The Republic of Cruelty

How the American Right Embraced State Terror as Policy

It is genuinely difficult to articulate the scale of moral depravity that now defines the Republican Party. And I’m not merely referring to the MAGA base—though at this point, the distinction has become largely academic. The so-called moderates within the Republican House and Senate caucuses have demonstrated no meaningful objection to systematic cruelty, cheerfully voting to allocate $150 billion to transform ICE into the largest domestic police force in American history even as it engages in documented constitutional violations on an industrial scale.

What we are witnessing is not mere political extremism or policy disagreement. It is the deliberate construction of a state apparatus designed to terrorize human beings into submission—funded by Congress, celebrated by governors, and toured by presidents who joke about teaching deportees “how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison.”

This is evil. Not in some abstract philosophical sense, but in the most practical, immediate sense: it is the deliberate infliction of suffering on innocent people in service of political goals, justified through appeals to necessity that dissolve under the slightest moral scrutiny. And those who enable it, who normalize it, who profit from it while performing sophistication—they have revealed themselves to be complicit in a system that treats constitutional rights as optional, human dignity as negotiable, and American citizenship as meaningless when it becomes inconvenient to political theater.

Let us examine the evidence with the cold precision it demands.

The Disappeared

According to the Cato Institute—hardly a bastion of bleeding-heart liberalism—at least fifty Venezuelan nationals who entered the United States legally and never violated immigration law have been shipped to El Salvador’s prison system. Not deported to Venezuela, mind you, but imprisoned in a foreign country with which they have no connection, based on nothing more than executive decree.

The majority of these men have no criminal record. Their families have no information about where they are or why they were taken. The U.S. government has provided no justification for these imprisonments and refuses to disclose what, if anything, these individuals are accused of doing.

This is not immigration enforcement. This is state-sponsored kidnapping operating under color of law.

The case of Jordin Alexander Melgar-Salmeron provides an even more grotesque illustration of how thoroughly constitutional protections have collapsed. Melgar-Salmeron was wrongfully deported to El Salvador on May 7th—thirty minutes after a federal appeals court explicitly ruled he could not be removed from the country. When the court ordered his immediate return, the Trump administration’s response was a masterpiece of bureaucratic contempt: they told the court they could not locate him.

Think carefully about what this means. The United States government violated a direct court order, shipped an individual to a foreign country where he faces criminal charges, and then claimed they had simply misplaced him. As if a human being were a piece of lost luggage rather than someone whose constitutional rights they had systematically violated.

When courts become toothless against executive power, when direct judicial orders can be ignored with impunity, when human beings can be disappeared into foreign prison systems without explanation—we are no longer operating under constitutional government but under something far more primitive and dangerous.

The Street-Level Reality

But perhaps the most revealing aspect of this systematic cruelty is how it operates at street level, where constitutional protections meet bureaucratic brutality.

Andrea Velez, a 32-year-old American citizen and Cal Poly Pomona graduate, was walking to work in downtown Los Angeles when she was “ambushed”—the word used by local news outlets—by unmarked federal agents driving cars without license plates. According to her attorneys, Velez recognized she was in danger and ran to nearby LAPD officers for protection.

The police refused to help her.

“The officers didn’t give her any protection,” her attorney recounted. “They let the ICE people take her away.” The LAPD’s explanation was bureaucratically perfect in its moral emptiness: they don’t get involved in immigration operations, focusing instead on “crowd control.”

Think about what this means. An American citizen sought protection from law enforcement officers while being attacked by unidentified individuals, and those officers stood by and watched as she was arrested. Local police have been transformed from protectors of citizens into enablers of federal constitutional violations.

Velez was charged with “obstructing an ICE officer”—apparently for the crime of seeking police protection while being assaulted by federal agents who refused to identify themselves. Her family believes she was targeted solely because of her appearance: “Just because of the color of our skin, they think we’re criminals. My sister was there, so they were like, ‘Oh, she looks Hispanic, so let’s take her too.‘”

This is racial profiling operating as federal policy. This is unmarked federal agents conducting street-level kidnappings of American citizens based on appearance. This is local law enforcement complicity in federal constitutional violations.

When a system reaches the point where citizens cannot distinguish federal agents from criminals, where seeking police protection becomes evidence of guilt, where appearance determines constitutional rights—we have moved far beyond the realm of policy disagreement into something that has a very specific historical name.

