There are few stranger or worse feelings as a journalist than calling upon an expert, hoping to be told that your interpretation of events is alarmist, only to have that expert sound more alarmed than even yourself.

I am by no means a legal scholar. I have no formal training in the law. What little expertise I do arguably have has come through this tried and true journalist method: talking to smart people with more knowledge than myself.

Over the past year and a half, when it comes to the question of whether democracy and the rule of law are holding in America, Frank O. Bowman III has tended to be among the first of those smart people to whom I turn.

I first spoke to Bowman, a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law, in July 2024 for The American Independent, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Trump v. United States that granted wide-ranging legal immunity to the presidency for “official acts.”

The conservative majority declined to draw a distinction in that case between what it considered official and unofficial acts, something that appeared quite concerning to me even from my unsophisticated vantage point.

Bowman provided the educated analysis that backed up my original interpretation — that the decision could insulate an autocratic president from legal accountability even for the most unthinkable acts, like ordering the military to orchestrate a coup d’état or directing federal law enforcement to arrest members of the political opposition on spurious charges.

“You notice that (Chief Justice John) Roberts doesn’t deny that his rule would apply. He just says it’s fearmongering, I guess on the implied basis that, well, golly, no president would actually do that,” Bowman told me at the time. “But he doesn’t say that if the president did do that, that his rule wouldn’t apply.”

Nineteen months after that decision came down, and more than a year after President Donald Trump’s return to power, I checked in with Bowman to see where his thoughts were.

I asked him whether the U.S. government could be credibly described as authoritarian at this point in Trump’s second term.

I didn’t realize I was subconsciously hoping to be reassured until he answered: “I think we’re there.”

It’s been hard for me not to arrive at the conclusion as well, watching the Trump administration pressure FBI investigators to stop looking into fatal shootings by federal agents or seize ballots to pursue his repeatedly disproven claim that he won the 2020 election.

However, there’s something about hearing your own alarmism validated by someone who knows what they’re talking about.

“I think the situation is rather worse than one would have anticipated,” Bowman told me. “You know, the worst case scenarios would have looked something like what we’re experiencing now. But I think even I probably didn’t think things would fall apart this fast.”

Over the course of a sobering 40-minute Zoom call, Bowman laid out all of the ways in which the U.S. Constitution has essentially ceased to function as a barrier to autocracy.

Where the independence of the Justice Department was once a sacrosanct principle within the executive branch, Trump now freely uses the prosecutorial powers of the state to help his himself and hurt his foes — as evidenced by the indictments of longtime opponents like former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James or the arrest of former CNN host Don Lemon.

“He’s using the department to prosecute his enemies,” Bowman said. “That’s not hyperbole. It’s not a hypothesis. He’s just doing it, and not only doing it, but saying he’s doing it in so many words publicly, effectively ordering the attorney general of the United States to go wield the power of the Justice Department to prosecute his personal and political enemies. All of that is happening now.”

The nature of the constitutional framework of the United States, with its investment of executive power in one individual, has meant that there was always some risk of this sort of bad behavior. But the checks that would previously have discouraged lawless actions are largely no longer there, Bowman explained.

“Up until Trump versus the United States, I think it was very clear that if he were to employ the pardon for a purpose that was itself illegal, he could be prosecuted for it,” Bowman said. “If he were to pardon somebody because they paid him a bribe, if he were to pardon somebody in order to facilitate an obstruction of justice, essentially to hide his own wrongdoing or somebody else’s wrongdoing, I don’t think there’s any question up to the day of that decision that a president was criminally liable for that kind of behavior. That appears no longer to be the case.”

And, as shown by the two unsuccessful impeachment attempts of Trump during his first term, there is effectively no way to remove him from office, possibly no matter how much he violates the law.

“The thing that we know from his first term is that a Congress controlled (by Republicans), or even one that has a significant number of Republicans in the Senate, is not going to impeach and convict the man,” Bowman said. “As a result of all that, we entered into Trump’s second term, and Trump entered into it, recognizing that he was largely immune from the checks that were built into the Constitution against autocratic, demagogic, dictatorial behavior. The current Republican Party is totally in his control. They are utterly unwilling as a body, and generally speaking, even as isolated individuals, to respond in any sort of vigorous way by criticizing him, much less voting against him in any significant matter. That means not only, of course, is impeachment dead as a serious means of getting rid of him, but it means that the basic structural limitations on presidential power are effectually neutered.”

