There is absolutely a Cultural Revolution feel to the communication by and around the president. See e.g. Bill Ackman's fully-prostrated worshipful response on Twitter this morning. The guy is a successful billionaire! And he needs to sound like a literal cult member in public lest he lose influence.
When everyone feels this way instead of fighting for the future they want to make reality... There are journalists, protestors, entrepreneurs, unionists, billionaires, etc, all fighting for what those history books will say. Ukrainians are fighting for what they will say right now.
I think a better question is what do you want them to say. Do you want them to say tyranny triumphed un-resisted?
The obeying in advance and reflexive glazing is scary in a Twilight Zone or slow-start-of-a-zombie-movie sort of way, but the fact that Trump is playing very fast and loose with due process, talking seriously about "deporting" American citizens and is actively applying economic death penalties to people on his bad side (like the EO stripping security clearance not only from Chris Krebs, but everyone who happens to work at his current employer) is scary in a "is the US as we know it actually going to survive this?" kind of way.
And I'm just pulling a few things off the top of Many Very Worrying Things here for brevity.
And don’t forget the Jan 6 types. They are the Red Guards of Trump and he used them on Jan 6 as an experiment. Pray we don’t have to witness a new culture revolution in our time!
