Civil Resistance Tactics in the 21st Century belongs on the virtual bookshelf of anyone who is studying or practicing nonviolent action.
Explore updated categories and tactics that respect and expand on Gene Sharp’s landmark work.Teachers & Give your participants a brief overview of the whole range of nonviolent tactics used around the world, when and how those tactics work, and how nonviolent tactics differ from, or combine with, other types of civil resistance. Use this concise guide to expand your toolbox and sharpen your analytical tools for selecting powerful strategies for your campaigns. This book dovetails with two huge online sources (Nonviolence International’s Nonviolent Tactics Database and Organizing & Training Archive) so that you can move seamlessly between strategy and implementation.
There is more than one author in the Goodreads catalog with this name. This entry is for Michael ^ Beer.
Michael Beer is Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School and Chairman of TruePoint a research based consultancy he co-founded. The firm works with senior executives who aspire to transform their organization into a high commitment and performance system through honest conversations about the organization’s alignment with strategy and values.
Voters walk in to cast their ballot for the US presidential and congressional elections at Dearborn High School in Dearborn, MIichigan on November 5, 2024.
(Photo by Adam James Dewey/Anadolu via Getty Images)
One expert expressed fear that “something truly spectacular is going to happen in which our 2026 midterm elections are not administered like past elections have been.”
A pair of experts warned this week that President Donald Trump is clearly telegraphing his intention to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections.
Stephen Richer, former recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, said during an interview with The Atlantic published Wednesday that he’s grown worried that “something truly spectacular is going to happen in which our 2026 midterm elections are not administered like past elections have been.”
When asked to flesh out how Trump could potentially rig the upcoming elections, Richer said it was unlikely that he would deploy US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to polling places across the country, if for no other reason than he lacks the manpower to accomplish such an operation.
However, Richer did express concern about the president’s ability to muddy waters in tight races and put pressure on his Republican allies to refuse to seat Democratic winners when he is claiming there are disputes about the results.
“Where I think President Trump is most potent is still in the post-election procedures,” he explained, “still in sowing doubt in the minds of enough Americans that they don’t think the elections are legitimate and, therefore… the Congress doesn’t have to seat its new members. That’s certainly a popular theory that’s floating about: that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), the outgoing speaker, will choose not to seat the new members, because they’re in allegedly disputed elections.”
Richer argued that California could be particularly vulnerable to this, since the state infamously takes so long to finish tallying its votes.
In a New York Times editorial published Thursday, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program, argued that Trump’s “campaign to rig our elections is well underway,” and he pointed to the president’s mass pardon last year of rioters who violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 as the beginning of his election subversion campaign.
“We have every reason to expect more actions like these in the coming months,” wrote Morales-Doyle. “A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump reiterated his threats to prosecute election officials who ran the 2020 election. Just days later, FBI agents seized ballots and election records from 2020 in Fulton County, Georgia.”
However, Morales-Doyle also said there was reason to believe that the American system can withstand the president’s assault on its election integrity, and he gave a nod toward several efforts across the country to fight back, including states resisting Trump’s demands to hand over their voter rolls and Democrats refusing to let new voter suppression legislation pass through Congress.
“We are already seeing how effective people can be in pushing back,” he concluded, “whether on the streets of Minneapolis or at town halls hosted by their representatives in Congress. It will be incumbent on all of us—election officials, advocates, state law enforcement, and voters—to see the administration’s efforts for what they are and to fight back.”
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Leaked documents obtained by Wired show that federal immigration enforcement operations in the US appear set to expand even more significantly in the coming years.
Overall, Wiredreported on Tuesday, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—has been aggressively expanding its footprint across the country, with “more than 150 leases and office expansions” that “have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.”
Many of these new facilities are near sensitive locations that ICE has targeted in its immigrant abduction campaigns, including schools, hospitals, and places of worship such as churches and mosques.
For example, records show ICE is planning to occupy an office building just blocks away from a preschool in Houston, Texas, and to move into offices in Irvine, California located near a childcare facility.
To speed up this rapid expansion, DHS has been leaning on the Government Services Administration to write off standard lease procurement procedures and to even conceal lease listings in the name of “national security concerns.”
Taken as a whole, Wired found that “ICE agents and officers will share buildings with doctors, restaurants, and businesses,” and will “expand existing offices and move in with unrelated government agencies,” such as in Philadelphia, where they are set to share space with the local Division of Motor Vehicles.
“The leasing plans give a clear picture of where ICE is going next in the US: Everywhere,” the report concluded.
The leaked plans about ICE’s aggressive expansion come as immigrants being held in ICE detention centers give disturbing accounts of conditions at facilities.
Seamus Culleton, an Irish citizen who has been held at a Texas ICE detention center for five months despite having a valid US work permit and no criminal record, told Ireland’s RTÉ that the facility is akin to a “modern-day concentration camp.”
“It’s a bunch of temporary tents,” he explained. “There’s a room for, probably, a thousand detainees in each tent… I’ve been locked in the same room now for four-and-a-half months. I’ve had barely any outside time, no fresh air, no sunshine. I can probably count on both hands the number of times I’ve been outside. So I’m just locked inside this room all day, every day.”
Culleton also said that the facilities were “filthy,” with toilets and showers being “completely nasty.”
Seamus Culleton, an Irishman with a valid US work permit, has been held in an ICE detention center for over four months and calls it “a modern day concentration camp” (Video: @RTERadio1) pic.twitter.com/p4nJJwuoXL
On Monday, ProPublicapublished letters that children detained at an immigration center in Dilley, Texas had written while they were being held with their parents.
Ender, a 12-year-old from Venezuela who has been detained in Dilley for over two months, complained about people getting inadequate medical care at the facility.
“Going to the doctor and… the only thing they tell you is to drink more water,” Ender wrote in his letter. “And the worst thing is that it seems the water is what makes people sick here.”
Ariana, a 14-year-old from Honduras who has been at the facility for a month-and-a-half, used her letter to explain the mental toll the detention has taken.
“Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” explained Ariana, who added that children being held at the facility are “being damage (sic) mentally, they witness how the’ve been treated.”
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US Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) is seen at the Senate Chambers on February 12, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
“Initially my reaction to all this was, I don’t care, I don’t know what the big deal is,” the Trump-supporting Sen. Cynthia Lummis said. “But now I see what the big deal is.”
Members of Congress were given a chance to scour unredacted versions of the Department of Justice’s files on Jeffrey Epstein for the first time on Monday.
There are more than 3 million pages available for lawmakers to comb through following their release to the public with heavy redactions. Meanwhile, despite a law requiring all the files to be released in December, the DOJ is still sitting on another 3 million pages that have yet to be published.
Lawmakers have so far only scratched the surface of the information available. But what they’ve seen after just one day has even some of President Donald Trump’s biggest defenders reevaluating their dismissal of the Epstein scandal.
“Initially, my reaction to all this was, I don’t care, I don’t know what the big deal is,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) told independent journalist Pablo Manríquez on Monday. “But now I see what the big deal is and it was worth investigating. The members of Congress who were pushing this were not wrong!”
GOP Sen Lummis says she’s changed her mind after new Epstein revelations today: “Initially my reaction to all this was, I don’t care. I don’t see what the big deal is. But now I see what the big deal is. The members of Congress who were pushing this were not wrong!”@PabloReportspic.twitter.com/aHBx36oguw
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who have led the charge in Congress for the files to be released, said on Monday that six individuals who were “likely incriminated” in Epstein’s crimes had their identities blacked out by the DOJ in the files that were released publicly.
