Yesterday, the New York Times reported on an ICE raid in Montebello, California which appeared to target Latino citizens solely because of the color of their skin.

The raid took place last Thursday, when ICE agents descended on the predominantly Latino working-class suburb of Los Angeles. Their target was a car lot which hosts a number of auto body shops and tow-truck businesses. Video footage shows the agents bracing employees against the wall and, in one case, tackling someone to the ground. The questions they asked suggest that they were not searching for anyone in particular and were instead trying to ascertain the citizenship status of the people who work there.

In other words, the agents saw a bunch of Brown people in a particular place and presumed that at least some of them would be undocumented.

Commenting about the article on Bluesky, Ami Fields-Meyer, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, addressed “my Jewish community,” asking why he could find so little opposition to the Trump administration's racist policies:

The US government is rounding people up based on their skin color, and many of the old guard Jewish organizations that have been most vocal about feelings of abandonment from other ethnic minority groups are nowhere to be found. Total silence.

He makes a valid point. Since Hamas's terrorist attacks on October 7^th, 2023, some Jewish organizations have expressed dismay at the lack of sympathy for Jews on the part of Black and Brown people. But the organizations can themselves be accused of ignoring racism against others, a trend which began well before October 7^th.

It gets worse than that, however. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have not only turned away from combating racism against other groups; they have increasingly allied with the very forces doing the racism—namely, Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Earlier this month, The Forward reported on a particularly unhinged speech by ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt to an audience of Republican attorneys general. “You have people hiding their faces behind scarves and keffiyehs like they’re in ISIS,” he complained in a reference to pro-Palestine college protesters, adding that they have been “storming libraries, vandalizing buildings and literally—I’m not exaggerating—terrorizing their classmates.”

Doubling down on the comparison of protesters to terrorists, he described the students as “frothing at the mouth, looking like they just came out of Mosul” (the site of a battle against the Islamic State in Iraq). Lest anyone mistake the implication, he declared that “the Founding Fathers didn’t want al-Qaida right running rampant on our streets.”

While he did acknowledge antisemitism on the right, he scorned the notion that it is “a problem on all sides.” Instead, he maintained, the “real deal threat” was “this convergence of what I call the radical left and, like, Islamist groups here in the U.S.”

Last year's campus protests witnessed far too many antisemitic incidents, as I have written in the past. But the notion that a majority of the protesters were motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment cannot be defended—not least because a substantial number of the participants were Jewish themselves.

Despite what Greenblatt claims and many others believe, college students are no more antisemitic than the broader population, according to the two most systematic surveys that have addressed the subject. Both studies were carried out after the October 7^th, 2023 attacks.

Prejudicial antisemitism, or the holding of negative stereotypes toward Jews (e.g. “Jews have too much power in the United States today”), finds no more support among college students than the general public and is a distinctly minority attitude among both groups.

Violent antisemitism, or the belief that Jews deserve to be violently attacked, finds even less agreement and displays no notable differences between students and the public at large.

Anti-Zionism, on the other hand, is far more prevalent among university students than the general public. But the surveys also found very little overlap between those who hold antisemitic views and those with anti-Zionist ones. This suggests that the two sentiments are not, in fact, equivalent—which makes sense, given that support for a single state in Palestine that affords equal rights to Jews and Palestinians can hardly be said to reflect any anti-Jewish animus.

The same surveys find that the vast majority of college students—between 70 and 77 percent—believe that advocating genocide against Jews is unacceptable. Granted, the fact that the other 23 to 30 percent would at least tolerate such calls is concerning. But contrary to Greenblatt, the notion that college campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism is just plain wrong.

As for where the biggest threat to Jews lies today, the evidence points squarely to the political right—the very group with whom Greenblatt and the ADL find such common cause. Another survey of predominantly young Americans does identify “evidence of prejudice on the ideological left and among racial minority groups.” At the same time, it concludes, “the data clearly show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right.”

Indeed, for all its Zionist window dressing, the Republican Party is home to a shocking number of antisemites, including Donald Trump himself. They are not the type who valorize Hamas, of course. Instead, they are the old-school, blood-and-soil variety—the kind that thinks the government is controlled by a secret Jewish cabal bent on destroying the volk.

