ABC barred from Trump’s UK press conference after his clash with Australian journalist John Lyons; The Guardian, September 17, 2025

 Amanda Meade , The Guardian; ABC barred from Trump’s UK press conference after his clash with Australian journalist John Lyons

"The ABC has been barred from attending Donald Trump’s press conference near London this week after a clash between the broadcaster’s Americas editor, John Lyons, and the president in Washington DC over his business dealings.

The Australian broadcaster said its London bureau was informed by Downing Street that its accreditation to attend the press conference had been withdrawn for “logistical reasons”...

Lyons, who is reporting for Four Corners, drew the ire of the president on Tuesday when he asked Trump how much wealthier he had become since returning to the Oval Office for his second term in January.

Trump accused the reporter of “hurting Australia” with the line of questioning.

“In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now,” Trump said. “And they want to get along with me.

“You know, your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I’m going to tell him about you. You set a very bad tone. You can set a nicer tone.”

Trump subsequently told Lyons: “Quiet.”"

‘Censoring you in real time’: suspension of Jimmy Kimmel show sparks shock and fears for free speech; The Guardian, September 17, 2025

Jonathan Yerushalmy, The Guardian ; ‘Censoring you in real time’: suspension of Jimmy Kimmel show sparks shock and fears for free speech

"Politicians, media figures and free speech organisations expressed anger and alarm at the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, warning that critics of Donald Trump were being systematically silenced."

Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times is meritless, First Amendment experts say; CNN, September 17, 2025

Brian Stelter, Liam Reilly, CNN ; Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times is meritless, First Amendment experts say

"President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times is meritless, according to half a dozen lawyers and First Amendment scholars who spoke with CNN.

But Trump’s chances in court are almost beside the point, some of the experts said, because the president seems to want a political rather than legal or financial victory.

Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Law School, said the 85-page suit “is a statement of contempt for truth, the American public, the judicial process, and everything that deserves our respect in the American tradition.”

However, Tushnet said, “to pick through its legal defects, such as the complaints about statements about Fred Trump — a deceased man who cannot be defamed — is to ignore its purpose: to threaten any criticism of Trump.”

‘Homie’: DHS Ridicules Dad They Plan to Deport to Tiny African Nation; The Daily Beast, September 6, 2025

 Jack Revell , The Daily Beast ; ‘Homie’: DHS Ridicules Dad They Plan to Deport to Tiny African Nation

[Kip Currier: This is unacceptable aberrant and abhorrent behavior for U.S. government leaders and agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to demean and torment human beings in this way. But as has so often been said of the Trump administration, the cruelty is the point: these actions are part of a broader stratagem. This behavior is an authoritarian tactic to dehumanize specific individuals and groups of people. The objectives of this systematic, intentional dehumanization are to (1) normalize cruelty, (2) undermine the rule of law, and (3) break down our democratic institutions. Political writer Hannah Arendt explains these strategies in her seminal 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism. The book is freely accessible through the Internet Archive via https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism .

Remember, too, that DHS Head Kristi Noem is the same person who told us in her 2024 autobiography No Going Back that she shot and killed her own 14-month old wire-haired pointer dog, Cricket, with premeditation and deliberation. This is not a good person, a positive role model, or someone who exercises sound judgment and well-reasoned decision-making. 

And this is clearly not someone who should be influencing policy and leading a government agency.]

[Excerpt]

"Maryland dad Kilmar Abrego Garcia has learned where the Department of Homeland Security has decided to deport him next. 

In an email obtained by Fox News, lawyers for the DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement informed Abrego Garcia’s legal team on Friday that his new intended destination is the tiny African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. 

Ridiculing Abrego Garcia’s legal claim of fear of persecution or torture—a core asylum principle—in many of the nations the government has considered deporting him to, the DHS wrote on social media that “Homie is afraid of the entire western hemisphere”."

Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode; The Guardian, August 29, 2025

Jonathan Freedland , The Guardian; Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode

"Meanwhile, apparently prompted by his meeting with Vladimir Putin, he is once again at war against postal voting, baselessly decrying it as fraudulent, while also demanding a new census that would exclude undocumented migrants – moves that will either help Republicans win in 2026 or else enable him to argue that a Democratic victory was illegitimate and should be overturned.