“In a couple of hours, we found six men whose names have been redacted, who are implicated in the way that the files are presented,” Massie told reporters outside the DOJ office where lawmakers viewed the files.
They did not initially specify the individuals’ names, but Massie said at least one was a US citizen and some were “high‑up” foreign officials.
Massie later revealed that one of the men on this list was Les Wexner, the ex-CEO of L Brands, which owns Victoria’s Secret. Wexner appears in the files thousands of times and was infamously one of Epstein’s most intimate financial clients.
After Massie questioned why Wexner’s name was blacked out, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced it had been unredacted and said the DOJ was “hiding nothing.” The other five names remained redacted as of Tuesday morning.
The FBIclosed its investigation into Epstein in July, concluding that while the financier himself abused several underage girls, along with his partner Ghislane Maxwell—who is currently serving 20 years in prison—he was not running a sex-trafficking ring that included other powerful figures.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said the files he and other lawmakers reviewed yesterday told a much different story.
“It’s disgusting,” he said. “There are lots of names, lots of co-conspirators, and they’re trafficking girls all across the world.”
Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) put it more succinctly when a Drop Site News reporter caught her on the way back from the DOJ office and asked what she learned from viewing the files.
“There’s a bunch of sick fucks,” she said.
https://twitter.com/i/status/2021015709359247659
Lawmakers also said the documents contradicted Trump’s claims that he booted Epstein from membership at his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, and disassociated from him in the early 2000s because the predator was poaching young female workers from the resort. Trump has said that one of them was the late Virginia Giuffre, then a 17-year-old locker room employee, who’d go on to become one of Epstein’s victims and most prominent accusers.
According to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), “for some indeterminate, inscrutable reason,” the DOJ concealed a summary of statements allegedly made by Trump, provided by Epstein’s lawyers, in which the president said he never asked Epstein to leave the club.
“One [document] was related to whether or not Trump had ever kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, as he claimed,” she said. “It’s not true. It’s a lie.”
The law passed in November requiring the files’ release mandates that victims of Epstein’s abuse have their privacy protected, but forbids the DOJ from redacting information to protect prominent individuals, including government officials, from embarrassment.
“The broader issue is why so many of the files they’re getting are redacted in the first place,” Khanna said. “What Americans want to know is who the rich and powerful people are who went to [Epstein’s] island? Did they rape underage girls? Did they know that underage girls were being paraded around?”
Massie and Khanna said they were disappointed to find that many of the files that were supposed to be available were still heavily redacted. Massie lamented that the DOJ had not yet provided access to the FBI’s 302 forms, which contain official summaries of interviews with witnesses and victims.
Raskin said viewing the files affirmed many of the concerns about the DOJ “over-redacting” files.
“We didn’t want there to be a cover-up, and yet, what I saw today was that there were lots of examples of people’s names being redacted when they were not victims,” Raskin told CNN. “There are thousands and thousands of pages replete with redactions. There are entire pages in memos where you can’t see anything.”
Lawmakers were given permission to view the files in a letter sent by the DOJ on Friday, following mounting criticism about the extensive number of redactions in the public release. They are required to sift through the files in a tightly-secured DOJ office and are barred from making copies available to the public, though they are allowed to take notes.
Raskin said that the office contains only four computers, making the process of sorting through more than 3 million files agonizingly slow.
“Working 40 hours a week on nothing else but this, it would take more than seven years for the 217 members who signed the House discharge petition to read just the documents they’ve decided to release,” he wrote in a post on social media.
Attorney General Pam Bondi is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee about the handling of the files on Wednesday. Massie said he plans to grill her about why so many potential co-conspirators had their names redacted in the public release.
“I would like to give the DOJ a chance to say they made a mistake and over‑redacted and let them unredact those men’s names,” he said. That would probably be the best way to do it.“
Blanche has responded to the criticism on social media, saying, “The DOJ is committed to transparency.”
Khanna: "Donald Trump had the FBI scrub those files in March. And the documents we saw already had the redactions of the FBI from March. So we still have not seen the vast majority of documents unredacted that have the survivor statements of the rich and powerful men who… pic.twitter.com/iiue4C75FW
Khanna, who appeared on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday morning, said that based on what he saw in the public release, the opposite is true.
“ Donald Trump had the FBI scrub those files in March,” he said. “And the documents we saw already had the redactions of the FBI from March. So we still have not seen the vast majority of documents unredacted that have the survivor statements of the rich and powerful men who committed these crimes.”
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Trump’s Big Government Came for the Sick and the Compliant / Citizens Dragged From Cars, Detainees Shackled to Hospital Beds, as Government Databased are Wiped Clean
Indifference to human life, rendered at monumental scale. The Raft of the Medusa, Théodore Géricault, 1818–1819, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris
The administration has built a detention system so opaque that families and lawyers are routinely denied the most basic information, including confirmation that a person in government custody remains alive.
On February 3, 2025, Franco Caraballo walked into an ICE office in Dallas for a mandatory asylum check-in. After months of compliance, he was detained on the spot and transferred to a federal facility in Texas. Weeks later, on a Friday night in March, he called his wife, Johanny Sánchez, crying and panicked, saying agents had handcuffed him and put him on a plane without disclosing where he was being taken.
Within twenty-four hours, his name vanished from ICE’s online detainee locator. Sánchez later learned her husband was among more than two hundred Venezuelan immigrants flown to El Salvador’s maximum security CECOT prison, accused of gang membership despite having no criminal record in either country. He was taken at a scheduled appointment, held for weeks, erased from the government’s own tracking system, and transferred to a foreign prison where communication and visitation are forbidden, a sequence that now defines standard practice.
That progression repeated nationwide throughout 2025 and into 2026. People entered federal custody, brief contact followed, and the they vanished. Attorneys searched databases that no longer returned a name, and public locator tools were of no help.
Detention now outpaces documentation. Transfers accelerate while records fail, medical removals cut contact, and removal flights depart beyond the reach of tracking systems, leaving no record for accountability. When a person disappears inside government detention, legal representation ends, medical advocacy becomes unreachable, families lose the ability to intervene, and oversight is nonexistent.
That failure begins at entry points engineered to look routine while concealing what follows, including scheduled check ins, workplace raids, courthouse pickups, and traffic stops that end in federal handoff. Detainees surface briefly in public locator systems just long enough to project accountability before rapid transfers permutant erase their names, a pattern Minnesota attorneys described after preparing consultations only to learn their clients had been moved across state lines without notice, discovering the transfer only after being told the client was already gone despite formal notification requirements.
People move through the system faster than any mechanism meant to track them, as transfers across facilities and state lines occur without warning, hearings disappear from calendars, filings stall, and due process erodes when physical movement consistently outruns recordkeeping.
Hospitalization accelerates disappearance by design. Hospitals employ blackout procedures that register detained patients under pseudonyms and refuse to confirm presence even to counsel, a practice physician has described as institutional compliance with erasure.
When Julio César Peña suffered a ministroke after detention in Glendale, California, in December 2025, his lawyer contacted the hospital and was met with a categorical refusal to confirm admission. Days later, Peña’s family found him unconscious, shackled hand and foot to a hospital bed, after learning for the first time that he had suffered a seizure that no one had disclosed.