The Doctrine of Acceptable Atrocity

But perhaps the most morally repugnant aspect of this systematic assault on constitutional rights is the ease with which its defenders have embraced what can only be called the doctrine of acceptable atrocity. When pressed about the obvious constitutional violations—American citizens arrested for their appearance, legal immigrants disappeared into foreign prisons, due process eliminated through bureaucratic decree—the response is invariably some variant of: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”

This is not just moral cowardice. This is moral depravity disguised as pragmatic wisdom.

ICE leadership has made their position explicit in internal emails obtained by The Guardian. Senior officials are instructing rank-and-file agents to “turn the creative knob up to 11” when it comes to arrests, explicitly encouraging the detention of what they euphemistically call “collaterals”—innocent bystanders swept up in enforcement actions against others.

Think carefully about that term: “collaterals.” This is the language of military operations designed to minimize the psychological impact of killing civilians. It is the vocabulary of systematic dehumanization, where constitutional violations against American citizens and legal residents become mere statistical noise in pursuit of arrest quotas.

The Trump administration has set a target of 3,000 arrests per day—1 million per year. When you design a system around numerical targets rather than legal standards, when you reward quantity over constitutional compliance, when you treat innocent people as acceptable losses in pursuit of political theater—you have created the operational framework for systematic tyranny.

And make no mistake about what “collaterals” means in practice. It means Andrea Velez, the American citizen tackled to the ground while walking to work. It means the fifty Venezuelan nationals with no criminal record shipped to foreign prisons. It means every legal immigrant, every naturalized citizen, every American-born person who looks like they might be foreign becoming fair game for federal agents operating under arrest quotas rather than constitutional constraints.

The moral calculation here is as simple as it is obscene: in order to arrest the people we want to arrest, we’re willing to arrest people we have no legal right to arrest. In order to deport those we consider undesirable, we’re willing to violate the rights of citizens and legal residents. In order to create the appearance of immigration enforcement, we’re willing to abandon the constitutional principles that distinguish law enforcement from state terror.

This is not the regrettable but necessary cost of effective governance. This is the deliberate embrace of systematic illegality as policy. When federal agents are explicitly encouraged to make warrantless arrests of “collaterals,” when constitutional protections are treated as obstacles to efficiency rather than foundations of legitimate authority, when American citizens become acceptable casualties in political theater—we have moved far beyond the realm of policy disagreement into something that has no place in constitutional democracy.

The “few eggs” being broken are not abstract policy costs or bureaucratic inefficiencies. They are human beings with constitutional rights. They are American citizens arrested for their appearance. They are legal immigrants disappeared into foreign detention systems. They are families destroyed by a system that treats due process as optional and constitutional rights as negotiable.

Those defending this system would have us believe that the immigration crisis is so severe, the threat so existential, that normally sacred principles must be temporarily suspended in service of urgent necessity. This is how every authoritarian system in history has justified its excesses—through appeals to emergency, crisis, existential threat that requires the temporary suspension of permanent principles.

But there is no immigration crisis that justifies the systematic violation of constitutional rights. There is no policy goal that makes acceptable the arrest of American citizens based on appearance. There is no enforcement priority that legitimizes the disappearance of legal residents into foreign prisons. There is no administrative objective that excuses the transformation of federal agents into unmarked kidnappers operating under arrest quotas.

The people making these moral calculations—the officials who speak casually of “collaterals,” the legislators who fund systems they know will abuse constitutional rights, the commentators who defend obvious illegality as necessary pragmatism—have revealed something essential about themselves. They have shown that they view constitutional protections not as sacred principles but as administrative inconveniences. They see due process not as fundamental to legitimate governance but as an obstacle to efficient operation. They treat American citizenship not as meaningful legal status but as revocable privilege subject to administrative discretion.

This is not the attitude of people committed to constitutional democracy. This is the mindset of people who view the Constitution as a suggestion rather than law, who see rights as privileges to be managed rather than protections to be honored, who treat justice as a luxury rather than a requirement.

The Infrastructure of Terror

But individual horrors, however appalling, require systematic infrastructure to operate at scale. This is where the true genius of contemporary American authoritarianism reveals itself: not through dramatic coups or emergency declarations, but through the mundane process of budget allocation and bureaucratic expansion.

The Senate has just passed legislation that would make ICE the largest interior law enforcement agency in American history, with an annual budget of $37.5 billion—more than the entire military expenditure of Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, or Brazil. The bill allocates $45 billion specifically for detention centers, representing a thirteen-fold increase over current capacity. Another $59 billion goes toward “militarizing the border,” $10 billion provides grants to states that implement “anti-immigrant policies,” and $1 billion funds military deployment for domestic immigration enforcement.