In that same spirit, the Trump White House now argues that, in effect, only one party should be allowed to exercise power in the US. How else to read the words of key Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who this week told Fox News that “The Democrat party is not a political party; it is a domestic extremist organisation.”

It’s the same picture on every front, whether it’s plans for a new military parade in Trump’s honour or the firing of health officials who insist on putting science ahead of political loyalty. He is bent on amassing power to himself and being seen to amass power to himself, even if that means departing from economic conservative orthodoxy to have the federal government take a stake in hitherto private companies. He wants to rule over every aspect of US life. As Trump himself said this week, “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’” The former Obama adviser David Axelrod is not alone when he says, “We have gone from zero to Hungary faster than I ever imagined.”

The trouble is, people still don’t talk about it the way they talk about Hungary, not inside the US and not outside it. That’s partly the It Can’t Happen Here mindset, partly a reluctance to accept a reality that would require, of foreign governments especially, a rethink of almost everything. If the US is on its way to autocracy, in a condition scholars might call “unconsolidated authoritarianism”, then that changes Britain’s entire strategic position, its place in the world, which for 80 years has been predicated on the notion of a west led by a stable, democratic US. The same goes for the EU. Far easier to carry on, either pretending that the transformation of the US is not, in fact, as severe as it is, or that normal service will resume shortly. But the world’s leaders, like US citizens, cannot ignore the evidence indefinitely. To adapt the title of that long-ago novel, it can happen here – and it is."

We shouldn’t focus on ‘how bad slavery was’ says Trump. What’s next?; The Guardian, August 22, 2025

Francine Prose , The Guardian; We shouldn’t focus on ‘how bad slavery was’ says Trump. What’s next?

"The attack on museums, like the assault on education, is meant to convince us that the truth doesn’t matter, that there is no truth, that the wisest course is to blindly accept and repeat whatever lies an authoritarian government chooses to tell.

There’s some disagreement about who first said: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” Some claim it was Winston Churchill, others attribute it to George Santayana. But does anyone doubt its veracity?

Perhaps the most nightmarish explanation is that our current administration actually wants us to repeat the most loathsome events of our common past – and to be assured that every act of brutality will disappear from our collective consciousness. There’s a terrifying kind of freedom in knowing that our most odious deeds will be erased from our historical memory, that what we do now will have no consequences – indeed, no reality – in the years to come.

According to the “historically accurate” museum exhibits and history books of the future, there will have been no slavery, there was no discrimination, there were no massacres of our Indigenous population. There was never a time when hard-working, law-abiding immigrant families were separated, when yet more children were stolen from their parents, when, according to the current estimate, 80,000 people – most of them entirely innocent – were imprisoned, when thousands more were kidnapped off the streets and deported from a country they had labored so hard to benefit. And none of this will be mentioned, none of this can be said or written on a wall text, lest we allow the unpatriotic ideologues to make America look bad."

This Evangelical Pastor Wants to Replace Women’s Right to Vote; The New York Times, August 14, 2025

David French, The New York Times ; This Evangelical Pastor Wants to Replace Women’s Right to Vote

"There are many reasons for Wilson’s rise, but one of them is squarely rooted in politics. When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, he inherited a recent Republican tradition: The Republican president isn’t just a political leader — he’s a de facto religious leader as well.

Leaders inspire imitators, and all too many people are open to pastors exhibiting the same values as the president they admire so much. Or to put it another way, when George W. Bush was in office, “compassionate conservatism” was en vogue. And now? When Trump runs an administration where it often appears that cruelty is the point, well then, empathy is a sin. It’s not that men like Wilson had no audience before Trump; it’s that there is a new demand for Wilson’s message because it matches the Trumpist spirit of this evangelical age.

Trump is a profane, authoritarian man who delights in attacking his critics. Wilson is also a profane, authoritarian man who similarly delights in personal attacks. He created something he calls “No Quarter November,” a month when he grants Christians the right to “hoist the Jolly Roger and just go to war with the world.” His aggression is referred to as the “Moscow mood.”"