Yet, these are precisely the forces with whom the ADL seeks to align us.

But there is a reason why Greenblatt and the ADL work so hard to form alliances on the antisemitic right—and why like-minded Jewish organizations find a welcome home there: Both have committed themselves to the oppression of Brown people. The ADL offers unflinching support to Israel and what scores of human rights experts and organizations have determined to be its genocidal assault on Gaza. Meanwhile, the Republican Party and its activist base are trying to remake America in the name of white power.

It makes sense, therefore, that the two sides find so much common ground.

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Earlier today, Democratic Senator Alex Padilla was tackled to the ground and handcuffed by FBI agents after challenging Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a press conference in Los Angeles.

Needless to say, the sight of government jackboots manhandling a sitting US Senator is not a common one. It also represents a dramatic escalation in the police-state tactics of an autocratic president.

At the same time, it will inevitably fail to elicit the sustained media attention that it warrants—not because the public has become inured to such displays but rather because the Democrats will not make an issue out of it.

On any given day, social media is full of indignation at mainstream news outlets for not giving Trump’s outrageous conduct the spotlight it deserves. This anger, while understandable, is misplaced. Yes, we should hold news organizations accountable for their editorial decisions. But as much as the media makes the news, they follow it, too. And if the Democrats are not drawing attention to something, the press can ignore it.

The reason why the news media tends to follow the GOP line when framing events is because Republicans are experts at manufacturing scandals which implicate their opponents.

The examples are legion. But one that comes to mind took place in March 2021. At the time, America was experiencing a post-pandemic surge in border crossings. The increase, while notable, hardly constituted a crisis. A country of 340 million people is perfectly capable of handling a sudden influx of a few hundred thousand migrants.

Yet, it still became a massive story because Republicans started screaming about it—nonstop and in unison. They held staged media events calling attention to Biden’s “open borders.” They sought out anyone who would listen and hammer the Democrats on immigration. Any question posed to them, regardless of the topic, received an answer on the demographic catastrophe the Biden administration had unleashed on the country.

Predictably, the media took the bait, providing ubiquitous coverage that accepted the Republicans’ “crisis” narrative. NBC's Meet the Press did a whole-ass episode at the Southern border. So alarmed was Biden at the bad press that he put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the addressing the non-existent problem, as if she was supposed to do something about it.

If the Republicans can invent a fake crisis, imagine what the Democrats could do with a real one—such as, say, the manhandling and arrest of a US Senator for the crime of asking a question. If the entire party did as the Republicans do and flooded the zone with righteous fury, news organizations would cover it. They might not want to cover it, but they would have no choice; if Padilla’s lawless arrest were the only thing that any Democrat talked about for a week, the media could not very well pretend that it was not happening.

But if all the Democrats do is issue cursory, milquetoast statements, then, yes, the media can treat it like a non-story, as they are likely to do now.

Shocking as it is, Padilla’s treatment is not particularly noteworthy in light of the tyrannical conduct that the Trump administration engages in on a daily basis. But it is egregious enough that the Democrats could turn it into a media-saturation event if they wanted to. They need only do things that call attention to it—things like shutting down Senate business or flying the entire Democratic Senate delegation to Los Angeles and challenging Noem to arrest them all. These are the sorts of displays that could capture attention and gain lasting resonance in the public imagination.

Indeed, they could have done the same for any of Trump's other abuses, whether his pardons of the January 6^th insurrectionists, the detentions of people on speech grounds, the deportations without due process, the arrest and prosecution of a sitting federal judge, etc., etc. With a little effort and coordination, any one of these affronts to Constitution and country could have garnered nonstop coverage that stuck in the public mind and eroded Trump's legitimacy.

But it cannot happen when the only opposition party in an authoritarian country believes that it is powerless to shape public perceptions.

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Now that Donald Trump has deployed thousands of soldiers to Los Angeles, the commentariat is awash in debate over his motivations. Was it an understandable, if excessive, reaction to violent protesters? Was it instead meant to distract from the depraved budget bill he is trying to ram through Congress?

