It’s later than you think, but it’s not too late.

APRIL 22, 2025

Look around, take stock of where you are, and know this: Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. If this sounds dramatic to you, it should. Over the past five months, in many hours of many conversations with multiple people who have lived under dictators and autocrats, one message came through loud and clear: America, you are running out of time.

People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a “slide,” but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country’s democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.

Shortly after Trump was reelected last fall, I called Ressa to ask her how she thought Americans should prepare for his return. She told me then that she worried about a failure of imagination. She knew that the speed of the destruction of institutions—one of the first steps an authoritarian takes to solidify and centralize power—would surprise people here, even those paying the closest attention. Ressa splits her time between Manila and New York, and she repeatedly warned me to be ready for everything to happen quickly. When we spoke again weeks after his inauguration, Ressa was shaken. President Trump was moving faster than even she had anticipated.

Jonathan Rauch: One word describes Trump

I heard something similar recently from Garry Kasparov, the Russian dissident and chess grand master. To him, the situation was obvious. America is running out of time, he told me. As Kasparov wrote recently in this magazine, “If this sounds alarmist, forgive me for not caring. Exactly 20 years ago, I retired from professional chess to help Russia resist Putin’s budding dictatorship. People were slow to grasp what was happening there too.”

The chorus of people who have lived through democratic ruin will all tell you the same thing: Do not make the mistake of assuming you still have time. Put another way: You think you can wait and see, and keep democracy intact? Wanna bet? Those who have seen democracy wrecked in their home country are sometimes derided as overly pessimistic—and it’s understandable that they’d have a sense of inevitability about the dangers of autocracy. But that gloomy worldview does not make their warnings any less credible: Unless Trump’s power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back—and that’s if you’re lucky.

The Trump administration’s breakneck pace is obviously no accident. While citizens are busy processing their shock over any one shattered norm or disregarded law, Trump is already on to the next one. This is the playbook authoritarians have used all over the world: First the leader removes those with expertise and independent thinking from the government and replaces them with leaders who are arrogant, ignorant, and extremely loyal. Next he takes steps to centralize his power and claim unprecedented authority. Along the way, he conducts an all-out assault on the truth so that the truth tellers are distrusted, corruption becomes the norm, and questioning him becomes impossible. The Constitution bends and then finally breaks. This is what tyrants do. Trump is doing it now in the United States.

In the Philippines, it took about six months under Duterte for democratic institutions to crumble. In the United States, the overreach in executive power and the destruction of federal agencies that Ressa told me she figured would have kept Trump busy through, say, the end of the summer were carried out in the first 30 days of his presidency. Even so, what people don’t always realize is that a dictator doesn’t seize control all at once. “The death of democracy happens by a thousand cuts,” Ressa told me recently. “And you don’t realize how badly you’re bleeding until it’s too late.” Another thing the people who have lived under authoritarian rule will tell you: It’s not just that it can get worse. It will.

Americans who are waiting for Trump to cross some imaginary red line neglect the fact that they have more leverage to defend American democracy today than they will tomorrow, or next week, or next month. While people are still debating whether to call it authoritarianism or fascism, Trump is seizing control of one independent agency after another. (And for what it’s worth, the smartest scholars I know have told me that what Trump is trying to do in America is now textbook fascism—beyond the authoritarian impulses of his first term. Take, for example, his administration’s rigid ideological purity tests, or the extreme overreach of government into freedom of scientific and academic inquiry.)

Between the time I write this sentence and the moment when this story will be published, the federal government will lose hundreds more qualified, ethical civil servants. Soon, even higher numbers of principled people in positions of power will be fired or will resign. More positions will be left vacant or filled by people without standards or scruples. The government’s attacks against other checks on power—the press, the judiciary—will worsen. Enormous pressure will be exerted on people to stay silent. And silence is a form of consent.