Trump sent ‘explicit’ threat to cut funds from University of Virginia, senator says; The Guardian, June 29, 2025

Marina Dunbar , The Guardian; Trump sent ‘explicit’ threat to cut funds from University of Virginia, senator says

"The University of Virginia (UVA) received “explicit” notification from the Trump administration that the school would endure cuts to university jobs, research funding and student aid as well as visas if the institution’s president, Jim Ryan, did not resign, according to a US senator.

During an interview Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mark Warner, a Democratic senator for Virginia, defended Ryan – who had championed diversity policies that the president opposes – and predicted that Donald Trump will similarly target other universities.

Warner said he understood that the former UVA president was told that if he “tried to fight back, hundreds of employees would lose jobs, researchers would lose funding, and hundreds of students could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld”.

“There was indication that they received the letter that if he didn’t resign on a day last week, by 5 o’clock, all these cuts would take place,” Warner added. He also said he believes this to be the “most outrageous action” that the Trump administration has taken on education since it retook office in January.

Ryan resigned from his position as UVA president on Friday. He was facing political pressure from Washington to step aside in order to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, the New York Times reported on the same day.

“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in his resignation message to the university community. He expressed an unwillingness to risk the employment of other staff, as well as cuts to funding and financial aid for students.

Ryan had a reputation for trying to make the UVA campus more diverse and encouraging students to perform community service. He had served as the university’s president since 2018."

Video: U.S. Senator Alex Padilla shoved, handcuffed at DHS Kristi Noem's news conference; Fox KTVU, June 12, 2025

 Fox KTVU; Video: U.S. Senator Alex Padilla shoved, handcuffed at DHS Kristi Noem's news conference

"U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-California) was physically shoved out of the room Thursday during a news conference with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles, where he was also briefly put into handcuffs by the FBI. 

The confrontation was caught on video by dozens of journalists and later took the internet by storm at the sight of a U.S. senator being taken down to the ground by federal agents after asking a question, even if he interrupted Noem as she was speaking.

Padilla, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee, was then let go and led to a private room with Noem for 10 minutes, who was in Los Angeles to address the ongoing demonstrations protesting President Donald Trump's immigration policies.

"I will say this, if this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they're doing to workers, to cooks, to day laborers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California and throughout the country," Padilla said to reporters at a hastily called news conference of his own."

Rachel Maddow says Trump is ‘absolutely panicking’ and has ‘no freaking idea’ how to respond to LA protests; The Independent, June 10, 2025

Justin Baragona , The Independent; Rachel Maddow says Trump is ‘absolutely panicking’ and has ‘no freaking idea’ how to respond to LA protests

"“The most important story of our time is this one,” she confidently stated. “What is this country going to allow him to do? This is an attempted authoritarian overthrow of the US Constitution and the US government. The attempted imposition of a dictatorial regime... the question is whether it will work.”"

‘Andor’ Shows How a Resistance Is Built, One Brick at a Time; The New York Times, April 23, 2025

James Poniewozik , The New York Times; ‘Andor’ Shows How a Resistance Is Built, One Brick at a Time

"The conflicts too may seem familiar, even more so as the second season unfolds. Imperial troops search for the “undocumented” amid a security panic that is manufactured — and amplified by media outlets — to justify a crackdown. The Empire disappears people to prison gulags with no hope of return. It bullies a small territory, undermining its autonomy to gain control of valuable natural resources. Senators weigh whether it is safe to speak out against the growing civil-liberties violations.

You could see this as Gilroy and company importing current events into the “Star Wars” galaxy. But you could also see it as current events repeating historical patterns that — swashbuckling and adorably memeable aliens aside — “Star Wars” has been concerned with since its beginning.

“A New Hope” hit theaters in 1977, a popcorn blend of Bicentennial rebel spirit and post-1960s antiauthoritarianism, about a feathered-haired farm boy flooring the pedal on his space hot rod and sticking it to the Man right in the exhaust port. As George Lucas said in a 2005 interview, he conceived his films in the Nixon and Vietnam years as a way of wrestling with the question, “How do democracies get turned into dictatorships?”...

