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.”"

Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada; The Guardian, March 26, 2025

Rachel Leingang , The Guardian; Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada

"A Yale professor who studies fascism is leaving the US to work at a Canadian university because of the current US political climate, which he worries is putting the US at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship”.

Jason Stanley, who wrote the 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Stanley told the Daily Nous, a philosophy profession website, that he made the decision “to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship”...

Social media posts spread on Wednesday, noting the alarm sounded by a scholar of fascism leaving the country over its political climate. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist and creator of the 1619 Project, wrote on the social media platform Bluesky: “When scholars of authoritarianism and fascism leave US universities because of the deteriorating political situation here, we should really worry.”"

The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher Education; The New York Times, March 15, 2025

The Editorial Board, The New York Times; The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher Education

"When a political leader wants to move a democracy toward a more authoritarian form of government, he often sets out to undermine independent sources of information and accountability. The leader tries to delegitimize judges, sideline autonomous government agencies and muzzle the media. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has done so over the past quarter-century. To lesser degrees, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey recently have as well.

The weakening of higher education tends to be an important part of this strategy. Academic researchers are supposed to pursue the truth, and budding autocrats recognize that empirical truth can present a threat to their authority. “Wars are won by teachers,” Mr. Putin has said. He and Mr. Erdogan have closed universities. Mr. Modi’s government has arrested dissident scholars, and Mr. Orban has appointed loyal foundations to run universities.

President Trump has not yet gone as far to impede democracy as these other leaders, but it would be naïve to ignore his early moves to mimic their approach. He has fired government watchdogs, military leaders, prosecutors and national security experts. He has sued media organizations, and his administration has threatened to regulate others. He has suggested that judges are powerless to check his authority, writing on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality. Above all, he is enacting or considering major cuts to universities’ resources. The Trump administration has announced sharp reductions in the federal payments that cover the overhead costs of scientific research, such as laboratory rent, electricity and hazardous waste disposal. (A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order against those cuts.) Vice President JD Vance and other Republicans have urged a steep increase of a university endowment tax that Mr. Trump signed during his first term. Together, these two policies could reduce the annual budgets at some research universities by more than 10 percent."

What if Trump Does Everything He's Promised -- and the People Don't Care?; The New Republic, January/February 2025

Steven Levitsky/Daniel Ziblatt,  The New Republic; What if Trump Does Everything He's Promised -- and the People Don't Care?

"And here we go again. President-elect Donald Trump wasted little time in signaling to Americans, through his Cabinet nominations and White House appointments, that he plans to move quickly to act on his most extreme promises. What kind of United States will we have in a year, or in four? How will the country and its democratic institutions change? What are the chances he doesn’t succeed? And what if he does—and an apathetic, exhausted, and inward-looking populace shrugs? We could think of no one better to ask these questions than Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard scholars who were co-authors of the 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die. They spoke with editor Michael Tomasky on November 25. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity...

Letvitsky: I have always looked back at periods of abuse like the internment of Japanese Americans and McCarthyism and wondered why so few people rose up against it at the time. Now I fear we may see something similar."

How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world; The Guardian, November 17, 2024

Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian ; How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world

"In the wake of Trump’s unnerving appointees, the investigative journalist and veteran of the libel court offers pointers on coping in an age of surveillance"

STAR WARS: Andor Clip - "Fight The Empire!" Maarva's Epic Monologue (2022); Star Wars via YouTube

Star Wars via YouTube; STAR WARS: Andor Clip - "Fight The Empire!" Maarva's Epic Monologue (2022)

"The adventures of rebel spy Cassian Andor during the formative years of the Rebellion prior to the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The series explores tales filled with espionage and daring missions to restore hope to a galaxy in the grip of a ruthless Empire."

‘Anticipatory obedience’: newspapers’ refusal to endorse shines light on billionaire owners’ motives; The Guardian, October 26, 2024

Lois Beckett, The Guardian; ‘Anticipatory obedience’: newspapers’ refusal to endorse shines light on billionaire owners’ motives

"When two American billionaires blocked the newspapers they own from endorsing Kamala Harris this month, they tried to frame the decision as an act of civic responsibility.

“I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division,” Patrick Soon-Shiong, the biotech billionaire who owns the Los Angeles Times, said. He emphasised that though some might assume his family is “ultra-progressive”, he is a registered “independent”.

At the Washington Post, which reported that its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, was behind the decision, publisher William Lewis described the retreat from making presidential endorsements as “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds”.

Veteran journalists and media critics are using a very different phrase to describe Soon-Shiong’s and Bezos’s choice: they’re saying the two billionaires, among the richest men on the entire globe, are performing “anticipatory obedience” to Donald Trump.

Yes, “cowardice” has also been a popular way to describe the choice by the billionaire owners of two of the country’s major newspapers to not to risk angering Trump by allowing their papers to endorse his opponent.

But “anticipatory obedience” is more specific. The term comes from On Tyranny, the bestselling guide to authoritarianism by Timothy Snyder, a historian of eastern and central Europe. The phrase describes, in Snyder’s words, “the major lesson of the Nazi takeover, and what was supposed to be one of the major lessons of the twentieth century: don’t hand over the power you have before you have to. Don’t protect yourself too early.” It’s a way of describing what Europeans did wrong as totalitarians came to power: by “mentally and physically conceding, you’re already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian”, Snyder explains."

Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in.; Vox, October 23, 2024

 Dylan Matthews, Vox; Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in.