The truth is, checks and balances work only when individuals are courageous enough to speak out. Many American citizens, though, have been conspicuously quiet in the early days of Trump’s second term. People like Kasparov and Ressa, who have lived through the flip to authoritarianism elsewhere, warn that this is a mistake, as do many scholars who have studied totalitarianism and dictatorships across history. At a time like this, hesitation can mean the difference between freedom and tyranny.

These are not uncertain times , not really. The trick of aspiring dictators is they tell you exactly what they’re going to do ahead of time. There’s a famous saying about propagandists—that they repeat the lie until it becomes true. But corrupt leaders use repetition effectively in other ways, too. An authoritarian repeats lies, yes, but he also repeats outrageous truths until they no longer sound outrageous, at least to some. Tell people again and again that you’re going to imprison political enemies or journalists, or otherwise take away basic freedoms, and the public becomes primed to accept the attack when it finally happens. The role of technology in the rise of authoritarianism cannot be overstated: Social platforms built for scale—and designed to reward anger, hate, and snap reactions over truth—helped Trump win the presidency, serve as networks for anti-freedom propaganda, and have assisted others like him in gaining power around the world. Technologies that could be used for democratic expression are instead used to warp public opinion and suppress dissent.

Back in 2017, Duterte’s propagandists made the hashtag #ArrestMariaRessa go viral—that was two years before he finally used a pretense to arrest her. By declaring his intent so far in advance, the president ensured that when he had his perceived enemies arrested, it would be shocking but not surprising. This is how dictators lead people to believe that something abnormal is normal, or that something illegal is permissible. This is how people come to find themselves “just following orders.” Sometimes, when you know what’s coming, that can be enough to let it happen.

Months before Duterte was elected in 2016, Ressa interviewed him for Rappler, the news organization she’d co-founded in the Philippines in 2012. Like Trump, who has sworn to root out “the enemy from within,” Duterte had taken aim at his own government. “I will stop corruption, I will stop criminality, I will fix government,” he told her at the time. He went on: “When I said I’ll stop criminality, I’ll stop criminality. And if I have to kill you, I’ll kill you. Personally.” When an authoritarian tells you he’s going to do something, believe him. Each outlandish statement is a trial balloon, one step closer to action. And when people don’t push back—or, worse, when supporters cheer him on—the boundaries for acceptable behavior permanently shift.

Garry Kasparov: How America can avoid becoming Russia

This is why Trump calls journalists purveyors of “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” It’s why he floats the idea of executing his perceived political foes, and doing away with the First Amendment. It’s why he has moved beyond simply wanting to deport people who are in this country illegally and now says “homegrowns are next” when he talks about his desire to send Americans to a gulag in El Salvador. And it’s why he is trying to take over universities and other once-independent institutions. In his first month back in office, Trump banned the Associated Press from the White House because it wouldn’t agree to use only the words he liked. He seized control of the White House press pool, which previously operated independently, run by members of the press. And his Pentagon told journalists that it would end long-standing tradition and do away with the press pool that has the chance to travel with—and ask questions of—the secretary of defense. Trump continues to muse, as he has done before, about crushing the press and anyone who leaks information to reporters. Trump ranted in a social-media post about anonymous sources, saying that “a big price should be paid for this blatant dishonesty” and threatening to sue reporters and news outlets. He went on: “I’ll do it as a service to our Country. Who knows, maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!”

Trump keeps moving the goalposts this way. Remember when he mused publicly that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it? He wants people to believe that they deserve to be punished, and that he deserves to do whatever he wants, with impunity. More recently, Trump put it this way: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

One key difference between Trump and Duterte, at least so far, is violence. Duterte started carrying out the extrajudicial murder of citizens within hours of taking the oath of office. He was, he said, making good on his promise to crack down on crime. (He’d previously done the same when he was a mayor, with the help of vigilantes and even police officers.) His administration, human-rights groups say, ultimately killed tens of thousands of civilians. “I’m not really a bad guy,” one of Duterte’s supporters told Patricia Evangelista, one of the reporters who worked in Ressa’s newsroom. To this man it was simple: “Some people need killing.” Ressa remembers it as a surreal time. She learned quickly that once a dictator takes power, dehumanizing forces are suddenly all around. This is how an authoritarian changes a culture: by getting supporters to cheer on grotesqueries of all manner, including the cessation of the freedoms he’s telling you he is about to seize. This is why so many Americans are horrified by Trump’s indifference to due process. Due process is important on principle—it’s a constitutional right. But doing away with it also signals that the state believes it can do whatever it wants to people.