This is not border security. This is the construction of a domestic police state with a budget larger than most nations’ entire military forces.

The funding sources reveal the cynical calculation behind this expansion. According to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, these detention facilities will be funded “in large part” by FEMA’s emergency shelter program—disaster relief money diverted to build what are, in effect, concentration camps. The government is literally stealing disaster assistance to fund systematic human warehousing.

The legislation is deliberately vague about how these astronomical sums will be spent, creating maximum funding with minimum oversight—the perfect conditions for systematic abuse to flourish without accountability.

Alligator Alcatraz

What does $150 billion in detention infrastructure actually look like in practice? President Trump provided a chilling answer this week by touring “Alligator Alcatraz”—a detention facility built in the Florida Everglades specifically designed to maximize psychological terror.

The facility is located fifty miles from civilization in swampland known for its “treacherous terrain and wildlife.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described it with obvious satisfaction: “There is only one road leading in and the only way out is a one-way flight. It is isolated, and surrounded by dangerous wildlife in unforgiving terrain.”

Governor Ron DeSantis was even more explicit about the deliberate cruelty: “They ain’t going anywhere once they’re there, unless you want them to go somewhere. Because good luck getting to civilization. So the security is amazing—natural and otherwise.”

This is not detention infrastructure designed for humane processing. This is a deliberate torture facility designed to terrorize people into abandoning their legal rights. The location was specifically chosen to maximize psychological trauma—isolation, dangerous wildlife, complete removal from any possibility of normal human contact.

DHS Secretary Noem made the psychological warfare explicit during the presidential tour, speaking directly to television cameras: “If you don’t [self-deport], you may end up here. And you may end up here and being processed, deported out of this country, and never get the chance to come back.”

The message could not be clearer: surrender your rights voluntarily, or we will traumatize you into submission in facilities designed specifically for that purpose.

Trump himself found the cruelty amusing, joking that detained individuals would be taught “how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison.” This is the language of officials who understand perfectly well that they are creating conditions designed to cause maximum human suffering—and who find that suffering entertaining.

The site itself carries historical weight that makes the cruelty even more obscene. According to the National Park Service, this location was originally proposed in the 1960s for what would have been the world’s largest airport, but the project was abandoned when federal reports determined it would “inexorably destroy the South Florida ecosystem and thus the Everglades National Park.” The site was considered too environmentally destructive for an airport, but apparently perfect for psychologically destroying human beings.

The Silicon Valley Silence

But perhaps the most damning indictment of this entire system is the deafening silence from Silicon Valley’s oligarchs—the very people who spend millions lobbying for skilled immigration reform and pontificating about the global flow of talent.

Where is Marc Andreessen’s righteous indignation about legal immigrants being shipped to foreign prisons? Where are Elon Musk’s Twitter threads about American citizens being tackled by unmarked federal agents? Where is Peter Thiel’s philosophical analysis of state terror operating under color of law?

These men built their fortunes on the backs of immigrant engineers, immigrant entrepreneurs, immigrant innovators. They never tire of lecturing us about how H-1B visas and skilled immigration are essential to American competitiveness. They fund think tanks, hire lobbyists, and deploy their media empires to argue that America’s technological supremacy depends on attracting the world’s best and brightest.

Yet when the very immigrants they claim to champion are being systematically terrorized by their own government—when legal residents are disappeared into foreign detention systems, when citizens are arrested based on appearance, when federal agents operate like unmarked kidnapping squads—these champions of immigration suddenly develop acute cases of political laryngitis.

Their silence is not accidental. It is strategic.

Because what the Silicon Valley oligarchs actually want is not immigration reform but immigration control. They want the ability to import skilled workers when labor markets are tight and export them when demand softens. They want immigrants who are grateful, compliant, and deportable—not immigrants with constitutional rights, due process protections, and the legal standing to demand fair treatment.

The current system serves their interests perfectly. When ICE operates under arrest quotas rather than constitutional constraints, when federal agents can target anyone who “looks foreign,” when legal status becomes meaningless in the face of administrative convenience—it creates exactly the kind of precarious workforce that maximizes their leverage.

Think about the message this system sends to every H-1B worker, every green card applicant, every naturalized citizen working in Silicon Valley: your legal status is provisional, your constitutional rights are optional, and your protection from state violence depends entirely on remaining useful to your employers and invisible to federal agents.

