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 administrationâs 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 â 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 administrationâs attacks on civil liberties. âI want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,â 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. âWeâre like people on the Titanic saying our ship canât sink,â she said. âAnd what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that canât sink.â
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 Snyderâs reasons are more complicated. Primarily, heâs 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.
âI did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale â but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,â 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.
Linkage
Things Katy is reading.
Weâre Experts in Fascism. Weâre Leaving the U.S.
in New York Times for YouTubeTrump Team Prepping New Strategy for Domestic Terrorism
Gorka brags about the ease with which he and his team have gotten Donald Trump to change direction.
âThe danger,â 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.
Bidenâs 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 Trumpâs 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 Trumpâs 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 doesnât 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 âmobilization indicators,â 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 governmentâs criteria listed in its 2021 âMobilization Indicatorsâ 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, âmany of the mobilization indicators included in this booklet may also relate to constitutionally protected activities.â
Trumpâs Tariffs Arenât Economics. Theyâre a Cultural Purge
in Washington MonthyTo be clear, Trump himself remains motivated by the same half-baked economic ideas heâs 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, weâre being âripped off.â Heâs been told repeatedly that trade deficits arenât inherently bad. He doesnât care. The misunderstanding is the point. And heâll drag the global economy into a ditch rather than learn how it works.
But those around himâthe far-right think tanks and political operatives shaping this agendaâare playing a longer, darker game. Trumpâs tariffs arenât just bad economics. Theyâre a declaration of economic war on the half of America that didnât vote for him. This is deliberate and strategic. Itâs a cultural counter-revolution disguised as industrial policy. And we know itâs not about economic leverage because Trump isnât even pretending these tariffs are a negotiating tacticâhe 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. Itâs not incoherentâitâs a plan being implemented methodically.
This isnât about economic efficiency. Itâs 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. Thatâs why itâs under attack. The goal isnât to elevate the dignity of manual workâitâs 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 politicsâan obsession with control over women and the restoration of a pre-modern vision of gender roles. Right-wing pundits are now proudly declaring that Trumpâs tariffs will âend the masculinity crisis.â Fox News chyrons bluster that his âmanlyâ economic policies will âmake you more of a man.â 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.
ICE director envisions Amazon-like mass deportation system: âPrime, but with human beingsâ
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.
âWe need to get better at treating this like a business,â Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said, explaining he wants to see a deportation process âlike (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.â
Lyons was one of a series of Trump administration speakers at the 2025 Border Security Expo at the Phoenix Convention Center, including Tom Homan, Trumpâs âborder czarâ, and Kristi Noem, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Most extolled Trumpâs 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.
âWe need to buy more beds, we need more airplane flights and I know a lot of you are here for that reason,â Homan told the crowd in his keynote speech, which kicked off the expo.
âLet the badge and guns do the badge and gun stuff, everything else, letâs contract out,â he said.
Why Are Trans People Such an Easy Political Target? This Crisis Was Decades in the Making.
in SlateWhile it may be tempting to put all the blame on Trump or the Republicans or Project 2025 (and they deserve the lionâs share), to do so would be to ignore decades of choices, missed opportunities, and betrayals within the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement that, read together, show how and why transgender people find themselves so vulnerable to political scapegoating and attacks today.
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Jessica Xavierâfounder of the transgender lobbying group Itâs Time, America!âproposed addressing these tensions in relation to conversion therapy by focusing on how the tie that truly binds LGBTQ+ people together is not sexuality but gender variance. âWe talk about gender variance when men take jobs as nurses [and] when men have long hair,â she said, to explain why the pivot away from morality toward gender variance was necessary. If you extend this view, you quickly realize that engaging in same-sex sexual relationships is in itself a defiance of gender norms, much like career and grooming choices. Xavier elaborated her perspective: âIf we frame this as a larger societal pressure that reaches to straight people ⊠If we all realize that weâre fighting the same enemy in different ways, that language has more implications for society: Itâs gender.â Gender and sexuality are impossible to tease apart, and those connections affect everybody who has ever worried that maybe they arenât âman enoughâ or âa good woman.â Attacks on transgender people are toothless in a social world where everybody is freed from strict gender norms. But such freedom also makes it harder to control populations, which might explain why political power grabs usually feature some aspect of suppressing gender expression.
