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police state
America Under Siege: Fear and the Unchecked Presidency
A republic cannot survive this indefinitely. The removal of Donald Trump from office—which is now imperative—is not about vengeance; it is about preservation.
Jan 14, 2026
There are moments when the danger facing a nation is not announced by sirens or declarations of war, but by something quieter and more corrosive: fear—abroad and at home—paired with the normalization of lawlessness at the very top of power.
The United States is living through such a moment.
A growing number of economists, constitutional scholars, and foreign-policy experts—including Professor Jeffrey Sachs—have warned that the country is now operating under an effectively unchecked presidency, and this is very dangerous. What once sounded theoretical has become tangible. Executive conduct has crossed from aggressive policy into outright violations of constitutional structure, international law, and basic norms of human dignity—leaving Americans and foreign populations alike unsure where law ends and coercion begins.
Consider Venezuela. A sitting head of state was forcibly apprehended and remains detained despite long-established principles of head-of-state immunity recognized by both international law and US courts. No congressional declaration of war was issued. No authorization for the use of military force was granted. Yet naval deployments, explicit threats of escalation, and coercive demands have proceeded as if constitutional limits were optional.
This is not a policy disagreement. It is a rupture of the separation of powers.
A republic cannot survive this indefinitely.
Under the Constitution, Congress—not the President—decides when the nation enters hostilities. When force is used without that authorization, the injury is not foreign; it is domestic. It alters the legal obligations of service members, bypasses elected representatives, and establishes precedents that future presidents will inherit and may get to expand. What is done once without consequence becomes permissible forever.
The international consequences are equally severe. When restraint is publicly described as conditional on “cooperation,” the message is unmistakable: compliance is demanded under threat. Under international law, consent extracted through coercion is no consent at all. Agreements reached in such conditions are void, unstable, and corrosive to global order. They invite retaliation, miscalculation, and escalation.
Against this backdrop, the President’s own conduct has crossed from provocation into mockery.
Posting a mug-style image of himself online with the caption “Interim President of Venezuela” is not political satire—it is a display of contempt for a population already living under the shadow of military threat. Venezuelan civilians fear for their lives. Survivors of armed attacks have described, in horrific detail, the killing of guards and soldiers by US troops acting like mercenaries with no mercy, aligned with US objectives, sparing only the President and his wife to be taken alive. In that context, ridicule from the most powerful office on earth is not harmless. It is psychological warfare by indifference.
And the fear does not stop at the border.
Inside the United States, many citizens have grown quiet—not because they are indifferent, but because they are afraid. Afraid of retaliation. Afraid of being singled out. Afraid that the institutions meant to protect them are bending rather than holding. Silence, under these conditions, is not consent. It is duress.
That fear is reinforced when the President openly refuses to rule out acquiring foreign territory by force. When Greenland and Denmark rejected his demands, the response was not reassurance but continued ambiguity. Sovereignty, once treated as inviolable, was suddenly spoken of as negotiable—through pressure, leverage, or worse. This is not how democracies speak. It is how empires test boundaries.
What ties these episodes together is not ideology, but the erosion of restraint. Courts are pressured to proceed where jurisdiction is barred. Congress is sidelined in matters of war and peace. Sovereign resources are discussed as assets to be reassigned under coercive conditions. Threats substitute for diplomacy. Mockery substitutes for leadership.
A republic cannot survive this indefinitely.
The Constitution was designed precisely to prevent this concentration of power. War powers were placed in Congress to slow escalation. Immunities were recognized to prevent cycles of retaliation. Diplomacy was meant to replace force, not disguise it. When these guardrails fail, the danger is not merely to foreign nations—it is to the constitutional order itself.
The most alarming feature of the present moment is not outrage, but normalization. Each uncorrected violation lowers the threshold for the next. Each silence under fear teaches power that it need not explain itself.
America is now at a point where clarity is no longer optional. A President who acts beyond constitutional authority must be confronted with the limits of that authority. Violations of the Constitution and of international law must be acknowledged—not obscured, denied, or ridiculed—and immediately remedied through full and lawful redress (as guaranteed by the First Amendment’s right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances). The alternative is not ambiguity. It is consequence.
If redress is refused, if illegality is neither recognized nor corrected, the Constitution provides a final safeguard. Removal from office is not vengeance; it is a mechanism of preservation. It exists precisely for moments when power becomes unmoored from law.
“America Under Siege” does not mean tanks in the streets. It means a nation deciding whether constitutional limits still matter when they become inconvenient. And history is unforgiving to republics that delay that decision for too long.
