Authoritarianism / Fascism

Income inequality and radical right parties have both been on the rise in Western democracies, yet few studies explore the linkages between the two – despite prominent arguments about voters feeling ‘left behind’. We argue that rising inequality not only intensifies relative deprivation, but also signals a potential threat of social decline, as gaps in the social hierarchy widen. Hence, voters higher up in the social hierarchy may turn to the radical right to defend existing social boundaries. Using International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) data from 14 OECD countries over three decades, we find that rising income inequality increases the likelihood of radical right support – most pronouncedly among individuals with high subjective social status and lower-middle incomes. Adding to evidence that the threat of decline, rather than actual deprivation, pushes voters towards the radical right, we highlight income inequality as the crucial factor conditioning perceived threats from a widening social hierarchy.

Kennedy and his anti-vaccine colleagues don't just minimize the dangers of the measles, but often slip into talking about this horrific disease as if it's a good thing to put children through. As I wrote about last week, he celebrated families in Texas who chose infection over vaccination, even though two of them lost daughters to measles. His anti-vaccine group had one set of parents explain why that's a good thing because "she’s better off where she is now." He romanticized measles as a "great week" for kids, because they get to skip school and eat chicken soup. On Fox News on Thursday, he insisted about measles, "We need to do better at treating kids who have this disease, and not just saying the only answer is vaccination."

You don't need to "treat" a disease you don't get, but clearly, Kennedy prefers kids get measles. The "treatments" he recommends have echoes of the Geiers' ugly treatment of children. He's been telling parents to overdose kids with vitamin A, which can cause liver damage. He's been pushing the steroid budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin, both of which can have side effects. None of these treatments work, and they all risk making the situation worse.

Kennedy exploits the language of the "wellness" industry, with its misleading emphasis on "natural" health care and "letting" your body heal itself. What's ironic is that's what vaccines do. Vaccines work by stimulating the body's natural immune response, so that it prevents infection using the body's own resources. All these "treatments" Kennedy touts aren't just ineffective, they're not "natural." They're blitzing a child with often overwhelming amounts of medication, which won't work but could make the kid even sicker.

Legal experts agree that sending American citizens to prison in El Salvador would be flagrantly illegal under both U.S. and international law — and that the idea itself is shockingly authoritarian, with few parallels in our nation’s history.

The Trump administration is indeed discussing this idea behind the scenes, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed to Rolling Stone. In their most serious form, these conversations have revolved around attempting to denaturalize American citizens and deport them to other countries, including El Salvador.

“You can’t deport U.S. citizens. There’s no emergency exception, there’s no special wartime authority, there’s no secret clause. You just can’t deport citizens,” says Steve Vladeck, a legal commentator and law professor at Georgetown. “Whatever grounds they try to come up with for denaturalization or expatriation, the one thing that is absolutely undeniable is that people are entitled to individualized processes, before that process can be effectuated.”

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 Trump, for his part, suggested Friday evening on Air Force One that he would follow the Supreme Court’s ruling to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “If the Supreme Court said bring somebody back, I would do that,” Trump said. “I respect the Supreme Court.”

To this point, his administration has not yet followed the high court’s order to “facilitate” return of a man whom, by the government’s own admission, it wrongfully deported and imprisoned in a foreign gulag.

“The problem that we’ve seen over the last week is a series of Supreme Court rulings that have gone out of their way to not endorse what Trump is doing, but also created these procedural artifices that have in some respects thwarted what the lower courts are doing,” Vladeck explains. “At this point, what is it going to take for a majority of the Supreme Court to treat the government’s behavior with the kind of contempt that the government is treating the lower courts?  

Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

And so we have the Trump administration’s dedication to releasing its steady stream of real and AI-generated propaganda designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X account labeled “ASMR”, a reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).

The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.

It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.

Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.

In recent weeks, Homeland Security’s requests shifted, according to the former senior Social Security official. Immigration agents began meeting with DOGE representatives at the agency to discuss how they could achieve their larger goal of pushing out tens of thousands of migrants that ICE was struggling to apprehend and deport, the official said.

That request soon morphed into the idea of placing immigrants into the deaths database, the official said.

Leland Dudek — the acting commissioner who was elevated from a low-level position after displaying public loyalty to DOGE — had qualms about the task, according to two people with knowledge of his thinking. He thought it was illegal, the people said.

Then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem intervened — and Dudek agreed to move forward.

On Monday, according to four people familiar with the matter, Dudek signed two memorandums with Noem allowing the database action. Dudek declined to comment on the episode.

The next day, 6,100 mostly Hispanic names and their attached Social Security numbers were added to the Death Master File, according to records reviewed by The Post.

The White House told The Post that the roughly 6,000 immigrants all have links to either terrorist activity or criminal records. The official did not provide evidence of the alleged crimes or terrorist ties but said some are included on an FBI terror watch list.

The immigrants added to the death database include a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old and two 16-year-olds — as well as one person in their 80s and a handful in their 70s, according to records obtained by The Post.

Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities.

In this Opinion video, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.

Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.

Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

She borrows from political and apolitical Slavic motifs and expressions, arguing that the English language does not fully capture the democratic regression in this American moment.

Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.

“I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave.

Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.

Gorka brags about the ease with which he and his team have gotten Donald Trump to change direction.

