It’s no longer a case of “the threat is real.” It’s already happening. Courts are repeatedly ruling against the current regime. But with a failure to adhere to the rule of law, our society’s system of checks and balances is nonfunctional, and our democratic republic is gone. What we already have is the beginnings of a dictatorship, as history has seen many times before–in other countries. The current regime is clearly and openly targeting political enemies; this is a clear step nearing the end of our system.

In a more concise version, here is Robert Reich from his substack:

“Federal judges in more than 120 cases so far have sought to stop Trump — judges appointed by Republicans as well as Democrats, some appointed by Trump himself — but the regime is either ignoring or appealin...

Some recent events, as summarized by Heather Cox Richardson in yesterday’s Letters from an American:

“Early yesterday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent three U.S. citizens aged 2, 4, and 7 from Louisiana, including one with Stage 4 cancer, to Honduras when they deported their mothers. The three are children of two different mothers who were arrested while checking in with the government as part of their routine process for immigration proceedings. The women and their children were not permitted to speak to family or lawyers before being flown to Honduras. The cancer patient was sent out of the country without medication or consultation with doctors although, according to Charisma Madarang and Lorena O’Neil of Rolling Stone, ICE agents were told of the child’s med...

David Brooks may have gotten some bold talk into the open, and it’s being amplified in many places. I see his article from yesterday quoted in many places on social media (including my own FB), and below in Robert Reich’s substack of today:

“Friends,

If the Trump regime can dictate what the universities of America teach or research or publish, or what students can learn or say, no university is safe.

Not even the truth is safe.

If the Trump regime can revoke student visas because students exercise their freedom of speech on a university campus, freedom of speech is not secure for any of us.

If the Trump regime can abduct a permanent resident of the United States and send him to a torture prison in El Salvador, without any criminal charges, no American is safe.

What do w...

David Brooks, of all people, has it right–it’s time for a mass uprising in this country.

Just an excerpt here:

Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together. But even these efforts are insular and fragmented. Several members of the Big Ten conference are working on forming an alliance to defend academic freedom. Good. But that would be 18 schools out of roughly 4,000 degree-granting American colleges and universities.

So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this too is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.

What is happening now is not normal poli...

From Robert Reich today, making clear what couldn’t be any clearer already:

Trump’s playbook is Viktor Orbán’s

Friends,

A few days ago I had breakfast with my old friend John Shattuck, who, as president of Central European University in Budapest, saw firsthand how Viktor Orbán took over Hungary’s democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state.

When Trump was elected in 2016, Trump endorsed Orbán, and Orbán started attacking universities — forcing the Central European University out of Hungary.

John believes Trump is emulating Orbán’s playbook. (Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”)

Orbân’s playbook has 10 parts, according to John:

One: Take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using polit...

Authoritarianism is here.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/authoritarianism

Now threatening to deport U.S. citizens.

This is a time that will, indeed, go down in history. But who will write the history that our children and grandchildren read?

Another day, another struggle with despair over what we are living in and how “U.S.A.” becomes something despicable. Robert Reich offers some words of encouragement on his substack:

“Friends,

It’s been another grueling week.

Several of you have asked me how to live in a nation whose leader has embraced cruelty as public policy. How do we inhabit Trump’s America without becoming complicit in this cruelty?

Molly watched Trump sign the executive order initiating criminal investigations of Miles Taylor (who wrote an anonymous 2018 New York Times op-ed describing internal resistance to Trump in his first term) and Christopher Krebs (who played a major role in undercutting Trump’s false claims about 2020 election fraud).

Molly asks: Is this America?

No, Molly, it is not...

Here is just one example of the amazing work science researchers are doing at universities, this one in Australia. This is the very sort of thing that would also happen at American institutions, but our idiocracy is using $ to turn education into a set of political litmus tests.

I don’t even want to note the absolute nonsensical craziness going on with the idiocracy’s approach to the world economy and global trade. Just look at any news source, but try not to look at the markets. Probably an overstatement, but a number of sources report that In 11 weeks, 11 trillion dollars has disappeared.

The daily news truly is unbelievable. Even his own team is calling its internal rivals “morons.”

Today’s posting from Heather Cox Richardson:

Stocks were up early today as traders put their hopes in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s suggestion that the Trump administration was open to negotiations for lowering Trump’s proposed tariffs. But then U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said there would not be exemptions from the tariffs for individual products or companies, and President Donald J. Trump said he was going forward with 104% tariffs on China, effective at 12:01 am on Wednesday.

Markets fell again. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen by another 320 points, or 0.8%, a 52-week low. The S&P 500 fell 1...

From the NYTimes Editorial Board today:

In his attacks on law firms, universities and other American institutions, President Trump is relying on an illusion. The illusion is that the institutions are powerless to fight back and that they face a choice between principle and survival.

These institutions do not have to capitulate to Mr. Trump. They have a realistic path to defeating his intimidation. Some law firms and others have begun to fight. In doing so, they have provided the beginnings of a playbook for standing up to his attempts to weaken core tenets of American democracy, including due process, free speech and the constitutional system of checks and balances.

For anybody who is skeptical of this idea and sees Mr...