The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms.
Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough (or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has apparently provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook), the transformation of American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once.
M. Gessen, "Beware: We are entering a new phase of the Trump era." The New York Times (gift link), 5/28/2025.
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In a post-reality environment, it turns out, the president didn’t need to wait for a crisis to launch an authoritarian crackdown. Instead, he can simply invent one. ... If you saw all this in any other country—soldiers sent to crush dissent, union leaders arrested, opposition politicians threatened—it would be clear that autocracy had arrived. The question, now, is whether Americans who hate tyranny can be roused to respond.
Michelle Goldberg, "This is what autocracy looks like." The New York Times (gift link), 6/9/2025.
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In a remark that has since gone viral, Conor Simon, a resident of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, observed:It’s really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armour to take him away is somehow the good guy.
Trump may spin spine-tingling tales of ‘bad hombres’, but videos of recent ICE raids tell a different story. The mother of a newborn is handcuffed and shoved, head down, into an unmarked vehicle, her family screaming, the neighbours filming, her baby cradled against a weeping woman’s shoulder. A young boy wails as his father is thrown into the back of a van. Children whose parents have been taken into custody sob on the floor of a school gym, not knowing if they will ever see their families again. The raids have not been on drug dens or sex-trafficking rings. They have been on restaurants and schools, hospitals and court houses. ICE’s war is not simply at home, but on home.
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Remember that studies of social movements worldwide show that it takes just 3.5% of a population engaging in sustained peaceful protests to topple an authoritarian regime. ... The Women's March in January 2017 was the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. Between 1% and 1.6% of the U.S. population participated. Double or triple that scale would approach the 3.5% threshold.
That's our mission: doubling or tripling the size of the Women's March and engaging 3.5% of the U.S. population in mass, sustained protests to stop authoritarianism in America, which is here, at our doorstep, right now.
MoveOn, 6/10/2025.
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On June 14, 2025: No Kings. Over 2,000 peaceful, nonviolent protests against Trump's authoritarian actions are planned in all 50 U.S. states (the map is pretty awesome—see above); there are also protests happening worldwide. (The Associated Press has a good explainer on No Kings here.)
I have been to many protests, from the very small (a handful of people standing alongside a road) to the very big (the Women's March in Washington, D.C.). And while I am not a person who loves crowds (pro tip: stand at the edge) or noise, I always come away feeling glad that I went, and humbled, too. It is a powerful thing to stand in community with other folks who care, to see that none of us are alone in our outrage, that we can show up for each other.
There are many good and valid reasons folks can't attend protests, but for those of us who can, we must. We can't cede space; we have to make it known that we do not stand for the rampant cruelty, idiocy, and greed of this administration. So on Saturday, my family will go to a local No Kings event in the morning. Later that night, we'll take our signs and march up and down the sidewalks of our village, just to bring it home to those of our neighbors who prefer to pretend none of this is happening. Every action matters.
