It is Happening Here.

The time for action is not in two years or four.

As bad as it is that so many tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of Americans were afflicted with the mistaken belief that “it can’t happen here,” it is infinitely worse that a nearly equal amount now believe it is not happening here.

It is.

We ceased to be a functioning democracy long ago when we ceded vastly and increasingly disproportionate power within our government to the tiny handful of the richest Americans. But now, every day in countless ways, we are becoming an authoritarian state.

We were always a racist, misogynist country. But now, our government is undoing what progress we made toward tolerance and re-institutionalizing and in some cases super-empowering old divisions in our society.

Our president and those around him promote despots and celebrate autocratic views. They emulate Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, and Orban. Nazi salutes and defenses of fascism have become so common place that each days new ones are scarcely, dangerously, no longer seen as newsworthy.

The current U.S. administration seeks to support and align themselves with the ethno-nationalist movements of the global right—in Russia, Hungary, Israel, India and many other nations suffering similar fates to the one that has befallen us.

Elon Musk seeks to not only recreate the apartheid regime under which he grew up but he has persuaded Trump, Vance, Rubio and others to penalize the South African government—primarily it appears because three decades ago they reject white minority rule.

With each passing hour during the past nearly two months we have seen the rule of law broken down and attacked, extremists placed in positions of great power, fundamental freedoms threatened and right upon right stripped away.

The right of free expression is under attack. The right to a free press is under attack. The right to due process is under attack. Not subtly. Not infrequently. Daily. Hourly. Openly. Indeed, they celebrate it.

They are arrogating onto Trump the powers of a king and to those around him the ability to gut our government, to persecute their enemies, to undo treaties and laws and Constitutional provisions that have prevailed in this country for nearly two and a half centuries.

None of this is overstatement. This is what is happening.