I look at this country and all I see is a stranger

When your country strips you of rights and protections, it tells you that it no longer recognises you.

- M. Gessen

A mourner's hat reads 'freedom prove me wrong' at a memorial ahead of Sunday's funeral for activist Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in a shooting at a college in Utah.

(BLOOMBERG)

Other times, you realise that you no longer recognise your country. People leave; families rupture along political lines; friendships shatter; people and institutions that used to be widely admired are vilified, and yesterday's villains are sainted; familiar faces disappear from the public sphere; an aggressive conformity takes hold; the material conditions of life change.

The indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show signaled just such a shift in landscape. The news tells us that we are moving from one country to a different, autocratic one. The television shows us: This country looks different, sounds different and feels different. A familiar face and a familiar voice vanish. Some people turned on their televisions Friday night to see a memorial to Charlie Kirk when they expected to see a comedian welcoming his next guest.

What unites the many actions of the Trump administration, from the sledgehammer it has taken to government programmes to the demonstrative cruelty it has built into immigration raids, is that they transform the daily physical, economic and psychic experience of life. President Donald Trump is remaking the country in his image: crude, harsh, gratuitously mean. The ongoing attack on civil society, which his administration plans to intensify in the name of Kirk, is a part of this programme. Civil society makes life more livable. The administration’s message is that the work of civil society no longer belongs in this country.