So, in the United States of America in 2026, the president can do pretty much anything he wants without fear he will ever face consequences. In the 250th year since the war for independence from an overseas monarch, Donald Trump is, for all intents and purposes, above the law.

“He’s immune from firing Justice Department people in order to pursue criminal schemes, in order to cover up his own wrongdoing, in order to cover up the wrongdoing of other people,” Bowman said. “He’s immune from pardoning for crime, from pardoning any of his minions for committing crimes. The result of all of that is that he has control over the investigative and prosecutorial organs of the federal government to an utterly unprecedented degree.”

This is a rather undesirable position for any democracy to be in, but especially one in which the president is someone who refused to accept an election loss, and whose administration openly describes his former vice president’s refusal to accept illegal elector slates as “betrayal of the president.”

Millions of Americans carry on life as usual. They make their morning coffee, they drop their kids off at school or soccer practice, they go to work. Even those of us who are the most plugged-in speculate about midterm election expectations or who might be the Democratic nominee for president in 2028. I increasingly fear it’s not out of the realm of possibility that those may be moot points.

Bowman offers some much-needed reassurance here: “Elections are run by states. They’re run by localities. It’s awfully hard for a federal government to impose its will on that, particularly in contested areas.”

But it’s only some reassurance.

“I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, not saying that we couldn’t slide completely into a long period of real darkness. I think we could,” he said. “I think the answer to whether that’s in the cards will depend to some extent on the guys with guns. Who controls them? How far are they willing to go? Will the people, particularly in command of the regular military, really be willing to see the country slide into a genuine dictatorship? All those things are questions we do not know the answers to.”

Perhaps sensing my despair, though, Bowman ended his assertion with a declaration that he had not yet completely lost hope.

“The challenges are many, and they’re incredibly stiff. But can we do it? Yes, many countries have survived far worse than this, and I like to still maintain some faith in the resilience of this country,” he said.

On good days, I share Bowman’s faith.

A week after I spoke to him, though, multiple news outlets reported state election officials are preparing for the Trump administration to try to illegally interfere in the 2026 election for the benefit of the Republican Party. That effort, if it transpires, may very well fail. But with each passing week, my good days grow fewer and further between.

The morning after the 2024 United States presidential election, I knew I had to get out of New York City. Not permanently — that realization would come later. But in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking victory, the buzz and rush and honking horns and blinding lights of the metropolis I’d always dreamed of living in became too much. I needed to think.

My employer, being a leftwing nonprofit, graciously canceled the workday for all of us that Wednesday. So I hopped in my car, picked a direction and drove. On the Staten Island Expressway and the New Jersey Turnpike, I tried to wrap my mind around the staggering implications of what had just taken place.

Two days prior, I’d been at a point in my career where I was genuinely contemplating what it might be like to buy a condo in a few years, find some smart and charming boy to marry, maybe even adopt a child down the line. I’d grown accustomed to middle class comfort. I wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be in my career, but I was making enough money that I figured I’d be OK in the long run. If I couldn’t land a full-time job at a more prestigious news outlet in the near future, perhaps I’d just write a book or three. There was no reason to believe my life of general stability wouldn’t continue.

Now, I gripped the steering wheel considering the fact that a man who once refused to accept the outcome of an election loss, and who openly seeks to harm his political enemies — which is how he views all 75 million Americans who voted for his opponent — would once again be the man steering my country, perhaps into the abyss.

I knew the guardrails were gone now. Trump had explicitly picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because he believed Vance wouldn’t repeat Mike Pence’s “betrayal,” as it is now characterized on the White House website by the actual government of the United States of America. Passing over the Delaware Memorial Bridge into Wilmington, I considered what it might be like to turn the wheel and fly off into the river below — and how that might not be much different from the choice America had just made.

I’ve always been a bit too much of a stubborn jackass for suicide, though. Instead I continued through Delaware until I arrived in Rehoboth Beach, a seaside gay destination in the summertime that on this autumn evening was chilly and uninviting. I found a bar at which to sip a couple beers while I commiserated with a lesbian couple about the election results, at least until the bartender asked us to stop talking about politics. It was the first time such a request had ever been made of me in a place outside of an obvious Republican stronghold, and perhaps a worrying sign of what was to come.

