Resist. How you can.

What George Packer gets wrong.

I confess to some irritation with George Packer’s latest piece for The Atlantic, which criticizes Yale scholars Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley for packing their bags and hopping across the border for the University of Toronto.

Snyder’s best-selling pamphlet, On Tyranny, is an instruction manual on how to resist authoritarianism. Lesson 1 warns: “Do not obey in advance.” It’s hard not to conclude that the Yale professors are doing just that. Cutting and running at a difficult moment, before the state has even targeted them, feels like a preemptive concession to Trump—a decision that Shore says she and Snyder made after his reelection.

How will you know when it’s time to go? When Trump deports an inconvenient American citizen and ignores a court order to bring him or her back home? Or when Yale is intimidated into firing a law professor for teaching civil rights? Or the Justice Department invents a pretext for FBI agents to confiscate computers in the offices of an independent publication and take down its website? Or the 2026 midterms seem certain to be unfree and unfair? Or when none of these extreme possibilities happens, but life in America becomes so rotten with injustice and corruption, so colorlessly orthodox, so unavoidably compromising, so impoverished, so shitty, that you lose the will to stay here? When your children plead with you to move abroad?

I can’t answer these questions for myself, let alone for anyone else. But I don’t believe the time has come—not even close.

And, well, good for George Packer.

But I think it’s arrogant that because Packer has decided he has the fortitude to stay — at least for now — it represents cowardice and surrender for others to choose differently.

Even as Packer’s piece appeared this morning, headlines revealed that President Trump is stepping up his pursuit of his enemies.

President Donald Trump is targeting two former first-term appointees over their criticism of his actions, stripping their security clearances and opening federal probes of their tenures.

The directives that Trump signed on Wednesday order the Justice Department to scrutinize Chris Krebs, who ran Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and former senior Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor.

The two critics are the latest to be swept up in Trump’s expansive retribution campaign, where he’s sought to use federal powers in unprecedented ways to punish political opponents, law firms, universities and others that he believes have wronged him.

Krebs, you’ll remember, pooh-poohed Trump’s lies about a stolen election in 2020. Taylor was the “Anonymous” administration official who told the world that Trump’s first-term staff was working to keep him from blowing shit up.

If you know you’ve pissed Trump off, in other words, there might be wisdom in seeking asylum abroad.

You wonder: What does Packer have to say to Krebs and Taylor, who now find themselves in the government’s cross hairs?

And why shouldn’t folks like Timothy Snyder, seeing the writing on the wall, get to safer ground while they can?

It doesn’t mean they’ve left the fight, necessarily. But it might mean they’ve decided to fight it from the most advantageous ground — somewhere that’s not under Donald Trump’s thumb.

As it happens, I’m currently reading Alexei Navalny’s memoir “Patriot.” He was, you’ll remember, the Russia opposition leader who survived an assassination attempt — and returned to Russia anyway. He was jailed and died in prison.

I picked up the book hoping to understand why Navalny chose to put himself back in such obvious danger after the assassination attempt. I still don’t understand. He might well have agreed with Packer’s exhortation to “Be a Patriot.”

But there are other ways of being a patriot. And sometimes, survival is more important.