Comment by derektank

No US citizen has had a federal law enforcement abduct them for making a sarcastic comment online (unless it was a legal threat, which has never been tolerated).

The US residents and visa holders who it has happened to, such as Mahmoud Khalil, are largely out of detention and, in his case, in a position to file a tort claim against the government of $20M dollars.

The current administration is a threat to the rule of law and I have no doubt they wish they were not subject to it. But they are, they have not attempted an auto-golpe, and people harmed by the administration continue to have the ability to seek redress through the courts. We are a little over a year away from midterm elections, which will almost certainly bring congressional impediments to executive power as well, at the very least in the form of investigations.

We in a dangerous period in US history, but it is not unprecedented, and the outcome is not yet determined. We are not in a fascist dictatorship today and, fortune willing, we might not yet ever be.