In those days, I oscillated between feeling like I could see clearly what others could not, and feeling like I was insane. I had nightmares about murder in the streets and war and being unable to stop any of it. And then I awoke the next morning and was told by many people, many friends, many relatives, that I was overreacting. After all, he was president before and we all survived, right?

Tomorrow will mark one year since Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States. And I now know that I was more right to be fearful than even I could possibly have guessed at the time.

Our president sends mad screeds to our allies demanding he be allowed to annex whatever territories he pleases because they failed to award him a prize he coveted.

Masked agents roam the city of Minneapolis demanding that random passersby on the street produce proof of citizenship, and kidnapping them if they can’t — or even sometimes when they can. They execute protesters and then are protected from even the pretense of investigation by the federal government.

That same federal government posts memes that could be described as flirting with Nazi ideology in much the same way one could be described as flirting with a person they’re in the middle of having sex with. It openly fantasizes about deporting 100 million people from America (there are only 51 million noncitizens residing in the U.S., the vast majority of them bearing legal status, so the conclusion one is forced to arrive at is that it’s not just immigrants who the Nazi government considers to be undesirables).

These are all sentences that would have sounded like they were taken from some absurdist dystopian fiction had you presented them to me in 2016 or even in 2021, and yet are now just facts.

In August as I wrestled with whether or not to leave the country, I stopped to see a friend in Denver. We both agreed that things were not yet that catastrophic. I registered it as a data point when I initially decided to stay.

Of course, I changed my mind and came to London anyway. A few weeks ago that same friend said these words to me on the phone: “Everything happened exactly like you said it would.” Things were indeed now that catastrophic, we both agreed.

It’s time for all Americans to consider what they would have done in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, because we are now living amidst the rise of Nazi America in the 2020s.

I made my choice as a journalist, knowing that a leftwing nonprofit news organization was no safe place in a country where the president of the United States freely uses the Department of Justice as a weapon to target his political opposition. I chose to leave anticipating that I would one day be silenced if I didn’t.

Not every American should leave, and many can’t. People have families and lives they can’t leave behind. And I feel more guilt than I can describe for leaving mine behind.

But the time has come for us all to consider what our place is in this fight, because the fight is here.

The afternoon of Sept. 10, 2025, I was sitting on my couch in Bushwick, having just filed a story for The American Independent, scrolling on my phone.

My thoughts drifted to the journalism master’s program in London that I’d applied to months prior, been accepted to, but ultimately decided to pass on. Not out of regret — just curiosity at the path not taken.

I clicked an email I’d received for the program, which I had yet to officially decline admission to but already seemed like something from a parallel reality. I perused some of the other names on the email. Strangers I’d never meet. Friends I’d never know.

In the surreal days after the 2024 election, I was overwhelmed with a sinking feeling that I couldn’t stay in the United States for four years of madness that were sure to be even worse than Donald Trump’s first term — which, after all, literally ended in an attempted coup d’etat.

I’d interviewed many of Trump’s most extremist supporters, including one who would go on to become the face of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. I knew what these people believed. I knew what they were capable of. I knew the immense danger to Americans, to non-Americans, to the world, if their movement was ever allowed access to power again. So, shortly after Trump’s second inauguration, I started to search for plausible ways to get myself out of the country. Master’s programs in countries with English-language media seemed the easiest route. Canada was too close, Australia was too far, but the United Kingdom — for all its problems — seemed just right.

The metaphor of the frog in a pot of boiling water has always been an apt one, though. Nine months into the new administration, even I had begun to tell myself that I could simply wait out the chaos. And, driving back to California from New York City to leave some of my belongings with my family before my potential departure for London, witnessing Iowa cornfields and Wyoming buttes and Nevada deserts, I was reminded of my immense love for the only country I’d ever known.

It’s a place that’s never really lived up to its values, sure. But for most of my life, I’ve had faith in it. Faith that it could learn from its mistakes. Faith that it could grow. Faith that it’s a place anyone from anywhere on this planet could come to and belong. And it’s always looked damn beautiful while it’s at it.

Taking in the grandeur of America from behind the wheel of a compact sedan somewhere on Interstate 80, I decided to stay.

I was confident in that decision as I read through that email from a lecturer at City St. George’s, University of London, pondering the alternate dimension I had steered myself away from.