In Minneapolis, the pattern became undeniable. An immigration attorney stood outside the attorney visitation room at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building for four hours trying to reach a client held for days, a client with severe medical conditions who depended on specific medications to survive. Family members attempted to deliver prescriptions without any confirmation the medication reached him. After telling agents directly that confirmation of life was required, the attorney received the same five-word response stating that attorney visitation was not conducted. Other attorneys reported identical denials at the same facility, paired with shifting explanations that clients had not requested counsel by name or that the building lacked capacity for legal visits, excuses without any basis in law. Carmen Iguina González described a national reality in which attorneys cannot locate clients or reach them without phones or visitation rooms and lose access entirely as transfers or deportations permanently sever contact.
The system exploits the narrow space between custody and death through practices that erase fatalities from official counts. ICE has released people from custody shortly before death, prompting litigation over concealed fatalities. In New Mexico, a transgender asylum seeker was handed parole papers from a hospital bed after weeks without medical care at the Otero Processing Center. Agency protocol requires death notification within 12 hours and public disclosure within two business days, yet deaths are relabeled when possible and bodies are moved.
After the El Paso County medical examiner ruled Geraldo Lunas Campos’s death a homicide by asphyxiation, directly contradicting ICE’s suicide claim, the next detainee to die at Camp East Montana, Victor Manuel Diaz, was never sent to the county examiner. His body was routed to a military hospital on Fort Bliss, bypassing the independent office that had exposed the agency’s false account. Yorlan Diaz rejected the government’s explanation of his brother’s death, saying his brother sought a better life and wanted to support their mother.
Isolation operates as policy at the Everglades detention site known as Alligator Alcatraz. Attorneys reported restricted access to counsel and interference with confidential communication, while detainees vanished from public tracking systems despite remaining in government custody. During a July 2025 visit, the president enthusiastically praised the surrounding alligators as guards who did not need to be paid and signaled his intent to replicate the model nationwide. Homeland Security officials labeled detainees “some of the worst scumbags” without a shred of evidence who entered the United States, language devoted to confinement and disappearance rather than survival.
The same gaps now extend nationwide. Migrants transferred to Guantanamo faced severe barriers to attorney access and family contact, forcing litigation simply to determine detention location and conditions. The detained population climbed from under 40,000 in January 2025 to more than 73,000 by January 2026, the highest level in the agency’s history.
The administration sold this buildup as a crackdown on violent criminals, yet the data shows that only 5 percent of detainees had violent crime convictions while nearly three quarters had no criminal conviction at all. The number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention surged by 2,450 percent in a single year, revealing a system built to remove those deemed by the administration undesirable rather than deliver public safety.
American citizens have been pulled into this intentionally opaque machinery. At least 170 US citizens were detained by immigration agents through October 2025, a figure that understates the scale because the federal government does not track how often citizens are seized. ICE admitted in court records that agents detained people without verifying citizenship, and more than 20 citizens were held for at least a full day without access to a lawyer or a phone call.
Aliya Rahman was dragged from her car by ICE agents, forced to the ground, and taken to the Whipple Federal Building, where she asked for medical care for more than an hour before losing consciousness and waking in a hospital with a concussion. George Retes, an American military veteran, was detained during a raid despite agents knowing his citizenship, leaving his family searching for days before locating him, after which he described institutional indifference from the agents. In January 2026, a 5-year-old American citizen was deported to Honduras with her mother under a deportation order issued a year before the child was born.
The detention apparatus continues expanding without any connection to public safety. ICE added more than 100 detention facilities in 2025 alone, while 45 billion dollars in new funding arrived through the One Big Beautiful Bill, enough to operate 135,000 beds through fiscal year 2029. The administration set a standing goal of 100,000 bodies in detention at any given time and began converting warehouses into dentation centers while constructing tent camps on military bases, including Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss, where 3 detainees died within 44 days.
People are getting sick and dying inside these facilities beyond the reach of outside intervention. 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, the highest number in 20 years, followed by at least 6 more deaths in the first 3 weeks of 2026 alone. A Senate investigation documented more than 1,000 credible reports of abuse in a single year, including medical neglect, physical and sexual abuse, and the mistreatment of children, while internal documents described an absolute emergency after ICE stopped paying for 3rd-party medical treatment, cutting off dialysis to the chronically disabled, prenatal care, prescribed medication, and cancer treatment across facilities holding more than 73,000 people.
History shows the consequences when disappearance becomes administrative routine. In Nazi Germany, people vanished into a vast camp network while families received silence or were told falsehoods, death certificates listed fabricated causes, bodies were cremated before notification, and records were destroyed to erase evidence.
A detention system that allows people to disappear from records while remaining in government custody recreates that danger inside a vast American bureaucracy, as any government that cannot account for where it holds someone forfeits any credible claim to safety or care.
Congress has funded a detention system that treats disappearance as a feature. What began as improvisation has developed into policy as capacity rapidly expands, with success measured in bodies processed and beds filled rather than lives preserved, while the sick, the disabled, and the elderly are reduced to surplus instead of recognized as humans entitled to protection.
The population inside these facilities exposes the lie used to justify their existence. Cells are filled with people who complied, reported for appointments, went to work, drove to the store, aged into vulnerability, lived with physical or intellectual disability including American citizens.
President Trump has shown open contempt for human life unless it benefits him directly, particularly toward those he frames as burdens rather than contributors, and that disdain does not stop at citizenship or ability. A government willing to erase an innocent human from a database will erase a disabled resident, an elderly patient, or a citizen with the same indifference, because the governing logic recognizes only usefulness and discards those deemed expendable.
Vladimir Lenin warned that capitalists would sell the rope with which they would be hanged. Congress has already delivered the symbolic rope by passing the One Big Beautiful Bill and financing a detention system that, this far, has functioned as a clandestine prepaid mechanism of disappearance and preventable death. A nation that budgets for erasure has already decided whose lives matter, excluding the disabled, the elderly, and the inconvenient.