Ressa has some advice for Americans: If you’re in a leadership position, she says, you must demonstrate that you understand the seriousness of the situation, and that you’re there to protect the people who are depending on you. But also, you have to know that not everyone is brave. Not everyone is ready to stand up for their freedom; those who are fearful are easily manipulated, and can put others at risk. When the stakes are this high, she advises, there’s no time for weakness. Remember that a weak link—be it an individual, a university, or a law firm—is a point of danger for those who need to hold the line. As I’ve written before, capitulation is contagious. But so, too, is courage.

In January 2018, Rappler received its first shutdown order from the government. Ressa and her co-founder, Chay Hofilena, immediately held a press conference to make sure that people understood that Duterte was trying to intimidate their newsroom and silence its reporting, and that it would not work. Years later, Duterte would again try to shut down Rappler’s website. But the goal was always to keep publishing no matter what—and Ressa succeeded. Preparation was everything. Her leadership team had a shutdown plan. She and her colleagues ran drills on how to bring their website back online within 24 hours, relying on servers in other countries, if the government of the Philippines shut them down. (Funnily enough, she had already positioned Rappler’s servers in the United States as a safeguard—she figured that America, home of the free, would protect the right to free press. Today, she advises American news organizations to move their servers elsewhere.)

Rappler also created a buddy system for the newsroom. “We knew that our journalists might be framed for crimes, and we warned them about that,” she told me. “We reminded them that if any altercation took place with the government, the first thing they should do is to pick up their phone and start live-broadcasting what was happening.” They did drills so that “going live” would be muscle memory for them, so that when the time came, they could be frightened and flooded with adrenaline, and start broadcasting anyway.

This practice paid off. At one point, one of Ressa’s journalists, Pia Ranada, arrived at the presidential palace for a press briefing only to be told that she couldn’t enter. She wasn’t given a reason. But she remembered her training: Ressa recalled to me that you can see in Ranada’s footage that her hand was shaking as she turned on her camera and asked why she was being kept out. The president’s security team indicated that the order had come from above, but wouldn’t say why. Even then, Ressa recalled, she and her colleagues did not know how bad it would get. “I always knew Duterte would come after the press—he told us he would!—but I failed to imagine the worst of it,” she said. “I never thought I would actually be arrested. I was wrong.” Corrupt governments use lawfare to punish people. Legal battles are expensive, and can destroy people’s reputations and livelihoods. Not everyone has the financial resources to go up against the government.

Ressa was arrested the day before Valentine’s Day in 2019, charged with “cyberlibel” over a story published before a cyberlibel law had even taken effect. In a little over a year, Duterte’s government filed 10 arrest warrants against her with a cumulative maximum prison sentence of 103 years. (Every time Ressa got arrested, Rappler’s audience and friends would step up and donate generously. “I liked to joke that this was not a sustainable business model,” Ressa told me.) Now, nearly a decade later, Ressa has defeated eight of those criminal charges in court—and Duterte is in prison at The Hague.

You find out very quickly who your true friends are when the government tries to break you. But it’s lonely, too. When Duterte was coming after Ressa, she worried that any friends who stood up for her were placing themselves at risk. There came a time when she felt she couldn’t even go out to lunch with a friend, in case that friend’s business or family would then be targeted by the government. For a time, she wore a flak jacket on her commute—roads were a favorite hunting ground for death squads, who would shoot people from their motorcycles; getting to and from places was the most dangerous part of her day. Others knew this too: At one point, a good samaritan offered an armored car. But Ressa eventually drew the line. As a former war-zone correspondent, she had a high risk tolerance. She also had a sense of mission: No one could stop her from telling the truth.