I had, after all, achieved much of what I’d set out to. Perhaps I hadn’t yet worked for a publication of the caliber that I craved. But I was born to two working-class 19-year-olds in suburban California and I’d managed to get myself a job in media, an apartment in New York City and a brand new Hyundai Elantra, goddamnit. I had my version of the American dream and I was loath to give it up. So I read the names on the email and felt perhaps the slightest bit of wistfulness, but outweighed by my pride in the stability my typing fingers had achieved for me up until then — as well as my fear of the unknown.

It was at that moment that a push notification popped onto the top of my iPhone screen.

Charlie Kirk shot at Utah rally.

There are shootings every day in America. In large cities. In country towns. In well-to-do suburbs. In impoverished enclaves.

I wish I could say I had the same reaction to all of them that I did to reading those words on my phone screen. But even before I knew Kirk was dead, I knew the reaction to an act of violence against a prominent conservative ideologue (a word I use generously here) would be just the impetus the Trump movement needed for a crackdown on political opposition.

I would be proven right within hours after it became clear that the shooting had ended Kirk’s life.

Watching Kirk’s online news channel, I saw the narrative forming in real-time.

“The Democrat party is rotten from top to bottom,” Matt Boyle, the Washington bureau chief for Breitbart News told Steve Bannon on Real America’s Voice. “They have been corrupted by the radical left. They’ve been taken over. They’ve been subsumed. Maybe one day we’ll get to a place where we have two parties again that are reasonable, but we don’t have a reasonable Democrat party anymore. Democrats are not reasonable. The fact is, is that they have created this culture.”

It’s pretty easy to imagine what follows from this sort of rhetoric. If America doesn’t have a reasonable “Democrat party” anymore, then why bother competing with it in the market of ideas? Why not simply use the powers of the state — the ones that will be completely at Republicans’ disposal until at least Jan. 20, 2029 — to crush those they disagree with?

Kirk’s body was hardly yet cold before we saw this mindset starting to take hold.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller began referring to a “vast domestic terror network” funded by liberals, and pledged to use the departments of Justice and Homeland Security to destroy this imaginary bogeyman.

Trump became emboldened to pressure prosecutors to harass his political enemies with not just investigations, but actual criminal charges.

While FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s ostensible attempt to pressure Disney to fire late night host Jimmy Kimmel backfired and became a victory for free speech, it raises questions, for me at least, about how far the Trump administration may try to go if it ever feels again that it has the wind at its back.

After many sleepless nights, I finally came to a conclusion that I had desperately tried to elude. I knew I didn’t want to live in a country where the president can order someone prosecuted and it happens. I didn’t want to live in a place where I genuinely worried whether my employer could provoke the White House’s wrath if it had the wrong political connections. And honestly, I’d known this for months, ever since I saw the first thinly-veiled Nazi meme on the Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter account. I’m the most annoyingly patriotic person my Bushwick friends know. I come from generations of military service and, had I not become a journalist, would likely have taken that path myself. But in autumn 2025, I found the United States was no longer a place I recognized, nor a place I wanted to continue building my life.

So I made the requisite emails to keep my place in the London master’s program. I spent my 28th birthday not celebrating, but throwing my belongings into a storage unit in Queens. I sold my car. I made arrangements for a friend to watch my cat until I could return for him. And in my last act before throwing my luggage in a cab to get to JFK, I accidentally locked my keys in my apartment — a sign I couldn’t go home again if I ever needed one.

I still ask myself whether I made the right choice, of course. Sometimes, like during Democrats’ resounding sweep of the elections that took place last month, I wonder whether I wouldn’t rather be in the fight more directly. But later, reading news of politicized prosecutions, of more families torn apart, of more conspiracy theories lent credibility by actors at the very highest levels of the American government, I wonder whether I would have really made it four more years in the middle of it all with my sanity intact.

And beyond even my sanity, I wonder whether it was a safe bet that my very livelihood would make it through the second Trump administration unscathed.

The day of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I was working for a Democratic-affiliated nonprofit news organization.

On Sept. 27, the day I landed in London, Trump signed a national security memorandum, NSPM-7, classifying views such as “extremism on race,” “extremism on migration,” and “extremism on gender” as “indicia” of left-wing violence.

Perhaps the only saving grace here is that the Trump administration, and its associated law enforcement apparatus, is filled with incompetent sycophants who refuse to make public appearances unless an appropriate aesthetic jacket can be found. If I were picking an enemy I knew I could outsmart, Kash Patel would certainly be high on the list.

