“Thank you for your attention to this matter”

The FFCKUS, on his media platform:

All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

~ What counts as an illegal protest?

~ Under whose authority will an agitator be imprisoned or deported?

~ How does one define “agitator”? And why assume that an agitator will be an international student?

~ Will imprisonment or deportation be decided without a trial?

~ Under whose authority will a native-born student be expelled or arrested?

~ Under whose authority will masks be prohibited?

~ And what about faculty or staff or administrators or unaffiliated persons participating in a campus protest?

This ill-defined array of threats is meant to terrify, and thus prompt obedience in advance. But as Timothy Snyder has written, one should not obey in advance:

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

The tame, bureaucratic “Thank you for your attention to this matter” seems especially chilling in this context.