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Over time, focusing on sexuality, relationships, and families headed by same-sex partners meant that gender essentially fell off the âLGBTâ agendaâuntil suddenly it became the rightâs primary target. As a result, transgender people are now vulnerable to political attacks for many reasons, not least of which is the missed opportunity over those many decades to educate the public about gender norms and gender variance. Itâs safe to say that this history might also be why those in power can behave as though the group doesnât have the backing of a critical mass of supporters or influential alliesâbecause of this legacy of negligence by the larger movement, frankly, they donât.
Clearly, the resistance to addressing gender head-on earlier in our history has had a broader impact on how LGBTQ+ politics are understood today. In particular, the failure to center gender and the ideas about masculinity and femininity that affect us all (not just LGBTQ+ people) has meant that coalitions with other groups were over before they began. These include most obviously organizations fighting for reproductive rights and gender equity, as well as others focused on bodily autonomy, such as activists looking to preserve the right to asylum, provide food and shelter to poor and homeless people, and end mass incarceration.
Denial
The Wikimedia Foundation, stewards of the finest projects on the web, have written about the hammering their servers are taking from the scraping bots that feed large language models.
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When we talk about the unfair practices and harm done by training large language models, we usually talk about it in the past tense: how they were trained on other peopleâs creative work without permission. But this is an ongoing problem thatâs just getting worse.
The worst of the internet is continuously attacking the best of the internet. This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web.
If youâre using the products powered by these attacks, youâre part of the problem. Donât pretend itâs cute to ask ChatGPT for something. Donât pretend itâs somehow being technologically open-minded to continuously search for nails to hit with the latest âAIâ hammers.
If youâre going to use generative tools powered by large language models, donât pretend you donât know how your sausage is made.
âImproper IdeologyââTrump Demands Womenâs History Museum Remove Trans People or Lose Funding
in Erin in the MorningâOver the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nationâs history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,â reads President Donald Trumpâs 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 Womenâs History Museum because they constitute an âimproper ideology.â
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 ânot recognize men as women in any respect.â 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 âfascismâ at work.
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Meanwhile, in a troubling echo of Trumpâs policies on trans people, the executive order condemns the Smithsonian for framing race as a âsocial constructâ rather than what Trump thinks it is: a âbiological reality.â
Police repression is a 'part of life now', activists say after Quaker centre raid
in Middle East EyeOn 27 March, some 20 police officers burst in on a group of young women at a Quakerâs meeting house in central London and arrested them on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.
The women were activists who had gathered for an open meeting of Youth Demand, a pro-Palestine and climate justice movement demanding an end to UK government arms sales to Israel and new fossil fuel licensing. The group emerged in the aftermath of Israelâs war on Gaza, which began in October 2023.
âIt was a publicly advertised talk,â said Lia, 20, who attended the meeting. âIt was a low turnout - six people in total.â
The women were sitting in a circle drinking tea when Lia looked up to see a large group of police pressed against the window.
âTheir hats were tapping against the glass,â she told Middle East Eye. âThen, there was a big thud. They kicked down the door, and then the whole room was full of police.â
The officers seized the womenâs laptops and phones, and led them off one by one, some in handcuffs.
âNone of us were resisting arrest,â Lia said.
Three of the women were taken to Bromley police station, the others to Kingston, where they were held incommunicado and interrogated in the middle of the night.
The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 stipulates that detainees are permitted an initial phone call, although this right may be delayed in cases relating to serious organised crime, terrorism or espionage.
It is a tactic increasingly deployed against pro-Palestine activists.
Simultaneously, police officers conducted overnight raids on their homes with the keys they confiscated from the arrestees.
Ella Grace Taylor, another one of those arrested, said she came home to find her room ransacked.
âMy bed was stripped. All my things were lying across the floor,â she told MEE.