Indeed, my former employer still operates. I have yet to see any liberal group face threats from the Trump administration that couldn’t be halted with some spine and resolve.

But it’s also December 2025. We have just over three more years to go. A lot can happen in three years.

So was my decision to come to London an overreaction, the crashout of a lifetime? Or will it come to be my lifeline, a means for me to report critically on the American government without fear of my employer being shut down? (Or at least with slightly less fear — Trump says he is suing the BBC after all).

I don’t know the answer, of course. But here’s what I do know: The night I landed in Britain, I slept through the night for the first time in months.

For the last nine months, it’s been next to impossible for me to tell whether my reaction to the second Donald Trump administration has been appropriate.

On the one hand, the world has kept on turning. He has proven the TACO theory (Trump Always Chickens Out) correct on his worst economic impulses. Perhaps a saving grace of this president being the oldest man ever elected to the office is he retains enough generational memory of 1929 not to want to spark a sequel.

But he’s moved at a quickening pace to take actions that would have been unthinkable in any other administration.

One only needs to look at the events of the past week alone to see the flashing alarm lights.

On Monday, the New York Times broke a story suggesting Trump may have given the United Arab Emirates access to advanced computer chips in exchange for a cryptocurrency investment, even amid national security concerns that the UAE might share the chips with China.

The day after the Times’ story broke, Trump sued the newspaper for unrelated allegations of defamation ahead of the 2024 election.

On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said on a podcast that Disney, parent company of television network ABC, could “do this the easy way or the hard way” with regards to taking action against late night host Jimmy Kimmel. ABC fired Kimmel shortly thereafter. While Carr and other conservatives had claimed Kimmel made misleading statements about the political ideology of the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk, Kimmel’s actual words were not as definitive as they suggest, and certainly were not grounds for the FCC to take action.

After Kimmel’s firing, Trump celebrated on Truth Social, writing: “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.” He later suggested that television stations critical of him should have their licenses revoked.

By Friday, it was reported that the president had been putting pressure on Erik Seibert, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, to step down for declining to prosecute two of Trump’s political enemies, New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.

On Friday night, the federal prosecutor did just that — he stepped down without a fight.

In the span of five days, the Trump administration faced what would have been a monumental corruption scandal under any other president; used its power to effectively silence a critic who the president already publicly targeted months ago; and forced out a federal prosecutor who wouldn’t corruptly press charges against political foes without evidence. And that’s without even mentioning the National Guard troops patrolling our nation’s capital, the masked immigration officers who may now harass Latinos with impunity, or any of the million other formerly unthinkable things this president is doing that are so numerous they have become impossible for anyone to properly focus on.

If you aren’t reading the news, it’s easy to feel like everything is normal. It’s even easy for me sometimes, too. I go out for drinks with friends. I sit on my couch rewatching No Country for Old Men with my cat curled up in my lap. I move my car for alternate side parking on Tuesdays and Fridays. If I don’t check Twitter or open my New York Times app, the world feels perfectly calm.

But danger lurks just beneath the surface. The Trump administration has pledged to use its power to attack left-wing groups, including reviewing the nonprofit status of liberal organizations. I’m sure you can imagine my concern when I work for one.

I try to reassure myself that everything will work out. But I’m increasingly concerned that the water in this pot we’ve all been sitting in has warmed so gradually that we haven’t even noticed we’ve been boiling for months.

Within hours of the assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, virtually every Democratic elected official and media figure denounced this act of political violence. And they were right to.

Political violence only begets more political violence. It’s the responsibility of every leader in this country to turn down the temperature when tragedies like this occur. This is something that President Donald Trump notably did not himself do when a gunman killed Minnesota State Senate Leader Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home in June.

Instead, the president told reporters he wouldn’t call Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in the aftermath of that shooting, referring to the Democrat and former running mate to Kamala Harris as “whacked out.”

"I could call him, say, 'Hi, how are you doing?' The guy doesn’t have a clue, he’s a mess,” Trump said. “So I could be nice and call him but why waste time?”

Democrats, in the wake of the Kirk shooting, universally took the high road.

“The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile and reprehensible,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted. “In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.”

Also in a tweet, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “Political violence is NEVER acceptable. My thoughts and prayers are with Charlie Kirk and his family.”

