If you can stand it, take a look at the nauseating video of masked federal officers pulling Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk off a Somerville street last week. Watch them casually saunter up to the Turkish Fulbright scholar, as one of them says, “Excuse me, ma’am.” See them grab her wrists, pull her phone from her hands, take her bag from her. Hear her terrified yells as she is surrounded by people whose faces she cannot see and whose identities she cannot verify.

“We’re the police,” they say — as if that could be any comfort — before cuffing her and marching her to an unmarked car.

The Trump administration has imprisoned Öztürk, here on a student visa, and is trying to deport her. They won’t be specific about why they chose her, but she was flagged by a shadowy group called Canary Mission, a doxxing outfit targeting critics of Israeli policy against Palestinians. Canary Mission and groups like them are effectively identifying students and professors whose thoughts offend them, highlighting targets for the state to disappear and deport.

How would we describe this if it was happening in another country?

The First Amendment, which Trumpists once pretended to revere, protects even the most heinous public speech: It allows Nazis to chant racist filth in the streets. Öztürk’s supposed transgression doesn’t come close to that uncomfortable territory. The only thing Canary Mission has on her is that she was one of four students who signed a polite op-ed in the student newspaper last year calling on Tufts to acknowledge as genocide Israeli attacks on Gaza. It expressed no support for Hamas, which carried out the horrific attacks on Israel in 2023. Still, it was too much for the thought police.

On Thursday, soulless Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a man whom Democrats in Congress voted to confirm on the ludicrous assumption that he would be a moderating influence in the administration, revealed that he had revoked the visas of 300 students like Öztürk, likely on similarly spurious grounds.

“We’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up,” he said.

Try looking in the mirror, Mr. Secretary.

Rubio and the rest of this administration are tearing things up with a speed that has surprised even those of us who knew what was coming. They are dismantling the federal government, tanking the economy, and making us a pariah state.

Being one of the world’s good guys isn’t something we are. It’s something we do. Cutting off life-saving aid to millions around the world, menacing allies, housing deportees in a horrific Salvadoran mega-prison, making people from other countries scared to travel and study here, as the arrests of Öztürk and others surely do — all of it makes us the bad guys.

Some MAGA zealots love this. But what about the rest of us?

Instead of fighting authoritarianism, too many who could slow its creep have rolled over instead.

Too many Democrats in Congress are still behaving with a decorum Republicans dispensed with long ago, refusing to leverage what little power they have to slow the cataclysm. As the president and his fans defy judges and issue flagrantly illegal orders, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seems incapable of absorbing the fact that the country is already in a constitutional crisis. Over and over again, an alarming number of Democrats voted for nominees who clearly intended to break this country. They play checkers while Trump’s GOP eats the board.

Trump has repeatedly abused his power to threaten universities, companies, and big law firms with destruction unless they chill speech, abandon justice, and bend to his demands. Some of them have folded immediately: Columbia University, giant legal firm Paul, Weiss, and many others jettisoned principles they once pretended were sacrosanct.

We know from experience that no amount of concessions will protect them from further attacks. Every surrender only emboldens Trump and his henchmen, who can only be slowed if everyone who cares about rights and democracy recognizes the crisis we are in and fights back — together.

One thing is clear: The threats, to law firms, universities, and students like Öztürk, will not stop coming.

Resistance may or may not be futile. Acquiescence definitely is.

Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at [email protected].