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The producer of a radio show I went on this morning said the host wanted to talk about Ilhan Omar, so I went back and listened to a bunch of the press coverage from last week to refresh my memory on the details. And I realized that the US media still doesn’t know how to talk about authoritarianism.

The people many of these shows had on were legal experts, law professor types, who could thoroughly discuss individual charges, precedent, procedure, and even point out that all this is “highly unusual,” etc. But they could not say—this is what happens in other countries.

The best context for understanding isn’t not the American legal system. We are talking about something else here. The comparisons are authoritarian countries. The intellectual and political lineage is Soviet thuggery: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”