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Associated Press / PBS NewsHour, “Families Search for Loved Ones After Hundreds Taken on U.S. Immigration Flights Disappear from Online Locator,” March 18, 2025 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/families-search-for-loved-ones-after-hundreds-taken-on-u-s-immigration-flights-disappear-from-online-locator
KFF Health News / Associated Press, “’I Can’t Tell You’: Attorneys, Relatives Struggle to Find Hospitalized ICE Detainees,” January 30, 2026 https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/ice-immigrants-hospitals-detainees-patients-rights-family-blackout-policies-california/
Miami Herald, “Hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz Detainees Drop Off the Grid After Leaving Site,” September 16, 2025 https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article312042943.html
American Immigration Council, “Immigration Detention Is Harsher and Less Accountable Than Ever,” February 2026 https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/press-release/report-trump-immigration-detention-2026/
American Immigration Council, “6 Deaths in ICE Custody and 2 Fatal Shootings: A Horrific Start to 2026,” February 11, 2026 https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-deaths-shootings-2026/
Senator Jon Ossoff, U.S. Immigration Detention Oversight, January 2026 https://www.ossoff.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/260114_Report_Patterns_v5.pdf
Cato Institute, “5% of People Detained by ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions,” November 26, 2025 https://www.cato.org/blog/5-ice-detainees-have-violent-convictions-73-no-convictions
ProPublica, “We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents,” October 2025 https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-arrested-detained-against-will
Associated Press, “ACLU Sues for Access to Migrants Flown to Guantanamo,” February 12, 2025 https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-02-12/aclu-sues-for-access-to-migrants-sent-to-guantanamo-bay
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, “Falsifying the Hospital Records,” accessed 2026 https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/camp-hospitals/falsifying-the-hospital-records/
Flatwater Free Press, “As Minnesota ICE Crackdown Continues, Detainees Quietly Transferred to Nebraska Jails,” February 2026 https://flatwaterfreepress.org/as-minnesota-ice-crackdown-continues-detainees-quietly-transferred-to-nebraska-jails/
ABC News, “Lawyers Allege Dept. of Homeland Security Is Denying Legal Counsel to Minnesota Detainees,” January 2026 https://abcnews.com/US/lawyers-allege-dept-homeland-security-denying-legal-counsel/story?id=129335914
Bloomberg Law, “Lawyers Fight ICE for Access: ‘I Want to Hear My Client’s Voice,’” January 30, 2026 https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/lawyers-fight-ice-for-access-i-want-to-hear-my-clients-voice
Texas Tribune, “ICE Bypasses El Paso Medical Examiner for Autopsy on Migrant,” February 3, 2026 https://www.texastribune.org/2026/02/03/texas-ice-detention-deaths-autopsy-el-paso/
Al Jazeera, “US Witnessed Many ICE-Related Deaths in 2026. Here Are Their Stories,” January 27, 2026 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/27/us-witnessed-many-ice-related-deaths-in-2026-here-are-their-stories
ACLU of Southern California, “ACLU Files Lawsuit Against ICE for Withholding Documents Related to Practice of Releasing People from Custody Prior to Imminent Death,” July 12, 2022 https://www.aclusocal.org/en/press-releases/aclu-files-lawsuit-against-ice-withholding-documents-related-practice-releasing
Even conservatives are fleeing the GOP as more and more Americans turn against Trump’s authoritarian project.
Nation Magazine Feb 13, 2026 (thenationmagazine@substack.com)
by Sasha Abramsky
President Donald Trump departs after making an announcement in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 12, 2026. (Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
Earlier this week, Gary Kendrick, a GOP council member in the red town of El Cajon, on San Diego’s eastern outskirts, announced that he was crossing the aisle and joining the Democrats. Kendrick was the longest-serving Republican official in the region’s local government. “I’ve been a Republican for 50 years,” he said, in the statement explaining his action. “I just can’t stand what the Republican Party has become. I’m formally renouncing the Republican Party.”
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An attorney friend of mine in San Diego, who knows local politics inside out, texted me, “When Trump has lost this guy, he’s in real trouble!”
President Donald Trump’s authoritarian project is finally running into real headwinds. That doesn’t mean that the danger is passing—far from it, as Trump’s escalating attacks on the voting process in the runup to the mid-term elections illustrate and as his venomous, racist social media posts testify to. But it does mean that Trump is losing control of the storyline. Even among his own base, there is a growing realization that there is something rotten at the core of his administration.
Having failed to break the will of Minnesotans despite two months of federal occupation, humiliation rituals, and brutal violence, the Department of Homeland Security announced on Thursday morning that it was ending the Minneapolis surge. It wasn’t because the surge had failed, Tom Homan was quick to claim; it was because Minnesota authorities had begun to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US Customs and Border Protection.
Don’t believe Homan’s explanation. The surge is ending because tens of thousands of Minnesotans stood strong and proud. They protested in the face of sometimes lethal violence meted out by ICE agents. They protected their neighbors. They refused to be cowed. And, as the ICE atrocities multiplied, the US public increasingly came to side with Minnesota in its struggle against this federally ordered occupation. By the end of January, more Americans told pollsters they wanted to abolish ICE than told them they wanted to keep the agency intact.
When this horrific chapter is written into US history books, Minnesota will be understood as the place where ordinary Americans defeated Stephen Miller’s might-is-right, white supremacist vision. Nonviolent protesters confronted the armed might of the federal government, and the federal government, having lost the battle for heart and minds, retreated. It is also in Minnesota where Democrats finally decided to fight over the funding for and accountability of ICE and its related security agencies.
A couple days after Kendrick announced that he could no longer justify being affiliated with the Republican Party, Attorney General Pam Bondi was testifying before Congress. It didn’t go well. When Representative Joe Neguse challenged her on why she had hired a convicted January 6 felon, who had been caught on camera urging his fellow protesters to kill Capitol Police officers, Bondi’s only response was that Trump had pardoned the man. It was hardly a prime-time answer. When Neguse then challenged her on why she had fired most of the cryptocurrency enforcement team at the Justice Department, thus easing the way for Trump to make a vast fortune off the crypto industry, Bondi melted down, screaming at Neguse like a frustrated child. When Republican Thomas Massie went after Bondi for removing some names from the released Epstein files, Bondi had another meltdown, snapping, “This guy has Trump Derangement Syndrome. He’s a failed politician.” She sounded like a petulant, name-calling teenager.
It was an extraordinary public glimpse into Trump’s sycophantic cabinet. It’s one thing to be extremely unlikable, another to be blitheringly incompetent. In these hearings, Bondi came across as both.
Her reputation also wasn’t exactly enhanced by this week’s decision of a grand jury in Washington, DC, to refuse to issue indictments sought by the government against Senator Mark Kelly and five other legislators who had reminded members of the military that they should not obey illegal orders. At the Nuremberg Trials, after World War II, US and other allied prosecutors succeeded in establishing the precedent that “I was only obeying orders” is not a legitimate defense for those involved in war crimes or crimes against humanity. Yet, under Trump, the US Defense and Justice departments have sought to punish people who restate this obvious moral truth. The grand jury’s decision was another reminder that when the public has a say, they tend to rebuff the administration’s efforts to use the Justice Department as an enforcer against political dissenters.
The decision to indict Kelly and the others was subsequently panned even by many Republicans, with outgoing North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis furiously denouncing the Justice Department’s use of “political lawfare” in bringing these charges.
Bondi, of course, remains in office, but any pretense that she is a credible attorney general is long gone. Her inability to keep cool under pressure and her repeated misuse of her office to bring prosecutions demanded of her by a vengeful and Constitution-scorning president has made her an “attorney general” with air quotes around her title—a reality-TV hire hopelessly out of her depth whose 15 minutes of fame has long since expired.
So, too, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Secretary of Defense (aka “War Secretary,” chest thump chest thump) Pete Hegseth remain in office despite their bouncing from one catastrophe to the next. The latest: The FAA’s suddenly announcing, on Wednesday morning, that it was closing El Paso’s airspace for 10 days, then, a few hours later withdrawing the closure. After initially refusing to clarify why the closure, which would have sealed America’s 22nd-largest city off from the rest of the world, had been ordered in the first place, the agency let it be known that it was because Customs and Border Patrol was testing, with Pentagon acquiescence, anti-drone technology over civilian airspace in southwest Texas—and that they hadn’t bothered to coordinate this properly with the FAA in advance. In any remotely normal administration, such stunning ineptitude would have resulted in multiple firings and/or resignations. In this administration, where accountability is for the birds? Bubkes.
None of this is playing well with the public. Last week at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told his audience that he had to win the election in 2024 because otherwise he would have had a “bad ego.” Having won, however, he boasted, “Now I really have a big ego, though.” Fifteen months on from the election, that monstrous ego is butting up against a rapidly changing political reality. By large margins, Americans, including a growing number of Republicans, are turning decisively against him and his mendacious cabinet.