But turning down the temperature doesn’t mean we should lose sight of this basic truth: Charlie Kirk was a repugnant human being who spewed hatred even in his final public words.

In Kirk’s last moment in front of a crowd, a person asked him: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last 10 years?”

“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk responded immediately before being shot.

The 31-year-old has said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake,” even while admitting his view is “very, very radical.”

He also denounced Martin Luther King Jr. — ironic, as individuals in his circles have begun comparing Kirk to King.

Kirk has said: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.”

He has argued that “Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years.”

He’s said that if his daughter were raped at age 10, he would insist she carry a resulting pregnancy to term. “The baby would be delivered,” he said.

Days before his death, he tweeted that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit throat of America.”

Kirk even said gun violence — the thing that ultimately killed him — is an acceptable trade-off for the Second Amendment.

“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” he said in 2023. “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty.”

Kirk paid that price. He, unfortunately, reaped exactly what he sowed.

He was not, as Ezra Klein wrote for The New York Times yesterday, “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” He was not simply “showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.”

He was a purveyor of hate and vitriol. He was a symptom of all of the things that are wrong with American politics in the present moment. No, he should not have been murdered for his beliefs. But I don’t suspect he would have much sympathy for a left-wing influencer of similar prominence meeting a similar fate. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Charlie Kirk is dead.

As of 7 p.m. Eastern, we still have no idea who the killer is. We don’t know what motivated them, why there, why now.

It doesn’t matter though.

By the time they go to bed tonight, millions of Americans all across the country will be fully convinced of the political views of the killer.

The machinery of the right-wing media ecosphere was already doing its job within minutes of the announcement of Kirk’s death.

I tuned into Real America’s Voice — Charlie Kirk’s own online news channel — in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The blame had begun right away, and predictably, it’s being pointed squarely at the left, with minimal evidence.

There was talk of how “hateful” MSNBC’s coverage was. How pundits have apparently suggested Kirk’s death was “deserved.”

It’s not difficult to find evidence of virtually all mainstream Democratic politicians and commentators condemning the shooting of Kirk.

“We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy,” former President Barack Obama tweeted. “Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.”

“I'm just incredibly sad for his family and his young kids, genuinely shaken about where this country is headed, and praying that we can find a way to walk ourselves back from the brink,” Jon Favreau, a former Obama staffer and current Pod Save America host, wrote.

Even Zohran Mamdani, the favorite to win the New York City mayoral race whose “Democratic socialist” self-description has made him a bogeyman for centrists and conservatives alike, tweeted: “I’m horrified by the shooting of Charlie Kirk at a college event in Utah. Political violence has no place in our country.”

Everyone in the left-wing mainstream is whole-throatedly condemning Kirk’s assassination. But that won’t stop — and isn’t stopping — the right wing from conjuring up a liberal enemy to be ruthlessly stomped out.

“The Democrat party is rotten from top to bottom,” Matt Boyle, the Washington Bureau Chief for Breitbart News (to the extent Breitbart can be referred to as news) told Bannon. “They have been corrupted by the radical left. They've been taken over. They've been subsumed. Maybe one day we’ll get to a place where we have two parties again that are reasonable, but we don't have a reasonable Democrat party anymore. Democrats are not reasonable. The fact is, is that they have created this culture.”

Another guest, former Navy SEAL and Warpath Coffee founder Tej Gill, just so happened to have an assault rifle displayed directly behind him when he told Bannon this: “You shouldn't have to look over your shoulder everywhere you go. This left-wing ideology is born from college professors. When young men, young women go to college they get radicalized by these college professors and it's getting to the point where it’s almost as dangerous as radical Islam.”

Gill went on to say: “They’re killing our children, Steve. These transvestite shooters are going into these, you know, this Catholic school last month, and whatever school, but it’s absolutely sickening. They’re attacking our children through their transvestites. They’re killing political figures that they don’t agree with. They’re desperate to hang onto power any way possible, even if it means killing people in the United States of America, the land of the free, the home of the brave, free speech country, they want to silence conservatives, they want to silence white people.”

It matters not that Democratic elected officials in Minnesota were themselves victims of political violence earlier this year. It matters not who Kirk’s killer might be. It matters not what their race, sexual orientation, or gender identity is. Conservatives have their enemy. And anyone who is not white, who is not heterosexual, or who is simply not a conservative, is that enemy.

