Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has a must-read essay in the latest Harpers Magazine. Her final paragraph sums up our predicament nicely, and points us in the direction we need to go. The problems that are now impossible to ignore didn’t begin with our current leadership, she implores us to remember. As Gessen points out, we at the ACLU have known this for a long time:

To be worthy of the lofty name “resistance,” the opposition to Trump must aim to break the country’s post-9/11 trajectory. It must question the very premise of the war on terror, challenge the very fact of a perpetual state of emergency, and confront not only the Trump presidency but the legacy of the Bush and Obama Administrations. Organizations such as the A.C.L.U. have been doing this for years. The Trump presidency has not only, paradoxically, brought the group millions of dollars, it has also, potentially, rallied millions of people to the cause. Now is the time to stop waiting for the Reichs­tag fire and start battling the consequences of the one we already had—Trump and the legal and public conditions that are enabling his presidency. 

Read the whole thing here. And please, listen to the ACLU.