In New York Times

Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities.

In this Opinion video, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.

Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.

Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

She borrows from political and apolitical Slavic motifs and expressions, arguing that the English language does not fully capture the democratic regression in this American moment.

Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.

“I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave.

Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.

This quote is just so telling:

A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend’s house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton’s 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.

The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

It's pure nihilism. Nobody expects anything good. They just want to see people they don't identify with hurt more.

“We have shifted this conversation so incredibly far in the direction of restrictions on trans people’s autonomy and rights in a way that was completely unfathomable to many of us even just three or four years ago,” said Chase Strangio, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Legislation in Oklahoma and South Carolina would make it a felony to provide hormonal or surgical transition treatment to transgender people younger than 26 — an uncharted incursion into adults’ health care. Other bills in both states, and in Kansas and Mississippi, would ban such care up to age 21. And bills in more than a dozen states would ban it for minors, which Arkansas was the first to do in 2021, against the consensus of major medical organizations.

A bill in Mississippi — declaring that “separate is not inherently unequal,” an allusion to Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling in which the Supreme Court upheld segregation — would define sex as immutably set at birth, denying transgender identities under state law. A measure in West Virginia would define “any transvestite and/or transgender exposure, performances or display” as obscene, potentially outlawing transgender people’s presence around children.

[…]

But the bills arriving in legislatures show a movement expanding beyond what it pitched itself as.

The 25-year-olds who would be unable to receive transition care in Oklahoma and South Carolina are not, after all, children. An Arizona bill would ban drag shows on Sunday mornings whether or not minors were around. (The lawmakers who introduced those bills did not respond to requests for comment.)

Matt Sharp, senior counsel and state government relations national director for the Alliance Defending Freedom, said his group believed “gender ideology attacks the truth that every person is either male or female.”

And Mr. Schilling, of the American Principles Project, confirmed that his organization’s long-term goal was to eliminate transition care. The initial focus on children, he said, was a matter of “going where the consensus is.”

Cathryn Oakley, the state legislative director and senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, said the bills disproved the notion that protecting children had ever been the motivation.

Friedman being Friedman:

What does it mean to say that the corporate executive has a “social responsibility” in his capacity as businessman? If this statement is not pure rhetoric, it must mean that he is to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers.  […] In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his “social responsibility” reduce returns to stock holders, he is spending their money.

[…]

But if he does this, he is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other.

[…]

Here the businessman—self‐selected or appointed directly or indirectly by stockholders—is to be simultaneously legislator, executive and jurist. He is to decide whom to tax by how much and for what purpose, and he is to spend the proceeds—all this guided only by general exhortations from on high to restrain inflation, improve the environment, fight poverty and so on and on. […]  the doctrine of “social responsibility” involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses.

A handsome new library branch in Inwood, at the northern tip of Manhattan, had its soft opening Thursday. It’s the second library in town during the past year or so to try something clever and innovative: partnering with a 100 percent affordable housing development. New subsidized apartments occupy a 12-floor tower above the library.

These days, NIMBYs are always fighting affordable housing projects. Communities are increasingly desperate for libraries. One obvious solution is the twofer — building housing and a library together — because there’s strength in numbers.

[…]

But that’s only half the Inwood project. In addition to the library and apartment tower, which has its own entrance and name, The Eliza, the development also includes a pre-K, a STEM study center, a teaching kitchen and community spaces.

TO THE EDITORS OF NEW YORK TIMES:
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.