“One thing has become clear to me,” Kendrick told reporters on Monday, as he announced that he was leaving the GOP. “The Republican Party is beyond redemption.”
Steve Bannon has suggested that ICE will be sent to monitor the polls for the November midterms.
“You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Steve Bannon proclaimed on his War Room podcast on February 4.
“We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen,” he said.
While you’re here enjoying Jon Richards’s latest cartoon, please take a moment to read these articles on related topics:
#SaveHERVote Senators Accountable for Voter Erasure: Her Equal Right
The SAVE America Act passed the House recently, and the women who cosponsored it in the Senate are betting you won’t read far enough to understand the damage.
We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back. -Malala Yousafzai
That estimate accounts for every woman who changed her name through marriage, adoption, divorce, domestic violence protection, gender transition, or cultural and religious assimilation. 60% of voting-age women in this country carry a legal name that no longer matches their original birth certificate, and the passage of the SAVE America Act would weaponize that mismatch to gut the constitutional right the 19th Amendment exists to protect.
The SAVE Act passed the House in April 2025. Its successor, the SAVE America Act, passed on February 11, 2026, escalating every provision. The original demanded documentary proof of citizenship to register for any federal election. The new version adds a national voter ID requirement stricter than nearly every state law on the books, forcing voters to appear in person with a passport or birth certificate matching their current legal name exactly.
Half of Americans have no valid passport while tens of millions of women carry a birth certificate bearing a name they shed at a courthouse altar decades ago. Supporters claim the bill requires states to build workarounds for name discrepancies. However, the same bill criminalizes registering anyone whose paperwork falls short, punishable by five years in federal prison. No election worker will gamble a felony on a workaround without a framework and lacking a deadline.
In addition to married women, damage hits adoptees with reissued birth certificates, transgender women who updated their legal names, divorced women carrying a name that no longer matches any government record, and domestic violence survivors who could be forced to produce documents that lead abusers straight back to the door. Therefore, 60% of voting-age women, six in every ten, face a new barrier between themselves and the ballot if this bill passes the Senate.
10 Republican women in the Senate have the power to kill this bill, and only one has voiced opposition, so here is where every last one has landed.
Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi is a sponsor. She was the first woman elected to represent her state in Congress. Mississippi has among the lowest passport ownership rates in the nation, and women who changed their names decades ago would be the first erased from the voter rolls.
Joni Ernst of Iowa also signed on. She built her public identity around fiscal discipline and efficiency, but this bill created an expansive federal bureaucracy designed to obstruct women’s access to the ballot, and she endorsed the bill.
Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming added her name. Wyoming granted women the right to vote in 1869, before it achieved statehood, and she now supports legislation that reverses that legacy.
Katie Britt of Alabama delivered the Republican response to the State of the Union from her kitchen table, presenting herself as the voice of American mothers, but she has said nothing while 60% of those mothers carry a name that differs from the one on their birth certificate and this measure would punish every one of those women for the change.
Susan Collins of Maine is equivocating. Her office has stated that the legislation extends beyond what she supports, but she has not committed to opposing the bill, and she faces reelection in a state that voted for Kamala Harris, and her silence looks far more like political calculation than principle.
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska stands alone as the only Republican woman in the Senate who has clearly opposed the bill.
The remaining four senators, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Ashley Moody of Florida, Deb Fischer of Nebraska, and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, are either sponsors or silent.
Senators reverse course when the political cost becomes unavoidable. Lisa Murkowski supported earlier versions of the SAVE Act before opposing this one. Susan Collins signed onto early Republican healthcare bills before casting the deciding vote that ended the Affordable Care Act repeal. Pressure changes outcomes when it is sustained and visible.
The bill serves no legitimate purpose and exists to disenfranchise women in service of Project 2025. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime, yet Georgia’s own audit found just twenty cases out of 8.2 million voters, a rounding error elevated into pretext. Republicans are exploiting that fiction to impose the most aggressive voter suppression effort in modern American history. The original SAVE Act stalled, then returned in a harsher form: a national photo ID mandate stricter than nearly every state law, forced ID scans for mail-in voters, and unrestricted transfer of state voter rolls to Homeland Security.
Democrats oppose it unanimously, but the sixty-vote threshold matters only if the bill stands alone. The real strategy is to bury it inside must-pass spending legislation and dare opponents to shut down the government. That is why these ten Republican women are the only pressure point left.
A woman’s Senate seat means nothing if she will not defend a right women bled for a century to win. Every Republican woman senator who cosponsored, endorsed, or stayed silent has betrayed that fight. The 19th Amendment forbids denying any citizen the vote on account of sex, and a name change must never become the weapon that destroys that guarantee. These 10 senators are betting American women will not find out until the damage is irreversible.
Call these 10 offices or reach any through the Capitol switchboard, because constituent status is irrelevant. Post #SaveHERVote everywhere and tag all 10 by name until their silence becomes politically fatal. The 19th Amendment is not negotiable, and any senator who refuses to defend it can resign. Share this with every woman in your life, because we are stronger together and we are done being silent.
Still, be prepared as a safeguard because if the bill advances through procedural tactics, voters may need documentation they do not currently possess. Glass Empires has already developed free Master Emergency Voter Documentation Guides that explains how to obtain every required document to protect voting access under any naming circumstance, and is now working on the updated edition and expanded distribution to reach vulnerable communities.
Women won the right to vote once, and we will not let 10 female senators take it back.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. -Audre Lorde
Out of nearly 8K subscribers, only 3% are currently paid supporters, while the reporting, research, and infrastructure still carry real expenses. Much of this work is produced without compensation, and it is not sustainable without more readers choosing to upgrade. Choose annual and save 20% compared to monthly. Thank you for being here. It matters more than you know.
Support the creation and distribution of these guides for vulnerable communities at buymeacoffee.com/glassempires Master Emergency Voter Documentation Guides Free Download
Sources:
SAVE America Act, H.R. 7296 — https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7296
Original SAVE Act, H.R. 22 — https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/22
Georgia citizenship audit, Georgia Recorder, October 2024 — https://georgiarecorder.com/briefs/georgia-gop-secretary-of-state-reports-audit-found-20-noncitizens-registered-to-vote-out-of-8-2m/
This is a long article. It’s long because it substantiates a bold claim: that if you are waiting for elections to save this country, you are dangerously wrong. A criminal organization has captured the electoral system, the courts, and the Justice Department itself. The evidence is clear and we will walk through every piece of it.
But the ending is not despair. The ending is bad people in handcuffs. State-level prosecutors can investigate and charge corrupt federal officials right now, immune from presidential pardon, and thorough investigation will find plenty to charge. Every state that can do this should start tomorrow. Do not wait for a coalition. Do not wait for permission. Do not wait for someone else to go first. Justice is the path to a healthy democracy.
Last weekend I spoke to Indivisible Charlotte at their ninth anniversary. Incredible people. The kind of people who give up their Saturdays to discuss ballot access and gerrymandering when they could be doing literally anything else. They had spent the morning discussing get-out-the-vote efforts for 2026, pop-up protests, how to tailor messaging for different communities, how to hyper-localize the issues they talk about, the machinery of democratic participation that has kept this country’s lungs pumping for two and a half centuries.
While speaking to the several hundred activists in attendance, I asked a question: if you are concerned about having free and fair elections in 2026, raise your hand.
It took a moment; some went up fast, some went up slowly, like people checking to see if it was safe. But they all went up.
