Good morning. It is Saturday, January the 24th. I'm Ali Velshi, and we begin this morning with the breaking open of an American crisis.

We were warned about a creeping authoritarianism, one that could sneak up on us and take hold bit by bit if we did not stand

up to each incremental trespass of our freedoms and values. But it has happened in the second

Trump era in almost the opposite way, not in fact bit by bit, like slowly turning up the heat

under the water until it's boiling. The way it's happened is everything everywhere

all at once. At home, Donald Trump is occupying American cities with brutalizing ice forces,

gutting the civil service, attacking universities, and setting the DOJ against anyone who stands in

his way. Abroad, he's seeking to occupy foreign countries, threatening international alliances that have protected American interests for generations and laying waste to the world order.

The Russian and American writer M. Gessen argues that the speed and intensity of this transformation has almost the same effect as slowly turning up the heat.

It's not so slow that we don't notice

it until it's too late, but it's so fast and furious that we can't keep track of it all.

Quote, we have become a country where people are disappeared by a paramilitary force that hunts

them down in their apartments on city streets and country roads and even in the courts.

Less than a year ago, videos of ICE arrests would go viral,

and social media posts about ice sightings would send chills down our spines.

Now even the most high-profile detentions have faded from view.

Who has been released? Who has been deported?

Who is still missing? Who can keep track?

We have become a country whose federal government deploys military and paramilitary forces in the streets of its

major cities, terrorizing the residents in the guise of protecting them. A foreign observer taking

stock of the United States could describe us as a nation on the brink of civil war, but we can barely

keep current the list of cities where troops have been or still are in the streets, end quote.

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