Dangerous times call for high levels of both calm and courage. You need to assume the worst is going to happen, and work backwards from there. People like to join the pack, and that’s not always a bad thing. Strength in numbers is real. You need to create a community around you. Not just for your own protection, but for everyone else’s. Remember that facts still matter. Every individual who speaks out, every person who calls a lie a lie, demonstrates fealty to the truth. Do not assume that your voice does not matter. It does. You also choose truth by what you read, how you choose to spend your time. If people no longer care about reality, authoritarians learn that they can do whatever they want. Put another way: If you lose reality, you lose the rule of law. You lose democracy. You are no longer free.

Steven Levitsky: The new authoritarianism

All you can do is hold the line. Hold the line to the standards of your industry’s ethics. Hold the line to what the Constitution says. The minute you step back, or voluntarily give up freedom, it is gone for good. Dissidents do not always win. Garry Kasparov spoke out against Putin and ultimately fled his country for America because he faced persecution at home. In the Philippines, the people were able to beat back Duterte democratically—but democracy is still extremely fragile there, certainly more so than when Duterte first won the presidency.

Basic American freedoms are already far more vulnerable today than even one month ago, even a week ago. The United States has long been a bulwark for democracies everywhere. Not so at the moment. But it is not too late. Find your people. Fight for your values. Collaborate with those who still believe in truth, and humanity, and the inalienable rights of the people.

“When I hear people ask if they should flee to some other country, some faraway land, I want to shake them. You want an escape plan? To where?” Ressa said to me recently. “If the United States of America falls, it’s the ball game.”

It is easy to dismiss warnings about the demise of American freedoms as hyperbole, or the darkest pessimism. But there’s a paradox here. Those who have the greatest sense of urgency about the need to protect democracy in the United States, those who have seen firsthand how bad it can get and how quickly freedom can be snuffed out—they are optimists in their own way. We should listen to them not only because they may be right, but because they recognize what Americans know in their bones to be true: This nation, these freedoms, they are sacred. They are ours. And it is not too late. Not yet, anyway.

Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, in April 1775, Boston was on edge. Seven thousand residents of the town shared these streets with more than 13,000 British soldiers and their families. The two groups coexisted uneasily.

Two years before, the British government had closed the port of Boston and flooded the town with soldiers to try to put down what they saw as a rebellion amongst the townspeople. Ocean trade stopped, businesses failed, and work in the city got harder and harder to find. As soldiers stepped off ships from England onto the wharves, half of the civilian population moved away. Those who stayed resented the soldiers, some of whom quit the army and took badly needed jobs away from locals.

Boston became increasingly cut off from the surrounding towns, for it was almost an island, lying between the Charles River and Boston Harbor. And the townspeople were under occupation. Soldiers, dressed in the red coats that inspired locals to insult them by calling them “lobsterbacks,” monitored their movements and controlled traffic in and out of the town over Boston Neck, which was the only land bridge from Boston to the mainland and so narrow at high tide it could accommodate only four horses abreast.

Boston was a small town of wooden buildings crowded together under at least eight towering church steeples, for Boston was still a religious town. Most of the people who lived there knew each other at least by sight, and many had grown up together. And yet, in April 1775, tensions were high.

Boston was the heart of colonial resistance to the policies of the British government, but it was not united in that opposition. While the town had more of the people who called themselves Patriots than other colonies did—maybe 30 to 40 percent—at least 15% of the people in town were still fiercely loyal to the King and his government. Those who were neither Patriots nor Loyalists just kept their heads down, hoping the growing political crisis would go away and leave them unscathed.

It was hard for people to fathom that the country had come to such division. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War, Bostonians looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.

That euphoria faded fast.

Almost as soon as the French and Indian War was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.

In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.

But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury, and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.

Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle that had been going on in England for more than a century over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?

This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.

Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.

The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.

