#authoritarianism

#authoritarianism

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 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.

According to an analysis of shutdowns in 11 different African countries by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the African Digital Rights Network (ADRN), each internet blackout deprives millions of citizens and businesses of access to information and communication tools that are essential to their social, economic and political life.

I think that my responsibility is to be transparent and to be honest, and the reality is that we are living in a time in which this administration and this regime is not interested in making sure that people understand history, Crockett said. We need to understand why they are so problematic. And so I am using that language because it is accurate language.

In 1980, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, an unrepentant former leader of the Nazi women's bureau in Berlin from 1934 to 1945, described her former job to historian Claudia Koonz as influencing women in their daily lives. To her audience approximately 4 million girls in the Nazi youth movement, 8 million women in Nazi associations under her jurisdiction, and 1.9 million subscribers to her women's magazine, Frauen Warte, according to Koonz Scholtz-Klink promoted what she called the cradle and the ladle, or reproductive and household duties as essential to national strength.

What are you supposed to call it when masked and uniformed federal police show up at a political rally for an opposition politician? Or when the president essentially declares martial law in the capital city? Or, for that matter, when the executive is trying to enforce its cultural policy on a nation's universities and museums? And what else to call it when the administration is trying to cook the unemployment numbers to hide a struggling economic picture?

I feel like readers of NPQ are going to be interested in the decision the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which you lead, has made to increase its spending at this moment. But I wanted to start further back. Because this is an extraordinary moment. We're used to a certain back and forth ideologically, but we're not as accustomed to a full-on rise of White supremacy, a wholehearted attempt to consolidate authoritarian power. How were you thinking about things last year? What scenario planning was going on?

Some of the most urgent films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival aren't here to soothe. Together, Orwell: 2+2=5, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, and Frankenstein play like sizzle reels of caution, and at their best, they're award-worthy symbols of alarm. These films, the first two of which are documentaries, don't just entertain-they confront fractured humanity, closeness and distance under Israel's siege of Gaza, and a creation we've set loose, growing beyond our control.

See told me sufficient material exists to create AI-powered interactive versions of historical figures like Napoleon, and that researchers are already working on such reconstructions in the hope they will help bring history to life. I mentioned See's prediction to friends and family who all immediately condemned the idea because they fear activists would conduct digital exhumations of history's vilest characters - fascist dictators and the like - to insert their hateful ideologies into contemporary debate.

Criminalization is the default framework people turn to in the United States to restore their sense of order, amid a crisis or emergency, so, when I hear someone suggest something wild, like calling the police on ICE, I understand where they're coming from. But as the Trump administration continues to consolidate power, we need to lose our illusions about the law as a moral instrument. We need more outlaws and less confusion about what the law protects and who it targets.

We are all familiar with the Trump presidential strategy of "flooding the zone." Its premise is that the mainstream media is incapable of running with more than one or two stories at a time. Therefore, if you hit the system on multiple fronts simultaneously this will take the wind out of any opposition. Hence, the Trump regime's accelerating addiction to outrage upon outrage.

Extreme politics and extreme weather go hand in hand, and both have to be confronted if we are to understand and overcome the polycrisis we are living through. Yet few media organisations are examining why the climate emergency is creating a new era of demagogues. Even fewer are scrutinising how those authoritarian leaders are trying to misdirect public attention away from the root cause of our current global malaise.

It's easy to take democracy and civil society for granted when it's all you have known. Americans are aware of the repression and brutality in faraway lands. But for most, autocracy is a word: not a threat, not a way of life. If you are born in an unfree state-like my guest, Oleksandra Matviichuk, and I were-it is a different story. We were both born in the Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, known to you as the U.S.S.R., Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

He then revealed, for the first time, details of his private meeting with Trump at the White House, when Trump pointed out a painting of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the only president to serve more than two terms: He showed me a painting. He said, Turn around.' And I said, Oh, there's FDR.' And I went, Of course.' And he goes, he said, What do you mean?' I said, I know exactly what you mean.' And then he went on and on about the third term.

PSAKI: Trump has surrounded himself with people who already treat him like a dictator. And I was going to try to describe for you just how sycophantic this cabinet meeting today was, how much it would make North Korean leader Kim Jong Un or Russian President Putin blush. But my attempt to summarize this meeting, just no matter how hard I tried, just could simply not do it justice. And this is one of those things you really have to see for yourself.

He enlisted a whole bunch of Ideology-patriarchy; social conservatism; utterly fake upside-down Christianity-in service of those basic motivations, not only to justify his own appetite for and personal acts of sadism and domination but to cast punishment and predation as far out into the world as he could manage. He studied psychology and the Bible so that he could borrow their authority and instrumentalize them to do widespread cruelty more effectively.