That same scene is playing out in living rooms and church basements and union halls across the country right now, where people who know something is deeply wrong are still being handed the same playbook and making strides to run it better. We know that Republican leadership is willing to win by rigging the game. They have shown us, and courts have confirmed it. We know they fired the election security officials, gutted the agencies that catch cheating, and sent home the lawyers whose job was to enforce voting rights. We know they control more than half the states. So why is our answer the same playbook, but better?
That gap is what this article is about. Not the threats themselves, though we will walk through every one; not the statistics, though they are devastating and we will use them. The gap between knowing something is wrong and doing something proportional about it. Because the people in those rooms understand the danger, and almost none of them have been told the full scope of what they are up against, and fewer still have been given a framework for response that goes beyond winning elections we can actively see being rigged.
So let me lay it out.
There is an assumption running through almost every conversation about American democracy right now, from cable news panels to kitchen-table arguments to the strategy sessions of the most sophisticated political operatives in the country. The assumption is that elections remain the mechanism through which this crisis gets resolved, that if we organize better, register more voters, raise more money, and file more lawsuits, we can win our way through it. The assumption treats the game as legitimate and the task as playing it better.
This article is about what happens when that assumption meets the evidence.
Nobody is going to cancel American elections. Elections are too useful; they provide the one thing that raw power cannot generate on its own, which is legitimacy. They let the people in charge say they were chosen, let allies in Congress claim a mandate, let courts defer to the “political process” rather than intervene. Elections, properly managed, are the instrument for consolidating power.
The threat is that elections become something else while still looking the same.
Political scientists have spent the last two decades studying countries where this has already happened, and they have an ugly name for it: competitive authoritarianism. The term describes a system that holds elections, counts votes in front of observers, and lets the opposition campaign, while structuring the rules so that the outcome is effectively predetermined. Sometimes the opposition even wins, which makes the whole arrangement look more legitimate, but captured courts and corrupted institutions make progress nearly unachievable and regression easy. The elections are real; the competition is not. The dice still roll, but one side loaded them.
Hungary is the proof that this works.
In 2010, Viktor Orban won a legitimate 52 percent of the vote, which the old Hungarian electoral system translated into a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority. He used that supermajority to rewrite the constitution, redraw every electoral district, and redesign the voting system itself, all through legal processes enumerated in the constitution he had just rewritten. He eliminated runoff elections, which had previously forced coalition-building, and created something called “winner compensation,” a mechanism that gives surplus votes from winning candidates back to the winning party’s national list. In any normal proportional system, those votes would go to an opposition party; in Orban’s, they feed the machine that already won.
Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton, calculated the effect. Winner compensation alone catapulted Fidesz from a simple majority to a constitutional supermajority in three consecutive elections: 2014, 2018, and 2022.¹ One rule. Three supermajorities.
In the very first election under the new system, 2014, Fidesz lost 625,000 voters.² Eight percent of their support vanished, and they kept their supermajority anyway, winning 44.5 percent of the vote while taking 66.8 percent of the seats.³ The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe sent observers and called it “free but not fair.”⁴ That phrase has applied to every Hungarian election since.
Then Orban captured the media. He did not ban opposition outlets; he bought them, starved them of advertising revenue, or had allies acquire them through friendly holding companies. By 2022, the OSCE found that “the government’s message was the only one that voters could hear.”¹ Rural voters, who make up Fidesz’s base, have functionally no access to independent news, and the opposition cannot reach them no matter how sharp the message or how polished the campaign, because the infrastructure for delivering it does not exist outside Budapest.
In 2022, the Hungarian opposition did everything American political consultants dream about. They unified across the entire ideological spectrum. They ran a single candidate in every district. They polled neck and neck with Fidesz for more than a year. They executed the strategy perfectly. And they lost by twenty points. Not because they ran a bad campaign. Because the system was designed so that running a perfect campaign within it would produce exactly that result. Their participation, their earnest and well-organized participation, gave Orban’s supermajority the appearance of a legitimate mandate. Fidesz took 135 of 199 seats.⁵
This is what a finished machine looks like. The dice still roll. The opposition still plays. But the system converts any governing-party plurality into a supermajority, and a supermajority lets the ruling party keep rewriting the rules that produce supermajorities. After each loss, the opposition tells itself it will work harder next time, and next time it does work harder, and it loses again, and in the years between those losses the regime uses its supermajority to capture another court, buy another television station, redraw another set of districts. By the time “next time” arrives, there is less to win and fewer ways to win it. The volunteers who knocked those doors, who organized those rallies, who believed their effort would be converted into political power through the mechanism of free elections, provided the one thing the regime could not manufacture for itself: the appearance that its dominance was earned.
Now watch the same machine getting assembled here, piece by piece, using American parts.
Start with who gets to vote. In June 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (570 U.S. 529), a provision that for almost fifty years had forced jurisdictions with histories of racial voter discrimination to get federal approval before changing any election rules. The Court struck down the formula that determined which jurisdictions fell under that requirement, and the effects landed within hours: Texas announced it would implement a voter ID law that had been blocked under preclearance,⁶ while Mississippi and Alabama moved the same day. In the decade that followed, at least 29 states passed 94 laws making it harder to vote, with the sharpest impacts falling on communities of color in formerly covered jurisdictions.⁷ North Carolina passed a law so precisely targeted that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it attacked “African Americans with almost surgical precision.”⁸ A Brennan Center study, drawing on over a billion voter records, found that the racial turnout gap in formerly covered states grew at twice the national rate after Shelby.⁹
That was twelve years ago, and we know what the removal of federal election oversight produces because it happened and we measured it.
Now the removal is accelerating. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal body responsible for helping states protect election systems from cyberattacks and foreign interference, has lost roughly a third of its workforce since January 2025.¹⁰ The Trump administration terminated funding for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an early-warning system that alerted state officials to election security threats crossing state lines.¹¹ The proposed 2026 federal budget would eliminate CISA’s Election Security Program entirely, zeroing out 14 positions and $39.6 million in funding.¹² Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warning that without CISA support, “our capacity to conduct this important work will be severely compromised.”¹³ Noem did not respond.
The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, the sole federal body charged with enforcing the Voting Rights Act nationwide, has lost roughly 70 percent of its attorneys since Harmeet Dhillon took over as assistant attorney general.¹⁴ Dhillon, who worked as a lawyer challenging the results of the 2020 election, issued a new mission statement for the Voting Section that reframes its purpose around prosecuting voters rather than protecting them; career voting rights attorneys received instructions to dismiss their active cases.¹⁵ The Brennan Center identified 14 active Section 2 cases at the start of 2025, and the DOJ has since withdrawn from or reversed its position in the majority of them.¹⁵ The Federal Election Commission, the bipartisan agency that regulates campaign finance, saw its chair targeted for removal in an unprecedented move just as the commission prepared to adjudicate complaints about Elon Musk’s contributions to the Trump campaign.¹⁶
Add up what just happened. The federal government has withdrawn from election protection; the agency that helped states defend against cyberattacks has been gutted; the lawyers who enforced voting rights have been sent home; the campaign finance watchdog has been neutralized. All of it has already happened.