Such speculation misses the point. There is a simple reason why Trump sent troops into Los Angeles: because he can. But why he can is a question that gets to the heart of our predicament.

On the face of it, there is nothing illegal about Trump's order. A specific provision in Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services allows the president to deploy the National Guard if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

What constitutes a “rebellion,” you ask? The law does not specify. This means that it is up to the president to decide—the same president who is deploying the troops.

That is quite a loophole. Indeed, the latitude afforded by the provision is wide enough to permit all manner of abuses. So long as the president claims that there is a “rebellion,” he can sic the army on the American people at his discretion.

In this case, Trump clearly is abusing his authority, even if he is technically following the letter of the law. “For the federal government to take over the California National Guard, without the request of the governor, to put down protests is truly chilling,” explains Erwin Chemerinsky, the Dean of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is using the military domestically to stop dissent.”

Why, then, have presidents not abused this authority in the past? After all, the last time any president federalized the National Guard was in response to the LA riots of 1992. The last president to do so over the objections of a state governor was Lyndon B. Johnson, who deployed the National Guard to protect civil rights protesters in Alabama in 1965.

If past presidents refrained from pushing the law to its limits, there is a good reason for that. The current administration is the first one in living memory, if not all of American history, that is not dominated by institutionalists.

An institutionalist is an officeholder whose primary allegiance is to the Constitution instead of the president personally. The institutionalist does her job instead of shamelessly kowtowing to her political master.

Trump wanted to use the military against protesters during his first term. But he was not able to do it. That is because the institutionalists in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Justice Department, and the White House recognized this naked abuse of authority for what it was and refused to go along.

Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, and Mark T. Esper, the defense secretary, both defied Trump’s order to shoot protesters in the streets. They were backed in this decision by Attorney General William Barr and the lawyers in the White House Counsel’s office. Their collective pressure was enough to make the president back down.

Those institutionalists are gone now. The officials who replaced them were put there precisely because they can be relied upon to do Trump’s bidding.

In this way, American democracy, and the separation of powers on which it was based, depended on the presence of institutionalists who were willing to push back against an authoritarian president.

Now that they have disappeared, all that remains is us.

Absent resistance from civil society, Trump will succeed at installing a police state. If civil society acts, he will fail.

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Over the weekend, several Congressional Democrats were barred from performing their Constitutional oversight duties at ICE facilities nationwide. Reps. Maxine Waters, Jimmy Gomez, and Norma Torres were denied entry to the Metropolitan Federal Detention Center in Los Angeles. Reps. Gilbert R. Cisneros Jr., Judy Chu, and Derek Tran were blocked from an ICE facility in Adelanto, California. Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Nydia Velázquez received the same treatment at a Manhattan facility.

Congressional oversight is essential to the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. It is designed to prevent the executive branch from abusing its authority. However, the system only works so long as there are actual people in positions of power who are committed to its preservation.

But if the president, his officials, and the leaders of his party do not give a damn, the system ceases to function. This is the situation in which America now finds itself.

All of this underscores a point I have made repeatedly in this newsletter, which is that the traditional guardrails that once reined in executive overreach have become obsolete.

On paper, Congress has oversight powers. In practice, the president is not letting it exercise these powers and no one in any position of authority is willing to make him.

On paper, the judiciary is empowered to review the executive’s decisions. In practice, the job of enforcing the judiciary’s rulings falls to the same executive branch that is defying them.

Now that the United States has transitioned to authoritarianism, there remain only two loci of power. The first and most obvious one is the executive branch. These are the guys with the guns, and they serve at the president’s behest.

But there is a second locus of power, too: civil society. What civil society lacks in guns, it makes up for in something much more formidable: the power to determine whether the president has legitimacy.

Legitimacy, you may recall, is the belief among the members of a society that the leader has the right to govern them. Legitimacy is a far more effective means of commanding obedience than are the other available methods, coercion and rewards. When the people believe that you have the right to rule, they will continue obeying even when you are not bribing them or holding a gun to their heads.

Just as legitimacy is given, however, so it can be taken away. If the leader breaks the rules that determine the lawful scope of his authority, the people might decide that he has lost his legitimacy. At that point, they can remove him by any available means, legal or not.