This is not immigration policy—it is labor control through state terror. And Silicon Valley’s oligarchs are not its victims but its primary beneficiaries.

The Tequila Oligarchs

The moral bankruptcy of Silicon Valley’s elite reaches its most grotesque expression in the All-In Podcast—four middle-aged men who have discovered that there is considerable profit in packaging sociopathy as insight while hawking luxury goods to an audience they secretly despise.

David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg spend their time selling $400 bottles of aged tequila while discussing nuclear weapons and federal troop deployments with the casual detachment of people who view human suffering as entertainment content. They open shows about potential civilizational collapse with product placement for their “unboxing experience,” apparently unaware that this reveals everything wrong with their moral universe.

“Being an elitist guys is very hard,” Calacanis jokes, perfectly capturing how these men have transformed elite status from responsibility into performance art. They’ve discovered that their audience doesn’t want serious analysis of immigration enforcement or constitutional violations—they want the performance of seriousness by people wealthy enough to be above consequence, sophisticated enough to make brutality sound strategic, and detached enough to treat systematic cruelty as just another investment thesis.

When these men discuss ICE operations that target legal immigrants and American citizens, they do so while literally double-fisting luxury spirits, performing the kind of moral detachment that allows people to feel intellectually superior while supporting policies that destroy other people’s lives. They’ve commodified nihilism and branded it as wisdom, creating content that provides their audience permission to abandon moral concern while maintaining the fiction of sophisticated analysis.

The fact that they seamlessly transition from marketing expensive alcohol to analyzing geopolitical catastrophe—without any sense that these might require different moral registers—reveals the complete corruption of serious thought by people who’ve learned to monetize the apocalypse. They treat warfare as entertainment, constitutional violations as content opportunities, and human suffering as variables in their investment calculations, all while performing the role of serious thinkers making hard choices based on rational analysis.

Their silence about systematic constitutional violations isn’t political prudence—it’s brand management. They can’t acknowledge that legal immigrants are being shipped to foreign prisons or that American citizens are being arrested based on appearance because doing so would interfere with their carefully constructed aesthetic of detached sophistication. They need their audience to believe that caring about constitutional rights is naive, that moral concern is weakness, that the systematic destruction of democratic institutions is just another market opportunity for those smart enough to see it clearly.

These are not serious people grappling with genuine moral dilemmas. These are moral parasites who have discovered that there is considerable money in packaging the abandonment of constitutional principles as strategic wisdom, while selling luxury goods to people who want to feel sophisticated about supporting systematic cruelty.

The tequila is the perfect metaphor: expensive, unnecessary, designed to signal status rather than serve purpose, marketed to people who mistake consumption for accomplishment. It’s the ideal product for an audience that wants to feel elite while supporting policies that are fundamentally barbaric, sophisticated while endorsing systematic stupidity, wise while enabling constitutional vandalism.

Building Alternative Kingdoms

But perhaps the most revealing aspect of Silicon Valley’s silence about systematic constitutional violations is what they’re doing instead of speaking out: they’re building alternative systems to operate outside the very legal framework they’re watching collapse.

Palmer Luckey, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale—the same tech oligarchs who remain silent while legal immigrants are shipped to foreign prisons and American citizens are assaulted by unmarked federal agents—are busy launching a new cryptocurrency-focused bank called “Erebor.”

The timing is not coincidental. While constitutional protections dissolve and federal agents operate like unmarked kidnappers, these billionaires are constructing parallel financial infrastructure designed to operate beyond traditional regulatory oversight. They’re not fighting to preserve constitutional governance—they’re building systems to escape it.

Erebor plans to serve “technology businesses in areas such as artificial intelligence, crypto, defense and manufacturing” while holding stablecoins on its balance sheet and facilitating cryptocurrency transactions outside traditional banking oversight. This isn’t innovation—it’s the systematic construction of oligarchic infrastructure designed to operate independently of democratic institutions.

Think about the moral calculation here: while immigrants with legal status are being disappeared into foreign detention systems, while American citizens are being arrested based on appearance, while constitutional rights are being eliminated through administrative decree—these same oligarchs who profit from immigrant labor are building financial systems specifically designed to avoid the legal frameworks that should protect those immigrants.

