The apartment is too quiet once Marcus's roommates leave for their late shift. He props his elbows on the wobbly desk, the one he pulled off a curb last August, and opens the laptop. Tonight's not for readings—it's for listening.
Dr. Brenner told them to post to the Class Portal about Weimar's institutions. He will. But what he wants—what the thesis always needs—is not just arguments in class voices. He wants what people say when they drop their guard and talk to their own side. Where they feel safe.
He opens X and types slowly: "Nisha Desai State U." Then "Jake Morrison State U." There are a lot of Nishas; fewer Jakes with the right profile picture—no hat in the avatar, but the bio is enough: "America First. Business major. ROTC. Faith, family, flag." Public. He does not hide.
Nisha is easier: the header photo from last summer's rally, a hand-lettered sign about protecting trans kids, the bio with she/they and a string of cause emojis. Pin on her backpack matched one in class. Public. She does not hide either.
Marcus follows both from his own account. He doesn't use an alias for school stuff. It's never felt honest. Within a minute, notifications light up.
Nisha (DM):
Marcus! Glad you're on here. We need more rigor on this app. Welcome.
Nisha (DM):
Marcus! Glad you're on here. We need more rigor on this app. Welcome.
Marcus! Glad you're on here. We need more rigor on this app. Welcome.
He smiles despite himself. Rigor is a word he's heard from her and from Dr. Brenner. It means different things in their mouths.
Jake (public reply):
Appreciate the follow, man. Respect your Qs in class. A thumbs-up and an eagle emoji. Straightforward.
Jake (public reply):
Appreciate the follow, man. Respect your Qs in class. A thumbs-up and an eagle emoji. Straightforward.
Appreciate the follow, man. Respect your Qs in class. A thumbs-up and an eagle emoji. Straightforward.
They both consider him safe enough to welcome. Not because he agrees—because he listens first. It's a reputation that opens doors and complicates sleep.
He scrolls back before tonight. If he's going to compare how movements talk—Germany then, U.S. now—he needs baselines.
Nisha's feed has threads like seminar notes spilled into the street. A long post from last night:
Nisha (thread):
Gleichschaltung wasn't just propaganda—it was institutional capture.
Nisha (thread):
Gleichschaltung wasn't just propaganda—it was institutional capture.
Gleichschaltung wasn't just propaganda—it was institutional capture.
She links to an essay, then to a screenshot of Weimar's Article 48. Her tone is urgent, not sloppy. The comments are a mix of support and "you're overreacting." She's replying to all of them at 2 a.m.
Tonight her retweets are churning with the day's numbers.
Nisha (quote post):
Twenty-six executive orders on Day One.
Nisha (quote post):
Twenty-six executive orders on Day One.
Twenty-six executive orders on Day One.
The graphic is everywhere. Another quote-post:
Nisha (quote post):
Emergency powers aren't abstract.
Nisha (quote post):
Emergency powers aren't abstract.
Emergency powers aren't abstract.
She lists three immigration orders, one about "remain in Mexico," one calling the border an invasion, one attacking birthright citizenship. The replies are a familiar split-screen—cheers, fear, sarcasm, bots.
Marcus bookmarks two of her threads for later and opens Jake's timeline. Different surface, same velocity. He's been posting since morning. A short video of him at ROTC, then a quote-post:
Jake (quote post):
Schedule F back = accountability. Elections should have consequences.
Jake (quote post):
Schedule F back = accountability. Elections should have consequences.
Schedule F back = accountability. Elections should have consequences.
The comments he engages with are about "deep state" and "sabotage." He is polite even when people are not. He keeps writing “with respect.” He shares a legal explainer about at-will conversions for policy roles, uses the word “mandate,” and tells someone “we're fixing what the elites broke.”
A little farther back, he's got a long thread from last week—pinned now—on immigration. Bullet points.
Jake (thread):
Every country has borders. MPP worked. CBP One was a joke.