But who, specifically, decides when a leader has lost legitimacy? It is not the guy sitting on his couch eating pizza. Instead, it is civil society—the organizations, activists, trade unions, business associations, and everyday protesters who represent the people vis-à-vis the state. The guy on the couch might have an opinion, but his opinion does not matter—unless and until he goes out and mobilizes with the rest of civil society.

For this reason, Trump's authoritarianism will be only as repressive as civil society allows it to be—no more, no less.

Right now, in Los Angeles, we are witnessing the most important showdown to date in Trump's presidency. On one side is Trump and the brute force he commands. On the other is American civil society. This showdown, and others like it in the coming years, will determine the particular shape of his autocratic regime—and whether it will survive at all.

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Now that Trump has sicced the National Guard on Los Angeles, Tom Nichols has a rather puzzling essay out in The Atlantic calling on the city’s residents to refrain from further demonstrations.

Nichols, a political scientist and longtime Republican, is no fan of the president. He left the party in 2018 over its handling of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation. But his advice to Los Angelenos that they stay home instead of protesting is wrongheaded, in my view.

“As unsatisfying as it may be for some citizens to hear, the last thing anyone should do is take to the streets of Los Angeles and try to confront the military or any of California’s law-enforcement authorities,” Nichols writes. Protesting will only “give him the authoritarian opening he’s seeking.”

If protesting is off the table, what would Nichols have us do instead? Nothing? That is exactly what he recommends, it turns out. “What if Trump throws a crackdown and nobody comes?” he ponders:

The most dramatic public action the residents of Southern California could take right now would be to ensure that Trump’s forces arrive on calm streets. Imagine the reactions of the Guard members as they look around and wonder what, exactly, the commander in chief was thinking.

Let us leave aside the matter of what use it would serve to befuddle the National Guard and examine the only other concrete suggestion he has, which is to let the courts handle it. “The law, for most people, is dreary to hear about,” he says, “but one of the most important stories of Trump’s second term is that lawyers and judges are so far holding a vital line against the administration, sometimes at great personal risk.”

Taking to the streets, by contrast, would only further solidify public opinion behind the president on the immigration issue. “Trump is also losing public support, which is another reason he’s zeroing in on California. … The fact of the matter is that tens of millions of Americans believe that almost everything about immigration in the United States has long been deeply dysfunctional.”

Both of these views—that we can rely on judges to rein in the president's excesses and that the main battle ahead is to win over public opinion—rest on the assumption that American democracy continues to function.

It does not. Nichols’s call to deprive Trump of the “authoritarian opening he's seeking” presumes that he has not yet succeeded in bringing authoritarianism about. But as I have explained repeatedly, he has.

Authoritarianism is here, and it requires that we shed many of our old assumptions about how power is gained and maintained in this country. That is because the old ways of checking presidential abuses are no longer sufficient.

Let us say that Trump tries to stay in power despite an election defeat—which, let’s face it, is an inevitability if he loses. What, if anything, could make him reverse course?

The answer is nothing—except, that is, the only thing that Nichols would like us not to do: take to the streets. (By the way, do you know what could really sour the public on Trump? The sight of troops brutally beating protesters on Sunset Drive.)

“The American system of government,” he writes, “was never meant to cope with a rogue president.” True enough. So then why is he asking us to rely on that very system to do what even he says it was never meant to achieve?

Think about it: If and when a federal judge holds the Trump administration in contempt, who is going to enforce the ruling? His own Justice Department? When he inevitably tries to steal the 2028 election, what is going to make him leave office? Bad opinion polls? Or perhaps the very federal courts he is already defying?

The fact is, now that we have transitioned to authoritarianism, there remain no effective restraints on his conduct except for civil resistance like protests and boycotts.

To be sure, any such resistance should remain nonviolent and certainly unarmed. In general, nonviolent resistance is far more effective than the violent sort. On this, the data is clear.

But to discourage any form of protest, whether violent or non-violent, is to throw away the only means we have of checking Trump’s authoritarianism.