They want the benefits of American economic infrastructure—the legal protections for property rights, the enforcement mechanisms for contracts, the military protection for global operations—without the obligations that democratic governance requires. They want to import workers when convenient and export them when expedient, all while operating through financial systems designed to avoid oversight by the democratic institutions they’re systematically undermining.

The name “Erebor” is particularly telling—it’s the name of the Lonely Mountain from Tolkien’s The Hobbit, where the dragon Smaug hoards stolen treasure while the surrounding lands suffer. These oligarchs have chosen to name their alternative financial system after a symbol of isolated wealth accumulation built on others’ suffering.

This is the operational definition of oligarchic secession: building parallel systems of governance and finance while maintaining access to the benefits of democratic institutions. They want American military protection for their global operations, American legal frameworks for their property rights, American infrastructure for their supply chains—but they want cryptocurrency banks and digital governance systems to avoid American taxation, regulation, and constitutional obligations.

Their silence about constitutional violations isn’t political prudence—it’s strategic calculation. They don’t want to defend constitutional governance because constitutional governance would constrain their ability to operate through alternative systems designed to concentrate wealth and power outside democratic oversight.

When legal immigrants are shipped to foreign prisons, when citizens are arrested based on appearance, when constitutional rights become optional—these developments don’t threaten the oligarchs’ interests. They serve them. A population kept in precarious legal status, a system where rights exist only at administrative discretion, a government that operates through fear rather than consent—these create exactly the conditions where alternative governance systems become attractive to those with sufficient resources to access them.

You want me to pretend they’re not evil? I can’t. When you possess the resources to challenge systematic constitutional violations and choose instead to protect only the violations that threaten your specific economic interests, when you watch state terror unfold against the very communities you claim to champion and respond with calculated silence while building alternative systems to escape democratic accountability—you have revealed yourself to be exactly what you are: an oligarch who views human rights as negotiable commodities rather than inviolable principles.

The Complicity of Normalcy

What makes this systematic cruelty particularly insidious is how it has been normalized through the mundane processes of democratic governance. These are not emergency measures implemented during wartime or crisis. These are policies debated in Congress, funded through regular appropriations, implemented by career bureaucrats, and defended by officials who maintain they are simply enforcing existing law.

The Senate vote to create the largest domestic police force in American history was not conducted in secret or under emergency powers. It was a regular legislative process, covered by mainstream media, defended by elected officials who will face voters in future elections.

The construction of detention facilities designed specifically to maximize psychological trauma is not happening in hidden locations or through covert operations. It is being celebrated in public tours, defended in press conferences, and funded through official government channels.

The disappearance of legal immigrants into foreign prison systems is not being conducted by rogue agents or unauthorized personnel. It is official U.S. policy, implemented through proper bureaucratic channels, defended by government attorneys in federal court.

This normalization of systematic cruelty through regular democratic processes represents perhaps the gravest threat to American constitutional government since the Civil War. When horror becomes routine, when cruelty becomes policy, when the apparatus of democratic governance is used to destroy democratic values—we face something far more dangerous than dramatic authoritarianism.

We face the slow, methodical, bureaucratically efficient destruction of everything that makes constitutional government possible.

The Etiquette of Atrocity

But perhaps the most revealing aspect of this systematic cruelty is not the cruelty itself, but the response of those who position themselves as democracy’s defenders when that cruelty is called by its proper name.

When you document that legal immigrants are being shipped to foreign prisons, that American citizens are being arrested based on appearance, that federal agents operate like unmarked kidnappers—when you use words like “evil” to describe systematic constitutional violations designed to terrorize human beings into submission—the pearl-clutching begins immediately.

Not about the constitutional violations themselves, mind you. About the tone used to describe them.

We live in a moral universe where calling evil “evil” is considered ruder than the evil itself. Where using accurate language about systematic corruption is treated as a greater transgression than perpetrating that corruption. Where pointing out that oligarchs profit from human suffering while selling luxury goods is considered more divisive than the actual division of families through state terror.

The professional moderates emerge to scold critics for “simplistic framing” and abandoning “persuasion” for “blanket denunciation.” They want us to treat obvious moral bankruptcy as mere “rational calculation,” to pretend that discussing nuclear weapons with the same energy as tequila marketing represents legitimate strategic thinking, to act as if systematic enablement of authoritarianism is just another valid perspective in the marketplace of ideas.

This represents the complete domestication of liberal discourse by oligarchic interests. These people have been so thoroughly trained to avoid moral categories that they experience moral clarity as personal attack. They’ve learned that their careers, their social standing, their access to elite circles all depend on maintaining the fiction that we’re dealing with normal political disagreements rather than systematic institutional capture.

