Authoritarianism

Chris Hedges: The Machinery Of Terror

January 12, 2026 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. Strategize! Authoritarianism, Chris Hedges, Fascism, ICE, Terror

I have seen the masked goons who terrorize our streets before. I saw them during the “Dirty War” in Argentina, where 30,000 men, women and children were “disappeared” by the military junta. Victims were held in secret prisons, savagely tortured and murdered. To this day, many families do not know the fate of their loved ones. I saw them in El Salvador, when death squads were killing 800 people a month. I saw them in Guatemala under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt. I saw them in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I saw them in Iran under the rule of the ayatollahs where I was arrested and jailed twice and once deported in handcuffs.

Creative Action Was Off The Charts In 2025

January 1, 2026 Rivera Sun, Waging Nonviolence. Resist! Authoritarianism, Creative Action, Mass Actions, Nonviolence

The rise of authoritarianism in the United States had devastating consequences in 2025. It was a year of unrelenting injustice, maddening and terrifying at once. Amidst the cycles of heartbreak and hope, resistance surged to unprecedented levels. Along with mass demonstrations and powerful boycotts, there were countless acts of creative protest that rekindled spirits, made us laugh out loud, and kept us rising up. In nonviolent struggle, creativity is an enduring superpower — and we’ve seen it working powerfully for us in 2025.

Student Resistance To Authoritarianism On Campus

December 7, 2025 Nick Engelfried, Waging Nonviolence. Educate! Authoritarianism, Higher Education, Student Activism, Trump Administration

Brown University senior Caitlyn Carpenter was working on a class discussion post the night of Oct. 1, when news broke that set off a firestorm of debate in academia. The Trump administration had just released a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” and invited nine prominent universities, including Brown, to sign on. Schools that did so would receive preferential federal treatment. The compact included provisions to restrict student protests, eliminate gender-neutral restrooms and identity-based affinity spaces, and limit international student enrollment, among other regressive measures. “I knew immediately we had to do something,” said Carpenter, who is a member of Sunrise Brown and an outreach organizer for the national Campus Climate Network, or CCN.

Trump Announces He Will Send National Guard To Occupy Memphis

September 15, 2025 Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, Truthout. Educate! Authoritarianism, Donald Trump, Memphis, National Guard, Occupation, Tennessee

President Donald Trump announced during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” that he is planning to send military troops to Memphis, Tennessee. During his appearance on September 12, Trump said his administration would deploy the National Guard “and anybody else we need” to the Tennessee city. Trump did not provide a timeline for the deployment. “By the way, we’ll bring in the military too if we need it,” he added. Trump said Memphis is “deeply troubled.” “We’re going to fix that, just like we did in Washington,” he said. The Memphis Shelby Crime Commission shows that crime in Memphis, including violent crime, has decreased since last year. Violent crime from January to June is down more than 17 percent this year compared with the same period in 2024.

Chris Hedges Report: When Religious Mafia And Rightwing Extremists Take Over

August 14, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. Resistance Report Authoritarianism, Fascism, India, Narendra Modi, Right wing extremism, Trump Administration

One of the most stark examples of the expanding tide of authoritarianism worldwide was the 2017 murder of Gauri Lankesh, an Indian journalist and activist, allegedly assassinated by a far-right religious group in India for her fearless journalism. Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is Rollo Romig, a journalist whose Pulitzer Prize-finalist book, I Am On the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Ruse of Autocracy in India, examines the historic and political context of Lankesh’s murder. Romig chronicles the rise of Hindu nationalist extremism in India, linking it to India’s current authoritarian policies under Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Lessons In Courage, Care And Collective Action

June 26, 2025 Moira Birss and Zia Kandler, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Authoritarianism, Community, International Accompaniment Movement, Social Movements, State Repression

As authoritarianism takes hold in the United States and attacks against our movements and communities grow, many U.S.-based organizers and activists are searching for ways to resist, grow and protect ourselves and our communities. Yet, a feeling of overwhelm and hopelessness pervades, especially as this administration deploys tactics aimed at repressing, intimidating and squashing those fighting for change. Rather than despair, we can instead look at the ways movements across the world have responded to authoritarian regimes. After all, for as long as governments have used such tactics, movements, organizations, and individual organizers and activists have cultivated strategies to keep themselves and their communities safe.

For Media, Unruly Protesters Are Bigger Problem Than Police State

June 15, 2025 Shirlynn Chan, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Educate! American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Donald Trump, Fascism, Media, Police, Police State, Propaganda

In the early morning of Friday, June 6, several federal agencies carried out militarized immigration raids across Los Angeles (Al Jazeera, 6/7/25). Armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI and DEA, tore through these neighborhoods in unmarked vehicles, carrying out a new method of targeted raids in workplaces like Home Depot, Ambiance Apparel and car washes (Washington Post, 6/8/25, 6/12/25, LA Times, 6/10/25). Later that morning, demonstrations formed in front of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building and Metropolitan Detention Center, where detainees were believed to be held (Al Jazeera, 6/11/25).