"Five years have now passed, and the fascism questions have only grown more frequent. Trump has had time to implement quite anti-immigrantand anti-Black policies, and refused to denounce his most extreme and violent supporters, from the neo-Nazis and white nationalists in Charlottesville to the Proud Boys group. And every week, I receive dozens of emails from readers wondering if I stand by my conclusion in 2015, that Trump is simply a bigot with an authoritarian streak, not a fascist.

So I reached out to the experts I talked to back then. Four of the five replied, and I also got in touch with a few more scholars who have researched fascism to get a broader view.

The responses were, again, unanimous, albeit tinged with much greater concern about Trump’s authoritarian and violent tendencies. No one thinks Trump is a fascist leader, full stop. Jason Stanley, a Yale philosopher and author of How Fascism Works, came closest to that conclusion, saying that “you could call legitimately call Trumpism a fascist social and political movement” and that Trump is “using fascist political tactics,” but that Trump isn’t necessarily leading a fascist government."

Real men reject fascism; The Ink, October 23, 2024

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, The Ink; Real men reject fascism

"Two things have grown increasingly clear: Donald Trump is a fascist, and he is winning the support of most American men. But it doesn’t have to be like this. There is a way out.

Yesterday, a breathtaking report arrived in The New York Times. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, warned in the starkest terms that Trump is a fascist with a real authoritarian vision and confirmed the murmurs about Trump being jealous not to have had the kind of generals Hitler did...

The distressing thing is that a majority of American men are looking at all of this and saying, “Yeah, let’s do that.” We are dude-bro-ing our way into democratic death...

So now here we are in a country that is changing a lot, has changed a lot — indeed, has, over the past few generations, done more to change the status and rights and dignity of women than hundreds of prior generations did. And we have done the right things while failing to manage social and psychological change — failing to manage the minds and hearts of those who experience these worthy changes as headwinds.

This seems to me central to the story of how a majority of men could do what populations bewildered by change and anxious about the future and their place in it have done: support fascism, support dictatorship, support tyranny to smash it all...

Yes, change is scary. Yes, it sometimes feels like you don’t know how to be these days. Don’t know what to say. Yes, it’s tempting to shake things up when you’re scared. When you feel attacked by the future itself.

But don’t. Because men worthy of the word don’t outsource the care and protection of their families to dictators. Men worthy of the word don’t depend for their self-esteem on the crushing and marginalizing of Others. Men worthy of the word don’t need women to be locked in the fourteenth century legally to feel whole. Men worthy of the word don’t hand over the keys to the future to billionaires who pull the strings.

However one might reject their premises, some fraction of the mass of American men who have succumbed to the lure of Trump’s fascism need to feel seen and heard and recognized in their stress and anxiety and sense of dislocation in the future that is coming. And they need to be invited into a contrary story of progress. Saving the country from tyranny needs to become aspirational for men. Not a lecture.

They need to remember, and become excited to say, that real men reject fascism."

Surviving Putin's gulag: Vladimir Kara-Murza tells his story; The Washington Post, August 14, 2024

Today’s show was produced by Charla Freeland. It was edited by Allison Michaels and Damir Marusic and mixed by Emma Munger, The Washington Post; Surviving Putin's gulag: Vladimir Kara-Murza tells his story

"Pulitzer Prize winner Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was part of August’s massive prisoner exchange with Russia, sat down to talk with Post Opinions editor David Shipley about his time in jail, the importance of freedom of speech and what the future holds for Putin’s regime."

Russian court jails US-Russian woman for 12 years over $50 charity donation; The Guardian, August 15, 2024

Associated Press via The Guardian; Russian court jails US-Russian woman for 12 years over $50 charity donation

"A Russian court on Thursday sentenced the US-Russian dual national Ksenia Khavana to 12 years in prison on a treason conviction for allegedly raising money for the Ukrainian military.

The rights group the First Department said the charges stemmed from a $51 (£40) donation to a US charity that helps Ukraine.

Khavana, whom Russian authorities identify by her birth name of Karelina, was arrested in Ekaterinburg in February. She pleaded guilty in her closed trial last week, news reports said.

Khavana reportedly obtained US citizenship after marrying an American and moving to Los Angeles. She had returned to Russia to visit her family."

As more schools target ‘Maus,’ Art Spiegelman’s fears are deepening; The Washington Post, June 14, 2023

Greg Sargent , The Washington Post; As more schools target ‘Maus,’ Art Spiegelman’s fears are deepening

"What alarms Spiegelman about the targeting of “Maus” on specious grounds, he told me, is that its “fable” form was able to reach a broad audience with a story “about dehumanizing people” and “othering.” Spiegelman suggested those looking to restrict books are seeking to limit school curriculums with their own acts of othering.

“Those others can include Asians, Indigenous Americans, Black people, Muslims — not to mention LGBTQ and beyond,” Spiegelman said. The book-removal frenzy, he noted, is “about squelching what’s supposed to happen in school, which is an education that allows people to become one country that can talk to each other with a base of knowledge.”"

Democracy is under attack – and reporting that isn’t ‘violating journalistic standards’; The Guardian, September 4, 2022

Robert Reich, The Guardian; Democracy is under attack – and reporting that isn’t ‘violating journalistic standards’

"It is dangerous to believe that “balanced journalism” gives equal weight to liars and to truth-tellers, to those intent on destroying democracy and those seeking to protect it, to the enablers of an ongoing attempted coup and those who are trying to prevent it...

“Balanced journalism” does not exist halfway between facts and lies."