When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dock hands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. One of the Sons of Liberty was a talented silversmith named Paul Revere. He turned the story of the colonists’ loss of their liberty into engravings. Distributed as posters, Revere’s images would help spread the idea that colonists were losing their liberties.

The Sons of Liberty was generally a catch-all title for those causing trouble over the new taxes, so that protesters could remain anonymous, but prominent colonists joined them and at least partly directed their actions. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”

John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.

They spurred people to action. By 1766, the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.

News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.

British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.

Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”

Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to convince people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.

In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.

Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.

British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April, they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there, they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.

But about 30 of the Sons of Liberty, including Paul Revere, had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. They met in secret at the Green Dragon Tavern to share what they knew, each of them swearing on the Bible that they would not give away the group’s secrets. They had been patrolling the streets at night and saw at midnight on Saturday night, April 15, the day before Easter Sunday, that the general was shifting his troops. They knew the soldiers were going to move. But they didn’t know if the soldiers would leave Boston by way of the narrow Boston Neck or row across the harbor to Charlestown. That mattered because if the townspeople in Lexington and Concord were going to be warned that the troops were on their way, messengers from Boston would have to be able to avoid the columns of soldiers.

The Sons of Liberty had a plan. Paul Revere knew Boston well—he had been born there. As a teenager, he had been among the first young men who had signed up to ring the bells in the steeple of the Old North Church. The team of bell-ringers operated from a small room in the tower, and from there, a person could climb sets of narrow stairs and then ladders into the steeple. Anyone who lived in Boston or the surrounding area knew well that the steeple towered over every other building in Boston.

On Easter Sunday, after the secret watchers had noticed the troop movement, Revere traveled to Lexington to visit Adams and Hancock. On the way home through Charlestown, he had told friends “that if the British went out by Water, we would shew two Lanthorns in the North Church Steeple; & if by Land, one, as a Signal.” Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.

The plan was dangerous. The Old North Church was Anglican, Church of England, and about a third of the people who worshipped there were Loyalists. General Thomas Gage himself worshiped there. But so did Revere’s childhood friend John Pulling Jr., who had become a wealthy sea captain and was a vestryman, responsible for the church’s finances. Like Revere, Pulling was a Son of Liberty. So was the church’s relatively poor caretaker, or sexton, Robert Newman. They would help.

Dr. Joseph Warren lived just up the hill from Revere. He was a Son of Liberty and a leader in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. On the night of April 18, he dashed off a quick note to Revere urging him to set off for Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock that the troops were on the way. By the time Revere got Warren’s house, the doctor had already sent another man, William Dawes, to Lexington by way of Boston Neck. Warren told Revere the troops were leaving Boston by water. Revere left Warren’s house, found his friend John Pulling, and gave him the information that would enable him to raise the signal for those waiting in Charlestown. Then Revere rowed across the harbor to Charleston to ride to Lexington himself. The night was clear with a rising moon, and Revere muffled his oars and swung out of his way to avoid the British ship standing guard.

Back in Boston, Pulling made his way past the soldiers on the streets to find Newman. Newman lived in his family home, where the tightening economy after the British occupation had forced his mother to board British officers. Newman was waiting for Pulling, and quietly slipped out of the house to meet him.

The two men walked past the soldiers to the church. As caretaker, Newman had a key.

The two men crept through the dark church, climbed the stairs and then the ladders to the steeple holding lanterns—a tricky business, but one that a caretaker and a mariner could manage—very briefly flashed the lanterns they carried to send the signal, and then climbed back down.

Messengers in Charlestown saw the signal, but so did British soldiers. Legend has it that Newman escaped from the church by climbing out a window. He made his way back home, but since he was one of the few people in town who had keys to the church, soldiers arrested him the next day for participating in rebellious activities. He told them that he had given his keys to Pulling, who as a vestryman could give him orders. When soldiers went to find Pulling, he had skipped town, likely heading to Nantucket.

While Newman and Pulling made their way through the streets back to their homes, the race to beat the soldiers to Lexington and Concord was on. Dawes crossed the Boston Neck just before soldiers closed the city. Revere rowed to Charlestown, borrowed a horse, and headed out. Eluding waiting officers, he headed on the road through Medford and what is now Arlington.

