"Essentially, the librarians are my suspects," the Texas police officer tells a school superintendent in the body camera footage. "If they are the ones that are choosing the books and putting them in there, you know, they're the ones carrying the criminal liability."

The Hood County constable was in the middle of a nearly two-year investigation of several school librarians for distributing allegedly obscene books. Local news outlet KXAS obtained the body camera footage and the nearly 800-page case file of the officer's investigation last year, which concluded after the district attorney declined to file the charges that the constable had taken the liberty of drafting up.

No librarian has been arrested in such a case yet, in Texas or elsewhere, but the incident illustrated a larger trend: On issues such as library books, abortion, gender, and even food, the culture war is now feeding the police state.

This phenomenon started in the states, and none have pursued it with more intensity than Florida and Texas, where governors and legislatures have competed to show that they're fighting the hardest against what they call "woke" excess and leftist hegemony. Now this style of governance—using criminal law, mass surveillance, tip lines, and the threat of police violence to wage the culture war—is going national.

This doesn't just implicate the freedom of trans people or high schoolers who want to read Toni Morrison; it's a danger to every American who wants to live, work, and travel without being monitored and menaced by the state.

"There's usually some kind of boogeyman of the day that justifies the building of a very extreme and well-funded and well-resourced policing apparatus," says Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights advocacy group. And that apparatus "ends up becoming a day-to-day enforcer of the laws."

The 'Blueprint State'

If you trace the origins of President Donald Trump's numerous executive orders this year on any culture war issue, it will often take you to Florida or Texas.

When the second Trump administration issued an order threatening to strip federal funding from K-12 schools that teach children "anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies" related to gender and race, it was lifting from Florida's playbook.

Likewise, the administration's campaign against universities on such issues as anti-Israel protests, transgender athletes, and critical race theory were all preceded by Florida, where a powerful executive branch, Republican-controlled Legislature, and conservative state Supreme Court allowed Gov. Ron DeSantis to apply intense pressure to public universities and school districts. The state has been a testing ground for the conservative movement's policy wish list on everything from public camping bans to expanding the death penalty to gutting civilian police oversight boards.

In a June report, PEN America, a nonprofit that promotes free expression, dubbed Florida the "blueprint state" for the White House's run of education-related executive orders. "Each of these federal actions has had a test run in Florida," the report stated.

We're seeing a "general intimidation of librarians," says Sabrina Baêta, the senior program manager of PEN America's Freedom to Read campaign. "It's people bringing books to police headquarters and claiming that there has to be some kind of police action against it. It's doxxing and threatening librarians and educators who are trying to do their jobs."

One of the most recent examples occurred in June, when Hillsborough County Public Schools Superintendent Van Ayres was summoned before the State Board of Education. The board grilled Ayres about why his district hadn't fully complied with a threatening letter from Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier and then–Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., demanding that it pull 55 "pornographic" and "inappropriate" books from high school library shelves. Some of the titles did indeed contain infamous amounts of sex and violence, such as Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. But others were clearly chosen for their LGBT content, such asthe young adult rom-coms Margo Zimmerman Gets the Girl, by Brianna R. Shrum and Sara Waxelbaum, and This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story, by Kacen Callender, or because they frankly discuss issues like teenage drug use (Amy Reed's Beautiful), sexual assault (Sapphire's Push), or eating disorders (Sherry Shahan's Skin and Bones).

Some inclusions were just bizarre. It seems unlikely that teenagers in search of a naughty thrill are cracking open The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami's doorstop novel of Japanese magical realism.

Ayres' answer—that the titles were being reviewed by trained "media specialists," which Florida now requires by law to approve all school library materials—only further incensed the board.

"Have you considered firing all your media specialists and starting from scratch with women and men who can read?" board member Grazie Pozo Christie asked. "These people that you trust to review these materials are abusing the children of your county. They're child abusers."

At one point during the meeting, Diaz said he wanted to "provide caution" to school officials and librarians that they "could face penalty under law and prosecution by the attorney general's office" for stocking obscene books.

