The New Yorker:

A practical guide to courage in Trump’s age of fear.

By Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer

Once upon a time—say, several weeks ago—Americans tended to think of dissidents as of another place, perhaps, and another time. They were overseas heroes—names like Alexei Navalny and Jamal Khashoggi, or Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi before them—who spoke up against repressive regimes and paid a steep price for their bravery.
But sometime in the past two months the United States crossed into a new and unfamiliar realm—one in which the consequences of challenging the state seem to increasingly carry real danger. The sitting President, elected on an explicit platform of revenge against his political enemies, entered office by instituting loyalty tests, banning words, purging civil servants, and installing an F.B.I. director who made his name promising to punish his boss’s critics.

Retribution soon followed. For the sin of employing lawyers who have criticized or helped investigate him, President Donald Trump signed orders effectively making it impossible for several law firms to represent clients who do business with the government. For the sin of exercising free speech during campus protests, the Department of Homeland Security began using plainclothes officers to snatch foreign students—legal residents of the United States—off the streets, as the White House threatened major funding cuts to universities where protests had taken place. And for the sin of trying to correct racial and gender disparities, the government is investigating dozens of public and private universities and removing references to Black and Native American combat veterans from public monuments.

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