#authoritarianism

#authoritarianism

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

Pop music may have been central to the New Left, but today's listeners are mostly reduced to hunting for Easter eggs, finding anti-Trump messaging in the likes of octogenarian Neil Young's tossed-off anthems. The eager critical embrace of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, based on a 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel steeped in the backwash of curdled 1970s left-wing militance, serves chiefly to underscore the film industry's studious disregard of the way America lives now.

Wicked: For Good is Ariana Grande's movie. And the film knows it, bending toward her every chance it gets. If the first Wicked centered Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), the shy outcast whose discovery of her magical powers and the sinister machinery behind the land of Oz led to her being branded the Wicked Witch of the West, Wicked: For Good focuses intently on her opposite number and best friend, Glinda (Grande), now positioned by the powers that be as the good (but secretly powerless) witch who

Perryman said the stakes go beyond courtroom victories. The real challenge is demonstrating that the public truly holds the power to counter and often stop the White House's seemingly unstoppable march toward authoritarian rule. "The real thing for us was, how are we going to show people that you actually still get to be in charge in your country-the people get to be in charge," Perryman told moderator and host of the podcast Pod Save America, Jon Favreau.

Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian author who writes in Russian and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, lives in the same Berlin apartment, with its high ceilings and spacious rooms, where EL PAIS visited her four years ago. The author of Voices from Chernobyl, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets continues to write by hand.

I first became interested in silence over 15 years ago when an overdose of New York City noise got me wondering if and how I could find refuge in its opposite, in absolute quiet-something that was not merely a reduction in or lack of noise, but a vibrant counterpoint to the sounds which we assume define and shape our lives.

ALL THAT YOU TOUCH, YOU CHANGE. ALL THAT YOU CHANGE, CHANGES YOU.

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.