Unsurprisingly, Ayres agreed to permanently remove all 55 books from Hillsborough County school libraries. He also ordered around 600 books flagged by the Florida Department of Education in 2022 to be removed from shelves and reviewed. After seeing Ayres get put on the hot seat, other Florida school districts began pulling books off their shelves as well.

Legislatures are tempted to use criminal penalties as a lever precisely because the threat of prosecution is so effective, but in most states that have considered bills to crack down on library books, cooler heads have prevailed. The North Dakota Legislature passed a bill in April that would have prosecuted librarians for not removing explicit material from libraries; Republican Gov. Kelly Armstrong vetoed the bill, calling it "a misguided attempt to legislate morality." Alabama and South Dakota also both introduced bills in their most recent legislative sessions that would have subjected librarians to criminal prosecution for distributing obscene materials, although the Alabama bill died and the South Dakota one was gutted and replaced with an appeals process.

Disputes over the content of school libraries can be resolved by school boards, and by other means that do not involve police investigations or probes by the state attorney general's office, which has more important work than perusing library stacks for prurient material.

This all comes with a price tag. Tampa Bay radio station WUSF reported that it will cost Hillsborough County Public Schools roughly $345,000 in labor to finish reviewing the roughly 600 books flagged by the state. That's an awful lot of money to make sure teenagers read fewer books.

All of that money and all of those threats might be for naught. In August, a federal judge struck down nearly every provision of the 2023 Florida law that led educators to remove thousands of books from school libraries.

Reviewing the list of books that had been pulled from shelves in Florida schools, such as On The Road, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Bluest Eye, U.S. District Judge Kent Wetherell concluded, "None of these books are obscene." The restrictions on them, he ruled, "are thus unreasonable in light of the purpose of school libraries."

'As Far as I Know, There Isn't a Case'

In March, Maria Rojas, a Texas midwife who operated four clinics for low-income women in Harris and Waller counties, became the first person in the state arrested for allegedly providing illegal abortions.

Rojas' case was the first opportunity for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office to flex its new criminal and civil powers under a trio of anti-abortion bills passed in 2021. The laws banned most abortions after six weeks with no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. They also subjected medical practitioners who perform abortions to criminal penalties, including up to life in prison and $100,000 in fines.

The proceedings against Rojas have been highly unusual, though. The state of Texas waited more than three months to formally indict her on criminal charges, leaving a 30-page arrest affidavit filed by Paxton's office as the only evidence offered by the state outlining Rojas' alleged crimes.

"I can't even call it a criminal case, because as far as I know there isn't a case," Marc Hearron, an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights who is representing Rojas, said in April, while he was still waiting for the indictment.

According to Hearron, Rojas was held in jail for 10 days, forced to post a $1.4 million bond, and fitted with an ankle monitor "without even so much as actual criminal charges being filed."

In late June, Rojas was finally indicted on 15 criminal charges: three for allegedly violating Texas' abortion bans and 12 for allegedly practicing medicine without a license.

The state began investigating Rojas' clinics in January, after Texas Health and Human Services received an anonymous complaint.

In addition to the criminal prosecution, Rojas is fighting a civil injunction that shut down her clinics. Her lawyers are appealing that injunction, arguing the state has offered no hard evidence that Rojas or her employees were performing abortions at the clinic.

Hearron calls the investigation and prosecution a "shocking invasion of someone's liberty and the ability of low-income and uninsured populations to be able to access basic health care."

The Texas Attorney General's Office did not respond to a request for comment.

At the same time, Paxton's office has been using the law's civil component to target out-of-state doctors. Texas won a $100,000 judgment in February against Margaret Carpenter, a New York doctor who mailed abortion pills to Texas residents.

The state of Louisiana also indicted Carpenter on criminal charges in January for allegedly mailing abortion pills. The state attempted to extradite her, but New York refused those requests. Additionally, Louisiana is prosecuting a mother for allegedly giving her teenage daughter abortion pills she received from Carpenter.

Focusing on the relatively small number of criminal prosecutions obscures the larger impact of the law, though, which opponents say has been to put maternal health care—the women who receive it and the doctors who administer it—under a police spotlight.