Protesting is not what will enable Trump. The only thing that will is not protesting. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can bring his regime to an end.

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A thought experiment:

Take two egomaniacal, fragile little blowhards and lock them in a room together for a month. One of them has money and media. The other has a gun.

Two things are guaranteed to happen:

1. The blowhard with the gun will be the only one who comes out alive.

2. He will take the other guy’s money and media assets with him.

Right now, a real-life version of this experiment is playing out before our eyes. The two protagonists, of course, are Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Musk has the money and the media. Trump has the gun—which, in his case, takes the form of the state and its monopoly on force.

At this point, I must take a moment to pat myself on the back. In the first few weeks of Trump's second term, everybody was convinced that Elon had become the new King of America. Remember this?

I pushed back against this view at the time, arguing that Musk’s apparent power was a mirage. Contrary to the consensus that he was holding Trump by a string, he was exceptionally vulnerable. Although he had real influence, it could be snuffed out on a whim.

Here is an excerpt from a piece I wrote in February:

Musk’s sway, while extraordinary, is also fleeting. Snatching it away is as easy as slamming the Wendy’s Baconator button on the Resolute Desk.

It is only a matter of time before these two imbecilic, impulsive narcissists come to blows. When that happens, Musk will receive a harsh lesson in the reality of competitive authoritarianism. His immense wealth matters little when up against the guy who can wield the Justice Department as his personal bludgeon. In all likelihood, he will become the subject of multiple criminal probes and be chased out of the country. It is a lesson that will not be lost on his fellow moguls.

History is replete with examples of business tycoons coming to rue their past support for autocrats. Trump’s reign should prove no different.

This was always how it was going to end. It might have turned out differently had the people in question not been as stupid, vain, and impulsive as they are. But these two assholes? Forget about it. A bitter, asinine, and very public falling-out was inevitable.

Musk has not been chased out of the country yet. But he probably will be before the end of the year. We are barely a day into this feud and administration officials are already talking up the possibility of investigations.

Authoritarian leaders almost always hold the upper hand over their oligarch-backers. There is a simple reason for this: The leader controls the state. And however influential the oligarchs may be, any policy decisions ultimately run through him. This is how it works whether you are talking about Russia, Hungary, Turkey, or Venezuela. The autocrat controls the oligarchs, not the other way around.

In democracies, oligarchs sometimes do call the shots. That is because the rule of law gives them a certain degree of protection from abuses by the executive. But authoritarians like Trump need not concern themselves with such trivialities and can weaponize the state against whoever they want. This is the whole point of being an authoritarian.

There are exceptions, to be sure, but they are rare. In places like the Philippines, the oligarchs are scions of multi-generational dynasties who possess independent power bases in the countryside as well as their own private armies. This gives them a good deal of leverage over an authoritarian leader.

Needless to say, Elon Musk does not have an independent power base in the countryside. Nor does he have his own private army. His cash and media assets do give him influence. So does the rather unique infiltrative mechanisms he has placed inside federal agencies; if there is one thing that might save his ass, this is it.

But when push comes to shove, the guy with the gun can take all of that away.

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Dan Drezner, a political scientist at Tufts, had a piece out today on the Trump administration’s flailing attack on Harvard. In essence, Trump has used up all of his firepower and has now run out of ammunition. He simply has nothing left in the barrel—nothing that would make a difference anyway.

As the president scrambles for new ways to ramp up the pressure, Harvard continues to stand its ground—and neither Trump nor his advisors have any idea what to do about it.

But the months-long campaign has had a surprising effect on the campus. A year ago, Harvard was wracked by internal conflict over Palestine. Now, everyone has united against Trump. The prevailing atmosphere is one of defiance. As Drezner writes,

the Trump administration’s threats and actions have accomplished something exceedingly rare on the Harvard campus: getting the community to put aside longstanding grudges and agree that Trump is making everything worse.

Drezner goes on to quote from a New York Times article that describes the complete turnaround since Trump’s onslaught began:

The Trump administration’s attack on Harvard has infused the campus with a sense of unity it has lacked over the last year and half, as the university prepares for commencement this week.

