#authoritarianism

#authoritarianism

The online celebrity, legal woes, and final liberation of the irate, ICE-defying DC resident known throughout the world as Sandwich Guy seem tailor-made for late-night TV wisecracking. But given that we're presently slogging through the world's stupidest fascist timeline, the Sandwich Guy set piece can give us some surprisingly useful lessons in how to mount protests that can deflate the Mussolini-style self-regard of the MAGA power elite.

For many Venezuelans, this is a disorienting moment. For a quarter century, our government has been using the threat of an American military attack to justify more and more authoritarian control over the country. Venezuelans got accustomed to dismissing it all as noise, just a pretext the dictatorship employed to stamp out civil rights. Suddenly, it's not just noise. President Donald Trump is very visibly preparing to do what Nicolás Maduro spent decades swearing the Americans would one day do:

It's a warning shot aimed at the very idea of independent civic life. The silencing of a revolutionary media outlet Instead, the Decree, once seen as a safeguard for civic freedom, is now being weaponized as a tool of control. Nawaat's team describes the action as part of a broader campaign of harassment: tax audits, financial investigations, and administrative interrogations that together amount to an attempt to "stifle all media resistance to the dictatorship."

We have a megalomaniacal president who, consumed by his quest for more and more power, is undermining our constitution and the rule of law. Further, we have an administration that is waging war against the working class of our country and our most vulnerable people. While Trump's billionaire buddies become much, much richer, he is prepared to throw 15 million Americans off the healthcare they have which could result in 50,000 unnecessary deaths each year.

In fact, since 1997 the Center for Systemic Peace has maintained a 21-point scale that takes into account various political variables elections, the role of the military, economic inequality, political violence and so on in order to describe where countries stand on the scale between democracy and autocracy. On the autocracy end, at -10, are the countries that you would expect: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, obvious autocracies all. At +10 are the apparent democracies: Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada and, until recently, the United States.

I think the little Manchurian candidate, JD Vance, wants to be president more than anything else, opined Psaki. I always wonder what's going on in the mind of his wife. Like, are you okay? Please blink four times, we'll-, come over here. We'll save you. I mean, he's scarier in certain ways, in some ways. And he's young, and ambitious, and agile in the sense that he is a chameleon who makes himself into whatever he thinks the audience wants to hear from him.

This is how authoritarian regimes do it. They create these kind of fake ideas that there's an enemy out there and it could be sitting next to you at one of these tables. So just somebody sitting at your table that you don't like might be one of those enemies, Pritzker said. So let's round them up, let's make sure they are the subjects of the laws that we're passing, because we don't like who they are. That is what authoritarian regimes do.

In Independent, out Tuesday from Legacy Lit, the former White House press secretary offers a candid, unsparing view of what she calls a "five-alarm fire" threatening American democracy. Through a blend of memoir and political analysis, Jean-Pierre chronicles how she rose inside government, why she left the Democratic Party, and what she believes must change if the country is to survive the authoritarian turn ushered in by President Donald Trump's return to power.

Portlanders deploying inflatable animal costumes, a brass band, mass ukulele renditions of "This Land Is Your Land," naked bike rides, and other tactics in their ICE protests are undermining the Trump administration's lurid claims that Portland, Oregon, is a "war-torn" city under siege by a violent left. It's hard to portray someone dancing in an inflatable frog or chicken costume as a terrorist.

threatened to sue ABC again over Jimmy Kimmel; demanded that the United Nations arrest someone regarding: a broken escalator (when he and Melania were forced to climb stairs like common folks), a malfunctioning teleprompter, and audio problems; ordered his Attorney General to prosecute perceived political enemies; fired a U.S. Attorney for not firing perceived political enemies; fired heads of agencies; threatened to fire federal employees permanently during the shutdown; and asked permission from the U.S. Supreme Court to fire a Fed Chair appointed by former President Biden.

For what it's worth, Ocasio-Cortez later recorded a video saying she carries no bias against short men - or "the short king community," as she put it - and that she was primarily referring to "how big or small someone is on the inside." But the fundamental point in the viral clip - that anti-authoritarian movements can benefit from making a mockery of that which seeks to be menacing - is a point that historians and experts on authoritarianism have also made.

And no surprise, judges in those countries have repeatedly done what Orban and Erdogan want. Donald Trump has not had the opportunity to pack the US supreme court to nearly the same degree. Nor has he, despite his brash, bullying ways, done much to pressure or browbeat the court's nine justices. Nevertheless, the court's conservative supermajority has ruled time after time in favor of Trump since he returned to office.

Fascism is supposed to look a certain way: black-clad, uniformed, synchronised and menacing. It is not supposed to look like an overweight president who can't pronounce acetaminophen and who bumbles, for a full minute, about how he would have renovated the UN's New York headquarters with marble floors, rather than a terrazzo. But as Umberto Eco remarked in his timeless essay on identifying the eternal nature of fascism: Life is not that simple.

Donald Trump's public and private push to have ex-FBI director James Comey indicted on criminal charges is a strong sign of the US slipping into authoritarianism, but it could also taint the case's chances of success because it is evidence of a selective and biased political prosecution, ex-prosecutors and scholars say. Trump's retribution drive against an old foe he blames for legal and political problems notched a big win when Comey was indicted last week on two criminal counts in Virginia.

About two dozen movies have topped the box office in 2025, and it's safe to say that Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another is the only one that depicts its protagonists freeing arrested immigrants from detention centers. The movie doesn't face much competition for the title of most political weekend-topper of the year; superhero pictures such as Captain America: Brave New World perpetually tell the most anodyne stories possible, even when they're supposedly about Washington-based conspiracies;

Donald Trump and Kristi Noem and Tom Homan said they were targeting the worst of the worst criminals. They lied and they continue to lie. Sixty percent of the individuals that ICE has taken in Illinois this year have no criminal convictions of any kind. ICE is running around the Loop harassing people for not being white. Just a year ago, that was illegal in the United States. Now, ICE is making it commonplace. That's not making America great.

The more s-t you give us, the stronger we get. And every good comic will take any kind of adversity and turn it into comic gold.

In the nine months since Donald Trump's return to the White House, the overall goals of his agenda have become clear enough: weaken the United States abroad to create an environment friendly to dictators, while using the U.S. government and armed forces to establish a dictatorship at home. Will it work? The success of Trump's plan depends on how we see it, or rather, whether we choose not to see it.

In a deeply divided democracy, an aspiring authoritarian seizes new powers, often by declaring "emergencies" when none exist. This is only possible after he cobbles together a strong alliance of far-right forces in the military, conservative religious nationalists, a few massively wealthy oligarchs, and some centrists spooked by the specter of "socialism." Freedoms are curtailed, institutions are undermined, and critics become "enemies of the people." Before long, troops are in city streets-and not too long after that, democracy is gone.