Jake (thread):
Every country has borders. MPP worked. CBP One was a joke.
Every country has borders. MPP worked. CBP One was a joke.
Links to videos of overwhelmed processing centers, numbers without sources, then to an official-looking press statement about terminating an app and reinstating remain-in-Mexico. The tone is: obvious truths finally said out loud.
Marcus hears Dr. Brenner's voice in his head: define terms. Opens a fresh note in his thesis folder and starts columns: surface claim, cited policy, actual text, implementation status, court response. Under Jake's "Schedule F," he types: EO 14171 (renamed category), policy-influencing positions converted; guidance due Jan 27; agencies submit position lists by April 21. Then he stops. This isn't a legal brief. It's a night survey. He leaves himself a bracketed reminder.
From the living room, the neighbor's TV thumps a bassline through the wall. Someone laughs. He keeps scrolling.
Nisha is also amplifying campus things—calls for a February teach-in, a mutual aid spreadsheet for students who lost jobs this week when shifts got cut at the student union. She writes:
Nisha (post):
If you can't name the institutions enabling this, you're not paying attention.
Nisha (post):
If you can't name the institutions enabling this, you're not paying attention.
If you can't name the institutions enabling this, you're not paying attention.
No numbers, just a feeling sharpened into a claim.
Jake is posting family photos—his sister at a basketball game, his dad in a work jacket, a Sunday church selfie with folded hands emojis—and they sit right next to policy posts about tariffs and fentanyl tracing. He doesn't separate the moral vocabulary from the economic one. It's all of a piece.
He backs out, searches both of their names with "January 6." Not because he wants to score points—because the social internet has sedimentary layers. Nisha's 2021 looks like most people's he followed then—black squares, bail funds, threads about police budgets. Jake's 2021 is quieter. A couple of "law and order" posts, a skeptical retweet about "media lies." He scrolls forward to this week and sees something new in the discourse: people arguing about whether the government can police posts. Someone drops a legal case about "true threats" and recklessness standard. It's mostly wrong in the replies, but the anxiety is real. He flags it for the thesis's U.S. chapter.
He doesn't like doing this without telling people, so he sends quick DMs.
Marcus → Nisha:
Going to be reading your threads to understand your frame. If I cite your public posts in class writing, I'll ask first.
Nisha:
Cite away. The point is to be seen. Also—come to the teach-in?
Marcus → Jake:
Catching up on your policy posts. Useful to see where you're pulling sources. If I reference anything, I'll ping you.
Jake:
All good. Happy to send links. MSM won't, lol.
Marcus → Nisha:
Going to be reading your threads to understand your frame. If I cite your public posts in class writing, I'll ask first.
Going to be reading your threads to understand your frame. If I cite your public posts in class writing, I'll ask first.
Nisha:
Cite away. The point is to be seen. Also—come to the teach-in?
Cite away. The point is to be seen. Also—come to the teach-in?
Marcus → Jake:
Catching up on your policy posts. Useful to see where you're pulling sources. If I reference anything, I'll ping you.
Catching up on your policy posts. Useful to see where you're pulling sources. If I reference anything, I'll ping you.
Jake:
All good. Happy to send links. MSM won't, lol.
All good. Happy to send links. MSM won't, lol.
He closes the DMs and drops back into the stream. If Weimar taught him anything, it's that the archive isn't just official memos and cabinet minutes. It's leaflets, rumor, café talk. In 2025, the café is an algorithm.
He jots comparisons, careful not to force them. Weimar had emergency powers on paper and in practice; the normalization happened before Hitler became chancellor. The day's "twenty-six orders"—that's a fact, not a metaphor. But whether the orders stick or get blocked will be the legal story of the year. He can't draw conclusions from the first data point.
Nisha's language keeps gravitating to capture and complicity. Judges, boards, donors. She trusts people but not structures. The trust line for Jake runs the other way: leaders over processes, mandate over procedure. She writes "we elected" frequently and "unelected" like a slur.