“School pride is probably at an all-time high,” said Abdullah Shahid Sial, a sophomore from Pakistan and one of Harvard’s two undergraduate student body presidents. He said he had not seen the campus so unified. “I hope it continues.”….

The extraordinary attack has caused many in the Harvard community to set differences aside at what they say is an existential moment for the 388-year-old university.

Wherever one falls on the Middle East conflict, Mr. Sial said, “everyone is on the side that cracking down on international students will not solve any of those issues.”

In other words, as the Trump administration unleashed the most radical measures it could come up with, the campus community managed to overcome its divisions and unite against it.

The ramifications go well beyond the university. For what is happening at Harvard is a microcosm of what will likely transpire in society at large. As I have written before, authoritarian repression often has the opposite of its intended effect, causing societal resistance to intensify as anger mounts against the regime. Quite often, it escalates to the point that the regime cannot control it.

We are currently watching a live demonstration of this phenomenon in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

By any account, the attack on Harvard is extreme. It is so extreme, in fact, that the White House is having a hard time coming up with novel ways of continuing it. It has suspended Harvard’s federal funding, launched investigation after investigation, and barred the university from enrolling foreign students.

So, imagine what will happen once his attack on American society reaches its limit. Not only is Trump liable to use up all of his ammunition very quickly, but the resulting backlash could be massive enough to end his regime. As Harvard illustrates, repression has a way of bringing people together.

But civil resistance movements typically require leadership. It is precisely this that Harvard’s administration is providing, standing firm in the face of Trump’s assault and inspiring solidarity among the community.

So it goes for all democratic movements. When opposition parties both unite among themselves and join forces with civil society, it can prove fatal to authoritarian regimes. In the past decade alone, such coalitions managed to overthrow authoritarian leaders in Bolivia, Ecuador, Moldova, North Macedonia, Slovenia, South Korea, and Zambia.

Notably, all of these countries featured civil societies far weaker than America’s own.

A number of scholars have expressed doubts about American civil society’s ability to defeat Trump. I am sorry, but if Zambia’s civil society could do it, so can America’s.

If it is to happen, however,, the Democratic Party will have to get its head out of its ass and start leading.

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Yesterday, President Trump announced that he is considering pardoning Barry Croft Jr. and Adam Fox, two men convicted in 2022 of heading a conspiracy to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. During the 2020 election campaign, you may recall, a group of whack jobs hopped up on Infowars dietary supplements hatched a plot to abduct the Democratic governor, which for some reason they believed would spark a second civil war (a good thing, in their view). The plan failed, as a number of their accomplices turned out to be undercover FBI agents.

Trump's announcement comes on the heels of the mass-pardon of hundreds of criminals sentenced for their roles in the January 6^th insurrection. Among them were Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, high-profile leaders of white supremacist groups who were found guilty of seditious conspiracy.

These are not the only examples of Trump attempting to foment violence against his enemies. Federal judges, in particular, have faced bomb threats and other acts of intimidation thanks to a constant fusillade of incendiary remarks from the president, top Republicans, and rightwing media.

What all of this adds up to is a big flashing green light to commit violence against Democratic lawmakers. The policy is summed up by a quip from the Pardon Attorney, an emotionally unstable man named Ed Martin: “No MAGA left behind,” he tweeted Tuesday.

Declaring open season on the opposition is not typical of nascent authoritarian regimes. India's Narendra Modi and his ruling party do sometimes encourage violent attacks on their opponents. Vladimir Putin is notorious for ordering assassinations of his critics. But no autocrat that I know of makes a habit of announcing it publicly; they tend to be a little more subtle about it.

This is yet another example of Trump's authoritarian overreach. As I have written previously, he is attacking more targets more quickly than any other modern-day autocrat. He is doing it, moreover, with nary an attempt to conceal his actions. This is not sustainable and is likely to trigger backlash as his grab for power accelerates in the coming years.

Still, you would not know it from the statements of Democratic leaders. In between incessant declarations about Medicare and Social Security, most Democrats scarcely have time to mention Trump's public efforts to have them assassinated.