The Creative Playbook Behind Turkey’s Mass Protests

May 1, 2025 Ela Buruk, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Authoritarianism, Creative Action, Mass Action, Turkey

In late March 2025, Turkey was rocked by its largest protests in a decade after Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu — a leading rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — was detained on corruption and terrorism charges. Outrage over his jailing and the subsequent closure of city services (such as metro and bus lines) under a protest ban quickly spilled into the streets. Yet alongside anger and defiance, an unexpected element emerged: humor and creative spectacle. Protesters of all ages, led by waves of university students, converged on city halls and public squares across Turkey, not only waving flags and chanting slogans, but also wielding costumes, memes and symbolic performances as tools of resistance.

Executive Orders And The Illusion Of Democracy

April 18, 2025 Arnie Saiki, Substack. Educate! Authoritarianism, Executive Orders, Governance, Presidential Power, United States

In theory, the U.S. Constitution provides for a delicate balance of powers: the president executes the law, Congress writes it, and the judiciary interprets it. But under the stress of national security, this tripartite structure can be undermined by the strategic exploitation of Presidential Actions. Of these Presidential Actions: Executive Orders, Presidential Memoranda, and Proclamations were never intended to be instruments of unchecked authority. They are meant to coordinate, not dominate. Yet as Congress stalls and the Supreme Court oscillates between political allegiances, presidents have learned to wield these Presidential Actions not as facilitators of governance, but as instruments of domination in a battlefield where the rule of law is subjugated by the rule of precedent, untethered to the balance of powers.

Chris Hedges: Surrendering To Authoritarianism

March 25, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. Educate! Authoritarianism, Campus Movement, Higher Education, State Repression, Student Activism

I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.

The US Can Learn From South Koreans Who Stopped An Authoritarian

February 18, 2025 Jungmin Choi, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Authoritarianism, DOGE, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Martial Law, South Korea, Trump Administration, Yoon Suk-Yeol

As Elon Musk and his DOGE team set about dismantling government agencies, many Americans expected a strong response from Congressional Democrats. Instead, party leaders offered weak statements and little resistance to being refused entry to the very agencies they are tasked with overseeing. This lack of urgency amid what’s being called an administrative coup stoked a wave of angry calls to “do more.” In their outrage on social media, many pointed to decisive action taken by politicians in other countries facing crisis. For example, someone on BlueSky noted that “South Korean politicians were literally scaling fences to protect their government,” while “our senators are sending out pre-scheduled tweets about the Super Bowl.”

Lessons On Fighting For The Climate Under Authoritarianism

October 22, 2024 Alessandra Bergamin, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Authoritarianism, climate crisis, Climate Justice, The Philippines

In 2013, in the devastating wake of Typhoon Haiyan, Yeb Saño began a two-week hunger fast. Saño, then a diplomat and the head of the Philippines delegation at the U.N. climate talks in Poland, had watched as one of the most powerful tropical storms in history obliterated his hometown of Tacloban. Just a few days after the typhoon, a weeping Saño declared to the delegates in Warsaw that he would not eat again until meaningful climate progress was made. But the fast, which Saño now also calls a hunger strike, was not just a political move.

The Slide Into Authoritarianism

August 28, 2024 John Kiriakou, Consortium News. Educate! Authoritarianism, Journalism, Press Freedom, Richard Medhurst, State Repression

All of us who care about civil liberties, civil rights, human rights and freedom of the press have had a front-row seat lately to a slide toward what can only be described as authoritarianism. The governments of the U.S., U.K. and even Canada have been working hard, sometimes in a coordinated fashion, to silence dissenting voices. The governments’ tactics have been heavy-handed, to say the least. Most recently, journalist Richard Medhurst was arrested last week by British authorities. Richard, who is one of the loudest and most important voices in support of human rights for Palestinians, was arrested at Heathrow Airport. Detaining a journalist is not terribly unusual in the U.K., unfortunately.

Anti-Trump Anxiety Ignores History

June 23, 2024 Nat Parry, Consortium News. Educate! Authoritarianism, Democrats, Elections, Fascism, Joe Biden, Liberals, Trump, US Imperialism

With President Joe Biden’s poll numbers tanking, American liberals are doubling down on what they apparently consider the best hope for his re-election: a strategy that relies heavily on whipping up fears of a dictatorship led by Donald Trump — warning that he would not only trample constitutional rights but likely imprison his political opponents. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently raised this specter on a podcast called “On with Kara Swisher,” openly fretting that President Trump would throw her in jail if he wins the November election. “I mean, it sounds nuts,” she said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy threw me in jail.”

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