Recently Greg Bovino, infamous former Border Patrol commander, served as a star attraction at a “remigration summit” in Portugal; there he took selfies with Austrian activist Martin Sellner, one of Europe’s most notorious rightwing extremists, and told him: “We’ve never talked before – face to face, that is – until yesterday, and we were on the same sheet of music almost immediately.”

Meanwhile, Tina Peters, the disgraced former elections clerk whose sentence was commuted by Colorado governor Jared Polis, pontificates on Steve Bannon’s show about how Democrats will cheat in the midterms. It is rare that those out of government service show contrition, but it is also rare that they immediately monetize past cruelty and present-day conspiracy theories. Presumably it is only a matter of time before the men who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti get to cash in with podcasts for Maga world.

All of this can happen only against the background of the second Trump administration promising impunity from day one – when the president pardoned even the most violent January 6 insurrectionists. If Democrats fail to ensure accountability, it is time that citizens seeking justice start peacefully taking matters into their own hands.

Authoritarianism is hardly a novel experience for Americans; the south was long subject to it, and the failures of Reconstruction – an abruptly halted transition to democracy – still hold important lessons. But we have rather little sense today of just how to deal with perpetrators of human rights violations in our midst;........

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