Gretchen Whitmer, for her part, is unlikely to change course from her current strategy of finding areas of compromise with the president. “He might want to get me killed, but at least we can work together to restore Asian carp to the Great Lakes” would not be a far-fetched response on her part to the recent pardon revelations.

Trump's reckless assault on rights and freedoms offers enormous potential for a large-scale civil resistance movement. But making it happen will require leadership. What the Democrats are offering is not that.

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Yesterday, a New York City high school student was arrested by ICE agents upon exiting his asylum hearing. From a legal standpoint, he had done everything correctly. Upon entering the country, he applied for asylum and was granted it. He showed up to a court hearing as the law required him to do. Despite that, he was detained and is now slated for deportation.

He was punished, in other words, not for committing a crime but for following the law. Had he broken the law by not showing up to his hearing, he might have been arrested anyway. But at least he would have had a chance.

His case illustrates a dynamic that lies at the core of Trump's regime. Over and over again, people are being punished for not committing crimes.

Civil servants who perform their legally-mandated duties are being dismissed for defying DOGE’s illegal incursions into their agencies. A Justice Department lawyer was fired after truthfully conceding to a federal judge that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant with legal status, was deported by mistake. Had he perjured himself before the court, he would have kept his job.

This pattern is typical of authoritarian regimes. Those who enjoy the leader’s support are free to crime to their heart’s content. In fact, they are often encouraged to do so because it allows the leader to hold the threat of prosecution over their heads and thereby blackmail them into compliance.

At the same time, those who follow the law often find themselves in the regime’s crosshairs. This is a problem inherent to authoritarian rule.

Almost all authoritarian countries today have formal constitutions which guarantee individual rights and set down constraints on the exercise of power by top officeholders. But autocrats necessarily violate these rules and protections in the course of their day-to-day conduct. The very nature of their rule requires it.

To stay in power, they must attack civil society, seize the powers of courts and legislatures, prosecute and jail opponents arbitrarily, and reward subordinates by providing them with opportunities to line their pockets.

Some authoritarians are able to change the constitution by virtue of holding parliamentary supermajorities. In this way, they legalize their abuses. Victor Orbán of Hungary is the prototypical example of such a leader. But even he ends up breaking the law routinely.

As I have repeatedly stressed in this newsletter, the rule of law in America is effectively finished. Trump destroyed it. The legal rights and prerogatives set forth by law, while largely unchanged as written, no longer have the authority they once did. If we wish to restore that authority, we will have to take it back from the criminals who rule over us.

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On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that a group of federal judges has been discussing the possibility of establishing their own security force. The proposal would transfer control of the US Marshals Service, which traditionally performed that role, away from the Justice Department and put it directly under the authority of Chief Justice John Roberts.

Behind this decision lies a series of escalating threats against federal judges who have ruled against Donald Trump. Fueled by a near-constant barrage of incendiary rhetoric from the president, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Elon Musk, Fox News, and Republican lawmakers, Trump’s fascist foot-soldiers have taken to issuing threats of violence against judges during commercial breaks from Heartland Bowhunter.

Everything from swatting attacks (in which someone falsely reports a dangerous individual at a judge’s residence) to anonymous pizza deliveries (signifying the sender has knowledge of a judge’s home address), bomb threats, and calls for beheadings have become regular occurrences.

In the past, judges experiencing threats to their personal safety would turn to the Marshals Service for help. But with the fox in charge of the henhouse, this option is no longer a reliable one. Nowadays, the Justice Department is more likely to incite such threats than protect the victims.

The fact that federal judges believe their personal security is at risk is obviously a five-alarm fire. At the same time, it signifies something larger: for all intents and purposes, America’s judiciary is no longer independent.

This is old news as far as the Supreme Court goes. By this late date, few observers, at least those not high on hopium, would expect the Roberts majority to rein in Trump’s authoritarian excesses. Since he took office, however, plenty of federal judges, including ones nominated by Trump himself, have displayed an admirable willingness to defy him.

But for a federal judge to do so at this point requires a readiness to contravene every incentive they otherwise face. An institution which relies for its independence on the personal bravery of its officers is not independent at all.