A ProPublica investigation published in February found that the rate of life-threatening sepsis infections for women hospitalized for pregnancy loss during their second and third trimesters rose by 50 percent after Texas' abortion ban was enacted. Although Texas' abortion laws have carve-outs for life-threatening complications like ectopic pregnancies, opponents of the law argue that this shows doctors are waiting until fetal heartbeats completely stop before administering care to women who are miscarrying, drastically increasing the chance of infection and other serious complications.

"There's an ongoing maternal health care crisis because physicians, especially OB-GYNs, are terrified of being thrown in jail and prosecuted for providing basic reproductive health care," Hearron says, "including things like miscarriage management or treatment of ectopic pregnancies."

Already, these laws are leading to edge cases in law and bioethics. This spring, the plight of Adriana Smith captured national media attention.

Smith, a pregnant Georgia woman, developed blood clots in her brain and was brain-dead. Doctors kept her on life support because they believed they were legally obliged to try to save her fetus under Georgia's anti-abortion law. Smith's family was stripped of decision-making power over her.

In June, after four months of keeping Smith's brain-dead body alive, doctors removed a premature-but-living baby boy from her. His family named him Chance.

As of late August, Chance is still alive. But the case raises fundamental questions about legal personhood, bodily autonomy, and the state's power to commandeer them.

According to Dana Sussman of Pregnancy Justice, a maternal rights group, more than 10 bills were introduced in statehouses during this legislative cycle that would allow charges of homicide for people who obtain abortions.

Even if one believes that abortion should be outlawed, it's worth considering whether expanding the scope of criminal penalties—their severity and who is subject to them—will bring clarity or confusion to maternal health care.

Bathroom Bans

Keeping the government out of your bedroom is an old trope. But these days the struggle is to keep the government out of the bathroom.

At least 14 states have adopted laws over the past couple years barring transgender people from using public restrooms that align with their gender identity.

In April, a judge temporarily blocked Montana's new bathroom law from going into effect. Montana 4th Judicial District Judge Shane Vannatta wrote that the law "is motivated by animus and supported by no evidence that its restrictions advance its purported purpose to protect women's safety and privacy."

Only two states, however, criminalize the act: Utah and Florida. The first time someone was arrested in the U.S. for attempting to violate a transgender bathroom law, of course it happened in Florida.

Marcy Rheintgen, a 20-year-old transgender college student, was arrested in March for washing her hands in the women's restroom of the Florida State Capitol building in Tallahassee.

Rheintgen was protesting Florida's Safety in Private Spaces Act of 2023. The law makes it a crime for an individual to refuse to leave a restroom or changing area assigned to the opposite sex when asked to by a government employee. It applies in government buildings.

Rheintgen had sent letters to dozens of public officials and lawmakers announcing her intentions, and when she arrived there were several Capitol police officers waiting for her.

"I wanted people to see the absurdity of this law in practice," Rheintgen told the Associated Press after her arrest. "If I'm a criminal, it's going to be so hard for me to live a normal life, all because I washed my hands. Like, that's so insane."

Rheintgen wasn't charged with violating the Safety in Private Spaces Act, but rather with a much more mundane charge of misdemeanor trespassing. That meant prosecutors wouldn't have to untangle the untested and poorly written law. It also deprived Rheintgen the opportunity to file a civil suit challenging the statute.

Rheintgen's arrest made national headlines, but the case against her ended quietly three months later, with barely a local news story to mark its resolution. In June, a Leon County judge granted a motion by Rheintgen's defense attorney to dismiss the case against her after the State Attorney's Office for Florida's 2nd Judicial District failed to file charging documents and other information within a 90-day deadline.

"I think they messed it up on purpose because they knew this was bad publicity for them," Rheintgen told the Tallahassee Democrat. "And they were scared of what could happen, like politically, that this would just cause a bunch of political blowback, which I think it would if I went to jail."

Prosecutors for the state attorney's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Again, even if one sees keeping trans people from their preferred bathrooms as a sensible policy, the immediate recourse to criminal penalties for edge cases—no one has yet been charged under Florida's law—wastes everyone's time and creates confusing new legal standards.