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Renee Good Died From the Kind of State Violence Our Founders Warned Against
When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
Jan 09, 2026
When I read that the young mother who was executed at point-blank range by one of President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons on Wednesday was named Renee Nicole Good, it sent a chill down my spine.
As the pain and outrage was washing through me, it also struck me as almost too much of a coincidence that she was there protesting state violence and Ben Franklin had been using the name “Silence Dogood”—as in “Do Good”—to warn American colonists about the very same dangers of state violence.
When 16-year-old Franklin slipped his first Silence Dogood essay under the door of his brother’s print shop in 1722, America had few police departments, no body cameras, no qualified immunity, and few militarized patrols prowling city streets. But young Franklin already understood the danger.
Writing as a fictional widow, Franklin warned that “nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own superiority.” The remark was in the context of self-important ministers, magistrates, and petty officials, but he was also talking about raw state power itself as we saw with the execution of Renee Nicole Good.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough.
Power that is insulated, Franklin taught, answers only to itself and believes its very authority excuses the violence it uses.
Franklin’s insight didn’t die on the printed page but, rather, became the moral backbone of the American Revolution. As Do-Good, he repeatedly cautioned us that power breeds cruelty when it’s insulated from consequence, that authority becomes violent when it believes itself superior, and that free speech is usually the first casualty of abusive rule.
In "Essay No. 6", in 1722, Dogood wrote:
Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.
Renee Nicole Good was on that Minneapolis street to express her freedom of speech, her outrage at the crimes, both moral and legal, being committed by ICE on behalf of Donald Trump, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller.
Thomas Paine took Franklin’s warning and sharpened it into a blade. Government, Paine said, is a “necessary evil” but when it turns its legally authorized violence against its own people, it becomes “intolerable.” Authority doesn’t legitimize force, Paine argued; instead, the ability to use force without accountability inevitably corrupts authority.
And here we are. This is the ninth time ICE agents have shot into a person‘s car, and the second time they’ve killed somebody in the process.
For Paine, violence by agents of the state isn’t an aberration, it’s the default outcome when power concentrates without clear accountability. Where Franklin warned about cruelty born of a sense of superiority (as armed, masked white ICE officers search for brown people as if they were the Klan of old), Paine warned us that force will always be directed against the governed unless that power is aggressively constrained.
James Madison—the “Father of the Constitution”—then took both men at their word. He didn’t design a constitution that assumed virtue; instead, he designed one that assumed abuse.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in Federalist 51, adding, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Because we and our politicians and police aren’t angels, Madison pointed out, state power must be restrained, divided, watched, and continuously challenged. Which is why the Framers of the Constitution adopted the checks-and-balances system—splitting the government into three co-equal parts—that Montesquieu recommended, based on what he had learned from the Iroquois (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy).
Franklin himself became even clearer about the threat of unaccountable state-imposed violence as he aged. Governments, he repeatedly warned, always claim violence is necessary for safety and we saw that Wednesday when puppy-killer Kristi Noem claimed that Renee Good was a “domestic terrorist.” Her comment is the perfect illustration of Franklin’s assertion that state violence, once normalized, always tries to claim justification.
To add insult to murder, Trump pathetically waddled over to his Nazi-infested social media site and claimed:
The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital… [T]he reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.”
Silence Dogood would have confronted him head-on, as she-Franklin repeatedly did with the petty, self-important officials of colonial New England. He repeatedly noted that surrendering liberty for a little temporary security not only doesn’t prevent state brutality but actually it invites it. In a 1759 letter, Franklin explicitly warned us about men like Donald Trump and the siren song of “law and order”:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Once a state teaches its agents that force is the solution, force becomes their habit. That’s how police states are formed out of democracies, as the citizens of Russia, Hungary, and Venezuela have all learned. And now, it appears, we’re learning as America becomes the world’s most recent police state.
This isn’t an uniquely American problem: It’s older than our republic. And Franklin told us exactly how it happens: When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz noted Wednesday, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis wasn’t a “tragic anomaly.” It was the predictable outcome of systems Franklin would have recognized instantly; the kind of corrupt strongman systems that reward domination, excuse cruelty, and punish dissent.
Trump wants us on the “radical left” to shut up and go away. But Ben Franklin taught us that silence in the face of power isn’t neutrality but is, instead, an extension of permission. He wrote as Silence Dogood precisely because he understood that abuse flourishes when citizens turn their eyes away and lower their voices.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough. We must demand accountability, insist on transparency, and refuse to accept state violence and a firehose of official lies as the price of order.