They demand “nuance” while supporting policies that terrorize families. They worry about “divisive rhetoric” while remaining silent about the actual division of families through deportation. They fear “extremism” in language while normalizing extremism in policy. They want “respectful discourse” about the disrespectful deployment of federal police against American citizens.

The concern trolling reveals a moral universe so inverted that accuracy becomes incivility, that calling sedition “sedition” is considered a greater transgression than committing sedition, that pointing out corruption is treated as worse than perpetrating it.

The Gentleman’s Agreement with Fascism

What we’re witnessing is a gentleman’s agreement to treat fascism as friendly disagreement. You can discuss the “complex challenges of immigration enforcement” and the “difficult trade-offs between security and liberty,” but you cannot call systematic institutional capture by its proper name without violating the social contract of sophisticated conversation.

The professional moderates want us to believe that we’re dealing with complex policy disagreements requiring nuanced analysis. But we’re not. We’re dealing with systematic constitutional violations designed to terrorize human beings into submission, funded by disaster relief money, implemented through arrest quotas that treat innocent people as acceptable “collateral damage.”

When federal agents are explicitly encouraged to arrest “collaterals”—innocent bystanders swept up in enforcement actions—we are not witnessing policy complexity. We are witnessing the systematic abandonment of constitutional principles in favor of state terror operating under administrative quotas.

When detention facilities are built in swamps surrounded by dangerous wildlife specifically to maximize psychological trauma, we are not seeing immigration enforcement. We are seeing the deliberate construction of torture facilities designed to terrorize people into abandoning their legal rights.

When American citizens are arrested for their appearance while walking to work, when local police refuse to protect them from unmarked federal agents, when constitutional rights become optional based on administrative convenience—we are not observing normal political disagreement. We are documenting the collapse of constitutional government into something far more primitive and dangerous.

The Stakes

The infrastructure of American authoritarianism is not theoretical anymore. It is operational. It has a budget larger than most nations’ militaries. It has facilities designed specifically to maximize human suffering. It has personnel trained to treat constitutional violations as acceptable quotas. It has victims whose only crime was existing in proximity to federal political theater.

And it has the enthusiastic support of an entire political party that has decided the deliberate infliction of human suffering is not just acceptable policy, but a source of entertainment for presidents who joke about alligators eating deportees, while Silicon Valley oligarchs who profit from immigrant labor build alternative financial systems to escape accountability to the very people who built their fortunes, all while professional moderates worry more about the tone used to describe this system than about the system itself.

This is evil. Plain and simple. Not “misguided policy” or “complex governance challenges” or “difficult trade-offs in a messy world.” Evil. The deliberate infliction of suffering on innocent people in service of political theater, justified through appeals to necessity that dissolve under the slightest moral scrutiny.

When a society loses the capacity to make these basic moral distinctions—when calling corruption “corruption” becomes worse than committing corruption, when using the word “evil” to describe systematic constitutional violations is considered ruder than the violations themselves—it has abandoned the meaning-making project that makes civilization possible.

The choice before us is between comfort and clarity, between etiquette and survival, between the polite fictions that make elite discourse comfortable and the moral truths that make democratic resistance possible.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And when federal police conduct explosive raids on family homes while democracy’s supposed defenders worry about whether critics are being sufficiently respectful to oligarchs, we are living through the kind of moral collapse that historians will struggle to believe actually happened.

The center cannot hold when those charged with holding it have convinced themselves that noticing its collapse is ruder than causing it. But it can be defended by those who refuse to participate in the gentleman’s agreement that treats fascism as friendly disagreement, who choose moral clarity over comfortable lies, who call things by their proper names regardless of how many professional moderates rush to scold them for their tone.

Remember what’s real. Call evil “evil.” Choose accuracy over false charity. And refuse to let those who enable systematic cruelty lecture you about civility while that cruelty operates with their tacit consent.

The revolution is recognizing that the emperor has no clothes. The rebellion is saying so out loud, regardless of how many courtiers rush to scold you for your tone. The resistance is choosing moral clarity over comfortable lies, even when—especially when—that clarity makes the people destroying democracy uncomfortable with reminders that their power, like all power, is temporary.

The republic they are building in our name is not the republic we inherited. And it is not the republic we must allow them to complete.

Nobody lives forever. But the principles we choose to defend—or abandon—will outlive us all.