These sorts of issues are not existential threats to public order that require the full weight of the law to solve, and private actors and institutions should be able to find their way to a bathroom policy without a criminal statute to refer to.

The Blue Meanies vs. the Anti-Liberal Right

Of course, Florida and Texas lawmakers weren't the first to draft legally dubious bills in response to social panics, nor is it a problem exclusive to Republicans.

The architects of Florida and Texas' culture war campaigns argue that they're just trying to even the score against a progressive regime that uses government power to enforce its ideological diktats on institutions both public and private.

It's true that blue states have long been innovators in nanny-state nonsense, perhaps most notably on the Second Amendment, where several progressive-dominated states and large cities have persisted in illegally squelching residents' constitutional right to bear arms.

During COVID-19 lockdowns, church congregations were prevented from meeting in person, playgrounds and beaches were closed, and children were kept home from school—while some of the politicians who ordered the lockdowns, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, were caught doing things like dining out at high-end restaurants.

The experience convinced an increasing number of conservatives that it was a loser's game not to exploit every opportunity to expand and consolidate political power, small-government values be damned. The choice was between being in charge of a state of emergency or living underneath someone else's, and they had gotten their fill of the latter.

The sheer number of bills churned out over the past few years by Florida and Texas is notable, especially in light of how petty the targets can be—drag queens, librarians, whoever might be using a certain bathroom stall. In July, Florida Attorney General Uthmeier launched a criminal investigation of a drag show at a restaurant owned by the vice mayor of Vero Beach. Uthmeier's subpoenas for records from the restaurant include guest lists and any other information to identify patrons.

Also notable: those laws' dismal track record in court. Federal judges, even those appointed by Trump or on conservative-leaning appeals panels, have repeatedly struck down culture-war bills championed by DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

In addition to the aforementioned book ban law, judges have struck down Florida's ban on social media for children under 14 and large portions of the state's Individual Freedom Act of 2022, better known as the "Stop WOKE Act."

One of the most contentious provisions of the act barred private employers from requiring employees to attend workplace training that promoted any of eight concepts that the state Legislature associated with critical race theory or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

As Jason Garcia, an independent Florida journalist, originally reported, when attorneys for the DeSantis administration defended the Stop WOKE Act at oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in 2023, they made an argument that stunned the judges.

Judge Andrew Brasher, a Trump appointee, asked DeSantis administration attorney John Ohlendorf if a more narrowly tailored law could simply give employees the right to sue if they were distressed by workplace training materials. Ohlendorf said no: "The state, I think, has an interest in protecting people from racist and offensive speech even if they would, misguidedly, welcome it."

"Really?" Brasher interjected. "Really? That's interesting. So the state has an interest in protecting me from hearing things that I want to hear?"

"I think so, your honor," Ohlendorf responded. "I don't see why whether the employee welcomes hearing that they are a morally inferior race goes to the state's interest."

Judge Britt Grant, another Trump appointee, asked Ohlendorf why the state, then, didn't have an interest in protecting the residents of Skokie, Illinois, from Nazi speech, referring to the landmark 1977 Supreme Court ruling that allowed neo-Nazis to march through the heavily Jewish town.

In the audio recording of the court hearing, Ohlendorf stammers between long pauses for 10 excruciating seconds before trying to distinguish the two cases. Ohlendorf says that, unlike Skokie, Florida's compelling interest in keeping racist speech out of the workplace is united by its interest in protecting captive audiences, such as employees, from being conscripted into listening to such speech.

This isn't noted just for schadenfreude. It shows what an extreme power grab these laws are. The state interest claimed by Ohlendorf represents a boundless paternalism. Stripped of context, it's indistinguishable from the leftist identitarian politics that the Stop WOKE Act purports to stand athwart.

In May, the 11th Circuit ruled against DeSantis again, upholding a lower court ruling that Florida's drag show law is likely unconstitutional.

In that latter case, the DeSantis administration lost in court to an Orlando restaurant named Hamburger Mary's. It was in fact the second time in as many months that Florida, the state DeSantis dubbed "where woke goes to die," had lost in court to a patty-slinging plaintiff.