Three centuries ago, a teenage printer’s apprentice warned us that silence enables abuse. He was right then. He is right now.
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Republicans Are Trying to Make Fascism Edgy and Hip
By declaring all opposition to themselves anti-fascism, MAGA isn’t leaving much mystery about their leanings.
Oct 23, 2025
For the last few weeks, Republican Party leadership has been carrying out a campaign to, essentially, classify the word “fascist” as hate speech against right-wingers. But while some Republicans shy away from the term, plenty of others, particularly among their base and their influencers, find it edgy and hip. Some have even begun to wear it as a badge of honor.
Most notably, last week, members of the Republican Youth—er, Young Republicans—were caught in a group chat declaring their love of Adolf Hitler and expressing fondness for his policy of mass extermination in gas chambers.
The incident caused some drama and led to some repercussions, but not as much as you might hope. Vice President JD Vance dismissed the story, saying, “Kids do stupid things, especially young boys… They tell edgy, offensive jokes. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a… very offensive, stupid joke is cause to ruin their lives.” By and large, that seems to be the tack most Republicans are taking, certainly from the top down.
Vance’s attempt to downplay the chats as just kids being edgy may work for some, but the truth is that many members of the chat were grown men well into their 30s, nearly Vance’s age, who occupied positions of political influence. Maybe they were joking, but it’s not clear where the irony or the punchlines were—and it’s a poor choice of comedic material if the party wants to shake the fascist label.
“Fascist” as Hate Speech
Ever since President Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP, Republicans have struggled with this fascist comparison. Actually, the left has used the term to describe far-right policies since long before Trump, but Trump’s Mussolini-like mannerisms, dictatorial ambitions, and cult of personality have made the term feel like a natural fit and brought it into more common use, especially in his second term.
After the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September, Republicans like Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) blamed the casual use of the word for inspiring Kirk’s murder and other acts of violence. Johnson said: “Calling people Nazis and fascists is not helpful… There are some deranged people in society, and when they see leaders using that kind of language… it spurs them on to action. We have to recognize that reality and address it appropriately.”
Simple compassion might, in fact, be regarded as an unlawful, anti-fascist, terrorist thoughtcrime.
It was also around this time that they began to escalate their campaign against “antifa,” characterizing it as a political organization and threatening to go after its organizers and funders. In truth, though, there is no formal group called antifa. Antifa is short for anti-fascism, and it exists only as an opposition to fascism. So Trump’s position of anti-anti-fascism, if you reduce the double negative, is simply fascism.
Maybe the most dramatic step so far in this anti-antifa campaign was Trump’s issuance of NSPM-7, a presidential memo that accuses people of using the word “fascist” as an excuse to “justify and encourage acts of violent revolution,” and further identifies “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” as indicia of potential terroristic inclinations and activities.
One can only guess how the administration is defining these terms, but if their actions to date are anything to go by, simple compassion might, in fact, be regarded as an unlawful, anti-fascist, terrorist thoughtcrime, and anyone who holds such views can be subject to, at a minimum, investigation, surveillance, and harassment by law enforcement—all of which sounds like anti-anti-fascism, to be sure.
Fascism defined
At this point, it’s important to examine just what, exactly, fascism is. The term has certainly been abused in America. For many, “fascist” has just become shorthand for “someone I don’t like,” or, more specifically, “someone who’s making me do something I don’t want to do.” To wit: Speed limits are fascism. No-smoking signs are fascism. Mask mandates during a pandemic are fascism. Taxes are fascism. And so on.
Alas, few historians would describe such basic laws or civic norms as fascism. While the word doesn’t have any one universally agreed upon definition, and even self-identified fascist societies differ in significant ways, there are a few hallmarks that distinguish fascism from other philosophies. The more of these qualities a government or a society has, the more fascistic it is:
- The merger of state and corporate power. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who coined the term fascist, said this was the philosophy’s most defining tenet.
- Authoritarian rule. Power concentrated in a leader with a devoted cult of personality, in whom people see a living embodiment of the nation.
- Police state. A militarized society, including citizen militias and police suppression of protests, speech, and other forms of dissent.
- Propaganda. Rampant propaganda that is rife with lies, conspiracy, and dehumanizing language.
- Censorship. Dissent or open disagreement with official narratives and state policies may be outlawed and punished violently.
