Pritzker and Newsom have pointed out. They just need to use them. Let your state’s governor know!

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I’m not just worried; I’m enraged. We’re watching our system of government being systematically, step-by-step refashioned into a surveillance-fueled engine of political vengeance.

Even worse, the same chilling logic that ruled Stalin’s courts — “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime” — has become this administration’s sinister operating principle. It retrofits guilt to the target, not justice to evidence.

That phrase isn’t hyperbole. It’s rooted in dark history. It was popularized in the Soviet Union, attributed to figures like Soviet jurist Andrey Vyshinsky or the notorious secret police chief (and Vladimir Putin’s hero) Lavrentiy Beria. The sentiment is unmistakable: Arrest or investigate the person first, cook up the criminal case later.

History proves the simple fact that nobody’s invulnerable to this. Everybody has made some sort of error, a typo or mistake on a tax or mortgage form, possession of federally-criminal marijuana, a protest post on social media that could be spun as a “threat.”

With a thorough enough investigation — like what they’re doing to John Bolton right now — most any of us could be hauled before a court on trumped-up charges. Particularly now that various forms of speech (like criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu or calling for boycotting Israel) are being functionally criminalized.

One 1940 Soviet transcript even has Molotov telling Juozas Urbšys that suspects should be “arrested and brought before the court, and the articles will be found,” a precise blueprint for manufacturing guilt.

Before that, 18th-century Scottish jurist Lord Braxfield said, “Let them bring me prisoners, and I will find them law,” and Russian proverbs like “if there’s a neck, there’s a collar” delivered the same moral decay: justice shaped by authority, not truth. This isn’t ancient lore; it’s the root of state-constructed guilt.

Now that ancient horror is pulsing through our institutions at the insistence of Donald Trump and his lickspittles in the DOJ and DHS.

Case in point: Kilmar Abrego García — a father and husband of an American citizen, living in Maryland, protected by law, with three young U.S. citizen children and official permission to remain in the United States — was illegally deported to El Salvador.

The administration called it a simple “clerical error” in March 2025, but public outcry and legal filings revealed something far more grotesque: Garcia was imprisoned in a dictator’s notorious “no exit” concentration camp famous for its harrowing conditions, was tortured, and then — so Trump’s people could save face — re-arrested when he returned successfully.

He now faces human smuggling charges from 2022, based on testimony from a convicted criminal who was offered leniency in exchange for it, only after he challenged the deportation. Worse, ICE is plotting to send Garcia not to Costa Rica — where he might be safe — but to Uganda, a country he has no ties to and where few speak Spanish.

His lawyers paint it as vindictive prosecution, as, apparently, did a federal judge this week — a punishment for daring to fight back.

This is not legal enforcement. It’s political vengeance masquerading as justice: identify the man first, find or define the crime later.

Look at Bolton. Months after any plausible need for urgency, the FBI raided his home, dredging up classified material cases that were long dormant.

The kickoff? He ended up on the 60-plus-names enemies list now-FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in his book “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.”

That’s “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime” in its most classic form.

But this malignant logic is no longer confined to political elites or contested legal cases; it’s sweeping across everyday dissent. Post the wrong meme on Facebook or X, show up at a rally with your face captured on camera — even once — and you can be flagged just like in China, Hungary, and Russia.

Big Brother is now AI, drones, and facial recognition systems feeding centralized dossiers and giant data companies working with government police agencies.

Law enforcement and federal agents are actively using surveillance cameras, social media mining, facial recognition, and geolocation tools to identify demonstrators, and — when Trump tries to steal an election or some other outrage and people pour into the streets — that power can be turned on anyone who dares to dissent.

Take StingRays, those cellphone spoofing devices. These bogus cell towers trick your phone into thinking you’re connected to a real cell tower (they pass through calls and data) but once connected they can read pretty much everything useful to the police that’s on your phone without your knowledge.

They’re now routinely used at protests and public events to harvest data on everyone nearby, not just criminal suspects. In one recent anti-ICE protest, researchers noticed anomalies in signal patterns, evidence of IMSI-catcher StingRay deployment. Yet law enforcement usually refuses to comment, denies their use, or hides behind national security secrecy, even as thousands of these devices have now been deployed to police and federal agencies across the country.

Imagine: you’re at a peaceful protest, you post a live stream or an update to Facebook or X. A drone snags your face, surveillance cameras tag you on the edges of the crowd, your phone pings to a StingRay, or your social media post is scraped and now you’re “the man.” The system is primed to “discover” the crime once it has your name.

Fed into the federal or state machines, that record becomes a justification for visa revocation, job termination, or even criminal charges, all not because you committed a crime, but because you dared challenge Dear Leader’s growing police state. Because you exercised your First Amendment right to protest.

As I wrote in “The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy,” this is 21st century authoritarianism with digital tools: identity becomes guilt, data becomes indictment, dissent becomes criminal. This is authoritarian policing in the digital age: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

And it’s happening all across the country. ICE used AI-generated lists — scraped from sites like the shadowy pro-Netanyahu Canary Mission — to target student protesters. Visas have been revoked and people deported over minor infractions like speeding tickets and “trespassing” on university or city property.

One student was detained on campus and imprisoned for weeks with no warrant ever shown. Another, a green card holder, had their status threatened because of political views in clear violation of the Bill of Rights. Others lost their scholarships or were thrown out of universities.

And it’s not just the students or protestors; they’re now going after institutions they see as not sufficiently compliant with their fascist agenda. In an echo of Hungary and Russia shutting down or cowing independent universities, Harvard had its $2.3 billion funding frozen because it wouldn’t capitulate to political demands.

All anchored in the same twisted logic: identify the person, then dig deep into their past to find something, anything, they may have done wrong.

“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

Another example are how the Trump police state is going after California Senator Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Fed Governor Lisa Cook for checking the wrong box on mortgage applications. All are now looking at years in prison because Trump labeled them enemies and his toadies “found the crime.”

You could be next. Or your neighbor or best friend.

This is not speculation or hyperbole. Our institutions are bending to politics in ways that echo the way Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Lukashenko, Putin, and Orbán successfully crushed dissent. Neutral, professional civil servants were replaced with loyalists, their versions of the Department of Justice independence were gutted, universities were cowed, airwaves surveilled, and, like here, their phones are “read” when they show up at a demonstration. Democracy is unraveling under the weight of fear and retribution.

If this doesn’t spur us into action, nothing will.

Democratic leaders must not treat this as partisan theater; it is existentially dangerous. We must:

Demand full transparency on surveillance tools and facial recognition programs.

Ban law enforcement’s use of StingRays and IMSI-catchers without warrants and full public reporting.

Prohibit facial recognition against legal demonstrators.

Require social media privacy and end secret algorithms and back-door deals with federal police when it comes to demonstrators and protestors.

Restore DOJ and civil service independence from the White House.

Safeguard visa rights and immigrant protections.

Elevate Abrego García’s and John Bolton’s cases to national moral action, making them impossible to ignore.

Hold hearings, issue subpoenas, defund institutions that weaponize law against dissent, and highlight this threat in every forum from state and federal House and Senate chambers to the streets.

We cannot allow the old Soviet (and modern Russian) slogan —“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime” — to become the default of American governance.

What’s happening to Bolton, James Clapper, James Comey, Cook, James, Schiff, Miles Taylor, et al — and student protestors across the country — is a crime against our Constitution and traditional American values. To go along with it is to accept Trump’s assertion that protest is culpability, dissent is danger, and democracy is a relic.

We must fight now, or what’s left of our democracy will slip into permanent chains.

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