Cowboy Logic and Red Meat Politics

In April, a federal judge denied a motion by the state of Florida to dismiss a lawsuit by Upside Foods, a company producing "cultivated meat"—that is, meat grown in a tank from animal cells rather than harvested from a slaughtered animal.

Upside Foods is one of a handful of companies in the U.S. trying to scale up this new technology, which it says could supply rising consumer demand for meat protein without the need to slaughter animals. (The nascent industry prefers the term "cultivated meat" over "lab-grown" or, too unappealing to even be considered, "vat-grown.")

The Food and Drug Administration approved Upside Foods' chicken as safe for human consumption in 2022, but the company ran into a problem: States were banning its products before they even reached the shelves.

Seven states currently prohibit cultivated meat. Texas became the latest in June. "It's plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives," Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a press release celebrating the law.

The first state to pass a ban was—you guessed it—Florida. DeSantis signed Senate Bill 1084 into law in May 2024, making it a second-degree misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum fine of $500 and up to 60 days in jail, to manufacture or distribute "any meat or food product produced from cultured animal cells." Businesses that violate the ban can lose their operating licenses and be slapped with fines of up to $5,000 per violation.

These bans are sops to the agriculture industry. At DeSantis' press conference to sign the bill into law, a sign on his podium read: "SAVE OUR BEEF." But the laws are also culture-war posturing. Red meat for the base, as they like to call it in politics.

Lawmakers' opposition to lab-grown meat is packaged in rhetoric that often echoes the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) crowd. As Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown explained in this magazine's July cover story, the loose MAHA movement combines crunchy, back-to-the-earth foodie and wellness culture with anti-elite skepticism of public health experts on subjects such as diet and vaccines. The disparate strands of MAHA congealed in the incubator of extended COVID-19 lockdowns, not unlike chicken cells in a nutrient bath. This has led to a notable shift in right-wing food politics, which used to reflexively oppose government finger-wagging about junk food.

"Florida is fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals," DeSantis declared when he signed Florida's law banning cultivated meat. Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen called his state's prohibition on cultivated meat an effort to "battle fringe ideas and groups to defend our way of life."

In the bizarre, zero-sum logic of politicians like DeSantis and Pillen, the freedom to eat bacon harvested from a pig that was alive and sensate before it was slaughtered is contingent on consumers never being given a choice to try an alternative, and for entrepreneurs to be banned from trying to bring alternatives to the market.

Upside Foods filed a lawsuit in August 2024 alleging that Florida's ban on cultivated meat violates the federal Constitution's Commerce Clause because the law was enacted to shield in-state producers of conventional meat from competition from out-of-state producers of cultivated meat.

The Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes the development of plant-based and cultivated meat alternatives, argues that cultivated meat could have several potential advantages over conventional meat production: It uses less arable land and resources, and it avoids some of the biggest negative externalities of industrial feedlots and slaughterhouses—disease outbreaks, heavy use of antibiotics, bacterial contamination, and noxious pollution.

If the cattle industry really couldn't survive the competition, if consumers would buy alternatives in such numbers that it would drive old-school ranchers out of business—even as DeSantis and Pillen insist that regular, God-fearing Americans don't want rib eye grown in a vat—then why are we better off shielding it with protectionist laws?

Not all cowboys see the logic in it. Many trade associations for beef producers support clear labeling requirements for cultivated meat but oppose outright bans. Jim Jenkins, a Nebraska cattle rancher, told the Flatwater Free Press that he thinks cultivated meat should be labeled, but adds: "In the good old United States of America, I think people should be able to compete, even if that threatens my business."

Wyoming and South Dakota lawmakers voted down bills banning cultivated meat this year, citing free trade concerns.

Meanwhile, the bans are having a predictable effect on investor confidence. Although the cultivated meat industry has received regulatory approval for several more products, the industry raised only $139 million in 2024, its lowest amount in five years.

The Coming Panopticon

What makes the creation of new criminal statutes especially worrisome is law enforcement's sweeping power to search and investigate targets, including across state lines.

The slow accretion of surveillance tools in the decades since 9/11, often justified for emergencies and for fighting terrorism, has enabled police to tap into vast, nationwide databases of personal information for routine investigations—facial recognition, cellphone surveillance, license plate tracking, sophisticated social media monitoring, and more.

