Waiting Too Long
- Mike Dickey
- Oct 10, 2025
- 3 min read
"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
-Don Henley
My computer says it's 25 degrees outside, the valley draped in a frozen fog I can't photograph through the condensation on the double-paned windows. Slane seemed extremely happy to come back inside at 6 a.m.
Every hour seems to bring a new jarring event in the slide toward authoritarianism. On the same day a federal grand jury indicted the New York Attorney General in an act of political retribution, the charges arising out of her attempt to help a niece qualify for a starter home, an academic whose life has been threatened over his politics was denied the right to leave the country.
Details are sketchy, but the story goes something like this.
Mark Bray is a tenured professor at Rutgers, after having served as a lecturer at Dartmouth. He's a leading scholar on the topic of fascism. He's had the temerity to speak out on the authoritarian drift in the U.S., which got him labeled a charter member of "antifa", a fictional organization created by MAGA that's composed of anyone who actively opposes fascism ("Anti-fascist". Get it?). I reckon Peg and me showing up for a No Kings protest makes us antifas, as well.
Anyway, members of Turning Point USA, that vile group of college-aged incel white boys led until recently by the now gradually decomposing Charlie Kirk, began targeting Bray as an undesirable. He and his family are threatened. His home address is published online. Someone suggests he be murdered in class, in front of his students. Finally, fearing for his safety and that of his family, he makes arrangements to move to Spain, arrives at the airport, and . . .
finds someone has cancelled his reservation.
No one can tell him how this happened. He returns to a hotel near the airport, assured by the airline that they'll find him and his family a flight in a couple days.
I understand this sort of thing happens routinely in Russia, just a means of reminding a dissident that his comings and goings are being watched, and they can scoop him up any time. The current administration has proven with Comey and James that they've adopted Beria's old policy statement, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." Cross MAGA publicly, and some DOJ stooge will pore through the records to find where you tore the tags off your pillows or sped on the New York Thruway a dozen years ago. If you try to fight back, that's an additional criminal charge.
Taken together, I see this week as an important waypoint on the decision to get out of the country. The political arrests have begun, people are being shot and clubbed in cities all over the non-shitty parts of the country by a paramilitary organization you and I pay for. And now they want you to read the news and understand they'll decide whether to let you leave--I half wonder if Bray's sin was that he planned to continue teaching and writing from the safety of Spain, a country that knows a thing or two about fascism.
I'm thinking next summer, after the LLM is complete. Pick a country and go. Make sure our investments are safely stashed somewhere like Switzerland.
Speaking of the LLM, it's time to digest another rather complicated lesson in estate and gift taxation, a class that forces one to learn accounting at a level I struggle to reach. Still, it's my ticket out of standing in court arguing about caulk or some small change bit of business perfidy, so I'll lean into the exercise.
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