thus always to tyrants
A View From the Near Future It began, as these things always do, with a reasonable nod. Fraud, we were told, lurked in the margins. Not everywhere. Not often. But somewhere. A statistical ghost. And so, in the name of confidence, clarity, cleanliness, we forged the National ID. A tidy little talisman of belonging. A […]
Under Donald Trump officials and media surrogates have reached for a familiar incantation: domestic terrorism. It has been applied not only to protestors, but to movements, to gatherings, to grief itself. In some cases, it has been applied to people who are now dead. That detail matters. When someone is killed during a protest and […]
Last night, people gathered in Brockport, New York. A small college town. Hundreds of miles from Minnesota. Candles in gloved hands. Silence broken only by breath and resolve. That distance is important. It’s the detail the mockers trip over. “What does Brockport have to do with Minnesota?” “What a waste of time.” “Do you really […]
The government is gaslighting us. Not metaphorically. Not rhetorically. Literally. We are being told not to believe what we saw, not to trust witnesses, not to trust video, not to trust journalists who were assaulted for doing their jobs. We are told the problem is our perception, our tone, our lack of patience. Fine. If […]
It is too common a scenario. They come at night, because daylight invites witnesses. The officers move through the neighborhood with practiced ease. Potential areas to investigate have been noted in advance. The orders are clear, the papers are already signed. This is not a search. It is a hunt. The illegal runs when he […]
There is something profoundly unwell about a president who sees rebellion in every raised voice, treason in every crowd, and enemies in the governed themselves. This week, Donald Trump once again demonstrated that his presidency is not merely authoritarian in instinct, but unstable in execution. In response to protests in Minneapolis following an aggressive federal […]
What frightens is not just this single moment of violence, but the machinery that made it foreseeable. Governments do not wake up one morning and discover they have thugs roaming their streets. They manufacture them. They take administrative agencies, arm them, strip away restraint, replace training with ideology, and aim them politically. When that process is complete, brutality is no longer a breakdown of the system. It is the system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
There are two horrible stories this week. Two stories separated by a thousand miles but driven by the same engine: a government drunk on its own authority and a political movement cheering it on like spectators at a public stoning. The first story comes from Dilley, Texas. Under President Trump, ICE’s family detention regime has […]
The most terrifying authoritarian actions never arrive wearing jackboots and shouting decrees. They arrive in legal briefs, phrased in the language of “security,” “integrity,” and “national interest.” And now Donald Trump is preparing one of the most dangerous authoritarian projects in modern American history: the power to strip millions of naturalized Americans of their citizenship […]
“All we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID” — President Donald J. Trump It sounds simple — obvious, even. That’s the trick. Authoritarians have always loved the obvious answer because it disguises the malicious one. The United […]
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