Make Autocracy Great Again Again

How it ends starts like this

Thank you Heather Cox-Richardson for your research, writing, reporting, dependability, and your humanity.

The below is my personal take of the facts as you have presented them in your excellent newsletter:

August 22, 2025

WHAT HAS HAPPENED

• Intimidation as policy: an early-morning FBI raid on John Bolton instead of a coordinated search with counsel. It reads like retaliation against a high-profile Trump critic and a warning to everyone else.

For you and me: If they stage raids for show at the top, local officials, activists, and ordinary critics can be chilled into silence.

• Weaponized investigations: new probes aimed at Adam Schiff, Letitia James, and Fed Governor Lisa Cook off a shaky “mortgage fraud” storyline, while no interest in Ken Paxton’s own mortgage mess. Selective by design.

For you and me: Law becomes a weapon, not a standard—meaning unequal treatment is likelier when we speak up or get caught in the crossfire.

• Hands-on arrests and show-of-force: bodycam suggests the Deputy AG personally ordered Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s arrest, later dismissed. The point looks like spectacle, not law.

For you and me: If a mayor can be grabbed on command, community leaders and organizers in our towns are not safe from performative arrests.

• Rewriting the past: DOJ digs back into Comey and Brennan to relitigate “Russia,” and partial Maxwell transcripts get waved around to distract from the larger Epstein files.

For you and me: Noise drowns signal, making it harder to track real abuses while fatigue and confusion sap our will to act.

• Dismantling neutral capacity: DNI Tulsi Gabbard moves to cut 40% of her office, including the Foreign Malign Influence Center. DIA director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse is fired. That blunts independent intelligence.

For you and me: We get less warning about foreign interference and real threats—policy gets made in the dark, and families are less safe.

• Militarizing the capital: National Guard in D.C. to carry weapons, more troops inbound, talk of extending deployments beyond legal limits, and public threats to “take over” D.C. and “invade” Chicago next.