- In-group vs. out-group. Hatred of “others,” especially immigrants, religious minorities, and the LGBTQ community, as well as any leftists and academics who support them.
- National and cultural mythology. Desire to preserve or attain “purity” of culture, language, or race and ethnicity, often through appeals to a mythical past.
- War. Jingoism and an aggressive foreign policy.
- Obsession with aesthetics. From architecture to attire, everything intends to give an air of magnificence, superiority, and national pride, no matter how superficial.
Any honest observer can see how much of the definition fits. Not all of it is unique to Trump, but he does tick more boxes than the average politician. Soon enough, though, simply pointing that out might land you in a heap of trouble. Unless, of course, Republicans shift gears and decide to embrace the term, as at least some of them are beginning to do.
Reclaiming Fascism as Something Edgy and Cool
Back in July, before Trump ratcheted up his campaign against antifa, Fox News comedian Greg Gutfeld went on a revealing rant about his feelings on the word Nazi and how it relates to him. Gutfeld said on his show: “The criticism doesn’t matter to us when you call us Nazis. Nazi this and Nazi that… We need to learn from the Blacks. The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word by using it. So from now on it’s, ‘What up, my Nazi?’”
Gutfeld’s show is intended as a comedy, though you might not recognize it as one. Still, it’s a peculiar joke to make, and frightening to consider who it might resonate with. And this attitude on the right is being more openly embraced: that fascism is hip or edgy and that all the progress made on freedoms and rights for gays, trans people, minorities, and women needs to be rolled back. For instance:
- The successful far-right influencer Matt Walsh calls himself a “theocratic fascist.” While Walsh has claimed it’s an ironic label used to troll his critics, if you pay any attention to what he says and compare it to what a “theocratic fascist” might say, you’ll find he fits the term quite comfortably.
- Another growing voice on the right, especially among the young, is Nick Fuentes, simply an unapologetic, loud and proud neo-Nazi who has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
- Trump’s recent nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, Paul Ingrassia, recently had his text messages leaked where he espoused racist attitudes and said, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” Ingrassia’s nomination has since been pulled, a relatively rare rebuke from this administration of that kind of conduct.
- A cadre of right-wing influencers have also been trying to sanitize, justify, and even push for the return of chattel slavery. Chief among these is Joshua Haymes, a former pastor who counted among his congregation Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Haymes recently said, “The institution of slavery is not inherently evil. It is not inherently evil to own another human being. It is very important that every Christian affirm what I just said.”
Republican influencers and the MAGA base are racing to the bottom, fast. It’s known as vice signaling: Each one trying to outdo the next in depravity to prove they are as un-woke and un-PC as possible, even if it reverts them back to plain-old KKK and neo-Nazi hatred and barbarism. It’s hard to say what abuse, constitutional violation, or act of violence they won’t enthusiastically push for, as long as it’s coming from the right side and being inflicted on an enemy. These aren’t ideas we have to debate. This is fascism, and civilized society already won the argument against it in World War II.
Fascism in the USA
Sadly, fascism is probably appealing to a lot of Americans, even if most are still hesitant to embrace the term. It’s in our national DNA. Our Jim Crow laws and citizenship standards even provided a model for Hitler’s antisemitic campaigns. There have always been bigoted, violent people in this country, and they appreciate a ruler who reflects them. And just as they were in the 1930s, the giant industrialists who shape our politics and society are all too happy to ally themselves with fascist forces, because they know a repressive state can protect their own power from being challenged.
But there are also strains of anti-fascism in our DNA. My grandpa, a veteran of World War II, was antifa, as were many members of the Greatest Generation. And it’s heartening to see older folks and veterans declare themselves antifa, even in the face of Trump’s threats. It should be a source of pride that we’ve overcome many of our bigotries and xenophobias. Despite all the loud fascist voices in right-wing media and social platforms, I still believe the vast majority of people believe in basic human rights for all. The No Kings protests on October 18 were a good showing of this solidarity.
As this administration goes further off the deep end—deploying the military against American citizens; sending masked Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents to terrorize poor and immigrant communities; profiling, detaining, and abusing people, including American citizens, on mere suspicion of being “illegal;” and disappearing people with no trial to God-knows-where—it’s no accident that they have declared anti-fascism their greatest enemy.
Maybe those 38-year-old kids in the Young Republicans chat were just joking about gas chambers and loving Hitler. But given everything else this administration is doing and everything their propagandists are saying, it falls a bit too close for comfort to, “It’s funny because it’s true.”
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