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Some of them are learned in the ways of fascism, others, like the leader himself, are intuitively antidemocratic, but the effects are the same, namely, the irrational rule of a leader who would like to rule as a king or dictator.

The hope is that Americans who either didn't vote or voted for Trump in the 2024 election — and now regret their choice — will recognize that they are not only welcome at these protests but are needed voices against what many feel is an increasingly antidemocratic federal government.

And ironically, it is abortion opponents who spent decades railing against the antidemocratic federal courts who have invested the most in the federal judiciary, litigating about the fate of the Comstock Act, access to abortion pills, and much more.

These failures begin with an obsolete set of assumptions and a crisis in imagination about the strength of American democracy and its political and societal institutions, the permanence of the rule of law and respect for the Constitution, and the character of the American people and how tens of millions of them are authoritarians or otherwise sufficiently compelled towards such antidemocratic values, beliefs, and behavior to put an open authoritarian and autocrat back in the White House.

Bonta’s office called the order “unconstitutional, antidemocratic, and un-American,” and said it would cause California and other states “imminent and irreparable harm.”