âWe were left this piece of paper that acknowledged theyâd been there. It said in small print on the back: âIf you want to know what's been taken, you have to come to the police station.ââ
âWeâve all been having nightmares. When we hear a noise outside or a van go past, there is this sense of paranoia,â she added.
The police are still withholding the womenâs phones, laptops and university coursework.
They're Arresting Us for Miscarriages Now
This week, a Georgia woman was arrested for her miscarriage. Iâll let that sit with you a moment.
The 24-year-oldâfound bleeding and unconscious outside her apartment complexâwas charged with âconcealing a deathâ and âabandoning a dead bodyâ after placing fetal remains in the trash.
Georgia has no law dictating how to dispose of miscarriage remains, but police arrested her anyway. Her mugshot is already splashed across the local crime pages. Did you know that one million American women miscarry every year? I hope the cops are ready to run out of film.
While this young woman sat behind bars, Georgia lawmakers considered a bill that would lock up even more women: The Prenatal Equal Protection Act (HB 441) would charge abortion patients as murderersâa crime punishable by life in prison or the death penalty.
You wouldnât know it from looking at the headlines. From the Associated Press to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, HB 441 is being covered as a âtotal abortion banâ rather than a radical step toward punishing women.
Fertility doctors could also be jailed for life; under HB 441, discarding frozen embryos would be a criminal offense. Fertility specialist Dr. Karenne Fru asked lawmakers at a Thursday hearing, âAm I guilty of murder? That makes me a serial killer.â
This isnât an issue of a single extremist state. The legislation in Georgia is one of eleven âequal protectionâ bills that have been introduced across the country since the start of the year. All of them seek to punish women who have abortions. The rest of us, of course, remain suspect: An Idaho legislator explained to a reporter last month that his âequal protectionâ bill would allow for the investigation of miscarriages.
Weâre barely three years out from the end of Roe. Still think feminists are âhystericalâ?
Israelâs latest vision for Gaza has a name: Concentration camp
in +972 MagazineConnecting all these dots leads to a fairly clear conclusion: Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza â through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment â into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area. Anyone caught outside its boundaries would be killed, and buildings throughout the rest of the enclave would likely be razed to the ground.
Without mincing words, this âhumanitarian zone,â as Magal so kindly put it, in which the army intends to corral Gazaâs 2 million residents, can be summed up in just two words: concentration camp. This is not hyperbole; it is simply the most precise definition to help us better understand what we are facing.
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Perversely, the plan to establish a concentration camp inside Gaza may reflect Israeli leadersâ realization that the much-touted âvoluntary departureâ of the population is not realistic in the current circumstances â both because too few Gazans would be willing to leave, even under continued bombardment, and because no country would accept such a massive influx of Palestinian refugees.
According to Dr. Dotan Halevy, a researcher of Gaza and co-editor of the book âGaza: Place and Image in the Israeli Space,â the concept of âvoluntary departureâ is based on an all-or-nothing principle. âConsider this hypothetical,â Halevy told me recently. âAsk Ofer Winter [the military general who, at the time of our conversation, looked set to be tasked with heading the Defense Ministryâs âVoluntary Departure Directorateâ] whether evacuating 30 percent, 40 percent, or even 50 percent of Gazaâs residents would be considered a success. Would Israel really care if Gaza had 1.5 million Palestinians rather than 2.2 million? Would that enable the annexation fantasies of Bezalel Smotrich and his allies? The answer is almost certainly no.â
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Whether or not Smotrich, Katz, and Zamir have read Halevy and Shafer Ravivâs articles, they likely understand that âvoluntary departureâ is not an immediately executable plan. But if they truly believe that the solution to the âGaza problemâ â or to the Palestinian issue as a whole â is for there to be no Palestinians left in Gaza, then it will certainly not be possible all in one go.
In other words, the idea appears to be: first, corral the population into one or more closed-off enclaves; then, let starvation, desperation, and hopelessness do the rest. Those locked inside will see that Gaza has been completely destroyed, that their homes have been leveled, and that they have neither a present nor a future in the Strip. At that point, the Israeli thinking goes, Palestinians themselves will begin pushing for emigration, forcing Arab countries to take them in.