Dawes and Revere, as well as the men from Charleston making the same ride after seeing the signal lanterns, told the houses along their different routes that the Regulars were coming. They converged in Lexington, warned Adams and Hancock, and then set out for Concord. As they rode, young doctor Samuel Prescott came up behind them. Prescott was courting a girl from Lexington and was headed back to his home in Concord. Like Dawes and Revere, he was a Son of Liberty, and joined them to alert the town, pointing out that his neighbors would pay more attention to a local man.

About halfway to Concord, British soldiers caught the men. They ordered Revere to dismount and, after questioning him, took his horse and turned him loose to walk back to Lexington. Dawes escaped, but his horse bucked him off and he, too, headed back to Lexington on foot. But Prescott jumped his horse over a stone wall and got away to Concord.

The riders from Boston had done their work. As they brought word the Regulars were coming, scores of other men spread the news through a system of “alarm and muster” the colonists had developed months before for just such an occasion. Rather than using signal fires, the colonists used sound, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency. By the time Revere made it back to the house where Adams and Hancock were hiding, just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green.

So were the British soldiers.

When they marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, the soldiers found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.

The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.

The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.

By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun. Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves.

Someone asked me once if the men who hung the lanterns in the tower knew what they were doing. She meant, did they know that by that act they would begin the steps to a war that would create a new nation and change the world.

The answer is no. None of us knows what the future will deliver.

Paul Revere and Robert Newman and John Pulling and William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, and all the other riders from Charlestown who set out for Lexington after they saw the signal lanterns in the steeple of Old North Church, were men from all walks of life who had families to support, businesses to manage. Some had been orphaned young, some lived with their parents. Some were wealthy, others would scrabble through life. Some, like Paul Revere, had recently buried one wife and married another. Samuel Prescott was looking to find just one.

But despite their differences and the hectic routine of their lives, they recognized the vital importance of the right to consent to the government under which they lived. They took time out of their daily lives to resist the new policies of the British government that would establish the right of a king to act without check by the people. They recognized that giving that sort of power to any man would open the way for a tyrant.

Paul Revere didn’t wake up on the morning of April 18, 1775, and decide to change the world. That morning began like many of the other tense days of the past year, and there was little reason to think the next two days would end as they did. Like his neighbors, Revere simply offered what he could to the cause: engraving skills, information, knowledge of a church steeple, longstanding friendships that helped to create a network. And on April 18, he and his friends set out to protect the men who were leading the fight to establish a representative government.

The work of Newman and Pulling to light the lanterns exactly 250 years ago tonight sounds even less heroic. They agreed to cross through town to light two lanterns in a church steeple. It sounds like such a very little thing to do, and yet by doing it, they risked imprisonment or even death. It was such a little thing…but it was everything. And what they did, as with so many of the little steps that lead to profound change, was largely forgotten until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used their story to inspire a later generation to work to stop tyranny in his own time.

What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing, even if it risked their lives, even if no one ever knew. And that is all anyone can do as we work to preserve the concept of human self-determination. In that heroic struggle, most of us will be lost to history, but we will, nonetheless, move the story forward, even if just a little bit.

And once in a great while, someone will light a lantern—or even two—that will shine forth for democratic principles that are under siege, and set the world ablaze.

Here is a link to the recording: Patty Durand on Georgia PSC

When: Monday, April 7, from 6:30-7:30 p.m. EST via Zoom
Registration: Click here. ]]> https://thirdact.org/georgia/2025/04/03/why-the-upcoming-psc-election-is-so-critical-to-georgians/ Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:32:56 +0000 https://thirdact.org/georgia/?p=1239 You are urged you to watch this very recent 15 minute video below, by More Perfect Union,  featuring Patty Durand among others, talking about the impact that datacenters have on Georgians. Cyndie Roberson, leading the fight on Cryptomining datacenters in GA, shared this video.