Two days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson stood at a podium and told America why the Pentagon needs an extra $350 billion:

“We’re fighting communism on our own shores.”

He followed that up on social media with, “THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE!”

The communists and barbarians, in case you’re wondering, are you and your neighbors, and the proof is how we voted in Democratic primaries this spring.Just the idea of returning to the McCarthy era of redbaiting like Johnson is doing here is obscene.

Fat Nixon is following Putin's playbook :

Putin’s first move was the media. In 2001, masked “tax police” raided NTV, Russia’s last independent television network, and handed it to a state-controlled company; within a few years every national network answered to the Kremlin. 

Putin’s second move was the oligarchs. In 2003 he arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, and the message was instantly understood: wealth in Russia would henceforth serve the Kremlin or be confiscated by it. Loyal oligarchs got massively richer; disloyal ones got prison or exile. Here it’s more subtle, but the message is the same.

Third came the security forces. Putin spent years building police and paramilitary units loyal to him personally rather than to Russian law; then in 2016 he created Rosgvardia, a national praetorian guard of some 340,000 troops answering directly to the president to “fight terrorism” and track down “illegal immigrants” within Russia.

Fourth, Putin criminalized the opposition. His “foreign agent” and “extremism” laws turned political dissent itself into a “security threat,” so that by the end even holding a blank sign in a public square got you beaten, arrested, or shot.

Then came the courts, the history books, and the public square. Putin perfected what Russians bitterly call “Basmanny justice,” courts that reliably rule for the Kremlin.

Our Supreme Court’s Republican majority now routinely uses the so-called “shadow docket” — a procedure invented for actual time-sensitive government emergencies — to hand Trump, oligarchs, and the GOP wins without briefing, argument, or explanation, while expanding the flow of dark money that keeps Republican and (too many Democratic) politicians in fear of or in debt to “donors” who fund elections and give them what the Republicans on the Supreme Court now call “gratuities.”

Putin then imposed unified patriotic history textbooks; here in America we’re watching schools, universities, and libraries being bullied into teaching a white Christian nationalist version of American history while the America 250 celebration was converted into explicitly partisan pageantry, complete with banners of Trump’s face draped across federal buildings in Washington the way Stalin’s once papered Moscow.

And Putin fenced off the squares. This month the Secret Service, the Interior Department, and the White House released a plan for permanent fencing around Lafayette Park, the most storied protest ground in America. The official rationale is security after assassination attempts, but when you read the plan’s own language you see that it identifies the park as a “focal point” for demonstrations and promises that a permanent, properly anchored fence “would assist in de-escalating most potentially violent protest.”

And finally, there’s the foreign policy aspect of it all, because aspiring autocrats always have each other’s backs.