This underscores a point I have made in the past: Now that America has transitioned to authoritarianism, the rule of law as we knew it is dead. The only thing that can bring it back is massive, non-violent civil resistance. The independence of the judiciary, not to mention self-government itself and the panoply of rights vested in us by the Constitution, can only be saved to the extent that we ourselves defend it.

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Earlier today, the New York Times posted a video featuring three leading specialists on fascism, Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley. Under the headline, “We’re Experts in Fascism. We're Leaving the US,” they explain why they chose to leave the country and seek political refuge in Canada, where they have each taken posts at the University of Toronto.

After watching the video, I find myself having mixed feelings about their decision. On a personal level, I understand why they did it. America has transitioned to authoritarianism, and it is conceivable that at some point the new regime will begin targeting individual academics. If it does, Snyder and Stanley, in particular, would figure high on the list of scholars who might come under attack (Shore, while a highly respected scholar, does not have the public profile of the other two).

Still, it is because they are such notable figures in the study of fascism—Snyder is the world’s leading expert on the topic—that their presence in the United States is sorely needed. Having taken on the public profiles that they have, it is arguably their public duty to serve as intellectual leaders of the resistance. The burgeoning movement against the Trump regime will need scholars like them to frame the issue, lay out the stakes, and explain why it is important to mobilize.

What they offer instead are excuses for their decision to leave. They even try to rationalize their move as somehow furthering the public interest, arguing that it is important for people in their position to do as the Russian opposition did and “set up centers of resistance in places of relative safety.” The claim strikes me as vacuous and self-serving. In all likelihood, they left because they are scared; it is as simple as that.

The reason why the Russian opposition, or what remains of it, has gone into exile is that every single opposition figure who did not leave is either dead or languishing in a gulag. As bad as things have become in America, that is not going to happen here—not for the foreseeable future, anyway.

Russia’s dictatorship took well over a decade to construct, and that was under an authoritarian leader who is far more competent than our own. Very few authoritarian regimes today can be classified as full dictatorships like those in Russia and China. In the vast majority, functional oppositions continue to exist and operate above ground.

In any event, we are a long way off from individual academics finding themselves in Trump’s crosshairs. He has far bigger fish to fry than them. For one thing, there are plenty of journalists, pundits, and TV personalities with daily access to audiences of millions who will come across his radar far sooner than a handful of Yale scholars.

Admittedly, I am not in a great position to throw shade at someone for leaving the country. My family and I have been living abroad since 2021. There are members of my family who have serious, debilitating health issues, and it proved impossible to get appointments with the relevant specialists on a realistic timeframe in the U.S. As a result, one could reasonably question what place I have to tell someone else, “you should stay.”

But we live abroad because we have to, and we were certainly not running away from anything when we moved. Nor do I have anything approximating the public profile and, therefore, responsibility of the scholars at issue here.

Americans now have two choices: give up or fight back. As I have previously explained, Trump’s position is exceptionally weak when compared to other authoritarians while that of American civil society is exceptionally strong. Despite the rather fatalistic undertone of the New York Times video, there is no reason why Americans should just surrender to their tinpot dictator when they are more than capable of casting him off.

But the American people need leaders, including intellectual ones, to encourage them to fight back. Being as prominent as they are, Stanley and Snyder were in a position to do that. But now that they have left, they cannot very well implore others to resist the regime that they themselves have run away from.

Who, after all, is supposed to assume that role now? Other people? Snyder and Stanley are the guys who would take on that task. If not them, who?

None of what I am saying here is meant to apply to ordinary people who have chosen to leave the country. It is a perfectly understandable decision that many have made for themselves and their families. Of course, Snyder and Stanley are human beings too and, as such, are subject to the same fears and insecurities others might feel under the circumstances. But they are far from ordinary; they are the leading voices on the issue.

Nor does any of this apply to other academics who are working abroad; they did not flee the system they must now urge people to rise up against. As a result, they still have the credibility to issue such calls. But when Snyder and Stanley do the same, how seriously can they be taken?

America could have used their help. But it is unclear what sort of help they can provide now that they have fled the very danger they left others behind to face.

*This post has been updated to reflect some additional thoughts I had after publishing it.

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