David Becker, a former DOJ official who now leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, put it plainly in a Votebeat report last week: the internal guardrails that stopped Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Bill Barr disputing fraud claims, CISA pushing back on disinformation, national security officials blocking the seizure of voting machines, all of those guardrails depended on individuals who chose to enforce them. “That line of defense is largely gone,” Becker said, “because the primary and perhaps only qualification for being hired by this administration is loyalty to this man.”¹⁷
In 2020, individual courage backed by functional institutions held the line: Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, Bill Gates in Maricopa County, Jocelyn Benson in Michigan, and Kathy Bernier, a Republican state senator and former county clerk in Wisconsin who publicly defended election integrity and ended up carrying a gun for protection before leaving the legislature.¹⁷ The institutions that once supported people like Bernier no longer exist in functional form, and without institutional backing, individual courage produces martyrs rather than systemic protection.
The Brennan Center’s 2025 survey of local election officials paints an even grimmer picture at the ground level, where the actual mechanics of democracy take place. Sixty percent said they are concerned about federal cuts to election security services,¹⁸ and fifty-nine percent fear political interference in their ability to do their jobs.¹⁹ One in three has been harassed, abused, or threatened,²⁰ and twenty-one percent say they are unlikely to continue serving through the 2026 midterms.¹⁹ The people who actually run elections, the ones who set up the machines and train the poll workers and count the ballots at two in the morning, are leaving; the people replacing them have less experience, fewer resources, and weaker institutional support than the officials they replaced.
Now move to what voters know. An executive order eliminated CISA’s capacity to help states counter election disinformation,²¹ and Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the unit that had monitored foreign interference in American elections.¹⁶ Project 2025 called for targeting university researchers who study election misinformation, and the administration has followed through.¹⁶ The administration is dismantling the infrastructure that delivers accurate election information to voters at the same time that the infrastructure for delivering disinformation expands without constraint; an information environment where one side controls the signal and the other side loses the ability to broadcast a correction is an information environment where elections cannot function as an informed choice.
Now move to what votes produce. The Supreme Court declared partisan gerrymandering unreviewable by federal courts in Rucho v. Common Cause (588 U.S. 684, 2019), a ruling that let state legislatures draw maps with whatever partisan advantage they choose and no federal judicial check. In 2025, President Trump personally directed Texas to redraw its congressional map to create five additional Republican-leaning districts, and the legislature complied.²² North Carolina’s Republican legislature redrew its maps after gaining a veto-proof supermajority, projecting an 11-to-3 Republican advantage in a state where statewide elections regularly split down the middle.²³
And then there is Louisiana v. Callais, the case that could end the Voting Rights Act as a tool for protecting minority representation entirely. The Supreme Court heard argument in March 2025, declined to rule, and ordered reargument on a far more sweeping question: whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining federal protection against racial vote dilution, is itself unconstitutional.²⁴ In a shift without precedent, the Trump DOJ withdrew the United States’ brief defending Section 2 and reversed its position to argue that the law’s protections are no longer constitutional.¹⁵ If the Court rules against Section 2, an analysis projects the elimination of 19 congressional seats currently protected by the VRA.²⁵ State Representative Terry Landry Jr. of Louisiana described what that means for the people who live in those districts: “This will affect state legislatures. This will affect city councils. It will affect school boards. You will see a huge impact on minority representation at every level of government.”²⁶
Orban rewrote the constitution, then staffed the courts that interpret the constitution he wrote. The American version follows the same sequence: stack the Supreme Court, then use it to declare gerrymandering unreviewable (Rucho v. Common Cause), preclearance dead (Shelby County v. Holder), racial gerrymandering harder to prove (Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP), and potentially Section 2 itself unconstitutional (Louisiana v. Callais). Once you control the body that decides what the law means, every move you make is “legal” by definition, and every move your opposition makes can be declared illegal at will. The DOJ reversal fits here too: Harmeet Dhillon redirects the Civil Rights Division from protecting voting rights to prosecuting voters, and that becomes the “legal” posture of the United States Department of Justice. Legality stops meaning “consistent with the rule of law” and starts meaning “approved by the people who captured the system.” That is the final stage of authoritarian consolidation, and it is the one that locks all the other pieces in place.
Now put yourself in Texas and watch all of this hit one person at once.
You are a voter in Harris County, sixty-three years old, and you have voted in every election since 1984. In 2020, you voted by mail; the rejection rate for mail ballots in Texas that year was 0.8 percent. In March 2022, after SB 1 took effect, the statewide rejection rate jumped to 12.4 percent, and in Harris County it hit 19 percent.²⁷ Federal District Judge Xavier Rodriguez found that the law violated the Voting Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, that Black voters faced rejection rates 86.9 percent higher than white voters, and that the state designed these barriers with discriminatory intent.²⁸ The Fifth Circuit reversed his ruling, and the mechanisms Rodriguez documented continue operating.
You want to vote in person instead, but Harris County has 4.8 million people and one ballot drop box, the same number as Loving County, which has 64 residents.²⁹ The average transit time by public transportation to reach that single drop box is 88.1 minutes.²⁸ You do not own a car; you are one of 143,000 Harris County voters in that situation.²⁸ In 2020, Harris County offered drive-through voting, which 127,000 people used, and overnight voting, which nearly 16,000 people used.²⁸ Texas banned both.
Political scientists have a name for what happens to people like you inside a system like this. In a 2024 study of competitive authoritarian regimes, the European Journal of Political Research described it as “acquiescence through participation,” a process that “legitimizes the ruling party and simultaneously divides and demoralizes anti-regime actors, thereby diminishing threats to the regime.”³³ Andreas Schedler, who coined the term “menu of manipulation” to describe how authoritarian regimes manage elections, put it more bluntly: the system lets those in power “reap the fruits of electoral legitimacy without running the risks of democratic uncertainty.”³⁴
And Texas is one state; Georgia purges voter rolls at rates that would trigger federal intervention if preclearance still existed, and the 50 counties with the highest minority population growth closed 542 polling places after Shelby while the 50 with the lowest minority growth closed 34.³⁰ Across the country, states have made it harder for citizens to bypass captured legislatures through ballot initiatives, raising signature thresholds, imposing supermajority requirements, and giving legislatures the power to override results.³¹ The last escape valve is being welded shut.
Put it together and look at what we are watching being built. Control who votes, through purges, ID laws, and registration barriers. Control where they vote, through polling place closures, drop box restrictions, and early voting cuts. Control what they know, by gutting CISA, disbanding the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and targeting researchers who track disinformation. Control what their votes produce, through gerrymandering that no federal court can review and the potential elimination of Section 2. Control who counts, by driving out experienced election officials through threats and replacing them with loyalists who owe their positions to the people whose power the counting is supposed to check. And close the last escape valve by making ballot initiatives harder to pass and easier to override.
No single piece of this is the kill shot. Together they build a system where elections still happen, votes still get counted, observers still watch, and the machine structurally predetermines the outcome across enough cycles that the opposition’s only path to power runs through the handful of jurisdictions the machine has not yet reached. That is competitive authoritarianism, that is what Hungary looks like, and that is what has been built, in public, with our tax dollars, while we watched.
Here is the thing the people in that Charlotte room, and every person doing this work across the country, need to hear. The people building this system need us to keep playing it the way we have been playing it. They need us to keep canvassing, keep phone banking, keep filing lawsuits one county at a time, keep treating each election as though the rules are the real rules. Our participation is the legitimacy. It is what makes the results look earned. The Hungarian opposition gave Orban his mandate by showing up and losing inside a system designed to convert their effort into his power. Their hard work, their real and sincere and well-organized hard work, was the raw material the machine needed to produce the appearance of democratic consent.
