#authoritarianism

#authoritarianism

The killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have been compared to the murder of George Floyd, because they all happened within a few miles of one another, and because of the outrage they inspired. There's an important difference, though: In 2020 the United States was in turmoil, but it was still a state of law. Floyd's death was followed by investigation, trial, and verdict-by justice. The Minneapolis Police Department was held accountable and ultimately made to reform.

"We're not going to have one magic solution to the problem that ails us," Raskin said on Sunday. "It's not going to be the courts, or the House, or the Senate, or the people in the movements. It's going to be all of it together."

A group of researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale warn that the rise of AI bots and AI agents could pose a serious threat to democracy. For example, power-hungry politicians around the world can relatively easily create swarms of AI bots that flood social media and messaging services with propaganda and disinformation. In this way, they can not only influence election results but also persuade parts of the population to replace parliamentary democracy with an authoritarian regime.

Before I get to the dialogue and the book, I wanna open with some preliminary thoughts about a domestic subject. And that is this extraordinary moment where Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins informed a TV interviewer that her department had run thousands of simulations, and good news, it was possible to feed an American person for less than $3 if that person ate a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing.

Hit me like, as my high school English teacher liked to say, "like a MAC truck." The episode starts with the tale of Icarus. You know, the kid who flew too close to the sun with his wax wings and plummeted into the sea. Or the little cherub NES character. Either way. And I'm sitting there thinking: has anyone in Washington actually read this story? Played the game?

In President Donald Trump's second term, everything is content. Videos of immigration raids are shared widely on X by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), conspiracy theories dictate policy, and prominent right-wing podcasters and influencers have occupied high-level government roles. The second Trump administration is, to put it bluntly, very online.

Almost 20 years ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone as "an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator." The world swooned at the time because that one device was all those things, and more. Today it is our wallet, our identity, our social media, our likes, dislikes, fitness levels, bank accounts, as well as our personal, sexual, and political identity.

Donald Trump's allegedly ailing health has been the subject of media speculation for months, which analysts have said is interrupting the president's quest to be seen as an unflinching strongman. Salon writer Chauncey DeVega suggested in a recent column that Trump's invasion of Venezuela was a "prime opportunity" for the president to "get his swagger back." But the problem, he said, is that Trump can't hide his clear mental and physical decline.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us: that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Goldberg quoted Leah Greenberg, a founder of the resistance group Indivisible, who said that while Donald Trump "has been able to do extraordinary damage that will have generational effects, he has not successfully consolidated power. That has been staved off, and it has been staved off not, frankly, due to the efforts of pretty much anyone in elite institutions or political leadership but due to the efforts of regular people declining to go along with fascism."

In Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, Gil Scott-Heron's 1971 spoken-word song 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' serves as both a secret password and background noise. The members of the defunct resistance group the French 75 use its lyrics as a call-and-response sign and countersign: If you know what comes after 'Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction,' you must be one of the good guys.

You may have read in your colourful newspapers that my country's president would like to shut me up because I don't adore him in the way he likes to be adored. The American government made a threat against me and the company I work for, and all of a sudden we were off the air. But then, you know what happened? A Christmas miracle happened. Well, it was September. It was a September miracle.

If we are to believe Hegel - or Collingwood - no age, no civilization, is capable of conceptually identifying itself. This can only be done after its demise .... Lescek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial p. 3.

As you know, there was another school shooting this week, this time at Brown University. The coverage has been what we've all come to expect: Republicans act like there's nothing we can do about it, and Democrats make meek noises about gun control. Nothing happens, and nobody even expects anything will happen. The suspected shooter was caught, after apparently killing himself, late Thursday night.

that incentivizes stories designed to polarize rather than illuminate. This flattening doesn't just distort our work; it enables erasure and makes authoritarianism's job easier. Authoritarianism thrives on main-character energy. It needs a hero story - a single person to valorize, platform, co-opt, discredit, or remove. Journalism has leaned hard into these toxic individualistic tropes, perpetuating a form of narrative kingmaking that creates a momentum of inevitability that feels impossible to escape.

Courts play an important role in authoritarian regimes. They legitimize the actions of despots by declaring them "legal" or "constitutional." They ensure institutional compliance with the regime's rules. And they make politically unpopular decisions that align with the authoritarian's goals while giving the authoritarian political distance from those goals. Quite simply, you can't instigate a strongman takeover of a constitutional democracy without having a robust judicial power that's willing to play along.

Alex Rikleen grew up in Wayland and now lives in Acton with his wife and two children. He graduated with an education degree from Boston College in 2009 and taught history for years. On the side, Rikleen wrote about fantasy sports, covering basketball and football. He pivoted in 2016 to pursue sportswriting, and since 2020 has balanced professional writing with an adjunct teaching position at Framingham State University.

If 2025 was the year the world woke up to democratic backsliding, 2026 may be the year journalism decides whether it will face that crisis alone or survive it together. Around the globe, authoritarians have learned to use the law to criminalize dissent through courts that perform an apparent due process while they dismantle it. The new authoritarian playbook includes a captured judiciary, economic suffocation of independent outlets, media capture and the slow erasure of collective memory.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, Atwood said she believed the plot was bonkers when she first had the concept for the novel as the US was the democratic ideal at the time. It was the land of freedom and people in Europe just didn't believe that it could ever go like that, she said. Despite this, Atwood added: I've always been somebody who has never believed it can't happen here. It can happen anywhere, given the circumstances.

The vote is carefully managed from start to finish so that only one outcome is possible: a longer lease on power for el-Sisi. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Egypt's ongoing House of Representatives elections. The voting results will not only decide the composition of the next parliament but will also determine whether, and for how long, the rule of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi will be extended.

At first sight, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across four decades.