With every new criminal statute, the reach of this network extends further.

In May, 404 Media reported that a Texas police officer accessed a private network of 83,000 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), operated by the company Flock, to search for a woman believed to have self-administered an abortion. That search included ALPRs in states where abortion is legal, such as Washington and Illinois. The EFF called the incident "a chilling sign of how far law enforcement surveillance has encroached on personal liberties."

"The ability for law enforcement in some states to get access to data and digital surveillance data from other states is going to be a massive problem," says the EFF's Guariglia. "This is just the first time we've seen this problem, and it will certainly happen again."

Reproductive rights groups say that these sorts of cases are popping up more and more.

"We're also seeing pregnancy loss as an increasingly suspect and potentially criminal act, whereas from our perspective, this is a health care medical incident, where someone needs often emergency medical care or just compassionate care," says Pregnancy Justice's Sussman. "But because of this post-Dobbs landscape, pregnancy loss is viewed with suspicion by law enforcement."

Many criminal investigations originate after someone close to the person getting an abortion reports it to the police. A research report published by If/When/How, a reproductive rights group that runs a legal hotline, found "about a quarter of adult cases (26%) were reported to law enforcement by acquaintances entrusted with information, such as friends, parents, or intimate partners."

The gigantic federal crackdown on immigration, which Florida's government has enthusiastically participated in, has also expanded surveillance rapidly. The Trump administration is working feverishly to streamline and tap into already existing federal data on Social Security, tax records, medical records, and student debt to identify illegal immigrants.

Suncoast Searchlight, an investigative news outlet, reported that the Florida Highway Patrol also tapped into Flock's ALPR network to aid in the state's immigration crackdown.

The Illinois Attorney General's Office has announced that it's investigating whether local police violated a state law that bars them from sharing data with out-of-state agencies seeking to enforce immigration or abortion laws. But Guariglia says the current attempts to limit this sort of interstate data trafficking between law enforcement isn't "realistically grounded in the realities of digital surveillance."

"There aren't enough protections, and even the protections that do exist don't seem to be holding," Guariglia says. "For instance, it is theoretically against the Constitution to spy on people just because of their politics. And yet that happens constantly in the United States today."

As Guariglia warns, this technology is being deployed against constitutionally protected speech. Police departments, federal partners, and private groups surveilled pro-Palestine protests across the country using social media trackers, facial recognition, and undercover investigators. In July, Straight Arrow News reported that it had found evidence of police using cellphone surveillance technology at a protest outside an ICE field office in Washington.

The huge surveillance architecture and data-sharing networks being created now won't go back in the box when the current crisis or the current administration is over, nor will they consider whether their targets used to have the right kind of politics.

Life During Wartime

Republicans like DeSantis—and pundits who champion these methods, such as the Manhattan Institute's Christopher Rufo—say they are simply using the left's playbook against it.

To hear Rufo and others tell it, they face an existential choice between fighting back with every tool available or surrendering to complete cultural and political domination by the left. Conservatism's dedication to principles such as viewpoint neutrality and the marketplace of ideas has "rendered the Right ineffective, to the point of cementing, as opposed to contesting, the status quo of Leftist hegemony," Rufo wrote in a manifesto outlining his tactics last year.

"The radical Left ruthlessly advances through the institutions, and the Right meekly ratifies each encroachment under the rubric of 'neutrality,'" Rufo continued. "In view of the social and cultural wreckage this dynamic had wrought, it is not merely a matter of preference but a matter of urgency to break it."

The problem with "wartime conservatism" and its militant leftist equivalent—although perhaps militant leftist is redundant—is that they can't tolerate deescalation, only more power and new enemies. The front lines of the culture war will only shift, never shrink.

The supporters of scorched-earth culture warring assume the tools they're unleashing won't be turned against them. Or, more cynically, that they will be able to politically capitalize off abuse against their allies and keep the cycle of endless retribution going.

That may be a way to win an election or two, but it's a long-term recipe for either a national breakdown or a complete surrender to a police state.