The Frog Has Been Boiled

Yes, it is as bad as we feared

It is March 2025. We are two months into the second Trump Administration, and nearly a decade into his ever escalating rhetoric against immigrants and the rule of law.

You are not crazy. Your eyes do not lie. Whatever you want to call it – authoritarianism, fascism, oligarchy, kleptocracy, kakistocracy – it is here.

It is happening. It has happened. It is continuing to happen.

The Executive has seized control of Congress’s power of the purse. The Executive is acting in defiance of the Courts.

In other words, the checks and balances of our Constitution are failing.

On the most critical issues such as due process under the law (4^th, 6^th, and 8^th Amendments) and freedom of speech and assembly (1^st Amendment), the Supreme Court will have two choices. It could rule against the Executive. Or it could rule in favor of the Executive.

The first choice runs the risk of an open Constitutional Crisis if the Executive refuses to abide by the ruling. And the second choice would skip the battle and award immediate victory to an Executive asserting the divine power of Kings.

The trees in this forest of unconstitutional Executive overreach are the specific cases. The case of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to an American citizen detained by ICE and held without cause in Louisiana. The case of Julio Noriega, a citizen detained by ICE and held without cause for 10 hours in January. The escalating attacks on academic freedom in higher education.

They are coming for the immigrants, and the pro-Palestinian protesters. We know from that old German poem that they will not stop there. Their rhetorical shift has begun. Already, the Executive is threatening to imprison in El Salvador those US citizens found guilty of vandalizing Tesla property.

I do not know how this is going to end. But the pattern of unrelenting escalation suggests it will not be pretty. We have already been boiled, yet still the water gets hotter.

Excerpt from They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933 - 45:

“If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked… But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next… And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy… and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose… Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing)… You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.”

Stand up now for what you know is right.

Speak up now for your freedom, and the freedom of all.

Join us now, before it is too late.

Join together as Americans as we shut the door on our failed past and despotic present.

We will call a Convention and build real American democracy to secure our shared future.

If not now, when?