In due time, President Donald Trump’s administration will use this killing to justify ever increasing attacks on the freedoms of the list of Americans the right wing doesn’t like. It’s a long list, and many of us are on it.

I’ve never really struggled reconciling my American patriotism with my idealism before.

Perhaps it’s just a function of how I grew up. Despite arguing politics with classmates in the conservative corner of Southern California I finished high school in, often being mocked for being the lone “liberal” in a classroom of white kids parroting conservative talking points, I was still the son of a military intelligence officer and the grandson of a helicopter door gunner. Serving this country, even with all its imperfections, was never a negative in my mind.

Like any nation, like any group of people, we’re a mix of good and evil, altruism and selfishness, honor and dishonor. 

Yes, this country — like many others — was created through the sinful subjugation of a preexisting population. Yes, it has perpetrated great crimes, including very recent ones such as the torture of Iraqis, illegal detentions at Guantanamo Bay, and the funding of genocide in Palestine.

But it’s also been the source of some of the greatest scientific achievements humankind has ever accomplished. It’s the place where millions of immigrants, including my own family, have come for a better life, and often achieved it. It’s a nation that was instrumental in defeating evil regimes 80 years ago and, for all the faults of the modern era, ushered in an age that has been far more stable and far less deadly than any in human history. In just the last few decades, this country has been responsible for saving millions of lives through the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development. It’s something that, to me at least, has always striven to do better than it did the day before, to learn from its mistakes, to become a more perfect union. I always believed that.

So I carried on loving this country, perhaps the same way you might love a romantic partner who you can admit is flawed and gets on your nerves and pisses you off at times, but is ultimately still yours.

As we approach this Independence Day, though, it’s become much harder to see the good as the second Trump administration has unfolded, taking a sledgehammer to science, lighting ablaze the foreign aid that could save as many as 14 million lives in coming years, funding gangs of masked goons to target anyone with brown skin in a Home Depot parking lot.

And even beyond being difficult to be proud of, it’s become legitimately scary. Arresting elected officials and suggesting opposition candidates be stripped of their citizenship moves far past the line of political mudslinging and deep into fascist authoritarianism.

There is, of course, no legitimate legal basis for raising the question that New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani might be an illegal immigrant or that he should be deported. But these things don’t matter anymore. We are not living in a rational era any longer.

The other day, discussing the news surrounding Trump’s statements about Mamdani with a friend, he asked incredulously: “But could they really take away his citizenship?”

Of course they can. Who is stopping them?

Something we all must understand is that we no longer live in a country where our government respects the rule of law. Some would say we never did, though I think that’s misguided. The rule of law, being a design of humans, has always been flawed, doling out punishment to those who don’t deserve it, letting off scot-free those who do. But never in the modern era, even including Richard Nixon’s administration, has there been such an air of utter lawlessness in the White House. George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Joe Biden all, at minimum, respected court orders. 

Donald Trump has proven he does not give one single fuck what any judge tells him to do, or what ink on a page might insist is his duty. He already perpetrated an attempted coup to hold onto power in 2021, and got away with through a combination of luck, the ineptitude of the Biden administration, and Trump’s own ability to jedi mind-trick his supporters into believing January 6 was a false-flag operation, or blown out of proportion, or something that never happened at all.

If Trump or his administration wants to do something, it will be done, no matter how theoretically illegal.

We do not live in a place where the process will protect anyone. We now live in a place where power — the raw, unfiltered kind that can only be perceived through the barrel of a gun — is what rules the day. And unfortunately, the Democrats lost the election in 2024. The only ones with that power are in the Trump administration. And they have no qualms using that power. No one is safe now. Not you, not me, not naturalized citizens, not people born here, not people who follow the rules. No one.

Consider what the reaction of Trump’s base might be if he were to direct ICE agents to arrest Mamdani and bring him before a judge for denaturalization proceedings based on fabricated charges of concealing “terrorist sympathies” when he became a citizen in 2018. Do you think they’d be outraged? Do you think they’d see it as an example of executive overreach, of big government corruption, of the nanny state gone too far?

Of course they wouldn’t. They think Mamdani is a dangerous communist and a suspicious brown-skinned interloper. They would cheer the removal of who they see as an unAmerican foreign intruder.

And let’s say we all take to the streets in protest of that action. Surely Trump’s supporters would insist their president respect our right to free assembly, to dissent peacefully against our government, right?