That is not an argument to stop showing up, and the people in that Charlotte room deserve better than being told their work does not matter. Their work matters enormously; the canvassing matters, the voter registration matters, the phone banks and the door knocks and the rides to the polls. All of it matters.
But it matters for what comes next, not for what is.
What comes next is this: the effort has to point somewhere different. We need to elect people who will use the power of the offices we help them win, not people who will hold the office and give good speeches and file press releases about how concerned they are, but people who will govern like the emergency is real.
A governor with executive authority and an attorney general with prosecution power do not need a friendly legislature for the most critical parts of this fight. The governor can direct state election security resources, issue executive orders on election infrastructure protection, and refuse to cooperate with unconstitutional federal demands. The attorney general can investigate and prosecute corruption under existing state law; because of dual sovereignty under Gamble v. United States (587 U.S. 678, 2019), those prosecutions are immune from presidential pardon. Corruption concentrates where accountability is weakest, and thorough prosecution has an asymmetric effect, not because we are targeting one party but because we are being thorough and the chips fall where the corruption is.
The tools for structural independence already exist. The Existentialist Republic team drafted model legislation for state attorneys general to criminally prosecute federal corruption immune from presidential pardon, for states to escrow federal tax revenues triggered by specific constitutional violations including election interference, to force corporations to choose between receiving government contracts and subsidies or donating to politics, and for states to independently investigate and prosecute child sex trafficking networks even when the federal government covers for them. All of it is available for free at The Existentialist Republic. Our team is in the process of reaching out to every state legislator in the country with these bills, and readers are independently doing the same, scheduling meetings and making the case in person. I have sat down with state legislators who are preparing to introduce them.
I keep coming back to that room in Charlotte, where every hand went up. Those people give their weekends and their evenings and, for some of them, their safety to the work of democratic participation. They have earned the right to know the full scope of what they are up against, and they have earned the right to a response that matches it. Find your governor, your attorney general, your state legislators. Call them. Tell them to prosecute corruption aggressively, fund state election security, and use the power they already have. The model legislation is free at The Existentialist Republic. Share it with them. Show up at their offices with it. Make it easy for them to act and uncomfortable for them not to.
Scheppele, K. L. (2024). How Viktor Orban wins. Journal of Democracy, 35(1), 78-93. https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/how-viktor-orban-wins/
Batory, A. (2014, April 16). With the final votes counted, Fidesz has secured a ‘super-majority’ in Hungary, but it is questionable how fair the election really was. London School of Economics EUROPP Blog. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2014/04/16/with-the-final-votes-counted-fidesz-has-secured-a-super-majority-in-hungary-but-it-is-questionable-how-fair-the-election-really-was/
Electoral Reform Society. (n.d.). Just how popular is Hungary’s Fidesz? https://electoral-reform.org.uk/just-how-popular-is-hungarys-fidesz/
Levine, D. (2022, February 22). OSCE member states must deliver on election observation mission for Hungary. The Hill. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/595126-osce-member-states-must-deliver-on-election-observation-mission-for/
Freedom House. (2023). Freedom in the world 2023: Hungary. https://freedomhouse.org/country/hungary/freedom-world/2023
Brennan Center for Justice. (n.d.). The effects of Shelby County v. Holder. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/effects-shelby-county-v-holder
Brennan Center for Justice. (2023, June 25). Shelby County v. Holder turns 10, and voting rights continue to suffer from it. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/shelby-county-v-holder-turns-10-and-voting-rights-continue-suffer-it
NAACP v. McCrory, 831 F.3d 204 (4th Cir. 2016).
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This is Drama Masks, a Bay Area performing arts column from a born San Franciscan and longtime theatre artist in an N95 mask. I talk venue safety and dramatic substance, or the lack thereof.
I recently recalled my 2022 appointment with SF Opera being partly felled by pro-Ukrainian protests objecting to the Russian ballet within. I never did see that show, but frequently returned to the Opera House afterward. I can’t recall which show it was, but an opening night bow saw several production members unfurl the Ukrainian flag onstage. The applause was deafening.
SF Opera picking a Russian story when they did can be forgiven: There’s no way they could have predicted Putin & Co. would go full super-villain around showtime. Given the millions of dollars in production costs, donations, and sponsorships, one can see the board’s rationale in not cancelling the show outright. (Not saying I agree, just that I can follow their logic.) Using the later show to unfurl the flag was a welcome reminder that actual people exist within the organization, people who are proud to take stances on issues that are important to them.
The Ukrainian flag was also projected onto the War Memorial itself at SF Ballet’s 2022 opening gala, and the Ukrainian anthem was played by the orchestra. But in terms of political bravery lately, the Ballet seems to be putting its wrong foot forward lately. A traveling performance of its blockbuster “AI ballet” Mere Mortals is scheduled for May 27-31 at the Kennedy Center—just before the once-venerated DC temple of culture is scheduled to close for two years for “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding,” according to our Destroyer-in-Chief, who egregiously affixed his name to the edifice before tearing down yet another cultural institution.
Trump’s hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center has led some of the country’s biggest artists—many of whom normally mute their politics—to publicly take a stand. Philip Glass, Patti LuPone, Stephen Schwartz, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the current Broadway cast of Les Miz are just a few of the major names who would rather roll naked over broken glass than kiss the ring. Even as Big Tech creates facial recognition apps for ICE and NBC censors Olympic crowds jeering the smarmy Veep, the aforementioned artists have let the world know that they want to be on the right side of history. When future generations look back on this troubled time and think of all the money these folks could have made if they’d played ball, they’ll stand as moral exemplars.
The Kennedy Center hasn’t seen this many simultaneous cancellations since the 2020 onset of the still-ongoing pandemic, but looming large among those few still on the program is SF Ballet. Its own patrons have certainly noticed. As of last week, a petition launched by regular Ballet supporters had acquired 7000 names imploring it to cancel the show. The company’s board was said to have held a meeting about the uproar on Friday, but no Kennedy Center cancellation announcement has been made as of this writing.
What are they waiting for?
Perhaps the company doesn’t want to seem “political,” but that argument falls apart immediately. For starters, everything, especially the arts, are political. There are just those aware of the politics and those who are unaware—and this administration is very much aware. Why else did Trump and Musk gut the NEA, and slap his name before Kennedy’s on a cherished institution? Why did Amazon spend $70-plus-million to flood local theaters with a propaganda fluff piece about his dead-eyed wife? If the Ballet can revive The Rite of Spring, let alone project a giant Ukrainian flag, it knows its work is political.
Sponsored link
So instead, the Ballet has created a Streisand Effect—rather than its silence helping it fade into the background, it’s created more publicity around the issue, throwing its recalcitrance into high relief, and raising questions about its high-rolling donors’ associations.
This is a big test for a big San Francisco arts institution, at a time when all arts are being attacked. While ICE agents are shooting unarmed civilians dead in the streets, the Ballet appears to be placating a fascist with a sub-par ballet featuring AI slop, a favorite plaything of the President and his toadying tech billionaires. I realize not everyone agrees with my opinions (both about the AI ballet and SF Ballet’s hesitation), but to quote one of the theatre luminaries who cancelled: “I’d rather be divisive than indecisive.”
Charles Lewis III is a San Francisco-born journalist, theatre artist, and arts critic. You can find dodgy evidence of this at thethinkingmansidiot.wordpress.com
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