APRIL 2025

Where is our Navalny?

A call for moral leadership in a moment that demands it.

There are moments in history when silence becomes complicity. This is one of them.

Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, we have witnessed an acceleration of anti-democratic behavior that would have once been unthinkable in this country. The administration has pursued retribution against perceived enemies, weakened alliances that took generations to build, gutted programs that protect the vulnerable, and launched a full-scale ideological attack on the values of pluralism, inclusion, and dissent.

And yet the opposition—fractured, cautious, and too often bound by convention—has failed to offer a compelling counterforce.

The response from the Democratic Party has been procedural, technocratic, and largely uninspiring. While institutions are tested and, in some cases, deliberately dismantled, we’re told to be patient. To wait for the courts. To trust in the system.

But the system is being rewritten in real time. And history tells us that systems, even robust ones, do not save themselves. People do.

There is precedent for moral clarity in dark times.

• Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who hid Anne Frank’s family in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
• Rosa Parks, the Black seamstress whose quiet refusal to give up her seat on a segregated bus sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
• Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who rescued more than a thousand Jews from the Holocaust.
• Nelson Mandela, who emerged from 27 years in a South African prison with a vision for reconciliation and multiracial democracy.
• Václav Havel, the playwright who helped lead Czechoslovakia’s nonviolent transition from communist dictatorship to democracy.
• Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who survived a Taliban bullet to become a global advocate for girls’ education.
• And Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who returned home to challenge a regime that would eventually kill him.

None of them began with power. What they had was conviction.

This is what we lack. Not just institutional resistance, but moral leadership. A voice that cuts through cynicism. A name that rallies rather than divides. A face that reminds us what integrity looks like when it matters most.

We need a Navalny.

Not a messiah. Not a brand. Just someone willing to say what needs to be said—and to risk something real in doing so.

Because while we defer and debate, the machinery of authoritarianism hums forward. It is visible in the undermining of public education, the criminalization of protest, the erosion of trust in the press, and the targeting of those who dare to think differently. It is ideological, yes—but it is also deliberate, strategic, and accelerating.

So where is our counterweight?

This moment does not call for perfect people. It calls for courageous ones. For someone to say, clearly and without calculation: this is wrong, and it must be stopped. Someone to remind us that democracy is not a given. It is a choice we make—or fail to make—every day.

The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, yes.
But only when people bend it.

So I ask, without irony and without hope of easy answers:
Where is our Navalny?
Who will stand up now—before the page fully turns?

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