"The Is What Happened to the Person Who Mocked the Assassination of Charlie Kirk at Texas Tech"

It is a short video, twelve seconds long, yet its impact is enormous. Two campus police officers put handcuffs on a young woman in Texas as she looks confusedly to the side. Above it, the comment from Governor Greg Abbott: "This is what happened to the person who was mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Texas Tech. FAFO." - a cynical "Fuck Around and Find Out" that sounds like a mixture of threat and victory howl.

Greg Abbott, governor of Texas since 2015 and one of the most powerful Republican politicians in the United States, is known for his hard line - against migrants, against abortion rights, against political opponents. But now he directs his show of power against a private citizen whose "offense" apparently consisted of publicly commenting on the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk - and not in the tone Abbott wanted. The fact that the governor of a state publicly celebrates the arrest of a citizen, not because of a provable crime but because of a statement, is more than just a slip. It is an alarm signal.

Because what resonates here is a concept of statehood that no longer separates justice from political display of power. "FAFO" - this is not a sober message, not a legal fact. It is the language of the prison camp, of execution without trial. Those who mock, who laugh, who do not follow the ideological rules, are to feel what happens. Exactly this tone has always driven democracies into the abyss when the state began to punish attitudes, not actions. The United States is no longer the country it once was. Under Donald Trump, political culture was radicalized, and Abbott is one of those governors who not only follow this course but push it forward. From militarized border policy to draconian abortion laws to the open criminalization of protest and mockery - Texas is a laboratory for a new authoritarian order. That now even the gloating over an arrest is politically instrumentalized shows how far the country has moved away from the principles of the rule of law.

Historians will inevitably be reminded of the 1930s, when in Europe first mockery, then criticism and finally every form of deviation was persecuted. Anyone who did not show the state’s martyrs the proper reverence was considered an enemy. The step from social ostracism to criminal prosecution was short - and the path to dictatorship paved. That an American governor publicly signals that there could be legitimate reasons for arrests that lie in the sphere of what is said or thought is a dangerous normalization of repression. The arrest, a signal to all who do not want to mourn the way he demands. And it is this part that endangers democracy. When political power holders begin to publicly define who may laugh and who may not, then the descent into a system of fear is not far away.

What is happening in Texas does not concern Texas alone. It is a test run for how far the right in the United States is willing to go to enforce its ideological order. Anyone who thinks this is all just show should take a close look: the language has changed, the tone has become sharper, and now the images follow. The United States, but also other Western countries, are on a path that bears uncanny parallels to the darkest chapters of history - and anyone who does not want to see this may only wake up when the last mockery has long since fallen silent.