“The danger,” one senior intelligence official told us, is that the team preparing the strategy are all warfighters, seeing America as no different than the Middle East.

When then-President Joe Biden issued the first-ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism in 2021, it was a response to January 6, basically casting the MAGA rioters as terrorists threatening the very survival of American democracy.

Biden’s 2021 strategy was itself alarming, casting as threats all kinds of Americans, including social media users, gamers, and students. In fact, the strategy led to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security establishing a backchannel with social media and gaming companies like Roblox, Discord and Reddit in order to monitor communications and map networks, approaches it had long used overseas.

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Now, the rewrite of the National Strategy document is shaping up to comport with Trump’s view of the country, the GAO hints and others say, rescinding the previous approach and altering the focus of counterterrorism actions over the next four years. That includes focusing more on Trump’s political opponents and framing petty crimes taking place at day-to-day protests as terrorism.

Counterterrorism is a fancy way for the government to refer to the business of pre-crime. Designed to prevent attacks before they happen, counterterrorism doesn’t need a crime on which to predicate its activities. Counterterror personnel are not law enforcers investigating a crime after it has occurred. They look for predictors of an attack. This process of divination partially relies on so-called “mobilization indicators,” characteristics that could move people to carry out acts of extremist violence.

Ever had a heated argument expressing sympathy for Luigi Mangione or HAMAS? Or bought military-style tactical equipment? Or withdrawn from family? If so, you meet the government’s criteria listed in its 2021 “Mobilization Indicators” booklet, a document intended to help local and state police to spot a terrorist.

These criteria might strike you as creepy because, as the booklet itself concedes, “many of the mobilization indicators included in this booklet may also relate to constitutionally protected activities.” 

To be clear, Trump himself remains motivated by the same half-baked economic ideas he’s always had: a fixation on trade deficits, rooted in the zero-sum notion that if we buy more from a country than we sell to them, we’re being “ripped off.” He’s been told repeatedly that trade deficits aren’t inherently bad. He doesn’t care. The misunderstanding is the point. And he’ll drag the global economy into a ditch rather than learn how it works.

But those around him—the far-right think tanks and political operatives shaping this agenda—are playing a longer, darker game. Trump’s tariffs aren’t just bad economics. They’re a declaration of economic war on the half of America that didn’t vote for him. This is deliberate and strategic. It’s a cultural counter-revolution disguised as industrial policy. And we know it’s not about economic leverage because Trump isn’t even pretending these tariffs are a negotiating tactic—he intends to make them permanent.

As I said last month, the project is about deskilling America: reducing white-collar work through AI and remote job cuts, destroying universities, starving higher education, using tariffs to wall off the country as a manufacturing-and-extraction island, gutting the cities, and pushing men into manual labor while nudging women into domestic roles. It’s not incoherent—it’s a plan being implemented methodically.

This isn’t about economic efficiency. It’s about political control. Education has always been a democratizing force. It creates citizens who are harder to intimidate, likely to demand fair treatment, and  less willing to obey autocrats. It delays childbirth, disrupts patriarchal family structures, and builds civic coalitions that threaten right-wing hegemony. That’s why it’s under attack. The goal isn’t to elevate the dignity of manual work—it’s to eliminate choice, to collapse the pathways that allow people to escape precarity and assert autonomy.

A key pillar of this reactionary movement is masculinity politics—an obsession with control over women and the restoration of a pre-modern vision of gender roles. Right-wing pundits are now proudly declaring that Trump’s tariffs will “end the masculinity crisis.” Fox News chyrons bluster that his “manly” economic policies will “make you more of a man.” The idea is that factory jobs and closed borders will somehow restore a lost sense of masculine authority that was never actually economic but cultural and social. 

The leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that his dream for the agency is squads of trucks rounding up immigrants for deportation the same way that Amazon trucks crisscross American cities delivering packages.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said, explaining he wants to see a deportation process “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”

Lyons was one of a series of Trump administration speakers at the 2025 Border Security Expo at the Phoenix Convention Center, including Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, and Kristi Noem, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Most extolled Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans, and Noem promised to expand its use to swiftly deport immigrants.

Several speakers, including Homan, told the military industrial complex representatives in the crowd that the Trump administration is depending on the private sector to implement its mass deportation agenda.

“We need to buy more beds, we need more airplane flights and I know a lot of you are here for that reason,” Homan told the crowd in his keynote speech, which kicked off the expo.

“Let the badge and guns do the badge and gun stuff, everything else, let’s contract out,” he said.

“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” reads President Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order.

He then declared that the accomplishments of trans people, and trans women in particular, must be removed from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum because they constitute an “improper ideology.”

The order condemns a planned exhibit at the Museum that would feature trans athletes. Now, Vice President J.D. Vance, alongside members of the presidential cabinet and staff, will lead the way in a sweeping overhaul of Museum exhibits, programming and leadership by blocking funding unless the Museum promises it will “not recognize men as women in any respect.” The language is a thinly veiled directive to remove trans women from the museum entirely.

Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement that the order was nothing less than “fascism” at work.

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Meanwhile, in a troubling echo of Trump’s policies on trans people, the executive order condemns the Smithsonian for framing race as a “social construct” rather than what Trump thinks it is: a “biological reality.”