Of course not. Images of the sorts of isolated acts of physical resistance that take place at the fringes of any largely peaceful protest movement, pumped vigorously into the eyes of millions through Fox News and Newsmax, would be all the justification needed to roll tanks down Fifth Avenue.

But of course our patriotic fellow Americans would never tolerate the use of force against their countrymen for exercising their constitutional rights, no?

Wrong. They will cheer as their false messiah orders the masses of leftist agitators and foreign sympathizers be gunned down in the name of liberating the burnt-out war-torn dystopias they believe these cities, the ones they only perceive through television screens, to be. American blood will run through the Hudson River and people who see themselves as patriots will argue it was an unfortunate but necessary act required for ridding their country of traitors.

Maybe the same way you might finally realize your romantic partner has become unrecognizable, someone you fear instead of love, it seems this country has turned into a far darker version of itself than I previously thought possible.

God help us all.

I’ve been covering protests since my earliest days as a journalist.

One of the very first stories I ever worked on was about student demonstrators surrounding the car my university president was riding in. 

I spent all of summer 2020 taking pictures and conducting interviews at marches in suburban Southern California in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, and that autumn I drove to Phoenix to report on the pro-Trump protests outside the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center.

But something feels very different now.

In all the countless demonstrations I’ve been to, it’s rarely been a struggle to get quotes from individual protesters.

When I attended a rally against President Donald Trump on Presidents’ Day in lower Manhattan, though, I found much more resistance to speaking to media than I was used to.

It wasn’t impossible — I still found people willing to talk. But there was a lot more skepticism, a lot more questioning of my motives and my credentials, than I’d experienced before.

A woman pressed me on who I was writing this story for, and ultimately declined when I revealed it was for a blog that I was just starting; I sure picked a hell of a time to start reporting for myself.

A man said “I’m just gonna stop talking” when I asked if he’d mind an interview.

Even those who were willing to speak were far more reluctant to give their full names than they’d ever been before. And given the direction this country seems to be heading, I’m not sure I can blame them — where before I would have insisted on a first and last name, I decided I would be happy just to take down their first.

The sentiments from everyone I talked to were much the same. A mix of fear, anger, and not knowing what else to do other than get out in the street. Which I could certainly sympathize with, as my instinct had been to get out in the street and do interviews.

One woman I spoke to in Washington Square Park, Robin, put it simply: “I’m really scared and really angry.”

Another woman I talked to in Union Square, Barbara, said: “I’m really upset at what’s happening right now in the country. The administration, Musk, all of it. It’s terrible. It’s awful … I was paralyzed the first week, and now I feel like you have to do something and it feels like a thing we can do.”

A husband and wife, Ira and Kristina, told me they’d been going to other protests, too, including one in front of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office in Manhattan — interestingly, they expressed not just “horror and disgust” at the Trump administration, but also frustration with Democrats for not fighting hard enough.

“I want them to vote against everything,” Ira told me. “I want them to make a very firm stand and make it clear that they’re not gonna participate in this ridiculous government. They need to come up with every procedural sand-in-the-gears thing they can do. They need to filibuster when they can. They need to make it as difficult to govern as possible.”

Of course, many of Trump’s actions are coming through executive orders, and Democrats don’t have a majority in either house of Congress. Even acknowledging this, though, Ira still wanted to see more fighting spirit from congressional Democrats.

“What [Trump is] doing is just executive orders and sending Musk out as a hit squad. So I’m not sure what the prospects are,” Ira said. “But when somebody like Hakeem Jeffries, who I admire enormously, says, ‘what do you want us to do?’ — you kind of really need to be thinking harder than that.”

Kristina, who said her parents were born in Lithuania, expressed a lot of concern about Trump’s actions on foreign policy.

“The collusion with Putin and what they’re doing to Europe and Gaza, and Canada and Mexico, I mean, they’re alienating the United States from the rest of the world,” she said.

These words of hers stuck with me, though: “Cutting Europe off, it’s gonna be a disaster. It’s gonna bring about a third world war.”

Is she being hyperbolic? Maybe. But before November 2016 I would have thought it was hyperbolic if you had told me the president in 2025 would be defunding federal agencies through illegal executive fiat. It seems nothing is certain anymore. And I’m just as scared as the rest of the protesters. God help us all.