Somewhere below the scroll there's risk. We all know it now. People are getting arrested for posts in a way that's faster than a few years ago; people also talk about grand juries pushing back. He keeps his own feed boring and puts the analysis in footnotes. But if the project is to understand how movements see themselves, you can't just lurk forever.
He refreshes. Jake quote-posts a clip from a cable segment:
Jake (quote post):
Ending birthright for illegal immigrants isn't radical; it's justice.
Jake (quote post):
Ending birthright for illegal immigrants isn't radical; it's justice.
Ending birthright for illegal immigrants isn't radical; it's justice.
He writes three sentences on the 14th Amendment's original purpose, tags a conservative law professor. No EO number in his text, but Marcus knows the one. He adds a note to check the exact language and the court calendar. Tonight, he doesn't correct him—just catalogs frames.
Nisha posts a photo of a flyer:
Nisha (flyer):
Emergency Powers—History, Law, and Now.
Nisha (flyer):
Emergency Powers—History, Law, and Now.
Emergency Powers—History, Law, and Now.
She tags Dr. Brenner, which makes Marcus smile. He won't retweet it. He might print it and underline, then put it face down in his drawer. She threads thoughts about Article 48 and the Reichstag Fire Decree, and then stops short of saying the quiet part. She knows how to imply. She knows how to let readers finish the sentence themselves.
Marcus thinks about this morning's class. Nisha named the mechanism—twenty-six orders, Schedule F stripping protections, emergency declarations bypassing process. Jake countered with democratic mandate and administrative accountability. Both used facts. Both drew different conclusions from the same data points. Dr. Brenner separated their arguments: Nisha tracking speed and scope, Jake asserting electoral legitimacy. The room went still not because anyone won, but because both arguments were coherent. That's the problem. Numbers don't resolve competing frameworks. They just clarify what people already believe about who should have power and what constraints matter.
Their Twitter feeds show the same fracture, only louder. Nisha writes "capture" and "complicity." Jake writes "mandate" and "accountability." Same twenty-six executive orders. Entirely separate stories about what they mean.
He stretches his back, switches to the profile tab that shows who he follows. Two new names at the top. Two people who will both, in different registers, try to recruit him—not to their organizations, but to their explanatory worlds. That's what they're all doing online: trading lenses.
Draft thoughts form. He hovers, doesn't post.
Marcus (draft):
Following classmates across perspectives to understand arguments at their strongest. Comparative history starts with listening. Will cite facts carefully; fiction lives in our heads, not in our timelines.
Marcus (draft):
Following classmates across perspectives to understand arguments at their strongest. Comparative history starts with listening. Will cite facts carefully; fiction lives in our heads, not in our timelines.
Following classmates across perspectives to understand arguments at their strongest. Comparative history starts with listening. Will cite facts carefully; fiction lives in our heads, not in our timelines.
He deletes it. If Dr. Brenner can have a secret handle and not press "Post," he can keep one thought in the notebook.
Instead, he creates a private list labeled "412 Voice Samples" and adds Nisha and Jake. Later he'll add Amir when he finds his handle, Emily if she has one. For now, two is enough.
He ends the night by writing down three things the feeds already made clearer:
He doesn't resolve any of this. That's not tonight's job. Tonight's job is to build the archive he'll need when the semester's arguments stop being hypotheticals and start being citations.
When he finally closes the laptop, the room feels smaller. He lies back on the couch, hoodie as a blanket, and thinks about his mother's closing shift and his grandmother sleeping in her chair with the TV on. Their worlds don't live online; his does, and so does the country's. If Dr. Brenner's question was when neutrality becomes complicity, his is smaller and harder: when does listening become endorsement? And what does he owe his own side when he thinks he doesn't have one yet?
He doesn't have an answer. He has a list, two follows, and a morning shift at the library. For now, that will do.
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