In an age of copycat I.P. cash grabs, “Andor” doesn’t merely echo its source material: It also retroactively improves it. Sometimes, “Andor” suggests, the long process of liberation is harder than bulls-eyeing womp rats in your T-16 and less glamorous than a lightsaber duel. Sometimes it simply means grabbing a brick. And sometimes it means becoming one."

‘Andor’ Is Not the Resistance You’re Looking For; The New York Times, April 22, 2025

 Gita Jackson, The New York Times ; ‘Andor’ Is Not the Resistance You’re Looking For

"“Star Wars” has always been political. When the main thrust of the narrative is about rebels rising up against empire, that’s simply hard to avoid. “Andor,” a Disney+ streaming series that premiered in 2022, wears its politics openly: The show is about the brutal sacrifices people make, or are forced to make, in resistance to authoritarianism. As the new season begins streaming on Tuesday, it seems especially prescient...

In the struggle against authoritarianism in real life, many of us are like that, moved to action even before we know what we truly believe. If nothing else, “Andor” visualizes a simple truth that I try to remember when the news is grim: There are more of us than there are of them."

Parks, libraries, museums: here’s why Trump is attacking America’s best-loved institutions; The Guardian, June 2, 2025

Margaret Sullivan , The Guardian; Parks, libraries, museums: here’s why Trump is attacking America’s best-loved institutions

"Why would any politician – especially one as hungry for adulation as Donald Trump – go after such cherished parts of America?

It seems counterintuitive, but this is all a part of a broad plan that the great 20th century political thinker Hannah Arendt would have understood all too well.

Take away natural beauty, free access to books and support for the arts, and you end up with a less enlightened, more ignorant and less engaged public. That’s a public much more easily manipulated.

“A people that can no longer believe in anything cannot make up its mind,” said Arendt, a student of authoritarianism, in 1973. Eventually, such a public “is deprived … of its ability to think and judge”, and with people like that, “you can then do what you please”.

That’s what Trump and company are counting on."

Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real; The Guardian, May 22, 2025

Adrienne Matei , The Guardian; Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real

"“Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.

First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.

The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Harfoush says in her video."

‘This Is What We Were Always Scared of’: DOGE Is Building a Surveillance State; The New York Times, April 30, 2025

Julia Angwin , The New York Times; ‘This Is What We Were Always Scared of’: DOGE Is Building a Surveillance State

"What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history of siloing government data to prevent its misuse. In their first 100 days, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have knocked down the barriers that were intended to prevent them from creating dossiers on every U.S. resident. Now they seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest."

Trump 100 days: delusions of monarchy coupled with fundamental ineptitude; The Guardian, April 29, 2025

David Smith  , The Guardian; Trump 100 days: delusions of monarchy coupled with fundamental ineptitude

"The portraits of Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan and other past presidents gaze down from a past that the 47th seems determined to erase. Trump is seeking to remake the US in his image at frightening speed. The shock and awe of his second term has challenged many Americans’ understanding of who they are.

In three months Trump has shoved the world’s oldest continuous democracy towards authoritarianism at a pace that tyrants overseas would envy. He has used executive power to take aim at Congress, the law, the media, culture and public health. Still aggrieved by his 2020 election defeat and 2024 criminal conviction, his regime of retribution has targeted perceived enemies and proved that no grudge is too small.

Historically such strongmen have offered the populace a grand bargain: if they will surrender some liberties, he will make the trains run on time. But Trump’s delusions of monarchy have been coupled with a fundamental ineptitude.

His trade war injected chaos into the economy, undermining a campaign promise to lower prices and raising the spectre of recession; his ally Elon Musk wreaked havoc on the federal government, threatening health and welfare benefits for millions; his foreign policy turned the world upside down, making friends of adversaries and turning allies into foes...

In 2021 Sabato, the University of Virginia political scientist, told the Guardianthat history would remember Trump as by far the worst president ever on the basis of his first term. “I was wrong,” he acknowledged last week. “This is the worst presidency in American history.

“The ignorance was actually our ally in the first Trump term. He didn’t know what he was doing and now, unfortunately, while he still doesn’t know what he’s doing, he knows more than he did. Trump believes he is infallible. He’s going to burn out with the public long before the end of this term.”"