Trump Crime Family

Autocracy: Rules for Survival 

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In the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.

By: Masha Gessen | NOVEMBER 2016

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. Instead, she said, resignedly,

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GasLit Nation: Russian Propaganda as Judge and Jury

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Feb 5, 2020

In a week when the GOP Senate will likely take their criminal president and crown him criminal king, we look at the big picture – treason, disinformation, and how to resist. Much like the Senate trial itself, our conversation centers on Ukraine. This week Andrea interviews Ukrainian journalist Olga Tokariuk about how disinformation makes its way from the Kremlin into western media and even into western courts, as demonstrated by a recent court case in Italy in which online Kremlin propaganda formed much of the “evidence”. This situation can happen anywhere, including here in the United States. Andrea and Olga also discuss censorship, state violence, and the difficulties in being a journalist in an era where multiple regimes seek to annihilate the very concept of truth.

Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa are experts on authoritarian states who warned America about election hacking years before 2016. Here, they take a deep dive on the news, skipping outrage to deliver analysis, history, context, and sharp insight on global affairs.

America was its own worst enemy. Now we are our own best hope.

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Writer and scholar Sarah Kendzior argues freedom is about what it means to be human, so we must protect it at all costs.

One of the most common refrains when a democracy collapses into an autocracy is that no one could have seen it coming.

The motivation behind this myth is the absolution of the powerful. After all, what cannot be predicted cannot be prevented, and therefore the failure of officials to safeguard our freedoms should be forgiven. This is the story we hear as Donald Trump approaches a possible second term and the U.S. plunges into unprecedented turmoil.

The premise, of course, is a lie.

Freedom is about what it means to be human, and to be recognized and treated by others as such.

What “No one saw it coming” tells you is who the powerful consider to be “no one.” “No one” are the multitude of marginalized Americans who warned in 2016 that their rights had always been on the line and would be even more so now. “No one” are the people who knew that a future American autocracy was possible because their ancestors had been subject to past ones: slavery, Jim Crow, internment camps, and other forms of legal subjugation that were destroyed only through decades of defiant demands for their eradication.

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