I’ve lived long enough to know what normal looks like.

This isn’t it.

When a president openly jails critics, purges civil servants, lies to law enforcement, and governs by vengeance… you’re not in a fragile democracy. You’re in a soft dictatorship. And you’d better stop calling it something else.

The media wants nuance. The courts want time. The public wants hope.

But me? I want clarity.

That line—between democracy and something else—it got crossed. Not with tanks. With shrugs. With silence. With just enough procedural cover to keep the headlines dull and the public confused.

And now?

We’re living on the far side of that line. And what we do here matters more than anything we ever did before.